CommentStreams:06ab58d963bbe234d461cb70684b67b0

Kola, thanks for sharing the piece, it was a lovely read. A few questions for advancing the discussion next week:

(1) What forms does the seamlessness take? Here I share some of the questions with Maja, most notably the matter of seamlessness and its actual implementation in various urban situations. It would be great to think of some examples where seamlessness becomes most visible in those built cities. Is it the infrastructure, the urban space itself, or perhaps the user experience of living in the planned city, or the (from the 2025 POV, perhaps already decaying) ideology of the seamless space of the global capital? You've probably know these already, but Rem Koolhaas' writings on "The Generic City", and to a lesser extent, "Junkspace" offers some good perspectives on this.

(2) Where does the seamlessness already fall apart? I.e. where are the cracks, contradictions and glitches in the seamlessness that these planned cities seek to embody? Again, I'm thinking of buildings disconnected from sewage or other layers of urban infrastructure, but also Potemkin Village-esque facades that signify one thing, while concealing something else, or just things that were never finished due to fluctuations in capital markets (the Burj Al Babas planned village consisting of identical spatial products in Turkey being one of the most poignant examples of the past decade). And then are the cracks also visible on other aspects of these seamless spaces?

(3) If the planned city is finite, what happens on its edge? Is this one of the sites where the contradictions between the assumption of blank slate and the realities of the world collide? Assuming that many of these developments suggest certain forms of order, it's fascinating to think what happens at places where the jurisdiction/masterplan/economic zone ends. Here I'm thinking about Keller Easterling's "Enduring Innocence", where she describes various forms of "extra state" urban enclaves and the infrastructures supporting them.

(4) How is the seamlessness translated between project material (decks, renderings, fly-through videos) and the actual materialization of these plans? You mention this in the beginning of your piece, and I think it resonates with my text about architecture's imaging cultures and the gap between the projected and the actual. A rendering of a planned city is not the same as the planned city itself, and the notion of seamless (experience, urbanism, gaze, ...) is represented and made operative in different ways in both of these domains. Dunno, I'd love to think about this more in the following days. Perhaps here one of interesting references here is Pedro Fiori Arantes' "The Rent of Form", where he makes analysis of the visual regime of architectural imagery, marketing, and the ways building representations are circulating the economy and generating value.

(5) Last, perhaps Rene Boer's "Smooth City" is an interesting reference when it comes to fleshing out seamlessness more in detail (yet from European perspective, so perhaps it's quite limited). I haven't read it yet, but it's been on the radar for a while. From the blurb: "René Boer argues in Smooth City that this new version of urbanity undermines the democratic nature and the emancipatory potential of cities, and hardly leaves any space for experiment, non-normativity and transgression."