“We need a new spatial contract. In the context of widening political divides and growing economic inequalities, we call on architects to imagine spaces in which we can generously live together
Hashim Sarkis on his decision to title the 2020 Venice Biennale How will we live together?
The metropolitan idea was built in the 19th century Europe. Then, for the first time, in cities like Paris or London a person can come into the city and exist without anyone ever knowing who they were before [1]. The anonymity, paired with the density of the city, breeds a certain sense of individuality that still marks life in the city today.
The city almost always represent the future, for better or for worse. We see it in 1927 in the silent movie Metropolis, and in 1967 Jacques Tati’s movie Playtime (a surprisingly spot-on commentary of our lives in the city with our new technologies and our descent to amusing alienation). As time went on, the ideas around what the life of the city represent grows, enriches, paired as more and more people around the world move from the rural to the city. The city may also represent otherness. People from anywhere flock the city, and one becomes anonymous. And as air travel became easier, the world becoming more ‘globalised’, so too became the globalised city. People became lost in another city, travel more. These days though, a scroll through any social media platform could show different types of people making homes in places of otherness describing the fluidity of how people make their homes in the world. This is 2019, Lost in Translation no more.
In 2014, the UN World Urbanization Prospects report showed that 54 percent of people in the world now lives in cities, and they are set to rise to 68 percent in the coming decades especially in developing countries. Pair this with growing concern about climate change, and the effects urban centers give-off, and the effects of indefinite growth (of what? of economy, families, buildings) on the environment, not to mention the interconnected web of economy of materials, food, merchandise, even waste. 21st century city life is a complex organism that we are still learning how to tame.
This blog is going to be about that. A person’s navigation through the 21st century city life. Observations, interrogations, and reflections on issues through the lens of architecture, environmental science, and social issues.
[1] Richard Sennett: The Fall of Public Man, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1977. Page 66
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