FACTICITY
Facticity is a term first used by philosopher, Johann Fichte. The term refers to facts and factuality that both express limitations and conditions of freedom. It’s meaning is so ambivalent that it explores an open-endedness and limits of freedom at the same time; these may include the relationship of time, place, context, or other unavoidable, or unforeseeable events. For example, the situation of a person who is born without legs precludes their freedom to walk; however, if future medicine were to develop a method of growing new legs, the person’s facticity might no longer exclude the activity of walking. In the context of the city this might lead to some visceral subjectivity, which promises a foundation for some interesting questions. If the future of the city were to develop a method of growing new legs, what activity would their facticity no longer exclude? I am also intrigued by the dichotomy between limitations and conditions of freedom. How can an understanding of these conditions allow us to frame new instruments for urban production?
My account will not assume that the modern city was substituted or challenged by the global city or its theoretical underpinnings. The goal of my presentation is to place the modern city into the context of today’s discussion. The exhaustion of theories and speculations we have encountered over the years has acquired an aura of something akin to intelligence. Far worse, we are absorbed by the sheer multiplicity of our output and our ambitions to continue to address complexity with even more complexity.
MULTIPLICITY
In his critique of the modern city, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, placed what he refers to as the three poles of urban––life, labor and housing––into the center of the debate. Instead of establishing a foundation for these common goals, Sloterdijk criticizes discourses on the city and its literature, and how urban theory mainly focuses on concepts of modern communication, infrastructure, and technology. It seems as if the phenomenon city continues to be reduced to generalizations of e-commerce, networks, flows, and movements of signs and signals. Despite our attempts, we continue to address problems with similar ideologies; from technological optimism, to good-life modernism, populism, environmentalism, and many more isms. Questions of materiality and density continue to dissolve the city into metaphors and disembodiments. The identity of the city is sought in the escape from its physical localization and in the dissolution of embedded situations. Consequently, and I quote Sloterdijk, “discourses about the city regularly appear in the company of (the modernist) romance of decentralization and the mysticism of immaterialization.”
Never before has the human spirit and the wholeness of the city been challenged to a degree that the evolution and its enlightenment, characteristics that have always determined the city, turned against the city. Environmental issues, or the ramifications of rapid urbanization cannot change the fact that the city is still predominantly seen as a triumph; after all, it is a place designed for maximum profit and efficiency; it makes us richer, more educated, happier, healthier, and perhaps even better looking. However, the incision of the global into the historic and post-historic city bypasses important questions of the factual city. There is a friction that causes conflicts and exposes parallel realities above the city of the status quo. Without dialectic, the old and the new city are diametrically opposed to each other leaving global systems functioning on top of the actual city, or in reality, disjointing it even more. Ultimately, I argue it “unemployed” the citizen from its own city.
MEMORY
If history appears to be in this ongoing state of crisis, we have to acknowledge so too does memory. Memory and progress, in part, predicated on the processes of forgetting are helping us to let go of the past in order to find something in the future. New is always better was the ultimate doctrine, inseparable from American dream. This cult of the new did not only define the strategy for marketing strategists, but is also was a guiding principle for those who are building frameworks for the next dream. We all subscribed to this commercial aesthetic. In recent years, the forward march of progress seems to have been whittled down to a merely technological affair, despite a generation APP with more social consciousness. However, what will it take to remember if the task of remembering is increasingly outsourced to app’s, and intrusions of electronic communication into our everyday lives have consequences for the ways in which the past will be remembered, and the history of the present will be written?
KALEIDOSCOPE
The city, I argue, in terms of its own history is an epistemological provocation. The complexity of the issues, climate, the environment, and other new parameters make it difficult to clearly differentiate the scalar frames that are important to allow us to find what makes it, or holds it together.
In her book, Cities by Design, Fran Tonkiss, director of the cities program at LSU, is making an argument for the social life of urban form. The social life of cities, so she says, is determined by the relationships between how people create and live in space.” This construction of the city allows us to acknowledge that the deeper structures of the city are still shaped by economic arrangements, social relations, legal constructions and policies, but yet, there is a social dimension to the city that relates to the individuals shaping it. Or as Jane Jacobs said, “a city has the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
With the expanding city, however, there is imbalance in this equation. Not only in terms of its morphological characteristics, but also in terms of the metamorphosis of the agencies that give and shape the culture of our time. Architects, planners, engineers, economical and political interests, all are determined by ideas and values of baby-boomers, millennial’s, generation x and z’s. Like Lewis Mumford said, “mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.” But how well have we communicated concepts and ideas of the city to the next generation? What methods do we have to develop to grow new legs for the city?
CONSCIENCE
Let me close my thoughts with Richard Sennett. In his book, The Conscience of the Eye, he argues: “The Ancient Greek could use their eyes to see the complexities of life. The temples, markets, playing fields, meeting places, public sanctuaries, and paintings of the ancient city represented the culture’s values in religion, politics, and family life… One difference between the Greek past and the present is, that whereas the ancients could use their eyes in the city to think about political, religious, and erotic experiences, modern culture suffers from a divide between the inside and outside. It is a divide between subjective experience and worldly experience, self and the city.”
— Antonio Petrov