VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a research-by-design project on Montréal’s public space. Started in 2018, the project analyzed spatiotemporal sequences orchestrated at sites where individuals and the municipal administration connect including, among others, City district halls, municipal courts, transit infrastructure, and recycling centres. The interaction framed by these is not only productive of public space in its political sense, but a fabrication of subjects both individual and collective (Agamben, 2007). With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, physical interaction with such public equipment has been drastically reduced and at times severed. There has been a noted acceleration of the “platform state” (Mazet, 2019) with increased online migration of public services. This project argues that for the city to remain a common thing, it must remain tangible. When its physical manifestations are reduced and/or replaced by virtual connections, it is the “appearance” of the city that is itself sacrificed (Arendt, 1998). Following a method of “inventory” based on documentation and recombination (Kenniff and Lévesque, 2021), the studied sites are dissected into parts that are then reassembled into ten architectural ideas. These new assemblies invite critical ways of thinking about the existing city and its public spaces as well as suggests latent capacities of the tangible to be salvaged, recuperated, and re-projected. In this sense, the project constructs alternative modes of physical interaction with the municipality, informing, as it were, potential ontologies of the individual, the collective, and the common.