'Invisible Cities: architecture without building' was the title of my dissertation, inspired by Calvino's wonderful 'The Invisible Cities'. The interest in cities grew out of my fascination with 'systems of people'. I'm intrigued by the way people in all their individualistic stupidity manage to form these functioning systems yet at the same time deny they're only a part of that system. My dissertation explores these micro-macro scales in an urban context, it looks at how a city is made up by our everyday practices rather than buildings or streets. We are co-producers of our cities, resulting in not one but many cities, each refracting and reflecting one another. That has its consequences for cities as a political space and the way we design or intervene in these spaces.
Partly the reason I ended up at Demos this summer, this is also something I want to explore further in my work this year. The installation we did for demos was a tiny experiment in this direction but I want to take this further. How will new technologies affect the way we perceive and live in our future cities? What new pleasures and anxieties will that create? How will it affect the systems we live in? And I'm hoping to use this space on my website to posts more thoughts and possible directions.