Everywhere is city: There no exterior to the global city that connects and sustains us all.
Everywhere is city: We still conceive of cities as discrete objects, separate from their surroundings. This is no longer true. There is no exterior to the global city that connects and sustains us all.
“One thing is sure. The earth is now more cultivated and developed than ever before. There is more farming with pure force, swamps are drying up, and cities are springing up on unprecedented scale. We’ve become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce, and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs.” - Quintus Septimus Tertullianus, 200 B.C.
Since the dawn of agriculture over 10,000 years ago, the human tendency has been to manage land. Cities evolved in a defensive posture, an inside protected against an outside. More and more, we’re embracing the stewardship role and increasing and extending the level of management. We must extend design and stewardship to encompass all terrain. The new global city is now defined with zones of urban, suburban, rural, leisure, and even “natural” precincts, all managed, all part of a designed system. Instead of isolated parcels of land or singular architectural projects, it is a matter now of considering an entire city infrastructure and its connected environs, whose reach is hundreds of miles beyond what has been conventionally considered urban domain. The city now represents all territory and all territory needs to be regarded and managed as one urban system. The contradiction embodied in the practice of architecture is that it has traditionally chosen to focus on big buildings rather than to see the big picture as the most compelling design project. Architects have tended to build pieces of city without regarding their relationship to the whole. But holistic thinking is exactly what we need here if we’re ever to develop the capacity we need to provide shelter on a global scale.
November 9th, 2006 00:02
this is the link to our concept that could help produce shelters on a budget.
http://www.macmeier.com/hometube