sha_two words

So, two words. Looking back on the readings and responses over the course of the semester, I'm very surprised at how cohesive they all feel, as an exploration of the city, and these new ideas about urbanism. Obviously I've been a little consumed by the relationship of urbanism and the internet as a global city, with pockets and hubs, infrastructure and slums, so that's sort of biased each of my responses. But overall, there's a sense of guided exploration, something I was not expecting. Words like fabric and system or media and interface surprised me in their relevance to the idea of cities. I don't usually read architectural theory, so I responded the most to the more literary articles, like McKibben's or Fuller's (and I've heard the exact opposite reaction, which is quite nice to know).

It seems to me the words I've become the most interested in are the ones that raise the question of the boundaries or definitions of design. If I had to choose two, then, I would choose infrastructure and slum -- infrastructure as a new scale of design, and slum as a celebration of a new class of designers. McKibben's article was really powerful to me as a way to convey how distant and unconscious we are of the mechanisms that support us. In Jeannette's class, too, reading about the birth of the Internet through Soft Cities, there is this huge detachment between the environment created and the infrastructure behind it. What this class made me constantly think of, and why I keep returning to infrastructure and slum, was the question of the role of the designer. I wrote in the response to slum, "is myspace the slum of the internet?" and now I'm seeking to draw even more from the online environment. Habraken's Support Structures talked about creating frameworks for fine-grain living, which in a lot of ways is how the internet culture has moved -- instead of service sites like amazon or ebay, you have cultural or social websites (the 2.0 of it all...) like facebook. Even a couple days ago, the infrastructure that the digg founders set up was under attack because of the posting of an illegal crack for HD-DVDs. The founders sought to remove the illegal postings, but digg users 'revolted,' posting up hundreds of blogs and images just containing the code, and then digging them onto the front page. How much control, after the infrastructure is set in place, does the designer have over the environment? I'm fascinated by the squeamishness, the need for control that was uncovered in the slum articles. It seems like the meaning of slum, the significance of it, is that slum is a celebration of a collapse of hierarchy. Infrastructure, then, is almost a surrender of imagination, where the supporting structures become so vast and complex that it becomes impossible to comprehend.

I'm intrigued by a new website I was introduced to, stumbleupon. What fascinates me is that it is similar to other websites that provide 'smart content' based on similar people's preferences (like pandora, or last.fm) but serves up other websites as its content. Stumbleupon actually becomes part of the browser, and I realized how powerful that actually is, that these sort of aggregator or super-sites have evolved so much as an interface to the internet that now they are actually embedded in the browser. Then I realized that google, and all of those little search engines, had already done that, and that search engines were in a way a sort of brute force aggregator.

So, what is the interface of the city? How do we design infrastructure that actually becomes invisible, exceeds imagination, embeds itself in the language of the city? What sort of slums arise -- what sort of social energy, discovery, interaction, and excitement comes out of something like this? And, thinking about it now, isn't that the sort of opportunities that cities themselves represent?

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www.stumbleupon.com