Metropolis - and what is that? 14.4.

Eetu Viren talked about metropolis. If you know Finnish you can also read the book Viren & Vähämäki: Seutu joka ei ole paikka - see also Pontus Purokuru's review Prekariaatin monumentti of the book.

We started with some images discussing how to define metropolis - I'm posting some similar ones:

Take the metro to the final destination in a suburb and you'll always find an Asian Fusion take-away. Mixture of cultures, ethnicities and extending outside all borders. In fact, not "mother-city" sending out extensions to colonies, but original urban mixture - "urban immensities".

Original also in the sense that metropolis is not a merely modern, global big city - but something that we have had before in history. And in fact, we had a long talk and Eetu explained his idea about where culture and man as a cultural animal comes from: cities are born from the original need to meet, drink beer and have sex with strangers. Not commerce or war-fare. Whole theory and speculation where our brains came from.

The global actual metropolis then: every space is covered with advertisement - surfaces are not solid, flow of information and communication is expanding everywhere.

One grounding concept or theory that Eetu also talked about was the production of value: out of the fordist factory, where time and space of production was defined and limited and the end product was a tangible commodity we have moved to a process of production that has expanded outside the factory. As Toni Negri said, the metropolis is to the post-fordist production what the factory was for fordism. The value of the tangible end-product is now a minimal part of the value production, the main part being made up of the "brand" - and the brand is something produced by all who use and consume the products. Value production has expanded like the metropolis, like our form of life.