Kamen Rusev
The city without objects endeavours to propose a city beyond the context of commodity capitalism that has been so destructive of our environment.
About
Our society is not equipped to deal with the environmental catastrophes it is causing. It is too in the thrall of commodity capitalism.
Our cities are increasingly characterised by careless expansion and wasteful development. They negate ideas of togetherness and collective life, and instead resemble compartmentalised infrastructure fields interconnected by the car.
This project speculates the densification of Dundee by projecting growth along three city strips. The proposal argues that our attitude towards living together, manifested in the project of the city, is reflected back at us as well as in the environment that we knowingly damage. A second narrative imagines the process of constraining the city's horizontal expansion not as confronting the urban fabric with a limit but as confronting the city with itself or, rather, confronting ourselves with our own desires. In order to investigate links between the individual and the forms of the city, the work brings together:
- analogical urbanism - the field of analogical objects
- commodity capitalism - fixation on objects as commodities
- environmental destruction - accelerated by commodity capitalism)
- dreams and the unconscious - the field of displaced and condensed objects
The city without objects presents an image of the city that is always tentative, always under revision, all process and no objects.
