[-empyre-] "can cities 'know' things?"

[Andres Burbano]

HI

In my opinion the understanding of cities, their dynamics,  their
structures and their histories is a key point of understanding what is
human nature. Several years ago I found the book "Emergence" The
Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software: by Steven
Johnson ... then I understood how big can be the study of a city and
how small is the field of traditional urbanism.

I that direction I wrote a short paper with some ideas about the
possible cross pollination between neurosciences and urbanism ... it
is a speculative text, but there are some ideas that can be
interesting, here a small part:

"In other words, the most important aspect of the brain is not its
structure, is what it produces: the mind, the consciousness. So there
is an important lesson here to be learned, the most important thing of
a city is not its divisions, its buildings, its neighborhoods or its
traffic, the most important and mysterious thing of a city is what it
produces. It is not easy to find a word, but I guess what a city
produces is an Ecology, to put it in more accurate way, what the
interaction of structures and processes in a city generates is an
Artificial Ecology."

I had the opportunity to work in experimental projects "on cities", in
several places in Colombia, South America and some places in USA as NY
or San Francisco ... I really appreciate the links and info that you
already sent to the list, thanks

Andres Burbano

burbane.org


On Jan 19, 2008 8:51 AM, Christina McPhee <christina at christinamcphee.net> wrote:
> Hi Ayesha,
>
> low tech, as in, what?  left luggage, graffiti, tagging......
>
> ?
>
> do you have a  url for this or is your work itself undercover, missing
> by design?
>
> christina
>
> On Jan 18, 2008, at 1:45 PM, ayesha hameed wrote:
>
> >  am a part of a collaborative perfomance project that attempts to
> > embed traces of these missing accounts in the form of low tech
> > interventions in public spaces across the city of Montreal.  And I'm
> > sure there are many others.
>
> Christina McPhee
> http://christinamcphee.net
> http://strikeslip.tv
> http://naxsmash.net
>
>
>
>
>
>
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