Urbocentrism
Design Philosophy Papers (www.desphilosophy.com) is calling for papers on the this theme to be published in a special issue during 2004. See below for submission guidelines.
The context:
The populations of mega cities are now the size of not-so-small nations, and still growing. However, even with average-size cities, the urban fabric stretches out endlessly, obliterating countryside. The forms of the built environment obscure the non-urban from view, inducing a condition of urban blindness.
At best, massive urban infrastructures deliver (or at worst, fail to adequately deliver) water, power, food and all other goods. For urban dwellers, it thus appears that the city materially provides all that is needed to sustain human life. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Cities large and small suck in labour, produce, water, energy and materials, transforming them into products, services and urban lifestyles and then expel toxic wastes, landfill volumes and greenhouse emissions, to say nothing of broken dreams and fractured cultures. Urban tastes for proliferating varieties and quantities of consumer good and services drive the demand for raw materials and foodstuffs. This is what lies behind environmental destruction (like salinised land, dying rivers, deforestation) that is often blamed on farmers.
At the same time urban lifestyles, in their eminently transportable material and immaterial forms, move beyond sprawling suburbs, displacing more self-sufficient and less materially intensive rural lifestyles (this, across the cultural differences of the rural).
Yet there is also much that is desirable about urban life. Does it always have to come at such a large cost?
Now consider:
Ethnocentrism — thinking and acting as if one’s own culture is all that there is, and henceforth applying its conceptual categories, values and standards to all other cultures — has been recognised as a problem for some time. But because urbanisation continues to erode ethnic and geographic cultural difference, a new problem is arriving – urbocentrism.
Urbocentrism is not just another figure to add to the repertoire of political correctness.
Urbocentrism is both cause and effect, a driver and a symptom of the imminent arrival of a totally urban world civilisation.
Urbocentrism’s disposition towards the rural is either to ignore, exploit or romantically fictionalise it.
Urbocentrism speaks:
A way of being/a mode of dwelling/a state of mind
An imposition/an exercise of power
An interpollation /a condition of victimhood
Urbocentrism is manifested in:
Urban/rural unequal exchanges: material, immaterial, economic, social and cultural
Economic and political global inter-relations (as this urbocentrism makes and breaks classes)
Cultural formations/de-formations; the affirmation, negation and replacement of existing knowedges and values.
We invite writers from a variety of disciplines to explore the
question of urbocentrism, in any of the terms sketched above. We seek
thoughtful, provocative and well informed papers as well as book or project
reviews from between 2,000 to 5,000 words. Submit a 250 word abstract by