The matter of cities

Diálogos: revista del Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad de Puerto Rico., 2020

The current pandemic forced restrictive measures upon the population’s way of life and spatial confinement of citizens in their homes. This summons urban thought to reflect about the present but also, or mostly, the future of the cities. I will grasp this opportunity to draw a few lines of flight that depart from the streets’ silenced rhythm, and to deal with relationality as the city’s own constitutive matter. Cities are usually thought in a dualistic mode (understood as oppositional or even as an ontological dualism), and they actuallygather different elements: physical city, discursivity, human, non-human, subjectivity, sensitivity, body. To take into account this relationality and its current outbreak from invisibility (like a virus), can help transform and diversify theoretical and practical perspectives on the cities, where the majority of human population is currently living.

Public Culture

The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By the twentieth century, the city figured prominently as a laboratory for testing modern techniques of governance. In the twenty-first century this discourse incarnates anew in visions of future mega-and smart cities. Then, as now, cities-as signs of the modern-are the elephants in a room full of adjacent concepts such as the state, the market, citizenship, collectivity, property, and care. This issue picks up a thread from the 1996 special issue and 1998 book of prizewinning essays on Cities and Citizenship (edited by James Holston and Arjun Appadurai). The contributors focused on the role of cities in the making of modern subjects by attending to associations between urbanism and modernity and thus with imperialism, colonialism, and extraction. Now, we reconfigure that line of inquiry to consider Urbanism beyond the City while bearing projections of the future in mind. The United Nations projects that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities or other urban centers. But this new density will be greatest in a small number of countries, none which are in the Global North (United Nations 2018). Yet even as cities take unprecedented forms without discernible limits, spatial theorizing continues to invest in a particular concept of the city and to expand that concept's reach into other areas of study, planning, and investment (Amin 2013). Spatial professions capitalize on the city's capacity for generating complex intersections of social, economic, and political forces. Theorists attribute a capacity to distinguish among divergent possibilities mingling unpredictably to the urban apparatus (Martin 2017). Even critical methods remain attached to the idea that cities-whether as infrastructures, instruments, or morphologies-anchor a very particular sense of social life. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 4) noted, philosophy coincides with the "contribution of cities: the formation of societies of friends or equals but also the promotion of relationships of rivalry between and within them." We position the concept of the city by treating it as a "friend" accompanying us through the journey presented in this special issue.

ABSTRACT Human being makes an effort to reach an absolute judgement inherently. Just like “cities”. They want life to proceed under control, its' own rationality and in the direction of cognition. At this point a major conflict begins. Today's modernity - rationality and history - tradition with a long past are waiting to collide for each other. It's almost impossible to creat universal and total structures in the light of all the modern discourses. Every settlement, every street, every building have certain characteristics in terms of that culture, perception and inhabitants. To understand and recognize the city, senses should belong to “it” before brains in contrary to the rationalist approach. Wars, especially the World Wars, throw up modernity to the transience of life. First I.World War, then II. World War caused a major trauma as the destruction of people, cities and countries. Big traumas were began to live in their own environment by individuals that are progressive in modernity. Life almost began to stop in cities that were destructed with their structure, vision, past and future. Immediately afterwards, this concerns and efforts to holding on life began to cover pain. At this point, architectural improvements have been effective for the cities that were demolished and struggled to re-stand up. Many items such as modernization, industrialization, urbanization begin to create traces through the texture and posture of the city. Should ‘connection with the past’ or ‘directly future orientation’ be effective for the settlement that wants to stand up to move on the road? Initially everything should be open, then all administrative and architectural decisions should be taken. First option for the city should restore a living organism with its' own dynamics. A place, in which its' people live their lives with the consciousness of their past, can entirely be "CITY". Necessary decisions about cities' own dynamics should be taken and make arrangements before important connections between regions, intersections, meeting points and transport networks. In order to reach right solutions, planning should be based on the transition from human& building scale to architectural scale. All the vital criterias should be determined carefully by emphasizing on the concepts as transformation, transition, interaction and ergonomics. From now on studies should be made for the creation of a real city. KEY WORDS: modernization, organism, inhabitants, settlement, building scale, architectural scale.

Urban Studies, 2019

2014

Few concepts aspire to touch on the urban condition quite like “urbanity” – and perhaps few others have found more diffuse or unsystematic definitions. Departing from the usual focus on the spatial conditions of urbanity through a systematic approximation with philosophy, this paper brings an approach to urbanity as a particular temporal and spatial experience of the social and material world. First recognizing the forces of social differentiation at work in everyday life, I discuss how differences shape the temporal condition of encountering, from bodily presence and the vision of the “face of the Other” to actual communication. Exploring phenomenological, communicative and ontological dimensions of urbanity, I then propose urbanity as a momentary experience of transcending differences. In its turn, the idea of urbanity as a form of counterbalancing – however momentarily – the tendencies towards social differentiation and distancing requires a clear idea of the material conditions at play. The recognition of local social and spatial idiosyncrasies leads to a truly plural concept of “urbanities” open to contingency, yet dependent on material conditions to come into being. Finally, I attempt to disclose from within the concept of urbanity an ethos inherently associated with an unconditional hospitality, unbounded communication, and an “orientation towards the Other”. Such a view places urbanity in an ethical horizon of experience relating past, present and (the responsibility for) future forms of producing and enacting the city – a view of “urbanity as becoming”.

Society and Space

Note: this piece is intended as a complementary text to accompany the extended essay I've written for issue 32.1 of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space entitled 'Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata: ecological urbanism, circulation and the immunisation of nature'. This issue of the journal, guest-edited by Bruce Braun and Stephanie Wakefield, examines topics related to the theme 'A New Apparatus: Technology, Government and the Resilient City'.) To interrogate the relation between governmental practices and the slew of recent technologies developed and deployed in the name of sustainability-whether 'green', 'resilient', 'ecological' or otherwise-is of course to interrogate the political status of such technology itself. How does the use of this technology expand governmental knowledge more broadly into a city's population and more deeply into the intimate spaces and practices of the individuals and groups which compose it? How does it open new sites of intervention, new surfaces of interface between administration and the citizens which it oversees? What inherent directionalities do such channels of power presuppose? More to the point, what new forms of subjectification (and desubjectification) are produced by this blossoming array of spatio-governmental apparatuses and what possible consequences could they have for the future of urban life? Certainly proposals like that of Office for Metropolitan Architecture's (OMA) recent contribution to New York City's initiative, "Rebuild by Design" (a part of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities project), highlight

Urban Studies, 2016

For some time now, the field of urban studies has been attempting to figure the urban whilst cognisant of the fact that the city exists as a highly problematic category of analysis. In this virtual special issue, we draw together some examples of what we call urban concepts under stress; concepts which appear to be reaching the limits of their capacity to render knowable a world characterised by the death of the city and the ascent of multi-scalar de-territorialisations and re-territorialisations. We organise the papers selected for inclusion into three bundles dealing respectively with complex urban systems, the hinterland problematic and governing cities in the age of flows. The phenomenon of urban concepts under stress stems from the existence of a gap between existing cartographies, visualisations and lexicons of the urban and 21st century spatial conditions and territorialities. Given that this disarticulation will surely increase as this century unfolds, a pressing question pr...

Open Philosophy, 2020

In recent years, the philosophical interest in urban issues has developed into a vibrant interdisciplinary field of its own. The development is linked to the obvious consequences of the broad global phenomenon of urbanization but also due to the increasing interest in practical and multidisciplinary approaches within different branches of philosophy. Philosophy of the City as a field of contemporary thought is open to heterogeneous topics, yet at the same time, it has already proven to break disciplinary barriers and bring different, previously distant branches of philosophy together to study urban issues. Joining forces in understanding the particular challenges of the urban lifeform seems indeed necessary since many of the issues require a flexible and problem-based approach. The increase in the philosophical interest in cities is of course not unique as parallel development is taking place in many other fields. One could even state, that philosophy is a latecomer, since urban studies have been developed more systematically already since the 1960s. There are many reasons as to why modern philosophy did not show interest in cities until relatively late, such as its linguistic and analytical emphasis. The focus of traditional Western philosophy on universal issues and immutable ideas has not helped either in developing an especially well-equipped methodology to encounter urban issues. Reasons for the omission have stemmed also from the fast industrial and subsequent postindustrial development of cities globally: the city as an “object” of study has been in such a flux that pinning down its features and prominent phenomena for any meaningful reflection must have seemed like a daunting task for philosophers of past generations.

City & Time, 2009

This paper discusses, essayistically, the concepts of urban and city. It starts with the acceptance that conceptualizing things is not an easy task. Quite the contrary, it is full of complexities, intricate approaches and calls for the consideration of historical and moving related facts. What is certain is that, despite being closely connected, they are different phenomena. Urban is considered something intangible, a way of life, which may characterize our entire contemporary society. ?The world is becoming urbanized!? is in fact a constantly stated mantra in many scientific fields since the Industrial Revolution. City is a real object, territorially delimited, and is represented by the concentration of buildings, roads, public and private spaces, people, altogether in high densities. This justifies the title of this paper: it is hardly difficult in our contemporary society not to be urban, but not necessarily a city dweller. This conceptual exercise turns more difficult when we co...

Urbanity is an elusive concept. This paper clarifies its conceptual value from an actor-centred perspective. The paper has been published in 2013 in the Book "Living the City", edited by Brigit Obrist, Elísio Macame and Veit Arlt.