Of Stones, Angels and Humans: Michel Serres and the Global City

The cover of Atlas reproduces a Winkel projection of a planisphere; it shows a nocturnal view of the orbis terrarum (fictive since night is not simultaneous around the planet), where the oecumene appears, like an upside down sky, as an immense galaxy made of all the lights of the cities of the world.

The inhabited space is now dominated by urban megalopolises; increasingly, the human species seems to be concentrated in cities. Global space appears as the archipelago of the cities of the earth. The planet becomes a city. Arnold Toynbee already had a foreboding that this was the major event of current civilization since the Industrial Revolution. He called this planetary megalopolis Oecumenopolis. However, Toynbee’s vision still belonged to the nineteenth century, inasmuch as he saw this extension as a proliferation of the industrial city and its metamorphoses, and of the infinite and boring suburbs that today surround these metropolises everywhere or indeed actually constitute most of them.