Towards a city of events
This is starting to feel like a reoccurring pattern where we have a guest speaker, I make a point of listening in on the discussion and then let it all out in the form of postmortem thoughts about what has been said. So, pattern or not, we are creatures of habit and after our talk with Antoine Picon I have a few things on my mind.
I want to start by saying that I’m truly grateful to Antoine for coming in and talking to us and I thank him for being amusing and provocative and opening the door for us to challenge those provocations.
Antoine Pic(k)-on me
As I mentioned, I liked the fact that Antoine was amusing and provocative. I think he was trying to bring the discussion down to eye level and avoid any philosophical or higher level debate. I personally feel that it was the right way to go and when things are important and close to the heart you want to push away the clutter and talk from the heart, kinda like a good therapy session and in that sense I think Antoine was acting as our therapist, reflecting our frustrations and questions so we can learn to confront them ourselves. Having said that, I think that the overall approach of his discussion reminded me of arguments I had with my little sister when I was young, where anything I’d say she’d say the opposite. I think Antoine made a remark about how being able to contradict oneself is his privilege. That was sort of disappointing to me because it’s the sort of debate tactic you take when you do not respect your opponent or you think you are above him intellectually. It’s the rule which breaks all rules, i.e. how can you discuss something with someone who has no static opinion?
Just Do It!
Another thing I find troubling is the role historians play in our society. My mother used to say to me when I was younger that if I don’t have anything nice to say about something or someone I shouldn’t say it at all. Historian such as Antoine have been watching our day to day “struggle” from a distance, analyzing past data and trying to infer from it about the future but not really getting involved. I’m not saying this about a specific historian or all historians for that matter but as the general approach taken by historian as to their role in our society’s evolution. Antoine mentioned historians as being pessimistic and I think that’s a valid perspective but one doesn’t have to be either pessimistic or optimistic but rather futuristic. What is it you can contribute to that future? other than a catastrophic promise? How is your insight to the past help us understand important steps towards the future?
Towards a non-modernistic approach
Antoine’s paper “Towards a city of events” plays on the name of one of the greatest modernistic manifests in architecture written by Le Corbusier called “Towards a new architecture” first published in 1923.
As I pointed out in class after Antoine’s talk, this is a very deterministic approach, a sort of problem-solving attitude that was prevalent in the beginning of the 20th century. The architects of that time were faced with the implications of the industrial revolution and desperately sought after way in which it could affect architecture. They did ask the big “whys” and how what they were doing was going to change the world and promised to solve all its problems. They dreamed up manifestos and theories about how the home was a “machine for living”, how the city should be divided into layers to accommodate all modes of transportation, and proud workers could enjoy cheap, industrial, customizable housing that would be grouped in mega-structures and leave enough open space for parks and recreational areas. Yes, they covered all their bases, tackled all the big “whys” and if you ever take a trip to Israel and walk through some public housing projects built in those days and under that spirit, I’m not sure you’d approve of how they answered those big “whys”. Big “whys” can be daunting, they can kill a creative process before it even starts, I agree with Antoine about the importance of being critical and reflective about your work but sometimes you “Just do it!”. Sometime you can’t see so far ahead to know that your this-won’t-save-the-world project might actually spark an idea in someone else’s brain and his idea has the ability to make a larger impact on the world. Maybe your idea was just a catalyst? I think Antoine advocated a very linear way of thinking and if i can be sure of anything today is that we are not living in linear times. Even the way he points out his examples of cartography, going from one era to the next shows his linearity where I would rather follow non linear models of history such as Manuel DeLanda’s “A thousand years of non linear history”.
Mapping the discourse
As Antoine mentioned the Renaissance map of Paris I thought to myself “what came first, the city or the map?”. Was is the difference between a plan and a map? could the map of Renaissance Paris been a catalyst for changing the city? Maybe it started out as a map where its maker added all these details and beautifications which caused the city planner to adopt it as a new plan for the city? Maybe the maps generated by SENSEable will one day have the power to trigger change in urban form and policy, maybe it’s just a matter of coming up with the right procedure and technology to do it? How’s that for a big “why”? Pfff….and I though I would have to kill myself with boredom.
A life less ordinary
And one last thing about life being boring. I understand Bo’s remark because he’s Danish and they’re lives are perfect (just kidding Bo…) but using “boring” as a parameter is just wrong in my opinion. I would suggest “Intensity” as a quantitative indicator for our lives. Yes, our lives today are more intensive than they used to be. Information is addictive but it has always been. Gossip is one good example of that. Women doing laundry on the banks of a river some hundreds of years ago is an example of that and if they had iPhones they would not stop doing the laundry but rather keep gossiping from home. Men would do it from the village’s pub and having more ways to communicate doesn’t necessarily mean they would stop going to the pub and their lives would suddenly become boring but it would enable them to stay more connected. If anything, our addiction to information should be regarded as a sign of us being intelligent life forms, in constant search for information and ways to expand our knowledge. I think using “Intensity” to describe our lives is a way to create a base for comparison between different times in history when life was less intensive than today or to describe one person’s day as a function of intensity. Intensity also hints to the existence of the “Event” which Antoine pointed out and could be thought of as an atomistic unit of data.
I have many more bits of thought running around in my head but I’ll leave it for now as is and maybe see if this blog generates any threats on my life?