Play lab: Inspirations

These cognitive maps were based on the urban layout of London, but the idea is that there are so many similarities among big cities, that if we superimpose this generic urban plan over most cities it would be valid. This speaks towards the homogenization of places, aesthetics, and eventually culture of cities across the world.

Benedict Anderson, 1992
Long Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics

“Will it really be possible to imagine oneself politically as a ‘European’, in the way that it was for long possible to imagine oneself as an ‘American’? If not, does this not point towards an ethnicization of existing nationalities, especially if, as is already happening, the Common Market itself encourages vast intra-European migrations?…Fin-de-siècle world-capitalism seems to be producing a new mutation of Acton’s ‘nationality’.”

Benjamin Barber, 2013
If Mayors Ruled the World

“If mayors ruled the world, then more than 3.5 billion people (over half the world’s population) who are urban dwellers and the many more in the exurban neighborhoods beyond could participate locally and cooperate globally at the same time — a miracle of civic ‘glocality’ promising pragmatism instead of politics, innovation rather than ideology and solutions in place of sovereignty.”