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The New Normal
The New Normal
PREFACE
This short book is the first in a new series from Strel-
ka Press, one that parallels the institute’s 2017-19
program, The New Normal. Several more titles in
the series are forthcoming.
As the new program director, I traveled last
October to Moscow, Kazan, St. Petersburg, Yekat-
erinburg, Helsinki, Berlin, and Copenhagen to in-
troduce our research plan. The text here is an ex-
panded transcript of that presentation (with a lot
of overdubs).
It is part manifesto and part syllabus. It lays
out why we would undertake an urban design pro-
gram with such a strong emphasis on emerging
technologies and speculative philosophy; or con-
versely, why we would convene a think-tank on
emerging technology and speculative philosophy
that takes urbanism — Russian urbanism, in par-
ticular — as its assignment. The talk is aimed at
inviting applications to join us in Moscow, and
the book is meant to invite a wider audience into
our project.
The urban design proposals we produce will
experiment with soft and hard infrastructures, fact
and fiction, future and past, and how they may con-
verge or diverge in unexpected ways. The program
itself is also an experiment. It will mix seminar,
studio and technical workshops in an alternating
sequence of modules that closely link conceptual-
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The New Normal
PROGRAMMING
THE PROGRAM
I will speak to the structure of the program more
specifically. I wrote the core outline for The New
Normal program during a residency on Suomen-
linna island, a 15-minute ferry ride from Market
Square in Helsinki. (December 6 this year, by the way,
will be the centenary of Finland’s independence from
Russia.) The curriculum is structured as a series of
intensive modules in which students will critically
engage urban futures in traditional and non-tra-
ditional ways: formal analysis, scenario develop-
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CHARTER STACKS
In the months since we announced our theme, the
phrase “the new normal” has trended in popular
discourse. It is often used in concert with declara-
tions that certain new things should never be con-
sidered “normal” and should not bend the frame of
acceptability to include them. We are reminded of
Eugène Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros, in which peo-
ple rationalize away the massive savannah mam-
mal suddenly marauding through town. “Give it
a chance, wait and see. Maybe it’s a rhinoceros and
maybe it’s not. How bad could it be, really? I heard
that it’s not even happening.”
Among our trending themes is the demeaning
of the real by conspiracy, fake intrigue, supersti-
tious populism, clickbait science, causality/cor-
relation fallacies, and motivated inference.
Exemplifying these tendencies in spades is
Adam Curtis, whose cut-and-paste political doc-
umentary, Hypernormalization, spins a good yarn
about the deep history of this iniquity, superglu-
ing it to the rise of Neoliberalism and all his pet
peeves (including a longstanding refusal to grasp
how technological systems operate with effects
that exceed political representation.) When Cur-
tis announces that now “no one has any vision for
a different or better kind of future,” he speaks only
for himself. We also see the new normal in the long
collapse of avant-garde novelty cycles, such that
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SPECULATIVE
SENSING &
SENSATION
For all our interest in planetary-scale systems, the
most cutting-edge aspects of urbanism are at the
level of sensing and sensation, both human and
machinic. Smart city scenarios are full of sensors
in the service of administrative loops, but they
tragically undersell the potential of machine sens-
ing at urban scale. In real cities, much more inter-
esting applications already flourish (and besides,
cites have always been information-rich). Concur-
rently, technologies that augment human sensa-
tion, such as virtual reality and augmented reality,
are becoming mainstream and as they do, they ex-
tend and focus the perceptual practice of everyday
urban life. We see these vectors — machine sens-
ing and augmented sensation — as correspondent
to and convergent with one another. For machine
sensing, the surfaces of the city are made more vi-
tal as they respond to light, touch and motion in
new ways, and for augmented sensation the living
inhabitants’ sensory apparatuses are infused with
new layers of hot and cool stimulus. There is an
urbanism to be found in the hatched membrane
between these.
We will be working with biosensing, 360 vid-
eo, 3D-scanning, virtual reality and augmented re-
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SPECULATIVE
MEGASTRUCTURES
But where do we find these cities? It may be true,
as Rem Koolhaas (a former Strelka director) has
suggested, that we’ve invested precious little time
in re-thinking what urban form might be, and that
the concentration of human populations into meg-
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PATTERN
RECOGNITION
We are a species whose success is based in pat-
tern-recognition but this comes at the price of false
positives and negatives. Cognitive biases run deep.
Like finding faces in clouds, even when we know
for certain that the pattern we see is illusionary, we
can’t help but see it anyway. Those biases are per-
haps strongest when it comes to human cultural
phenomena. When it comes to one another, we see
what we want to see and don’t see what we have
no words for. At the scale of a whole society, when
important patterns of cause and effect, life and
death, are outside understanding, then biases may
accumulate into fantastic apparatuses, invested
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PLATFORM
AESTHETICS
The circumstances into and onto which our proj-
ects move are dark webs. Appearances confuse.
What looks like a clean slate may actually be a can-
vas so full of contradictions that no light can pen-
etrate it. What seems uncertain may not be, what
looks like cool gamesmanship may be a slow-mo-
tion nervous breakdown. The post-truth mode of
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URBAN PRACTICES
Once more, the program is advertised for those
who are more comfortable with counterintui-
tive perspectives and working across differing
scales than their current circumstances may allow
them. Research will draw upon urban data, urban
economics, urban philosophy, urban software,
urban cinema, urban services, urban science-fic-
tion, urban systems, urban interfaces (and even
urban planning).
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Design always takes a risk when address-
ing any state of exception, in that its techniques
of mitigation may prematurely normalize, and
so sustain, a pathology that would otherwise dis-
sipate by its own failures. In hopes of protecting
what is good, design interventions can smooth the
way for what is harmful to carry on. Sometimes the
best defense is to let something destroy itself.
So, again, pick your emergency (electron dis-
tribution, value exchange, protein capture, carbon
dioxide storage, etc.) What is actually worth what
to whom: how much value is there in the world and
why? What should be done with the cities, now?
To repeat the point: to see things anew, and to see
them for what they really are, in all their marvelous
strangeness, both beautiful and ugly, will require
both our most intense and adventurous imagina-
tion and techniques. The future has not been can-
celled. The future is where we will live and grow,
but first we need to catch up to the present.
END NOTES
i WeChat — at the very least — is perhaps dis-
abusing notions that Californian app models
are merely copied by their Chinese analogs.
ii See his 2014 lecture “Countryside and Hinter-
land” at Strelka (remotely)
iii See her talk, “Extrastatecraft” at Sonic Acts,
Amsterdam. February 23, 2013.
iv David Rotman ,“Hotter Days Will Drive Glob-
al Inequality” MIT Technology Review, De-
cember 20, 2016.