El manifiesto del Diablo

En 1975, José Agustín Goytisolo escribía sobre arquitectura y urbanismo en términos perfectamente vigentes hoy en día. No es nada raro, ni un caso de premonición poética, que haberla haila.

Ya en 1972 el Club de Roma hablaba de la imposibilidad del crecimiento ilimitado. Al año siguiente la OPEP lo demotró. 30 años después la cosa va peor de lo previsto: vamos para 8.000 millones de personas en el mundo y el consumo de recursos y la contaminación se suman a la aceleración en la destrucción de la selva tropical.

No queda duda que con este panorama por delante, es proporcionado desear que por lo menos no se diga que no teníamos imaginación y sentido del humor.

Public Space and Traditions

Royal Tracks, Spain

The first thing that defines public space is its legal condition: it belongs to everyone.

In Spanish cities, since 1273, many of those spaces have to allow that flocks of transhumant pasturage pass through them. All this traffic is organized in the so called "Royal Tracks" (Cañadas reales). The one that crosses Segovia has 500 km long and starts in León and ends in Extremadura, close to Portugal.

The use of public space for this purpose, as an exercise of old rights, is the only way we urbanites realize this traditional lifestyle still exists. How many of our own urban traditions depend on the existence of public space? Probably the majority.

Do not miss the video: the sheep at the centre are at a standstill while the outside ring turns around.

Naive Realism

Population density. Data from the G-Econ project, Yale University

There are innumerable recommendations for surviving current crisis. I propose naïve realism.

Think for a moment that there were 2 billion people in the world in 1940; that we are now 6 and will be 8 billions inhabitants in the world in 2050. Sum to it that our planet can not possibly feed that amount of “animal spirits” (Keynes). John Gray insists (see “Homo Rapiens and Mass Extintion”, 2002, in his last book Gray’s Anatomy, Allen Lane, 2009) that the “plague of peole” is not going to reach the “Era of Solitude” (Wilson), when humankind would be alone because all the rest of animals have been killed, nor the eradication of humankind (Lovelock): The future is going to be a combination of genocide, war, epidemic, natural destruction and the sort of generalized social collapsed that has taken place in post-Comunist Russia.

Just as we do everyday, that we live knowing that we are going to die, we have to choose what kind of life we want to lead in a world that is condemmeded to change radically and violently in the next future. I call it naïve realism, adapting slightly Keynes' “naïve optimism”. Gray puts it this way: "From a human point of view, this may be a discomfiting prospect; but at least it dispels the nightmare of an age of solitude".

What architects and artists should do in such a situation?. Well, maybe to preserve the aesthetic as a value, as some of them have always done: the harmony of the aesthetic experience is the only way humans experiment their subjective unity authentically. There is nothing more we can do, but we should not do either anything less.