Got it. Property rights and potato chip bags. Good points.
The city is not just a conglomeration of property rights, deeds, and other official documents that grant exclusivity to every single speck of dirt in a given location. It's not that at all. Cities are dense overlapping interconnected social webs made up of individual agents each with their own understanding of how a particular place can and can not be used. Most of us agree to respect property rights because we believe that it makes for a better civilization, (in the Rousseauian sense), or we've been socialized to do so and haven't given it serious thought, or some even fear as Althusser might have called it the RSA, or realistically any combination of reasons. My point is not that people should go around grinding down bits of churches or painting on walls, or any of the other examples I've given earlier, it is that cities already exist in the gray zone between public and private by their very nature because they are made of mental constructs created by individuals who have internalized a wide variety of beliefs on the subject. Every single one of us does something everyday that could in some form be considered a trespass. There never will be strict adherence to an idealized lawful state. Such a state doesn't exist. This is my first point.
My second point speaks to the idea of relative value. When someone tags a wall, and trust me I find most of that stuff to be just as unsightly as you, (but that's a subjective aesthetic judgement), they are not intentionally doing damage, that is not their intention at all. What is happening is the conversion of property into social capital within their particular community (or as I phrased it above, their localized social web). This is what I mean when I describe destructive acts as generative. What is seen as defacement in your community is seen as creating value in theirs. Use value isn't a thing that exists one way or another; it clearly can differ from person to person and community to community and is often dependent on the destruction of the very thing in question.* please see David Harvey's brilliant ideas about creative destruction
All that understood, how can we best design buildings and places with that in mind? How can we accommodate other uses that will surely happen whether we'd like them too or not? More security cameras? Hostile architecture? Incorporating areas for street art? Finding ways to channel certain acts into ways we find acceptable?
Now, I understand that this is all high level theory and probably seems like a lot of nonsense to those who really just want to talk about the Our Lady of Good Voyage church. To them I apologize for the digression.
That in mind I will say that I like the uneven edge to the ledge and I find it interesting how unorthodox uses can influence design and function.
