« To the past
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May 3, 2012
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William Gibson, on Cities
Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn’t really get interesting as a species until we became able to do cities — that’s when it all got really diverse, because you can’t do cities without a substrate of other technologies. There’s a mathematics to it — a city can’t get over a certain size unless you can grow, gather, and store a certain amount of food in the vicinity. Then you can’t get any bigger unless you understand how to do sewage. If you don’t have efficient sewage technology the city gets to a certain size and everybody gets cholera.
via The Paris Review.
Apr 26, 2012
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But the simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner was to put urban archaeology in every frame. It hadn’t been obvious to mainstream American science fiction that cities are like compost heaps—just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. In Europe, that’s just life—it’s not science fiction, it’s not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every square inch of it.William Gibson
(Source: theparisreview.org)
Dec 10, 2011
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Studying cities to learn about minds: some possible implications of space syntax for spatial cognition
Came across this intriguing proposition over the course of my senior essay research - that the way a city is shaped influences the way it functions, and vice versa. I haven’t read the paper, but it seems like something that someone might find immediately useful.
Abstract: What can we learn of the human mind by examining its products? The city is a case in point. Since the beginning of cities human ideas about them have been dominated by geometric ideas, and the real history of cities has always oscillated between the geometric and the ‘organic’… Here I argue … that all cities, the organic as well as the geometric, are pervasively ordered by geometric intuition, so that neither the forms of the cities nor their functioning can be understood without insight into their distinctive and pervasive emergent geometrical forms.
Oct 31, 2011
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The Intimacies of the Urban
Daniel Coffeen articulates the wicked, voyeuristic thrill that comes from unwittingly eavesdropping on the lives of strangers.
But it’s not just windows. This intimacy is everywhere, all the time. You can smell your neighbors’ cooking, are privy to their parties, their taste in music, when they wake and when they sleep and when they go out.
In Species of Spaces, Georges Perec has a great thing on apartments: you’re eating your dinner and right on the other side of the wall is someone else’s bathroom. Or mere feet from where you sleep, a stranger is sleeping, as well, your two heads almost touching. If you think about it too much, it will freak you out.
(via Thought Catalog)
Jun 2, 2011
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China’s ghost cities
“In November 2009, Al Jazeera English correspondent Melissa Chan discovered the nearly empty “ghost city” of Kangbashi on the steppes of Inner Mongolia, equipped with six-lane highways, an opera house, art museum, and a stadium. The city immediately became a symbol of China’s housing bubble, which has resulted in 64.5 million empty apartments across the country—enough to house a third of its urban population.”
“While Kangbashi became the latest example of China’s overbuilding (on par with the empty New South China Mall—the world’s largest), the city is actually a complete success. Its sold-out apartments are second or third homes owned by the residents of Ordos, the city next door. Ordos is the capital of China’s coal and rare earth metals mining boom, with a GDP-per-capita estimated to be higher than Beijing … A city that found riches deep underground is building another city skyward.” (article link)
This reminds me of two cities in Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”. I forget both their names, but:
- in the first city, an entire mirror city for the dead was built underground, similar to the city of the living in every way. When there was a change in the city of the living, it had to be reflected in the city of the dead. With time, the differences became so minute that it became increasingly difficult to tell which city was the city of the living, and which was the city of the dead.
- in the second city, the city’s inhabitants occasionally had an overwhelming desire for newness. To meet this need, they built multiple cities - when the bug hit them, they all uprooted from one city and moved into another, satisfying an odd fallow cycle of their own making.
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Curious about cities, patterns, design, and marginalia. I use the word 'narrative' a lot. Emmanuel is Ghanaian, and a long way from home. Nice to meet you. (@equartey, Pinterest, email, ask)
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