Benjamin Jepsky
Our Artificial Homeland
Artifact, Territory, Structure, Network, Urbanization, Terrain
This is a research thesis that engages with an experimental format. It concerns urban theory and seeks to construct an environment around an idea. Not as a confirmation of results but as a pedagogical framework that can continue to expand in many different directions, inevitably incorporating the contributions and statements of many things at once.
The goal here was twofold: to provide the research and produce the framework. The work explores the construction of an integrated theory of urbanization by analyzing diverse dynamical systems and their embedded urban conditions to grasp their distinctiveness within an overarching system of capital. Through this research, I consider what it means to have agency over the urban process in relation to Lefevre’s “Dissolving City” in which he asks, “is the right to the city still tenable when the urban condition is planetary and the geographies of the political are being so radically rearranged?” Where investigations of the urban invariably unfold within its domain, locking our analysis into a perpetual assessment of the current state, I instead question how we evaluate the present itself, by engaging with the history of a broader schema beyond the city limits - The Critical Structure.
In this model, I contend that although systems of capital engage with consistent mechanisms and that the work of these pervasive apparatuses might even be to collapse these different places into a single definition at the global scale, these unique places with their own exceptional systems have not collapsed together in totality and rather compose a blurred history of interrelated systems shaping the inscription of a contemporary modality. Understanding this dynamic, where urbanization serves as a historical anchor for descriptive examination and also in large measure the subject of investigation itself, allows for an expanded examination of the political consistency of spaces that the urban sustains and reproduces across these different systems (and how it does so) - aligning existence with various forms of power and authority (among which capital holds a significant position).
To support this inquiry, I am constructing a research network to support and surround this idea with ARE.NA, an online social networking community / research platform and HYPOTHES.IS, an online annotation interface. A framework launched in relation to Mindy Seu’s “The Multidimensional Citation” that discusses a learning trail that reflects an ecosystem rather than a line; it is not static, but open, dialectical, can extend further, and acknowledges the multi-authored. It provides the tools to engage the work as part of the process.
Overall, the goal is to obtain agency over the evolving urban schema through historical knowledge and provide a framework to ask big questions.