Why Cities Look the Way They Do

Richard J. Williams

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780745691848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Geografía humana

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.

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 ...