Monday, 2 November 2009
Lefebvre and De Landa
First text in Week 3 concerns Lefebvre’s discourse on 'Urban' analysis from the viewpoint of a Post-Marxist, post WWII commentator. Lefebvre proposes that all elements of a fully 'Urbanised' society are linked through 'flows' of energy. In his terminology, 'flows' can take the shape of almost any relationship between parties i.e. financial, social, labour etc. He considers post WWII society to be in a state of 100% urbanisation whereby no part of human society, whether generally considered 'Urbanised' or not, is linked to the energy transfers invoked by metropolitan areas over their surroundings, both physically and otherwise. Of interest is that his view of 0% 'Urbanisation' requires the environment of the Earth to exist as it was pre-human i.e. that humans cannot reduce their influence on the Earth to (pre-)historic lows now we have reached post-industrialisation. In his view of World capitalism, Lefebvre see's the replacement of heavy industry by service-related business as a major contributor to the (almost total) assimilation of 'Urban' societies. The suggestion in his text is that human society must reach a careful balance with the natural world and to influence it gently through coercion in order to satisfy all needs of the 'Urbanised'.
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What direction do you forsee the development of sentient, thinking cities, so past the level which we are currently at, of slowly emergent technologies which influence the overall make up of structures within the urban sphere, onto more independently minded, constantly evolving and developing independently and as a whole? I have a lecture on wednesday by Mark Shepard, a artist and architect focusing on sentient cities. I will see what he has to say in regards to this area, as it is also a area of focus for my research work.
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you getting involved Pedro! Been looking at the future of urbanisation less as an abstract sentient and more as a cooperative approach by series of different concerned groups. In Germany, they call the first stab at these 'Baugruppen' - like-minded folks (usually financially) get together and set out parameters for the production and integration of their particular segments of domesticity in to the urban whole. Where these are failing at the moment is that they usually don't accurately represent the make up of the populous so much as create suburban zones of exclusion led by idealistic post-hippy creative’s after 'alternative' communities. The second stumbling block is usually geographic in that these places seem to mostly occur in classic satellite territory making them questionable on the urban-design front... Lastly (and most notable) is that they tend not to create, as an outcome of holistic discussion, high (or even medium-high) density developments required to fulfil the sustainability needs regarding land usage - the last thing we need is more fucking semi's...
ReplyDeleteA couple of interesting bits of info:
The Ambivalence of Participation and Situational Urbanism - Jesko Fezer/Mathias Hayden (from a book of urban essays called UrbanAct)
I read the below book for my dissertation in Glasgow so you may have seen it in the flat. I think it rocks and provides a good base for the issues raised by the essays here...
Transurbanism - Arjen Mulder (ed)
The below essay is in there somewhere:
The Right to Participate in the Work of the Imagination - Arjun Appadurai
Apologies if this comment is ridiculously long...