CITY AS POLITICAL FORM: FOUR ARCHETYPES OF URBAN TRANSFORMATION

摘要

The city is the most explicit index of power relationships. Walls, squares and streets are not only meant to support the functioning of the city, but they also form an extensive governmental apparatus. Without proposing a cause-and-effect relationship between form and politics, the intention here is to trace the political origin of quintessential city projects within the history of the modern city. The aim is to test the political instrumentality of architectural form. For this reason, instead of focusing on the city at large, the focus will be on paradigmatic architectural archetypes. The category of archetype that will be advocated here will not be the way Carl G Jung defined it, as a universal contentless form, nor as innate pattern of behaviour. Instead, following Giorgio Agamben, the idea of archetype as example will be proposed: neither a specific nor a general form, but a singular formal event that serves to define the possibility of a milieu of forms.