BLUE REBELLION: AN INTERVENTION ON THE TOXIC URBANISM OF ULTRA CLEAR GLASS

Neoliberal societies have become addicted to BLUE. Since 2008, the consumption of ultra clear glass, UCG, in the world has doubled. UCG has become the material pervasively present in office, apartment and commercial buildings in wealthy global urban settings. UCG eliminates the use of iron in the composition of floated glass. The glass loses its green color to become clear, with a capacity to block the transmittance of the ultraviolet, infrared and orange spectrum of natural light, when combined with coatings. As a result, the outer sky looks bluer when seen from wealthy global interiors. In 2015, the increase of the consumption of UCG changed the long-sustained tendency in the glass industry of reducing its emissions. Though UCG can reduce the window-caused heat gainance in building interiors; in the sites of glass production it brought an unprecedented increase in CO2 and NOx in the air and promoted the practice of hydraulic fracturing gas extraction throughout the world. A realm of yellowish skies loaded with NOx segregated from a continuous urbanity networked by intercity initiatives — such as Bloomberg Philanthropies’ C40 Cities or Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities — where BLUE hegemony is pursued and worshipped. Blue Rebellion promotes an intervention on the global urban addiction to clear BLUE; a combined action to envision technosocieties emancipated from segregation and from the offsetting the airy yellow.