Space of flows
Fragmented Places and Open Societies
Felix Stalder
“We have a McDonald’s in virtually every city of the planet. Yet, increasingly, there is no way to predict what will be located right next to it. On the ground, the many globals and locals mix in seemingly random ways. The result is a kind of a patchwork of cultures and their physical expressions jumbled together in agglomerations, sprawling metropolitan regions held together by fast transportation networks. These regions emerge without much planning, often they don’t even have same (or, how are we to call the region, which can be traversed in either direction within a few hours, comprising London, Paris and Amsterdam). The people who life on, or travel between, these patches - the connected as well as the disconnected - are, quite naturally, building their own cultures that enable them to deal with this new fragmented reality, increasingly without reference to the geographic place as whole. Consequently, the focus of this new ‘community’ or network-centric culture lies on internal, rather than on external communication. Community-building becomes an end, rather than a means, to the degree that ‘community’ is one of the few concepts that is virtually always positively connoted … What is needed are cultural codes that can not only circulate within particular networks, but that can travel across all of them. A renewal of fundamental rights could serve as a starting point for this project to reinvent democracy in the space of places, using the space of flows to expand the range of cultural expression, rather than diminishing it.”
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