Edge-City, Bubble-City, Foam-City

Abstract

AbstractDuring the last century, we have become familiar with the constant metamorphosis of the edges of our cities. The edge of our cities is constantly being destroyed and rebuilt. But this instability of the edge mirrors the changed status of the city itself. Contemporary cities never cease to redraw their boundaries, to include further territories, wanting to coincide with the totality of the territory. But in this sense the edge of the city is not the threshold through which the city looks out onto something else, cultivated or uncultivated land. The edge of the city is an absolute, a periphery that has no centre behind it and no landscape in front of it. The contemporary city is a bubble-city, which does not have a state to which it belongs, but a series of other bubble-cities with which it interfaces in a sort of fundamental autism and equally fundamental hyperconnection. In other words, the planet surface is a foam of urban bubbles.KeywordsEarthFoamLanguageAgricultureGeometryTopology