The city is a battlesuit for surviving the future
Matt Jones, design director at Berg in London, has published a piece in Future Metro which Bruce Sterling “would like to call ‘the greatest design-fiction writing I’ve ever seen,” but (a) it’s not about design, (b) it’s not fictional and (c) it’s not even writing.”
“This piece,” Sterling says, “is doing the same futuristic thing that Archigram did decades ago, except for us, for now, in our idiom, with our techniques. It’s far-out, it’s edgy, it’s visionary, it’s truly violative of the given norm, and yet there’s nothing merely cheap and sensational here. These are ground-breaking concepts dressed in a Pop Art battlesuit, and beneath that guise lies profundity. Time is going to be kind to this.”
A small excerpt:
“I’d contend cities are not just engines of invention in stories, they themselves are powerful engines of culture and re-invention. […]
Cities are the best battlesuits we have.
It seem to me that as we better learn how to design, use and live in cities – we all have a future.”
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