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1. •  
     CommentAuthoridoru345
   • CommentTimeApr 26th 2006

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   BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh writes:

   
   
   "Evolution is operating with a vengeance in the urban environment," New
   Scientist reports, "as animals struggle to adapt to novel conditions and cope with 'evolutionary illusions'." An evolutionary illusion is when an animal "does something it has evolved to do, but at the wrong time or in the wrong place." Like grilling chicken in bed at 3am.
   
   
   Or massaging oneself in public.
   
   New Scientist then explains how "cities are not just accidental homes for animals that really ought to be elsewhere. They are also hotbeds of evolutionary change, shaping the adaptations of their resident fauna as surely as the Serengeti plains or the Amazon rainforest."
   
   Interestingly, both of these articles seem to overlook any evolutionary changes cities might inflict upon humans – in addition to the squirrels, rats, songbirds, or coyotes who also happen to live there. The evolutionary illusion of the studio apartment, for instance: what strange pathology of life wrongly lived has made its appearance inside these domestic spaces? What new behavioral triggers have evolved? Pale-faced urban apartment dwellers staring at themselves in badly lit mirrors, wondering where on earth the rest of the planet has gone, popping zits.
   
   
   [...]
   
   
   I (crudely) brought this very topic up earlier
2. •  
     CommentAuthorDanieru
   • CommentTimeApr 26th 2006 edited

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   For my recent blog post on 'The Digital Rebirth of Utopia' I tried hunting down a movement in Dadaist Art I heard about a few years ago. From what I remember Dada inspired a group of artists to contemplate the organic development of urban environments. They believed that over time the city comes to reflect nature in its chaotic evolution, but that on short time scales this disorder lead to mankind's discomfort with their surroundings.
   
   If urban planning were to be drawn from scratch and its trajectory aimed in the direction of nature then perhaps a more natural, more real urban entity would develop.
   
   Of course this was art, it was a century ago and it was Dadaist (inherently nonsensical in many respects) but it always comes to mind when I think about man, nature and the city.
   
   Let's assume that in a thousand years from now a large majority of the Earth's present biodiversity will be extinct. It will therefore be the animals at home in our current urban sprawls which themselves occupy the organically designed cities of the future (if that is the direction mankind chooses to take their design). I like the idea of all structure being somehow inescapable from nature. The animals are not at home in 'our world' as such, it is our attempts to mentally diconnect ourselves from nature which creates this illusion. Nature is nature. Change is change. Survival is evolution, however it takes place.
   
   [I have submitted a question to Metafilter about the Dadaist movement in question. Perhaps a better definition will arise there...]
3. •  
     CommentAuthorDr. Orphusi
   • CommentTimeApr 27th 2006

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   I work in the city, and I walk to work contemplating the fact that I’m probably the only person contemplating the fact that everything around me is utterly absurd – these two things are intricately related… we’re talking about, to a degree, how modern landscapes such as cities reflect the society that builds them… well, all the things in my home city; the shops, the people shopping, the fancy signs, the fashionable clothes, all the senseless eccentricities and accessories, they really do reflect the general populous… as I was saying, I walk past everyone, and I think: how often do these people even stop to think about the absurdity of everything around them, how often do they think about their place in the universe, or about what all the things around them actually mean and signify? Lately I’ve been looking at almost every inanimate object and contemplating the hyperreality of that object, why it was built, and why in that fashion, and why we need it…
   
   Anyway, I’ve strayed off topic… but I can imagine aliens watching humans build their cities and thinking “Why do they build this, when all they need is this, and at this proportion?”
4. •  
     CommentAuthorDanieru
   • CommentTimeApr 27th 2006 edited

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   Found these via the AskMeFi question I linked to above (that place rules):

   "We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience."
   - Larry Law, from Images And Everyday Life, a 'Spectacular Times' pocket book.

   "The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images... The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living... The liar has lied to himself"
   - Guy Debord

   Both quotes taken from Situationist Wikipedia page
   
   P.S. This topic has jumped all over the place. Natural evolution to Cultural Semiotics... Nice
5. •  
     CommentAuthoridoru345
   • CommentTimeApr 27th 2006 edited

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   Dr. Orphusi:
   
   I walk past everyone, and I think: how often do these people even stop to think about the absurdity of everything around them, how often do they think about their place in the universe, or about what all the things around them actually mean and signify?
   
   ==============
   
   
   Two things, a statement and a question, occur to me...
   
   * It is almost impossible to overestimate the impact capitalism has had upon contemporary urban forms
   
   * If we were to compare an ancient metropolis – perhaps Rome at the empire's height or pre-modern Kyoto or one of the great cities of ancient Egypt - with modern variants, which (if any) would seem more "natural" to us?
   
   Here's the point I'm stumbling towards: building cities - big cities - is obviously something we do. It's natural. As natural as a forest. But cities' forms are powerfully shaped by the demands of capital (for ex. the U.S.' infrastructure is extraordinarily car dependent - even in areas of sufficient density to support mass transit...this is the result of corporate/political pressure more so than any coherent design philosophy).
   
   The 'artificiality' of cities doesn't perplex or trouble me - people have been constructing the things for millenia; if every one was burnt to the ground we would, eventually, build new ones.
   
   That's what we do.
   
   What troubles me is how these habitations have been shaped according to the will and requirements of a relatively small elite - the out-of-place Citibank skyscraper built in Flushing, New York that destroys a small neighborhood's 'spirit'...the rail system not built so a new highway expansion can be constructed...the endless stream of intrusive advertising images...the dull high rise car parks...all these things and more serve the needs of various powerful interests who get their way because money has very long legs.
6. •  
     CommentAuthorDanieru
   • CommentTimeApr 27th 2006 edited

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   I do find myself questioning the breadth of other people's perceptions, but I try not to allow this to stroke my ego. There is a lot to be said for different aspects of thought, however 'in depth' they appear in comparison to your own. What I find the saddest aspect of our massively overpopulated world is how little people consider each other these days. I can get a tube train from one end of London to the other, a distance people even 200 years ago may never have travelled. I can pass 10,000 people or more on my 30 minute journey, each a distinct conscious awareness, each basked in the complexities of however many years of experience they have had on this planet, and very few aware that I am contemplating them at any particular moment. In these enormous urban sprawls humans rarely see each other as people, or even as other humans. The literally billions of oppurtunites to share a perceptive understanding lost every minute of every day on this modern planet astounds me and saddens me. Yet throughout it all, I am just as guilty of 'perceptive avoidance' as the rest of the people I pass on the street. Each of us misses countless chances of gaining new, mind expanding perceptions on the world every single day. Such is the multifaceted culture we live in.
   
   ---
   
   The city is definitely a natural entity. I think it is in the maljudged urban planning, and conflicting capitalist interests that true organic growth emerges. Chaos rules all nature.
   
   I think it is the definition of 'city' that somehow gives it its transcendant power over our culture. Chaos and order don't usually have categories, these are human given. For instance...
   
   Water runs through underground, ancient limestone deposits and over many millions of years carves out the caverns of stalagtites and stalagmites which fuelled the imaginations of our superstitious and God fearing ancestors. At some places in these caves water drips from the ceiling, each time leaving an infinitestimally small amount of lime behind. Over time these deposits gradually build up, and the stalagtites mentioned earlier form in droves. Some of these stalagtites grow enormous relatively quickly, some take centuries to emerge, some will never grow more than a centimetre before eroding and losing their grip only for the process to start all over again. The large stalagtites are our cities, the small our villages, with a whole range of settlement in between. Chaotic forces well beyond our perception cause the stalagtites to be the way they are, and these forces are in constant flux. The running water is culture, ebbing and flowing through the chaos of the mountain.
   
   Human civilisation is a product of emergence, as is all ordered complexity.
7. • CommentAuthorjennyology
   • CommentTimeApr 30th 2006 edited

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   Nice analogy there...
   
   This discussion reminds me of an obituary I stumbled upon in the LA Times last week on Jane Jacobs. I've been looking into her work a little bit, and the concept of encouraging diversity and critically analyzing some of the myths we share about the city itself seem very pertinent to creating conducive, dense atmospheres.
   
   It's hard to say at exactly what size or density the city becomes incompatible with most non-human ecological functions. Obviously an organic farming community that only grows native crops offers a more nature-friendly human habitation model. However, I do think cities can function on large scales while incorporating the majority of the natural environment beyond a planned public park or two. The problem inherent in city planning is something that Jane Jacobs seems to talk a lot about: diversity.
   
   "The city has something to offer to everyone, since it is created by everyone"
   
   I really like that quote because I think it offers an insight into what a lot of those who are drawn to the cities are searching for. And yet, more often than not, we find ourselves disillusioned, alienated, and apathetic. Many are searching for their niche, for something that feeds their ego, and a way to express that to others. The expected outcome is that everyone will have a specific niche and this will create diversity. Coming from Los Angeles, which has failed about as much as the first world can fail in community-building and not destroying the environment, I definitely feel the segregated cultural/environment landscape sentiment. We have some nice beaches, a forest here and there, and a huge racially-segregated core that is so decentralized each of us feels forced into third-party communication and individualized transport. I look to developing nations who have yet to create their set definition of the city for innovation… all the first world can do now is attend to cleanup and rearrangement, which takes a lot more effort than making those qualities a priority in the first place.
   
   We are of nature, even while changing it or 'destroying' it. To attempt to separate the human from the environment in any sense is utterly nonsensical and eventually deleterious to both concepts (neither demonizing nor deifying yields much progress these days). Even our parks have their boundaries… and therein lies the problem.
8. •  
     CommentAuthorDanieru
   • CommentTimeMay 1st 2006 edited

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   I listened to an interesting program on BBC Radio 4 recently which talked about the British formula of 'the modern city'. It switched my head around as to the matter, not least because it made me realise how different British cities are from many of their American, and more interestingly, European counterparts.
   
   The image of the European city the world over is one bathed in cultural heritage, rich in architectural time capsules for the eye, the mind and perhaps the soul to behold. Yet the British city is a very different kind of beast.
   
   When I think European city in Britain the immediate examples which come to mind are:
   
   London, Edinbrough, Brighton, Bristol, York
   
   And that's about it. Of course we have other large cities, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds - which are on the up and up, but in European terms they fall very short of the ideal world city. Britain doesn't have the metropolies of America either, where perhaps every state has at least one 'World-Stage' city.
   
   I don't know if I am making sense here, a lot of this is based on instinct, a knowledge of Britain coupled with an internal awareness of Global expectation/image/simulacrum.
   
   Any Brits here agree? Or any non-Brits who have visited the UK have similar opinions? Perhaps you think I'm making no sense. The metropolies of the future are ours to imagine.