Be it wild urbanization or depopulation, urban phenomena seem to be generating tacit - and unsubstantiated - general agreement. Be it because they happen on such a grand scale, everyone seems to think they can only be handled by resorting to two all-pervasive rhetorics: the rhetoric of the large scale – Bigness - and the rhetoric of the smart city. Taken together, they seem to be forming a new urban species for the third millennium (MMM) being implemented at the global scale: “the Redundant City.”

Is it credible that the sheer size of urban matter and its alleged increasing smartness has led everyone - including architects - astray?

In 1914 Europe as a whole precipitated into a full-scale war triggered by reasons that still today, one hundred years later, are not agreed upon. Brought to an end by the first Communist revolution (Russia) and the first military surrender based on no military reasons (Germany), the first European war from 1914 to 1918 unleashed the full force of a rapid “first modernization” fuelled by a seemingly endless list of technological breakthroughs. The latter opened the door to a mad urban explosion - a Big Bang? - reflecting a silent international competition among the world’s most developed nations all seeking to house the largest metropolis of the day.

The first randomly scattered seeds of Bigness generated a new, unknown physical species, an arrangement of collective human life credited to be able to rationally solve most of the problems related to urban life and/or urban matter, which, in turn, was assumed to work best if not limited in size or, better still, in the size of its “administration.” For a while, meaning the better part of the twentieth century, unlimited urban expansion seemed to be a typically Western phenomenon, a phenomenon for the Old and the New World (the USA). Yet, in 1991, the seemingly peaceful ending of the seventy-plus years of the Soviet ruling experiment effectively put an end to Cold War beliefs and assumptions, while generating the illusion that “history,” as people knew it, was ending.

The 1991 event created new waves of “thoughtless optimism” in the West due to a newfound, self-appointed sense of superiority. It simultaneously signaled that the “buildable field” was wide open and that it was eager to embrace the glorious, triumphant march of a number of Western-concocted financial (and urban) strategies and beliefs. Two examples: the notion that there was plenty of space for everyone and the idea that, should space shortage become a problem, one could always invent new virtual fields inhabited by newly designed avatars.

The Eastern worlds (Far and Near) swallowed the “open-field theory” hook, line, and sinker. They too started forming urban incrustations in the field that were so wild that even the West, before partaking in the same game, had to go through various layers of psychoanalytical work to effectively remove any sense of guilt or ill-directed pride.

2001: Ten years after Moscow’s alleged “transition” into the wildest sphere of (instant) high capitalism, Steve Jobs, the widely, ex-post elected “philosopher of the twenty-first century,” launched (in less than nine months) iTunes and the iPod. Embedded into both applications was the assumption that a right to easily available, cheap, and portable “smart fun” was to become the daily priority of (rural and urban) citizens of the world, regardless of their chosen occupations.

The first decade of the MMM is the first decade in world history in which the Internet became a permanently available tool for quick and easy (and never wrong) explanations and solutions. In the second decade, digital solutionism and Silicon Valley’s tendency to solve problems it has itself fabricated (or simply do not exist) has become the new über-ideology. It updates Prince Minsk’s heartfelt belief: it is now assumed that an algorithm, not beauty, will eventually save the world.

One is somehow not allowed to think about the pre-Internet world. To look for a possible way out is to buy a one-way ticket to irrelevance or public ridicule. Trying to imagine the world in its pre-Internet state has become pointless, unless one has suicidal tendencies or simply wants to be labeled as nostalgic, reactionary, anti-modern, or worse. What? Are you not being interested in being invited to the next Google (or Apple) press conference?

Digital measurement, mercification, increased efficiency, solutionism, data, and minority dictatorships are now permanent fixtures of the MMM landscape. They have become the holy, democratic presence of the daily experience. They cannot be discussed as contingent, or as something that might go away or may prove to be potentially unhelpful, helpless, or mischievous.

The Urban Meltdown, too, is here to stay: it has happened. It has arrived: like the Internet, “it is just there.” As strange as it might be that an endless series of cables—the Internet—is invested with manual-free, meta-narrative qualities, it is equally strange that the urban meltdown and its narrative (Bigness) have no operative guide. Basic questions, like “how do they work?” are best left unanswered, even if digital geeks are ready to acknowledge that “there is nothing permanent about the Internet.”

In the MMM Mind Twist it seems that theory and practice have no problem standing in stark contrast to each other, a stance that carries the not-insignificant-advantage of shifting away any debate about alternative models, such as, for instance, a small-scale approach to urban matter. Ideas that attempt to counter the status quo can be easily buried under an endless heap of digital garbage.

The project of ameliorating contemporary life can only be implemented by pushing technological development to its natural conclusion: self-tracking devices able to defeat obesity, insomnia, global warming, and, most of all, memory loss. Everything get stored, nostalgia has no chance. (Proust will pardon humankind of the MMM.) One’s life is permanently available on some digital cloud a few clicks away and can be indefinitely retold, changing the narrative or the angle for the benefit of posterity. Digital participation, in the form of blogging, is waiting at everyone’s bedroom door.

The Urban Meltdown itself is soon likely to “vanish” from both the debate and public view thanks to all-recording glasses that will keep everyone busy or entertained. Self-driving cars will chauffer the affluent to the restaurants TripAdvisor has selected by fishing from the lists ranked by best FB “friends,” whom they have never physically met, courtesy of Google maps.

Streets will always be clean and shining. Some innovative, free of charge app will have convinced the entire population that its main goal is to accumulate bonus mileage for exotic, connected tropical islands through civic duty, like cleaning the portion of street that runs in front of their homes, which, like cars or glasses, will also have turned into smart, self-cleaning objects equipped with 24-7 video monitoring for social networking, courtesy of FB.

Everything will be customer-based, custom made depending on the mood of the final user: news, algorithmic book reviews, self-tracking devices, networking, chat-lines, recipes, books, magazines, and Hollywood movie endings. Nothing will go un-clicked or un-tweeted. The never-ending “digi-anal” culture of (individual) fun has arrived. For good.

While Western philosophy has abandoned—even in France—the idea of providing one, unique answer to the big questions of human existence or grand philosophical systems, the Internet has become the one and only grand system. It has become the solution to all our problems by promising to rid our lives of any friction once and for all.

The Urban Meltdown and “thinking big” are mere “conditions” that are not supposed to deserve “thinking.” They have been permanent fixtures of our mental landscape for almost a century now. They are a merely physical reflection of the financial logic of permanent, a-critical growth for growth’s own sake.

The Urban Meltdown and “thinking big” are just a blueprint for permanent growth. They cannot be animated by small intentions. Their limitless masses rule out any risk-taking proposition. Like freedom on the Internet, they are assumed to have fallen from the sky. Their origin is not to be questioned, just their impact is worth studying.

Urban matter has become the main target—a strategic space—for testing computer-based technology expressed by apps of infinite nature. But if we take our blindfolds off, perhaps we’ll start to realize that urban matter is not comparable to cars, phones, watches, glasses, or whatever object now nostalgic of its lost simplicity.

The rhetoric of the smart city just assumes that cities can be as “smart” as a phone. But it is very well known that urban matter, much like architectural matter, is the opposite of smart or simple. It is actually quite dumb, complex, and anarchical, much like the human beings who are responsible for its inception. Urban matter is a complex, anarchic, and irrational matter that can’t be anything but incomplete given that it is built and used by flawed users—human beings—who cannot be compared to digital apps. Its very incompleteness is what allows its own resilience; it is what permits the formation of its many inner limes (frontiers) and the different scales housed within its perimeter. It is only by taking into account this complexity that one may look for the most appropriate “scale for action,” in seeking alternatives to the impossible smartness of the Redundant City.

A Berlin paradox is in place: a conurbation that is the result of a series of political, economic, and historical circumstances that proved crucial for the recent history of the West itself now stands outside of Western tradition, at least as far as urban exempla are concerned. Berlin stands out as a “unicum” in the spectrum of Western urbanization.

Several demolition sprees (caused by war’s destruction and the clearing of the rubble) managed to produce collective despair in Berlin for a prolonged time, a half a century. But somewhere between these various waves of despair, they brought about a unique, “unplanned urban landscape,” formed by vast tracts of empty space with isolated buildings here and there, casually displaced. It is a landscape that does not rely on large-scale urban planning but on the casual accumulation of formally distinct urban episodes, micro-cities, or mid-size “towns” sitting in a vast (and intimate) unused space.

Berlin’s urban structure appears deeply skeptical not only about the possibility but also about the theoretical merit of putting in place an overarching urban plan. Berlin’s implicit project for urbanity is tactically open to the multiplicity of its territorial circumstances, even if its individual parts (islands, or dörfer) are resolute in their formal appearance. It is an urbanity that can be read as an exemplar territory taking full advantage of its geographical conditions.

Contrary to the impersonality of Bigness, this multitude of scales is made evident and is recognized by its residents, who describe themselves as citizens of the bezirk (district) in which they live rather than of Berlin. This visibility is due to a specific, anthropological way of understanding infrastructure, which is treated at the local and regional scale simultaneously. Air quality, water pollution, social services, public transportation, noise control, green areas, and commercial venues have to meet local and regional standards calibrated on the number of residents in each district/municipality.

In the hour of triumph of increasingly smart (and impersonal) urban Bigness, in the hour in which everyone seems to be talking nonsense about the (non existing) option of controlling the megalopolis or the megaform, Berlin unequivocally affirms that the administration of urban matter can be successfully implemented by understanding the crucial importance of the small scale, like that of its various bezirke, which, on average, vary between 200,000 and 300,000 residents. Size does matter, and it should be considered the most strategic scale for action.

Berlin is an abstraction, a conceptual label that stands in opposition to the increasingly popular Westernized “Redundant City.” Berlin is simply the name used to identify not a city of 3.5 million people, but an archipelago of twelve towns (dörfer) or of ninety-five Kieze (localities) of different size. Berlin is governed according to certain, simple, pre-tech urban ratios that do not seem to have the need of being transformed into some savvy app. These ratios are also based on distance, multi-scaling among building, open areas, urban infrastructure, citizens’ needs, and the diverse, often non-urban terrains and domains onto which urbanity projects its effect. The Berlin ratios have not surrendered to technologies, engineering, contracts, manufacturers, politicians, or international corporations. They keep delivering an urban landscape aligned with walkability—or personal health—as primary goal: 30 m² of green space per dweller.

Multi-scalar thinking implies a latent alternative ecology that, like all ecologies, relies (in theory) on ex-ante planning. Yet, as it has become abundantly clear to anyone who can still use their own eyes, the current scenario is dominated by a new kind of city (the Redundant City) whose inexorable march cannot realistically be stopped ex-ante.

Ex-ante planning is no longer an operative option for architects, planners, or administrators. What it is available, without resorting to apocalyptic scenarios, is ex-post alterations, or “urban adjustment,” trying to restore, at least in the most acute cases, a sense of urbanity or “cityness” deprived of some of the distorted logic of the financial world. ¹

Perhaps urbanization can be effectively ex-post “corrected” by resorting to “urban hacking,” or to a Nobel project that can limit the seemingly unstoppable march of the Redundant City, that urban hackers may find attractive.

Hacking is the activity of the “hacker”: an individual busy taking on intellectual challenges apt to creatively overcome limitations and restrictions imposed by self-nurturing, hostile systems. ²

Much of the literature about urban sustainability is based on the damage the environment has suffered, without clear, effective operative actions. The above observations entail a new course of action: a Nobel Project to limit the Redundant City based on six simple theorems.

1. Varying percentages of the “not-used” city could be selectively torn down, putting an end to its misery or agony. This would create (via demolition) new un-built islands or towns (dörfer) that, in turn, create value for everyone involved in the development of urban matter: investors, the administration, the real estate market. The selective reduction of urban matter aims at creating some badly needed “pockets of emptiness” that can become instrumental in defining a Dörfer-Großstadt in which a suffering population may enjoy the breathing space of a truly sustainable urbanity rather than suffocating in its ultimate demise.

2. By applying selective demolition, clear geometric administrative and human limes can be identified within the urban fabric. Selective demolition makes it clear that urban fabric is not a container or a bounded closed unit, but a multi-scalar system through which multiple cross-border economic circuits circulate. Multi-scalar thinking suggests that living in urbanized areas is a “border-crossing experience,” navigating from one island to the other.

3. The Dörfer-Großstadt is also an “administrative model.” It defines a new collection of “towns” that, individually, form a neighborhood, a community; in short, a multitude of languages sharing a zip code—an urban island. The Dörfer-Großstadt is based on the individuality of the different building units of the different “islands” that, as in a virtual network, depend upon the mutual interaction between the different single members.

4. Selective demolition makes it easier to find greater balance between the verticality and the horizontality of the urban landscape. The Dörfer-Großstadt does not preclude “densification.” Dense structures can actually be inserted at critical infrastructure nodes. It is an option that reflects the diverse dynamics of the systems at play in the body of urban matter.

5. Demolition does not have to turn into an unsustainable economic nightmare. Pockets of technological dumbness should be created within the existing urban fabric. Rubbles can be piled up to artificially create natural landscapes on the very site where demolition is done. These areas can become pockets of technological dumbness able to provide a pause in a redundantly hyper-connected smart city. The German Trümmerbergen from World War II provides a spectacular, convincing precedent in this regard, indicating the way.

Alfred Bernhard Nobel is the Swedish chemist and engineer who held 355 different patents, dynamite being the most famous.

In 1888 Alfred’s brother Ludvig died while visiting Cannes, and a French newspaper erroneously published Alfred’s obituary, which is said to have brought about Nobel’s decision to leave a better legacy after his death. The obituary read “Le marchand de la mort est mort” (The merchant of death is dead) and went on to say that “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.”

Nobel immediately understood how he would be remembered and, consequently, on November 27, 1895, he signed his last will and testament and set aside the bulk of his estate - 31,225,000 Swedish kronor (equivalent to about 250 million US dollars) - to establish the Nobel prizes to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality. A year later, on 10 December 1896, he had a stroke in Sanremo, Italy, and passed away.

The Nobel prizes are awarded for eminence in physical science, in chemistry, and in medical science or physiology. There is a fourth prize for literary work “in an ideal direction” and fifth to be awarded to the person or company that renders the greatest service to the cause of international fraternity, in the suppression or reduction of standing armies, or in the establishment or furtherance of peace.

The phrasing for the literary prize given for a work “in an ideal direction” has caused a great deal of confusion since the start. For many years, the Swedish Academy interpreted “ideal” as “idealistic” and used it as a reason not to give the prize to important but less Romantic authors, such as Henrik Ibsen and Leo Tolstoy. This interpretation has since been revised and the prize has been awarded to authors who are not representative of literary idealism.

In 2001 Alfred Nobel’s great-grandnephew, Peter Nobel, asked the Bank of Sweden to differentiate the award given to economists “in Alfred Nobel’s memory” from the five other awards. This has caused considerable controversy about whether the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is actually a “Nobel Prize.”

I believe that all of the above will convince others, other than me, that it is time to ease the political or artistic tension surrounding Nobel’s name, and to call for the establishment of a true Nobel project, one that is more in tune with the well-deserved aura of the mythical inventor.

A previous version of this article was awarded Second Prize at the 2015 THE PLAN Best Paper Award contest. – Ed.