Customer Reviews

Quantum City

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In Quantum City, Ayssar Arida recalibrates analysis and possible action at an urban level based on his reading of quantum phenomena. By so doing he further elaborates and clarifies strategies for action as a designer and critic in relation to both individual architectural artifacts and the assemblies of objects and events that become cities. In an era when the predictable formats of urban design and planning no longer seem particularly relevant or effective, Arida joins others who are searching for more synthetic ways and means of urban description and thus of urban production. What distinguishes his discourse from other infrastructural, delirious, fuzzy, or post-structural reassessments of urban design, is the use of quantum relations. The interdependencies, but also the quirky shifts in significance, that this prevalent form of scientific thinking offers in the urban realm clearly have relevance to work on as complex and contradictory system as a city - an intricate assemblage of forms with more intricate cultural implications and motivations.

Arida begins with a whirlwind synopsis of urban thinking from the Ancients to the present followed by an equally terse look at the now venerable history of quantum theory. Where the book gets very interesting, and here it could have become just the opposite as this is the most speculative portion of Arida's text, is when he relates theory and the city using his reading of the quantum, viewing urban space and the relations between forms. Here the programs, motivations and manifestations of urban desire form a matrix for action based on relations, on balances and uncertainty. Holistic connections are formed at this point unnecessarily, but the basic notion of an urban field of shifting interactions not only, more clearly than usual, describes the extraordinary circumstances of the city but seems to, more effectively than usual, propose new ways of working there.

Michael Stanton

Arida's Quantum City provides a cogent framework for describing the city in terms of the language and concepts of quantum theory. This approach allows him to view buildings as events, urban users as roving subjectivities, and to re-texture the urban space as a process of interference rather than a collection of static objects. The author is at his best grappling directly with the city, and notions of quantum theory that provide a means to re-evaluate `chaos'. Without being proscriptive, the book makes a different kind of sense out of what makes urban space tick, and offers a novel critique of classical urban design. More importantly, it makes inroads into offering a new set of language/conceptual structures that allow us to see the city differently, and therefore offers the possibility of solving existing urban problems in novel ways.

I was disappointed by this work, which tried to apply advanced scientific theories to explain the chaotic conditions of one city [why this single case?].
The script is a very mixed: dense at times, light [or superficial] at others...