Seventh Lisbon Architecture Triennale

It is a simple question, that hides a complex set of transformations of both the city and its backdrop, revealing a new figure in the making with a magnitude of planetary dimensions. To sort out these transformations, a re-assembly of architecture and what it means to build a collective environment is required.

The simple question opens up a space where new notions of architecture start to emerge. It is a space where projects, new ideas of collaboration with material structures and dynamic  environments, with different life-forms, with information, energy and material fluxes are newly formed. It is a space where architecture guides the material characterizations of the millenary shifts marking life on our planet.

Intensification is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa within the context of its seventh edition, “How heavy is a city?,” curated by John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog (Territorial Agency). It features contributions by Michaela Büsse, Emanuele Coccia, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Paul N. Edwards, Tim Lenton, Geoff Manaugh, José-Carlos Mariátegui, Anne McClintock, Raqs Media Collective, Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith, John Tresch, Laura Tripaldi, and Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams.

How heavy is a city? The complexity of formulating a response to this simple question points to a wide set of transformations that have taken place to what we used to call the city, as well as its backdrop: intensification, construction, destruction, erosion, emission, accumulations, duration, acidification, half-lives, extinction, fossilization… It begins to reveal a new figure in the making with a magnitude of planetary proportions. To measure the weight of the city demands a cognitive shift, away from the image of a dense human space surrounded by an outside, by another, unrecognizable space. It calls for a new aesthetics, one that can register the signatures of the activities of a phantasmagory of entities and align with science’s difficult modes of sensing sentient being, cybernetics’ multiple feedbacks, and politics new associations and mangles.

Today, to think of the city implies connecting human spaces with the spaces of all other living forms, and with their material, energy, and information fluxes. What we used to call the city has morphed into an intensification of all processes on the surface of the earth. To think of the city today is to think coextensively with the technosphere, the novel geological paradigm whose rise marks the exit from the Holocene parameters of the Earth System.

The contemporary city scatters in all directions. It is a vast and growing system propelled by the combustive dynamics of fossil fuels. It is an offshoot of the biosphere, made up of all its 8.2 x 10⁹ human constituents, and all that keeps us alive, including domesticated animals and plants, fisheries, plantations, farmland, infrastructure, institutions, energy supplies, global transportation systems, and nature reserves. It is a city enmeshed within a multiplicity of other species’ cities.

The city can be found in the sky, in the growing amount of greenhouse gases, and in the increased storms and heat. The city is in the land, forests, and mountains; in the reconfiguration of biomes and the microscopic plastics found in almost all animals. The city is in the vanishing snows and ice of melting glaciers; in the channeled and segmented water fluxes of what we used to call rivers, and in the retention of sediments in deltas. The city is in accelerating sea level rise; in the reconfiguration of oceanic circulation; in overfishing; and in the disappearance of coral reefs.

The contemporary city is the key technological component of the planetary transition of the Anthropocene, and its dynamics engender the rapid oscillation of all the structures and systems that came to be known as inherent constituents of the modern world-system: identity, nation, household, locale, class, gender, state, the international, the global… All are rapidly appearing in contradiction one with another. Moving between stability and multiple dynamics, extension and intensification, cybernetics and linearity, the crisis-stricken world-system of today cannot help but discover an Earth System on an unstable trajectory.

The technosphere baffles architecture, which is itself the technology of the city’s transformation. From within, the city appears as the result of the multiple projects, designs, actions, and processes that lie within the human remit of control and capacity. Yet, from the outside, humans are only one component, drawn into its functioning and endeavoring for its sustainment. The study of the technosphere grounds the potential for future architectures to create renewed associations between entities; between human, nonhuman, and posthuman polities and their material spaces.

There is no easy way to recompose the figure of the city and make it accommodate the multiplicity of beings that cohabit it. For Earth is a closed environment, with essentially no mass input or output. The intensification of the city is therefore the transformation of metabolizing systems. Therefore, to make the contemporary city lighter implies increasing the energy of the whole system, to start recycling its material uptake into other metabolic paradigms of the earth. It implies not less, but more energy. More biosphere. More light.