DISTRIBUTED URBANISM: CITIES AFTER GOOGLE EARTH

摘要

How many urbanisms are there now? New urbanism, generic urbanism, bingo urbanism, landscape urbanism, ecological urbanism, splintered urbanism, superlative urbanism, guerilla urbanism, green urbanism, polycentric urbanism, integral urbanism... and now "distributed urbanism"! What all these isms indicate is that the rapid urbanization of the world's population is not only topical, but perplexing. And that's probably how it should be because if there is one thing we've learned from twentieth-century urban planning it is that cities defy reduction. Distributed Urbanism is a small collection of essays about contemporary cities edited by Gretchen Wilkins, an architect based at RMIT. The term "distributed urbanism" is not clearly defined but it seems to mean that contemporary systems (communications, logistics, etc.) are -by virtue of technology - no longer centralized but distributed across global space and increasingly democratically interfaced.