anomy & taxonomy

The Generic City is our contemporary habitat, without identity, without center or periphery, minimally referencing geography, useless to unionize by the nature of history that has no home within the generic. How do we call upon the empowering fraternity of identity without a shared common ground, or story for? Except with the shopping mall that provides city-dwellers with destination, route, and idle conversations—much like the airport. Neither of these models however, includes the necessity of food production if green space is residual, “immoral lushness compensates for the Generic City’s other poverties.” Koolhaas’s sidewalkless, skyscraped world does not suggest a system dependent on outside resources of petroleum or peri-urban farming as that would interrupt the generic by the nature of physical rootedness. The requirement of at least the latter is unavoidable and unrepresented in this waiting room, post-modern condition.

If the discrepancy between the classical and the generic cities are their centeredness, what do we understand the meaning of the city generic, as “center” to be? Are we offered any real hope for meaning or iteration along the continuum of city development? Do we look to industrialization as responsible for our economic metabolic rift, welcoming the arrival of the general?

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“age-old distinction between the Same and the Other” (Foucault)
The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, by Jorge Luis Borges
Certain Chinese encyclopaedia, in which animals are divided into:
(a) belonging to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed,
(c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs,
(e) sirens,
(f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification
(i) frenzied,
(j) innumerable
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
(l) et cetera,
(m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies