Architectural Ecologies. Code, cultures and technology at the convergence

If we were to analyze systematically the parameters of today planning we would see that contemporary (and not contemporary) architects are more concerned in designing the forms of time rather than spatial ones. Time-based space occupies the realms of invisibility and virtuality. Plus, it deals with the movements made by the dynamic observer that XX century had started to follow close. When Gilles Deleuze imagined the foldings of space, he was foreshadowing what the new infrastructures of transport and information would have produced, relentlessly deforming the relationship between space and time. “The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.” Deleuze The measure of mobility is rarely calculated in meters, and more frequently in seconds, hours, days. It is the time-based parameter that defines the price of a trip, more than the real spatial distance. Once the bodily experience of movement is lost, the time employed is what really counts. Thus new geographies are drawn anew: the suburbs outside the cities sink in the folds of exclusion and distance, while city centers are ruled by other proximities, positioned along the same speed vector. In this folded, sometimes only rumpled territory, the cardinal points allowing multiscale and intermodality are those hubs facilitating a shift of transport, speed and scale. The media that can convert movement in mobility (i.e. the movement of the whole system, not of the single individual) become the protagonists of the updated planning of places. It is therefore an extraordinary association of transports and media that allows to reach synchronicity and ubiquity. Synchrony is one of the aims of the system. While all the points are dynamic, the space/time appointment is the only possibility of real encounter. The dynamic point encounters another one only and solely if it also meets its schedule Ubiquity, which in old utopias we believed could be reach with powerful dematerialization machines, was instead obtained thru new media and their high-fidelity. These bring us to be omnipresent in different places and realities. Ubiquity is a radicalization of simultaneity and mobility without movement; in this case the most plural forms of time come to the forefront, rather than the individual forms.