Self-sufficient design: essay on the understanding of the city of future as a global habitat

In this paper the issues related to post-industrial cities and the environment are considered. The answers to these questions submerge deep into the architectural philosophy, theory and practice as such, changing and questioning all the current paradigms and strategies. Consequently, the objective of this work is defined by issues like: What sort of a city is necessary and possible? Is it necessary to redefine the concepts of local and global in terms of their reduction to the same thing? Or whether the contemporary city has its limits or has already become a global habitat? What is the role of today's architectural practice in the context of global change and what do we do? Ultimately, whether is the architecture as we know it, or better as we desire it, in a position to provide the answers to these questions? Furthermore, this paper comprehends concepts such as postmodernity, the global economic crisis and the global climate change, all in the context of contemporary architecture and new paradigms and strategies within what is defined as a sustainable and self-sufficient design. The paper relies on the thesis that social processes, free markets economy and the natural processes are functioning as nonlinear dynamical system, and that their causation does not offer predictability and control. In other words, this paper comes from Alain Badiou's hypothesis that the current discrepancy between theory and practice is merely an emancipatory stage that promises a new state of affairs. In that sense this paper continues Badiou's new subjective paradigm, regarding something that is outside the power of death-which is neither enjoyment (that is pleasure beyond pleasure and limits of the body) nor satisfaction in the sacrifice (that is enjoyment in another world, of pleasure beyond suffering), but rather something new, something like an Event, that might be seen as a process of creation, artistic creation. The theoretical level considers the problems related to the functioning of society, economy and nature, and their reflection in relation to the current phenomena and problems of contemporary cities and the environment as such. The world, the landscape and the city are understood in this study as a diagram, as something more based on time rather than space and, as such needs no presentation in the traditional sense. Accordingly, the world needs to be considered as an ocean of information, i.e. direct connection and sharing limited by particular perfection of existence, but certainly featured in the reflection of one in another, regardless of the scale or the time of existence. The habitat of the twenty-first century city is no longer limited to local; it can and needs to be understood as a global habitat. Consequently, this paper argues that cities of the future shall be understood as a living landscape, as an energy system, as a bio-infrastructure, as well as a parametric model and a place of communion of living beings, that is, as a planetary continuum