How The Urban Eclipsed The City: An Interview With Ross Exo Adams - Failed Architecture
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Urbanisation is not and has never been entirely about cities. Beginning with the earlier colonial practices of spatial planning and its projections onto the supposedly “open” spaces of newly settled land, and continuing as a project to establish one continuous global system of social, political and economic control, “the urban” has now decisively eclipsed the city, encompassing the entirety of our planet—such that we can even talk about the urbanisation of the oceans.
This is the provocative argument set out by architect and urban theorist Ross Exo Adams, in his new book Circulation and Urbanization, which uses the work of famed Catalan planner Ildefonso Cerdá as a starting point to explore the emergence of the urban as a set of techniques of social control—from infrastructure to the organisation of domestic space. Cerdá is most well known for his plans for the expansion of Barcelona after its medieval walls were torn down, but in his more theoretical writings he also popularised the term “urbanisation” (urbanización). Central to Cerdá’s theories, Adams shows us, was the notion of “circulation”, the idea that in an urban environment, people, things, and commodities should be able to move without friction, in contrast to the stagnant, overcrowded cities of the early nineteenth century. Far from his vision being limited to cities, Cerda imagined urbanisation as the extension of his project in Barcelona to encompass the entire globe, which would eventually eclipse the city altogether, producing an entirely new space that is neither city nor country, but urban.