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Friday, March 15, 2013

Architecture The All City

Posted by Charles Mudede on Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 8:28 AM

Mendis and Hsiang have embarked on a project to map out the entire world, as one city. They see the globe as an a single urban entity — for instance, impact from cities spreads out to the rural farming areas who feed them — so we should start visualizing it as such. The project will bring together disparate data such as population growth, economic indicators, topography and more to create a comprehensive geo-spatial model of the world.

Here is the video of that project:

But what do I see in all of this? The emergence of a new form of consciousness. There used to be a time when humans would make progress by way of the great individual, the new type of mind that connected the dots and revealed some unexpected aspect of reality. My feeling is that the great individual mode has been exhausted. The complexity of the human world, the terrific speed of its cultural evolution, and its intensifying metabolic relationship with nature, which Marx described as the universal (the general is production, the particularities are how wealth is distributed, and singularities are consumers) can only be grasped or processed by something much larger than the great individual, by something like a truly social intelligence. Networked cities might be to this globalized awareness what neurons are to the mind of the brain.

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Good Morning Charles,
Are you bewaring the Ides of March?:)

The other thing that Mayor Bloomberg has done is kick off an ad campaign against teenage pregnancy:

http://www.city-journal.org/2013/eon0311…

To be sure, it is hotly controversial:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/nyregi…

Still, I commend him for trying to tackle an intractable problem. By & large, I like what Mayor Bloomberg has done for NYC. No wonder it is appealing.

Posted by lark on March 15, 2013 at 9:21 AM

Charles,
Whoops! @1 I accidentally placed the comment in the wrong posting thread. It's in the correct one now.

Posted by lark on March 15, 2013 at 9:28 AM

Complex adaptive systems.

Charles: You'd love The Quark and the Jaguar, if you haven't already read it.

Posted by Matt the Engineer on March 15, 2013 at 9:41 AM

@3, i needed a good book recommendation. this sounds perfect. thanks.

Posted by Charles Mudede on March 15, 2013 at 10:07 AM

I'm reminded immediately of Tracy Kidder's 1983 Pulitzer winner The Soul of a New Machine, essentially the story of a new type of computer being built and the obsessive, tireless engineers that birthed it. The creation of the thing was at exactly the point where computers reached a complexity that no one person could possibly comprehend. It seems the "death of the author" is extending also to our habitat, both through the end of "master builders" and also "master governors" (the notion that Obama's presidency has been especially imperial flies in the face of how even his modest projects have so often been stunted). The liberal in me is ultimately comfortable with this; it means our institutions, processes, and projects will depend and reflect our sociality. I admit we do sacrifice the kind of Romantic success of our "masters" and that certain aesthetic modes are going to be nigh-impossible to achieve, excepting perhaps modest intimations through corporate and private patronage. What we must develop, in a pragmatic-liberal spirit (ala Richard Rorty), is a poeticized process, an aesthetic of construction and use. The installations of Christo seem a helpful model in this regard, given how the process of their making and striking is integral to the piece itself.

Posted by chaseacross on March 15, 2013 at 2:31 PM