The City is Me

by Rosane Araujo

Overview

Proposing a new way of understanding the relationship between the city and personal identity, The City is Me argues that there is no longer a distance between the two. The result of extensive research about our notions of the city and the person throughout time, this volume explores the technology, research findings, and new ideas that have made it impossible to sustain conceptions of the city that are based on the criterion of a boundary. Showing how this shift mirrors the decentralization and fragmentation of personal identity in a globalized world, Rosane Araujo confronts the challenge of rethinking urbanism in a way that corresponds to the risk and uncertainty—but also to the possibilities—of today’s cities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781841506395
Publisher:	Intellect, Limited
Publication date:	12/15/2012
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Rosane Araujo, a Brazilian architect and urbanist, is a visiting scholar at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements xi

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

General Structure of this book 12

Chapter 1 About Concept 13

1.1 The concept of City 18

1.2 The city 19

Chapter 2 Reconceptualizing the City 21

2.1 The informational city 24

2.2 The videocity 27

2.3 The metapolis 28

2.4 The megacities 28

2.5 The global city 29

2.6 The cybercity 29

2.7 The e-topia 30

2.8 The nodal city 32

2.9 The city of bits 33

2.10 The ecstacity 40

2.11 Other concepts of city 44

Chapter 3 Urbanism in Fluid State 47

3.1 Brief introduction to topology 50

3.2 A form that creates its permanent mutation 52

3.3 The twenty-first century Orbanism 56

Chapter 4 Reconceptualizing I 59

4.1 René Descartes 62

4.1.1 Cartesian Philosophy and the foundation issue 62

4.1.2 Subject as foundation: I-substance 62

4.1.3 Subject as a first-person consciousness 63

4.1.4 Subject of reflection 64

4.1.5 The Cartesian I: I-subject 64

4.2 Immanuel Kant 65

4.2.1 The Copernican revolution and the critical project 65

4.2.2 The Kantian transcendental subject 66

4.3 Sigmund Freud 68

4.3.1 Freud and Psychoanalysis 68

4.3.2 Unconscious and consciousness: the Freudian topography 69

4.3.3 Ego: das Ich 72

4.4 The systemic thinking of Ludwig von Bertalanffy 73

4.5 The Systemic thinking of Maturana and Varela: the concept of autopoiesis 78

4.5.1 Unity, closure and coupling 78

4.5.2 The human knowledge 83

4.6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's rhizome 85

4.7 The cognitive ecology of Pierre Lévy 87

4.7.1 The couplings of space-time 88

4.7.2 Virtualizations 91

4.8 Complex networks 95

4.8.1 Random networks 96

4.8.2 Scale-free networks 97

4.9 Summary chart 98

4.10 Considerations 101

Chapter 5 The Concept of Person According to the New Psychoanalysis 105

5.1 The equivalence I = Person 108

5.2 Person = Primary Formations + Secondary Formations + Original Formation 112

5.2.1 Primary Formations 112

5.2.2 Secondary Formations 114

5.2.3 Original Formation 115

5.3 Persons are IdioFormtions of our case 116

5.3.1 Haver 117

5.3.2 The Person "is" in the order of "Being" and "há" in the order of "Haver" 118

5.4 Person is a Pole with Focus, Fringe and Background 119

5.5 Negative definitions of I = Person 121

5.6 Without frontiers 123

Chapter 6 The City is Me 127

6.1 The city is me: pole, focus, fringe 131

6.2 The urban pole in focus and fringe 133

Chapter 7 Conclusion 137

Bibliography 145

Notes 155

Authors Index 175

Editorial Reviews

Araujo’s approach is aggressively interdisciplinary, challenging boundaries and championing the polysemy of conceptual approaches. Both city and person are extensible concepts: as we experience the city, the city experiences us, collecting and collating data about our movements, trajectories, interests and habits. . . . The City is Me traces many of the important developments and theories that are contributing to the formation of ‘smart’ cities connected and wired through sophisticated software and user interfaces.

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

Araujo’s approach is aggressively interdisciplinary, challenging boundaries and championing the polysemy of conceptual approaches. Both city and person are extensible concepts: as we experience the city, the city experiences us, collecting and collating data about our movements, trajectories, interests and habits. . . . The City is Me traces many of the important developments and theories that are contributing to the formation of ‘smart’ cities connected and wired through sophisticated software and user interfaces.

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies