After the Metropolis, the Info-Ecological Networks and the End of Urban Experience

Abstract

The contemporary ecological crisis that has given rise to summits and debates, culminating in the recent international meetings organized by the United Nations COP (Conference of the Parties on Climate Change) and which has begun to inspire global government and business management policies, is probably a of the maximum expressions of the crisis of the urban imaginary, based on the centrality of human action and the separation between the subject and nature. The definitive crisis of this anthropocentric conception, which marked the philosophical, political and social tradition of the West, finds its origins in the new forms of connection possible after the diffusion of digital ecological networks, that is, in the various forms of connection of various types of surfaces ( Internet of Things) that allowed the transmission of information in real time in the network of a multitude of information, coming from all types of surfaces and substances, vegetables, animals and minerals. This innovation has triggered a widespread communication throughout the environment that has altered our relationship with the environment by creating info-ecologies, that is, complex reticular habitats that connect individuals and physical spaces to data networks and diverse substances. The urban form of the West is thus overcome, based on the anthropomorphism of space and its reification. To the urban landscapes succeed the info-ecologies and the connective networks, bearer of a new contractuality between individual, space and information.