Architect / Photographer
Los Angeles, U.S.
Link: Polarinertia.com
Submission: "Cellular Urbanism"
The contemporary city is now a matrix of communication systems that have propelled beyond the territorial limits of the city. The freeways, telephone and satellite networks, fiber optic cables, radio and television frequencies each provide systems through which the everyday city flows and composes itself. We have reached a point in the development of the city where the individual has supplanted physical territory as the dominant form of urban identity. The will of the individual now determines the city's urban plan and its boundaries. The traditional city of solid and voids has disappeared, to be taken over by a meshwork of interactions. In fact, in cities like Los Angeles where the physical boundaries have become so expansive and invisible, it is often the telephone area codes that mark the psychic boundaries of the city. Like the individual who has a post office box in Beverly Hills for the prestigious 90210 zip code, we are also seeing call forwarding in order to capture the perception of being in the "city". The boundaries of the city are blurring further as the interactions that used to happen in face to face transactions have now been transplanted by distance shrinking telephone conversations, e-mail and network connections. With communication being freed from the confines of the land-based systems and adapted to the body (palm-sized mobile phones, pda's and laptop computers) the individual is able to leap beyond previous spatial barriers to create their own connections.
The desire for individuality has led to a devaluing of the collective which previously marked a city as a whole. Citizens are now stockholders deciding on the form of the city through buying habits. The city changes daily, rearranging itself to the rhythms of its citizens, each creating their own city through the windshield, the computer monitor and cell phone. What is to be made of architecture and urban planning in this dispersed postwar city? Urbanism must come to grips with the new reality of mobile and malleable infrastructures. We must begin to compete with corporate telecommunications planners; creating malleable alternatives and subversive itineraries to their transparent systems. Like the cellular towers themselves, today's urbanist must form connections between the communications networks and the everyday reality of the city, carving new systems of interaction and collective space from the smooth surfaces of corporate control.
Bio:
Polar Inertia is edited by Ted Kane, a photographer and architect devoted to exploring the urban condition among the strip malls and car washes of greater Los Angeles.
Polar Inertia journal is an outlet and a resource for on going research into the networks that define the contemporary city. The journal began with the idea that an understanding of the conditions of post war urbanism requires immersion into the technologies and instruments that have molded the growth and image of the city. Using Los Angeles as a primary research laboratory, Polar Inertia works under the belief that by exploring and documenting the infrastructure and land use patterns we can begin to understand the contemporary and future city. The research in the journal provides a basis from which to explore the potential for alternative proposals for urban development informed from the daily realities of the city.
"600-700 sea vessels scrapped on Asian beaches annually"
“Shipbreaking,” Greenpeace, http://www.greenpeaceweb.org/shipbreak/whatis.asp (accessed February 1, 2006).