A city is crooked because it is diverse, full of migrants speaking dozens of languages; because its inequalities are so glaring, svelte ladies lunching a few blocks away from exhausted transport cleaners; because of its stresses, as in concentrating too many young graduates chasing too few jobs … Can the physical ville [city] straighten out such difficulties? Will plans to pedestrianize a street do anything about the housing crisis? Will the use of sodium borosilicate glass in buildings make people more tolerant of immigrants?
Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, 2018 # 4
Crooked city planning
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- More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think ‘transversaly’. As the waters of Venice are invaded by monstrous, mut …
What if everything is entangled
The city is perhaps the paradigmatic place of entanglement. We share streets, buildings, infrastructures and air; we depend on one another, even when we do not know one another. The city is crooked precisely because so many different lives, languages, desires, inequalities and dependencies intersect in the same space.
Yet much of this entanglement remains invisible. Architecture, urban design and social structures can separate us, filter our encounters and allow us to look through one another rather than at one another: we sip our coffee looking through the vitrine, through the window cleaner brushing it; we move through the city without seeing the labour, care and infrastructures that make our everyday lives possible.
Perhaps the question is whether the city can become a place where its crookedness — its unavoidable interdependence — becomes visible. Can we create spaces of encounter that make the relations connecting us perceptible? Spaces where the window cleaner, the migrant, the delivery worker, the child, the elderly person, the commuter and the café customer connect as participants of the same web of dependencies?
Rather than trying to straighten the crooked city, what if we learn to see its entanglement — and make visible the and that is already there.
Meike Gleimof our Imagination
