Urban Constellations

Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-Industrial Britain

Zoë Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472427229
• eBook ISBN: 9781317003939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates the iconic architectural cultural spaces of the contemporary cityscape as engines of regeneration. Promising much to their fading locales, these spaces locate culture in the space where production once ruled in order to revitalise post-industrial urban provinces. With close attention to four sites across the UK, Urban Constellations engages with the work of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, to read these spaces and in so doing, offer a critical intervention into the theory and experience of contemporary cityscapes. Developing the notion of surface ethnography as a methodological approach to examining the form of cultural experience produced by urban cultural spaces, the author sheds light on the manner in which they transform cultural spectatorship, express wider political and ecological concerns and offer differing views to the 'native' and the 'tourist' in the construction of local history. The book also examines the decline of the idea that iconic projects can drive regeneration, in the failures and delays that can beset such undertakings. Offering a rich examination of the legacy of urban change in its most recent formulation - that of cultural regeneration - this book reveals the fragile potential of the spaces produced by contemporary 'dream houses' and as such, will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, sociology and social theory, urban studies, cultural geography and architecture.

Chapter 1
The Modern and Postmodern Metropolis or Managing Urban Experience

All the cosmopolitan centres that are also sites of splendour are becoming coming more and more alike. Their differences are disappearing.

Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Analysis of a City Map’ (1995 [1928], p. 44)¹

Baudelaire is the source of the cruel aperçu that the city changes faster than a human heart.

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Return of the Flâneur’ (1999b [1929], p. 265)²

Alien Invasions and Ghostly Encounters

For Jean Baudrillard, contemporary architectural forms appear as alien spacecraft, crash-landed on to their sites in the urban wasteland of post-industrial cities. They are the products of science fiction, residues of an imagined future, projected onto derelict space in the hope of enlivening it through cultural consumption rather than industrial production. City spaces are irrevocably transformed by these invasions, which appear as such since they pay no heed to the context or history of the surrounding cityscape. They are chimerical, monster-like structures from another planet. To read these spaces with Baudrillard, then, is to enter into a science-fiction story: a narrative of quantum physics, stellar activity, chaos theory, image technologies, and other theoretical parameters unfamiliar to conventional social and cultural analysis. For Walter Benjamin, writing about urban spaces in Paris exiled, as another kind of alien, from his home city of Berlin, cities beg another type of narrative: not a science fiction story but, rather, a ghost story. For him, cities are haunted: by their pasts, by the personal associations we map within them across time, by the utopian potential of their new architectural forms and the lost dreams inherent in their ruins. Neither thinker, then, offers a conventional means of understanding urban space or its transformation. Furthermore, theorising their conceptual relationship to one another as a ‘constellation’, I argue throughout this book that their work illuminates the contemporary cityscape in novel and necessary ways.

This book is primarily concerned with the management and development of the post-industrial cityscape, its recent transformation through the insertion of iconic architectural projects, and the associated production and management of urban experience. The millennium has witnessed a plethora of ‘cultural regeneration’ projects that are signalled by flagship structures housing cultural initiatives, for example, art galleries, concert halls, and museums. This transformation has developed in the UK but also elsewhere, Guggenheim, Bilbao being perhaps the most famous European example. These cultural venues, housed in their iconic shells, are a self-conscious attempt to produce a symbolic shift in the urban skyline, and a new identity for faded or forgotten cityscapes. There is, then, an element of similarity about these new buildings, designed as they are by a handful of high-profile architects, and proliferating wherever there is the chance of inward investment, and the attraction of mobile capital. The sites of such buildings are often waterfronts, disused docks, old steelworks and other vacant industrial spaces left empty and bare by the decline of the heavy industries.

As Benjamin points out, nineteenth-century Paris produced a set of seminal buildings, a new façade for the rapidly expanding city facilitated the advances in technologies such as glass and iron (Benjamin 1999a, p. 223). The arcades, winter gardens, railway stations and exhibition halls were described by Benjamin as the ‘dreamhouses’ of industrial capitalism. This book is an interrogation of four buildings – The Lowry, Salford, The Deep, Hull, The Sage, Gateshead and The Public, West Bromwich – as contemporary ‘dreamhouses’. I analyse how these sites mediate and construct experience, through their iconography, their inner spaces, and their relationship to the cityscape in which they are placed.

Contemporary ‘Dreamhouses’ and their Spectres

I now wish to turn to some remarks on the nature of the buildings under analysis. As already noted, this book does not concern itself solely with the political or economic decisions that have driven such developments. Rather, following Sharon Zukin (1995), it is concerned not so much with the political economy of cities but rather the symbolic economy; the relationship between culture and power. In this respect, the book is not so much concerned with the cultural policies of urban regeneration exclusively, but rather the phenomenological and experiential aspects of the cultural sphere and its effect on the subjective negotiation of the cityscape. It is also a book with a dual aim, equally concerned with highlighting how the perspicacious and elusive concepts of Benjamin and Baudrillard are particularly resonant when deployed in constellation, and the demonstration of how such a framework can underpin readings of the cultural experience of the contemporary cityscape.

There is, however, a rationale for the choice of the buildings under analysis: they are all located in post-industrial urban locations and they are all funded or part-funded by public finances in the form of National Lottery monies via the Arts Council or the Millennium Commission. This is a deliberate strategy since this book is concerned with public space, or at least, space built with public use in mind rather than the solely private spaces of entrepreneurial capitalism. My research is intended as a comment on the nature of public architecture at the turn of the twenty-first century, access to which is not debarred by financial constraints or penury, or out of bounds due to commercial or private usage. However, all of the venues discussed, since they involve some kind of cultural endeavour, require payment of some kind in order to take advantage of the full extent of their internal spaces, whether concerts, plays or other artistic performances. All except one – The Deep – can be accessed without paying an entrance fee. This idea of free entrance was in part a result of New Labour’s strategy of eradicating admission fees for museums and galleries, and in part a deliberate attempt to make the buildings the focus of some renaissance of urban life.

Of course, this raises the question of inclusion and class, which plays out in differing ways in the different locations. The spectre of class, to some extent, haunts all of these spaces. This haunting is perhaps inevitable since the locations were established upon their heavy industries which relied, in turn, on a propinquitous, abundant labour force and its attendant class structure. The notion of the haunting of spectacular spaces of the contemporary urban has been taken up in different ways by various writers, including Benjamin (de Certeau 1984; Derrida 1994; Debord 1995; Gordon 1997; Edensor 2005; Pile 2005).

The buildings have a prescribed or self-consciously fashioned sense of how they wish to shape the visitors’ experience. This comes through from both their dazzling exteriors and their internal aesthetic configuration of space as well as their attendant publicity material, websites and guidebooks. The spaces are narrated with a self-conscious sense of the kind of experience they expect visitors to have. Experience is constructed as pleasurable, as ‘culturally-good’. A re-articulation of a certain ‘Reithian’ sensibility permeates the spaces.³ The fact that they are iconic spectacles designed by ‘starchitects’ also serves to produce a sense of reverence for the building itself. Of prime importance in the construction of this narrative is the somewhat ironic notion that the spaces are interactive rather than didactic and that they are (apparently) accessible. This officially-sanctioned ideology is followed by visitors up to a point: we are led, choreographed through the space. What my readings seek are ‘moments’ – those pauses, gaps or cracks which implicitly undermine that preferred reading; moments in which resistance to that preferred reading might occur.

The book and the readings therein are not concerned with the celebration of cultural regeneration, a sniping from the side-lines at its pretensions, or a reactionary outrage at the millions of taxpayer’s money it has taken up. Rather, it is a reading that seeks to reveal the hopeless hopefulness of it all, one which traces the melancholia that such developments provoke. These buildings enchant the cityscape and yet, when read against the grain, potentially disenchant it at the same time. It is to perform an act of awakening to the ‘dreamhouses’ of contemporary urban culture. Baudrillard would want to maintain that this is not possible, that the experience they construct is so sophisticated, so cultivated, that oppositional readings or dissension is constantly jeopardised. His approach is rather more playful; rather than straightforward opposition, he offers instead ironic readings in the hope of at least disturbing these perfect surfaces of contemporary culture. What I am seeking to do in this book, then, is not to attempt to create these moments of disruption, but rather to locate them or ‘read them out’ – to evoke, what Benjamin would call the moments of ‘profane illumination’ at play. The ghosts I’m trying to evoke, summon and conjure – or at least trace by insisting upon the possibility of their presence- these residues, are best revealed, I argue, through the conceptual repertoire of Benjamin and Baudrillard in constellation. But, ultimately, by a sense of the Benjaminian ‘messianic’ as rupture, as a possibility that cannot be eradicated, however sophisticated the postmodern experience of the city may be. This point is crucial to my thesis: it is my reading of the ‘messianic’ as rupture and Baudrillardian irony as disturbance which both makes the distinctions between their critical projects apparent, and which also points to the similarities, the similar purpose driving each. The following chapter, then, sets out the concepts I put into play from each of the two thinkers demonstrating how they might be read in constellation, what such a reading entails, and how an analysis of the spaces can be produced out of this method.

Defining the Parameters of the Cityscape

Before I journey through the buildings I have employed as case-studies, the rationale of their choosing, or discuss the conceptual repertoire that guides the analysis, it is necessary firstly to set out the contours of the debate through which the city has been theorised. The notion of giving a survey of literature on the city is far too broad and ambitious a task for the constraints of the book and in terms of its general relevance to the material therein. What this chapter aims to do, then, is to specify the theoretical constellations and contexts through which an account of Benjamin and Baudrillard and the theme of the urban emerge. Taking the modern city as a point of departure, I sketch out some of these accounts: the understanding of the modern city as the site of spectacular forms of capital, the effect on and management of urban behaviour, the emergence of an urban ‘personality’, and the cityscape as a site of material, psychological and symbolic experience. It is the attempt to give a broad understanding of how cities have been theorised within certain intellectual traditions, those traditions which have been a direct influence on Benjamin and Baudrillard. It is also to set out why it is that Benjamin and Baudrillard, in constellation, both consolidate and challenge previous accounts of urban experience, offering fruitful and frustrating ways of reading the cultural spaces of contemporary cities. Consequently, there is no sustained discussion of work where the built environment is configured as a mere backdrop to the lives of social groups; instead I argue that it is the real and imagined fabric of the city that actively structures and facilitates the form of experience made possible in the urban milieu.

Throughout this chapter, I trace the relationship between the individual and the city using accounts that address the notion of modern urban life and that establish the city as the site of forces which produce and constrain agential action: the work of Marx, Freud, Simmel, and variously Surrealism, Situationism, and Postmodernism.⁴ All cities, then, across history offer up moments of suppression or containment in order to function. The buildings under analysis, I will argue, are the latest, incomplete expressions of this urge: to delimit or prescribe urban experience in particular ways. What I demonstrate is that such management is central to all forms of urban life but that what that management might consist of – the form it takes – is subject to both temporal and spatial shifts and developments. At its core, this book seeks to register a fundamental ambivalence about the buildings under analysis. It seeks to problematise the rhetoric that surrounds their arrival, to unpick the seamless narratives they wish to tell of themselves and to interrogate the versions of urban culture they present.

At this stage it is perhaps pertinent to point out what the book is not concerned with. Whilst the buildings undoubtedly function as tourist attractions, I am not centrally concerned with their economic, political, and institutional dynamics, but rather the more specific experience of the spaces and how they function to construct a particular set of cultural effects. As such, there is no sustained discussion of the literatures on tourism, museums and heritage.⁵ Equally, the literature on urban regeneration, civic boosterism and cultural policy is only broadly mentioned since it is much too economically-deterministic and policy-driven and does not pertain closely enough to the reading of the cityscape as a locus of subjective, symbolic experience.⁶

As well as being evidence of global architectural signatures, however, one must acknowledge the British context of such sites. At the forefront of the New Labour Government’s Urban White Paper (DETR 2000) was the notion of ‘culture’ as a driver of regeneration in the post-industrial city. The paper set out strategies for the revitalisation of urban environments. One key aspect was the directive that lottery-funded cultural initiatives, especially those involving ‘flagship’ buildings by well-known architects, should have positive, regenerative effects, on the cityscape. This exemplifies what commentators such as Scott (2000) and Clarke (2003) suggest is the reliance on cultural initiatives as catalysts to regeneration. Despite the conspicuous appearance of such lottery-funded cultural projects (museums, galleries and arts centres) it is open to question, however, to what extent these developments have caused the desired ‘urban renaissance’.

British provincial cities increasingly compete nationally amongst each other as well as with London. But this competition extends to the global city market as British cities attempt to rival European destinations such as Barcelona, Paris and Berlin (Sassen 2001). In this sense a hierarchy emerges with certain cities being more successful than others at what Liam Kennedy has called ‘imagineering’: the redevelopment of the city’s image through the management of both its cityscape and its public perception (Kennedy 2004). This creation of a hierarchical relationship between cities is accompanied by fears of the elision of regional differences and local context. This has led some commentators to remark that our cities are becoming generic ‘blandscapes’ seeking formulaic solutions to the crises and effects of global capitalism thus rendering one urban landscape indistinguishable from another (Zukin 1988; Zukin 1995; Bell and Jayne 2003; Yakhlef 2004). The effect of capitalism is one of the fundamental paradigms to understanding the modern city and it is to a discussion of this I now turn.

Modern Cities: Marx, Capitalism and the City

For Marx, the antinomies of industrial capitalism, and its predication upon class struggle, serves to produce the proletarian individual as exploited and the bourgeois as exploiter. The modern industrial city, then, functions as the apex point of intensive capitalism and its contradictions. It is in the city where the newest forms of social life and technological organisation come together in such a way as to transcend all prior categories of traditional understanding. As Vidler points out,

A common and often explicit theme underlying the different responses of writers and social critics to the big cities of the nineteenth century might be found in the general concept of “estrangement”: the estrangement of the inhabitant of a city too rapidly changing and enlarging to comprehend in traditional terms; the estrangement of classes from each other, of individual from individual, of individual from self, of workers from work. (Vidler 2000, p. 65)

The city, then, is the site of capitalism’s violence, barbarism, and alienation as well as wealth accumulation, commodity production and exchange. Yet, in forming the labouring classes as a mass, the city concomitantly produces the potential for social change through class consciousness and associated collective action. The city, for Marx, is the site of both insurrection and revolution which form the dialectic of repression and possibility. The modern metropolis explodes the proportions of the city as it was previously understood, either in terms of the Ancient Greek polis or the medieval citadel. It transcends the limits on participation in terms of its mixing of class groupings and in terms of space, a transformation and obliteration of previous categories of urban understanding. As Marx points out, however, this explosion of limits in the modern city is the spatial concomitant to the shift in economic organisation from feudalism to capitalism. The modern city and its social and symbolic life are made possible by this shift in political economy. As the most potent site of capitalist production the modern city heralds the crystallisation of mercantile capital into bourgeois civil society. In the German Ideology (1845), Marx notes that it is in the urban milieu that bourgeois taste codes, aesthetics, law and philosophy – all the aspects of the ideological superstructure that simulate and legitimate the economic organisation at society’s base – come to bear. These ‘ruling ideas’ serve to shore up the economic security of the bourgeoisie since they present the class organisation of society and its ideological superstructure as natural, inevitable and the best of all possible worlds. As Marx and Engels famously note: ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force … the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas’ (Marx and Engels 2006, p. 9).

For Marx, capitalism is inherently exploitative, barbaric and revolutionary; its very raison d’etre the pursuit of profit on tighter and tighter margins, exploiting the labour power of the masses (the proletariat), for the benefit of the merchant classes (the bourgeoisie), whose name, from ‘burgeis’, literally means ‘of the towns’. The modern metropolis runs to the rhythm of the capitalist economy and is thus a site of rapid change, the dissolution of previous orders of labour, kinship ties and property ownership. In the modern capitalist city, as Marx famously states, ‘all that is solid melts into air’.⁷ The experience of the city, then, under capitalism, perhaps best captured by Marx’s colleague Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), is one of violence, barbarism, dehumanisation and alienation on the one hand and rapid investment, material, and technological change on the other. As Vidler notes, ‘From Baudelaire … to Engels … the physical fabric of the city was identified as the instrument of a systematised and enforced alienation’ (Vidler 2000, p. 65).

Marx’s fascination at the revolutionary potential inherent within capitalism itself made him no less certain of its barbaric effects. The spaces of the nineteenth-century capitalist city – the factories, workhouses and mills – were the spaces of management of productive bodies; these spaces train the body of the worker. Rather than the worker using the machine, for Marx, the machine, uses the worker, who begins to imitate its mechan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Modern and Postmodern Metropolis or Managing Urban Experience
• 2 Conceptual Constellations, Moments and Flânerie
• 3 The Lowry or Class, Mass Spectatorship and the Image
• 4 The Deep or the Abyss of the Surface
• 5 The Sage or Erasing the Traces, Tracing Erasures
• 6 The Public or the Death and Life of Great British Buildings
• Conclusion
• List of References
• Index