Epistemopolis
The birth of a Modern city turned out to be stillborn once we saw through the rhetoric. Everyone wanted utopia, but when (and if) it was built, no one occupied it. Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris remains axonometric drawings on yellowing paper and the Unité was disdained by the following generation for its authoritarian attempts at social engineering. Sure, roving bands of capitalists and idealists continue to attempt to erect utopia (or a nostalgic, profit driven pseudo-utopia) with planned villages on picturesque waterfront property (and if it doesn’t exist, create the waterfront itself), but they are fighting a battle that has already been lost. Failing to achieve the “twin fantasies of order and omnipotence,” urbanism has died as a profession, at least pragmatically, and architects have withdrawn into the security of isolated buildings and dreams of archi-theocracy—the last gasps of humanity defined by distinctiveness.
This paper develops metropolitan thinking in the wake of Modernism in two parts. Part one is a study of the metropolis as an analogical model for epistemology, a condition which I have called the epistemopolis. By pitting the chaos of New York and the sprawl of Los Angeles against one another, I am able to suggest a robust epistemology based on the city—the anarchic epistemopolis. Part two expands upon the idea of the epistemopolis by developing the urban dimension of the argument. It continues a critique began in part I of the sprawl epistemopolis and introduces a second model—collage city. These two inadequate versions of the epistemopolis are used as springboards for developing a more precise understanding of the anarchic epistemopolis, which is enumerated in five points.
