Things, buildings, and cities - My talk at ISPA conference 2016

I am very pleased to give a talk at the 3rd International Conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture. The conference will be held in Bamberg (Germany, July 20-23). Here's the abstract of my talk:

Buildings are frequently regarded as artifacts. While they do not fall in the narrow understanding of artifacts as „simple, hand-made objects which represent a particular culture“ (Hipline 2011), they obviously qualify as human-made objects. My paper will consist of two parts. In the first paper, I will argue that it is reasonable to consider cities as artifacts. More precisely, on a certain level of abstraction a city can be understood as a complex artifact made up from lower level artifacts including buildings. In the second part, I will start to explore the implications of the idea that things (in the sense of: individual artifacts in common understanding), buildings, and cities can be considered as artifacts with regards to the validity of knowledge transfer between the Philosophy of Design / Technology (‚things‘), the Philosophy of Architecture (‚buildings‘) and the Philosophy of the City. Especially by Philosophers of Technology seem to be tempted to transfer insights about (technological) artefacts from their field to the field of Philosophy of Architecture and Philosophy of the City (e.g., Borgmann 2006, Dorrestijn & Verbeek 2013). I will use the challenges presented to larger scale artefacts to the mediation theory (Verbeek 2011) as an example to initiate a discussion on why and how size matters. Verbeek’s approach has been chosen as an example, because of the specific emphasis given to human expirience in the framework.

The haunting of cities

While Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014) did not meet all of my expectations (but that might be due to my misplaced expectations), I enjoyed reading his introduction to Laura Oldfield’s Savage Messiah (2011). Fisher reminds us that the

„...struggle over space is also a struggle over time and who controls it. Resist neoliberal modernisation and (so we are told) you consign yourself to the past. … .Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there’s no work to do. If neoliberalism’s magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fanaticism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium. Savage Messiah is about another kind of delirium: the releasing of the pressure to be yourself, the slow unravelling of biopolitical identity, a depersonalised journey out to the erotic city that exists alongside the business city. The eroticism here is not primarily to do with sexuality, although it sometimes includes it: it is an art of collective enjoyment, in which a world beyond work can – however briefly –be glimpsed and grasped. Fugitive time, lost afternoons, conversations that dilate and drift like smoke, walks that have no particular direction and go on for hours, free parties in old industrial spaces, still reverberating days later.“

The idea of „a spectral city“, „a London haunted by traces and remnants of rave, anarcho-punk scenes and hybrid subcultures at a time when all these incongruous urban regeneration schemes were happening“, strongly resonates with my own curiosity about how the past shapes our contemporary lifes in a city. To be more precise: I am wondering, if and how our lifes leave traces in the urban environments - and if and how cities could be understood as places of transmission (Debray). Is the haunting of cities something that is rooted in the (digital) memories? Or is it the atmosphere of a city (Boehme), which haunts us? To stay with the current example: Is it the explicit and shared knowledge about the past in Savage Messiah, which creates the past? Or are documents like Savage Messiah just articulations of something, which exists independently from memories made explicit?

Is crowdsourcing a form of participatory governance?

Peter Moskowitz’s Crowdfunding is evil for public goods raises an interesting question about the limits of participatory urban governance. From a philosophically informed perspective, I found it striking and worrisome that we can now see crowdsourcing projects for infrastructure projects (e.g., for maintaining roads). After all, even traditional liberal authors like Kant saw it as the duty of the state to take care of the basic infrastructure: „Build good roads, mint sound money, give us laws for exchanging money readily, etc.; but as for the rest, leave us alone!” (Kant, Conflict of Faculties)