¿Qué fue de Granada? II – Obsolescence of growth.
Latent: 20130606/BE/A
Information is the resource and the good that can be shared and multiplied infinitely.
It is effectively said that information is the reason for people to come to cities in search for ideas, information, in order to learn how to survive.
A city is connected with individual and collective experience, memory, intelligence and sentimentalism… a city is anthropology, culture and emotions. A city is made by an enormous chain of decisions, choices, shared identities and individual experiences.
Energy, in the center of the classical discourse about Cities, their birth and meaning, is just one of the materials that make the cities able to operate. But not the one that gives them power: the bigger the city is, the further it has to go to feed its community.
Nowadays there is the possibility of a network, netlearning, netbuilding… Information is traveling all around. Being located does not matter anymore, and neither so moving in cities. When information can spread, then the city can dissolve. Or at least the worst consequences of cities, which are connected with physical, social and environmental limitations (hyper-population, pollution, unhealthy concentration, slums, misery, criminality, expatriation… ).
In the meanwhile, Brand New Urban Plans are added to existing ones. This new urban projects can be more or less green, and anyway they will never be completely green, but they are added to the still unsolved problems of old ones. The cities that we already know and love –Berlin, Taipei, Granada, Medellin–, that draw our identities, and that we could make better, as the way to a realizable utopia. So cities keep growing under the creed of growing.
What if there was no need of new enormous urban planning? What if we were wasting energy for the same and obsolete needs?
Obsolete needs bring us to stack the cities in old models, wonderfully customized in adaptation to a really old fashioned scenario.
In a world where technological objects tend to be smaller, a green urbanism could be the one that looks inside and start operating from the inside, technologically and socially for contemporary values.
Why development should mean growth? Why not developing qualities, developing possibilities, developing survival, ethics?
Cities as other working associations forms that takes space in urban realities can be dissolved in a network of individual collaborators and units. Qualities can remain as a developing substance. Cities could be stabilized as an existing human specific topography in the human landscape, in the same way that places take part of landscape and collective memory. Strategies of a non material city –the information and the network that allows us to learn, collaborate, work and live together– could go further than the material city while the material city –the existing one that we already know and love– gets itself better and better.
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INFO: ¿Qué fué de Granada? – Drei Gedanken über “green-washed” Urbanistik (So what happened to Granada? – Three thoughts about green-washed urbanism) is composed by three collages and three texts:
- Veralten des Wachstums
- Funkelnagelneue “greenwashed” Landschaft für alle
- Organisch ist metabolisch. Und Nachhaltigkeit ist kein Videospie
- Obsolescence of growing
- Brand new green washed landscape for all
- Organic is metabolic. And sustainability is not a videogame
This work is taking part in the exhibition “Greenwashing”, in Berlin, from 6th June 2013, to 7th July 2013, organised by Group Global 3000, Arts and other Sustainabilities, with other six artist and curated by Tom Albrecht.