Cool City Spaces

This folder is about urban space and what it reveals about human life in a contemporary city. The anthropological study focuses on the material culture as a witness of approximately four centuries socio-economical and political dominance of a rather peculiar idea: belief in the liberation from the predicament of the human condition through unlimited production/ consumption and the freedom of entrepreneurship. A canvas to harbour the emanations of solidified thought, as it were. In the current era of the Anthropoceen we bear witness of its pinnacle through severe alienation, a sense of lost spirituality and life meaning resulting in a certain astrangement. The suggestion of an emerging dystopia seems to lurk around every corner and materializes from time to time in the urban landscape. Refuge in mega-consumption and hyper-commodification seems to suggest a means to cope with the uncertainty and often manifests itself as the only – though treacherous – remaining path to salvation. None the less, we stay humans in search of meaning and in need of cultural expression, even in the most daunting of predicaments.