I remember my grandad telling me that the Americans were sending rain to the Olympics in Moscow to sabotage it. But can they do it, I would ask, Of course they can. My awe was then broke by rational triangulations, Of course it is impossible to make rain, that surely is a mix between conspiracy theories and magical beliefs in science. Well, if an Independent journalist can be more reliable than a grandfather, here's the confirmation that my grandad always knew more than his contemporaries.
Life in the city is made possible by a fragile web of mutual trust, though a filigree of unspoken pleasantries, and an intricate meshwork of altruistic gestures. A permanent exchange of mute interrogations and minute nods between strangers forms a complex language that ensures the common conditions for survival. Of course we can see bodies looking past other bodies, trying to walk though, overtake, get there before them, without knowing very well where exactly is there, or whether there is in fact a desired place, or if what there is to do there is actually what needs doing. But that is always what is emphasised when talking about the city, isn't it, the rat race. It's a gross version of urban metabolism in which life and its processes are reduced to competition between contained unities, as if one had just arrived from a rushed reading of the theory of evolution and had forgotten how life is sustained by a convuluted tangle of symbiotic connections with other animals, pla...