O., friend and companion of multiple runs and even more fencing moments, allowed me to read one of the essays she produced for her master degree. I am aware that we share the fascination for that construct, the city, as much as we enjoy reading and writing science fiction. So it is no surprise that her current essay is about an imaginary space, a place that changes, that is strongly temporal and performative, and perhaps accordingly, is full of possibilities. To read O. disquisitions is for me to be ten years old again, inside an ice cream shop with an open voucher in my hand. Just imagine the possibilities of a place designed to have all possibilities!! And yet. Is not the mere stability of a city what anchors us into a reality that changes way faster than what we can cope with?
Few years back another friend of mine came to Utrecht for a job interview. We got together in the afternoon, and expend quite a great deal of the afternoon and night walking from one bar to another, adding a seemingly endless amount of alcohol to our circulatory system. My friend kept on noticing the cuteness of the city. Utrecht is indeed a medieval city and most streets of the city center retain plenty of houses build few hundred years back. Of course, they are pretty. Somehow. But actually they are not. Both my friend and me would like a modern designed house ten times better. And yet both agree that Utrecht downtown is cute. What is going on? Was it all alcohol talk? The answer seems obvious. Both my friend and me were educated in Caracas, a city without memory. He lived for long time in Sidney, another city crowded with modernism. Perhaps both of us found solace, peace, in a place that has actually not changed in few centuries.
On top of the temporality of her space, O. adds performativity. So she and het team designed a space that can perform, as far as I understand, different things to different persons. Again, I am fascinated by the possibilities. I have to think in that silly movie derived from the not silly at all tale of Phillip K. Dick, The Minority Report. I remember people walking around and being recognized by the omnipresent screens, who then would serve to each passerby individually tailored contents. A truly performing space, one might say. And yet I remember that part of the movie (as many other aspects of Phillip K. Dick dystopias) as extremely tiring. Tied to those omnipresent but small screens comes the memory of those nightmarish yet well loved wall-covering screens in Bradbury’s 451, conforming the ultimate performative, and hideous, place. If there is one thing that I love from Caracas, that huge and anonymous mess of a place, was her totally disinterest in me. The city did not perform anything at all for me, and then, I could perform whatever I wanted. Or not. The choice was all mine. And there was freedom in it.
So then I have to wonder. Is that my ideal future, my ideal place? a location filled with stable old and boring buildings, incapable of perform anything and as anonymous as possible? Somehow I seem to be making an apology for the banlieus of Le Corbusier, and we all know how that tale ends. So, my friend Moises would ask again, as he already did in the comments of my previous text “what’s your question inti?” Is there a problem that our cities needs to solve, a clear question for our places to answer? I believe there is indeed. O. herself, at the end of her piece, points the direction. She questions our own destiny, or at least our aspiration of destiny: “The question still looms: what kind of people we want to be?” As Moises would put it, we can debate endlessly if the city should be anonymous or personalized, performative or neutral. But the question does not get answered by offering more possibilities. We need to ask what do we want to be. Perhaps.
Or, perhaps, we need to stop asking. Perhaps we need to start seeing. As in that infinitely sad and infinitely promising end of Fahrenheit 451, only when the house and its screens had been burned, only when the city has gone in ashes and wind, only then could Montag walk back.
And perform.
Inti,
I agree one must stop asking, since questions act as a starter and one should avoid getting stuck in a seemingly pool of curiosity without going anywhere. But "What do we want to be?" may work as a starting point provided that it doesn't take the bumpy road of identity "whatever"... Because it could lead to a narcissistic approach to urbanism, so the diverse globalization of cities will collapse before parochialisms of different sorts, reducing current level of communication and exchanges within and without cities boundaries...
A diverse globalism is a product of the liberal frame of thought and, as you put it, it can combine a sense of freedom with a sense of anonymity or even of a careless account of what particular individuals are there, doing things. The trend to smart cities and hyper-surveillance may cause a loss not only of privacy, but of what we have experience to know as an urban environment. It would be like going back to dwell in a small town where you feel to belong, but at the same time you long to escape from the reach of so many eye balls which know exactly who you fucking are. Pueblo chiquito, infierno grande, as we say over here.
I'm particularly stressed by the surge of the woke, cancel culture and political correctness thing. Censorship from the people who used to fight censorship. It's as if social networks are like a virtual prototype of such smart cities, hyper-watched communities with parochial lives, and we may be at the brink of falling into a brick and mortar version of it.
By the way, the British author Helen Pluckrose is currently addressing this issue of illiberal trends from a liberal-left perspective, that may appeal to you...
I'm super glad that we are now talking once again and look forward to doing it so, from now on...
Wow! I know this is a hot topic. I mentioned my fears (which don't seem to be yours) as a friendly exchange of thoughts and impressions. We agree we disagree on that topic and still I think it's a healthy touch-base to do it once in a while...
A Charter for the Smart City seems to be a challenging read and I hope to embrace it soon. Let's leave my comments for later on then. But, as always Inti, thank you! I learn something every time I read anything you dare to write!!