Post-Empire Urbanisms

The following is an excerpt from an article written by Ed Keller for a class he is conducting at SCIArc, Post-Empire Urbanisms. While I am not enrolled in SCIArc, I believe much of what Keller contends resonates, to a large extent, with what I believe my thesis is dealing with.

Parallel Realities, Trans-national Archipelagos, New Urban Ambiences

"...Cities have historically functioned as 'ambient' environments, with many cultural, economic, political and aesthetic systems inflecting each other and creating complex urban ecosystems with lifespans in the centuries. The city comes to life through the overlapping ambiences it can host: either as a kind of software, in cultural movements, or a kind of hardware, in the physical forms of the architecture of the city itself. The unique nature and identity of any urban location emerges in an irreducible resonance that is produced between that 'software' and 'hardware'. In the case of the contemporary global city, the intensification of this relationship has produced a more radical set of bifurcations, no longer resolved as the outcome of a binary logic ('ambience'), yet rather as a monolithic temporal construct of parallel realities.

The political theorist Frederic Jameson argues that in contemporary post-capital/post-national society, the task of creating 'cognitive maps' of urban space and cultural landscapes has become substantially more complex. Today's development of geotagging, locative media systems and the like are symptomatic of a new genre of representation and communication that will radically transform the city.

The 'time' of the institution, which organizes a kind of monolithic memory structure on a political and cultural level, contrasts dramatically with the time of the individual subject, which is filled with myriad unpredictable details. Similarly, the 'time' of the built fabric of the city provides an archetypal and shared memory which spans all cultures, while the individual subject in their chance encounters creates an absolutely unique memory which then cascades into the urban form itself, in many ways. Urban morphologies are now on fast forward, as they adjust ever more rapidly to global systems that provide individuals, collectives, institutions with constantly shifting ways to interact.

Architecture operates as a key link in this dynamic relation, in its capability to slow down such time, unlike many other disciplines tied into the practice of generating urban morphology. This seminar will study these emerging 'Post-Empire' landscapes of control, systemic tendencies, and new freedoms."

Keller, Ed. Parallel Realities, Trans-national Archipelagos, New Urban Ambiences. 2007

The above preambles what I think is a challenge for the interpretation of our new urban environments. The turn of the century saw the embrace - with fear and admiration, and rejection in many cases - of the virtual as an extension to the real. The proliferation of technology has led to the virtual becoming an alternative to the real, in terms of how we interact and share.

The italicised statement above brings to light the following questions:

1 How does one perceive the virtual in the light of the real?

2 How do we employ technology such that the virtual augments the real, insofar as it may become an alternative reality in itself?

3 Granted that technology allows the creation of a personalised space (as defined by one's own interactions with mobile technology / computing interfaces), how does one perceive the physicalities / "form" of this personal space?

4 What happens when a network of such personalised spaces are created? Again, how does one perceive its "form"?

5 How do we 'remap' the structure of a city in a way that effects in the production of a collective consciousness of the multitude?

6 Taking that a step further, how can diversity be maintained, or even brought to the forefront, in this collective consciousness? What might the technological means to do this be?

These thoughts will be the core questions as I pursue my thesis.