The fading of cities and nature. Contemporary urbanicism, dwellings and community spheres

Abstract

This essay aims to contribute to a deep and situated understanding of the destructive processes that shape contemporary material, emotional and symbolic life, both in nature and in human settlements. Such understanding stands on the basis of a disquisition about the tendencies that deform the contemporary city, starting from our daily living and experiential knowledge as inhabitants, and contrasting it with the original historical intentions of the Western city project, since this is the one that was imposed as a model all over the world with the European colonial expansion.The basic proposition is that the city, as historical project and situated praxis of political and territorial creation of community, has been destructured, phagocytized, denied and degraded to the point of its collapse, by the urbaniza- El dEsfallEcimiEnto dE las ciudadEs y la naturalEza. urbanicismo contEmporánEo, habitarEs y ámbitos dE comunidad65 tions or post-cities of contemporary capitalism, within a phenomenon that we call urbanicism.It is stated that the characteristics of artificiality and domination of nature observed in such phenomenon express –due to the scale of its expansion– a qualitative transformation that undermines the possibilities for the equilibrium of life in any territory, since those characteristics signify disproportion as a behavioral and infrastructural logic that serves the greed of capitalist accumulation.The article closes pointing out the social persistence, within this tendency, towards the creation of appropriate places for life, which constitute material and corporal, situated and significant relations that we can call scopes for inhabiting. These express the persistence of a creative power aimed at the generation of meaningful and localized living environments.