FOAM CITY
In a context that suggests human activity must remain autonomous from nature, Peter Sloterdijk says the current nature of the human environment is defined by the fact that nature and human activity must be considered parts in a larger network, a whole that must not be managed by simple urban planning strategies. Sloterdijk says, "If the phrase "everyman is an island" has become virtually true for most of the population in the modern metropolis, how can we still think of "society" as a concept? While agencies analyzing "the real" work at the pure depiction of individuals in their own households, the agencies of social synthesis are engaged in producing the comprehensive forms under which these insulated individuals can be integrated into interactive wholes." We do not exist as independent objects unaffected by other outside forces, instead we all exist completely dependent on each other and the contents of our personal "bubbles" within a large adapting network."
All people and things in this world are interconnected; nature does not exist as this vast space outside of us. Sloterdijk's Foam City is described as a co-isolated foam structure within a society conditioned to the ideas of individualism and a combination of neighboring bodies, but must be considered as loosely touching cells of everyone's personal "bubble." Sloterdijk suggests that there is no outside, which puts emphasis on the interconnectivity of all things in nature as a global whole of the human environment. Cities can no longer be considered as independent pieces within an urban space, but we can now imagine the city as a changing adaptable organism. Charles Darwin says," It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Japanese Metabolist and Archigram also theorized about the city in terms of relationships like an ego-sphere foam structure. These ideas are similar to that of interconnection between everyone within a co-isolated environment opening up new questions regarding bottom up planning in our architectural discourse.