![]() This accelerated emphasis, which is key to global-city making, puts even more emphasis on exchange value rather than use value built over time, and it erodes and even shatters texture. 2 For all cities subject to this, the repetition means that any form of production or consumption and any site that cannot generate a massive surplus as real estate is replaced by an architectural and urban order geared toward rapid and often startling exchange value. The real consequence for cit- ies and neighbourhoods under this intensification is that development brings ‘repetition rather than innovation’, as Jamie Peck and others have said about Vancouver, the city I live in. The result, felt across the globe, is an urban development and redevelopment which overrides existing textures, replacing them with social homogenisation, a limited architectural vocabulary and an emphasis on security, all tied to the supercommodification of built space and notions of liveability for a global investor class. This intensification of the city itself as an economic engine, as the agent of surplus value, also generated a potent global logic of gentrification as a naturalised process of city development that tragically became utilised as a policy for cities of all sizes. Along the way, the non-economic utopian prospects that were part of the imagination of the urban over the twentieth century (including the global city construct) and the city as a site of experiments in living or focal points in new modes of militancy get lost. In the new process of creative destruction, cities are left struggling to hold onto the multiplic- ity of their textures and histories. That moment’s optimism for cities as the site of a new cosmopolitanism and citizenship has been stripped away, revealing a much more rationalised urbanism driven by economic intensification. This reality is counter to the optimistic perspective of the ‘global city’ in the late nineties when it was understood that a global-urban dynamism would concentrate the intersections of culture, media and new modes of work in a way that would bring a multiplicity of spatial practices, communicative networks and possibilities into the city. Despite the massive growth of cities in this era of planetary urbanism, the textures of the city have not necessarily become more varied nor more distinct. Ironically, while the urban fabric has expanded across the planet, the multiplicity of urban textures has been diminished. ![]() Not Here, Not Anywhere” at MACBA, Barcelona 2018. Text for the catalogue of the solo exhibition “Domènec. L’ascension et la chute de la colonne Vendôme ![]() Two Shelters and the Phantom Limb (Ted, Charles-Édouard and Henry David) ![]()
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