First Sunday reflection; “Lima the Ironic”, and more

Since reading The Lettered City, Rama’s notion of a rigid order within the colonizer’s city planning has been stuck in my mind. So much so, that, in this past week’s numerous expeditions throughout Lima, I have been attempting to find this alleged ‘orderliness’; as of now I have found everything but. In a rather wonderful way, this city is the most chaotic and disorderly place I have seen in my life. The foot traffic is all over the place; vehicles swerve and gap one another while pigeons fly to and fro. The streets are filled with vendors of food, art, and massages; their stands are plastered against a background of rising towers that look incredibly out of place in and of themselves. This may be solely my interpretation, but the whole scene offers no semblance of ‘order’, and I love it. I believe this irony serves, at the very least, as some form of a ‘fuck you’ to the colonial powers that attempted to mold a perfectly orderly Lima. Indeed, I wondered whether this disorderliness that Lima has adopted was due to some failure by the Spanish or simply a symptom of something like a massive increase in population, or pressure over the centuries to grow in ways that reflected growth around the world. However, as I type this, I’ve realized that this question is not a simple “either/or” because Lima responding the pressures of Western modernity in the first place is rooted within its colonial past. Instead, I think the answer relates to our first discussion about the inability of a simulation to create something ‘real’. I believe that the Spanish failed in their goal of an orderly utopia due to the inevitability of reality. Of course, this questions whether Lima’s disorderliness is a ‘fuck you’, but I am choosing to interpret it as so because it makes me happy. Further,