TOWARDS A DIGITAL DISURBANISM
Today architecture and urban planning are in a state of flux, not only in their methods and achievements, but in their professional structure. Like other professions and employments, their anticipations and certainties are shrinking and disappearing, while a raft of temporary objectives comes forward to take their place.
We live in a new era, a time when, increasingly, agriculture, industry, and even the service industries, no longer necessarily provide jobs, and jobs in any case no longer provide security. It is a time when, trade by trade, profession by profession, all the old careers are being picked off by digital systems that lie in wait for them like snipers. Over fifteen years of 'downsizing' and 'rightsizing' in industry, commerce and professions has inflicted tremendous casualties on the workforce. One by one each certainty has stumbled, felt a stab of pain, and joined the ever-lengthening queue for compensation.
In this way all of us are, or will be, victims of a war that is being fought between the future and the past. It is an action so savage that, instead of rushing forward to storm the Millennium in the manner of the pioneer Futurists at the beginning of the 20th century we, their descendants, are in full retreat. We flee the battlefield, running from the future and searching desperately for a refuge in the past. Among us are artists, intellectuals and scientists who, less than half a century ago, enthused over great highway settlements and linear cities, and thought nothing of proposing the demolition of every surviving evidence of history. Today our view has changed. Eyes bulging with terror we resist the decentralisation we once called for. We sieze upon anything old that reminds us of its opposite. We build fortresses in our minds out of the castles, palaces, churches and cathedrals that have been bequeathed to us by history. These we vow we will defend to the death. Our families may be atomised, our social structure destroyed, but these ancient treasures we will cling to until the advance of a new century finally tears our fingers one by one from their ancient stones and casts us naked into the jaws of tomorrow.
It takes continuity to provide certainty of the future. The kind of continuity that enabled one single regime to survive for 3,000 years in ancient Egypt. We have no such continuity, and none to look forward to. We are not marchers but motorway drivers in a long tailback. We can neither see what is blocking the road in front of us, nor can we predict when we will escape from it. We have no idea whether we will be hurtling along the road at 80 miles an hour in ten minutes time, or be standing still in a traffic jam. It comes hard to us to realise our powerlessness in the machine world. We feel as though we used to know everything, and now we know nothing. We are used to being taken seriously, and now we lack self-respect. As Europeans we are used to being rich, and now we are relatively poor. We used to consider our continent the centre of civilization, but now the world has revolved away from us and we have become a tiny Polynesian island.
Perhaps more tragically our state can be compared to that of the North American Plains Indians in the 19th century. They were a native civilization swept aside by a massive tide of European immigration, a society atomised by exclusion from an industrial revolution they did not understand. As long as they lived, the new technologies of mechanized farming, repeating firearms, railroad networks and machine production were used against them. They had no means of replicating these innovations: nor could they prevail over them. The white man's industrial revolution bred uncertainty and terror in their hearts. They were condemned to a state of perpetual wakefulness, never to be certain of their future. In the final stages of their disintegration they began to dance, just we have. They wove shirts that were supposed to be bulletproof, just as we weave environmental ideas.
As the history books tell us, the magic shirts of the Indians did not work, and their dances ended in drunkenness and death. In the same way our culture of urban treasure houses will not save us from the onslaught of the information revolution. Like those Indians we shall have no peace until we surrender ourselves to its superior power.