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Jean Robert
Biography/Bibliography/Contact
A
Swiss architect who migrated to Mexico in 1972,
I consider that my intellectual biography starts
there and then. The contact with a culture in
which so much can be achieved with so little radically
questioned my professional certainties. The first
person who helped me to put my culture shock into
words was John Turner, met at Cuernavaca. He pitilessly
dismissed my pretensions of understanding what
was going on in so-called popular or "informal"
settlements out of my professional perspective
and my readiness to offer "services".
Then,
with Ivan Illich's guidance, I started to examine
traffic - a major shaping force of urban spaces
in the industrial age - as the conjunction, or
the SYNERGY between what people can best do BY
themselves (walking or biking) and what can be
done FOR them by servicing agencies (in that case:
transportation). Following the mutual proportion
of freedom to walk and means of transportation,
that synergy will be positive or negative. As
Illich had shown in Energy and Equity, the degree
of negative synergy (or counterproductivity) of
urban traffic can be directly associated with
its energy-intensiveness, often manifested as
speed. This insight still provides the best -
and the less explored entry - into the causes
of ongoing and coming social, ecological and climatic
catastrophes. This understanding led me to explore
the history of the energy concept since its invention
at the time of the early railroads and the first
photographs.
Speed
dissolves the particularities of the "landscape"
into fleeting images, apparently confirming the
scientistic notion that all that exists simultaneously
coexists in a universal background space, the
coordinate space of mathematical physics. This
new insight oriented my further research toward
the history of space perceptions, a topic that
will be the core of my interventions at the Oakland
meetings.
During most of my adult life, I tried to walk
on two different feet: one theoretical and "intellectual",
the other, practical. I spent some time thinking
of alternatives to the dominant technologies of
industrial society. Thanks to gifted students
and friends, I had the chance to introduce a workable
dry toilet on the Mexican scenery. I believe that
people should empower themselves with a firm control
on the elements of the modern material civilization
and that this empowerment is our time's major
political endeavor.
Contact
smarcos@infosel.net.mx
Bibliography
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