ABSTRACT
The research project Beyond the Desert of the Real addressed these questions, taking as its laboratory the city of Winnipeg, Canada. The ideas for the project were developed in evening meetings over the course of several months, spanning the end of Narratives in the Cityscape and the beginning of éCartographies. Narratives in the Cityscape brought together the voices of diverse subjects and social groups in a polyvocal rendering of the city. The project as a whole attempted a hybridization of ways people see the city, ways they talk about it, and ways they make it. As a model for the making of cities, this intertwining would build an emergent Real into any symbolic system, a little dys-into every utopia. This might be the way beyond the desert. In urban terms, this calls for a landscape beyond the modern city. That city's divisions of one function from another, of private from public space were a realization of a now-outdated mechanistic epistemology.
