'Life as it is' A renovation of the project of the city

The renovation of the project of the city critiques the utopian character of the modern city project in order to reconfigure our capacity to creatively imagine different possibilities of what ought to be in relation to the alienating theoretical and historical conditions of modernity. Critique is focused on the technological foundation of the modern project that narrowly co-determines thinking and making as an instrumental calculus of production. While technology has enabled us to dominate the material world and transform both human nature and the city it has also resulted in our alienating loss of contact with reality and diminished the possibility of imagining reconciliation of the city with "life as it is." Renovation strives to recover the creative function of possibility within the city project through the dialogical examination of two 1920s avant-garde experimental city projects: Dziga Vertov's "Man With The Movie Camera" and Andre Breton's Nadja.;Renovation is grounded in a theoretical and historical genealogy of the modern city project, from Plato's Republic through Renaissance ideal cities to the critical dissolution of traditional forms and meanings of architecture and the city within the emerging conditions of modernity. Simultaneously, the genealogy also recovers forgotten meanings and configurations of the project upon the anamnesis of the limits of knowledge, the measure of life, ideas of space, and the visibility of art. Delimiting the modern utopian imperative, this other knowledge is a prologue to the dialogical articulation of the form and character of the renovated project through the detailed examination of Vertov and Breton's avant-garde projects. Reflecting fundamental contrasts within a persistent modern dialectic of imaginative consciousness between knowledge and affect, consciousness and the unconscious, representational picturing and imaginative vision, the juxtaposition of Vertov and Breton's projects articulates the renovated project upon the mediation of the modern gap between technological production and creation based in the recuperation of the dark, spurious origins of creative knowledge in Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and the reconfiguration of a project in terms of the work of art in Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art."...