Hannah Arendt about the Polis

Hannah Arendt explains her concept of the polis departing from an ancient Greek (Heraclitus, Aristotle) understanding of this term. In The Human Condition (1958) she argues:

"The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.

This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world—do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being," and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality." [1]

And about the public realm and the space of appearance:

"Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance,and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d'etre. Without being talked about by men andwithout housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object; without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be as floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes." [2]

[1 ]Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, (1958) 1998, p. 198, 199.

[2] Ibid, p. 204.

Definition of Architecture

Today I found a very nice definition of architecture by David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000):

"The architect has been most deeply enmeshed throughout history in the production and pursuit of utopian ideals (particularly through not solely those spatial form). The architect shapes spaces so as to give them social utility as well as human and aesthetic/symbolic meanings. The architect shapes and preserves long-term social memories and strives to give material form to the longings and desires of individuals and collectivities. The architect struggles to open spaces for new possibilities, for future forms of social lives."

Harvey, David, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 200.

The favela as a image of counter-modernity?

Daniela Fabricius in: Resisting Representation - The informal Geographies of Rio de Janeiro.

"Even though they are very much a product of modern economies and social transformations, favelas are still associated with an abject, primitive. or regressive form of urban life. Even if Rio's favelas were once visited and celebrated by figures like Le Corbusier and Marintetti, they remained an image of counter-modernity, particular in a country like Brazil, which developed a strong Modernist ethos. Favelas are frequently misunderstood as a transitional urbanism, a phase of urban form as it evolves from a premodern to a modern civilization. The slums that appeared in European cities in the 19th century and gave way to today's modern metropolises are often used as examples to argue this point. But there is no evidence or reason to believe that the informal settlements in the Third World will or should develop as European cities do. Brazilian favelas are over 100 years old and don't necessary become more urbanized with time; sometimes, in fact, "favelization," a planned and newly constructed portion of the city eventually (sometimes in just a few years) becomes a favela."