What is the platform city? The platform city is not an event. Nor is it a policy, design typology, or contemporary movement. The platform city is an atmosphere, an environment produced through entanglements of technology, urbanism and capital. The platform city is a way of inhabiting urban life that is shaped by a series of enmeshed attachments between tech companies and their structurally coherent design typologies, which engender particular kinds of user behaviour for profit-driven maintenance. In clearer terms, the platform city is a world on demand and mediated access.
Our imagination about cities and technologies has a strong linkage to the sense of clean and convenient. A world of co-working cafes, QR codes, craft beer, delivered groceries and goods. Clean, clear and elegantly touch some buttons on the clean designated interface. Voila! Everything is there as if the phone is the wand in the magic world!
It may be a world where the less than romantic complexities of life are obscured under the cropping of a tidy Instagrammed cropping. Where the complexities of life are packaged away in storage facilities outside of representation. What are the logistics behind contemporary urban living? Are these logistics as ‘clean’ as the aspiration images circulating our newsfeeds and routines? And how do we articulate, define and redefine the clean vs. in contemporary urban life?
Our intervention intends to explore the structural messiness behind the curated ‘perfection’ of the platform city – an urbanism epitomized through the uban archi-scape of stockholm. What are the mechanisms behind easy, breezy, sanitized encounters? How can we shed light on these mechanisms, and consider the filth, dirt, and messiness behind the production of idealized platform life?
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Project (external):
Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus
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Additional information:
A Thinking Practice is a practice based symposium addressing collective learning processes in relation to listening, asymmetries, filth, not-knowing and desire. We long for a space to think, feel, organize and practice with others. A space where we, despite knowing that we won’t find any simple solutions, engage with each other in an unknown future.
The symposium is initiated from an interest in working collectively, from the perspective of the fields of choreography and urban planning. We believe that in times of urgencies, in moments of doubt, in seconds of fear, we must gather and think. And thinking does not mean big Thought, but a practice which involves every nerve and every relation. A thinking that involves paying attention to that which is already there in order to imagine what could be. We notice each other because we are at stake to each other.
The focus of the symposium is to practically investigate forms of thinking. We believe that all thoughts are thought from somewhere – in relation to a practice and to thoughts previously thought. We therefore see that how we think is crucial for what we think. Through which practices can we attune ourselves to listen for that which we do not already know? What practices of attention help us to be available for others, for the not-understandable, for the opaque? And how can we encourage each other to think, in all its multitude of practices, in order to create collective change?
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Research Areas:
Development and Advancement of the Architectural Arts: 100%
