Owen Hatherley, writing for the Guardian, reviews David Harvey’s new book, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution:

[Harvey] returns time and again to a critique of “horizontalism”, a “fetish of organisational form” that too often remains at small-is-beautiful, an almost narcissistic concern with process and personal interaction over wide-scale action, something that “can work for small groups but (is) impossible at a scale of a metropolitan region, let alone for the 7 billion people who now inhabit planet Earth”.

Sounds interesting.

BAD FAITH

In an essay for Breakthrough Journal, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus warn us about ecotheology, a hypocritical concept of environmentalism that, “like all dominant religious narratives, serves the dominant forms of social and economic organization in which it is embedded”. So far, so good. A concept of nature as pristine and in opposition to human activities is deeply flawed (Timothy Morton even says that “Nature” is a completely poisonous concept for truly ecological thinking). But then Shellenberger and Nordhaus claim that the solution is a renewal of faith in modernisation:

Today’s nihilistic ecotheology is actually a significant obstacle to dealing with ecological problems created by modernization — one that must be replaced by a new, creative, and life-affirming worldview… Let’s call this “modernization theology.”

Yes, new technologies can help us overcome some of the most destructive aspects of human activity, but the very last thing in the world we need is to make a theology of this. John Christensen, responding in the same issue also thinks its a terrible idea, writing:

Modernization is the vocabulary of power. Modernization is a totalizing agenda. It knows what’s good for you and everyone and everything else on the planet.

At the end of their essay, Shellenberger and Nordhaus recruit Latour via his interpretation of Frankenstein as a warning against abandoning our monsters, not a warning against creating them in the first place. As Christensen says, this is weird, since Latour can hardly be taken as a theologist of modernisation. Latour’s contribution to the issue, “Love Your Monsters” is here, and his argument is more nuanced than Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s. He points out that once you’re involved, you can’t just back away from something. God, he points out, didn’t do this:

If God has not abandoned His Creation and has sent His Son to redeem it, why do you, a human, a creature, believe that you can invent, innovate, and proliferate — and then flee away in horror from what you have committed?

Commitment to something doesn’t mean faith in it, necessarily (God doesn’t have faith in humankind). To observe that we’re in this now, and we can’t back out is very different from insisting this was the right way all along.

Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, offering an ANT’s-eye view of architecture, point out how problematic it is to see a building as primarily an artefact in Euclidean space. A building has many more dimensions than three:

We should finally be able to picture a building as a navigation through a controversial datascape: as an animated series of projects, successful and failing, as a changing and criss-crossing trajectory of unstable definitions and expertise, of recalcitrant materials and building technologies, of flip-flopping users’ concerns and communities’ appraisals. That is, we should finally be able to picture a building as a moving modulator regulating different intensities of engagement, redirecting users’ attention, mixing and putting people together, concentrating flows of actors and distributing them so as to compose a productive force in time-space.

I think Latour’s criticisms hold true of BIM systems, too. While adding a few more meagre dimensions to the three honoured in traditional descriptive geometry, BIM is even more committed to the idea that a total documentation is possible.

David Maisel, American Mine (Carlin, NV 2), 2007 — part of his series ‘The Mining Project‘, which looks at the industrial landscapes of resource extraction. “These sites are the contemplative gardens of our time”. Via Geoff Manaugh.