“How could such a catastrophe hit a city called “Paradise”? » asked the victims of the megafire that ravaged California in 2018. The same question arises about Los Angeles, the “city of Angels”. Faced with the megafire, would angels mutate into demons, and heaven into hell? The megafire, however, is not a divine punishment, any punishment, nor even a sad misfortune. It can be explained by various factors, such as extreme climatic events, the decay of forests, the cultural destruction of people who had expertly maintained and cultivated nature for thousands of years, the introduction of highly flammable decorative or profitable plants (eucalyptus , laurel, oil palm, Douglas pine, etc.).
All these factors boil down to one, more general one: the city. I distinguish it from the city, whose mode of existence is that of “live well”wrote Aristotle, of political and economic independence, of inclusion in a larger environment, geographical, historical, biological, of which it knows itself to be a part.
In contrast, the city was thought of as a paradise, precisely. His ideal is to owe nothing to the Earth. In Los Angeles, water was diverted, the natives were chased away, concrete was built. Everywhere, we would like to nullify the natural elements; we bury the waterways, we “condition” the air, we build on slabs. The ideal of the city is above ground, the Tower of Babel, this biblical construction intended to allow humans to leave the earth and transgress the limits of their nature as mortal beings; it is the city of Birds, this ovoid fortress floating in the air that Aristophanes made fun of, it is also the city of Thomas More or Tommaso Campanella, the phalanstery of Charles Fourier, the Radiant City of Corbusier.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers “The ecocide resulting from megafires is also an ethnocide”
-Read later
We would like the city to be outside of time, regulated by a superior intelligence, that of the omniscient Expert, soon to be replaced by artificial intelligence. We would also like that, like the Tower of Babel, the construction of which assumed a people speaking a single language, having only a single project, pursuing a single and same objective, it determines the conduct of people and the harmonizes between them, without their knowledge. We need a term that is to the city what “transhumanism” is to human individuals.
You have 62.6% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
