The City Beyond The City

Without the aegis of planning, and having surpassed the scope of the emergent processes that frame growth in ‘informal’ sites, the city beyond the city must turn to other models to define and delimit its expansion. In Rio, the fractured city, a city of a thousand polities and realities, this model is the shared – and conflicted – dreaming of the citizens themselves. Arrangements of buildings and traffic-flows, sites of commerce and culture, are processional artefacts of the collisions of a thousand superimposed realities. In the city beyond the city, we, as designers, acknowledge both the ineffectual approaches of design and planning, as well as the unsatisfactory compromises of bottom-up, emergent and generative The city beyond the city speculatively ‘maps’ the conflictual desires, knowledges, potentialities of these new Feral Cities. The virtual in its state of wonder – the contemporary, a moral sickness – and somewhere between them, the bridge – a new assemblage. We cannot design the desires of a million fractured worlds. We can only suggest – evoking a notional sketch of what might emerge in the City Beyond.