Improper Relations: Crossing the Urban Extensions with Practices Accompaniment

While dedicated genealogies may be capable of grasping how particular built environments, spatial dispositions and fabric got to be the way they manifest themselves, there is something that eludes coherent narratives of development and prospective futures. Particularly at the urban extension, these are spaces of intensive contiguity of the disparate—disparate forms, functions, and ways of doing things. They are replete with gaps, interstices, breakdowns, contested territories, and sediments of dissonant tenure regimes, financing, legalities, and use. Instead of being able to discern legible articulations among the details of composition, the proliferation of housing, commercial, industrial, logistical, recreational, entrepreneurial, and governmental projects are less subsumed into overarching logics of capital accumulation or neoliberal rationalities as they are “strange accompaniments” to each other, where nothing quite fits according to design, where things dissipate or endure without obvious reason, and where improvised alliances of use and rule continuously reshape what it is possible for any particular individual or institutional actor to do.