Negotiating our Global Cities

The powerless own the city just as much as the powerful. Even though the equity between the two is hard to reconcile, I believe it is within the constructs of our global cities where we can most successfully mediate its differentiation. Here, inside the framework of our urbanscapes, is where we have the opportunity to level the playing field for our city dwellers and preserve the urban tissue that connects us all to each other. By letting these scenes play out, we begin to formulate responses that culminate into tangible value: cultural diversity.

If we don’t, we see the rise of a global monoculture, the manufactured response to the universalization of our cities. It is here where we allocate our lives to technology, capitalism, gentrification, and allow unforgiving worldwide connectivity to batter us. In this position, we are always playing catch-up, never fully understanding the present and rarely cognizant of the details that define our daily lives and personal engagements.

In this aspect, we need to focus on negotiating our divided cities, a challenge that is finally breaking the surface and is paramount in how our cities grow. I believe this is where architecture plays a major role in how it develops. It seems as if we are playing a game of reconciliation between technology and context, and our built environment is the most substantial medium in which it is appropriated. If we continue to become a society hinged on our obsession with technology, capitalism, global gentrification, privatization, etc., we will subjugate our truest connection with nature and replace our sense of place for a system that will ultimately consume and homogenize our own existence. We will marginalize our own quality of life and well-being and become numb to our own desires and joys.

Architecture needs to be the force in which we blend our cultural diversity universally. Our cities are incubators for whatever we put into them, and they are becoming more important to the sustainability of our global communities. When we look at history, it is our cities that have withstood the hands of time. They are the stronghold that provides the framework in which we mold and shape our society. And our cities will continue to have great influence on how we respond to changes (technology, globalization, etc.) as we move forward, so we must be strategic in the dialogue taking place within their boundaries. We must be not lose our sense of place and the connection we have with each other on a human level.