The Image of the Hyper City

Landi, Davide

Abstract

© 2018, The Author(s). Since the nineteenth and twentieth century, information has been pivotal both in the cultural tradition and then in the economic tradition. While the Fordism economic model and its specialisation requirements originated a simplistic zoning and single-use development approach to the design of a city. It, however, determined a fragmented growth of cities. Inevitably, the zoning as an urban strategy affected the architectural scale. Nevertheless, the idea of information, commercial goods and thereby people freely able to flow through the city allowed architects and urban designer to conceive new types of urban infrastructures. For example, trains, which were designed on the model of urban “arteries and veins.” Over time, the persistence of urban and architectural segmentation has strengthened social and economic inequalities among urban society. In addition, information has played a more vital role in this strengthening process. The technological achievements of the twenty-first century such as information technologies have significantly affected cities. The new informational patterns have provided new ways of designing, and in turn how societies experience cities. These “quantified cities” consist of digital data that dynamically interacts with “quantified human beings.” Consequently, a renewed urban semiotics is established, which is built around an alternate sociological comprehension. Is this new urban semiotics able to heal an ill and divided urban body? The paper will investigate a new concept of “quantified city” based on the notion of “Hyper-Reality,” and its inhabitants who are entering in a “post-human” condition while living in a dynamic urban environment. In particular, the critical analysis will be used as a “tool” for redefining the perception of the city (i.e., the image of the Hyper City) through inhabitants’ (post-humans’) relational patterns which are technologically mediated (i.e., Google Maps, Uber, Instagram, etc.). The more traditional notion of urbanisation is questioned with a focus on how the an urban society is embedded within the digital condition and the notion of a city.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 15, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Sep 29, 2018
• Publication Date: Sep 15, 2019
• Deposit Date: Mar 7, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 12, 2020
• Journal: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law
• Print ISSN: 0952-8059
• Electronic ISSN: 1572-8722
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 32
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 533-548
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9583-8
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/5628064
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9583-8