About this item
Highlights
- How urban paradigms of efficiency, sanitization and surveillance transform city life into seamless "experience" and erode the non-normativeIn cities across the world, a new urban condition is spreading rapidly: an ever-increasing push toward efficiency, sanitization, surveillance and the active eradication of any aberration, friction or alternative.
- Author(s): Rene Boer
- 272 Pages
- Architecture, Urban & Land Use Planning
Description
About the Book
"In cities around the world a new urban condition is spreading rapidly: an ever-increasing push for "perfection", efficiency and control and the active eradication of any aberration, friction or alternative. The smooth city with its sanitized spaces and new technologies compresses urban life into a seamless experience. While the demand for safe, clean, and well-functioning urban environments is understandable, the rise of the smooth city undermines the democratic nature and emancipatory potential of cities, while leaving almost no space for anything that is experimental, non-normative, transgressive or otherwise out of tune. Smooth City provides a coherent framework to effectively criticize the enormous and in many ways problematic impact of 'smoothness' on cities everywhere, by investigating its origins, characteristics and consequences. At the same time, it offers a starting point to challenge the obsession with perfection and instead collectively work towards much needed alternatives."--Publisher.Book Synopsis
How urban paradigms of efficiency, sanitization and surveillance transform city life into seamless "experience" and erode the non-normative
In cities across the world, a new urban condition is spreading rapidly: an ever-increasing push toward efficiency, sanitization, surveillance and the active eradication of any aberration, friction or alternative. From Dubai, Hong Kong and London to Amsterdam and Cairo, the smooth city, with its gated communities and theme-park zones, insidiously transforms urban life into seamless "experience." While the demand for safe, clean and well-functioning urban environments is understandable, the ascent of the smooth city corrodes the democratic and emancipatory potential of cities, leaving little space for the experimental and the non-normative. Smooth City investigates the origins, characteristics and consequences of "smoothness" and points toward possible alternatives.
René Boer (born 1986) is a critic, curator and organizer in and beyond the fields of architecture, art, design and heritage. Based in Amsterdam, he is a founding partner of Loom: Weaving New Worlds and an editor at Failed Architecture.