Design IV / Fall 2023
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Seto Inland Sea, Japan
Professor James Lowder
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When the world becomes increasingly fast, in transportation, in communication, in production and in consumption, and neoliberalism divides the city into components while privatized initiatives commodify its architecture, we must consider the world where we can no longer think of building as a slow act. And we must also consider how to define an entirely new urbanism—the urbanism of speed. As the impeccable marketing for the post-industrial phenomenon of personal mobility produces increasing isolation, we might be faced with an ideology where once more, we just need to go faster. 
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The new dogmatism of speed believes the urban failures of continuous movement can be reprimanded precisely by enhancing them; shrinking the half-hour commute into two minutes produces a city entirely unrecognizable in character, population and distribution. Speed solidifies the architectural impulse, which collages the city as instantaneous snapshots of decentralized but also highly personal thought. The perpetual urban dilemma of density becomes irrelevant, when suddenly the space between cities collapse by virtually instant connections. The city will be a global and singular mosaic of situations. 
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When our traditional measures of space and distance are disrupted beyond repair, this version of the city will constitute a formal divorce between structure and image. This disruption will render navigation from a top down map obsolete, and with it the conventional notions of ground, locale and public space lose their urban expression.
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In this imaginary dystopia, high-speed rail becomes the primary device for transportation, replacing a tiered separation of travel with only two speeds: by train and by foot. This speed elicits a dichotomous society, one on the network and one outside. When all goods, labour and exchanges are connected and distributed from one source, the network will become the new medium of opportunity as well as oppression. The network is a Potemkin society only revealing its most attractive facades of urban life, one where long distances and the separate class that must maintain the network becomes invisible. Two kinds of nodes will emerge: Discrete locations of interest with specific conditions, resources and existing utility, and entirely artificial points that develop simply as hubs between other nodes. These new intersectional cities will be the new way that cities grow: inward rather than outward. 
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By means of instantaneous connection each city will be part of a larger whole, and the occupation of the city, traditional heterogenous, might then turn specialized; where speed is king, zoning has no consequences. Real estate will be in a constant competition between every single other lot on the network. There may finally be an opportunity for the architect at the critical points of this system—the station. As the station becomes the only moment important enough for intervention, and the effects of an intervention become exponentially multiplied at these singularities, perhaps in this respite only architecture can introduce an artificial slowness, a short walk from platform to platform, or a piece of identity un-blurring some hidden authenticity of travel, holding us back from endless acceleration.