Post-Urban Relics in Global Megacity

The chapter is part of a joint publication of Chiba University / Universidad de Monterrey that collects the results of the QOL section (Quality of Life in overcrowded cities) of the PULI multi-university program (Post Urban Living Innovation Education and Research Program) funded by the Japanese government. The QOL-PULI tackles the overcrowded condition of large congested conurbations that challenges a consolidated metropolitan lifestyle all over the world and casts the residents into a post-urban condition with insufficient provision of essential services such as housing and transportation, delivering large social strata into intolerable living circumstances. The chapter discusses the present role and prospects of architecture as a means to construct the system of urban space and consequent urban landscapes. The chapter elaborates on the marginality of the very notion of 'the urban' and the residuality of its surviving relics in an age characterized by the geographic expansion of the human settlement and the consequent novel human condition. Such post-urban condition is also explored through the shifting focus of the architecture and urban design discourse onto the fields of conventionally ancillary or even distinct disciplines, such as landscape architecture or landscape ecology. In sites where the vertical stratification of the locus has been encapsulated by implacable metropolitan artificiality or disconnected from a pristine site by erasing processes of diffusive degradation, the chapter raises questions about the possibility for the interpretative excavation of urban relics that exceeds the archeological dimension.