Astragalo. Culture of Architecture and the City

For the contemporaries of the first 25 years of the 21st century, contemporaneity, understood as a historical condition and cultural pattern, reformulates problems and introduces new subjects of study, conditioning the revision of apparently consolidated procedures and theoretical frameworks. The awareness of living in new eras, such as those of the anthropocene and the digital, opens up hypotheses of transition towards a post-human world in which the city and the territory, public space and social practices, architecture and the aesthetics of everyday life are confronted as the end of a historical cycle, giving rise to a different state. José Luis Pardo (2011) argues that due to the civilisational change we are undergoing; we are in a permanent transition of paradigms: is this the case in the Global South?

The direction taken by the development of technology since modernity affects different disciplinary fields, such as Architecture and Urbanism, which have become a kind of absolute knowledge about the ways of inhabiting the Earth, considered as an available resource to be instrumentalised with the consequent disappearance of biomes and the degradation of landscapes. Urban territories, cities, have been transformed into devices with a high environmental impact. To be a contemporary of these changes means paying attention to concepts such as the Anthropocene, Capitalocene or Chthulucene which, due to their breadth, express the multi-causality of the processes that affect the planet as a whole, opening up the possibility of developing a new ethic in the relationship between humanity and nature.

Likewise, the entrenchment of the digital era promotes informational logic in all orders of existence, facilitates compulsive connectivity between monadic individuals (Sadin, 2020) and expands the application of artificial intelligence, giving rise to crisis phenomena that transcend national boundaries and challenge the power of states. Realities emerge in which subjects develop, by epochal imperative, new sensibilities and cognitive capacities that alter the notion of space and time. The urban locus as a factor of stability in space and duration in time, yields to the volatility and instantaneity of the digital, modifying collective practices in urban public space.

Cities (in the Global South), characterised by their multiple temporalities and spatialities, which in themselves can be explained by their historical complexity, are confronted with the need to process new externalities that are specific to their singularities and to political, economic and cultural globalisation. Thus, the question of our times, of the anthropocene and the digital, constitutes an epiphenomenon that introduces new parameters for thinking the city as a palimpsest of meanings, material elements and social practices.

Are these worlds in ruins, human and non-human worlds produced from a logic of transience and instantaneity, of ephemeral times and amnesic spaces (A. F. Carlos), of forgetfulness and substitution? In this new era, the separation between Nature and Culture, as well as between subject and society, is unsustainable and requires new perspectives and approaches to confront the dualisms, colonialism and hegemony of the Western world.

Based on the fact that today's city is an expression of the power of globalised capitalism, and that there is a shift from the city-work-politics triad to the city-management-business triad, enhanced by the disruptive presence of technology, we have posed the following questions, which the texts presented here answer from different aspects:

- What are the possibilities and limitations of the South in the face of the complexity of contemporary trends that imply a significant civilisational transformation?

- Do these trends constitute new threats or new opportunities for societies marked by acute inequalities?

- To what extent does the Global South propose a situated epistemology, adequate to face the challenges of the contemporary moment?

- What emerges as a development of this epistemology in relation to the values, elements and procedures of design disciplines such as Architecture and Urbanism?

Whose answers have been arranged in 4 Turns:

• Turn 1: Architecture, Limits, and Transformations. Papers 1, 2 & 3
• Turn 2: Architecture, Gender, and Otherness. Papers 4 & 5
• Turn 3: Architecture, Nature and Culture. Papers 6, 7 & 8
• Turn 4: Architecture, Design and Society. Papers 9 & 10