Contemporary urbanism is marked by convention, where the user is assumed to be a generic subject. What ensues from this condition is a tension between the norm and that, which is considered to be outside the norm.

Cities today are confronted with rapidly changing demographics, i.e., the aging of wide sections of the population, a foregrounding of the role of women within the social order, increasing poverty, and more diversified social strata. Thus, discrepancies arise between non-differentiated urban design and differentiated users.

This presents an opportunity to not only question established standards, but to affect a shift away from an understanding of the city through the lens of a universal subject towards a differentiated understanding of urbanism.