Metropolis

THE LIVING CITY, THE URBAN BODY seminar

Armando Montilla

The aim of the Seminar is to discuss and identify cities as living entities in constant transformation subjected to multiple forces, which over the years model their shape and environment. Global phenomena such as socio-economical disparity, mobility and migration, socio-political issues, mass consumption and fear, plus the search for total sustainability are to be considered as part of this learning process. The subsequent generation of more localized events, including social unrest, the act of protesting and the reclaiming of the streets, and the existence of trans-national spaces of survival and subverted spaces of lifestyle all give a new quality to what we recognize as public or private space in the city today, according to politics of propinquity. In addition to all of this, the use of emerging new technologies create enormous changes in social patterns and urban behavior, which are very hard to follow due to the incredible speed in which these technologies are generated, changes that allow for the creation of brand new spatial conditions in the city. Within these conditions of physical and virtual action present today, it is important to emphasize the acknowledgment of these new urban situations, and to recognize in them new urban generated spaces as key elements within the process of urbanity, as they become new strings of DNA components generating the city, closely interrelated with all other modeling processes over the urban phenomenon. If we understand cities today as collateral results of social, economical, psychological, and urban & architectural factors, they then require a strictly inter-disciplinary study and analysis, which can be situated among all sciences including all social, economical and scientific disciplines. Such study demands the consideration of all elements, both physical and virtual, which dictate the process of urbanity while simultaneously adding to such complexity.The Seminar is divided in three parts, during which the idea of the subverted, splintered, and mediatised city will be explored around the main idea of democratization of city space and towards the concept of 'City Theory' - the study of cities based on all social, cultural and economical factors - plus the search of the 'Eco-social', a sustainable and desired urban balance. The identification of new types of urban spaces derived from this phenomena and the anticipation of predictable yet unseen new urban conditions will be the focus of study.

The social and demographic debate of place, goes beyond the idea of a container, becoming more of an iconic notion. This makes the idea of place, a more ephemeral (rather than physical) concept, so when looking at mechanisms conveying the idea of city perception, one must look at a complex referential system, tied to notions of Heimat and Verhäutnis. The idea of locality is present, but not fixed. It is rather a result of a familiar references' saturated web, territorial understanding and social relationships (both inter-personal and between person-objects); along with both behavioural and interpretation patterns. All of these come from our familiar & environmental backgrounds, leading to specific lifestyles and determining the perception of our immediate surroundings beyond consciousness. In other words, they determine 'how we see the world'. This 'how we see the world' is embedded in our every day perception of the city, in our daily lives, patterns of movement and use of cityspace...[...]...The city, now seen as a living and changing organism, hosts invisible networks and forces that shape the use of its space, the production of the built and non-built environment and the spatial relation between them. These relationships are highly mediated, and so the newly created spatial relation induced by apparent disorganization and anarchy gives a new quality to the city as a whole