The TIME-city, the Asian Megalopolis and its Production of Life

Public lecture by Dr Rick Dolphijn
Fellow at IIAS and Lecturer at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Wednesday, 30 November 2005, 15.30 – 17.00 hrs
Leiden University
Building 1103
Nonnensteeg 1-3
Room 329

This lecture will deal with a phenomenon linked to the largest migration in human history: the rise of the megalopolis as it is now taking place predominantly in East and Southeast Asia. A city form radically different from ones we have known so far. It no longer grows through harmonic concentric layers, separated by time, united by space, but through atonal fragments pressed into one another like felt, where the only consistency is imposed by gravity. It is an urban form that lacks urbanity, that neglects traditional differences between city and countryside, that thickens the body of the earth with a plaque of socioscapes more and more organized by time, less and less by space.

Rick Dolphijn is neither an architect nor an urban designer, but a cultural philosopher interested in studying the new city form not so much according to its buildings, but to how its inhabitants enter into composition with the materiality that surrounds them; how it forms their minds, thoughts and actions; how every new city form comes with a new form of life. And especially the Asian megalopolis, as its size and the effect it will have on the rest of the world commands our attention.

Information
Ms. Amis Boersma
071-527 4159
iiasfellowships@let.leidenuniv.nl