ABOUT THIS BOOK

Proposing a new way of understanding the relationship between the city and personal identity, The City is Me argues that there is no longer a distance between the two. The result of extensive research about our notions of the city and the person throughout time, this volume explores the technology, research findings, and new ideas that have made it impossible to sustain conceptions of the city that are based on the criterion of a boundary. Showing how this shift mirrors the decentralization and fragmentation of personal identity in a globalized world, Rosane Araujo confronts the challenge of rethinking urbanism in a way that corresponds to the risk and uncertainty—but also to the possibilities—of today’s cities.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Rosane Araujo, a Brazilian architect and urbanist, is a visiting scholar at Columbia University.

REVIEWS

“Araujo’s approach is aggressively interdisciplinary, challenging boundaries and championing the polysemy of conceptual approaches. Both city and person are extensible concepts: as we experience the city, the city experiences us, collecting and collating data about our movements, trajectories, interests and habits. . . . The City is Me traces many of the important developments and theories that are contributing to the formation of ‘smart’ cities connected and wired through sophisticated software and user interfaces.”

— TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

General Structure of this book

Chapter 1 – About Concept

1.1 The concept of City

1.2 The city

Chapter 2 – Reconceptualizing the City

2.1 The informational city

2.2 The videocity

2.3 The metapolis

2.4 The megacities

2.5 The global city

2.6 The cybercity

2.7 The e-topia

2.8 The nodal city

2.9 The city of bits

2.10 The ecstacity

2.11 Other concepts of city

Chapter 3 – Urbanism in Fluid State

3.1 Brief introduction to topology

3.2 A form that creates its permanent mutation

3.3 The twenty-first century Orbanism

Chapter 4 – Reconceptualizing I

4.1 René Descartes

4.1.1 Cartesian Philosophy and the foundation issue

4.1.2 Subject as foundation: I-substance

4.1.3 Subject as a first-person consciousness

4.1.4 Subject of reflection

4.1.5 The Cartesian I: I-subject

4.2 Immanuel Kant

4.2.1 The Copernican revolution and the critical project

4.2.2 The Kantian transcendental subject

4.3 Sigmund Freud

4.3.1 Freud and Psychoanalysis

4.3.2 Unconscious and consciousness: the Freudian topography

4.3.3 Ego: das Ich

4.4 The systemic thinking of Ludwig von Bertalanffy

4.5 The systemic thinking of Maturana and Varela: the concept of autopoiesis

4.5.1 Unity, closure and coupling

4.5.2 The human knowledge

4.6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome

4.7 The cognitive ecology of Pierre Lévy

4.7.1 The couplings of space-time

4.7.2 Virtualizations

4.8 Complex networks

4.8.1 Random networks

4.8.2 Scale-free networks

4.9 Summary chart

4.10 Considerations

Chapter 5 – The Concept of Person According to the New Psychoanalysis

5.1 The equivalence I = Person

5.2 Person = Primary Formations + Secondary Formations + Original Formation

5.2.1 Primary Formations

5.2.2 Secondary Formations

5.2.3 Original Formation

5.3 Persons are IdioFormations of our case

5.3.1 Haver

5.3.2 The Person “is” in the order of “Being” and “há” in the order of “Haver”

5.4 Person is a Pole with Focus, Fringe and Background

5.5 Negative definitions of I = Person

5.6 Without frontiers

Chapter 6 – The City Is Me

6.1 The city is me: pole, focus, fringe

6.2 The urban pole in focus and fringe

Chapter 7 – Conclusion

Bibliography

Notes

Authors Index