[-empyre-] Benjamin, Cortázar, tatto

[Ethel Baraona Pohl]

As a personal experience I can say that I learned to love the concept of
"city" mostly through literature. I felt so good when reading the subject
of this e-mail to continue the conversation that we started the past week
—which I'm very thankful to all of you who has shared ideas, experience and
knowledge with us!—, that I can't help to gon on sharing some more thoughts.

Paris has always been the representation of this concept of "city" since
those years when I discovered the *flâneur* described by Benjamin, the
Paris imagined while reading Cortazar's Hopscotch or the way that Georges
Perec talked about his mother house. The dictionary describes "city" as a
"center of population", but it seems like we don’t see the city just as *“a
center of population”* anymore. Far away of the avant-garde discourse and
aesthetic production, it looks like we’re facing a globally-oriented debate
which shows the future of our cities dominated by ruins.