Conclusion

Architects and planners, among others, perhaps need to consider the rhythms their plans and building designs encourage, how the spaces they assist in making smother the possibilities of everyday spaces made through spontaneous, lived rhythms rather than those imposed after being formally conceived. Apart from the tangible materials used to create such places as Potsdamer Platz, architects, planners, developers, and investors are all also working with the dominant networked rhythms of an increasingly international economy, itself moved more and more by the imperatives of an financialized capitalism.

Whether a more developed rhythmanalysis, the combining of the visual and the aural, allows for a fuller sense of the spaces being produced in today's cities, their felt intensities, the sensual side of being in amongst the spaces created through the settling of dominant rhythms: well, the answer has to be a Lefebvrian, "yes and no".

Melody, harmony and rhythm are always in conflict (Lefebvre 1992, 83), so perhaps the aim should be to allow the melodies and harmonies of everyday city life - the indigenous and diverse (Lefebvre 1996, 239) - to be present and experienced, without being drowned by dominant rhythms - the 'global and homogenous' (ibid). It's a simple call for a more democratic production of urban space where different rhythms, codes and gestures can be accommodated and allowed to emerge continually to 'rhythm urban time' and thus make a public space of representation full of 'intrigues, encounters and negotiations' (Lefebvre 1996, 234, 237). The makers of plans and models, perfectly scaled, well lit, 'peopled' by a few plastic figures, should lend an ear to the sorts of rhythms that 'should' fill these future spaces, as the new smothers the old, rather than accommodate the visual and aural spectacles produced by the private sector.