TransUrbanism

Are we post- or trans-urban? Does it matter? This collection of essays and interviews with luminaries from the fields of architecture, anthropology, planning, electronic art, and media theory will delight prefix buffs with its wranglings over the condition of the urban today. Frequently jargonated to opacity, often technocratic and complacent in the contributors’ fixation with design or dewily pious when it remembers its social responsibilities, this book is nevertheless punctuated with interesting observations and hypotheses about contemporary cities.

The suspicion that TransUrbanism (‘urbanism plus transformation… urbanism plus globalisation’ as editor Arjen Mulder puts it) is just posturbanism with go-faster stripes, yet another discovery of the classical city’s ‘instability’ in the information age, is confirmed and complicated by Edward Soja and Mark Wigley’s contributions. Soja argues cogently that capitalist urbanism has always been fundamentally unstable and that, while the city is definitely going through a period of dramatic deconstruction and reconstitution (yes, we are ‘postmetropolitan’), the ‘transurbanism’ and ‘post-urbanism’ tags alike mystify the persistence of urban industrial capitalism as the defining fact of the city.

Wigley points out that the city’s loss of physical limits and displacement by electronic communications is a pretty well worn dream/nightmare of architects and planners. It was declared by the Russian ‘disurbanists’ as long ago as the 1920s (radio transmitters cause the city to collapse into an endlessly dispersed industrialised countryside – like today’s ‘postsuburbanism’ minus capitalism?), while Melvin Webber’s 1964 ‘The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm’ clearly formulated the ideas that contemporary architects and anthropologists compulsively repeat. In short, the city has always existed as a paradoxical place in which people huddle together to disperse, a launch pad into cyberspace. TransUrbanism makes an interesting in-flight magazine, even if a lot of the stories read like advertising features.

TransUrbanism // V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002 // ISBN: 90-5662-236-6 // 239 pp, pb // £21.95

Ben Seymour <ben AT kein.org> is a writer and filmmaker based in London