Suchergebnisse

Designed in 1967 for a site near Prague, Czechoslovakia, and exhibited that year at the Montreal Expo, Etarea was to be a city of 135,000 inhabitants, where the conveniences of automated infrastructure would satisfy future socialist generations. Conceived by the architect Gorazd Čelechovský as the ideal communist city, the case offers compelling insight into the influence of Marxist humanism and systems theory on post-war and specifically post-Stalinist state socialist architectural culture. Informed by these intellectual currents, as the article details, Etarea placed the question of meaning at centre stage. Meaning in architecture was considered in terms of both cybernetic communication and existential phenomenology, and its function was no less than to advance the communist transition. Etarea was informed by Civilization at the Crossroads (1966), an influential policy treatise that emphasized the significance of the intelligentsia and the so-called 'scientific and technological revolution' to future communism. The article explores the function of the 'living environment' as a conceptual banner and link between the publication and the project. While Civilization argued that urbanization must be decoupled from industrialization, Etarea was to be a model 'post-industrial' environment. Three aspects to Etarea are analysed in detail: the territorial question of the city-country divide, the balance between automation and socio-psychological meaning and tensions between political emancipation and cybernetic control.

The smart city has become a hegemonic notion of urban governance, transforming and supplanting planning. The first part of this article reviews current critiques of this notion. Scholars present three main arguments against the smart city: that it is incompatible with an informal character of the city, that it subjects the city to corporate power and that it reproduces social and urban inequalities. It is argued that these critiques either misunderstand how power functions in the smart city or fail to address it as a specific modality of entrepreneurial urban governance. The second part advances an alternative critique, contending that the smart city should be understood as an urban embodiment of the society of control (Deleuze). The smart city is embedded in the intellectual framework of second order cybernetics and articulates urban subjectivity in terms of data flows. Planning as a political practice is superseded by an environmental-behavioural control, in which subjectivity is articulated supra-individually (permeating the city with sensing nodes) and infra-individually (making citizens into sensing nodes).

AbstractHow is the notion of 'culture' understood and used in planning the transformation of obsolete industrial space? This article analyses the evidence from a current planning project in Suvilahti, Helsinki. It shows that 'culture' is imagined and employed as an instrument capable of producing difference in urban space. The transformation of the Cable Factory in Helsinki and the subsequent consensus on the importance of 'culture' are shown to have influenced the planning of Suvilahti. On the one hand, planning is being carried out with a deliberate minimization of planning interventions and the promotion of the spontaneous, non‐planned practices of cultural producers: the future Suvilahti is imagined as a 'cultural enclave' and its community is characterized as a 'living organism'. On the other, 'culture' is planned in terms of its supposedly positive effects on urban space. Planners do not want to interfere with the non‐planned character of 'cultural production', yet at the same time they express certainty about cultural production's positive spatial and socioeconomic effects. The transformation of Suvilahti is playing an important part in the large‐scale planning project to redevelop the old industrial harbour in Kalasatama, Helsinki. The changes in the nature of planning are analysed under the concept of cultural governmentality.