The Challenges of Urban Despatialization
For Christian de Portzamparc, the prehistory of the contemporary urban revolution can be traced back to the mid-twentieth century, just sixty years ago, and to the age of discontinuous urbanization and functional zoning by isolated pockets that reflected a negation of the street. Today, the effects of the new environmental challenges and the ubiquity of technologies are provoking a change of scale in our approach to cities. Digital technologies are transforming our relationship to space and time, and we experience the city as a dislocated and disjointed structure. Confronted with this “despatialization,” we must start afresh from the physical places themselves and reconsider materials, territories and infrastructure in order to envision the true goals of architecture. Christian de Portzamparc is a French architect and urban planner, recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize 1994 and of the Grand Prix de l’Urbanisme in 2004.
