Such views of place have been evident in a whole range of settings – in the emergence

of certain kinds of nationalisms, in the marketing of places . . . in the new urban

enclosures and . . . by those defending their communities against yuppification . . . All of
these have been attempts to fix the meaning of places, to enclose and defend them:
they construct singular, fixed and static identities for places, and they interpret places as
bounded enclosed spaces defined through counterposition against the Other who is
outside.
(Massey 1992: 12)

while Kilburn may have a character of its own, it is absolutely not a seamless, coherent
identity, a single sense of place which everyone shares . . . If it is now recognized that
people have multiple identities, then the same point can be made in relation to places.
Moreover, such multiple identities can be either, or both, a source of richness or a source
of conflict.
(Massey 1993: 65)

‘Safety Becomes Danger’ (co-authored by John Fitzgerald) explores the uses

and meanings of a particular shopping strip in inner-city Melbourne which
became, for a time, strongly identified with heroin sale and use in public space. It
also became the site of many overdoses and deaths in nearby streets and lanes.
Drug trading was camouflaged within a diverse streetlife, with injecting sites dispersed
through laneways, car parks and toilets. These injecting zones occupied
liminal places which slide between categories of private and public, safety and
danger. Those who inject in public space are caught in a dilemma, needing both
safety from police and exposure in the event of an overdose. The chapter concludes
with a discussion of the paradoxical task of bringing such drug use within
the medical gaze without bringing it into the public gaze

As the title of this book suggests and as argued in Chapter 1, the task for place
theory is to move from conceptions of place as stabilized being towards places of
becoming. A key theoretical base for this lies in Deleuzian philosophy and
particularly in the conceptual toolkit outlined in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987)
book A Thousand Plateaus. ‘Place’ is not a concept deployed in this literature,
indeed the language of A Thousand Plateaus is difficult and esoteric. My aim is
to render it more transparent, and to construct a theory of place as assemblage.
A key guide in this task is De Landa (2006), whose construction of a Deleuzian
‘assemblage theory’ is a theory of society rather than of place. This application of
such an approach to place is practical as well as theoretical. While I am interested
in contributing to better theories of the place–power nexus I am also interested
in understanding the ways in which specific places work: the morphologies and
socio-spatial networks of boundaries and segments; the flows of everyday life;
the narratives that are expressed through them; and the desires, hopes and fears
that are invested in them. I have long been of the view that place/power issues
require multiplicitous methodologies linking phenomenology, spatial analysis and
discourse analysis (Dovey 2008). Place is at once experienced, structured and discursively
constructed. It is the contention here that Deleuzian theory has a potential
to encompass these complexities and to provide a useful framework for the
understanding of place and the practices of urban transformation

The Deleuzian notion of the primacy of desire is linked with a ‘sense’ or ‘sensation’
which is seen as a raw experience of perception prior to cognition, language
or meaning. For Deleuze sensation is a kind of animal condition strongly linked
to desire; in the human world it is the initial impact of a work of art, spectacle,
building or landscape that ‘passes over and through the body’ prior to meaning
or cognition (Conley 2005: 244–245). Sensation is linked to the ‘affect’ of an
event or encounter that connects the material and experiential. If one were to
speak of a ‘sense’ of place in this context it would connect the phenomenology
of the body to the precognitive encounter with the everyday world as in the work
of Merleau-Ponty (1962).
 Abstracto.
La presente Tesis de Máster es una investigación que trata sobre diferentes aspectos de edificios
transformables y transportables, tales como componentes como mecanismos para generar movimiento,
estrategias de diseño y detalles constructivos, enfocada en mejorar la comprensión de las necesidad
técnico-constructivas de este tipo particular de arquitectura.
Las primeras aplicaciones de edificios transformables y transportables fueron desarrolladas durante el
período de posguerra como resultado de la necesidad de solucionar problemas habitacionales y la transfor-
mación de las industrias, altamente influenciados por los avances de las estructuras espaciales. Y hasta
pocos años, el diseño de este tipo de edificios era sólo enfocado en estructuras temporales o pocas apli-
caciones a soluciones reales, siendo la mayoría puros conceptos con una imagen futurística pero con
deficiencias en su desarrollo técnico.
Recientemente, un nuevo tipo de arquitectura transportable y transformable está siendo producida, como
soluciones para el uso diario y aceptado por las comunidades donde son insertados. En este tipo de proyectos se
concentrará la investigación, analizando desde los componentes y conexiones de los edificios hacia los aspectos
técnicos del diseño.

The city of Sophoria is made up in two half-cities. In one there is the great roller coaster with steep
humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the Ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with
crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-city
is of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the
school, and all the rest. One of the half-cities is permanent, the other is temporary, and when the period
of its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant lots of
another half-city.

Some preview assumptions can be done about the actual professional work on this area. The research
are mostly done in scissors and tensile structures with large attention on its technical characteristics as a
unit, but a few applications to a real building design or construction are applied, and hardly any research
comes out to a prototype phase. Transformable structures are often associated with shelter after
disaster situations, and the most projects come as donor-led temporary portable shelter to a recent
catastrophe that hit the news worldwide. These designs usually are pure concepts, poor technical
development and hardly executable, but they have the high technological and futuristic style, with
quality pictures and presentations that can make into any architectural publication (Figure 4 and 5). And
they in fact do, when searching in publications for transformable and transportable design prevail the
shelters for a world, which apparently, is in collapse.