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Young Lectures in the Netherlands – Implicated Difference, Uncanny Peacocks, the Constant Safari

Young Lectures in the Netherlands – Implicated Difference, Uncanny Peacocks, the Constant Safari

Jason Young, Associate Professor of Architecture, will speak at the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands on January 11th delivering a lecture titled: IMPLICATED DIFFERENCE, UNCANNY PEACOCKS, THE CONSTANT SAFARI.

Arguably, the city is the most celebrated and academically cherished formal and spatial configuration of urbanism. Sustained exploration of the material conditions within contemporary post-industrial cities, however, can have the effect of foregrounding a dilemma in one’s urban study.

One can uphold the propriety of the city and the individual disciplines that labor to make sense of it; or, one can let go of the city in favor of urbanism itself, placing “proper” disciplinary conclusions at risk while exploring the myriad spatial configurations produced by the processes of urbanization that persist outside of the canonic territory of the city.

Drawing from his current book project, Skirmishes with the MacroPhenomenal, Young’s lecture will push away from the city as a model for the work of the disciplines most concerned with urbanism, proposing instead that those disciplines risk their coherence by corresponding with the plush contingencies of post-city formations of urbanism. Young’s research plots the emergence of a new digitally-construed, technologically-bloated urban subject who arises at the intersection of statistics and market segmentation research.

This database subject is vividly rendered within the horizontally entropic landscapes of franchised experience. Franchise spaces, meanwhile, tend to operate as contemporary institutional vestiges, attempting to preside over the shifting terms of identity brought on by the persistent appearance of the logistics underlying franchised experience. The cultural logic of speed lures the compact scalar relationship between the morphology of institutions and the database subject towards what Young has termed the MacroPhenomenal.

Visit the Berlage Institute website for more information.