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Robert Park clearly explained in The City, how urban areas are essentially the cradle for “reason and reflective thinking.” Modern society organizes itself in cities that are the product of the rationalization of our own needs, which are then classified and “reduced to measurable units, and even made objects of barter and sale.” The city is an accurate reflection of the needs of its inhabitants and for that reason a mirror image of themselves.

It is not surprising that there are so many different areas of knowledge devoted to understand the city, from urbanism to social anthropology; humans have been mildly obsessed with the structure, health, and future of urban environments. The latest version of the Venice Biennale, focused on “Cities, Architecture and Society” as its theme, is acknowledging the fact that over 75% of the world population will live in cities by the year 2050, and we should therefore keep paying atttention to this subject.

The event ended last Sunday and was visited by over 130,000 people. This year’s biennale was accompanied by a SuperBlog, a media experiment that left us with an interesting souvenir that lets anyone interested in this topic to access interviews, multimedia reviews, and most importantly, honest accounts of the event.

One relevant example of the city as a reflection of its inhabitants and as a symbol in its own right is Desktopolis, a project by London-based architect Tomas Klassnik that was exhibited as part of the RCA's contribution to the biennale. The project focuses on one of the measurable units described by Robert Park: the work space. Klassnik proposes an evolution of the modern work space that merges living and office areas in direct “opposition to positivist principles of transparency and progress.”

The bizarre world of Desktopolis offers the perfect tool to review the modern city in the context the work-life struggle and corporate fixation. Civilization grows into a chaotic [dis]order in which the benefits of safer, friendlier metropolis (like New York and London in the past few years) make cities a possible environment for families without loosing their quality for answering our needs in other areas, this force us to constantly wrestle with work-life balance, sometimes finding ourselves confusing one area with the other, which leads to monotony, inconformity, and certain sense of claustrophobia. At the end the solution might not be far away from Klassnik’s proposition.