About density, innovation and politics
Here is the presentation that i made for hackitectura.net at the World Information conference last weekend:
* hackitectura.net/ wikiplaza at world-information paris 2009 /download pdf/ 5 MB
After the lecture by Saskia Sassen, where she defended density as a potential for political change and social transformation, and we all guess that innovation, there where as short ellaboration on it, that i will retake later on...
I just was thinking lately, howmost of the people ate WikiPlaza actually have come to Paris, from smaller places like Seville, Cadiz, Orelans or Asturias... and how we put together the wikiplaza concept, working for some weeks from a silent studioin a not son modern and not so dense town in Baja Andalucia...
It does make me think as well of the William Gibson novel Idoru, where one of the main characters, lives in a community of homeless in the Tokyo subway, from which connected to the Matrix 24/7 he has a vantage point of view, and actually becomes part of the nodal process, which taking place worldwide inbetween the digital and the physical will radically transform the future...
Density might be an easy way, - however with many drawbacks... But there are multiple other ways today...
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In the afternoon, i tried to go see a presentation by Philippe Morel, whose piece on biocapitalism and the wood industrial-scientific complex is one of the most impressive texts i have read lately - but i got the address completely wrong and ended up lost in Boulevard Dornano, one of my favourites urban landscapes in Paris. Indeed, i realized the beauty of the metropolis, the amazing style of the young French-africans, the human mixtures and attitutudes that can hardly be found in smaller cities... It made me think of Tony Morrison's New York stories and about Sandro Mezzadras Derecho de fuga... Instead of the lecture i just say in a cafe watching the people pass by, and ended up buying myself a funky hat trying to capture a little of the style of Northern Paris...
