A Coalition
How heavy is a city? This simple question emerges from long-standing talks, friendship, critical inquiry and collaboration with a growing coalition of scientists, architects, urbanists, artists, philosophers, thinkers and practitioners.
Initially, it’s a question about the material characterization of the intensification of human activity that marks the rapid transition of the Earth to a new phase of its 4.6 billion years long history, what scientists call the Anthropocene. A preliminary assessment suggests a mass of the technosphere of about 30 trillion tonnes. This is the sum total of terrestrial and marine components of the active material and energy fluxes that sustain contemporary humanity.
The simple question is also one of multiplicity. It addresses issues of magnitude, spatial organization, form, technology, materiality, and the multiple relations that human spaces have with other entities. It is a question that multiplies and expands the notion of cohabitation, of what we can understand as a city. It is a question about materiality, immateriality, about the spectres of modernity and our multispectral technologies.
How heavy is a city? We address this question as an opening towards other questions, each leading forward an interest and curiosity about what it means to shape cohabitation, assemble new forms of action, negotiate the plurality of knowledge forms and challenges that the Anthropocene epoch has brought to the forefront in stark contrast.
Similar in magnitude to the biosphere, the 30 trillion tonnes technosphere mass is rapidly growing and intensifying, leaving a huge amount of debris in its wake: in the skies, in the waters, on the surface of the Earth, deep down in sediments and high above in its orbital components. It is propelled by the combustive dynamics of fossil fuels and extractivism. It is reshaping all spaces and cutting across all forms of life: how to be lighter?
How heavy is a city? A simple question that calls for a new coalition for action. A question that evokes a new architecture. It is a call to rethink the city of humans as a coalition with other form-making entities, with a living Earth.