URBAN STUDIES
Introduction to Contemporary Thought on the City
City Within a City, Venice 2000
A PRIMER IN URBAN STUDIES
Robert Hotten, and Dr. Peter Diprose, 2003
A PRIMER IN URBAN STUDIES. Monterey: Seadog Press
ISBN
CONTENTS
Posturbanism: Eco Design From Norm to Formlessness
Great Urban Design Venice, Paris, San Francisco
The City as Hypertext: Pedagogy and Poetics
URBAN STUDIES, INTRODUCTION
2XL THE CITY IS FLAT: YET EXPANDS FASTER AND FASTER FOREVER
ABSTRACT
2XL: The City is Flat: Yet Expands Faster and Faster Forever. Like in the theory of the flat Universe, the City continues expanding faster and faster forever. The City is flat. What if it were that simple? And, then, what if the city continues expanding faster and faster forever? If this analogy is correct, then most theories of the city are wrong. The city as "tree," "network," "landscape," etc., all make overcomplicated and, more importantly, limiting assumptions in an attempt to define a metanarrative rule and model urbanism. The inflammable interfaces and machinic agency contained in the process-oriented collaborative agency will allow expansion of urban thought into the eternal, infinite, and virtual. Further, threshold, formlessness, hyperfigures, and social formation of general assaults on beauty, the sublime, and the glim become commonplace.
DISCUSSION
THE CITY IS FLAT
Metric dimension
Flatland, Situationist (Psychogeographic Map of Paris), Primal Allegory of Landscape, Agrophilia, Generic City
Villette, Parc de la Villette is a particularly rich material subject.
"...there are two sections of Parc de la Villette that, in retrospect do strike me as cinematic: the basins in front of the Cite des Sciences et de l'Industrie and Alexanders Chermetoff's Jardin d'energie. Both are sunk below the body of the park and both have an unusually powerful sense of place, one very hard and one very soft. A neo- Freudian structuralist might read them as male and female polarities, as disembodied entities seeking each other's presence. One could go further, identifying the Geode as a phallic tip and the tracery of the bamboos in the Jardin d'energie as pubic hair. A cylindrical void set amonsgt the bamboos has rippling water on its walls and emits soft groans from concealed speakers. According to this reading, the surface level of the park symbolizes the baffling matrix in which we live our lives. Each of us may believe that the world contains our perfect partner; only a few of us are lucky enough to make contact. But wandering through the matrix without discovering the voids, one feels only confusion. Another parallel can be drawn with a video game that lacks a strat or finish. One's "life" is spent amidst endlessly shifting scenes, always modulating around similar themes. Line clashes with point, point with surface, surface with line, and so on for ever. Shifting scenes are characteristic of the algorithms that produce computer games. Tschumi's lines, points and surfaces are algorithmic. This explains the analogy, at least for one reading, and may have been one of the designer's aims." (Turner)
YET EXPANDS FASTER AND FASTER FOREVER
Topological and Ametric dimension
Memories Dreams Desires, KRCF
2XL THE CITY IS FLAT:
YET EXPANDS FASTER AND FASTER FOREVER
The Glim
The city expands alongshore in a reflective relation to the water and the inherent infinity of the glim. Beauty and the sublime are manifested in itsuniversal orientation and configuration. Concatenation.
Open Sky, Space, Thirdspace, Universe, 3xl Garden City, Terminal Architecture, Hypertext, Labyrinth, Landscape
Formlessness
Something imperceptible, unstable, fluid and formless, as in an activity. The Tuilleries Garden, by the fountain on a summer day, with thousands of people, walking, sleeping, reading, and fulfilling all manner of fantasies, is formlessness.
Thirdspace
Thirdspace too can be described as a creative recombination and extension, one that builds on a Firstspace perspective that is focused on the "real" material world and a Secondspace perspective that interprets this reality through "imagined" representations of spatiality. With this brief and. I hope, helpful and inviting introduction, we re ready to begin our journeys to a multiplicity of real-and-imaginary places. (Soja)
Form and the Flux
How is it that we can become preconceptually aware of an impetus to act? When we become aware of an impetus to act we are aware of a symbol; a desire to recollect. When we recollect we become aware of a proir symbol that is a state of desire pointing forward as a state of anticipation. It is a symbol of what is to come. Each symbol is a "form"; a sort of preobject to awareness with boundaries; forestructures. How do forms arise before awareness and what is their nature? How is it possible to be aware of form and what is awareness? What is prior to form, what is "flux"? Asking these questions amounts to asking about meaning against the scene of form and the flux. (Carspecken)
CONCLUSION
This is a new way of looking at urbanism that is both simpler, and thus allows a more universal understanding, and at the same time unlimited as a topology of networks, agency, events, and subjectivity.
TYPOLOGIES
Flat City: Los Angeles
Expansive City: Paris, San Francisco, Venice, Sydney
Film: Matrix, Dark City, Existenz, Being Malkovich, Lost Highway
Landscapes: Coastlines, Guggenheim Bilbao Museo, Piazza San Marco, Tuilleries, Cafe Marly
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