Fundamental Trends in City Development (Urban and Landscape Perspectives)

224 Pages·2008·3.41 MB·English

by  Giovanni Maciocco

Urban and Landscape Perspectives
Volume 1
SeriesEditor
GiovanniMaciocco
EditorialBoard
AbdulKhakee,FacultyofSocialSciences,UmeåUniversity
NormanKrumholz,LevinCollegeofUrbanAffairs,
ClevelandStateUniversity,Ohio
AliMadanipour,SchoolofArchitecture,PlanningandLandscape,
NewcastleUniversity
LeonieSandercock,SchoolofCommunityandRegionalPlanning,Vancouver
FrederickSteiner,SchoolofArchitecture,UniversityofTexas,Austin
ErikSwyngedouw,SchoolofEnvironmentandDevelopment,
UniversityofManchester
RuiYang,School of Architecture, TsinghuaUniversity,Departmentof Landscape
Architecture,Peiking
Forothertitlespublishedinthisseries,goto
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EditorialStaff
IsabelleDoucet
PaolaPittaluga
SilviaSerreli
ProjectAssistants
MonicaJohansson
GiovannaSanna
Translation
ChristineTilley
AimsandScope
UrbanandLandscapePerspectivesisaserieswhichaimsatnurturingtheoreticre-
flection on the city and the territory and working out and applying methods and
techniquesforimprovingourphysicalandsociallandscapes.
Themainissueintheseriesisdevelopedaroundtheprojectualdimension,withthe
objectiveofvisualisingboththe cityandthe territoryfroma particularviewpoint,
whichsinglesouttheterritorialdimensionasthecitysspaceofcommunicationand
negotiation.
Theserieswillfaceemergingproblemsthatcharacterisethedynamicsofcitydevel-
opment,likethenew,freshrelationsbetweenurbansocietiesandphysicalspace,the
righttothecity,urbanequity,theprojectforthephysicalcityasameanstoreveal
civitas, signs of new social cohesiveness, the sense of contemporarypublic space
andthesustainabilityofurbandevelopment.
Concernedwith advancingtheorieson the city, the series resolvesto welcome ar-
ticlesthatfeatureapluralismofdisciplinarycontributionsstudyingformalandin-
formal practices on the project for the city and seeking conceptual and operative
categories capable of understanding and facing the problems inherent in the pro-
foundtransformationsofcontemporaryurbanlandscapes.
Fundamental Trends
in City Development
Giovanni Maciocco
GiovanniMaciocco
ISBN:978-3-540-74178-7 e-ISBN:978-3-540-74179-4
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2007938163
(cid:2)c 2008SpringerScience+BusinessMediaB.V.
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orotherwise,withoutwrittenpermissionfromthePublisher,withtheexception
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To Mariangela, Caterina, Maria Antonietta and Sara
Contents
Three Categories of Utopia.......................................................................1
City Adrift...............................................................................................1
Conservative, Liquidatory and Resistant Utopias...................................3
The Discomposed City...............................................................................7
The Formless City..................................................................................7
Crisis of the Context of Proximity..........................................................9
Crisis of the Ethics of Proximity..........................................................18
Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity............................................22
The Generic City......................................................................................41
The Revenge of Functionalism.............................................................41
Thematisation of the City.....................................................................44
The City as a Simulacrum.....................................................................53
Desired Landscapes..............................................................................57
The Segregated City ................................................................................67
The Urban Project of Inequality...........................................................67
Elitist Segregation as Global Identity...................................................72
Flat Man................................................................................................79
Reinventing the City................................................................................97
Externity................................................................................................97
Recovering Sensitive Knowledge of the City.....................................103
Walking is the “Speech Act” of the City............................................112
“Dynamic Traditionality” as a Requisite of Urban Innovation..........116
Narrating the City Means Designing its Possible Future....................120
Artists Take the City by the Hand......................................................123
Horizons of Contemporary Public Space: Intermediate Spaces.........133
Counterspace and Disenchantment with the Modern City.................138
The “Void” and the City Project.........................................................150
… and the City was Born of Chaos: Designing the City
at its Edges .........................................................................................155
vii
viii Contents
The Territory of the City....................................................................160
Towards a Reinvented City................................................................165
References...............................................................................................183
Index.......................................................................................................199
Name Index.............................................................................................217
Three Categories of Utopia
City Adrift
What do phenomena like sprawl, the “generic city” or urban segregation
have in common with the concept of city? The issue is not so
straightforward: Madame, vous n’auriez pas une question plus petite!
replied Matisse to a woman who had candidly asked the master at a lunch
what he thought of art. The same question, applied to the field – moreover
uncertain and not easily defined – of the city, is not exempt of the same
risks attached to the vastness and complexity of the theme and the dangers
inherent in eclectic, linear, reductionist approaches to problems. This, in
any case, is the query this book departs from, principally due to the
bewilderment we feel in the face of these phenomena found throughout the
urban world, which put our concepts of city to a hard test, or at least those
concepts we consider inherent in the city, such as: interaction between
men, proximity between men and places, solidarity systems, social
mediation between individuals rather than individualism, etc.
We think of sprawl as liquefaction of the city, urban growth without
shape, “the explosion of the city”. The generic city is seen as a
phenomenon of standardisation of life and the space produced by
shopping,1 a primary way of urban life. Urban segregation2 is considered a
phenomenon produced by spatial agglomeration of the new urban elites
that create social spaces which are powerfully structured and separated like
fortresses.3
We are adopting these expressions as the conceptual space for exploring
the “city adrift”, but simultaneously as a space in which to record new
stimuli for the regeneration of that environment which is propitious for
organized life, which still remains the city.
This is a space where urbanists’ utopias unfold, the last to preserve the
utopian plea, as David Riesman maintains in his famous essay The Lonely
Crowd (Riesman 1950). In spite of its age, this is a premonitory essay,
where Riesman inquires into the American social character – and to a large
1
2 Three Categories of Utopia
extent that of all the developed Western world – which was formed in the
mass society. Its current interest lies in the introduction of the theme of
inclusion or exclusion of man in the metropolis, pursued by a sense of
solitude and anxiety for fear of not being accepted. This is hetero-directed
man, guided from the outside, whom Riesman saw emerging in that
America on its way to becoming a mass organised, consumer civilisation.
In hetero-directed man the category of failure is fear, as in fear of
exclusion. Just as in the self-directed Renaissance man and man of the
Protestant Reform, where the individual found his own compass and his
own objectives within himself, the category of failure is guilt. Whilst in
man directed by tradition in the Middle Ages, an immobile society, where
children continued doing the work of their fathers, the category of failure
is shame.
One of the main forms of spatial instability of the city is produced
precisely by the consumer society and mass organisation, dealt with in
Riesman’s theories and presented in contemporary terms by Koolhaas in
the generic city of pervasive shopping.
It is a spatial tendency that in its turn generates loneliness and a loss of
public space as a place where personal uneasiness may be transformed into
a social project.4 This is the thesis Zygmunt Bauman develops in his essay
In Search of Politics (Bauman 1999), placing himself as Riesman’s
successor in our times. The forms used to explore types of sociality
change: people, in the pre-industrial epoch, crowd, in the industrial epoch,
(dismayed) multitude, in our post-industrial epoch.
To explore what we call the city adrift, we will analyse some of the
urbanists’ positions, but more generally, those of scholars of the city, using
as analytical category the utopia5 with which urbanist flirting, referred to
by Riesman, continues, and which Bloch describes as an internal path,
preparing the meeting with the Self:

after this internal vertical movement: may a new expanse appear, the world of the soul,
the external, cosmic function of utopia, maintained against misery, death, the husk–realm
of mere physical nature. Only in us does this light still burn, and we are beginning a
fantastic journey toward it, a journey toward the interpretation of our waking dream, toward
the implementation of the central concept of utopia. To find it, to find the right thing, for
which it is worthy to live, to be organized, and to have time: that is why we go, why we cut
new, metaphysically constitutive paths, summon what is not, build into the blue, and build
ourselves into the blue, and there seek the true, the real, where the merely factual disappear
6
– incipit vita nova. (Bloch 1918).