BOSASA DS Da o“y TransUrbanism®esistina_the Cit Mark Wigley 103 ¥ uae wg in teal rte at Corns Uns, He steatosis Acree Men des un (1903, wht Wats, Desire” Ors Te fasting of Woeee of Dears ey Cart’ New Baber The yer Arete of Dee S38 eS ae ang Stoaonst acters Hom Constants New Babe 1 Beyond 2000 28 ere wring ona pris ol vetual sae ‘We don’t go to cities. Cities come to us, stream towards us. To occupy a city today vero aur in a dense array of overlapping media steams. The limit of the cy 5 rot the limit of some physical terrain but the limit of is packaging. Cities corm pete with each other, packaging themsehes ike any oer produc, and is ne sa promotion thatthe terri mits of urban space are drawn, Ths snot simply @ characteristic of mass consume culture ofthe electron 298 of instar taneous global ows, We have aways ad 10 be tod when we ae ina ci. Tete i always sgn on the highway, ofa voice on the train or plane, that fl YOU thot you ae now in such-and-such a cy, and another sgn to tel you when You have left Wy do they have to tell you? Because a ity is nat. a physical object. ree Jompex package with mary afferent kinds of fit. The signs normaly spear n an indeterminate zone, 2 vague tetany thats only undersnod 1 be aeetakts of a place when a sign suddenly appears. The sign could easly De nove, There nathing in the physical envionment rat confres what he Sm says “The fact that these signs now appear in diffuse media streams fs NOt uch big news. You don't go to a place like Manhattan by getting on a plane, Tanding on the coast of 2 big continent and driving onto 2 smal sland covered sth skyscrapers. To go to Manhattan is only to go t0 the hard copy. 25 WAI hak the images that you know so wel, to sv inthe source of the Flow. And pethaps to aiscover the paradox that you cannot see Manhattan 6 well in Prannattan. The famous skyine is only visible from outside the Bland: In 2 sens ou have to eave there to be tere, Asa media capital, New York sof oust 100 aay an example, but the same phenamenon s experienced with even W6 ‘inal tet most golted town, When you think of acy, even an obscure one shat YOK might cherish because it seems to have escaped the global econo escaped104 ‘modernity even, you think of an image. Cities are experienced in terms of images. Visitors bathe in images before going anywhere — scrutinizing guidebooks, web- sites, business brochures, videos, airline magazines, friends’ snapshots, and so on = then project these images onto the place, twying to match what they see to what they expected to see. And what is seen is completely shaped by what is expected. Physical form is at best a prop for launching or modulating streams of This transformation of the conventional understanding ofthe city is usu ally understood as a threat to the traditional figure of the architect. If the city is ro longer a material organization, the architect, asthe very figure of the materi- al organizer, would seem to be almost ielevant. As a result, architectural dis- course has been nervous about the contemporary city, and has devoted a whole to the threat. There are countless essays, lectures, conferences, special issues, and books on the apparent forrlessness of the city. There is even a team of professional superstars that go from conference to conference, publication to publication, reproducing a melancholic despair. The point is always made that Cities aren't cities anymore, and therefore architects can no longer be architects ‘A much smaller group celebrates the formlessness, declaring it to be the possi- bilty of new forms of practice, but in the end they too try to tame the wild city, transforming the shock into carefully controled books and artworks, We could ask architects to stop crying about the city, demanding that they bravely embrace the essential indeterminism, instability, immateriality, ephemeralty, gaps, confusion, and strangeness of urban life, We could call for new forms of practice that celebrate rather than resist disorganization. Digital dis- ‘order and overload could become the role model ~ every architect turned into a surfer, riding rather than resisting the flows, But this new form of heroism would too quickly bury the specific expertise of the architect. Indeed, it would erase the figure of the architect completely. Architecture is primarily a form of resistance ‘Architectural discourse is always threatened by the city It is built on fear, an expert fear even. Architects cannot surf. They vist all the exotic beaches, talking about ‘every new wave that rolls in, as if they're about to jump in, But they don't, and would quickly disappear if they did, Architects can easily envisage their own dis appearance. They'te a permanently endangered species, but so permanently that they have developed a whole lifestyle around the threat, surviving by carefully keeping their distance. In sight of the action, but safely detached from it, they relentlessly scrutinize the contemporary world, interrogating everything except their own pathology. ‘The unexamined pathology is not simply that of the architect in the end. 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