The Urban Age
In the academic world in which I work, proximity to the rich and powerful is at best a matter of expediency, and at worst elicits the charge of complicity. What I appreciate about architects and designers is the irreftutably practical nature of their world, in which structures of power and the market shape the context of practice. If we social scientists are in the world but pretend to be above it, designers are both of the world and in it.
This past week I was in Berlin for the Urban Age conference, the last in a series of high-powered summits of city mayors, urban planners, architects and designers, and sociologists and geographers concerned with the fate of cities — London, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Berlin. This was part of my class at MIT on Social Theory and the City, taught by Richard Sennett, who brought our entire class to Berlin for the conference. Amongst the many people I met this weekend, I had the good fortune to interact with the urban geographer Edward Soja, whose work I have followed for years — and who said to me over a drink later that he was there as much for the intellectual exchange as for the political networking! Here is Ed Soja on the screen asking a question of the mayor of Bogota in the panel on mobility and transport. It was great to meet and listen to people whose work I have read and taught for several years. Presentations by my teacher Richard Sennett on open and brittle cities, Deyan Sudjic on listening to the city, Saskia Sassen on cities at the intersection are online.
The conference was as much about networks as ideas, and it was an interesting chance to observe academics who felt they were close to power, as well as politicians who felt they were close to ideas. The architects and planners, including us students, were all somewhere in-between. Our group will re-convene in MIT next week to take stock of the summitry. Rumours are thick that the conference network will move to Brazil and India next year, and I look forward to helping with Urban Age if it happens in Mumbai, as some have suggested.
