THE PLANETARY URBAN

DIAGNOSIS

The conjuncture of being-ness, the immanent mechanism running our existence, is currently being dismantled on all levels and all scales. From a person to household, from a city to nation and to the entire planet, all is subjected to withdrawal of basic infrastructures of survival. The precarity and displacement metastasized through the systems characteristic for our time is foreclosing our right to space, the cities, the planet. The viability of human life form on the planetary surface is questionable.

SYMPTOMS

The symptoms of planetary urbanization, which we observe, might create presuppositions that we need to act in a counteractive manner on the physical level. That we need to reassemble the form in order to avoid its own disassemblage. Yet the mere reorganization of the matter in the field of visibility results in omission of the true constructive aspects of spatial reality. It is not the role of the form to breathe life into the invisible mechanisms, it is the mechanisms which conduct the visible physicality.

By outgrowing the overemphasis on urban morphology and instead focusing on the necessary parallel, relational quality and unification of the two — tangible realm of the physical form and intangible realm of the systemic mechanism, we allow a conception of the urban on the unified spectrum of tangibility and scale, and release it from the constraints of dualistic paradigm.

A laborious recomposition of the spatial distortions in order to connect the fragments of a puzzle is, at this point, not only redundant, but contributes to further distortions. Identifying a fractured and fragmented system, disintegrating in its coherence and weakening in its structure, has thus a precise function. It puts a threshold to a different kind of conceptualization without being fatigued by the outdated notion of the urban as typologies of urban fabric bound in structured settlements.

MISSION

The emergent epistemology of the planetary urban adds voice to the thesis on a large scale, intelligible and apprehensive of the contemporary status of planetary terrain.

Global megacities, densifying infrastructures, permeation of wilderness, rapid commodification of space and population increase are among the vast materialized forms of a mechanism calling for reparation and extension of existing planetary networks and systems.

Yet, urbanization of everything leaves no space for extensions — the other. Although unevenly, the urban now blankets the planet, proliferating every system. There is no more outside of the urban world. There is only outer space, now becoming an extension of our operative territory. The urban practice calls for transcending the established protocols, engaging with the former obscure — the new normal.