2012 Writing Cities Conference Abstracts
May 10-12, 2012 | Cambridge, MA
City of Edges
Aneesha Dharwadker (Harvard GSD)
Delhi is a city composed of edges that are constantly being transgressed. This condition is historically rooted in the paradigm of the walled city, multiple constructions of which spanned centuries before colonialism. The ‘city,’ as imagined by the pre-colonial Hindu and Muslim societies, was defined and limited by a massive, continuous edge, a clear division between urban and non-urban and a defense mechanism against foreign invasion. For most of the second millennium CE, this paradigm appeared in multiple locations across the Delhi landscape, and evolved formally and tectonically but did not fundamentally alter in character. A ruler’s desire to express and immortalize his empire through urban construction, and to generate a heterogenous atmosphere within that construction, remained stable. When British-designed New Delhi was inserted into the landscape by 1931, it signified a modern, open-plan contrast to the so-called indigenous urban imagination; however, this paper argues that the apparent negation of the ‘Indian’ city in New Delhi could not, in fact, avoid the intrinsic wall-ness of Delhi’s historical urban ethos. Recently, the walled city has taken on global (and more metaphorical) proportions in the form of the Pragati Maidan convention center, the 1982 Asia Games complex, and the 2010 Commonwealth Games complexes. These various incarnations of the wall over many centuries produce a city of increasingly perforated limits: in other words, the material edges erode, blur, and even disappear as time passes. The paper explores how material ‘limitation’ has evolved in Delhi, from the massive masonry walls of the 11th century to the wafer-thin, translucent gates of today’s sports complexes, markets, residential enclaves, and other ‘cities within the city.’ Conventional wisdom suggests that the cities of the past are lost, accessible only through nostalgia and a flattening of history into narratives and images; however, this paper proposes that Delhi’s multiple cities, past and present, all actively shape the modern condition both spatially and semiotically. The paradigm of the wall—its limiting capacity, and our capacity to breach it in turn—is ever present.
The Walls Race / Walls of Informality: Splintered Urbanism in Port au Prince, Haiti
Dan Weissman and Aviva Rubin (Harvard, GSD)
In a society where individuals have tenuous capacities to control environments, the wall presents the most tangible method to command physical territory. In Port au Prince, Haiti, the inclination to create internalized utopias that externalize the undesirable–years of corruption, neglect of the city, and effects of the earthquake–have manifested a walls-race. As an ongoing splintering of urban fabric into discrete cells, homes, businesses, and institutions have raced to construct walls that exert control over territory, under pretenses of security. Read through ecological, social and political realities, this paper intends to deconstruct meanings and uses of walls in the Global South, challenging the notion of ‘wall as separator.’ We first seek to understand how transported cultural values associated with traditional uses of walls in Haiti affect territory when transcribed onto contemporary urban conditions. We look to language–French, English and Kreyòl–as well as procedures of governance–cadastral survey and property law–to decipher these barriers and transformations conditioned in Haitian society. Through these analyses, as well as personal experiences and research by thinkers such as Estudio Teddy Cruz, Nezar Alsayyad, and Eyal Weizman, this paper reveals alternative urbanizations employing the wall. Appropriated by the myriad forms of informality that dominate daily life in Port au Prince, the wall, formerly a barrier, is the backdrop for urban life. The wall has become the very spine on which a robust and resilient informal architecture and economy is hinged, serving as the anchor of vibrant intervention. For these reasons, we put forth a textual and graphic reading of this persistent phenomenon invading cities, investigating the climate of the walls-race, the typologies of ‘wallness,’ outliers, and meanings. At the macro scale, this paper theorizes on the use of the wall as a means of anticipating future spatial practices of urbanization.
Liquid limit: The River Plata System.
Jeannette Sordi (Harvard GSD)
Contemporary communication and transport systems have changed the world geography; both material and immaterial boundaries seem to have lost their historical and political role. But, what if the boundary connected instead of separated, merged instead of divided; instead of presuming its dissolving, it was space of potential development? What if this limit was liquid? What if it was a river? This paper studies the relationship between land and water on the Rio de la Plata system, through a comparative method that investigates how across six cities this “liquid limit” has been treated in their urban development. European colonists discovered the sites of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rosario, Santa Fè, Sao Paulo and Asuncion sequentially following the water path. Through the centuries each city has developed its particular relationship to the river and it is in the tenuous limit between the city and the water that the crucial natural, social and infrastructural struggles and transformations take place. It is in the residual space between the built and natural environment, along this 7135 km thread, that lies the greatest potential impact on urban regeneration and ecological of the Plata Region. Different stories and histories drove different stages of urban development along the riverfronts. In Asuncion, an exception, this limit is still undetermined. One can distinguish two cities: one of the water, where the informal Guaraní settlements are; and one of the land, over “quote 54” (m) where the formal city developed. Seasonal floods make this limit variable, dynamic and instable. A critical overview of the transformations of the cities down the river might open questions for this “last”, in which the limit between city and nature, formal and informal, past and future, is still undetermined. No matters how developed communication and transportation systems are, no matters how liquid society has become. (Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 2000).
Network Topography: Between Global and Site-Specific
Nikola Bojic (Harvard GSD)
Thin and Imaginary borderlines stretched between the tangible matter of the city and its intangible manifestations have been wildly erased in the era of locative media and social networking. It becomes impossible to think about the urban tissue without considering real time data flows and threads of global networks intertwined with it. Yet, even though globalization made distant places just few clicks away, our everyday life inside the social network reveals that we are mostly occupied with picking the same places, clicking the same topics, hanging with the same group of people. As an illustration it is enough to compare total number of our Facebook friends with the number of names that we repeatedly see on our Facebook wall. Behind this basic example lies residue of the fifty years long focus on infrastructure of globalization that produced the effect of imaginary cosmopolitanism which prevents us from seeing the limitations of our own networking efficiency (Zuckerman, Listening the Global Voices, 2010). Therefore, instead of living within the totality of the network, it is more likely that we exist only inside the particularity of the social bubbles situated somewhere within the network. In that sense one might say that the internet as a global infrastructure greatly resembles the ideas of Yona Friedman or Constant who imagined light mega structures spreading above the traditional city. Apparently, the drive for social equality and freedom which comes along with these architectural visions confirms that democracy of the world infra structure stays within a domain of utopia. On the other hand, recent political changes on the global scale illustrate that democracy might vigorously occur exactly inside the social bubbles. Appropriating different forms and durations these bubbles have been inflated around certain topics of public interest (Latour, From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, 2005). This paper aims to ask what happens when those bubbles hit the ground? Can we say that new urban forms follow the topics around which social bubbles have been inflated? Can we speculate on typologies and functions of these spaces and can we observe city as an unstable landscape of these junctures? Finally, it becomes clear that globalization in the era of social networks does not reflect itself just through metropolitan architecture of a global cities like it did during the last century. Quite opposite, new measurement of the globe is a pinpoint on the Google map. Contemporary globalization is bringing critical inversion of scale; from world -city to site-specificity as the only appropriate spatial module through which a bubble society could be represented.
Producing Disability and Demanding Inclusion in Indian Cities
James Clark Osborne (MIT, DUSP)
In this paper, I think critically about the role of the “disability access audit” in creating new forms of embodied participation, experiential and technical expertise, and imaginaries of what the modern Indian city should be. Over the past ten years, disability rights activists in urban India have used a new tactic, the access audit, to call attention to the physical and functional limits created by inaccessible public spaces such as transportation stations, government buildings, and parks. For this exploration, I utilize participant observation and interviews conducted in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore between 2008 – 2009 in order to analyze the current trend within urban Indian disability activism of conducting access audits of public spaces. I situate these access audits in relation to other forms of audits prevalent in India today, Indian and international disability legislation, and the current political terrain for disabled people in India. I look critically at how (the absence of) regulation frameworks and technical standards create a sense of disability universalism whereby activists imagine themselves to be a new local citizen as well as an extension of an international disability community. I reflect upon the resistive and performative implications of simply being disabled in the Indian urban sphere. I analyze how disability activists make claims about the relationship between subjective bodily experiences and bodies of objective knowledge. In doing so, I explore the emergence of a professional access audit apparatus focused on technical standards. As neither volunteer nor professional access audits have yet resulted in significant architectural or programmatic changes, I am interested in what other effects and affects these audits produce and what discursive authority claims of inaccessibility have. Who is empowered by physical space in the emerging city? In keeping with the theme of this conference, I examine how the modern Indian city is both a space of possibility and constraint (or limits for the purpose of this conference). The city is a space of possibility in that it allows for the emergence of new identities and imaginaries and it is a space of limitation in that political and material changes do not occur.
Beyond the City: Urbanization and Land Conflicts along Highways in India
Sai Balakrishnan (Harvard, GSD)
Urbanization is no longer contained within the spatial limits of cities. Much of the urbanization, particularly in developing countries, is taking place along infrastructure corridors. These corridors cut across multiple cities and villages, and are larger in scale than the political jurisdiction of individual local governments. The transformation along these infrastructure corridors are fraught with contestations between real estate developers, industrialists, farmers and informal residents over the acquisition, consolidation and conversion of agricultural land into urban uses, and more broadly, the distribution of costs and benefits of the new corridor developments among these diverse, competing interests. Since traditional institutions, like urban and rural local governments, collapse in these trans-local territories of overlapping cities and villages, what are the new institutional arrangements that can effectively manage these large-scale, emergent transformations? This paper investigates new hybrid institutions – like land cooperatives – that are emerging on the ground to manage land consolidations at this regional, i.e. corridor, scale. The land consolidations along the Pune-Nashik highway in West India are regulated by farmer-owned land cooperatives. Cooperatives are regional institutions, i.e. they are at an intermediate scale between decentralized local governments and centralized sub-national governments. They are hybrid, i.e. they lie somewhere between the pure state and the pure market. Through a close examination of the land cooperatives along the Pune-Nashik corridor, this paper challenges the inadequacy of our existing spatial limits of the urban v. rural, and argues for new spatial divisions and hybrid institutions that are reflective of the complex urban transformations unfolding on the ground. Institutions like the land cooperatives merit attention both because our current institutional frameworks of the state v. market do not adequately capture them, and because they open up alternative possibilities for managing emergent forms of regional transformations.
Discontinuous Regions: High-Speed Rail and the Limits of Traditional Governance
Naomi Stein (MIT, SA+P)
Globalization and the interconnectivity of the economy have magnified the role of regions, large-scale polycentric agglomerations with networked labor markets. At the same time, increasing attention is due to localized urban quality, as non-vehicular modes as well as more compact forms of development become imperative in an environmentally conscious world. Within this context, the increasing interest and adoption of high-speed rail—a mode that simultaneously addresses multiple scales—is perhaps unsurprising. Because of its multi-dimensionality, high-speed rail (HSR) challenges traditional distinctions between intra- and inter-regional transport. Capturing a portion of both short-haul air and mid- to long-distance auto travel, HSR changes the time-space landscape. From streetcar suburbs to interstate-induced sprawl, metropolitan growth has always been closely linked to the development of the urban transportation system. HSR pushes this boundary further, enabling the possibility of discontinuous regions: single labor markets that spans large distances but do not include all intermediate areas due to network effects. Such a form may in turn stimulate a new form of regionalism in which the connected areas are not, as in the traditional metropolitan case, municipal governments linked by contiguous development, but rather are clusters of cities and towns, linked across much longer distances by the high-speed rail network. This paper will present the relationship between high-speed rail development and limits on traditional models of governance, using the case study of current HSR plans in Portugal. Based on information collected during a series of interviews with national and local officials, this paper will discuss a number of ways in which high-speed rail is changing modes of thought about metropolitan areas and urban governance, including: the integration of national entities into local planning processes, the potential for new models of commuting, and a the role of HSR planning as an exogenous catalyst for regional cooperation.
Island-City Limits: Singapore’s Urban Determinism
Kian Goh (MIT, DUSP)
“Everything we do or say, good or bad, thinking not thinking, is to stay the horror of the randomness of planetarity” (Gayatri Spivak, NYC, Feb 24, 2012). Spivak invoked the planet, she said, because “something should remind us of the limits to what we do.” This paper engages planetary limits by beginning with a study of Singapore, an islandcity-state. Geographically contained, with scarce natural resources, and a history until recently dominated by its status as colonial outpost, Singapore has surpassed its humble DNA to become an economic powerhouse. Its success is predicated on a carefully negotiated relationship between its postcolonial identity and status as present-day Global City. The island-city-state has accomplished this positioning by deploying the themes of multiculturalism and meritocracy as transformative nation building concepts, and strategically invoking the limits of resources and geographies – its sheer island-ness – to impose social and urban determinism. Singapore constructs and reconstructs colonial and postcolonial identities and built and natural environments. Recently, urban scholars have posited the idea of complete human colonization of the Earth – a planetary urbanization. What can we assess from Singapore’s management of postindependence fragmentation and concrete spatial boundaries to address this new confrontation with limits? I do not suggest that we transpose Singapore’s strategies to a global scale – an impossibility. Instead, we can learn from both the process of Singapore’s negotiated decolonization and Spivak’s planetary admonition to unearth and assess global landscapes of power. Based on this I propose a decolonial urbanism, simultaneously to address issues of global environment and justice.
The Line As Territory: A Theoretical Reading of Informal Urbanism in Jakarta
Mariel Villeré (MIT, SMArchS)
As Manhattan celebrates the 200th anniversary of its trademark grid, scholars and designers reflect on the grid’s evolution and influence in shaping city institutions and public life. Read as a dense series of borders, the grid divided land by its inhabitants’ race and class, creating voids and solids. Heidegger questions the implicitness of the border, declaring that it is constructed, believed to be there, but thoroughly abstract. Derrida furthers this theory with deconstruction and the discussion of the parergon, which emerges from that always-present thickness in-between. It becomes obvious that every border is fiction (in its intangibility) and reality (in its importance for thought operations) at the same time. As writers and theorists of the urban condition, we depend on borders, or limits, to qualify and quantify people and places. Benedict Anderson’s Census, Map, Museum intertwines the development of institutional census and nineteenth century map-making as co-dependent mechanisms used to quantify ethnic-racial classifications, specifically in the complicated territory of Southeast Asia. Imagined communities in and the social perception of power emerge from the map. Examining the drawn lines of a map with reference to Derrida’s theory of the parergon, the interior vibrates the exterior and would be nothing without it, and we are left without a precise measurement –what edge of the line do we measure from? If a map’s lineweights are scaled 1:1, the line itself may span several city blocks, as with the Green Line between Israel and Palestine. The line becomes territory. This paper will explore the phenomena of pocket urbanism in Jakarta, where squatters appropriate liminal spaces and occupy the line itself as a participatory process in political and discursive space. While arguing the reciprocal conditioning of this occupation and the process of explosive urban growth, development and industrialization, the paper will trace the historiography of drawn representation from which space becomes contested.
Under-writing Cities: The New Limits To Urbanization, Insurance, and the Circulation of Risk
Alpen Sheth (MIT DUSP)
With the expansion of the built environment and its hyperconcentration of value, “cities” are a site for the production of concentrated risk for all sorts of catastrophic events and underwriting that risk is a complex business. The transformation of the insurance industry and its role in transferring the risks of urbanization are the focus of this paper. The seismic events that began with September 4, 2010 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand and accounted for a loss of 50 percent of the buildings in the central business district will serve as a critical illustration among others of contradictory processes that have emerged since the 1990s. The two processes particularly relevant to the contemporary moment are: 1) the narrowing of insurability and its impact on urbanization in the aftermath of environmental catastrophe; and on the other hand 2) the expanding scale, scope, and circulation of insurance as a risk-transfer mechanism. Understanding these processes helps to explain how the specter of environmental catastrophe and the production and circulation of its risks are altering the very limits of urbanization and accumulation under neoliberalizing capitalism.
My Home is Not a Castle: Property Lines, City Limits, and the Law
Benjamin Solomon-Schwartz (Harvard, HLS)
The law creates boundaries between places and gives them meaning. When people travel through space, they are subject to different rules implemented by different authorities. These travelers might be trespassing in one location and free to walk in another; they might be able to build a tall building in one place, maintain a single-family home in another, and farm in yet another. Many designers and urbanists ignore the importance of legal limits like property lines and municipal boundaries, sketching pictures that too often collide with legal realities. But even when architects and planners consider the legal effects of these limits, they frequently present conceptions that are simplistic and, sometimes, deeply mistaken. First, in the U.S., private property rights are frequently presented as creating a hard distinction between space under the control of a private entity and the public realm. In reality, shades of grey characterize these lines. The public has certain rights to intrude on private land, and the property owner can establish some rights that transcend the boundary of her land. Second, the conventional American discourse around local government describes municipalities as having absolute autonomy within their boundaries, called Home Rule. In fact, Home Rule powers are extremely limited, their scope determined by the state in which a municipality is located. Furthermore, the singular importance of municipal boundaries is complicated by the fact that there are boundaries with high legal significance within municipalities. These boundaries include zoning districts established by local governments, electoral districts set by state governments, and boundaries of common interest communities set by private parties (governed by homeowners associations). The legal effects of these boundaries operate in the background of any proposed urban intervention. In order to facilitate effective urbanist programs, it is critical to unpack the nuances of the operation of these legal limits.
A Dynamic Approach to Examining Feedbacks Between Regional Constraints and Water Management: Insights from Singapore
Karen Noiva (MIT, SA+P)
Historically and prehistorically, water quantity and quality issues have challenged urban policy and technology. Singapore, an island nation located o the coast of Malaysia, was an important trading outpost for Great Britain since the mid-19th century. Since gaining independence in 1960, rapid economic and population growth have been maintained through aggressive and conservative top-down management strategies, which integrate economic and social goals with resource considerations. Water has been a particular focus on Singapores integrated resource management: although receiving twice the global average precipitation, by 1960 demand occasionally overwhelmed supply. Today, however, Singapore leads the world in desalination and reclamation technology and is known for its success integrating land-use, nancial, and research management in securing freshwater for the past ve decades. Using System Dynamics and 50 years of water management data, I developed a methodology examining how Singapore altered exogenous physical limits imposed by local land and infrastructure resources through endogenous factors including policy, nancial management, and technology. However, even as Singapore has modied its natural local environmental carrying capacity through technological and cultural adaptation, it is increasingly dependent on complicated water-purication technologies that are more intensive in material, energy, and nancial resources, raising questions salient to larger issues of urban sustainability and resilience. Our intention with this paper is to present a quantitative approach to examining how both physical and social limits can contribute to long-term urban water availability. At Writing Cities, I also hope to gain insight into how quantitative approaches to resource constraints can contribute to discussions on policy and design for sustainability and urban resilience, and vice versa.
Urban-natures and ‘Limiting Machines’: Evaluating Hybrid and De-limiting Production in Urban Spaces and Infrastructures
Travis Bost (Harvard, GSD)
A dualist conceptualization of the urban-nature relationship has proven increasingly irrelevant and counterproductive as has been noted in many ways by authors including Swyngedouw (1996), Haraway (2004), and Latour (1993). While early Kantian Enlightenment conceptions justified a conquest of nature for industrialization, Modernist era urban infrastructures (dams, canals, aqueducts, etc.), embedded this dualist relationship in city form and process where nature was: externalized (Harvey 1996), ‘hidden’ from visibility and consciousness (Kaïka 2004), socially produced and commodified (Smith 1984), and spectacularized (Gandy, 2002). These industrialized infrastructures mediated nature through an opaque and mystifying process where nature was always located at the end of a tube or beyond the wall of a dike. They then produced social constructions of ‘hinterland’ and ‘first nature’, and forming hard-lined limits of the space of nature and that of the urban. However these limitations have proven mere ideological constructions rather than veritable historical conditions. Castree and Braun’s (2002) ‘social natures’, Gandy’s (2005) ‘cyborg urbanization’, and Swyngedouw’s (2006) ‘hybrids’ have sought to explain the synthetic qualities and implications of socio-natural production. The consequences of a hybrid nature thesis involve the dissolving of socially-produced urban-natural limits, as each omnipresently shapes the other. While there has been considerable theoretical and critical repositioning of infrastructure along this line of thought (e.g. Fletcher 2008), within design of urban landscapes and infrastructures—despite the ample enthusiasm to ‘bring nature into the city’, ‘heal post-industrial scars’, and ‘give back waterfronts’—the critical question remains: are we succeeding in revealing the social-production process of synthetic urban-natures, or are we in fact producing new urban-natural limitations and alienation with nature merely on display in the city? This paper therefore takes up this question, making use of recent design polemics and New York City’s High Line—the most celebrated recent project claiming a re-orientation in perspective.
Cyber-Panopticon vs. the Anthill: Or, the Clash of Anarchies over the Fate of the Commons
Ian Gray (MIT, SA+P)
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is endowed with the second largest tropical forest in the world after the Brazilian Amazon. Yet unlike Brazil, where industrial agriculture and commercial timber harvesting account for the bulk of deforestation, DRC’s forests are cut down by subsistence farmers in need of cropland or to provide fuel wood for cook stoves. Indeed, nearly 90% of the country’s household energy supply comes from forests in the form of charcoal and firewood. Kinshasa, with nine million people, serves as the principal market for fuel wood and as a result, the city limits are represented as a visible line of deforested plains expanding year by year into the Congo Basin. This resource dynamic, made comprehensible by remote sensing technology, has caught the attention of climate experts who would like to alter the increasing degradation of the Congo Basin’s forests as a means to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases. Toward this end, the World Bank has developed an experimental investment program, financed through avoided carbon payments, intended to substitute the supply of wood from rainforests with wood from vast acacia farms planted on the degraded Bateke plateau surrounding Kinshasa. The agenda to separate the forest from the city implicates a number of questions concerning limits. Can a set of non-state actors, leveraging panoptical, yet networked mapping tools, fulfill the traditional role of the state and establish new limits on the use of common resources in the DRC? If the State is not in control, who is being invited to participate in the creation of these new limits? This paper analyzes how these asymmetries in the global valuation of carbon are being articulated and localized in the landscape around Kinshasa.
The Bandido in Urban Brazil
Graham Denyer Willis (MIT DUSP)
The bandido – bandit, robber, drug trafficker, thug, criminal, thief- is a fixture in research and popular imagery of urban violence in Brazil. Most examinations and representations of the world of crime and disorder touch on the concept. Yet, even in the most prominent work in the field, the bandido has always been poorly translated and/or awkwardly defined in clunky and transplanted, if not literal, terms. Current representations typically construe the bandido as a one-dimensional character, sever the word from its meanings and limit a complete analysis of the spatial, racial and social position that bandidos hold in urban social relations. I draw on ongoing ethnographic research with police detectives in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and interviews with urban residents to examine the production of the bandido and the significance of the term as a social marker. In particular, I highlight the various dimensions of the bandido- as individual, social unit, social space, personification, governance, political conviction, and identity. I attempt to show that the concept is currently limited by awkward or literal translations that do not reach into the various imaginaries of the term. In transcending these, I argue that the concept of the bandido is embedded in a complex pattern of social relations that underpin the current dynamic and emerging trends of violence and governance in urban Brazil.
The Idioms of Architecture: A Critical Reflection on the Limit Between Literature and Form
Adam Kaasa (LSE Cities Programme)
What are the limits of architecture? As researchers concerned with the built environment, this question is as conceptual as it is pragmatic. Doing research concerned with the built environment, particularly historical work that depends as much on archival materials and documents as it does on built projects, invites the debate around what materials constitute architecture, and therefore, what materials should be analysed, or determined as analysable. Understanding the limits of architecture insofar as to what extent it stretches beyond its sometimes-built materiality, is to construct the limits at which we can begin to ask questions. As researchers, the limits of our questions depend, at times, on the limits of the materials we are questioning. And so understanding the limits of architecture is a necessary exercise for conducting research about it. This paper grounds itself in the methodology of an in-depth archival project analysing a moment in the history of modern architecture and planning in Mexico City as an exercise to think through this limit. The project relies on postcolonial theories to interrogate historiographies of the modern that condition spaces beyond a European origin as mimetic. It does so by examining three case studies: the building; the architectural journal; and the plan. Each case study employs one idiom of architecture as a different way into the building as a form and its relation to politics and Mexican modernism. These idioms test certain limits regarding what can, or should be considered architecture. Building on the work of Beatriz Colomina (1987; 1994; 1995) and Kent Kleinman (2001; 2007), this paper will use the tensions arising from the distinction between the archival document and the built environment, between media and architecture, between literature, in a broad sense, and the materiality of form, to critically address the methodological choices researchers make when confronted with questions about architecture. The paper aims to raise questions about the limits assumed about or placed on the multiple idioms architecture, and their impact on the limits around the questions we, as researchers, can, and end up, asking.
From the City as Oikos to a Politics of the Urban
Derek Galey (Harvard GSD / HLS)
Contemporary accounts overwhelmingly ascribe the essence of urban development to economic factors—think Ed Glaeser, Richard Florida, etc. We are told that cities are economic engines, that density fuels productivity, and that urban living is a necessary evil for the sake of access to quality employment. The word economy stems from the Greek root, oikos, which conveys the domestic sphere. And yet, the Greeks referred to the city by precisely the opposite term, polis. The polis was both a functional urban unit and the form of relations that took place among its citizens—namely, the political. While the oikos populated the city, the latter was understood to convey something beyond an amalgamation of households. For the Greeks, a city was first and foremost a political space. The collection of economic actors contained within a polis was greater than the sum of its parts, giving rise to the possibility of collective action. Functionally, the elevation of the oikos over the polis has privileged economic development over identity formation, inter-urban competition over metropolitan cooperation, and real estate speculation over empowered community decision-making. While it is true that urban residents generate a disproportionate share of economic activity, it is also true that cities have given rise to the ideas that enable the regimes of sociopolitical organization under which economic activity unfolds. Cities certainly accelerate the process of market exchange, but the essence of the urban lies not in incremental advancement in economic efficiency. Instead, cities must be conceptualized as political spaces, opening up possibilities for natality, contestation, and revolution.
Representational Limits: Towards a More Inclusive Conceptualisation of the New London Skyline
Gunter Gassner (LSE, Cities Programme)
“The reconquest of architectural vision entails the use of many of the same methods that are employed in curing amnesia. A shock will often do it, or the focusing of attention on familiar objects, which have almost disappeared by being taken for granted. It is like the proverb often heard in childhood, whose significance is suddenly understood for the first time in later life, when it is used in an unfamiliar context. Through such experiences, the eye as well as the mind can discover fresh meanings, and through it the creative ability” (Hastings in the Architectural Review, 1947). Extend limits of visual urban planning and ‘the new London skyline’ What are the limits of visual urban planning? Does the city as a visual composition affect us? Are buildings capable of creating drama and/or critical awareness of traditional power structures? Is it possible that urban views draw people out of themselves and create empathetic relationships between people and people and between people and buildings? These questions may sound naïve, even irrelevant to many of us. In times of a global economic recession and the ongoing Euro‐crisis, politicians, urban planners, architects and sociologists seem to have other and ‘bigger’ problems. Yet, it is interesting that the City of London – the historical core of London and one of its two financial service industry hubs – locates both: some of the largest construction sites for commercial high‐rises in Europe as well as the ‘Occupy London’ anti‐capitalism camp. Within ‘the new London skyline’, oppositional developments are taking place simultaneously. In London, more and more commercial high‐rises that host FIRE (Financial, Insurance and Real Estate corporations) have replaced church steeples as the tallest structures in the city. London’s skylines are rapidly transforming from ‘historical’ to ‘commercial’ ones, a process New York underwent more than one hundred years ago. Professional debates regarding ‘the new London skyline’, however, are English specific and strongly related to the Townscape movement as developed in the middle of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of WWII, theorists developed eighteenth century picturesque garden principles such as ‘irregularity’ and ‘sudden variation’ further, but now for an urban context. Drawing on Surrealism, urban planning was conceived as ‘democratic art’ and urban views as ‘Surrealist collages’: broken images made up of pieces. Arguing for ‘old and new rubbed together’, Townscape theorists de‐contextualized elements (buildings, tress, traffic, etc.), that is, they took them out of their conventional context and created illuminating conceptual collages. In so doing, they shifted the focus from elements to relationships between elements and aimed at jolting citizens out of their complacency. For Surrealists, then, the collage represented a discontinuous representation of history, or rather, a historical rupture, a rupture of the history of the powerful. For the Writing Cities Conference 2012, I propose to take some of the seemingly ‘naïve’ ideas about these extended limits of visual urban planning seriously and discuss them in relation to contemporary London. In so doing I hope to contribute to transatlantic debates about the impact of aesthetics on socio‐political processes in general and ideas of skylines in particular. The proposed paper is related to my PhD thesis The Topicality of the ‘new London skyline’, which is an analysis of professional skyline debates and their proactive and critical potential in global London.
Existential Risk, Marxism, and Natural Limits
Daniel Daou (Harvard, GSD)
Forty years ago, the publication of the “Limits to Growth” commissioned by the Club of Rome added fuel to the old debate to whether there are natural limits to human growth on the planet (Meadows, Randers and Meadows 1972). There would seem to be a clear cut line separating those who think that growth can be decoupled from prosperity -and thus see a steady state economy viable- and those who see in scientific progress and endless source for humanity’s increasing problem solving capacity (Tierney 1990; Myers and Simon 1994). The present paper has three purposes. First, it will try to offer a broad overview of the arguments for and against the limits to growth tracing the modern schism between “boomsters and doomster” (Tierney 1990) to Marx and Engel’s attempt to dismiss Malthusianism (Malthus 1798; Marx 1875; Walker 1979; Benton 1989). Second, the case for a “sustainability” based on our capacity to face “existential risk” (Bostrom 2004) will be briefly developed elaborating on Holling’s distinction between adaptability and resilience (Tainter 1988; Holling, Gunderson and Ludwig 2002). Finally, the paper will attempt to ground the discussion within urban theory by exploring the potential effect the proposed definition of “sustainability” could have on the revision of neo Marxian urban studies loosely suggested by Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika under the rubric of the “urbanization of nature” (Swyngedouw 2006, 2009; Kaika, 2006).