The “urban” is no longer a place—neither contained within a patch of land called city— but an enactment: a choreography of negotiations among human and more-than-human life. It is performed through the assembling and mutual infiltration of beings, infrastructures, energy grids, logistics, pollination, and data. There is no universality here, nor non-discontinuity. Each of these enactments composes what we call the urban: a stage where coexistence is ceaselessly tested, responded to, and renegotiated.
To think the urban today is to acknowledge its transscalarity: how a click on a smartphone, a body crossing a field, or a species adapting to a heat island all act as agents in the same urban script. The urban exceeds the city.
Urbanism thus becomes the study of how scales transition; how planetary extraction meets domestic intimacy, how the political is rendered through material and biological entanglement. The urban is enacted wherever these crossings occur; it is less a geography than the performance of interdependence.
Andrés Jaque
Andrés Jaque is an architect, writer and curator whose work explores architecture as a cosmopolitical practice. He is the Dean of Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York. In 2003, he founded the Office for Political Innovation, a trandisciplinary agency working in the intersection of design, research and environmental activism. His projects often explore social and ecological networks. In 2016, he was awarded with the 10th Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts. In 2024 he won the UNESCO Global Award for Sustainable Architecture and in 2014, the Silver Lion to the Best Project at the 14th Venice Biennale. Jaque is the author of award-winning architectural projects, including the Reggio School (El Encinar de los Reyes, 2020) and the Babin Yar Museum of Memory and Oblivion in Kyiv.