A QUANTUM CITY: MASTERING THE GENERIC

Abstract

We know of so many books about the city, in so many veins: engaged, theoretical, demonic, utopian, dystopian, fictitious, idealistic, green, misanthropic…. Our book A Quantum City is none of these. The only thing our book has in common with all of them is a fascination with The City itself. But we are convinced that each era — including our own — has to reinvent its City. Cities embody political and economic values and thus also the spiritual values of our cultural identities. Urbanism, by contrast, turns into something akin to a landscape — an increasingly global landscape which does not settle around different ecological compartments. Quantum physics shows us that we create our reality in the way we see and measure it. The urban is systematic and balanced, however complexly it might be engineered. But our cities are architectonic. They do not take measures for granted, they challenge them by re-articulating their units, and the magnitudes those units support. This book seeks to invert the perspective and to learn to see, instead of an empty centre, a centred void, like a citizen of our digital world — a sheaf of intelligible probability and delicate sensitivity, a quantum of City.

Keywords

Quantum / City / Mastering / Generic

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press