City 2.0

The city is much more than a set of isolated objects that need to connect; its origin is not the street that leads us from home to work or school, but the public place par excellence. Just as we need a private space in which we can be refugees to satisfy our most basic human needs, we need spaces in which we interact with our neighbors, with nature, with weather. The networks we now know as streets were once for humans; the cities where the car was not conceived as a necessity, seem more human and more correct than our contemporary vials solutions, we generate more dehumanized spaces while we generate, too, more and more organisms for the defense of our rights as citizens. We are certainly generating inconsistent and incongruous cities; we build shopping malls that seem cities instead of regenerating the city reincorporating commerce, we propose intelligent transport systems to give more space to private vehicles without thinking of our human travel needs, we increasingly require exclusive places that close off a street, squares and beaches where there is neither democracy nor equality or human rights.

And now that the distribution channels have changed, so does the city. The displacement of products and information that in the past took days and used large vehicles, has been reduced considerably. The imperceptible waves and information networks have significantly transformed our lives; we have music and film available in a "click", we can work and study from home eliminating our need to move, we exercise on stationary machines in front of a monitor in motion. The system of connections needed to acquire our satisfactions is dying and the city with it. Maybe is time to consider if we still need cities.

The complex human relationships are now resolved with "wi-fi". Most living spaces now have this awkward name as a fundamental part of human existence; restaurants that once served to meet our friends, discuss our experiences and live together, have fallen as a set of chairs where guests at the same table chat through mobiles and tablets. In the parks is difficult to find a ball or a kite but very easy to see children playing with new electronic equipment, where they virtually kick a ball or struggle against the wind not to knock nonexistent kites. Public spaces are disappearing and it seems every day we get closer to the futuristic films realities, the writers of "Wall-e" will be very proud to see how their creation are becoming real.

There is no doubt that the change in distribution channels is a great achievement of mankind, a phenomenon that has allowed significant progress in democratization of satisfaction and information while also secreted more people according to their education and purchasing power, powerful weapons against the totalitarian and corrupt governments. There is no doubt that globalization - and neoliberalism - would not be possible without the distribution and wireless communication but have also produced a terrible dehumanization and the gradual destruction of the city at a level that Jane Jacobs would never have imagined in 1961 when she published his masterpiece "Life and Death of Great American cities."

How to humanize the city despite the technology? I do not write this text to discourage or to demonize wireless networks, which now rely heavily on our personal and professional lives, but with the intention of building city with them and despite them. The city should not be understood as connections but as vitality; city is not traveling a road to get from point A to point B but all we can do in the way: people who we can know, shops where we can consume, parks and spaces that can see.  We have to take advantage of technology to relive the city by ourselves and not through a screen, to see everything around us, to be citizens and non-IP codes for downloading information. There is no more than conclude with the final sentence of Jane Jacobs:

"It is true that inert cities without force usually contains the seeds of its own destruction and little else. But instead, the cities of intense, lively and diverse life contain the seeds of their own regeneration and have enough energy to take on the problems and needs of others." Jane Jacobs. Life and Death of Great American cities. 2011

JPV