Sociologist, professor at Columbia University, Saskia Sassen is a specialist of globalization, migrations and the sociology of the world’s largest cities, via her concept of a “global city.” Her latest book Expulsions (2014) includes her controversial chapter “Dead Land Dead Water.” In her current project she positions urban space as one of the strategic scales for implementing sustainable strategies. The organizing framing of her project is “Delegating to the biosphere what she does best.” Saskia Sassen Columbia
As part of the Paris Animal exhibition currently on show at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, the two curating architects, Léa Mosconi and Henri Bony, look back at the genesis of their project: to retrace the history that links animals to the capital’s urban fabric.
When they acknowledged the global urban boom at the turn of the twenty-first century, Western observers were dumbfounded by the sheer magnitude of the revolution that was unfolding. A small number of thinkers such as Saskia Sassen and Rem Koolhaas have nevertheless tried to grasp the phenomenon through concepts such as the “generic city” and the “global city.” After nearly fifteen years, this urbanization of the world is still advancing at full speed, even though a number of critical factors seem to have come into play. For this issue of Stream, Saskia Sassen looks back on our urban condition and on the evolutions of the “global city,” highlighting the increasing importance of social issues. More than ever before, she believes that the complexity of the city makes it the right scale for formulating sustainable strategies by repositioning our relationship with the biosphere. Saskia Sassen is a sociologist. Specialist of globalization, migrations and the sociology of the world’s largest cities, she teaches at Columbia University. Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and a professor of the humanities at New York University.
Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.
The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.
Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?
The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.
Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
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Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!