One afternoon in utopia: the nomadic city

We had this workshop yesterday; about designing future hybrid cities, we all split into groups on different topics such as, “endless energy city”, “ ambient city”, etc.

I ended up in the nomadic city group, and so right now I guess you must be asking yourself but what is a nomadic city ??...well, actually defining this was kind of the point of this workshop...And so we had this long brainstorming with so many interesting but very abstract question, it started by understanding whether we were talking about people nomadism through the cities or the city being nomad itself.

But even once you’ve chosen one of those path, it’s absolutely not an answer, it’s more like a hundred more question and so the brainstorming went on and on and on and on and I‘ve got to tell that I haven’t been focused from the beginning to the end.

What I know is that people had different conception of what makes a city, for some people it was about infrastructure moving through space and / or time, without border, this can basically be shop or other stuff with very short temporality ( imagine that every single shops , restaurants, institutions changed every month, continuously, how could you feel the belonging to a city, wouldn’t that be some kind of nomadism? The extreme example of that are some huge festival like The Burning Man, where a city emerge in a few days and disappears few days later.

But this can as well be something more utopic and powerful, and there were quoted the different architecture utopia from the Archigram collective, or the concept of the hypergreen tower by Jacques Ferrier: people leaving in zero environment impact towers, who can be build quickly in the countryside, and who offers every services we find in the cities, people could just go from tower to tower and by the standardization of it it’s like you always in the same city whereas you moved (so the city moves with you).

I didn’t follow it correctly but there was also the idea of an inter-cities passport, and to be accepted you would just had to bring goods, resources or competences with you (once again I was a little bit sleepy at this part of the topic).

I kept for the end the idea I liked the most, which consist in looking at cities this way: cities are a little bit like brands, it become more about identity, which for city could be a set of people, typical architecture, weather, historic institution, transportation, signaletic, languages, activities, etc...
If cities became more and more independent from the country they are in (which is already the case, often, big cities doesn’t reflect their country), then you could imagine a city who would spread in different points of the globe who matches this identity, linked by a uniform transportation system. It’s a switch from continuous to discontinuous, from dots to the constellations.

We had some example close to this scenario in the past, mainly due to important emigration moves (from Orleans to new Orleans, from York to New York, etc...) .
And there are also those people who live in a town, work in another, and just take the train every day, which sometimes is just as long as the downtown transportation systems... This idea is just an increase of this situation to the whole world.

Ok now just remember the title of this post mention utopia.