Paradoxical Urbanism

Anti-Urban Currents in Modern Urbanism

Malcolm Miles

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9789811563409
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811563416
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Modernist urbanism seems progressive, even Utopian: design for a better world through a democratic and humane built environment. But two currents undermine this vision from within: an Arcadianism which turns to a rural idyll as retreat from change and the effects of industrialization; and an instrumentalism by which the humane vision becomes prescriptive and anti-democratic. Malcolm Miles argues that these two currents undermine modernism's progressive vision. This book examines the roots of modernist urbanism in the seamless, self-contained systems of Cartesian space; and identifies contradictions within modernist urbanism in its instrumentalism and reliance on de-politicised professional expertise. Miles adroitly reviews the postmodern culture of industrial ruinscapes; and posits that if cities are to be places of proximity, diversity, mobility and agency, this will require a move from modernist instrumentalism to a creative and radically democratic co-production of the built environment.

© The Author(s) 2021

M. MilesParadoxical Urbanismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6341-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Colliding Utopias

Malcolm Miles¹

(1)

Bradford-on-Avon, UK

Abstract

This chapter argues that the concept of the City—distinct from specific cities—is idealised, in part in reaction to industrialisation and cultural representations of inner-city dirt and crime. This negativity denies the benefits of freedom from rural ties to the land and kin, favouring nostalgia for imagined pasts. Yet the conditions of city life – living among people from different backgrounds, social and geographical mobility, and the agency of citizens—are liberating. The chapter reflects on the meanings of the terms ‘city’ and ‘urban’; and on the contradictory term urban village. It observes the rise of suburbia, and the search for stability in refusals of the contingencies of city living. Finally, it turns to sociology, and a gap between a regressive nostalgia and a recognition of engagement in city life’s perpetual changes.

Keywords

CityUrbanUrban villageCommunitySocietySuburb

End Abstract

Words carry baggage. Their meanings are mediated between the rules of a language and its everyday uses within the social, cultural, economic and political conditions of a society. One aim of this chapter is to draw out different meanings and associations which indicate how the concepts ‘city’ and ‘urban’ are understood, and might be questioned. Another is to suggest that certain conditions found in cities, such as a high density of population, or a diversity of people and interests, may be either threatening or a means to a liberating way of life which is not possible in smaller settlements. In the next chapter I examine the allure of village life, as mythicised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that it undermines the potential for liberation in cities. Here, I begin by looking at words, then move to conditions and the range of representations which shaped how conditions are apprehended.

Words and Places

The words city and urban allude to large human settlements, but with different associations. In English, urban is rarely used before the nineteenth century,¹ but urbane, from the same root, means courteous or educated, linked to living in a city with institutions of learning and an elite able to develop ideas of taste. This may seem to be of interest to philologists but not much help in ordinary life yet words and meanings exhibit frames of meaning which are ingrained but not fixed. The idealism attached to the concept of the city derives in part from the Greek word polis, which means the democratic city, informing the English word political. But idealism reveals its undercurrent here, too, because the policy of classical Athens was the preserve of around 5% of its population, all wealthy, free-born men. The political is a matter of power relations—who is included or not in determining the future, and the image, of a city—while the interests of different groups may be not only oppositional, but also overlapping. As political scientist Margaret Kohn argues,

Urban space is often characterised by contrasts and contradictions that exist side by side; rich and poor; production, consumption and reproduction; decay, renewal and reappropriation. Their juxtaposition in space is a glaringly visible reminder of the impossibility of achieving complete control, order and homogeneity. It is the quality that makes urban space at once threatening, fascinating and haunting.²

Kohn cites critical theorist Seyla Benhabib’s discussion of the term actuality to denote, not a situation as it is but, ‘what it could be but is not.’³ In 1960s Paris, the Situationist group of students and artists made unplanned detours in the city to find sites of revolutionary pasts, and, ‘a poetry made by the communal appropriation of the past in the present.’⁴ Today, in not dissimilar detours, urban explorers transgress spatial and legal boundaries to find what might be equivalent traces in derelict interiors, underground passages and de-industrialised sites. For geographer Oli Mould they, ‘defy the prevailing narrative’ of late capitalism to see signs of alternative pasts and futures.⁵ I return to this in Chap. 5.

To return to the terms urban and city, sociologist Richard Sennett writes of three kinds of space in medieval Paris: the cité included the royal palace and Cathedral; merchants lived and traded in bourgs on both banks of the Seine; everyone else lived in communes, with no defensive walls. Outside the cité, buildings were separated only by the space necessary for circulation. The pathways of one commune did not link to those of another. Shop-keepers used hired thugs to attack their rivals’ customers. Street life was vicious.⁶

Sennett’s realist picture of medieval city life contrasts with the idealised picture of cities in, say, late medieval and early Renaissance art: white towers and crenelated walls adorned by brightly coloured pennants; and stone gates to protect the city from the world outside. But the prevailing idea of a city—or the city, like a citadel—is shaped by such representations, a legacy of the culture of a privileged class which retains currency as a vehicle for projection of how cities might be, of what would be nice.

For geographer Edward Soja, city plans are determined by, ‘mental or cognitive mappings of urban reality and the interpretive grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate and decide to act.’⁷ Interpretive grids become ingrained but the role of academic work is to interrupt this, rupturing any generalised notion of what a city is in favour of investigation of the specific conditions and experiences of what cities (plural) are. For Soja, this questions a convention that villages came first, and grew into towns, then cities. He shows that this was not always the case by citing archaeological evidence from Çatal Hüyük, Anatolia.⁸

In Çatal Hüyük, communication was by rooftops reached by ladders from courtyards. As its population grew the city expanded by building outward. Exterior walls had no windows or doors, and might be reinforced. But this ad hoc expansion was not informal but orderly, as archaeologist James Mellaart writes, using standardised house plans, brick sizes, doorway heights, and measures of a human hand (8 cm) and foot (32 cm).⁹ As cultivation and herding spread in a widening belt around the city, shepherds built huts for overnight stays, which were the first villages.

Çatal Hüyük is unlike a modern Western city in both form and trajectory but contributes to an understanding of cities as sites of high-density dwelling, division of labour, and a specific spatial practice. The rest is a matter of negotiation, which is also what cities are about.

Representations and Narratives

In sharp contrast to Çatal Hüyük, classical Athens is said to express the democratic ideal. As noted above, this is illusory. Athenian society relied on slave labour and foreign conquest; it had a limited democracy which excluded women, foreigners and slaves, leaving 5% of the population, all free-born, wealthy men, to participate in the assembly (pnyx), where political decisions were made. In the agora, a marketplace surrounded by booths for administrative purposes, a colonnade where citizens of sufficient leisure could converse offered debate. Yet there were few public events in the agora and the myth of Athenian democracy persists because that is how this history was written, by a class for whom the presiding image was convenient.

Other prevailing images are informed by medieval sites, such as Sienna, or San Gimignano in Tuscany. Geographer John Gold notes that Cumbernauld in Scotland, built in the 1960s as a series of concrete structures on a ridge, has, ‘the symbolic appearance of a medieval Italian hilltop citadel.’¹⁰ Life in a medieval citadel was, as in Paris, more violent than that expected in Cumbernauld; and Gold makes the point critically, not to affirm the idea. But myths of the city are persistent. Industrial cities conjure smoke and grime; but Sennett writes that, in the bourgs of Paris, ‘the economy promised to set [citizens] free from the inherited dependence embodied in the feudal labour contract.’¹¹ For an emerging bourgeois class a bourg was free from feudal ties. Merchants formed trade networks, such as the Hanseatic League of ports around the Baltic Sea, and negotiated terms with ruling dynasties. On their gates, these ports displayed the message, ‘city air makes one free’ (Stadt Luft macht frei).¹² As Sennett writes, ‘Profit lay on the horizon of the possible, in the la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Colliding Utopias
• 2. From Arcadia to Plotlands
• 3. Drawing a Line
• 4. The Contradictions of Modernism
• 5. Post-industrial Ruinscapes
• 6. An Urban Revolution?
• Back Matter