Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alexandria, Los Angeles, New York City, Non-Urban, Rotterdam, Urban
“Cities are like armies“
Port of Singapore
Nazi rally in Nuremberg
To me this comparison seems intuitive. Perhaps it is too obvious, but I could hardly find a single mentioning of it in the internet. A google search of “cities are like armies” only returned two sources. One was from Frederic Harrison’s 1918 “On Society” in which he references French philosopher Augustus Comte who believed that industrial cities were like army camps. The second was from Paul Glover, the founder of the Philly Orchard Project who speaks about how cities have grown too far from there resources. I agree with them both.
The comparison between cities and armies begins with logistics. The term logistics (one of the fundamental concerns of this urban blog) originates from the Roman”Logistikas”. The logistikas were responsible for supplying and managing the resources of the different Roman legions. Like cities today, the legions, constantly in motion, relied on well calculated logistics to manage water, food, dwelling, transportation, and tools to provide order so that the army could achieve its assigned goal. No matter where a legion needed to go to complete its task, these ‘essential life resources’ (ELR’s) had to be made available for the army to have any success. So too the city, often founded for reasons beyond ELR’s has to find ways of sustaining the daily lives of its inhabitants. In this sense logistics are seen as secondary. They are the routine things that are kept silent so the primary goal can be focused on and accomplished. Therefor the very notion of logistics is the history of human advancement. Our ability to increasingly sustain our existence more effortlessly is arguably the exact cause of out ‘post animal’ self realization. In this since logistics are vital.
The simile “cities are like armies” can even extend beyond logistics. Cities defined as fixed sites of communal human living presumably first began with the notion of protection/defense. If people amassed together and shared/traded resources they would have an advantage in reserving ELR’s and thus surviving. Although rarely threatened by invasion, protection and perseverance are still of upmost concern to the city. Albeit terrorism, global competition, class wars, or environment ‘disasters’ cities are in a constant state of growth and adaption in order to survive… A constant motion, a constant fight, a constant crisis. Every city is trying to win (whatever that means) but whatever the cause may be logistics are what sustain it.
As the human project continues to polarize human needs and human desires, the logistics of our cities become increasingly critical. As cities swell the logistics of sustaining them become increasingly complex, threatening cities and human civilization. In this climate of crisis if a city wants to persevere, evolving our metaglistical infrastructures will be critical. Water, food, dwelling, transportation, and tools, the essential life resources, form the foundation of our essential LIFE INFRASTRUCTURES. Through researching, redesigning, and rebuilding the metalogitical infrastructures of our urban planet, cities and their inhabitants can thrive. This is the concern of METALOGISTICAL URBANISM.
The first significant project of this blog will be defining the contents minimal scope.
Over the next couple of weeks I will begin by tentatively establishing the basic essential life resources of our cities.
1) Water
California Aqueduct Pumping Station
2) Food
Currently Under construction: MVRDV's Rotterdam Markethall
3) Dwelling
Independence Plaza in Tribeca
4) Transportation
Alameda Corridor running from the Port at Long Beach to the Inland Empire
5) Tools
Bibliotech Alexandria
For each broad resource category there will be a quick introduction and some associated provocations. Please, if moved to do so, challenge these 5 essential resources or suggest other categories.
Spend the next minute thinking about the work that went in to suppling the last water you drank, the last food you ate, the room you are currently in, what got you there, and the electronic device beneath your fingertips. These architectures make up the underworld of the city.
I am seeking the non-urban. A recent conversation between a couple of my peers, Nilus Klingel and Gabe Jewell-Vitale, left us wondering what is non-urban. Taken seriously we found this quite a challenge. Here is a brief attempt to find it!
Beginning with Merriam Webster:
URBAN: “of, relating to, characteristic of, or constituting a city.”
thus:
NON-URBAN: not, “relating to, characteristic of, or constituting a city.”
The part of this definition that triggered our intellectual debate was this requisite of not “relating to a city.” The city proper is easy to define. It has buildings, density, a border, and political representation. But do you know anyone, living in any environment, that is not somehow connected to a city. Our lives are so incredibly irreversibly linked to the urban complex how could any of us be non-urban or live in non-urban places.
An innitial reaction to this question might ring off a list of assumed non-urban geographies, but closer analysis given the above definitions complicates these simplistic generalizations. First off farms, farms are most certainly related to the city. Every farm-scape is intricately connected to the city through infrastructure, and our expansive gastro-consumption. As farms become increasingly industrialized and corporate, the country is increasingly in the domain of the city. National Parks/Forests, this is arguable and is more a question of degree, but it offers an important case. Consider Yosemite National Park in California. Once one of the wildest, and most remote environments in the country, the park has increasingly become an urban spectacle. With urban California on its doorstep Yosemite attracts 4 million people a year, the equivalent to 11,000 people a day. These 11,000 people drive their cars into this valley, park, and hike on a host of dense trails, they may shop, eat, and they certainly will be entertained. While most people would admit to coming to Yosemite to escape the urban, one must ask is this collective escape authentic. Has the very act of dreamily escaping the urban, itself become an extension of the city? Would the park even exist if it didnt act in servitude to the urban mass?
Across the globe, what we have historically thought of as anti-urban is actually becoming a satellite for the urban. As cities and their resource needs expand when do areas we might have considered non-urban, siberia and northern canada (resource extraction), antartica (land grab for laboratory space), the artic (expansion of shipping lanes) become “related to the city”.
The ocean (shipping lanes, oil, recreation), the amazon (hydro power and luxury wood products), patagonia (hydro power and paper mills), the desert (Dubai!), deep space (space-station/satellites)
I give up!
My search is over. By whatever power is invested in me (little to none in actuality) I hereby temporarily declare the non-urban dead.
Did it ever have a chance? Should it?
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
