Ways of life in the dreams of the city. Or how architecture becomes the shepherd of the collective imagery

Abstract

Analysis of the contemporary city and architecture from the notion of «dreaming» is uncommon. However, in the history of architecture a thorough search detects a whole battery of non-metaphoric symptoms of sleep, sharing the stage with the neoliberalism action that induces desires in societies as religion has done in history. Humans, who share this scenario with other, not human, beings become docile and their problems no longer derive from their attitudes, but in turn, have their own, intractable «life». To express how architecture becomes the herdsman of the collective imagery, the article argues that architects are no longer demiurges or puppets, as Lefebvre intimated. They are the shepherds of this religion of individual dreams dreamt by the city that in turn dreams, as an independent form of life, about the way of life of its inhabitants.