Variable Urban Geometry

M. Castells

The internationalization of the capitalist production results in location standards that deeply modify the features of the industrial space and its impact in the urban development. A process where the streams, in time of the companies, become the units of work and decision. The streams tend to substitute the localities, in a space logic without-place. The new space logic is defined by a complex process of territorial development, based in the information streams enters the diverse units of the corporations. The macro-space created by these streams is the basic space dimension of these complexes large-scale.

The resultant space form of these processes of reorganization, promoted for the development of the systems of carrier and communication, is not a vast one and indiferenciada territorial extension. This dynamics configures multinuclear space structures in the areas metropolitans. A process that produces new managemental centers, changing the locations metropolitans and complicating geometry of the urban structure.

This realinhamento of the units of production and jobs through the connections of the streams, independently of its location, detonates a complex process of space hashing of the metropolises. The location of the economic and social agents passes to be determined in another mode: the positions are organized in networks and streams.

A hashing of the location standards occurs. A different space model, seated in connections in continuous change. A process that articulates centers, jobs and markets with different intensity and in different scale. These changes result in a pattern that if it modifies without ceasing: the structural positions if dislocate the all moment, depending on the time, place and type of activity.

This process of reorganization redimensiona the metropolises in accordance with the drawing of the connections. The capital streams segment local spaces, when incorporating them in different modes in the mutant geometry of its international logic. A process of relocação and rearticulação, that a space pattern produces entirely new. Anti-symmetrical networks of interchanges that do not depend on the features of no place. Variable geometry that denies productive function for any place is of its position in the network, whose dumb drawing continuously.

The architecture of these networks is subjects to the constant changes. What it remains as logical of the new location is its geographic discontinuity. The new space is organized around information streams that, at the same time, congregate and separate its territorial components. Intersecções and exclusions that change the proper concept of location for streams. The development of these freely linked constellations in the areas metropolitans emphasizes the functional interdependence of different units in an urban system for long pitches, minimizing the paper of the territorial proximity.

M. Castells, The Informational City, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991 and the Society in network, Peace and Land, São Paulo, 1999.