Mismatched Boundaries
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PROJECTIONS 6 the MIT STUDENT JOURNAL OF PLANNING ■ FALL 2007 MISMATCHED BOUNDARIES MANY THANKS TO Kathy Hoag, Janice O’Brien, Alice Twohig, Sandy Wellford, and Karen Yegian; and Shannon McKay, Gretchen Weismann, and Pamela Siska for their help with the final editing. (c) 2007 MIT DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES + PLANNING All rights reserved. No part of this journal may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means without prior written permission from the publisher. Text set: Univers 57 Condensed, Univers 47 Condensed. Digitally published using Adobe InDesign. Printed and bound in the United States of America by Sherman Printing, Canton, MA. Cover image: Thomas More’s Utopia More, Thomas. (Source: The common-wealth of Vtopia [electronic resource] Printed by B. Alsop & T. Fawcet, London, 1639. Series: Early English books online.), outside cover; Shanghai, China (Source: Marissa Cheng) inside cover. TABLE OF CONTENTS 0 EDITORIAL 6 Dr. Nora Libertun de Duren 1 CONTINGENCY PLANNING + THE BORDER SPACE 14 Dr. Sergio Peña 2 LAND TITLING IN STARR COUNTRY COLONIAS ALONG THE TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER : PLANNING + STABILITY ISSUES 36 Dr. Cecilia Giusti, Jane E. Larson, Dr. Peter M. Ward, Flavio A M de Souza, Marlynn May 3 ACROSS THE RIVER : URBAN BORDERLAND DEVELOPMENT IN THE REPUBLIC OF HAITI + THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC : THE CASE OF DAJABÓN + OUANAMINTHE 56 Dr. Lena Poschet 4 CITIES ACROSS NATIONS 74 Els Verbakel 5 REMNANTS OF SYMBOLS : THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN DESTRUCTION + RECONSTRUCTION IN MOSTAR 98 Allison H. Stewart 6 STRATEGIC PLANNING + THE METROPOLITAN AREA IN BUENOS AIRES : GUIDELINES TO UNRAVEL THE THREEFOLD BOUNDARY ISSUE 118 Dr. Juan Abal Medina, Luciana Cingolani, Francisco Romero 7 MISMATCHED BOUNDARIES BETWEEN THE DISCIPLINES OF CIVIL ENGINEERING + URBAN DESIGN CONSIDERING POLDER CITIES IN THE NETHERLANDS 134 Fransje Hoomeijer 8 DERRY/LONDON + LONDONDERRY : CITIZENSHIP + PUBLIC SPACE IN NORTHERN IRELAND RESEARCH BRIEF 156 Gary Doherty 9 INCOMPATIBLE ZONE SYSTEMS RESEARCH BRIEF 166 Dr. Daniel Baldwin Hess 10 DESIRESCAPES BORDERSCAPES RESEARCH BRIEF 174 Midori Taki Dr. Nora Libertun de Duren EDITORIAL ON MISMATCHED BOUNDARIES “When are men, living in the same place, to be regarded as a single city - what is the limit? Certainly not the wall of the city, for you might surround all Peloponnesus with a wall. Like this, we may say, is Babylon, and every city that has the compass of a nation rather than a city; Babylon, they say, had been taken for three days before some part of the inhabitants became aware of the fact.” Politics, by Aristotle (350 BC). Book 1:3 The question of how to defi ne the boundaries of a city seems to be both essential and so far unresolved. Statistical reports on urban population, econometrics analysis on the performance of urban nodes, urban and even national institutions hardly map the same cities within the same boundaries. As a consequence, it is increasingly diffi cult to understand how all these variables are actually interconnected in the urban realm, even less to generate meaningful comparative studies among different cities. But if the blurriness of urban boundaries in the collection of data challenges the validity of inter- and even intra-urban comparisons, it is even more diffi cult to compare the content and strategies of different social movements that rely on a fuzzily defi ned polity and a contested geography. Of course, this contestation of urban boundaries is no surprise in a world where urbanization is covering ever more territory, and urban nodes are immersed in a multidimensional global network. Likewise, as more and more people migrate to cities and urban life spreads beyond traditional urban boundaries, urbanization encompasses a wider diversity of social and geographical conditions. LIBERTUN The paradox is that, precisely at the moment when urbanization has become one of 7 the most meaningful entry points to understand the transformations that are affecting contemporary societies in both developed and underdeveloped nations — and that can illuminate the connections between local and global forces of change — cities are becoming increasingly harder to map. But let us go back for a moment to the beginnings of the western twentieth century and we will fi nd that a need for new urban categories is a typical symptom of a rapidly changing society. If we look at cities then, we will fi nd them rapidly growing at the pace of the new industrial economy, with new factories demanding concentrated capital to MISMATCHED BOUNDARIES afford them, crowds of labor to operate them, and masses of products to amortize them. We will also fi nd that the presence of this new crowd is disruptive to the old social order and that sovereign nation-states are creating institutions for managing the rapid growth of industrial cities. Finally, we will fi nd that social thinkers are developing novel theories that can explain the forces behind the social changes that cities render visible. PROJECTIONS 6 Yet, regardless of the success of these early thinkers in portraying modernization, as the twentieth century progresses, these categories become less and less meaningful. From a social evolutionary perspective, the rapid growth of metropolises in both developed and undeveloped nations questions the assumption that urbanization is a good proxy for national development. In addition, the changing geography of industrial production blurs the Weberian distinction between productive and consumerist cities (Weber, 1958). Likewise, the appearance of new urbanization patterns, such as gated communities, edge cities, urban slums, and hollow urban centers, outdates much of the urban-suburban growth model of the Chicago School (McKenzie, 1925), and the validity of the psychological traits that Stanley Milgram attributed exclusively to urban dwellers (Milgram, 1970). Moreover, the nation-state sovereignty, which was one of the key enablers of the capitalist economy that fed the growth of modern cities (Tilly, 1988), is being superseded by the multiple transnational networks in which these capitalist cities are embedded. Thus, a century of urban expansion trespassed over the geographical boundaries of cities and gave rise to metropolis of unprecedented size and to a network of instant communication among world cities (Castells, 1996); and, in this process, it forces us to revise many of the conceptual tools we use to describe what does and what does not belong to the urban realm. As meaningful social, political, and economic exchanges are sustained — or broken — regardless of the proximity of their participants, Durkheim’s organic solidarity should be tested at a global scale (Durkheim, 1883). From online communities that fl ow seamlessly over jurisdictionally boundaries, to gated communities that retrench in a controlled territoriality, a myriad of decentralized, bottom-up — albeit not necessarily democratic — practices are creating a multiplicity of urban boundaries. As a consequence, and as we shall soon see, mapping the urban territory becomes a cause for confl icting interactions. It is not by coincidence that famous utopian and ideal cities have had clearly delineated boundaries. In Utopus, Thomas More imagined a wise and despotic conqueror, who built an artifi cial island so to prevent his people from abandoning the LIBERTUN superior society he created (More, 1624). Also, in their studies of ideal community types, early modern thinkers imagined them with fi xed, static boundaries. Ferdinand Tönnies Gemeinschaft was a closed social unit (Tönnies, 1921). Likewise, Max Weber 8 identifi ed the fortress as one of the PROJECTIONS 6 fi ve defi ning elements of the ideal western city (Weber). Thus, following Louis Marin’s interpretation, the social function of utopias is producing a critique of the actual society in which MISMATCHED BOUNDARIES their authors are embedded, and in that sense utopias are like inverted mirrors of the time and place in which they were created (Marin, 2001). For instance, Tönnies’ detailed description of the harmonious life of pre-industrial communities is an evident critique of the capitalist organization that was taking throughout Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. Therefore, by defi nition, utopian places depend on clearly demarcated boundaries that allow creation of this virtual ideal world, in stark contrast to a real one. This condition of utopian thinking should FIGURE 1. Thomas More’s Utopia. Source: have been problematic for the modernist More, Thomas. The common-vvealth of Vtopia designers who wanted to embrace [electronic resource] Printed by B. Alsop & T. modernism both as a normative practice Fawcet, London, 1639. Series: Early English as well as a transcendental ideal - all books online. the more so when the utopian project of modernism is one that poses continuous and boundless progress as one of its foundational ideals (Tafuri, 1979). Not surprisingly, most paradigmatic modern urban utopias did not address the question of urban boundaries. Both Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre FIGURE 2. Axon and plan of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Source: Le Corbusier (1967). The Radiant City, New York: The Orion Press, pp. 204-205. LIBERTUN 9 FIGURE 3. Plan and perspective of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. Source: De Long, MISMATCHED BOUNDARIES David G. (ed.) (1999) Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City, Weil am Rhein, Germany: Vitra Design Museum, pp. 33, 43. were quite oblivious to the borders of the ideal cities they proposed, fading them into grids that could be repeated ad infi nitum (Le Corbusier, 1929; Wright, 1935). PROJECTIONS 6 From the outset, boundaries were both a need and a challenge for the modern urban project, which aimed to show both a patent discontinuity with anything that was non- modern as well as the potential for boundless expansion. But the problem of modern urban designers became a well of theories for modern urban sociologists who saw in the tension between the old and the new urbanization modes the engine that could explain urban expansion. Beginning with the ecological models of the Chicago School, the growth of the city was stylized as a consequence of the changing needs of urban populations.