Pasteurized and Homogenized: Modern Urbanism an D Human Needs

2013

Long before 2008, when the world’s urban population surpassed the rural for the first time, cities and their populations have drawn outsized attention by all kinds of scholars—less for their unique individual histories than for their ability to represent the human experience. Giovanni Botero (1544-1617), musing on the variability of population growth over time, wrote in 1588, “Let us settle this question insofar as it concerns cities, however, because that will also settle it for the world as a whole.” To Botero the world does not hold cities; cities contain the world within them. Such a breathtaking claim of universality rests on the Aristotelian assumption that cities are a natural outgrowth of human nature: study cities and one will understand what makes people tick. And while scholars of the present may have a less rosy outlook on cities than did Botero, who saw reflected there both human and divine achievement, the universal quality of cities and their centrality for understand...

Technological networks (water, gas, electricity, information etc.) are constitutive parts of the urban. They are the mediators through which the perpetual process of transformation of nature into city takes place. In this article, we take water and water networks as an emblematic example to excavate the shifting meanings of urban technological networks during modernity. Indeed, as water becomes commodified and fetishized, nature itself becomes re-invented in its urban form (aesthetic, moral, cultural codings of hygiene, purity, cleanliness etc.) and severed from the grey, ‘muddy’, kaleidoscopic meanings and uses of water as a mere use-value. Burying the flow of water via subterranean and often distant pinpointed technological mediations (dams, purification plants, pumping stations) facilitates and contributes to masking the social relations through which the metabolic urbanization of water takes place. The veiled subterranean networking of water facilitates the severing of the intimate bond between use value, exchange value and social power. We argue that during early modernity, technologies themselves became enshrined as the sources of all the wonders of the city’s water. Dams, water towers, sewage systems and the like were celebrated as glorious icons, carefully designed, ornamented and prominently located in the city, celebrating the modern promise of progress. During twentieth-century high-modernity, the symbolic and material shrines of progress started to lose their mobilizing powers and began to disappear from the cityscape. Water towers, dams and plants became mere engineering constructs, often abandoned and dilapidated, while the water flows disappeared underground and in-house. They also disappeared from the urban imagination. Urban networks became ‘urban fetishes’ during early modernity, ‘compulsively’ admired and marvelled at, materially and culturally supporting and enacting an ideology of progress. The subsequent failure of this ‘ideology of progress’ is paralleled by their underground disappearance during high-modernity, while the abandonment of their ‘urban dowry’ announced a recasting of modernity in new ways. We conclude that the dystopian underbelly of the city that at times springs up in the form of accumulated waste, dirty water, pollution, or social disintegration, produces a sharp contrast when set against the increasingly managed clarity of the urban environment. These contradictions are becoming difficult to be contained or displaced. Les grands réseaux techniques (eau, gaz, electricité, information etc.) font partie intégrale de l’urbain. Ce sont les médiateurs du processus continuel de la transformation de la nature urbaine. Dans cet article, nous prenons comme exemple emblématique l’eau et les réseaux d’eau afin d’explorer les significations changeantes des réseaux de technologie urbaine durant la période moderne. Alors que l’eau devient une marchandise fétichisée, la nature elle-même est reinventée dans ses formes urbaines (esthétique, morale, codes culturels d’hygiène, purité, propreté etc.) et coupée des significations grises, ‘ternes’, kaléidoscopiques, et des utilisations de l’eau comme une simple valeur utilitaire. L’ensevelissement de l’eau par les médiations technologiques spécifiques souterraines et souvent distantes (barrages, usines de purification, stations de pompage) aide et contribue à masquer les relations sociales à travers lesquelles prend place l’urbanisation métabolique de l’eau. Les réseaux d’eau souterrains voilés facilitent la coupure du lien intime entre la valeur utilitaire, la valeur d’échange, et le pouvoir social. Nous soutenons que durant la première période de modernité les technologies elles-mêmes devinrent inscrites comme sources de toutes les merveilles de l’eau de la ville. Les barrages, les réserves d’eau, les égoûts et d’autres éléments similaires étaient célébrés comme des icônes glorieux, conçus avec soin, ornés, et situés de façon prominente dans la ville, célébrant les promesses modernes de progrès. Durant la période de haute-modernité du vingtième siècle, les lieux de pélerinage matériels et symboliques célébrant le progrès ont commencéà perdre leur pouvoir de mobilisation et à dispara?‘tre du paysage de la ville. Les réservoirs d’eau, les barrages et les installations industrielles devinrent simplement des constructions d’ingénieurs, souvent abandonnées et délabrées, alors que les courants d’eau disparurent sous terre et à l’intérieur. Tous s’effacèrent aussi de l’imagination urbaine. Les réseaux urbains devinrent des ‘fétiches urbains’ durant la première période de modernité, causant un émerveillement et une admiration ‘obligatoires’, culturellement et matériellement représentant et soutenant une idéologie de progrès. L’échec ultérieur de cette ‘idéologie de progrès’ a son parallèle dans leur disparition sous terre durant la période de haute modernité, alors que l’abandon de leur ‘dot urbaine’ annonçait un remaniement de la modernité dans des directions nouvelles. Nous concluons que le bas-ventre dystopique de la ville qui surgit de temps à autre sous la forme d’accumulation de déchets, d’eau sale, de pollution, ou de désintégration sociale, produit un contraste marqué avec la clarté de plus en plus organisée de l’environnement urbain. Ces contradictions deviennent difficiles à contenir ou à supplanter.

Paris has long retained a status in the popular imagination as a revolutionary city, a city in revolt. This indelible reputation has its origins in the French Revolution and bleeds into the late nineteenth-century, across the July Revolution of 1830, the June Rebellion of 1832, the February Revolution of 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1872. Through the twentieth-century, this narrative contends, and indeed into the twenty-first, the people of Paris remained threateningly revolutionary (flaring up in soixante-huit) but were more or less effectively suppressed by a state and city that had learned from, and adapted to, those explicitly revolutionary years of the long nineteenth-century. At the center of this structural adaptation, within both the popular and academic imagination, are the urban transformations enacted under Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine. Not only are these changes understood as having been enacted in direct response to fears of barricade-building revolutionaries, but they are also thought to have fundamentally changed the landscape of Paris - creating the modern city that we know today. Though the Paris Commune appears to be perhaps the most obvious counter-argument to this anti-revolutionary narrative, occurring, as it did, after Haussmann's tenure had ended, it is difficult and misleading to take this revolution out of the context of the Franco-Prussian War and the resulting siege of Paris. More broadly, however, it seems myopic to frame the pacification of the Parisian population that ushered in the twentieth-century as merely a result of the material reality of a new urban landscape.

EGA Revista de Expresión Gráfica Arquitectónica, 2020

Este artículo examina los dibujos de Jean Renaudie para la nueva ciudad de Vaudreuil (1967-1968). El análisis de su estructura, su cromatismo y su formalidad, situará aquel conjunto de croquis como el punto de inflexión hacia la fusión de arquitectura y urbanismo en un marco teórico único. El desarrollo abordará el propósito de Renaudie de expresar la complejidad y el deseo de cohesión social, en un grafismo dispuesto a exponer su idea de “la ville est une combinatoire” frente al zonning funcionalista de la Carta de Atenas, fuertemente criticado por su generación. El objetivo será demostrar si aquella abstracción gráfica sugería ese “espacio absolutamente otro”, capaz de alojar la nueva sociedad por la que abogaba la teoría social de sus referentes intelectuales -Althusser, Foucault, Lévy Strauss, Lefebvre, Marcuse-. Y si, a su vez, supuso el germen de materializaciones posteriores como las desarrolladas en los conjuntos urbanos de Ivry-sur-Seine, Givors o Saint Martin d’Hères.

Journal of Urban Design, 2009

recipes for success. The last part presents a useful 'how to' list, something good to copy and give to local officials when discussing how best to design public open spaces. Along the way, the author discusses the perennial question if good public places are purposely designed or simply evolve naturally over time. Shaftoe, like others before him, clearly documents the ingredients needed for creating well-used public spaces based on human needs. He presents many of the features necessary to make good open spaces such as movable seating, shelter from the elements and the importance of people watching and providing food. Yet I fear that current practice may not be as warm and cuddly as Shaftoe suggests. We still know too little about the meanings that people attach to public spaces as well as the expanding typology of spaces emerging today. The increasing cultural diversity of cities is leading to spaces that are more controlled and specialized and more exclusive than inclusive. Users such as new immigrant groups, teenagers, and the elderly are too often left out of consideration or even purposely designed out. Conflict and struggle over space are more common in cities than ever before. This book raises but does not fully address some of the more important theoretical and applied issues facing public space today. We need to enlarge the research agenda on public space to understand fully the meaning of open public urban spaces and the role of urban design in shaping their future. Convivial Urban Spaces is a useful and comprehensive primer for understanding the human dimensions of public space. Students and practitioners will find it an accessible and hopeful account of public space design today. It does not break new ground on the emerging role of public space in cities, but adds another voice to the social requirements for making good public spaces. More importantly, it highlights the contributions urban designers and landscape architects can make in shaping the public realm of towns and cities.

This article explores the role of individuality in Europe's urban past. In so doing, it builds on Georg Simmel's famous article 'The metropolis and mental life' as well as recent work especially by Bernard Lahire, Niklas Luhmann and Uwe Schimank. The article brings out key sociological insights and links them to a range of studies by urban historians, which are thus revisited from a fresh angle. The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern city: first, sites of social and cultural life; secondly, politics and government; thirdly, nonhumans such as material objects, animals and natural elements.

Planning Perspectives, 2016

Prior to the Second World War Europe’s ruling classes had no perception of the destiny of the modern city. This despite the fact that almost a century earlier Baudelaire had intoned the decadence of their most beautiful city. Proud of their ordered, authoritative, and often authoritarian capitals, Europeans saw history as a course predestined to create that miracle of civilisation exemplified by the metropolis of the old continent: wealthy, with a rigid social hierarchy, symbolically, physically and culturally rooted in history, firmly established at the summit of a providential, though still highly dramatic process. The metropolises of Europe were perceived, in the end, as organisms at the pinnacle of their conscious maturity and the height of their industrial and financial might. They appeared to posses an ability to self-regulate internal and external conflicts, imposing models of assimilation and reciprocal adaptation upon sources of imbalances, conceived by imagining the possible effects of disturbances and anticipating their transformations – thus adopting planning in the form of a series of direct systematic operations. Two years later, in 1939, Claude Lévi Strauss went much further; his direct experience with São Paulo, Brazil (and New York) convinced him that the modern metropolis, which he observed and which observed him with a thousand hidden eyes as he, a foreigner, crossed it, cannot be judged according to the parameters of architecture (thus also excluding those of planning), but with those of the landscape; and to the same degree that everything in the natural landscape is in transformation, simultaneously luxuriance and putrefaction, he claimed that «the cities of the New World […] pass from first youth to decrepitude with no intermediary stage». With no intermediate stage: this is the most important clue, the tag that for the great anthropologist implicitly, though peremptorily, invalidated the idea that the cities of the New World are truly part of history. Lévi Strauss, who certainly learned to be a narrator of cultures and ethnographic contexts as Walter Benjamin learned to be a narrator of cities, froze – despite being captivated – in front of the metropolises of the New World, home to a coexistence between past and present, and between proximity and distance. Perhaps the time has come to truly study the world’s metropolises as individuals in the midst – or at the beginning – of their evolutionary age seeking to establish their stage of development and that of their parts, in the concreteness of reality. The term stage is used here to refer to a recognisable and well-characterised structure that is organised and relatively balanced – equivalent to one of the stages of Jean Piaget’s theory of development. This would make it possible in the most appropriate terms to solicit different urban communities to autonomously imagine the effects of on-going disturbances, accompanying them as they realistically express their fears and desires and anticipate the form and objectives of tangible operations to be implemented within the limits of a community’s available resources and level of organisation and the pedagogic capacities of the city and its government.