SUBJECT: URBAN AGENCIES: INTERFACING PASSION, INFLAMMABLE BY FAIRNESS

WF: Your work and thought has always centered around a problematic and complex notion of territory within data space and electronic networks, which you have variously described as spaces of action or events—concepts which have also been used to describe the fluctuating political, social, cul- tural realities of the city in contrast to its spatial organization. To which extent is your recent interest in urbanity related to fundamental qualitative similarities between the spaces opened by electronic networks and those tra- ditionally supported by and created within the architectures of the city? KR: Our discourse places itself outside an architectural framework. When we talk about problems of urban spaces, we mean the urban as a machinic assemblage that is constituted not so much by built forms and infrastructures, but as a heterogeneous field that is constituted by lines of forces, by lines of action and interaction. These lines form the coordinates of an urban topology that is not based mainly on the human body and its movements in space, but on relational acts and events within the urban machine. These can be economic, political, technological, or tectonic processes, as well as acts of communication and articulation, or symbolic and expressive acts. The urban field that we are talking about is therefore quite different from the physically defined spaces of events and movements. Rather, we are interested in what the relation between the spaces of movement, the spaces of events and the relational, machinic "spaces" might be. It does not really make sense to oppose the city and the networks in the suggested way. We are interested in finding models of agency for and in complex dynamic systems and approach the urban as such a complex system. We understand the city not as a representation of the urban forces, but as the interface to these urban forces and processes. Therefore, the city features not as a representation, but as an interface that has to be made and remade all the time. WF: Could you elaborate on what Knowbotic Research calls "connective interfaces" and describe their difference to the failed urban participatory models of the seventies?