La Ciudad Jubilada / The Retired City

U “Alain Finkielkraut reminded us (...) “The actual dynamic of urbanization is not that of the extension of cities, it is about their slow and implacable extinction... The urban politic was born and has been developed to put an end to the city.” (...) But the city is not only the consequence of a projection that is imposed on an indifferent population, shaped passively following the directives of the administrators and the planners at their service. Beyond those plans and models, urbanism is, mainly, the society that citizens produce and the ways the urban form is spent, one could say, by its users.

It is these citizens who, in a determined moment, may not participate in (as a matter of fact, they don’t participate with a certain assiduousness) the directives of urban officials and will create their own forms of territorialization, modalities that will be always ephemeral and cross-disciplinary when thinking, and using, the gears that make the city possible. This never concluded work of society on itself is what produces the constant entanglement of metropolitan's life, a state of permanent boiling that unfolds hostilely or indifferently to the urban political discourses and handworks (...)

It is often proclaimed that there exists an urban form, resulting from politically determined planning, but in reality one suspects that the urban, in fact, does not have a form." ”Manuel Delgado. The public animal.