Ruins of the Future

The two essays in this e-book—“Ruins of the future” and “The era of extreme urban forms”—were written, strictly speaking, in sequence. The first one is an introductory reflection on the book Chai-na—a case study of China as a fast-paced machine of urban growth, boosted by the 2008 Olympics. The second essay is a conference at the 2012 ENANPARQ (National Meeting of the National Association of Research and Postgraduate Education in Architecture and Urban Design), which draws consequences of what is outlined in the second part of that book, namely, the hyper- and trans- urbanizations in big Asian and African cities (or agglomerations), and identifies the obscene counterpoint represented by the proliferation of what Mike Davis and Daniel Monk called “evil paradises”. These studies complement each other to provide an overview not only of the monstrous contrasts that define the contemporary world but the original context of what would later be called “military urbanism” (a time where cities are under siege, with scanning systems, and target populations are tracked, monitored, preventively contained, and addressed according to risk profiles). 

In order to analyze China and its megalomaniac fantasy of a future that purports to be infinite, Otília Arantes starts the volume by searching the past for the collective aspirations (of achievement or overcoming) that nurtured the history of the modern capitalist society, the dreamworlds that fostered the daydreams of prosperity of the people from both the Eastern and Western blocs of the Cold War. When they awoke from that utopic dream of mass production and consumption, they had to face the harsh reality: on the one hand, the huge expansion of the “planet of slums” closing the urban frontier; on the other hand, the concealment of its contradictions by the “follies” of the Star System in architecture. The reference to Benjamin in the first essay is directly related to the observation of the phenomenon that generally accompanies these great mass events: the collective dream of bliss, happiness, and power. This colonization of dreams, which started in the nineteenth century, was a fact that, despite his focus on an awakening to the revolution, Benjamin did not ignore. Today, according to Arantes, the belief that the reshaping of the world by the industrialization-urbanization would lead the masses to paradise has crumbled. The two essays show two types of dreamworlds compared at the very moment of a false awakening—the second one focusing on cities of the so-called third world.

Keywords: China, Dreamworld, Hyper-spatiality, Hyper-urbanization, Lagos, Luna Park, Mike Davis, Moscow, Delirious New York, Evil Paradises, Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, Perestroika, Planet of Slums, Rem Koolhaas, Rockefeller Center, Ruins of the future, American dream, Star system in architecture, Stephen Graham, Susan Buck-Morss, Susan Sontag, Skyscraper, Trans-urbanization, Military Urbanism, Walter Benjamin