Does our knowledge about city and urban planning have solid ground? Can historical research promote creative thinking? How can we theorise about urban design and architecture in our age of the media? These questions have guided the creation of this multi-layered, richly documented and illustrated triptych, in which the Dutch architectural theorist Wim Nijenhuis pursues a creative goal: to stimulate new ways of thinking in architectural culture.Each part of the triptych treats distinctive issues with a particular style of writing:I – a treatise on urban history. Using the archaeological-genealogical toolkit Nijenhuis reveals the difference between urbanistic discourse in the modern and the classical age; the first staging the street and public space, the latter adhering to representation and mathematical order. In great detail he shows how modern urbanism did not emerge from idealistic motives and technical urgencies, but from an accidental mix of medical, engineering and aesthetical parlances, and how classical thinking on the city dissociated from Renaissance by an intertwining of military science, political science, anthropology and ethics.II – a bundle of essays about the condition of the city in our media age. In strikingly composed texts the author prophesies how rapid traffic and transmission speed of media will distort the perception of our real cities. This gradual event will profoundly influence the cultural role of architecture.III – a set of meditations about epistemological problems. Questioning the practice of critical writing, Nijenhuis proposes change of subjectivity (and thereby worldview), ethical indifference, parody, curative mythomania and hypermodern dilettantism.The book is composed as a cloud essay that serves to enrich the reader’s theoretical understanding of urban interventions. Dialoguing with philosophers like Bataille, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski, Sloterdijk and Virilio, Nijenhuis covers multiple disciplines such as urbanism, architecture, history, media science, philosophy and art. Stretching urbanistic thinking beyond its limits he carries the reader along into the miraculous world of the street, the engineer, the norm, the form, order, fortresses, discipline, army camps, city frontiers, the Temple of Salomon, the quest for beauty, the ‘impressiveness’ of images, speed, the tragedy of the omnipolis, solidification of time, and the liquidising potency of apocalypticism and Taoist non-action.The Riddle of the Real City testifies to four experimental exercises: transitory subjectivism to reveal hidden dimensions of the person, transhistorical verticality to communicate with singular events from the past, theory as toolkit and pursuing a personal path in reading and investigation.
Human and plant relationships are described within the rich tradition of multispecies ethnography, ethnobotany, and political ecology. In theorizing this relationship, the issues of functionalism, and interconnectivity are raised. This article aims to re-examine the position of plants in the context of contemporary urban spaces through the prism of environmental ethics. Despite conceptual plurality and socio-cultural complexity of human–plant relationships, social scientists fail to note how the perception of ‘greenery’ has objectified plants in urban environment. Without seriously considering bioethics, theories of human–plant relationship might fail to note exploitive anthropocentric relationship between humans and plants in urban spaces. The article is inspired by reflections of urban flora in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2013.01.007 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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In many European cities, urban experimentation is increasingly preferred as a method for testing and disseminating innovations that might ignite a transformation toward more sustainable cities. By both academics and practitioners, these experiments tend to be approached as relatively neutral initiatives through which plural urban stakeholders willfully collaborate, while their success is seen as above all dependent on effective management. For this reason, the political nature of urban experiments, in the sense that they entangle different and often contending stakeholders in their innovation processes, remains relatively unarticulated in both practice and the academic literature. Building on the urban experimentation literature and political theory, this conceptual paper argues that the depoliticization of experimental initiatives is especially problematic for unleashing their transformative potential, which requires revealing the existing power-relations and biases keeping the status-quo in place and negotiability of radical alternatives. From this perspective, the paper sketches out four ideal-typical trajectories for experiments as related to their (de)politicization; optimization, blind leap, antagonistic conflict and transformation. Bringing insights from political theory to bear on the urban experimentation literature, we proceed to hypothesize the implications of our ideal-types for urban experiments’ transformative capacities. The paper closes by presenting a future research and policy agenda.
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