In my view, what an open city means is that people are exposed to one another. That’s my idea of the open city, that it’s a place where physical presence with the other, and comfort with the physical presence of the other, does the work of allowing people to live together even if they are not engaged in the process of negating their differences.
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There seems to be a rush to exceed time, to produce urban environment and sociality for which we have no language, something that goes beyond speculation, something cut loose from having to make sense now. The city cut loose from what it had embodied or promised.
For me a city…is a complex but incomplete system. And in that mixity of complexity and incompleteness lies the capacity of cities to have very long lives. Much longer lives than very powerful corporations, which often are very closed systems.
Cities have become sites, places, for massive deployments of increasingly complex and all-encompassing technical systems, some of them good, some of them dubious.