Re: Re: Hack The City
That’s a very positive slant on the matter, fair play to you soulsearcher
. . . and here I was thinking I’d be giving them the five days for free.
A cynical person might characterize this Hack the City initiative as a case of an outfit who can’t come up with their own ideas, putting out a rescue call for other peoples’ ideas in order to forestall their funding being cut in the next shake up.
Luckily, nobody around here is cynical, but, being old and cranky, as you’ve correctly deduced, I’m not reading this jargon strewn invitation to give freely of my time, with its accompanying, multiple, spelling mistakes [see, old – and – cranky] just as a piece of innocent over-enthusiasm, I’m inclined to read this, appallingly un-proof read, jargon-fest as symptomatic of an ailment which afflicts almost all architecture and urban discourse at the present time.
We’re directionless, despondent and underemployed, but we’re desperate to appear relevant, knowledgeable and useful. We think that we can veil our shallow mysteries in a threadbare cloak of mystique. We’re trained to see and trained to appreciate what we see, but we forget that everyone else sees too and, without the conditioning, they don’t get it. We’re mesmerized by the conflicts inherent in urbanism, the gritty ugliness juxtaposed with the gleaming beauty, but we don’t recognize that this has always been so. We think we need new ideas, we think the urban condition is now somehow radically different than it has always been. Quote: ‘The city is changing: no longer is it an aesthetic creation, or purely an industrial powerhouse. It is a living, breathing super-organism, with a myriad of multiple and competing functions. As a super-organism, the future city will be defined more by its metabolism, than purely its primary function or spatial form.’
When did the city suddenly become a living breathing super-organism?
. . . probably at Catal Huyuk, eight thousand years ago!
We need to learn again how to mend cities, not how to artify, in a pseudo artistic frenzy of graphic vacuousness, the slashes and gaps that not mending the city has left across the face of the city.
Gratuitous displays of nauseating jargon is only a symptom of the problem, not have the wisdom, or the will, to learn how to mend our cities is the problem.
