Disaster Movie Or New Jerusalem? Alternative Urban Scenarios for the 21St Century

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Disaster Movie Or New Jerusalem? Alternative Urban Scenarios for the 21St Century 37: 2 (2008) ss. 5–15 YMPÄRISTÖ ALUE JA Malcolm Miles Disaster movie or New Jerusalem? Alternative urban scenarios for the 21st century Through the 1990s, a strand in urban commentary Introduction depicted contemporary cities as sites of dystopia. Mike Davis, for instance, likens the future scenario of In 1998, Mike Davis (1998) likened the future Los Angeles to the scripts of disaster movies. When scenario of Los Angeles to the standard plot of a the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York – disaster movie. Post-industrial cities, it seemed, known as 9-11 – brought the projected disaster into were dystopia, now framed in the categories of reality television with repeated scenes of the falling post-modern architectural discourse. From the towers, it seemed this script had served its purpose 1920s to the 1960s, the city of international (although since then it has been reincorporated modernism was intended to provide security, into projections of climate change). This dystopian decent housing and public services for all through imagery contradicts earlier modernist ideas of the the agency of rational planning. But by the city as a location of a new, utopian social order 1990s the dream had crumbled. Cities – Los from the 1920s to the 1960s. This idealism builds on Angeles in particular – were sites of insecurity and romanticised images of the city as a site of culture disintegration as the affluent class withdrew to in an uncultured landscape, or a place of safety, a gated compounds (in a phenomenon called white citadel, in face of wild nature. A difficulty uniting flight), and streets became zones of crime and the dystopian and utopian images of these kinds is that arbitrary power of privatised security agencies. both tend to universalise the experience of urban In 1992, the disaffected vented their frustration dwelling while privileging the plan and the design in Los Angeles and other North American cities. over the material reality. At the level of everyday life, Leonie Sandercock (1998: 11) recalls: as Lefebvre and de Certeau argued, urban space is produced in another way by its inhabitants. Similarly, “Twilight, Los Angeles, 29 April 1992. … The taking the argument to today’s alternative society and city is burning. As the smoke and the glow from its ecological and socially equitable settlements, new the fires begin to rise over the city, millions of social practices emerge as moments of liberation horrified citizens huddle in front of TV sets which within the restrictions of present structures of transmit images that confirm everyone’s worst power. The paper outlines this argument, and gives nightmares”. several examples of alternative urbanism. It makes no claim that these practices constitute an ideal The burning followed a not-guilty verdict on four society, but rather re-frames the utopian within white policemen tried for violent assault on a the everyday as a really possible future other than black citizen. But in all parts of the industrialised catastrophe. world – the global North – structural economic changes caused new insecurities for both blue- and Key words: alternative urbanism, dystopian city, white-collar workers. In many cities, by the 1990s, urban space, utopian image manufacturing had been replaced by immaterial 5 37: 2 (2008) ss. 5–15 production to leave vast areas of vacant industrial lots, while redundant industrial buildings were used for cultural purposes and the mall became a ubiquitous consumer space, often privatizing city streets watched by security cameras. In the first section of the paper I look at three overlapping aspects of cities in the post-industrial ALUE JA YMPÄRISTÖ ALUE JA economy – the city as a war-zone; the city of symbolic economies; and the city as ruin. In the second section, I turn to contemporary utopian possibilities, aware that a frequent criticism of utopias is that they cannot accommodate change. Yet Richard Sennett (1995: 155) and Edward Soja (2000: 248) remind us that city air makes people Figure 1. Paley Park, New York City. All figures are the author’s original photographs free (Stadt Luft macht frei) – or was said to do so in the port-cities of the Hanseatic League. I take this sentiment as a basis for really possible urban The difficulty is that such spaces tend to utopias today, within the dominant society in, as figure in a privatisation of public urban space yet, localised experimental models such as eco- and subsequent re-coding for consumption. The villages – the research and development work for planners in Barcelona welcomed the new mall a new society. (figure 2) near their offices because it gave young people a place to socialize in a subway café.1 Non- Section I affluent groups use malls for their own purposes, hanging-out instead of consuming (Miles 2003), City as War Zone but the commonplace use of private security firms to guard such sites suggests that non-standard uses In City of Quartz, Mike Davis observes the white suburbs of Los Angeles. He sees “carefully manicured Lawns” and “ominous little signs warning ‘Armed Response!’” while the most affluent areas were constituted as gated compounds “behind walls guarded by gun-toting private police and state- of-the-art electronic surveillance” (Davis 1990: 223). Davis notes that middle-class people have access to facilities in cafés and art galleries, but the homeless, whose sleep in the park is broken by randomly activated sprinklers, have only the street for convenience. Forced to relieve themselves in the street, homeless people’s behaviour reinforces their status as outside civil society. The term street people becomes pejorative, and streets are seen as dangerous. (Davis 1990: 226, 235.) But even the burnt-out sites of civil disorder are opportunities for redevelopment. The provision of new public open spaces is ubiquitous in urban redevelopment. This has some validity. Sites such as Paley Park in Manhattan attract high levels of use (figure 1). William H. Whyte (1980) shows, using time-lapse cameras in the 1970s, that such small urban social spaces are more likely to be successful when they offer a variety of spaces, planting, water features, a café, and moveable seating which users configure as they like. Figure 2. The New Urban – a mall in Barcelona 6 37: 2 (2008) ss. 5–15 YMPÄRISTÖ ALUE JA are at best tolerated (and not always). New centres create new margins, geographically and psychologically. When the new public spaces of a city constitute a celebration of global consumerism, those to whom it is denied become marginal people. For those who access consumerism, the presence of the marginal breeds fear. Zygmunt Bauman (2000: 38) notes, “Ours is a time of patented locks, burglar alarms, barbed- wire fences, neighbourhood watch and vigilantes …”. Insecurity leads to compulsive life-style consumerism as defence against being no-one; and, implies that those for whom such consumption is not accessible are non-people, to be generalized as Figure 3. Section of the Berlin Wall in Manhattan the underclass. The underclass has no power, unlike the the free world (figure 3). The style is like that of traditional working class which exercised its power the subway, and among those who added graffiti in France in the general strike of May 1968. to the Berlin Wall was New York street artist Keith Among the visual signs of its existence is graffiti. Haring. Then, graffiti was bought by art dealers. This was an issue in New York from the 1970s, Jean-Michel Basquiat, previously known by his tag, when graffiti on subway trains was perceived as a SAMO (Cresswell 1996: 36), became an art-star. sign of an underclass living, literally, underground Perhaps it is a question of place, or in subway tunnels. Tim Cresswell (1996: 37) dominant perceptions of an urban environment observes a sense of dissolution in the popular corresponding to underlying anxieties. Graffiti is press, for whom graffiti was a new plague: annoying, often tediously repetitive, but its status as sign of social collapse requires explanation. “Throughout the 1970s graffiti is referred to Cresswell (1996: 38) cites anthropologist Mary variously as garbage, pollution, obscenity, an Douglas (1996), for whom dirt is matter out of epidemic, a disease, a blight, a form of violence, place, differently constructed in different societies. dangerous, and a product of the mad, the ghetto, Cresswell (1996: 39) cites Julia Kristeva (1983) and the barbarian.” for whom dirt, or that which pollutes, exceeds its boundary. Marginalised (like the Freudian Cresswell (1996: 38) cites a letter in the New York repressed), it returns to disrupt the centre. For Times, “’No civilized metropolis … would endure Kristeva this applies to the place and status of such garbage and its continuing proliferation … women. It can equally be applied to the place shocks many visitors and repulses untold numbers of and status of the vagrant and insane, who were local travelers.’” Similarly, Richard Sennett (1990: excluded from the visible streets of Paris to be 206) quotes a subway passenger: removed to the Hôpital Général in 1656, in what Michel Foucault (1967: 38–64) calls the great “I do not find myself consciously making the confinement. Perhaps this is the beginning of the connection between the graffiti-makers and the city-as-war-zone, in the demarcation of boundaries criminals who occasionally rob, rape and assault between what can be seen in a city and what is to passengers … [but] the sense that all are part be removed from sight. of one world of uncontrollable predators seems To take this argument one further, Rosi inescapable. … their ever-present markings serve Braidotti (2006: 48) writes that, following to persuade the passenger that … the subway is Foucault’s analysis of the production of the a dangerous place.
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