A Cidade Indefinida

Abstract

.The contemporary city is a strange and heterogeneous organism, a complex blend of a great number of multiple elements. With undefined limits, stateless and global, body in a range of a variety of physic shapes and social processes even more diverse and liquid, the city becomes object for a profuse debate that continually tries to understand it, based on the classic structures of the urban thought. Titled as The Undefined City, this document aims to be set aside this discussion, understanding that the categorization is not preponderant to the approach of a patently new, and amidst all the proposed definitions, undefined phenomenon. This dissertation bends, in a more operative attitude, over the phenomenon that leads to the urban reality the way we perceive it today, so as to lighten it. In order to identify the molds that underlie this apparent chaos, this study tries to understand the main modeling agents of the contemporary urban form, by articulating them. The city is here approached by the processes that shape it, as in to sort out patterns of regularity that underlie the so vast range of practices and formalizations. Following up the economic infrastructural and politic processes, the present text aspires to set clear the context which leaded to the modern city, and to understand the way how these dynamics of modernity, so identitary and unitary, then developed into an embodiment of the city, so far from its principles: splintered, disperse and heterogeneous. Understanding the appearance of new market pulsions, as the urban scale grows wider and expands, making unavoidable the politic's liberalization; figuring out the relationship between global massification and the strengthening of the phenomenon of choice - individualization and physical and virtual mobility as a possibility but also as a need - ; grasping the weight of differentiation, diversity and fugacity over the dematerialization of places into ambiences, the disintegration of referents and the marketing of culture; for then unveiling the territorial manifestations on a market-leaded infrastructure - expanded, globalized, but also diversified and local -, that matches the hypermasses and the small scale, the hyperconcentration and the hyperdispersion, in a reality that scatters the physical continuities and underlines multi-scalarity and relational proximity. Approaching these questions in order to allow a more serene and expeditious stance before what is the contemporary urban phenomenon, not to pursue the answers but rather to strengthen the conscience over the pertinence of the questions.