POP UP PLACES

Seventeenth-century plans of the city of London show us a stone place of timeless dimension. It is a city that unites its destiny with a utopia that transcends the individual that inhabits it. Time seems to stand still; it does not come about, perhaps because its destiny—that of its utopias—transcends time itself. This city that inherited the Londonian modernity is followed by a new place, the city of machines and movement. It is a city that reunites individuals in moving rooms and by the time of itinerancy. The inhabitant is revealed to be a group of individuals that understand the city as the union of two specific places united by the continuity of those lines. Then the notion of time in dwelling emerges that, together with the distance that connects both points, is derived from the idea of velocity. To dwell is now to travel. The room is measured in velocity, and life is intensified like the acceleration of the same relationship of places. Added to this city of movement and increasingly accelerated time there is a new place: the pop-up place. They are places that we inhabit in an almost disjointed way, and places that take us to other places, to other homes, to other times where we fulfill our small dreams and eventually our own small utopias. These are weak, almost micro-utopias, but ones which we can reach within the limit of our personal life and of our short existence. They are dreams that we can fulfill, dreams that we add to other dreams, both our own and those of others. Man abandons timeless nature of the transcendent utopia and also the revolutionary ambition. It is a dwelling that intervenes in the city it occupies and that, in turn, modifies and intervenes in the same man that inhabits it. The city is now a city of “pop-up places”.

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