From Megalopolis to Split Screen. Three Contemporary Urban Aesthetics

This paper assumes that cognition is not a purely mental process but takes place in a series of physical sites, institutions and media. I explore here three sets of images through which a knowledge of the contemporary city is constituted: those of the Argentinean painter Guillermo Kuitca, those of the American TV series “24” and those produced in the occasion of recent projects by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). This exploration leads us through different ways of putting the experience of contemporary urban spaces into visual form, with the hypothesis that these images not only represent it, but are constitutive parts of it. On these premises, my analysis highlights three elements: first, the gap between cartographic representations of the city and the increasingly diverse patterns of practice in urban space, secondly, the development of an urban “culture of emergency” and, thirdly, the advent, in the work of certain architects and urban planners, of a “cosmopolitics” of the urban phenomenon.