5. WEAK AS VERB We think of the city as relational in a physiological rather than in a formal way. Differentiated situations, settings and micro-environments, the relational capacity of the new, of the non-fragments in a minor history inside major ones create new configurations, not disconnected stratifications. Places become like the ‘noise’ of Serres: a complex intersection of changing modes. Notational, molecular, writing on the sidelines – the multiple stories of the project become side notes in the grand narratives of the city. Autonomous tales, tales inside the tale, independent, minor and unconnected become accents, intuitions in the margins. The small modifies the large. The succession of minor elements determines a city inside the city, and it influences its character by incorporating its dynamics: Reversible, provisional, unresistant. Nothing is fixed. Open to the future, dynamic, an ecology as a never- determined process, always in evolution. Reversible, where time can turn back without projecting itself inside history. Non-figurative, territories in braille and performative field. Space without pre-constituted figures, without metaphor or symbols is a field shaped by inconsistent elevations and imperceptible realisations. The project is background on background. Adaptive, energetic and evolutionary, it is able to collaborate with existing spaces as does a battery or a bicycle’s dynamo.
6. WEAK AS ADJECTIVE Technonature is an operational strategy where ecology is degree zero. In a vision that considers the nature-artefact relation as crucial, we hold Pessoa’s definition as central: ‘Maybe it doesn’t only happen to me, but also to all those who civilisation has given birth to for the second time. Yet I feel that for me, or for those who feel like me, artificiality has become a natural thing, and what is natural seems odd. I stand corrected: artificiality has not become natural: natural has become different.’ 10 Weakcity bases itself in landscape strategies, in particular techno-nature that rethinks the territorial and urban project. Its operational modalities and its chameleon linguistics responds to the project crisis through ecological logic. In its theoretical and methodological conditions developed within the philosophy of science 11 , Technonature is able to overcome dichotomies between the city and the vernacular, the hybrid and the conciliatory. It is an aesthetic of disappearance 12 , a camouflage, a metaphor and, above all, a restoration of environmentalism and sustainability. Forman’s landscape ecology considers the urban project as a ‘not-only-anthropocentric’ condition, and the product of differentiated effects of synergies, not of scale. 13 A new design process uses ecology as a structural field for the urban project; the primary steps are to recover, to remedy and to reactivate ecological qualities. Ecology as degree zero predisposes the urban ground to consequent modifications. In this sense, ecology is the level of the maximum projectual possibility because it resets and prepares new ground for future transformations. In its formal specifications, ecology reclaims the contents of ecological and environmental art, disciplines with which it shares not only topics, but also the overlapping of multiple disciplines. The aim is to transform urban space into a new aesthetic of the city. ~
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10 Fernando Pessoa. Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa . Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1998 11 In particular, Merleau-Ponty, La nature , 1996 12 The aesthetic of disappearance underlines the virilion concept of in- formative and perceptive excess, which is able to produce an absence. 13 Neil Brenner. ‘Rescaling Urban Questions’ in New Geographies 0. Harvard GSD, September 2009 and Daniela Perrotti. ‘Conceiving the (everyday) landscape of energy as a transcalar infrastructural device’. Projets de paysage 04/ 01 /2012, www.projetsdepaysage.fr : ‘In his 1999 text Infrastructural Urbanism, Allen distinguishes between two kinds of effects produced by infrastructures and apt to influence the field conditions: the capillary effects of scales, generated by a great number of small elements that compose the infrastructural network, and the effect of synergy, that originate where there is convergence and interchange between different systems in the network.’
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