I've dipped in and out of Nigel Coates' Guide to Ecstacity for ages (literally years). I think it epitomises, and of course has affected, my view of the city and is what I look for when visiting cities. Markets are the easiest Ecstacity-esque spaces to be found, but London as a whole is perhaps the real Ecstacity for me. There's something distinctly ecstatic about travelling between Bengal, Egypt, Vietnam, China and the Caribbean on the tube.
LONDON: THE REAL ECSTACITY
Ecstacity is parts of seven cities: Cairo, London, Mumbai, New York, Rio, Rome and Tokyo, as imagined by Nigel Coates.
‘Half-real and half-imaginary, Ecstacity builds on the increasingly global outlook of existing cities . . . it partners a fluid architecture of hybrids with the information world we already inhabit.’
Nigel Coates
It is not your traditional utopian literature: it is grounded in where we are now and where we are going in the near future. In fact it’s not about the where at all, it’s about the how and why... Understanding Ecstacity is understanding ideas of diversity, complexity, tolerance and the merging of city activities and spaces.
The complexity of Ecstacity is a fundamental building block of it, which is perhaps why the Guide to Ecstacity is a weighty 464 pages... Perhaps to understand the ideas behind Ecstacity you need only to experience (and to love) London. |
|
|
|
