也是个地儿² also space²

对不起，我写英文

I’ve started blogging over at Miji at Yan Jun’s site. I’m publishing drafts of essays that will eventually become a talk at alsospace. Some things will be duplicated here…

Many of my friends know I have been working on the concept of the city for some time. “The picture of the city that we carry in our mind” Borges wrote, “is always slightly out of date”. A cafe degenerates into a bar. An antique shop replaces a favorite  bookstore. So, it is with our concept of the cities generally. Indeed, we have been neglectful. The dust is thick over the subject.

I have persuaded the topic rigorously in late night conversations and in libraries. There are few topics that are of little use to the city. So, conversations and debates roam. It is the way I like it. A conversation on the processes of French cheese making might pollinate a conversation on the performance art we saw last night.

Shortly after completing The Prince, Machiavelli wrote soliciting patronage to Francesco Vettori. He had been exiled to a farm and the chores it entailed.

“When evening comes, I return to my house and go to my study. At the door, I take off my cloths of the day covered in muck and dirt and put on my regal and courtly garments. And decently reclothed I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions and they, in their humanity, reply to me.”

I cannot put my own situation better. I too have not been ashamed to speak with those that came before. It has been my luck to have this chance.

The two qualities of an artist, thinker, intellectual and people I respect above all others are imagination and sincerity. I have tried to bring my own version of these to bear on the topic of cities.

In April, I will begin a series of lectures in China, followed by lectures in Europe and Australia. At the invitation of a friend to publish some writings on a blog, I have begun to write the essays. They will inform the eight week lecture tour continuing to refine my thinking. And, afterward the revised lectures will be ready for publication.

My battle cry has been this: We need a new vision of the city for today. The city has changed drastically with the rise of mega cities across Asia and the Middle East from 1920’s Parisian arcades or the lessons Las Vegas taught us in 1970’s America. As the world changes, at the birth of the Chinese nation and in wake of Dubai and Shenzhen, our urban concepts have become old. A new imagination of what the city can be is needed. It is time to radically rethink our concept of the city with the imagination of previous generations. It is time to suspend the interstitial.