Conclusion-Seeing Through: Types and the Making and Unmaking of the World

Urban centers of today’s world are ceaselessly transformed through the insertion and erasure of buildings and landscapes. Obviously buildings and places don’t physically move, at least very seldom, but ideas about buildings are transported through the movement of people, ideas, imaginations and images. This circulation is dependent on the intellectual structure of type, and it is in this form of knowledge that buildings and urban structures move around the world where they are replicated and molded into new contexts, transform social practices and change local fabrics. Types and typologies are a way of organizing knowledge into categories of kinds of things: urban is a type recognized by human density; city is a part of a typology of settlement that includes agriculture, wilderness, and so on.1 Although there are many forces that make cities, it is the conceptual framework of types that enables this feat of movement.