Extant Barcelona Part 1: Cities as Social Objects
The built environment is the manifestation of the society that created it. There is no blank canvas, rather a city is built and rebuilt upon a fabric of choices made in contexts that no longer exist.
How is it possible to comprehend this complexity? Can we call the city we inhabit today a single city through time? Is a city knowable in this way?
Object
Graham Harman defines an object as any entity that cannot be paraphrased in terms of either its components or its affects. This definition can equally be assigned to physical objects, such as a table, or social objects such as the Dutch East India Company.
This definition gives a useful foothold for an investigation into how we perceive the built environment, especially cities. Individuals may have different opinions as to the specific enclaves that constitute it; what is in, what is out. But these disagreements only reinforce the object-ness as per Harman’s definition.
A city cannot be paraphrased, taking away buildings, streets, or in most cases whole districts, won’t stop the city being.
Can the city we find today really be defined as the same city it was 100 years ago? Change is incremental. Even in periods of mass building, the construction can take years or decades, before even considering the time taken in planning and design phases. So if the city object is constantly growing and renewing, the original questions persists: Is it knowable? How can we understand this complexity?
Harman describes social objects passing through four stages in their life cycle:
Birth: The object comes into being.
Symbiosis: The object interacts with existing contexts and develops in some way.
Decadence: All symbiosis is complete.
Death: The object ceases to exist.
This is a useful model for thinking about the development of a city.
Birth: There is a raison d'être for the establishment of a settlement. This could be access to a trade route, natural defenses, or fertile land.
Symbiosis: Political and technological advancements, and many other things, can have an impact on the development of a city. It is important to note that symbiosis is non-symmetrical. For example, me moving to Birmingham certainly marked a new era in my life, while it would be hard to argue it had the same impact on the city.
Decadence: This stage is defined as the social object being so far removed from its raison d'être that it is no longer under threat. No change will happen after this point, only death.
Death: A social object dies when its strong ties are no longer relevant. For example the Dutch East India Company is no longer active due to changing trade routes and spice purchasing habits in Europe. For cities death can come from many different avenues, from natural disaster, economic shifts, or geo-political changes.
Extelligence
Birth and symbiosis phases that are interesting to understanding cities the incremental development of the cities we inhabit today. So how can we identify moments of urban symbiosis?
If the built environment is the manifestation of the society that created it, then it follows that there is a shared social understanding of these social objects too.
Intelligence is defined in many ways, from the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, to capacity for abstraction. What is consistent is that intelligence is always considered to be the trait of an individual. Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen coined the phrase Extelligence to mean the cultural capital available to a society in the form of artifacts.
For urbanism, extelligent artifacts would include (but mot limited to) peer-reviewed referenced written histories, and historical maps. Using these sources we can start our exploration of shared understanding to identify the moments of symbiosis.
Part II
In the next post we will use Barcelona as a case study to test our ability to identify symbiosis. From there, we will explore these moments through mapping.
Harman, G. (2016). Immaterialism : objects and social theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Stewart, I. and Cohen, J. (1997). Figments of reality The evolution of the curious mind. Cambridge University Press.