“The field of urban studies has been animated by an extraordinary outpouring of new ideas regarding the role of cities, urbanism, and urbanisation processes in ongoing global transformations.” (Brenner & Schmid, ‘Planetary Urbanisation’)
01. Hyperreading the Urban
Over the course of four intensive classes and making use of a digital HYPERREADING methodology, we were introduced to the most important and updated concepts of the Urban Theory, which will become a part of our new everyday language as connoisseurs of the urban.
02. Planetary Urbanization
Before, I understood the concepts of the Rural and the Urban as adversaries that are trying to destroy each other in a war that the last was winning by far. Now, I understand urbanization as an ongoing socio-spatial TERRAFORMING process of the human intervening in the planet, therefore I can admire the era of a PLANETARY URBANISATION we’re living in.
03. Urban Galaxies
This transformation has arrived to a point where our cities stopped being understood as delimited spaces like in the past. Metropolitan scales of the urban have created the marvelous concept of URBAN GALAXIES, constituted by the large number of stars composed from what we call cities, regions, neighborhoods and homes.
04. Synthetic Intelligence
Although, this collapsed growth comes with its challenges, we are lucky to live in a technological era where we can coexist and team up with the SYNTHETIC INTELLIGENCES to make a human-machine reading of the planet condition in order to propose innovative solutions to the urban challenges that threat our existence, even though we are the cause of them.
05. System synergy
Thanks to this course, now I can read and understand the urban in a different way, not as a bounded delimited territory in which the city happens and an outside of rural-wild activity, but more as a whole system of synergistic interactions between the human and non human, a boundless spread to the most remote corners of a planet, an entity and partner that we need to respect and take care of.
Keywords
HYPERREADING: Reader-directed, screen-based, computer-assisted reading
Key concept defined by professor James Sosnoski (1999) ‘Hyper- readers and Their Reading engines’.
PLANETARY URBANIZATION: Extensive and interconnected processes of urban development and expansion ocurring on a global scale. Urbanization is no longer confiend to traditional cities but encompasses a broader range of spatial and social phenomena, the spread of urban forms into non-urban landscapes, and the impacts of global economic and environmental changes.
Key concept by urban theorist Neil Brenner (2009) ‘What is critical urban theory?’
SYNTHETIC INTELLIGENCE: Intelligent algorithms, models, and systems that simulate human-like thinking and decision-making, designed to learn from data, adapt to different scenarios, and optimize their performance in various applications.
Definition by Lark Editorial Team (2003) ‘Synthetic Intelligence’. https://www.larksuite.com/en_us/topics/ai-glossary/synthetic-intelligence
TERRAFORMING: The process of modifying a planet, moon or other body to a more habitable atmosphere, temperature or ecology (Earth-shaping).
Definition from Earth.com (2024) ‘What is Terraforming?’ https://www.earth.com/earthpedia-articles/terraforming/
URBAN GALAXIES: Sprawled polynucleated metropolitan regions around the world that stretch beyond any single metropolitan region and often traverse multiple national boundaries, in whoch, the representation of their contours and boundaries remains a focus of considerable research and debate.
Key concepts by urban theorist Neil Brenner & geographer and sociologist Christian Schmid (2017) ‘Planetary Urbanisation’
