index

Urban flows

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People assembling to watch a parade (Charlottesville, Virginia)

People walking in Chicago

The discourse of flows . . . the urban ecology of liquifaction, of swarm/flock behaviors, pressures and breaches, stability and instability thresholds, of hunting algorithms and productive catastrophes . . . soft systems. . . . a liquid urbanism of grazing, perpetually interacting force, an urbanism where forces are allowed to interact and in so doing to declare their natures . . . urbanism free of the controlling obsession with certainty, predictability, or permanence. It acts pastorally through intercession, perturbation, and vigilance, like tweaking interest rate dials in financial markets, or like a shepherd driving his herd, applying pressure at certain times at selected points, watching for eventual disturbances, monitoring changing conditions, prospecting for openings and new hybrids and possibilities. It does not fix its attention on the rigid and monumental. The shepherd observes the unfolding life of the flock, its movements, its collective affects, the flow of the continually reshaping mass and the flow of the landscape in continuous interaction. Yet his intervention are soft, fluid, indirect, and yet for all this almost precise: he 'controls' it like the drummer in a jazz quartet, only by adding to it. . . . a pastoral urbanism of inflection. Kwinter 1995, 35, 31