The question of growth and contraction has effects and constituents that vary widely. Preeminent among them should be how to reach equilibrium for the sake of our species and our respective sanities. 

In an effort to avoid contraction, cities compete to win friends and influence people, to extract talent and resources from another place in order to import it to their own respective jurisdictions. Ambition for growth needs to be traded in for the pursuit of survival possibilities, adjacencies for resilience and cohesion as the days get oranger and more hot dog weather friendly. What is our willingness to change?

“…each block is covered with several layers of phantom architecture in the form of past occupancies, aborted projects and popular fantasies that provide alternative images to the New York that exists.” – Rem Koolhaas, “Delirious New York”

A systems approach to the cultural aesthetics of “city” allows for a multi-generational analysis. This unburdens it from the evershifting fashions of psychogeography and the emotional hierarchy of needs by which we anthropomorphize our architecture to accommodate memory (perceived, real, or fabricated). Our bias in selection does not speak to an objectified history but our individual preoccupation with style and taste, cornerstones of consumption. These words are not championing pragmatic banality but rather an understanding of the viral organism that is the built environment. A true temperature and pulse check will reveal its aging viability. Despite the sustained sales pitch, sincere but naive, aspirational but delusional, the contemporary city in crisis is fueled by a designocratic libertarianism that says we build out of these problems through the establishment of mini-autocorrect facilities, carbon off-set bling.

Being responsive at times to powerful forces need not produce only bad results, though it matters which were planned and which were chance. Surrounded by physical totems of our consumption we wade in the flood of electronic opinions that seek to recenter exclusivity, with a magnetic volume of its own, as individually definable; without staff at the doors a lack of monitoring can become dangerous. Accountability can be many things that are not punitive, possible teeth holding something in place.

Of course no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded. Exclusion has gravity for certain receptors. We continue to be enamored with convenience, even at the cost of our own demise. These follicles that would continue to grow hair long after our last breath are maybe part bird’s nest. 

We must consider the perversion of scale and its robbing of agency and usurping of small tribe council decision making. Churches going from sweat lodge to cathedral to arena. Music evolving from campfire to all-ages basement to ubiquitous half-time talent Vegas residencies. Fur trading to sharecropping to real-estate moguls with television time. Agency and influence diminished in favor of spectacle and fireworks and clickbait. With it the disappearance of accountability, mutability, permeability.