While our scientific discoveries and technological development have reached unforeseen imaginaries, our societies are on the edge of a cliff, driven by a perfect storm of the effects of climate change, accelerating automation and growing inequality.
Whilst we set increasingly ambitious targets, our capacity to imagine & practice in the development of new human environments seems entirely broken and captured by the perceived truth of our institutions, rights and our economies- from ownership to planning.
Throughout this series, we will discuss with critical necessity the need to renew how we understand the dark matter of our built environment, reimagining the deep codes of urbanism, our means of organising for change in a complex world and the subject of our reality what it means to be human in our increasingly dense, intense and conflicted cities in the face of a radical transition.
The Boring Revolution: Our architecture and urbanism both follow and are formed by the deep codes of our society – ownership, property rights, planning, real-estate markets & economies of scales amongst others. These rules are increasingly coming to the end of their usefulness – driven by a combination of bureaucratic revolution (i.e near zero cost of machine transactions, speed of computing and distributed ledger technologies) and the shifting nature of value. This will change the future of architecture and urbanism – how we use it, how we own it, how we organise it and finally the very nature of the spaces we make.
Form does not follow function, form does not follow finance, form follows the forms of contracting, procuring, owning. How will a revolution in these forms change our architecture and urbanism for the better ?!
