Pressure is a typical symptom of city living. The cultural permutations of the concept of a continuous force applied to a body can be followed in the range of explanatory metaphors that use it. Terms like expression, impression, oppression and repression have wide currency across the human sciences. The deployment of such terms as if they were explanatory suggests that such disciplinary domains as urban sociology, environmental aesthetics and cognitive psychology imagine their respective fields in terms of an economy of forces. Hydraulic figures of speech in Simmel and Freud-and, more recently, in Tonino Griffero's theorisation of atmosphere-support this proposition. The roots of the philosophical mindset that seeks to neutralise pressure go back to the nosology of Immanuel Kant, to Descartes' dream diary and even the role Pallas Athene plays in The Iliad. The urban manifestation of our 'vacuum culture' is the agoraphobic planning of Le Corbusier or Niemeyer. Against this background, to make the epistemological case for promoting a pressure culture is to offer a different politics and poetics of public space, one that handles pressure positively. The sociability that embodies this communicates gesturally; its designer can be characterised as a dramaturge of turbulence.
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