Posthuman Urban - Session 11

Two main fields of urbanism

- Infrastructural
- Ecological
Limits of Object Form and Function
- How infrastructure conditions us on how we think and act
- When does a building become an infrastructure
- What is a built object after all
Paul Edwards
Micro - Meso - Macro
Scale through a notion of time
Micro: human time, lifetime, duration of year,
Meso: a century, or further
Macro: geological time scale, before humans were on earth, extremely long shifts of time
- A piece of infrastructure in impermanent if thought through a long scale of time
Functional continuity (Degree) - Technological innovation (Kind)
- We live in an age of functional continuity
- It is difficult to undo infrastructural systems once in place
- How we might undo infrastructure that have be instrumentalized
ARPA
- Responsible for invention of internet
- “Seemingly valid excuses can be manufactured wholesale for anyone situated in the
network. Thus the very notion of moral agency begins to dissolve”
- Perception of public change fundamentally changed due to phones and technology

“What distingues infrastructure from technologies is that they are objects that create the
grounds on which other objects operate and when they do so they operate as systems”

Toronto city planning board,

- Jane jacobs advocate for the people how infrastructure affects people especially
marginalised groups
- Metro and city council
- Metro: voices of people in metropolitan people
- City: people in the city
- metro wanted access to city with cars
- City wanted to stop expressways and property costs might change
- NIMBY movement: Not In My Backyard
- Anti expressway protesters rejected the notion that expressways were progressive.
- “Infrastructure stories sometimes organise histories and sometimes remain the ghost
of histories” (Katrina still & Scott Lloyd)
Rem Koolhaus OMA
- Infrastructure and ecological landscape urbanism - charles waldehim
- A disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape replaces
architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism
- Landscape has become both the lens through which the contemporary city is
represented and the medium through which it is constructed
- Stan allen: Write piece of thinking through infrastructure and what it means for the
environment
- Built environment through notions of time, what would it meant to construct
and deconstruct something through a system that is not fixed
- The social imaginary is not a set of ideas rather it is what enables through
making sense of the practices of society