Oct 16, 2010 “The Wire” as an urbanistic enquiry
“… In The Wire, the city appears clearly for what it is: an organic Social Network in which commercial, political, criminal informations and goods are passed through, like it happens in a DNA chain, making a difference not only for the single point, but for the whole chain.
Is noted by James Harkin in his recent book Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We are, The Wire is one of the most accurate enquiries over an urban environment – if you think at them as a network of exchanges. But it’s more than that, The Wire gives us a map to orientate ourselves in a modern city. And not in a prototype or just a city of the future, but the cities as we already know it: an urban conglomerate of chinese boxes where the money, their movements, their transfers, their rehabilitation from dirty money to clean and disposable money makes everything happen – from the planning of the instruction system to the renovation of urban areas, from transportations to media topics. As a result of all these blind effects, The Wire shows his “omniscient” follower the daily reterritorialization of Baltimore’s “moral” geography.”