"By now it is customary to engage the work of Rem Koolhaas in terms of its active alignment with processes of cultural transformation, its planned instabilities and flexible components - an architecture designed as a dynamic ingredient of perpetual social flux and reorganization."(Crary in AMY 9.14)
The peculiarity of explaining a quantitive term like bigness in a qualitative way points out to a larger issue behind the word. It is here that Bill Mitchell's analysis of the fragmentation of the city into bits meets with a physical way of recombination.
Whatever happened to urbanism?
asks Koolhaas in his book S,M,L,XL: He points out that urbanism dissappears, and bigness may be the point where new urbanism starts. "Above a certain scale, it is no longer a matter of architecture, but that the building itself becomes a kind of urbanism"(Rem Koolhaas).
It is this certainly a different form of reassembly than the one Bill Mitchell anticipates as a general evolution, it is a physical form of reassembly of fragmented pieces.
What disappears with urbanism?
one is attempted to ask. What kind of values do we still assign to cities and to the realm of public? Most probably it might be the form of the city and urbanism which disappears, in the same way as the idea of the city appeared - not too long ago. But certainly important values of the city will not only survive, but will have the chance to step out more prominent as they are freed of the cage of the term "urban quality". It is definitely not that people don't like any longer community, or congestion. The success of the internet, and the success of every informational technology is based on connecting what is not enough connected; and this process seeems to just have started. Its success could partially even be explained with the missing success of the urban model in the last decades: as the living quality in urban areas is threatened by the many sources as traffic, pollution, crime, high living costs, moving working spaces and so on, every model of assembly without these problems must become successful. Maybe Bill Mitchell's vision of the shift to an informational society and to electronic communities might be too shorthanded, and any model of built community and congestion which carefully excludes the well known problems might with its granting of physical contact and closeness be more successful.
Certainly it would be too singleminded to cancel the formulation of successful community spaces from the architectural agenda and to solely rely on the welfare effect of electronics. "For Koolhaas, modernization can no longer be questioned according to the same humanist reflex it once was, if only for the fact that the brutal realities of exploding demographics have alone made dillydallying not only obsolete, but indeed, a more cruel and a more irresponsible proposition than qualified surrender ("Into the evil element immerse"(?))"(Kwinter in ANY 9.20).
In a similar way Bill Mitchell treats the developments of the informational technologies: carefully he avoids any complaints or any emphasis on possible problems. City of Bits reads more like a handbook: it prepares the reader how to get a first place in new societies, as far as possible detached from physical realities in cyberspace.
There seems to be consensus all around that society and attitude of the society shift into a new stage. But already the name for this stage differs then remarkable. It is for Mitchell the informational age with the fragmentation of common physical structures. It is for Koolhaas almost on the contrary the culture of congestion.
Other Chapters:
1 Venice I
2 Venice II
3 Venice III
4 Browsing
5 Blueprint
6 Construction
8 Lille
9 Literature