Actar Publishers & Institute of Advanced Architecture of Barcelona
Buckminster Fuller used to affirm more than 4 decades ago that “humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons”. A reflection that nowadays is especially relevant: in the rising of the Third Industrial Revolution, no one doubts that the way in which we inhabit the world is changing, although what is imperative, in Buckminster Fuller’s words, is to be able to formulate the following question: What are the values that we want to add to our society? The new paradigm of “advanced city” (Figure 1), driven by the new technologies of the 21st century, is not far away from this reflection. A new city model that is characterized for being self-sufficient, participative, productive, decentralized, interactive and informational (real time data). Its urban operative is based in the urbiotics and characterized by its constant and intensive connection with the rest of the cities. It involves, indeed, something very different from what currently happens: nowadays we inhabit a city model that entrusts its production to what is happening beyond its urban borders and that has concentrated its ability to build networks, infrastructures, services and knowledge around a few corporative groups. In this scenario, people’s power – democracy – is the big injured. Movements like the 15M or uprisings like the Arab Spring, are nothing but the claim of democratic values that nowadays are understood as insufficient. However, the last technological progresses have the potential of offering us a very different panorama. While the urbanism of the 19th century added value to the rural territory transforming it into urban territory, the urban regeneration of the 21st century through the advanced city should add value to the territory transforming it into a democratic one. It is necessary to alter the oligarchic structure of power that governs nowadays, and with respect to this, the new technologies applied to the city must strike us, above all, with the following question: How can advanced cities help us to reformulate the democratic practice?
Coming back to the “polis”: the cosmo-polis
However, before facing the previous question is necessary to clarify what follows: why is the city the adequate instrument to rethink democracy? In order to answer this question, it should be assumed that the Nation-State system has become obsolete. On the one hand it is too limited to manage the global problems caused by ecology, migratory movements, energy, economy… but on the other hand it is too extensive for a democratic participation understood as significant and stimulant by the citizen. Under these circumstances, cities offer the best alternative for a government that besides being effective is democratic. Why cities? Firstly, cities concentrate most of the world economic flows. Secondly, cities house more than half of the global population. Also, cities are the main source of cultural, social and political assets that mold our society. And finally, cities are not worn and limited by issues related to sovereignty and nationalism that muddy the interaction among the current Nation-States. But, above all, cities allow citizens to perceive and apply the values of participation, collaboration and community with results that are much closer and significant than what they can achieve in the Nation-State. Therefore, and after moving from the greek “polis” of Pericles to the Nation-State of the Westfalian treaty, there is a return to the “polis” as the main democratic institution. However, the “polis” of the 21st century must not be, as in the Ancient Greece, a range of monads, but a net of cosmo-polis. A city of cities. A tissue of poles of urban activity that constantly interact in order to answer to a migratory, touristic, economic, energetic and business system that nowadays, besides being multiscalar, is rhizomatic and transversal. For that, we already count on institutions such as UCLG (United Cities and Local Government) which provides an institutional infrastructure in order to seat agreements, treaties and interurban projects. Cities have a central position in the political, financial, cultural and demographic landscape, and therefore, any alteration in its functioning has the potential to offer deep transformations. A huge opportunity to redefine our political landscape, transcending a technocracy that, in many cases, seems to stumble blindly without really knowing where it should focus its brand new devices.