SUPER CULTURE
A NOVA CULTURA DO INDIVÍDUO
Embora a nossa época se caracterize pelo desenvolvimento de uma nova economia de mercado, também somos testemunhas duma nova época de individualismo. EstaT não é, evidentemente, uma invenção recente. Em ruptura frontal com a ideologia das civilizações precedentes, organizadas de maneira holista e com um fundamento sagrado, o individualismo é um sistema de valores que instala o indivíduo livre e igual como valor central da nossa cultura, como fundamento da ordem social e política.
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A CULTURA MUNDO COMO CIVILIZAÇÃO
A hipermodernidade toma forma sobretudo na urbanização excrescente do mundo. Estamos na época das megalópoles, das hipercidades tentaculares que congregam milhões de indivíduos e que, longe dos bairros centrais e ricos, geram periferias e subúrbios explosivos, uma vez que as cidades são o horizonte de vida dos seres humanos de todo o planeta.
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O mundo é uma aldeia global, dizia McLuhan; o mundo é uma cidade global, poderíamos dizer nós a partir de agora.
Gilles Lipovetsky + Jean Serroy ›
A cultura-mundo - Resposta a uma sociedade desorientada, 2008
NEW FRONTIERS
Edward Burtynsky › City Overview, Shanghai, 2004
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At the start of the 20th century, 10 percent of the earth’s population lived in cities. By the end of this decade, 50 percent will be urban dwellers. By 2015, there will be 58 metro areas with more than 5 million inhabitants each. Of these enclaves, 48 will be located outside the developed world. The lower-profile cities - those like Bombay, Lagos, and Dhaka - are flourishing the most, while traditional mega-metropolises, such as London, Osaka, and Detroit, are stagnating.
Office for Metropolitan Architecture › Wired Magazine, 2003
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Our old ideas about space have exploded.
The past three decades have produced more change in more cultures than any other time in history. Radically accelerated growth, deregulation, and globalization have redrawn our familiar maps and reset the parameters: Borders are inscribed and permeated, control zones imposed and violated, jurisdictions declared and ignored, markets pumped up and punctured. And at the same time, entirely new spatial conditions, demanding new definitions, have emerged.
Where space was considered permanent, it now feels transitory - on its way to becoming. The words and ideas of architecture, once the official language of space, no longer seem capable of describing this proliferation of new conditions. But even as its utility is questioned in the real world, architectural language survives, its repertoire of concepts and metaphors resurrected to create clarity and definition in new, unfamiliar domains. Words that die in the real are reborn in the virtual.
Rem Koolhaas › Wired Magazine, 2003
THE ENDLESS CITY
Hubert Blanz › Roadshow #02, 2007
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Get used to it. The future is urban and in 50 years it may be weird to find people living in the countryside.
The UN planet-watchers have found not just that we are becoming an urban species but that the world’s cities are growing and merging with each other, forming vast “megaregions
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But what will it be like to live in the endless city?
The answer, says British environmentalist Jonathon Porritt, depends not on the size but what on what kind of cities we build. In Europe you can travel across heavily urbanized areas without even being aware that you are in a megalopolis. A long history of parks, open space, civic responsibility and good public transport has not divorced people from the natural world. “Sustainability can certainly be achieved in urban areas. Cities actually have some distinct advantages when it comes to energy use and transport,” says Porritt.
But life in the endless city would be psychologically intolerable without contact with nature, he says. The vast city disconnected from the natural world and impossible to leave becomes a vast prison with potentially terrible consequences for both human society and the planet itself.
“The key is the degree to which the cities of the future allow people to live high quality lives. Without access to green space sustainability is impossible. Life must include a connection to the natural environment”
Jonathon Porritt
John Vidal › Adbusters #90: Whole Brain Catalog, 2010
