Emergence & Informality

I had said it before, but I felt I needed to stress this notion conveniently: as IABR’s Open City makes clear, emergence and informality are definitely around (and around) – certainly making me want to push forward once again on the Emergent Megalopolis film series…

And so the consequences of thousands of architects in the West fleeing from the “crisis” in the West towards an increasingly challenging Third World are also starting to make its appearance in the field of architecture…

From the look of things, the architectural star-system is soon going to be substituted for NGOs and humanitarian organizations as the most interesting providers of food for thought in the field of architectural intelligence.

Young architects are systematically dumped and trashed at your doorstep? Yes! But, fortunately, they are also finally realizing that they can stop complaining and just export themselves to places where the need for architectural skills is much more crucial than back home.

As we repeatedly hear that in 2050 75% of the world’s population will be living in cities –with most of these being totally deprived of minimum conditions for living– it is certainly good for the whole of the human race that this shift is happening and architects are not only looking for just being the new cool ass.

The Open City exhibition was quite effectively driven to embrace both of these emergent realities: that of the old-new urban realities and that of the shift of the profession towards an architecture destined to deal with radical needs and a profound scarcity of resources.

Like someone was saying, if economical stagnation is here to stay, maybe this is only a testing ground for our own future urban reality – as Bruce Sterling magnificently describes it in White Fungus, his contribution to Beyond #01.