week three_article three_blog five

Ellen Dunham-Jones_Temporary Contracts: On the Economy of the Post-Industrial Landscape

Let us consider, for a moment, a possible future. Let us suppose that within the next few years a plentiful, clean burning, completely green fuel (hydrogen, canola, whatever) for heating our homes, running our vehicles, and powering our cities emerges and is successfully integrated with existing technologies. If this were to occur it would be quite believable for contemporary culture to continue to expand and develop much as it is now, with “speed, mobility, and malleability being its central attributes of cultural production.” Indeed, with ecological sustainability less of a global concern than ever before, there would seemingly be little reason for culture, certainly global culture, to shift its current course. Consequently, the ongoing creation and expansion of edge cities; the move to suburbia and beyond to exurbia would seemingly proceed unabated. The result of temporary contracts, these “cities only in scale” (as Dunham –Jones would identify them) would continue to be the nexus of our post-industrial landscape. In such a future how is architecture to create those characteristics of cities and city life which have long been viewed as valuable: community, public space, public services, place, memory, history, etc? Can such concepts and constructs be applicable in different ways and in new forums; redefined if you will? Let us consider, for example, telecommunications and perhaps its greatest user interface, the internet. Can we establish meaningful virtual communities within such a technology? How can we create virtual public space? Can place be established if it is severed from a geo-physical context? Would re-applications of such concepts not be more in line with our current postmodern/post-industrial mindset? Or are we to seek to operate outside of this cultural mindset somehow; to attempt to direct it and have some influence over its formation and growth from an external position? Or perhaps our old notions/characteristics of ‘city’ are to be discarded, tossed to the garbage pile of the no longer relevant?