A critical History of Utopias, through the dialectics of Urban and rural space.
Theme: The subject of this research is the analysis of contemporary boundaries between Rural-Urban and the search for bounds between the post utopian turn of the 70s and the emergence of cybernetics and the virtual.
My initial hypothesis is that current disassociation of the Urban phenomenon from spatial representations (the process of alienation from place through managerial capitalism, cybernetics and virtual-ity) can be grasped only through the dialectical opposition of Urban and Rural space, in other words
a) To define what is natural and what is artificial and
b) Conclude for the necessity or not of centrality. I argue that is crucial to trace similar dialectics from the past, for example in the spatial transformation of rural space in the middle ages during the transition from serfdom to market economy (the métayage system), or in Jeffersonian visions of American cities and the contra dictionary characters of conceived space (Philadelphia) and industrial space (e.g. N. York) or even better in the first decade of soviet planning with the conflict between desurbanists and urbanists. Can we define the dialectic between virtual and urban as a result of the contradictions between the rural and the Urban? If our answer is positive then we have an opportunity to confront at an ideological level a world of constant flux (with infinite trajectories of representations but rather fixed as a socio-economic organism) and a possible future that is pure product of reason and thus again static (but rather radical as a socio-economic organism). Because here lies the first paradox that I try to research, how could one conceive of a better future without projecting an image of it (and hence falling into the dual pitfalls of futurology and deterministic notions)*.The first paradox thus is targeting the end of Utopianism and the lost efficacy of spatial aesthetics. We will name it, the paradox of a static future.
The second paradox though is something that happened simultaneously with the appearance of virtuality and the emergence of the first paradox, because although both paradoxes don’t have any relation of cause and effect or any other explicit link, they are results of the same historical event.
The second paradox could be outlined as the emergence of urbanism as a totality through the destruction of the city. We will name it, the paradox of a non city urban totality. But how someone can conceptualize urbanism as an abstract reality that forms a global homogenized space?
We consider urbanism as a dominant phenomenon that its dimensions and nature reflects a specific setup of space and time, and this was somehow true not only for the industrial cities but also for the long evolution of urban forms throughout the centuries. Even in the 70s when M. Tafuri illustrates the reality of technological integration and the collateral alienation of spatial formations from ideology through diagrams of the intensity of telephone communications going out from
However it is also crucial the fact that urban cant be completely disappeared and evaporate (not yet), it still have a spatial representation.[2] The difference is that now it doesn't need to create or form new representations of space so as to support the new social evolution but rather is supported by an existing compatible and "eternal"[3] spatial pattern, the post-industrial city. The question that arises from this conclusion is why current urbanism avoids the radical alteration of the industrial city’s urban matrix?
The main reason that I advocate is the devaluation of the role of utopian vision and architecture[4] in what we can call dialectical process of urbanism. This doesn't happen instantly but it was developed at least in 2 specific chronological periods during 20th century.
a) During the financial crisis of 1930
b) During the restructuring of capitalism in the 70s, the simultaneous emergence of the virtual and the end of the last period of utopianism.
Obviously this isn't the only and sufficient enough reason for shaping the current context. Nonetheless on the process of elaborating our concepts, virtual is clearly the keystone of our theoretical structure. It is the force that occupies the void that was left from the retreat of utopianism. And the spatial representation of this "void" is the boundary between rural and urban. In the current context Virtual can regulate and sustain the organic connection between the two spatial entities far more efficiently then any program of restructuring the urban agglomerations or reorganizing the productive vast areas of agricultural sector of global economy. Taking into account the enormous inertia of metropolitan areas, the informational network help not only the de-territorialisation of capital[5] and furthermore the managerial evolution of financial economy but also the subsequent transition from architecture(-1930) to techno-utopia(1945-1970) to virtual-ity (1970-) as the mediums of spatial evolutions[6].
Summarizing the Problématique .[7]
The main objective of my research is the establishment of one hypothesis.
If Urbanism is experienced as a totality, a similar hypothesis with Lefebvre in his book urban revolutions, then what is the future of the urban rural dialectics? And if Urban rural dialectics (a product but also a producer of political economy) are responsible ( largely) for the evolution of spatial aesthetics then what is the future of them(and thus what is the future of Utopia)?
Last but not least, if virtual is what we can call artificial space and urbanism is an unquestionable part of our “natural” social condition can we assume the urban rural dialectics are transcended by the dialectics of virtual-urban?
The diagram bellow is a possible linear structure of this transcendence, where the black bold line is the continuous dialectical development of cities and countryside and the red is signifying the beginning of the second dipole of virtual and urban under the weight of the socio-techno-economical transformations.
[1] Architecture (at least what we can call avant-garde) as a major tool of spatial interpretation of rationality and politics.
[2] The definition of urban as a centrality in production of space by H.Lefebvre is aiming exactly at this point, urban has had a specific spatial antithesis with the rural and still h
as.
[3] This is mainly the conclusion of conservative American thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, based on the assumption that a liberal democratic community(+free enterprise capitalism) ultimately satisfies humankind's needs for economic stability self-esteem and recognition.(the end of History)
[4] Manfredo Tafuri is very explicit on this specific su
bject, [...the crisis of modern architecture begins in the very moment in which its natural consignee-large industrial capital-goes beyond the fundamental ideology, putting aside the suprastructures.]
[5] Richard Sennett The culture of new capitalism, [...linear development (Fordism) is replaced by a mind-set willing to jump around.] several quotes like the above one outline one model of managerial capitalism and shareholders that its transforming the centrality of urbanism and promot
es an "uncaged" economy.
[6] It is clear-I suppose- that the trinity architecture>techno-utopia>virtuality refers to the aspects of the three of them as instruments of public equilibrium. Architecture keeps throughout my hypothesis the property of being a “science of sensations”
[7] is a French term denoting a concept somewhat similar to the English Research question, but also including elements of definition and contextualization
