Marcello Faletra on the City as a Fibrous Tumor and Global Capital

In an editorial for Artribune, writer Marcello Faletra critiques the contemporary metropolis as a site of death, anxiety, and dispossession. He draws on Frank Lloyd Wright's 1938 observation in 'The Living City' that a city's plan resembles a fibrous tumor. Faletra cites Mike Davis's notion of 'dead cities' and Marc Augé's concept of 'museum-cities,' arguing that mega-architectures by Santiago Calatrava and Jean Nouvel are mere packaging for global money. He quotes Subcomandante Marcos, who contrasts old mafia with today's suited criminals in designer offices. Faletra asserts that these branded metropolises serve no community; stock-market time has hijacked social time. Nationalism resurges from this rootlessness, and the hi-tech, surveilled city produces rootless, robotized inhabitants. The metropolis becomes a promise of ruin, a chain production of unhappiness. Faletra calls for a 'science of ruins' as envisioned by Davis, where the future museum is the city itself as a fibrous tumor. The piece was published in Artribune Magazine #32 and is by Marcello Faletra, a essayist and editor of cyberzone.