Metropolis

EUROPE LOST AND FOUND Seminar

Kyon Park

As Europe is becoming a more dynamic structure, with unstable territories and an unpredictable future, the project’s context is the restructuring of society - from its modernist ideology around an invisible and incremental path toward the uniform existence of multiple states in the European Union. Already influenced by “the others,” Europe cannot subsist by itself. In attempt to construct its distinctive self-identity, the European Union should reflect on the Western Balkans as its most prescient and nearest model. What lessons might be gained from the experience of the Western Balkans and the collapse of its economic stability and political authority? Will the emergence of the new, adaptable, innovative and bottom-up phenomena that emboss the Western Balkans help in the building
of new economic, cultural and political structures for the EU? Could the parallelism and hybridity of the European Union and the Western Balkans present a successful multi-polar geopolitics that can manage the complexity of our layered cultures and histories? Europe, with “the others,” may well be our best chance of making the next free and civil society, a compelling quest that “Europe: Lost and Found” would like to imagine.

Cities are sites of violence. We keep on simultaneously building and destroying them. These endless cycles of destruction and construction may be intrinsic to the progress of the urban environment, yet their excessive recurrence seems beyond the adaptive limit of inhabitants. One could envisage a future where modernity, ruthless in the use of natural resources and human labour, may leave a trail of abandoned cities lying exhausted along the route of advancing capitalism.
In truth, however, cities are just moving, shifting their boundaries across the land. Enclosure no longer protects communities, it destroys them. At the same time as the density of suburbs begins to exceed that of the inner cities - in developed nations at least - the enclosure now protects the periphery rather than the centre. The concept of enclosure, the very principle on which cities were founded, is in transformation.
And, within the standardised geography of ‘everywhere but nowhere’, both the centre and the edges of any city or culture seem superfluous. With generic malls, hotels and offices now dominating skylines and public spaces, the homogenisation of urban identity is integral to the internationalisation of labour, commerce and information. The goal is the convenience of having cities that look and feel the same; that conform to the standards and comforts expected by increasingly globalised industries and their professionals. And in binding distinctive and distant landscapes, the architecture of globalisation constructs an immaterial city, one that is lacking a particular location but is nevertheless quite real and functional.
In order to achieve the franchising of urban and cultural spaces, the history of any particular place must be modified, and in some cases, eradicated outright. For example, many Asian cities, amid urban developments of monumental proportions, are erasing their traditional sectors and building standardised urban and cultural landscapes, all Western inspired. In turn, the remnants of indigenous architecture and spaces, now dysfunctional in both economic and cultural terms, could only survive through their thematisation as restaurants, museums and amusement parks. With the absence of ‘active’ culture, selected memories are being reconstituted as ‘official’ history, and returned to the urban fabric, stripped of their precision and idiosyncracies and primarily attached to massive commercialised spaces. As much as the Asian officials claim that the Westernisation of their cities is not literal but interpretive, the survival of traditional ways of life will be virtually impossible without their icons and symbols.