4 August

I've created this image to explain the magic of an ordinary city street. It's like a special x-ray image of things you normally can't see. A project I've been working on for a while. Behind the simple facade of an ordinary street something incredible is happening. Something invisible. At first it seems like it's just 'services'. Water and electricity and sewage and broadband etc. You can see those here. But just as electricity passing through wires creates a magnetic field, that allows that energy to act at a distance, the flow of these services creates a social field, that allows social forces to transmit and hold things together. That sounds like an analogy or metaphor. But it's not, it's a particular type of physical field, like an electromagnetic field, that I discovered. I mentioned it indirectly the other day when I said the role of councils is to stop people fighting, by installing infrastructure. Services don't just provide water and electricity, and remove waste etc. People who use them constantly exchange information and energy with the wider 'grid' of connected services, and that exchange or that grid is what continuously creates a field of social relations, a direct force that holds those people and things in place. The coloured flow and glowing connection points in my diagram capture that field being continuously created, separately to the flow of physical things like water and electrical energy and waste. It's an exchange of information and energy, through a wider grid of information and energy. This is the invisible way civilisation holds together, through a social grid. A field of social forces. Things don't just happily coexist, you can't just put people and buildings and vehicles and energy and plants and waste etc. together in a space and they all somehow magically connect and interact to maintain harmony. They're held together by a special field, a social field. As a grid, like the electricity grid (which is part of this wider social grid). But bigger and wider than the electricity grid alone. Not an analogy, an actual field and actual grid of mixed forces and energies.