2017.3 Transmedia Urbanism. Berlusconi and the Birth Of
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PERSPECTA 50 2 URBAN DIVIDES Terrains of Contestation: Contents The Politics of Designing Urban Adaption 63 Kian Goh Preface A Metropolis – Meghan McAllister Not an Enclave 7 and Mahdi Sabbagh Gaza Ring City Michael Sorkin 75 with Terreform Foreword 8 Jon Calame Forever Transient: Life at the “Affordable” Mexican Periphery Power Lines: Boundaries of Erasure and Expansion Tatiana Bilbao Estudio 85 with Onnis Luque in Los Angeles 15 Dana Cuff Deepening Division: Interpreting Scales of Spatial Contestation in Johannesburg {Dis}Incorporation: Further Notes on the City 103 Guy Trangoš as a Legal Concept 27 Jesse Vogler Separation Anxiety: Inequality and Exclusion in Athens and Cape Town (Re)Connecting Belfast: Mobility Justice Alfredo Brillembourg, 121 Hubert Klumpner and Alexis Kalagas in Divided Cities Mark Hackett and 36 Ken Sterrett “Along Sound Lines”: Drawing up Dubai’s Labor Camps from 1950 to 2008 Watercraft: Detroit Water Infrastructure and Its 132 Todd Reisz Protocols of Sprawl and Displacement 44 Mitch McEwen Jerusalem's Divisions: Transmedia Urbanism: Architectures and Topographies Berlusconi and the Birth of Urban Violence of Targeted Difference 144 Annabel Jane Wharton 243 Andrés Jaque Evidence: Visualizing Urban Divides Open Portals: Meghan McAllister On the Divisions and Permeabilities 153 and Mahdi Sabbagh of Global Chinatowns 252 Gary W. McDonogh Traversals: In and Out of the Dadaab Refugee Camps The Making of a Public: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi Guerilla Art 173 and Alishine Hussein Osman in the 1970s and ‘80s 264 Jenny Holzer The Concrete Tent: A Paradox of Permanent Temporality Toward new possibility in Decolonizing Architecture Art the public realm, together: 193 Residency Polis Station Jeanne Gang and 282 Alissa Anderson Heritage, Modernity, and Difference in Contemporary Indian Urbanism Urban Commoning in Cities Divided: Field Notes from 202 Jyoti Hosagrahar Hong Kong and Taipei 292 Jeffrey Hou Rio’s Favelas: The Power of Informal Urbanism Radical Urbanism in the Divided City: On M. Paul Friedberg’s 213 Theresa Williamson Riis Park Plaza (1966) 302 Marisa Angell Brown A Hierarchy of Separation: Emerging Territorialization Techniques in Romanian Gypsy Communities 229 Andreea Cojocaru 243 Aerial viewofMilano 2. TRANSMEDIA URBANISM: ANDRÉS JAQUE BERLUSCONI AND THE OFFICE FOR POLITICAL BIRTH OF TARGETED DIFFERENCE INNOVATION Accounts of Silvio Berlusconi’s casting television programs from its Milan could afford them. They were found mainly power seldom include two of its key headquarters at a central position in the in bars, churches, and the living rooms of sources: namely, architecture and urban- city: Corso Sempione. The building includ- wealthy families. These places, where tele- ism. Whereas his involvement in media is ed Studio TV3, which was, at the time, the vision was communally watched, turned seen as a momentous constituent of his largest television studio in Europe.1 The into transfamilial spaces of interclass en- political trajectory, what is often forgotten headquarters were redesigned by no less actments. Control over the television signal is that his particular way of reinventing the than the architect Giò Ponti. Architecture was precious, for it brought the power to relationship between politics and media was already an essential factor. decide what content would shape collec- was an architectural invention, developed In postwar Italy, television was not tive existence.2 and tested through the interiors, buildings, watched alone. In 1954, the cost of a TV RAI worked hand in hand with the landscapes, and urbanism to which he and set was 250,000 lire—three times the an- Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, a his team devoted a large part of their time nual salary of a secretary. Very few people public holding company that owned many and resources, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. In 1968, Silvio Berlusconi, then chair and owner of urban development company Edilnord Centri Residenzia- li, started to promote “Milano 2,” a 712,000-square-meter residential city ten minutes from the center of Milan. Present- ed as an alluring and inoffensive mix of rational architecture and vernacular em- bellishment, Milano 2 embodied a radical urbanism. Conceived as an alternative to the converging and homogenizing cul- ture promoted by state-centered postwar European governments, this new urban model would instead segregate society into differentiated clusters of specialized consumption targets. Life in Milano 2 was structured by a cable television service that would grow to become the corpora- tion now known as Mediaset. Milano 2’s capacity to integrate the economic, social, and political evolution of its inhabitants was fueled by a series of design strategies meant to coordinate TV programming, interiors, access to commodities and services, architecture, and landscaping into what I will call “transmedia urbanism.” This coordination was intended to render Berlusconi’s company as the compulsory node in a new context in which purveyors, consumers, and the links that brought them together were reinvented. TV NATIONS The European national TV networks, such as the BBC (United Kingdom), RTF (France), and RAI (Italy), played a fun- damental role in the social articulation of economics and politics of everyday life in Europe’s postwar period. While the 1952 European Coal and Steel Community is often considered as the first forerunner of the European Union, the true antecedent was the 1950 organization that brought together the European national public TV networks, the European Broadcast- ing Union (EBU). It was precisely these networks that played a role in the social, economic, and material reconstruction of postwar Europe, operating within a system where the unifying elements of national societies could be organized from the top- down with the intention of maximizing their power of self-production. In this process, RAI was paradigmat- ic. In January 1954, RAI began broad- Interiors of Milano 2 apartment. Photographs by Miguel de Guzmán. 244 Andrés Jaque capacity of the nation’s industrial muscle should aid in the development of advanced solutions to provide the workers it at- tracted with places to live.8 At L’Espresso magazine, architect Bruno Zevi added his voice to the discussion, advocating for the relocation of workers from cities to underdeveloped rural areas, where land was cheaper. All these ideas would rapidly develop into housing projects—but not for the workers. MILANO 2 In 1968, Edilnord acquired the 712,000 square meters of land in the municipality of Segrate, where Milano 2 would be constructed, at a bargain price due to the noise pollution of air traffic from the nearby Linate International Airport. Berlusconi’s political influence facilitated a reduction of air traffic and the accep- tance by left-wing municipal authorities of Milano 2’s masterplan. This development was designed not only to supply accom- modation for ten thousand inhabitants, but also as a complete urbanism equipped to provide education, fitness, entertainment, Interiors of Milano 2 apartment. Photographs by Miguel de Guzmán. idealized nature, and, above all, sales. Its 2,600 apartments were placed on the of the main industries that shaped every- competence week after week, and Bon- perimeter, with their TV rooms expanding day life in Italy—from telephones to high- giorno’s language was carefully tailored to onto big balconies, directed not toward the ways, food to cars, airplanes to military make participants and audiences feel as if Milan skyline, but to an inner landscape, weapons. By 1960, eighty percent of Italy’s they were exactly the same: equal citizens with large trees carefully placed to sup- population watched television, with RAI or “ordinary Italians.” Ordinary Italians press any perception of a neighboring hu- playing a unique top-down role in unifying would simultaneously be the unspecialized man presence. Under the direction of the Italian society. RAI significantly contribut- consumers and manufacturers of the ge- landscape designer Enrico Hoffer, more ed to the standardization of language and neric products advertised on television. than five thousand trees were planted at helped make Italian universally spoken in This entire process dovetailed with Milano 2. A significant number of them southern Italy. Moreover, RAI suspended a massive provision of residential units in were already over twelve meters tall when its programs everyday between 7:30 and cities. During the 1950s and 1960s, the they were relocated—among them, 8:45 pm to synchronize dinnertime across number of residential units in Italy in- fir trees, maples, Japanese red maples, the country.3 National schedules were creased by thirty-five percent, sixty-eight cedars, birches, beeches, gingkoes, coordinated to ensure rest hours for work- percent of them built in the thirteen magnolias, pine trees, plane trees, and ers and efficiency in family management. most populous cities. Waves of migra- lindens.9 Adjacent dwellings would be Television delivered a coordinated mass tion followed a government initiative to screened by a costly and carefully com- of workers to the nationally centralized concentrate workers in urban areas. The posed biological version of TV snow, an industries. government’s aim was to ensure a uniform arboreal screen vibrating like the static In 1957, RAI began to produce short provision of labor to the factories that were light noise of unsynchronized TVs. films to advertise industrial products. The producing goods at a national scale.6 Milano 2’s young design team was intention of these films was to convey the In 1968, not only did students protest led by the then thirty-one-year-old archi- value of industrial products to audiences in Milan, but so did domestic migrant tect Giancarlo Ragazzi, partnered with who would be rendered into a generic workers, who had come mainly from the Giulio Possa and Antonio D’Adamo. The universal public in part by the effect of south of Italy and who were still attracted architects paid careful attention to the sec- this commercial TV content. These short by Milan’s economic miracle and industrial tional bifurcation of the design.