EXCERPT: "THE SIMULACRUM OF UTOPIAN DECAY" (A. GLASS 2020)
"...And as we progress along into the 21st Century. There has been a reemergence of the
nuclear family concept of mass consumption which is also seen in the way our cities have
grown, construction and property markets have all synchronized in their boom of the last
two decades. There is however a dispositional spike in birth rates, while the pace of
newborns per capita is growing. Not on par with the 3 babies per couple as it was in light
of the 1950s baby boomers. Consumption has mirrored the same everyday products
which were bought in earnest all those years ago, rising in its reflective sentiment within
this new century at an exponential spike. In the decades that followed the 50's, began the
discourse against the modernist lifestyle and nuclear family concept, it in turn gave rise to
what we may look now, from a novelty perspective of the counterculture, that simply does
not exist on the scale of what was perpetrated from the 1960s to the 1990s, eventually
collapsing into a rhetoric of fashionable aesthetics. There is a surreality to all this, on one
hand we have this what appears to be cohesive society, within the realms of capitalism,
there are free and open markets, on the other hand there is the socialist idealism of central
planning and government intervention, that has infused two types of consumers within our
cities, what is deemed as the pragmatic middle class consumer of the 1950s ethos and the
luxury consumer, that originates from the Chinese engine of consumption. A Communist
country. Despite the paradoxical social and political indifferences to the concept of global
markets and the cities that have become a centerpiece of integrated collectivism - which is
this digital age. We need to look at another part of our history, the 1800s and the concept
of a Utopian vision, an interlinked and structured society. That may offer a reflection of
what is occurring on a global scale today. Through these two significant aspects in our
history of centering and maintaining a city structure for a society that lies within, we may
have ended only creating a structural world that could be deemed as the Simulacrum of
Utopian decay..."
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