In the present time, we see that a significant part of humanity — producing and feeding on images — mentally inhabits its brave new world: cybernetics, robotics and telematics have expanded the horizons, but the instantaneity of networks has imprisoned the human being in the webs of the ELETRONIK°SCREEN. Yet this humanity exists, physically, within a larger social body whose members consubstantiate a Planet-City. As the greatest cultural and sociotechnical artefact produced by humans in the history of their transformative existence, the city is the resultant that expresses the technical ingenuity of constructing the artificial habitat. In the suggestive imaginary of human potency in subjugating the Earth to the contemporary urban way of life — expanding its influence and diffuse impacts — Coruscant is the dystopia that (con)fuses with the very idea of the Technosphere.
In recent years, resuming imaginaries projected long before, the great expansionist spectacle is being rehearsed beyond Gaia, where one no longer lives but merely survives: abandoned, in ruins propagated by the full extractivism of progressive capitalist exploitation, our collective dwelling in the Cosmos — the same dwelling of other, non-human beings — has been reduced to a mere theatre of operations of a civilisation that has already distanced itself from Nature, in a perceptible, utilitarian rupture, to extract from it everything that must serve the gears of the devouring machine, which produces, consumes and reproduces itself under this mode of life.
The Elected-Elite wishes to colonise other Spheres: to this end it perfected the missile and thus constructed the space rocket. But before the planned, extraterrestrial neocolonial expansion — founding colonies on the Moon and on Mars, for example — it may reach the new promised land of the imaginaries propagated by capitalist ventures, which commission architectural reveries and hi-tech ingenuity, in the spectacular risco of every new city (for every great construction site is a great opportunity to extract surplus value). The term I employ is ambivalent: the noun risco refers both to the projective drawing and to the probability of danger and threat (risk). And more: in using this word, I refer to the verb — beyond the meaning of projecting and instating an image — a diagram drawn on the ground of the terreiro* / territory is an act of the power to invoke — revealing the very intention of the gesture, which carries the sense of transforming a previous situation, including to suppress, erase, expel. Such a gesture is represented in exemplary fashion in the creative act of the capital city of the young nation of the new world as seen through the eyes of the coloniser: the erudite modernist architect thus describes the archetypal diagram that founds Brasília — in his words, "born from the primordial gesture of one who marks a place or takes possession of it: two axes crossing at right angles, that is, the very sign of the cross".
To urbanise is the most expressive act of the civilisation that models everything, as Debord perceived (1967), from a precise technique that acts upon the territory, the physical base of its actions; thus, he wrote in thesis 169, a synthesis which I reproduce in free translation: "urbanism is that taking possession of the natural and human environment by capitalism which, developing logically into absolute domination, can and must now remake the totality of space as its own scenario." Years before, Mumford, ever critical and observant to power, stated in The City in History (1961), that, in his time, "increasingly automatic processes of production and urban expansion have displaced the human goals they are supposed to serve." A potent synthesis of these ideas can be found not in the texts of the many thinkers who have studied the subject, but rather in this visual narrative: in Le Domaine dex Dieux (The Mansions of the Gods), from 1971, Goscinny and Uderzo imagine Caesar's strategy against the rebellious village of Astérix — a city project conceived as a "nature park", to be imposed upon that territory after the forest is destroyed, which will force the Gauls to "accept" civilisation, subjecting them to the power of Rome, "condemning them to either adapt or disappear".
* Terreiro is a place, temple, ceremonial space where the rites of Afro-Brazilian religious cults are celebrated.
Silvio Luiz Cordeiro