We live in towns and cities that weren?t constructed for us. We live in societies, organizations, institutions that weren?t designed for us. We live in conditions and infrastructures construed for others. Others who are now completely alien to us. Others who belonged to an entirely different world. Others who are now completely alien to us, though they may have lived where we still do not that long ago. Though they may for some of us still even remain hazily within living memory. Yet, others who belonged to an entirely other world, regardless of the lapse of time or proximity. Others whom we can?t reach any more, not even in our imagination. Yet their world, their constructions, their values, have caught us in a tight wrench even though they have nothing much to do with how we live any more. Nothing much to do with how we think or feel any more. Nothing much to do with the material evolution we have arrived at, nor even on the plane of ideas and ideals either.
Perhaps a good metaphor for how we live now, all over the so called developed (I do not even dare use the adjective ?civilized? world) and beyond even, are the Le Corbusier high rise apartment houses. Blocks of flats that were not only designed but envisaged as the construct that would bring about a quality of life for the occupants never before imagined. Unfortunately, as is the case with most man inspired and designed utopias, reality turned out to be diametrically different. A high rise urban paradise turned into an urban nightmare, with high rise slums, squalor and criminality rife up unlit staircases and corridors as inhabitants cowered in fright behind locked doors. Which is how we live now.
Our great cities of London, Rome, New York, even smaller ones like Athens, remain on this earth inhabited by creatures struggling hard to squeeze themselves into conditions and dimensions no longer even remotely able to serve the material everyday life, or values, ideologies and aspirations we now have. It?s as if we have grown out of our boots but don?t have another pair we can fit into, so we cram and squeeze and hobble along, often in terrible pain. But it?s the very world with its constructions and its values or lack thereof, cramming us in so terribly that also prevents us from doing anything about it. Either by way of new constructions or new ideals.