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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
We tend to think cities look the way they do because of the conscious work of architects, planners and builders. But what if the look of cities had less to do with design, and more to do with social, cultural, financial and political processes, and the way ordinary citizens interact with them? What if the city is a process as much as a design? Richard J. Williams takes the moment construction is finished as a beginning, tracing the myriad processes that produce the look of the contemporary global city.
This book is the story of dramatic but unforeseen urban sights: how financial capital spawns empty towering skyscrapers and hollowed-out ghettoes; how the zoning of once-illicit sexual practices in marginal areas of the city results in the reinvention of culturally vibrant gay villages; how abandoned factories have been repurposed as creative hubs in a precarious postindustrial economy. It is also the story of how popular urban clichés and the fictional portrayal of cities powerfully shape the way we read and see the bricks, concrete and glass that surround us.
Thought-provoking and original, Why Cities Look the Way They Do will appeal to anyone who wants to understand the contemporary city, shedding new light on humanity’s greatest collective invention.
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Seitenzahl: 347
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Table of Contents
Cover
Figures
Preface
Notes
Acknowledgements
1
:
Introduction
Cities as Processes
Writing about Looking
The Stones of Venice, Again
Notes
2
:
Money
r > g
Notes
3
:
Power
Postmodern Power
Transparent Power
Anxieties of Power: the Scottish Parliament
Bureaucratic Power
Notes
4
:
Sex
Cruising the Piers
Sex – Lost in Translation
Notes
5
:
Work
Living Big in a Loft
Amsterdam's Broedplaatsen
Creative Labour
California Dreaming
Silicon Valley
Notes
6
:
War
The Military-Industrial Complex
In the Grey Zone
The City of Terror
9/11 Revisited
Notes
7
:
Culture
The Culture Industry
‘Make Beaubourg Buckle!’
The Industrial Gallery Space
The Judd Studio
The Culture Industry Goes East
After the Industrial Space
Notes
8
:
Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of figures
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Singapore, the view from the Jen Orchard complex. The epitome of the…
Figure 1.2 Visualization for The Pinnacle, development by CBRE in the City of L…
Figure 1.3 Canary Wharf, London. The spectacular skyline is entirely a product …
Figure 1.4 Paraisópolis favela, São Paulo. High-rise suburb of Morumbí in backg…
Figure 1.5 Foster and Partners, 30 St Mary Axe, London, completed 2003. (Photo …
Figure 1.6 View from Tate Modern viewing platform looking towards the City of L…
Figure 1.7 Singapore central business district. View from Marina Bay Sands Hote…
Figure 1.8 Herzog and de Meuron, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. From a disu…
Figure 1.9 Praça dos Tres Poderes, Brasília. The political centre of the new ca…
Figure 1.10 Intersection of 405 and 110 Freeways, Los Angeles. The experience o…
Figure 1.11 Castlefield, Manchester. The remains of the world's first industria…
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Daniel Libeskind, Reflections development, Singapore, completed 2011…
Figure 2.2 Trump Tower, Chicago. SOM architects, completed 2008. The Trump fami…
Figure 2.3 John Portman, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles. The architect as real …
Figure 2.4 John Portman, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles. The atrium, looking sk…
Figure 2.5 John Portman, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco. The architect's big…
Figure 2.6 View of City of London with Rafael Viñoly's 20 Fenchurch Street on t…
Figure 2.7 Rafael Viñoly Architects, 20 Fenchurch Street, London. The upper flo…
Figure 2.8 Rafael Viñoly Architects, 432 Park Avenue, New York. (Photograph cou…
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 The Capitol, Washington, DC. (Photo 2010.)
Figure 3.2 Tiananmen Square, Beijing. The world's largest urban square, dating …
Figure 3.3 Michael Graves, Portland Building, Portland, Oregon. The first large…
Figure 3.4 Terry Farrell, SIS Building, London, completed 1994. (Photo 2018.)
Figure 3.5 Kenzo Tange, Tokyo City Hall, completed 1990. ‘Metropolis’ made real…
Figure 3.6 Miralles Tagliabue EMBT/RMJM, Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh. View o…
Figure 3.7 Palais de Justice, Brussels, built 1866–83 to a design by Joseph Poe…
Figure 3.8 Berlaymont Building, Brussels. The home of the European Commission. …
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 On Pier 52, in the same area at the same time, Gordon Matta-Clark ma…
Figure 4.2 Cruising Pavilion, Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2018. Installati…
Figure 4.3 Canal Street, Manchester. Here, and elsewhere on the street, the ‘C’…
Figure 4.4 Still from Lost in Translation. Scarlett Johansson contemplates Toky…
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Fisher Body Plant, Detroit. Albert Kahn, built 1919. (Photo 2016.)
Figure 5.2 Fisher Body Plant, Detroit. Albert Kahn, built 1919. (Photo 2016.)
Figure 5.3 Life magazine on loft living, 1970. The magazine was right on trend …
Figure 5.4 Noorderlicht Bar, NDSM, Amsterdam. Steven Gerritsen (architect), bui…
Figure 5.5 Scheepsbouwloods, NDSM, Amsterdam. One of two giant assembly halls o…
Figure 5.6 De Ceuvel, Amsterdam. Space & Matter architects, built 2013–14. (Pho…
Figure 5.7 Google HQ, Mountain View. The Googleplex, a refurbishment of an exis…
Figure 5.8 Google Bus on Haight St, San Francisco. A symbol of Silicon Valley's…
Figure 5.9 Google HQ, Mountain View. (Photo 2014.)
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Hiroshima in 1945 from the Red Cross building. (Photographer unknown…
Figure 6.2 Frontispiece from The Bombed Buildings of Britain (1943).
Figure 6.3 Liberty Ship, Richmond, CA. At its peak, in 1942, the Permanente fac…
Figure 6.4 Ruins of Ministry of Defence, Belgrade. The damage results from NATO…
Figure 6.5 Anti-terror barriers, Royal Mile, Edinburgh. Installed in 2017 in re…
Figure 6.6 Michael Arad/Ove Arup, 9/11 Memorial, New York. (Photo 2016.)
Figure 6.7 Rachel Whiteread, Holocaust Memorial, Vienna. (Photo 2011.)
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, Centre Pompidou, Paris, completed 19…
Figure 7.2 Centre Pompidou, interior. (Photo 2011.)
Figure 7.3 Tate Liverpool, opened in 1988. Jesse Hartley was the original archi…
Figure 7.4 Judd Studio, New York. The studio occupies all floors of the buildin…
Figure 7.5 798 Art District, Beijing. (Photo 2017.)
Figure 7.6 798 Art District, Beijing. View of Bauhaus-derived interior, mid-195…
Figure 7.7 Street art, Gillman Barracks, Singapore. (Photo 2015.)
Figure 7.8 V&A, Dundee. Kengo Kuma and Associates, completed 2018. (Photo 2018.…
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Paraisópolis favela, São Paulo. The favela has been substantially re…
Figure 8.2 St Matthews, Leicester. The unspectacular global city. (Photo 2018.)
Figure 8.3 St Matthews, Leicester. The Burleys Flyover dates from 1976. (Photo …
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Why Cities Look the Way They Do
Richard J. Williams
polity
Copyright © Richard J. Williams 2019
The right of Richard J. Williams to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9180-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9181-7(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Names: Williams, Richard J., 1967- author.
Title: Why cities look the way they do / Richard J. Williams.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018046810 (print) | LCCN 2018060070 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745691848 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745691800 | ISBN 9780745691817 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: City and town life. | Sociology, Urban. | City planning.
Classification: LCC HT151 (ebook) | LCC HT151 .W58 2019 (print) | DDC 307.76--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046810
Typeset in 11/13 Sabon
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Figures
All photographs are by Richard J. Williams unless otherwise indicated.
Figure
1.1
Singapore, the view from the Jen Orchard complex. The epitome of the global city. (Photo 2018.)
Figure
1.2
Visualization for The Pinnacle, development by CBRE in the City of London. (Photo 2016.)
Figure
1.3
Canary Wharf, London. The spectacular skyline is entirely a product of thirty years’ development, dating from the 1986 deregulation of financial services in the City of London. (Photo 2015.)
Figure
1.4
Paraisópolis favela, São Paulo. High-rise suburb of Morumbí in background, as shown in exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and Tate Modern. (Photo 2009.)
Figure
1.5
Foster and Partners, 30 St Mary Axe, London, completed 2003. (Photo 2018.)
Figure
1.6
View from Tate Modern viewing platform looking towards the City of London. (Photo 2016.)
Figure
1.7
Singapore central business district. View from Marina Bay Sands Hotel. (Photo 2015.)
Figure
1.8
Herzog and de Meuron, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. From a disused power station to the biggest and most visited museum of modern art in the world. (Photo 2016.)
Figure
1.9
Praça dos Tres Poderes, Brasília. The political centre of the new capital, inaugurated in 1960. (Photo 2001.)
Figure
1.10
Intersection of 405 and 110 Freeways, Los Angeles. The experience of successfully navigating this intersection is one of the highlights of the film
Reyner
Banham
Loves
Los
Angeles.
Photograph on the approach to LAX. (Photo 2018.)
Figure
1.11
Castlefield, Manchester. The remains of the world's first industrial city, now an urban park. (Photo 2017.)
Figure
2.1
Daniel Libeskind, Reflections development, Singapore, completed 2011. The logic of the icon. On release, prices for individual apartments started at 2.5 million Singapore dollars. (Photo 2015.)
Figure
2.2
Trump Tower, Chicago. SOM architects, completed 2008. The Trump family business is real estate. (Photo 2015.)
Figure
2.3
John Portman, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles. The architect as real estate developer. View of block, and pedestrian access to the hotel. (Photo 2010.)
Figure
2.4
John Portman, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles. The atrium, looking skywards. (Photo 2010.)
Figure
2.5
John Portman, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco. The architect's biggest atrium, and once the world's. (Photo 2014.)
Figure
2.6
View of City of London with Rafael Viñoly's 20 Fenchurch Street on the right. The other buildings are Tower 42 (Seifert and Partners, left) and the ‘Cheesegrater’ (Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, centre). (Photo 2016.)
Figure
2.7
Rafael Viñoly Architects, 20 Fenchurch Street, London. The upper floors attract double the rent of the lower ones – so there are more of them. (Photo 2014.)
Figure
2.8
Rafael Viñoly Architects, 432 Park Avenue, New York. (Photograph courtesy Rafael Viñoly Architects © Halkin Mason.)
Figure
3.1
The Capitol, Washington, DC. (Photo 2010.)
Figure
3.2
Tiananmen Square, Beijing. The world's largest urban square, dating from 1415. The modern enlargement was completed in 1959 to allow rallies of half a million. (Photo 2017.)
Figure
3.3
Michael Graves, Portland Building, Portland, Oregon. The first large-scale postmodern monument. (Photo 2017.)
Figure
3.4
Terry Farrell, SIS Building, London, completed 1994. (Photo 2018.)
Figure
3.5
Kenzo Tange, Tokyo City Hall, completed 1990. ‘Metropolis’ come to life. (Photo Bohao Zhao, Wikimedia Commons.)
Figure
3.6
Miralles Tagliabue EMBT/RMJM, Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh. View of whole Parliament complex from Calton Hill, showing the integration with the buildings of the Old Town. (Photo 2018.)
Figure
3.7
Palais de Justice, Brussels, built 1866–83 to a design by Joseph Poelaert. The word ‘architect’ allegedly remains an insult in the neighbourhood affected by its building. (Photo 2015.)
Figure
3.8
Berlaymont Building, Brussels. The home of the European Commission. Lucien de Vestel (architect), built 1963–9. Renovations took place in 1995–2004. (Photo Andersen Pecorone, Wikimedia Commons.)
Figure
4.1
On Pier 52, in the same area at the same time, Gordon Matta-Clark made
Day's
End
. (Photo Alvin Baltrop,
untitled
, c. 1975. Digital image © 2018 Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.)
Figure
4.2
Cruising Pavilion, Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2018. Installation shot. (Photo Louis de Belle.)
Figure
4.3
Canal Street, Manchester. Here, and elsewhere on the street, the ‘C’ of ‘Canal’ never survives for long. (Photo 2018.)
Figure
4.4
Still from
Lost
in
Translation
. Scarlett Johansson contemplates Tokyo from the Park Hyatt Hotel, Shinjuku. (S. Ford Coppola, dir., 2003.)
Figure
5.1
Fisher Body Plant, Detroit. Albert Kahn, built 1919. (Photo 2016.)
Figure
5.2
Fisher Body Plant, Detroit. Albert Kahn, built 1919. (Photo 2016.)
Figure
5.3
Life
magazine on loft living, 1970. The magazine was right on trend here, anticipating the wholesale move downtown of commercial galleries in the 1970s.
Figure
5.4
Noorderlicht Bar, NDSM, Amsterdam. Steven Gerritsen (architect), built in 2005 using off-the-shelf technology from the agriculture industry. (Photo 2016.)
Figure
5.5
Scheepsbouwloods, NDSM, Amsterdam. One of two giant assembly halls on the site. (Photo 2016.)
Figure
5.6
De Ceuvel, Amsterdam. Space & Matter architects, built 2013–14. (Photo 2016.)
Figure
5.7
Google HQ, Mountain View. The Googleplex, a refurbishment of an existing Sun Microsystems campus. Clive Wilkinson architects, completed 2005. (Photo 2014.)
Figure
5.8
Google Bus on Haight St, San Francisco. A symbol of Silicon Valley's economic colonization of the city in the 2010s. (Photo 2014.)
Figure
5.9
Google HQ, Mountain View. (Photo 2014.)
Figure
6.1
Hiroshima in 1945 from the Red Cross building. (Photographer unknown.)
Figure
6.2
Frontispiece from
The
Bombed
Buildings
of Britain
(1943).
Figure
6.3
Liberty Ship, Richmond, CA. At its peak, in 1942, the Permanente factory launched the SS
Robert E. Peary
, 4 days, 15 hours and 29 minutes after its keel had been laid. (Photo 2014.)
Figure
6.4
Ruins of Ministry of Defence, Belgrade. The damage results from NATO airstrikes in 1999. Stealth F-117 and B-2 aircraft were widely used in the operation, the latter flown directly from bases in the continental US. (Photo 2015.)
Figure
6.5
Anti-terror barriers, Royal Mile, Edinburgh. Installed in 2017 in response to vehicle attacks in Nice, Berlin and London. (Photo 2017.)
Figure
6.6
Michael Arad/Ove Arup, 9/11 Memorial, New York. (Photo 2016.)
Figure
6.7
Rachel Whiteread, Holocaust Memorial, Vienna. (Photo 2011.)
Figure
7.1
Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, Centre Pompidou, Paris, completed 1977. (Photo 2011.)
Figure
7.2
Centre Pompidou, interior. (Photo 2011.)
Figure
7.3
Tate Liverpool, opened in 1988. Jesse Hartley was the original architect. James Stirling was responsible for the Museum design. Tate occupies part of one pavilion; the rest is mixed use. (Photo G. Man, Wikimedia Commons.)
Figure
7.4
Judd Studio, New York. The studio occupies all floors of the building. Some of Judd's extensive art collection can be seen from street level. (Photo 2016.)
Figure
7.5
798 Art District, Beijing. (Photo 2017.)
Figure
7.6
798 Art District, Beijing. View of Bauhaus-derived interior, mid-1950s. (Photo 2017.)
Figure
7.7
Street art, Gillman Barracks, Singapore. (Photo 2015.)
Figure
7.8
V&A, Dundee. Kengo Kuma and Associates, completed 2018. (Photo 2018.)
Figure
8.1
Paraisópolis favela, São Paulo. The favela has been substantially redeveloped with municipal funds since this photograph was taken in 2009.
Figure
8.2
St Matthews, Leicester. The unspectacular global city. (Photo 2018.)
Figure
8.3
St Matthews, Leicester. The Burleys Flyover dates from 1976. (Photo 2018.)
Preface
I am standing at the edge of a big roundabout near the centre of Leicester, an industrial city in the English Midlands. I'm trying to get to the Asian supermarket on the other side, my favourite place for food shopping, when I am in the city, which these days is fairly often. It's a muggy summer's afternoon, and the traffic is intense, roaring around me, and above me on an elevated flyover, making conversation difficult. It's a struggle to get across the road, so I have time to take in the surroundings. Around me are the surviving brick fragments of the Victorian industrial city, grimy but unexpectedly handsome, some low-rise social housing in the postwar Swedish style, and hard by the flyover, a twenty-storey modernist high-rise, built of a piece with the road scheme. It is a place no one would describe as beautiful, but I have got to know it well, and lately (and somewhat self-consciously) I have started to take pictures of it because it is, in its peculiar way, an extraordinary sight. A bizarre amalgam of things, it is something that no one would have consciously built in its present form, or could even have imagined, a century ago. Why is the traffic roaring over my head at fifty miles per hour? Why does that housing look like it belongs in Gothenburg? How have those Victorian factories survived, and what are they now for? Why is the supermarket that shade of green? Why is it so hard to get across the road? These are good questions. We habitually pass through places like this wherever they are in the world (and this fragment of Leicester could actually be anywhere, from São Paulo, to Singapore) but we rarely take them seriously, or spend any time looking at them. We should, because areas like this are what our cities mostly are. But why, if we wouldn't deliberately set out to make cities like this, do they look like this? Why do cities look the way they do?
There aren't any straightforward answers, in part because when we think about cities, we habitually think they must have been designed. We want to attribute London to Christopher Wren, Barcelona to Antoni Gaudí, Chicago to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, or São Paulo to Lina Bo Bardi. We're habituated to think of design and intention. But even if these individuals built great things in cities, they are no more than fragments of the whole: cities rarely have designers as such, however much we might want that to be the case. Instead, this book argues, cities are the outcome of processes that may have spectacular visual effects, but which are in themselves generally unconscious. Design responds to processes, such as the demands for housing, or for places for people to work, or for buildings that make attractive capital investments, to pick examples of typical urban processes, as well as one covered by this book. And design is often trying to ameliorate the effects of processes – think how much architecture is about mitigating changes in, for example, the workplace. But cities, and the way cities look, are largely the result of processes that design doesn't, and can't, control, much as it might like to. Of course, that is much less true of planned economies – for example, in North Korea now, or the USSR in the 1950s, or even, briefly, in Britain's postwar new towns (see Harlow, or Milton Keynes, or Cumbernauld). It is, however, certainly true now of the global cities of the world, which is to say those cities that understand themselves to be part of the global economy, or which aspire to be part of that economy. ‘Global’ means not only financial and informational networks, but also, importantly, the projection of ‘global-ness’ to the rest of the world, a promotional process in which the way a city looks matters a great deal. (For more on this, you could start with the work of Saskia Sassen, a sociologist of globalization.1)
Design, of course, routinely struggles with this problem of process. ‘Design’ means architecture to begin with, the professional discipline most commonly associated with city building, and it means all the professions allied to, and overlapping with, architecture. It means landscape architecture, when we are thinking of the open spaces of cities, their parks and public spaces, their streets and squares. It means town planning, which, depending where and when it has been practised, can be a highly ends-oriented, practical profession focused on the provision of primary services, or one astonishingly short on detail, bordering on art (Lucio Costa's 1957 plan for Brasília is a great example of the latter). Design can also mean the contemporary subdiscipline of ‘masterplanning’, a kind of urban public relations aimed at attracting capital or boosting a city's standing in some real or imaginary urban competition. Design certainly means engineering, in terms of both the engineering of buildings without which they would not stand up, and the major structures of cities, like bridges or highways, or towers. Some of the latter inhibit a grey zone bordering on architecture – think of the work of Gustave Eiffel of the eponymous Tower, or, more recently, the work of Santiago Calatrava, who has made bridges into a form of public sculpture. You can find all these disciplines in more or less the same place, educationally and professionally, and in multinational practices, like Foster and Partners, where you find them as all part of the same multidisciplinary package. The firm can, and often does, provide all these design services.
The design professions have some important things in common. They make it possible to believe in a designer, someone who literally draws, and through drawing makes things come into reality. That is a very powerful idea, endlessly reiterated in photographs of architects or planners at desks, drawing. I met the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in 2001 when he was already 93 years old (he died eleven years later, when he was nearly 104). He was as great an enthusiast for the myth of the designer as you could hope to find. We met in his studio, where we sat at his desk, and his conversation was punctuated by sketching. I pick up a pen, he told me as he told absolutely everyone who came through the studio, ‘and a building appears’ – and that magical transformation, effortless lines in pen and ink becoming concrete, seemingly without any intervening struggle, was what Niemeyer described to everyone in every TV interview, every press interview, every photograph. He had an engineer in the office, of course, but the process of building held little interest for him, as did (notoriously) the performance of his buildings after they had been put up. There was often a gap, to say the least, between the rhetoric of the image in the architect's hands, and the messy reality. Niemeyer's buildings, as often as they were brilliant, could also be highly impractical and poorly built. The case of Niemeyer is merely an example of a much bigger problem, of course, which is our tendency to invest too much in the myth of the designer, in their unencumbered imagination, in their ability to produce total solutions. The reality is far more complex.
So this book is, first of all, about processes – the circulation of money, the operations of political power, the changing nature of things as different as work and sex, and the impact of war and culture. The book is about the way all these processes inform the look of the city, much more than the actions of any individual. Second, it's a book about images. Cities are their visual representations as well as material realities. As much as we understand cities by the way they look in reality, we also understand them through images that we have already seen – so we can understand the modern city at night, all high-rise towers and lights as constituting some kind of romantic image (see chapter 4) because we have seen so many films that say this. Or we understand a refurbished industrial building to be culturally sophisticated, because we have now seen so many pictures of such buildings converted for creative purposes (for example, chapter 5). As tourists, we know how much images of cities condition how we perceive them, so our experience of New York or Beijing, Venice or, for that matter, Disneyworld, is a mixture of material reality and image. So when we think of the look of the city as being conditioned by process, we're thinking of it as an image as much as a material reality for the reasons above – and it is often through image, especially images in mass media forms like film, that the argument about process is best made. City designers have a stake in design, naturally enough. Filmmakers, artists and photographers, and for that matter we ourselves, with our smartphones, aren't subject to the same restrictions, and it is their (and our) images that often best reveal the processes of the city. Put crudely, designers tell you how they would like the city to be; image-makers, at least for some of the time, are more inclined to try to tell you how it is. Of course, the best designers exemplify both attitudes. Learning from Las Vegas, the great 1972 book by the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, is a radically open-minded survey of that city as much as it is a prescription for anything new.2 Its openness to the actual city as much as to the imagined one is an important lesson, and one of the models for this book. Although it is about the real city of Las Vegas, it is more generally about the city as process. And thinking about the city as a process, architects would argue, explains why cities take the strange forms they do, how they evolve and change and how we as their inhabitants often have more agency than we might think. Seeing cities as processes arguably downgrades the role of the designer, and not all architects will be pleased by this book's emphasis. But understanding process not only explains why cities look the way they do; it might, in the end, help us make better cities.
Notes
1
S. Sassen,
The
Global City: New York,
London, Tokyo
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also Loughborough University, Globalization and World Cities Research Network,
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/
.
2
R. Venturi, D. Scott-Brown and S. Izenour,
Learning from Las Vegas
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).
Acknowledgements
This book developed from a conversation with Emma Longstaff, and it would never have come into being without her ideas and enthusiasm. Subsequently, my conversations with the following people were important at different times: Stephen Cairns, Hugh Campbell, Baillie Card, Vivian Constantinopoulos, Mark Cousins, Mark Crinson, Neil Cox, Glyn Davis, Isabelle Doucet, Ed Hollis, Claudia and David Hopkins, Andrew Horn, Jane M. Jacobs, Penny Lewis, Christoph Lindner, Jolien van der Maden, Richard McClary, Carol Richardson, Igor Stiks, Peter Vermeersch, Iain Boyd Whyte and Sharon Zukin. My colleague Chia-Ling Yang, along with Colin Brady and Shiu Gao, facilitated an excellent visit to Beijing in 2017, while Jose Lira at FAU-USP came up with a very good reason to go back to São Paulo. I visited Los Angeles several times during the research phases, and that city provoked for me some of the most profound questions about what a city might be, and how it might look. It was a particular pleasure to talk through these questions with Mary and Ben Banham who had long debated them with Peter (Reyner) Banham, and then with Banham's editor at NewSociety, Paul Barker. In LA itself, the Getty generously provided funding to do archival research on the same question. I couldn't have done the book without the hospitality of all these people and their own intimate knowledge of cities. Unexpectedly, one of the pleasures of writing the book was having my children, Abby and Alex, introduce me to a new city, Leicester. As ever, the book is dedicated to them.
1 Introduction
Cities as Processes
I have a confession: I hate Venice. Not its architecture, precisely, and certainly not its long-suffering residents, but for what it reveals about our understanding of cities. We pretend it's an unchanging product of human ingenuity, in other words the opposite of process. We institutionalize that view in UNESCO World Heritage Status, which is an attempt, in essence, to stop time. And yet this city exemplifies more clearly than almost any other how important process is in defining how a city looks, the process here being the circulation of tourists (and I am certainly one of them). It would be a much better place if we could be honest about this fact. I have visited often enough myself, mostly for the huge Biennales of art and architecture, huge international exhibitions that occupy purpose-built premises just beyond the end of the Grand Canal. Almost everything in Venice now exists in relation to the tourist processes, which bring upwards of 10 million visitors to the historic city each year, and 30 million to the Venice region.1 On an average day, 60,000 visitors enter the historic city alone, 5,000 more than its resident population. And most days in the summer season, cruise liners, now limited to a mere 96,000 tonnes in displacement, chug up the Canale della Giudecca to the city's deep-water port, each one carrying as many as 5,000 people, or 10 per cent of historic Venice's resident population. Only 3 per cent of the visitors are Italians: this is a truly global phenomenon. Given my day job as an academic, I ought to be able to see past all this, to the art historical city of the Basilica, and the Piazza San Marco, and the contemporary art spectacle of the Biennale. But I've never been able to do it. Each time, I'm transfixed by the density of the crowds, by the difficulty of moving about, by the distortions to city life brought about by the dedication to this one industry, by the sheer, inadvertent spectacle of it all. Venice has been a tourist destination since at least the eighteenth century, when well-heeled young Englishmen made it a stop on their Grand Tour, and a subject of their poetry. However, the contemporary city is the first in which the crowds who have come to see it have displaced the thing they have come to see; the true spectacle of the contemporary Venice is the tourist industry itself.
Well, so what? Venice is interesting because its overwhelming, complex and often spectacular reality couldn't be the result of any conscious design; instead, authorless process made its impact on the way the city looks. As long ago as 1968, a British art critic, Lawrence Alloway, grasped something of this. Writing about the Biennale, he argued that Venice wasn't a city, but should be better understood as a cultural medium, like an exhibition or a newspaper, ‘compounded of famous architecture, recurrent festivals and tourist industries’. Venice, he wrote, was ‘a communicative pattern, a geo-temporal work of art’.2 It's a throwaway remark, but a perceptive one, because it describes a city – correctly – in terms of process, rather than as an object. And in addition, it implies that a process-oriented understanding of a city does not mean that it will have nothing to look at. If anything, the reverse is true, for it is a ‘work of art’, it has ‘architecture’, it's a ‘communicative pattern’ – and so on. Most important of all, perhaps, is the implication in this process-oriented understanding of the city that it is ongoing. In other words, the contemporary Venice, with its millions of annual visitors, its Biennales and its leviathan cruise ships, is the city as much as the art historical city of monuments.
So what of the ‘process’ that makes this strange, contradictory city? The process in this case, tourism, might be multidimensional and transhistorical, comprising not only economic actions (like the provision of hotel beds, or docks for cruise ships), but the cultivation of cultural beliefs, or, as academics tend to call them, myths. A British, Venice-based writer, Dominic Standish, has written of the city's having been produced by a series of these myths as it became a fashionable place to visit, some political, some cultural, all of them prone to keeping it in its peculiar condition.3 So he argues, for example, that the eighteenth-century Grand Tourists (among them the poet Lord Byron) had much invested in Venice's contemporary decay because of their attachment to the idea of the ruin. For these Romantics, the ruin was a convenient symbol of the frailty of human existence and, by extension, the futility of human progress. This makes for great literature, of course, but also for poor city building, and, as Standish and others have argued, it is this widely shared and now longstanding commitment to the city as ruin that has prevented it from modernizing. Almost everyone with an interest in Venice seems to be committed to maintaining it in as close to a premodern condition as possible. My own discomfort in the city has something to do with this cult of the ruin, and how awkwardly this sits in relation to the fact of all the people, and their processing (I am also not that wild about crowds). But that aside, what is interesting about Venice from the point of view of this book's argument is how important process is to the look of the city. Thinking about this most art historical of cities only in terms of intention and design gets you only a little way. The spectacular experience of Venice can only really be understood if you allow yourself to think of process.
Or more accurately, processes – for Venice, like any city, is not just the manifestation of one process, but of many, interacting with each other. And in common with any number of smaller cities, it is dominated by one in particular, which in this case is the circulation of tourists. On ‘process’ itself, I use instead the word ‘theme’, or ‘industry’, because I feel it is important to embody a sense of cities as dynamic entities, in large part immaterial, and certainly not fixed; we tend to see them as objects, when in fact they are more like events, or performances. ‘Process’ implies time, and it also tends to imply some kind of circulation, which in the case of cities could be of money, political power, sexual desire, human labour, violence, or culture. And these are, slightly modified, exactly the processes described in the six chapters that follow in this book. There could certainly have been more process categories, religion or religious belief being one of them, and if I had been writing about cities in another time, or with a different geographical focus, I would have included them. But this is a book about self-consciously ‘global’ cities, and those cities, although they contain plenty of believers, are broadly secular in organization. The list could certainly be extended to religion, however, as well as to a variety of other categories, from waste, to transportation, to food. The aim was not to provide an exhaustive categorization of urban process, but, in the first instance, to show how process matters in the visual culture of cities.
So it is process that explains why cities look the way they do. Yet cities have not always been studied in visual terms as much as you might think. A small number of cities, Venice among them, are supposed to exist as art objects, and have a thick literature around them describing them in these terms. But most cities are not like this. Most cities, perhaps the cities that we for the most part live and work in, are invisible, and have little representation in films or art, no touristic sights, no books telling you what to look at or how to look at it.
Figure 1.1 Singapore, the view from the Jen Orchard complex. The epitome of the global city. (Photo 2018.)
That is one problem with looking at cities. We don't always know how to do it, with the exception of the places that make an appearance in tourist guidebooks. Another, perhaps more serious problem is the value given to looking. Looking so often is thought to be a frivolous activity; books of pictures are, we still imagine, less serious than books filled with words. Looking remains closely tied to low-value activities like shopping, an entertainment, rather than a productive activity.
To really understand a city we might say that we need big data, numbers and words, and analyses of (say) traffic flow, and sewerage output, and CO2 emissions, or demography. City plans, certainly those for much of the twentieth century, were remarkably coy about images. I have on my desk a plan for the city of Edinburgh, the place where I live and work, from 1972 (Edinburgh: The Recommended Plan). It is a big book, outsize in format, and running to 300 or so pages. Remarkably, for a document that offers a plan for this city of grand views, it has almost no images; just nine perfunctory, low-res black-and-white photographs out of several hundred figures.4 Instead, the city is reduced to statistics on demography and flows and money, proposing incremental work on traffic calming and the zoning of different activities. That is not to offer a criticism of the plan (although it is by any standards very boring) but it is to say, simply, that it is one that does not take looking seriously. It says to the casual reader that the city is to be understood through different kinds of data, and that images, as evidence, are unimportant.
People who study cities are often uneasy about images, with good reason. There are real connections between images and the commercialization of cities. Images of cities, especially the ones discussed in this book, are more often than not images of those cities as commodities. To pay attention to looking is, it can be argued, to comply with the idea that cities are primarily assets to be bought and sold. For an example of that, you only have to look at the visualizations of new property developments that can be seen on the hoardings around construction sites (see Figure 1.2). As Gillian Rose, a geographer, has described, these can be extremely seductive images, full of promises of luxury, and good weather.5 They can also be threatening for the inhabitants of the area in which they make an appearance, presaging in the worst cases the economic displacement of lower-income populations by high earners.6 While I was writing the book, images of this kind became targets for attack by housing activists in London, as impoverished local authorities realized their fixed assets, selling off social housing for profit. Images in this context can be dangerous.
Figure 1.2 Visualization for The Pinnacle, development by CBRE in the City of London. (Photo 2016.)
Images and commodities are certainly connected, and you can see it in the way that words connect the two things. To ‘speculate’ is, in one basic sense, to look; it is also to invest money with a view to making a profit in the future. ‘Spectacle’ is a word that combines the two ideas perhaps even more closely. As the French writer Guy Debord (about whom we will hear more later) said: ‘Spectacle is capital accumulated until it becomes an image.’7 If we take that statement at face value, we need to be wary of looking, and of the visual in general. Looking is never innocent, although it might seem that way.
