The following text unde1takes a creative investigation of signing, mapping and negotiating urban design and human habitation. Today, discourses of innovation and the entrepreneurial subject embed the concept of creativity as creative knowledge and design take center stage in popular and political discourses of the twenty-first-century city. This chapter places the subject of design within tropes of creativity, knowledge, and subjectivity with particular attention to ways these discourses frame and form our understandings of the city-the city as it was, is and may be, and selves within it. Negotiations of space, place and time call for attention. Knowledge production and its transfer has become a hallmark and impetus of urban growth, and the equation of "innovation" with "creativity" is a driving condition for the ends of globalized economic progress. This utilitarian view is open for interrogation. The aim is to open modes of signing and place-making to critical enquiry. This chapter works with methodologies from Jacques Derrida, namely deconstruction, as a way of de-centering dominant practices of thinking, writing, and designing. It thereby unpacks the notion of signing with paiticular attention to the devices of mt, design, and creativity w.ithin urban contexts to sign the city otherwise.
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