Coda: Postmetropolis and the Art of Fabrication

Abstract

The city is at an end, announced Rem Koolhaas as we approached the millennium (1999b); a proposition posed in less categorical terms by Kevin Robins (1994), Rob Shields (1996) and in Edward W. Soja’s reflections on the postmetropolis (1995, 1997, 2000). We seem to be pitched into a future ‘no-place’ beyond ourselves. In fact, however, few of these thinkers want in the end to suggest the city or metropolis has arrived at a final terminus, but that a kind of city or its representation is now in crisis, requiring us to comprehend a double condition of simultaneous decline and emergence: in short of reflexive transformation.