001 INTRODUCTION
or ... what is he doing at Substack?!
2.2O24
I see my urbophilia@Substack venture as an experiment, an essai into the thinking-writing-publishing continuum process. I hope that this platform can facilitate such intellectual (ad)venture well. When optimistic, I believe that this could become an exciting exercise (even leading to a Casablanca moment ?!). That is why I have decided to try.
This introduction is only a draft. Over the forthcoming weeks, I might be updating it; even frequently. Introduction will stay a draft, as the key point is to begin, to start exploring what really can be done here, to find ways of having fun – while producing something serious. If that proves possible, then the draft will morph into a Foreword, and enable the rest, “the Work” itself, to find its own form.
Here I am going to only sketch out what you, while surfing Substack to check what’s new, might want to know: who am I, what do I do, what do I intend to do with this trial and how ... as if I knew the answers.
I
Who is he, or – who am I?
Curriculum Vitae should provide a sufficiently objective account. According to this, recently published (and slightly edited) version, Darko of darkor.substack.com is
Darko Radović, an architect and urbanist, Professor Emeritus at Keio University, Tokyo, a co-founder of co+re, an international platform for strategic thinking making and living better cities (based in Tokyo. Bangkok. Milano. Ljubljana). Currently, he is Professor at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and University of Ljubljana. He chairs City Space Architecture Advisory Board of Public Space Experts (...) Darko has taught, researched, and practised architecture and urban design in Europe, Australia, and Asia. His books include infraordinary Tokyo - right to the city, (Tokyo: shinkenchiku a+u, 2021); In Search of Urban Quality (with Boontharm; Tokyo: flick Studio, 2014); Subjectivities in Investigations of the Urban (Tokyo: flick Studio (2014); eco-urbanity – towards well-tempered environments, (ed., Routledge, 2008).
While that account does sound boring, it provides a number of keywords of relevance for my urbophilia.Substack plans. Yet, of course, that remains insufficient, especially not when it comes to the character of my intended work. More information is scattered in various books, essays, papers, lectures, recorded and unrecorded encounters, discussions – the fragments of which, posted on urbophilia.substack.com, should help you enter the Work even before the project has started.
(books, authored and edited, so far ...)
The hardest of questions – who am I – will open the project.. That question is the very core of Western philosophy. Touching the Self touches the very essence of our being in the World. From there, a swarm of other questions, inquiries into the diverse what, where and why, when and how inevitably arise. These will set up the tenor and orientate discussion towards subjectivity, language, senses and sensibility, responsiveness and responsibility – within our main theme.
Those discussions will point at diverse possible openings into the Work, the possibility of which I want to explore.
II
What is that Work about?
Both the theme and sensibility that informs this project are in its title – urbophilia.
urbs + philia
city + affection, love
That can’t be formulated in a more succinct way. We can only expand upon it.
A separate essay on (my) urbophilia should be posted, hopefully soon.
In broadest terms, this Work is about thinking, making and living better cities. The possible starting points are innumerable, so I have decided to start ... from the beginning. When it comes to this topic (that notoriously difficult to define “I”), personally I was lucky, both to have been born in an exquisitely beautiful and culturally rich city (where the beauty was the projection of that diversity), and that my formal education in architecture and urbanism was marked by an early encounter with a polymath, an artist, architect and urbanist capable of bringing us all close to the inexplicable, a professor whose opening question to his urbanology course was unanswerable: what is city?
A separate essay on that fateful moment, as one of the inevitable digressions, should be posted later on.
What is city, he asked us, simultaneously asking himself, and knowing not to expect an answer. The years of my formal and informal studies that followed, travels, encounters, architectural and urbanistic practice in various parts of the world, have all helped me deal with it, but – the original question remains. The deeper in urban investigations one gets, I have learnt, the fascination with untameable complexity of the urban only increases. Fifty years on, asking and trying to answer what cities are remains at the very core of my professional and academic being.
Irresistible digression 1: to me the most formidable attempt is in Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite (of course) definition:
(Lefebvre of the urban; a slide from DR Theory and Practice of Urbanity course)
III
What do I intend to do here?
We enter this project, by seeking the way, a method as literally μετά + ὁδός, the way – beyond. Beyond clichés.
Reaching back to some of the previous efforts should help with finding the pulse, the rhythms and arrythmias of the stories and histories to be told and elaborated upon here. The original meaning of “history”, the Greek ἱστορία, stands for both inquiry and – judgment. Designing entry points should, thus, set a sense of rigour, the timing and tempo (akin to what musicians get from the metronome).
That, probably, answers the opening question – what is he doing at Substack?!
Furthermore, I hope that an urbophilia workshop on this platform will provide me with discipline needed to enter the project. My intention is to attempt an essay, to essay, again in the original sense of the word, as encapsulated in the French essai, as in Latin exigere, ex = out + agere = to weight, to drive, to set in motion.
One can never put that in a more accurate and provocative way then Theodor Adorno has in his “Essay as Form” (1958), targeting “the academic guild”. For him, essay “does not begin with Adam and Eve”. An essay and an essayist enjoy a “childlike freedom that catches fire, without scruple, on what others have already done”, where “luck and play are essential”. It resists “departmental specialisation” and it celebrates “little acts of knowledge […] that […] cannot be caught in the net of science”. For years my, research, supervision and teaching were aimed in that direction. In my various research and design research projects in Asia, Europe and Australia, especially within our experimental Theory and Practice of Urbanity (TPU), I explored variations on a theme of Debordian, Situationist dérive, drifted in order to explore essayistic freedom in 1:1 scale, in concrete situations of everyday life.
That is what I want to bring to Substack. Essay(ism), in its original sense, as an open-eyed action. That should, I hope, help reset my own search to this moment, towards current, pressing, concrete urban questions. Our times, which Yanis Varoufakis finely, provocatively dubs Techno Feudalism, are marked by global (dis)order in which, not accidentally, while chasing “answers”, we have lost – the questions.
The process to be attempted, explored, developed and, hopefully, enjoyed at urbophilia.substack.com will generate a series of variously heterogenous, seemingly and truly (dis)connected fragments, drifts and drafts, written and drawn, texts and textures which might identify some resultant forces, help me move towards – the Work (a kind of a book, perhaps; here the message should decide the medium). I hope that the readers could find that interesting, and perhaps useful, in their lives and work.
By opening the question of questions, the Work to be undertaken will seek to become an essay on essays on cities, an essay of essays on urbanity. An essay as a field, designed not to impose one, but to provoke multiplicity of readings. Overlaps, intersections, fuzzy, jazzy zones will make the text flow (as it happened before) disintegrate, becoming fertile.
That pulls the questions Who (am I, in this project)? and What (this project is, in me/to me?) together. They merge. The Who of the authorship (that initial, crucial, slippery question) and the What of the (pre)occupation; the ultimate complexity of the self and the ultimate complexity of the urban, in unison.
Another three quotations frame our opening well:
Theodor Adorno: “the thinker does not think, but rather transforms himself into an arena of intellectual experience, without simplifying it”
György Lukács: “the essay is a court, but (unlike in the legal system) it is not the verdict that is important, that sets the standards and sets the precedents, but the process of examining and judging.”
Georges Perec: “the essay rejects ‘the hostility to happiness of official thought’ which seals it off against anything new as well as against curiosity, the pleasure principle of thought.”
In this approach the issue of language will be(come) of critical importance to us. That is where Pandora might come in (to the rescue?).
(Heidegger, Andrić, Cixous, Jullien; on translation; source: DR TPU lectures)
IV
WHY all this?
As an architect, urbanist, I was taught, and I do believe that in every design there is a desire to create a better world. By often repeating that, I remind my students that, whoever the designer of the chair they are sitting on was, (s)he wanted to make a good, comfortable, at least functional object to sit on (the fact that the quality of product does not necessarily match such the aspiration is not relevant here). In tune with that innate desire, my passion for ecologically and culturally sustainable production of humane spaces is inseparable from broader imperatives of ethics and morality.
Varoufakis’ (2023) definition of new global reality which we all have collectively slipped into, the one in which the cloud capital has defeated capitalism and descended back into the feudal order, repeats Saramago’s declaration how “we live in the times of barbarism”, which in turn refers to a century old premonition of Rosa Luxemburg and her even older source, Engels. That lineage only points at predictability of the banal. The accuracy of Guy Debord’s early diagnoses from 1967 and 1988 is simply disarming:
(Debord’s summary, 1967&1988; a slide from DR TPU lectures)
More about that is to follow, in our forthcoming urbophilia@Substack discussions (or, in my echo chamber).
V
How to begin?
Well, I have just done it! If you find these ruminations worthy of your time – please join urbophilia@Substack.com. My invitation to the readers is to seek their own ways to enter this creative process and to benefit from it. That invitation is based on hope that this platform might take the reader beyond what I expect, that it could indeed help us all to reach a true urbophilia Casablanca moment.
