The problem with Google’s vision is that it doesn’t acknowledge the vital role that disorder, chaos, and novelty play in shaping the urban experience. Back in 1970, cultural critic Richard Sennett wrote a wonderful little book—The Users of Disorder—that all Google engineers should read. In it, Sennett made a strong case for “dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities,” where strangers from very different socio-economic backgrounds still rub shoulders. Sennett’s ideal city is not just an agglomeration of ghettos and gated communities whose residents never talk to one another; rather, it’s the mutual entanglement between the two—and the occasionally mess that such entanglements introduce into our daily life—that makes it an interesting place to live in and allows its inhabitants to turn into mature and complex human beings.
Google’s urbanism, on the other hand, is that of someone who is trying to get to a shopping mall in their self-driving car. It’s profoundly utilitarian, even selfish in character, with little to no concern for how public space is experienced. In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to. Since no one formally reviews public space or mentions it in their emails, it might as well disappear from Google’s highly personalized maps. And if the promotional videos for Google Glass are anything to judge by, we might not even notice it’s gone: For all we know, we might be walking through an urban desert, but Google Glass will still make it look exciting, masking the blighted reality.
rePLACE BEIJING
The rituals of everyday life trace regular paths along streets and through buildings, organising the solids and voids of the built environment into narratives and patterns of association. Complicated by memory and social rituals, our experience of the city is of a dynamic place, a stage for public performances and private tragedies, of significant moments and the incredibly mundane. The habits, rituals, and actions of its population, the lived experiences within the city define it as something that is always current, always in constant, random movement.
rePLACE BEIJING begins by a public invita-
tion to reconsider the city as an active process of documenting time and place inseparable from our everyday, lived experience. Your participation is requested as a singular contribution towards an alternative, collective understanding of how the city both literally and metaphorically vibrates, or where ‘the beaten track’ runs rich with/counter to personal knowledge, memory and cultural myth.
Anyone located in Beijing can participate by mapping out a frequent route from their day-to-day life, recording the regular patterns and particular moments associated with this journey. Simply follow the instructions to upload your route as well as text, images, video and/or sound documenting observations and discoveries made along the way. You can also take part following a ‘tour package’ prepared by someone else. Simply download the PDF map of any of the routes already uploaded and retrace someone else’s everyday ritual.
Through the various stages of the project, rePLACE seeks to provide a way to understand the city, not only through its built spaces, but in the ways its residents are interacting with it in their daily lives——the routes we follow and the moments where these routes cross, overlap and run parallel or tangent to each other. This is foremost a reconsideration of history and image-making outside of our traditional understandings of these terms, where forms of heritage preservation can go beyond passive historicisation and generate living processes to actively celebrate the city-in-flux.
流动的水泥 - 引进一部关于中国城市 化空间的 .pdf 期刊
Concrete Flux- introducing a .pdf journal on urban spaces in China. (Chinese Version)
