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Meta City: Origins and Implications

2014; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-03798-1_6

2239-2696

David Grahame Shane,

Smart Cities and Technologies

The Dutch group MVRDV first used the term "Metacity" in 2000 to describe a city that was formed from information, meta meaning about or above in Greek, as in metadata or metaphor (Shane 2011, Shane and McGrath 2012). The city thus became a statistical entity formed of masses of data, describing relationships amongst its populations, its environments, and its various systems of flows and stasis. MVRDV's Metacity was a data cube containing information about all the inhabitants on earth, a cube based on the demolished Kowloon Walled City: a three-dimensional slum, The City of Darkness (MVRDV 1998). This heterotopic and chaotic, hyper-dense urban village, used in some action movies before demolition, was a messy and informal, a maze of corridors, stairs, wires and rooms, far from the clean, transparent cube of data envisioned by the Dutch architectural group. The metacity of information contained three other contemporary urban models. In part the data cube reflects the metropolitan model, the idea that the complexity of the city can be controlled from a single center by a single urban actor as in the dream of earlier imperial regimes with power residing in their original, "mother" city, but at a new global, United Nations scale. In part the metacity incorporates the widely distributed, mega-scale characteristics of Gottmann's (1961,1990) auto-dependent megalopolis model that is in crisis as the true costs of petroleum powered growth become clearer in terms of global climate change. The metacity also includes elements of the fragmented metropolis model especially its powerfully interconnected digital realm that created the dense urban fragments and informational clusters to provide resilience and back up for the megalopolis in the crises of the 1970's and 80's, leading to the megamalls of the 90's and early 2000's (Shane 2011). Besides supporting giant new nodes and sites, the important point of the metacity refers to the role of information in shaping the perception and use of the city, so that areas that formerly appeared as countryside or peri-urban territories now fall under the urban umbrella (Gleick 2012). Urban form thus becomes at once urban and rural, a conditioned described as "desakota" (village-city) by Terry McGee (1971, 1991, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2007). This paper will examine the origins of the metacity in earlier urban models and implications of the city of information for the definition of the city in the future, including the need for new hyper-dense urban nodes.