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Agents of Transformation and the "Death" of Urbanism Preeminence of the Decorated Shed Staging Uncertainty |
[1L1] SUSPENDING JUDGMENT: THE POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY
TRANSFORMED. Capitalism and neo-capitalism have produced an abstract space that is a reflection of the world of business on both a national and international level, as well as the power of money and the ‘politique’ of the state. This abstract space depends on vast networks of banks, businesses and great centres of production. There also is the spatial intervention of highways, airports and information networks. In this space, the cradle of accumulation, the place of richness, the subject of history, the centre of historical space, in other words, the city, has exploded. (Henri Lefebvre) Before most of us have been able to detect it, what we have been calling a city has already changed. I’m not referring to the medieval walled city, which has been long dead. I’m discussing the modern or contemporary city, which has culturally, politically, and physically metamorphosed beyond previous standards for recognition. To some, this transformation has warranted the creation of new terms. In the past, the word metropolis was used to describe the extended twentieth century gridiron, which bristled with skyscrapers. Today the term
megalopolis is used to describe the bewildering sprawl of mass transit systems, technology
parks, entertainment complexes, strip malls, and bedroom communities which extend from
older city edges, annihilating previous physical distinctions between city and hinterland,
as well as previous geopolitical boundaries. To the majority, however, the elusive word
city still suffices to describe any settlement of particular size and socio-economic
significance. The irony is that what we call a city is no longer inherently urban, or
suburban, or even exurban. It is all these things and more. We would perhaps do better to
describe the countryside, like the goatherd in Calvino’s Cecilia4,
or whatever is antithetical to the city. In any case, what we must realize is that our old
definition of city has been modified to address new forms of human development.
It goes without saying that the technological instruments of physical and virtual mobility, the automobile and telematics, have driven this transformation, allowing unprecedented levels of freedom and connection, as well as urban fragmentation and atomization. Today, we are bombarded with the trite image of a corporate executive leaving her downtown office for a quiet pasture in the country, powered by an off-road vehicle, laptop computer, and cellular phone. Indeed, these technological developments (and the infrastructures required to power them) have made this image possible, but it is unreal. Despite popular notions about exurban mobility and the resulting decay of cities, evidence suggests that cities are not only here to stay; they are growing at an unparalleled rate.
Like molecular gravitational models, centrifugal forces in cities may be balanced by equal centripetal ones. Saskia Sassen corroborates The Economist survey in suggesting that "the widely accepted notion that density and agglomeration will become obsolete because global telecommunications advances allow for maximum population and resource dispersal is poorly conceived. It is, I argue, precisely because of the territorial dispersal facilitated by telecommunication that agglomeration of certain centralizing activities has sharply increased. This is not a mere continuation of old patterns of agglomeration; there is a new logic for concentration."7 Indeed, it is this new logic for concentration which is determining the future shape of cities, and inherent to the logic is an understanding of how these mobile and static forces interrelate at a fundamental level. Sassen continues: "Cities are preferred sites for the production of [finance and advanced corporate] services, particularly the most innovative, speculative, international service sectors. Further, leading firms in information industries require a vast physical infrastructure containing strategic nodes with hyperconcentration of facilities; we need to distinguish between the capacity for global transmission/communication and the material conditions that make this possible."8 Thus, an understanding of the technological instruments of mobility and the infrastructures that channel them is paramount to predicting future urban form. 4Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities, Trans. William Weaver (Harvest/HBJ, 1972) p. 152-153 5Parker, John, "A Survey of Cities" in The Economist (July 29, 1995) p. 3 6Ibid., p. 18 7Sassen, Saskia, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, 1991) p. 5 8Sassen, Saskia, "Reconfiguring Centrality" in Anywise, Ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996) p. 128
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According
to a 1995 survey in The Economist, the
global urban population will rise by about one billion in the next fifteen years, and
although seventeen of the world’s twenty-one largest cities by the year 2000 will be
in the third world, major cities in industrialized nations are experiencing a rebirth as
well.5 The survey goes on to suggest that as the mobility of
capital and information in cities increases, the static factors, which include
"housing, public services, infrastructure and, above all, distinctive political and
cultural traditions" become more important: "Many people have concluded... that
cities are finished. This survey, by contrast, has argued that cities have revived over
the past decade partly because these immobile factors are precious resources in an
increasingly mobile world. Their resilience suggests that cities are likely to continue to
thrive in a post-industrial world."6
A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell. Copyright © 1998 by Blaine Brownell. All rights reserved. |
