This City Does Not Exist
Friday, February 4, 2022 at 2:16PM Back in December Mel Jordan and I gave a joint talk called ‘This City Does Not Exist’ at the City, Public Space & Body conference, Institute for Creative and Culture Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London.
‘The city’ for us (as for this conference) is not something that can be known in advance and thus taken-for-granted. Each city contains a pluriverse of cities. In this sense, the city does not already exist, having been created by architects and planners, say. Such an approach risks limiting responses to the city to critiquing or otherwise tactically engaging with it – as famously with the flaneur, the derive, and the male citizen who psycho-geographically walks through a pre-given urban space. The city, for us, is neither mass nor abstract, formal nor technical. Instead, we see the city as something that has to be invented and called forth in relation to specific contexts and situations: artistically, practically, theoretically.
For anyone interested, Mel and I are in session 11: The Making of Cityness, which is here and below:
But you can now access all of the recorded sessions and presentations of the conference here
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