At Adam Greenfield of v-2.org and elsewhere will be giving a talk I'd go to just for the title alone, even if it weren't about rethinking the superheroes of 20th century urbanism: "Killing The Fathers, or: If You See Jane Jacobs On The Road..."
We need to come to terms, in other words, with the fact that fetishizing Jane Jacobs' long-lost Hudson Street gives us, ack, Celebration; that the Situationists' collapse of public/private and work/leisure into "unitary urbanism" mostly turns out to mean having to listen to some clueless bozo yawping into his mobile in the Starbucks; that Archigram's headlong embrace of the disposable ethic looks ever more embarrassing in an era when resource wars loom as the most likely endstate of all our most cherished plans.I've been on something of a Situationist/Constant's New Babylonian binge for a couple of weeks, and with the ideas I had for the WTC Site Memorial still gnawing on some remote part of my brain, I will probably be the future-old-kook with a sheaf of crumpled schematics stuffed into my satchel on the front row, waiting to ask him woefully underpunctuated questions.
Conflux lectures, 9.17.06 [confluxfestival.org]
Reversals, inversions, anticipations, returns [v-2.org]
Previously: my WTC memorial proposal, part 1, part 2, nov 2003; my angsting over it, mar 2005. I posted my embarassingly designed poster/entry on flickr [I used powerpoint; it's all I had at that moment.]
