The Hyper Reality Principles in the Age of the Post-Humanism: the Paradigm Post-Human Body - Hyper City

Since ancient times, the analogy between the human body and the built environment was direct. On one side, the Greeks used a “psychological understanding” of the body, on the other the Romans used their “geometrical understanding” of the body for the production of urban forms. The “enlightened designers” of the 18th and 19th century desired to create a “healthy city” on the model of a “healthy body.” The ideas was that people could freely flow through the city along new urban infrastructures such as trains. These soon became the urban “arteries and veins.” Nevertheless, in the 20th-century, cities acquired a spatial segregation in order to satisfy some specialization requirements and to improve efficiency, and economic individualism. The “modern arteries and veins” were not any more sufficient for tying different parts of a fractioned urban body. The technological achievements of the 21st century such as information technologies (IT), have significantly affected cities. These new informational patterns have provided new ways of designing, and so, experiencing cities. These are “quantified cities” made of digital data that dynamically interact with “quantified human beings.” Are these new contemporary digital “arteries and veins” able to heal an ill and divided urban body or will they emphasise the existing individualistic and urban socio-economic segregation patterns? This paper will investigate a new concept of “quantified city” based on the notion of “Hyper-Reality,” and the role of citizens who are entering in a “post-human” condition living in a totally dynamic urban environment. In particular, the critical analysis will be used as a “tool” for redefining the perception of the city, the users (post-humans’) relational patterns, and how users take information from the city after the advent of IT (i.e. Google Maps, Uber, Instagram, etc.) and its future development (i.e. Hyper City).