ZAERA-POLO (2017): The Posthuman City. Imminent Urban Commons

ZAERA-POLO, Alejandro (2017): The PostHuman City. Imminent Urban Commons, en Architetural Design; pp. 26-35

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In the Anthropocene, humans have become capable of modifying natural ecosystems, geological structures, even the climate. They have become so powerful that it is increasingly diffi cult to delimit

the natural from the artifi cial. As the most populated human environment, cities are a central focus of these transformations, and are primarily designed around human functions. This, despite the fact that the crucial questions they need to address – air pollution, rising water levels, draught, heat island effect, deforestation, biodiversity, food security, automatised work, inequality – are primarily driven by nonhuman – some would say posthuman – concerns.

(...) For cities to address the challenges of the Anthropocene, in which the primeval elements – air, water, energy and earth – have become artifi cial, humanised and politicised, they need to redefi ne themselves as a much broader entity: one that is concerned with machines, animals, plants and the collective of all their peer cities. Citizens will have to develop a cosmopolitical perspective of the world at large as their cosmologies will no longer be limited to the conceptualisation of the natural elements, but crucially mediated by the technologies that feed us, transport us, condition our environments, recycle our refuse, produce our clothes or connect us to each other.2 Like air, water, energy and living creatures, technologies are an integral part of the imminent urban ‘commons’.

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As the human environment became increasingly controlled by technology, and as politics – a word derived from the Greek politika, meaning ‘affairs of cities’ – came to replace cosmologies as systems of knowledge and governance, typology and monumentality became primary tools for urbanism, with the structure of human relations prevailing over the physical determinations of the environment.

(...) 

The current prevalence of artificial environments – cities – and politics has naturalised technology and de-politicised nature. The pressing nature of ecological concerns and the scale of technological developments call for the imminent city to re-politicise both nature and technology and

construct new urban cosmologies able to develop new urban sensibilities.

Far from producing urbanity, humanist urban functionalism has dismantled the commons and undermined urban democracy. Cities have become sources of extreme inequality and environmental

degradation, which are even threatening their own subsistence, and are pointing at insurmountable

contradictions at the core of the current modes of economic integration. Theorists like Jeremy Rifkin

and Paul Mason argue that we are already entering a postcapitalist world in which politics are shifting

from a focus on capital and labour, to a focus on energy and resources.3 They have proposed new

economies – shared economies of zero marginal costs – that would be driven by new technologies: peer to- peer organisations, big data, sustainable energy sources and carbon-neutral technologies likely to become the drivers of a new kind of urban politics.

(...)

For cities to become devices for the common good rather than instruments producing power structures (and therefore inequality or ecological destruction), imminent urban technologies need to locate resources and technologies at their core. Rather than splitting urban life into functions easily captured by power, these imminent urban commons need to become instruments of devolution and ecological awareness, constructed transversally across technologies and resources.

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Air

Air is the element that most intimately binds all humans on earth together. However, seven million

people die every year from exposure to air-induced diseases (...) Climate-altering technologies

such as pollution mitigation, cloud seeding, carbon sequestration and adiabatic cooling are some of the instruments able to mitigate anthropogenic effects on climate and forge a contemporary cosmopolitics of air to bring about both new cultural constructs and design opportunities.

Water

Water

retention for urban comfort, water collection and water treatment systems are also important areas

of development. By 2050 a third of the people on Earth may lack a clean, secure source of water. Each component in the urban water cycle brings its own benefi ts and challenges. The systematic replacement of impermeable/non-osmotic pavements, such as asphalt surfaces covering a large percentage of urban land; the introduction of bioswales or the recovery of buried streams within cities; and the development of water-retaining materials for building envelopes – these are some of the current possibilities for urban practices likely to change the landscape of future cities.

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Fire

Fire – the placeholder for energy – is one of the vital questions that cities need to address in the very

near future (...) Buildings  consume 40 per cent of global energy and 40 per cent of global resources, and produce 48 per cent of carbon emissions, with large energy use concentrated in urban centres.8 The development of solar, wind, tidal and ground-sourced energy sources able to power cities without resorting to the combustion of fossil fuels will profoundly redefi ne the new urban cosmopolitics (...) As sustainable energy is primarily mediated through electricity, it needs to be resolved with locally responsive strategies, as the potentials of sustainable energy sources vary depending on climate and geology. A new cosmopolitics of sustainable sources would do away with global geopolitics and national energy standards, and would take climatic variations into account.

Earth

Earth is a complex substance incorporating topography and humus – the bioactive layer of the soil (...) Transferring surface energy budgets from geophysics and microclimatology to architecture can account for the relationship between land, hydrology, energy and airfl ow.9 Biotechnologies – urban farming, hydroponics, and algae cultures with the ability to produce food, biofuels and even light cities – are some of the fastest-growing technologies with urban applications. Green building envelopes – roofs and walls – are capable of not only increasing a building’s albedo (refl ectivity coeffi cient), but also retaining natural humidity in the urban microclimate, absorbing CO2, producing oxygen, and reducing the heat island effect. These technologies have yet to be incorporated into buildings as an integral part of the earth’s surface, an intrinsic component of the imminent urban cosmologies.

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Sensing

The proliferation of sensors in the environment is one of the most defining facts of the imminent urban milieu (...) When these sensors become interconnected, an unprecedented common, novel in sensibility, will create a collective, global sensorium. Some websites are already constructing this data-based sensorium on an open-source status. Personal environmental sensors in development, when connected to smartphones, will be able to distribute instant remote sensing to urban populations, enabling constant updates on the urban environment, transport, security, temperature, wind, humidity, pollution and many other factors. These will become crucial tools reacting to changing environmental urban patterns and generating an unprecedented consciousness about our urban environments. The time when local air quality becomes a collective obsession and starts driving real estate values is imminent.

Connecting

One of the more powerful imminent commons has been created by the emergence of social media on the Internet. These technologies have entirely reshaped the protocols of communication and relations

between citizens. The possibility of connecting domestic control mechanisms with smartphones

may also reshape the way in which we relate to our jobs or domestic infrastructures, and look likely to transform the structures of governance (...) Questions of control and privacy are currently some of the most pressing for governments, corporations and lawmakers – and surely for architects and urbanists. The development of unprecedented forms of domesticity, work and leisure, their deterritorialisation and impact in urban cultures and politics is also one of the most important of imminent urban realms’ evolutionary patterns.

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Moving
Transportation is one of the most energy-intensive activities in contemporary cities, accounting for
a large percentage of overall carbon emissions. Unipersonal electric vehicles and self-driven vehicles
are likely to change urban traffi c beyond recognition, and a number of global companies are  addressing the development of these technologies. Electromobility and sharing schemes for unipersonal or logistic vehicles are now spreading worldwide, anticipating decentralised urban transport infrastructures with a minimal carbon footprint. Logistics are an important part of these developments dealing with energy consumption, carbon emissions and pollution.

Sharing
Some of the most transformative processes triggered by ubiquitous computing and Web enabled
devices relate to the possibility of sharing services and goods in time, including Airbnb, bicycle and car-share schemes, co-working spaces, and other urban processes based on shared economies (...) The management of resources and energy though sharing, recycling or optimisation through the deployment of new technologies is increasing, and current legislation needs to shift towards the normalisation of sharing protocols. The potentials of the urbanisation of technology give rise to new potentials for architecture to engage with these crucial processes of contemporary urban culture.

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Making
If the late capitalist city is characterised by the exile of production from the urban core, the takeover of fi nancial services and the securitisation of the city through residential markets as a key component of urban economies, there are now new technologies of digital fabrication, laser 3D scanning, 3D printing and robotics relocating some high-value fabrication activities back to the urban cores. The impact of these technologies on urban economies signals the return of production to the city (...) Shared spaces of production, rentable fabrication equipment, and processing recycled or reclaimed
materials are key aspects of this shift in production. Inexpensive CNC routers and 3D printers, the rise of Etsy and Pinterest, open-source software and free tutorials have encouraged a wave of DIY production generating small-scale urban industry. A revision of new urban production technologies and how they may be reinserted in the urban fabric is now an important fi eld of consideration and research.

Recycling
Metropolitan governments have been giving increasing attention to the collection, sorting and
recycling of urban waste and biosolids. This has reached a geopolitical dimension, with regional and
even transcontinental systems of treating refuse (...) The physical structure of the city itself has been a
subject of recycling activities, with an increasing rate of preservation and retrofi tting of existing
urban infrastructures. Waste management issues are intertwined with land management and pollution, as landfi lls and carbon dioxide emissions now influence the processing of waste. Tagging programmes for tracking the waste management process have been experimented with by researchers aiming to reveal the hidden systems that govern our unwanted possessions, and potentially to develop more intelligent systems for these processes.
It appears inevitable for urban practices of the immediate future to incorporate these emerging technologies in fi elds where the new urban commons are to be found, ranging from governance to
production. Especially because urban technologies based on human functions have now become
mechanisms to divide and to control power rather than to produce resilient commonality, imminent
cosmologies will need to address the politics of the posthuman commons – resources and  technologies –in order to enable urbanistic practices that are both artificially mediated and collective.

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Like in 1933, our current age is marked by vast technological development which needs to be incorporated far more into the ways we conceive and design cities within wider global ecologies. Just as the Athens Charter was able to synthesise human-centred politics around the division of functions, the arcane elements of air, water, fi re and earth and the rise of artifi cially mediated collectivities and metabolic processes enabled by the emerging technologies of sensing, sharing, moving, making or recycling should become the central concern of a posthuman urbanism. An update of the modernist human-centred functions that still form the spine of urban practice is now imminent.