Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue 9780812209013

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Rethinking the American City

A r c h i t e c t u r e | T e c h n o lo gy | C u lt u r e Series Editors: Klaus Benesch, Jeffrey L. Meikle, David E. Nye, and Miles Orvell

Rethinking the American City An International Dialogue

Edited by Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch foreword by Dolores Hayden

u n i v e r s i t y o f p e n n s y lva n i a p r e ss p h i l ad e l p h i a

Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rethinking the American city : an international dialogue / edited by Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch ; foreword by Dolores Hayden. — 1st ed.   p. cm. — (Architecture, technology, culture)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8122-4561-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)   1. City planning—United States—History—21st century. 2. Cities and towns—United States—History—21st century. 3. Architecture and society—United States—History—21st century. I. Orvell, Miles. II. Benesch, Klaus, 1958–. III. Hayden, Dolores. IV. Series: Architecture, technology, culture. NA9105.R48 2014 720.973'09051—dc23 2013021874

Contents



Foreword  Dolores Hayden

vii



Introduction  Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch

xi



1  Energy  David E. Nye

1



2  Sustainability  Andrew Ross

29



3  The Multicultural City  Mabel O. Wilson

49



4  Ruins  Miles Orvell

71



5  Aesthetic Space  David M. Lubin

93



6  Designing the City  Albena Yaneva

119



7  Mobility  Klaus Benesch

143



8  The Digital City  Malcolm McCullough

167



9  Future City  Jeffrey L. Meikle

193



Conclusion 215

List of Contributors

219

Notes 223

 v

contents

Index 233

vi 

Acknowledgments 245

Foreword  Dolores Hayden

two or three decades, researchers from many academic disciplines have explored the history of the built environment, enlarging the history of architecture from the aesthetic study of individual works by well-known architects to the economic, political, social, and cultural analysis of ordinary buildings. Ordinary buildings are shaped by many actors: construction laborers as well as developers, residents as well as landlords, community organizers as well as architects. Everyday buildings are planned, designed, built, inhabited, appropriated, celebrated, despoiled, and discarded over long stretches of time, so study of the built environment may reveal much more about everyday life than the analysis of high-style architecture. Anthropologists and geographers have joined historians of architecture, technology, and cities in research on the built environment, adding the insights of qualitative social science and bringing the geographers’ term cultural landscape to the study of places as the combination of natural and built environments. Many Americans turned away from reading about the built environment in the 1950s and 1960s because they were profoundly disappointed with mass suburbs, interstate highways, and urban renewal. Popular disillusionment only grew as the ruthless demolition of older urban neighborhoods occurred on an unprecedented scale, and bad building patterns became commonplace as government subsidies for new construction favored suburban malls, fast-food outlets, and office parks. Academics and practitioners compounded the problem in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s by wrapping discussions of architecture and planning in impenetrable jargon while ignoring the vast influence of the real estate lobby on public policy. Historians who believe in the possibility of popular reengagement with American places are now trying to interest the public in historic In the past

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Dolores Hayden

and contemporary sites as the material expression of culture and politics. To that end, the authors in this volume have created a lively interdisciplinary discussion about architecture, technology, and culture, and their efforts are similar to those of organizations founded in recent decades to support broad investigations of the built environment, including the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, the Urban History Association, and the Vernacular Architecture Forum. (Conferences held by these groups regularly attract two or three hundred scholars, and presentations of research may extend beyond academic groups to public humanities venues.) Yet for all the vitality of this field, definitions of key terms such as space, place, public, private, urban, and suburban remain controversial. There are ongoing debates about the most interesting spatial scale to study: is it the building, the neighborhood, the city, the metropolitan region, the nation, or the globe? And how much does analysis of the built environment need to be visual and spatial versus social, economic, or political? Economic questions often provoke highly critical analyses of capitalism, as well as more positive assessments of real estate development as progress. There is much to argue about, especially when contemporary building projects are under scrutiny and questions of public policy may be involved. The nine essays gathered in this volume respond to these debates and offer diverse ways to approach the history of architecture, technology, and culture in our present time. The authors examine a wide range of topics, from the design of transportation systems, workplaces, and housing to public art, urban ruins, and futurist visions of the city. They utilize many different analytical frameworks for probing specific examples of land use, infrastructure, and building design across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Because the authors conferred and recorded extended conversations about each essay, thoughtful responses follow each piece, expanding the original contributions with pointed questions about definitions of terms and methods of research. There is some sharp disagreement as well as excited accord. The commentaries and the authors’ replies (in the dialogue section following each essay) provide the kind viii

Foreword

of intellectual exchange that often occurs within academic peer-review processes, behind the scenes, before publication. The concluding section of the book explores some of the common threads in these papers. Narratives of progress are contrasted with narratives of decline. There is a shared concern for analyzing economic, social, and political power, one participant notes. Another reports that “the voices of ordinary people are becoming a little more audible.” And a third commends sustained thinking about architecture, technology, and culture, and the ways they interact. While specialists in the history of the American city will enjoy this collection of essays and the provocative dialogue they spark, these investigations of the processes of shaping space will also appeal to readers in many interdisciplinary programs, including American studies, cultural studies, urban studies, visual culture, technology studies, and environmental studies.

ix

introduction Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch

As early as 1903, the German sociologist Georg Simmel defined urban

spaces as sites of increased human interdependence and interconnection, where “the relationships and concerns of the typical metropolitan resident are so manifold and complex that . . . their relationships and activities intertwine with one another into a many-membered organism.”1 To study cities thus also means to study human interaction and to explore the possibilities for common ground in an increasingly divided, competitive global world. As Simmel claimed more than a century ago, cities are enormously complex organisms, with ramifications for practically every aspect of human life. Whether we think of them as incubators of new forms of metropolitan mentalities (as Simmel believed) or simply as architectural facts bred by spatial and economic necessities, cities have become both the nemesis and laboratory of human life in the new millennium. The editors and authors of the present collection, Rethinking the American City, share this notion of the city as a critical social and architectural space. Foregrounding the most pressing issues of modern, globalized societies in the twenty-first century, cities have once again moved to the center of intellectual and political debates. Whether we look at class issues and social justice (such as housing rights, eviction politics, or the transformation of public into private spaces); at racial or gender concerns (as in ethnic spatialization and the unequal structuring of urban spaces); at environmental issues (as caused by the urbanization of nature and the devastating ecological footprints of mega-cities); or at the effects of globalization (as in the largely transnational, multi-ethnic “instant” or “arrival cities” populated by migrants and refugees), cities provide vitally meaningful case studies for both “good” and “bad” politics.2 Two recent works—one by Mike Davis, the other by Benjamin Barber— written from different perspectives, together highlight the centrality of the  xi

Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch

city to any consideration of the future. In an essay discussing the impending consequences of global warming, urban historian Davis notes that even though the causes for climate change and ecological collapse are manifold, carbon footprints in the urban regions of the Northern Hemisphere remain largely responsible for destroying climate stability.3 Heating and cooling urban environments, transportation into and within the city, and urban industries and workplaces all combine to usher in, Davis argues, a new, drastically changing ecological epoch. What make urban areas so environmentally unsustainable, however, are precisely those features that “are most anti-urban or sub-urban”: explosive horizontal expansion, urban sprawl dictated by speculators and developers, gentrification and extreme spatial segregation, absence of democratic control over planning, and other such situations. By contrast, as Davis claims, qualities that are most “classically” urban seem to point to a different, more virtuous ecological future: urban growth designed to preserve open spaces and vital natural systems by well-defined boundaries between city and countryside; rigid implantation of structures that can recycle and reduce waste; large domains of public or nonprofit housing; spatial integration of work, recreation, and home life, and so forth. Davis thus articulates a striking paradox: “that the single most important cause of global warming—the urbanization of humanity—is also potentially the principal solution to the problem of human survival in the later twenty-first century.” One does not need to share Davis’s enthusiasm in embracing socialist urban utopias as a solution to global ecological crisis in order to acknowledge the city’s preeminent role in providing a template—perhaps the only one—for a socially and ecologically sustainable form of communal living. Whatever the dire consequences of urban sprawl and densely populated mega-cities, cities—as both a form of social self-organization and as an architectural expression of the human need for interaction and protection—are here to stay. Whether we envision them as “Aerotropoli,” as in John Kasarda’s mobility-centered version of the “way we live next,” or as rigidly engineered, sustainable experiments in social living (modeled after early modernist social housing projects of the Bauhaus), there is little doubt that cities spell out the most promising xii

introduction

attempt yet to engage with the ecological and political challenges of an overpopulated, globalized world. With a somewhat different thrust, this is also the argument of political scientist Benjamin Barber, who argues in If Mayors Ruled the World that cities have been the foundation of democracy because their population is naturally interdependent and interconnected.4 City mayors and representatives are frequently pressed to engineer creative solutions to nagging problems such as transportation, sewerage, or waste disposal, and they thus tend to “get things done” regardless of political convictions and divisive ideologies. Barber’s is a fervent appraisal of the city’s capacity to provide governance solutions to the degradation of political and democratic practices on a national and global level. The challenge for Barber then is how to reimagine the face-to-face participatory township of the ancient world in an increasingly global, networked, interdependent world of mega-cities. Cities may offer us the opportunity to preserve a vital democratic culture vis-à-vis the challenges of globalization and ecological crisis, focusing on their proven capacity for networking and cooperation. Regardless of their respective methodologies and obvious political differences, both Davis and Barber emphasize the importance of rethinking the city as a laboratory for alternative social and political practices. They also stress its role as an “architectural engine” (Le Corbusier) to produce certain types of “good” behavior and to keep other behaviors, with negative consequences for the public and municipal good (as caused by the neoliberal version of globalized capitalism), from getting out of hand.5 Convinced that cities deserve renewed attention because they mirror many of the most important issues that have dominated cultural and American studies for several decades now, the editors of Rethinking the American City decided to engage a group of internationally renowned cultural studies scholars, urban historians, and architects in a conversation on American cities. We had recently initiated a new series, Architecture, Technology, Culture, and we wanted above all to exemplify the interdisciplinary practices that lay behind the field we were trying to represent, which we thought of as centered on the idea of technique as Nobert Wiener xiii

Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch

understood the term—signifying the larger aesthetic and intellectual order of a period. Our editors—Klaus Benesch, Jeffrey Meikle, David Nye, and Miles Orvell—accordingly invited six scholars to join us: Margaret Crawford, David Lubin, Malcolm McCullough, Andrew Ross, Mabel Wilson, and Albena Yaneva. We described the project to our participants as an effort to conduct a “conceptual inventory” (borrowing the phrase from anthropologist Paul Rabinow); we depicted it as “an examination of some of the leading concepts and tools that govern our thinking about space, with an eye to their genealogy and their usefulness to the future.” In doing so, we were guided by a number of key words that demarcate both the broad view we want to take of our subject and the scope of the city as a social, historical, and also imagined space. As the organizing editor, Orvell developed a set of terms that comprise current thinking about the city: energy, sustainability, the multicultural city, ruins, aesthetic space, designing the city, mobility, the digital city, the future city. But we do not think anyone would argue that there are many other possibilities, and we offer the set here as representative but surely not exhaustive. Each speaker was assigned a topic, and the participant was invited to offer a paper that would then be the basis of an extended conversation. We liked the idea of holding a conversation in order to see what synergy might develop from a group of diverse people focusing their attention on a series of topics of common interest. The recorded conversations would be edited to reduce redundancy and would appear, with the original papers, as part of an integral chapter.6 Obviously, this was something of an experiment, although the idea of recording scholarly dialogue and discussion has some precedents.7 What we were attempting was at once focused and discursive, with each presentation centered on a topic, a set of questions, and some visual images that were circulated in advance in order to give us all a sense of the whole. Taken together, the topic assignments were meant to provide a broad coverage of the field but also to conform to our sense of the participant’s recognized interests. In the event, some speakers requested a modification of their topic, and others interpreted it according to their ongoing research interests. Most xiv

introduction

speakers responded to the images presented to them initially as prompts; others brought their own or supplemented the images with a battery of new ones to illustrate their talks. Each chapter in this volume begins with an image designed to represent the topic to follow, while in the essays, some of our authors refer to additional images that were either initially supplied or else were brought by the speaker. The extended conversations are printed here immediately following each individual essay and usually begin with responses by two assigned “first responders.” I think it is fair to say that for the participants, it was a rare luxury to be able to spend thirty or forty minutes responding to a single paper, allowing us the opportunity to have thoughts and second thoughts and to react to one another with a sense of spontaneity that encouraged speculative thinking. And the fact that we were spending these two days together gave us as well the opportunity to cast our thoughts backward and forward across the topics, seeing connections that might not have appeared initially. The conversations themselves, following the papers, seemed to us to bring many facets of the original talk to light, as well as to excite new paths of inquiry; there is an inevitably desultory nature to these colloquies but also a circling back to key ideas as we try to refine our thinking. Our brief concluding conversation, at the end of this volume, does not promise a definitive conclusion or summation, but several strands became visible to us as we reflected on the papers and conversations—about the process of “creative destruction,” about the politics of urban form, about the layered form of the city, about future possibilities for urban space, about an ideal balance between human needs and space, about pessimism balanced by optimism, about trying to make sense of the messiness (in the fullest sense of that word) of space and place, about ways of inhabiting and appropriating urban space, and about the relationship between America and the rest of the world in what appears to be the twilight of American global power. Why Munich? the reader may be wondering. Most simply, because we were guests of our editorial chairman, Klaus Benesch, who was able to arrange funding for the conference at Amerika Haus. And we were all xv

Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch

acutely aware of where we were during these meeting days—in a beautiful city that was not only filled with awful memories of German and European twentieth-century history but that offered a model of forward-looking thinking about some of the issues we were discussing. Talking about the United States from a position outside of it gave us all a sense of distance, literal and metaphoric, but also a sense of comparison—that America was part of a larger world of interconnecting politics, technology, and spatial designs and that we must understand the culture of the United States in this larger transnational perspective. Postscript. One invited speaker who could not attend because of other commitments was Dolores Hayden, who has since the 1970s helped define the cultural study of space.8 We were delighted to have her “participate” in the conference, after the fact, by way of her foreword to this volume.

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Rethinking the American City

Horse-drawn wagons and carriages, an electric trolley car, and pedestrians congest a cobblestone Philadelphia street in 1897. National Archives.

1

EnergY  David E. Nye

provide a capsule history of the role of energy in American urban transportation. Imagine, first, an image of late nineteenthcentury Broadway, in New York City, with parallel tracks, on one of which is an electric streetcar and on the other a horse-drawn car. The second moment is on a busy New York street corner, where cars, pedestrians, and horse-drawn vehicles again share the same space. The third moment leaps three generations forward, to an enormous freeway interchange in Los Angeles. The fourth instance suggests roads not taken: instead of highway systems, cities might have developed mass transit of various kinds, including aerial tramways such as one that operates in Portland, Oregon. Finally, the fifth instance is a high-speed rail station design for Anaheim, California, the station itself powered by solar energy. These five moments together propose a narrative. They move from the densely populated urban city of the Progressive era to the urban sprawl of the present, from collective transport to the individualistic automobile to the current search for mass transit alternatives. In a very real sense, this narrative and these spaces are central to any analysis of the American city’s development since circa 1880. But the story is, of course, far richer than this initial sketch might suggest. I want to embroider on these examples, to write what Clifford Geertz would call a “thick description” of the energies and processes just described. This analysis relies on the study of American energy regimes laid out in my Consuming Power (1998), where I argued for the primacy of consumer demand rather than taking the usual focus on the industries of supply (coal, oil, gas, etc.) in understanding the path of U.S. development, an argument that rejects technological determinism. It may feel as though technical systems automatically drive events, but the histories of energy and of transportation Just five moments

1

David E. Nye

are better understood as the technological momentum of systems put in place at an earlier time.1 Thus the average American citizen may feel forced to own a car in order to live an ordinary life, but the car itself did not cause this state of affairs. Rather, the transportation choices made generations ago have been embedded in society and are difficult to change. The five historical examples discussed below are highly suggestive when seen in this light, and taken together, they raise two questions. Will the United States overcome the technological momentum of the automobile and redevelop its central cities? Will the United States recover the shared social spaces that once were so common in its urban life? Returning to the opening example, you would see that even a street as important as Broadway was not paved with asphalt, but with wood, at the turn of the century. This was by no means unusual. New York streets first started to be macadamized and then asphalted in the 1870s. Yet it took decades for all the streets to be paved, even in New York. Portland cement roads were also being built after 1894. Sanitary reformers promoted these efforts in order to reduce the mud, dust, and dried horse manure. Pressure to pave the roads also came from bicycle enthusiasts, who numbered over one million by 1900. In 1905, when there were still few automobiles, 161,000 miles of road had been paved, largely inside cities and between the most important centers. During these years, as Clay McShane has shown,2 the definition of what the street was to be used for remained an issue, and city residents struggled to retain the use of the street for activities other than transportation. In residential areas, homeowners regarded the street as an extension of shared community space, where children might play or activities be held. The street was less an artery of transportation than it was a space for the occasional commerce of peddlers and wagons that sold and delivered a wide range of goods, including ice, coal, fish, cheese, fresh fruit and vegetables, and ice cream. In more commercial districts, the street was crowded with people, not vehicles. Stores expanded onto the sidewalks, and peddlers took up part of the street. The role of the street was not merely to move traffic. It had traditionally been part of the commons, and it was not given up to the dominance of 2

energy

vehicles without dissent. After recovering the nineteenth-century sense of the street, one can look at it with fresh eyes. By contrast, the point of view of many modern photographs is either looking down the street as though one were in a vehicle maneuvering through traffic or gazing out the car window at a passing scene. That point of view is ideological: it suggests the functionalist view of roads, the Robert Moses conception of the city. In contrast, of course, stands Jane Jacobs, with her demand that urban spaces be multifunctional, emphasizing the local community, not the passing motorists. In 1900, the public had long been accustomed to going into the street in order to board horse cars and, later, streetcars. The horse car had been an urban institution for several generations. Introduced in 1832 in New York, by 1860, horse cars in New York alone carried 45 million passengers a year. They gave a smoother ride on the rails than the omnibus provided on cobblestones. They made possible the expansion of the walking city and roughly doubled the radius of the city’s functional size. Yet horses smelled, attracted flies, and produced tons of manure that were left on the streets.3 Horse cars also were too slow for the burgeoning cities of the late nineteenth century. Electric trolleys were faster and cleaner.4 They could have interior lights in the evenings and better heating systems in winter. During the 1880s, the advantages were so clear and the potential profits so palpable that many inventors worked on developing electric streetcars. The first to overcome the technical difficulties was Frank Sprague, in 1887. He developed a system that was reliable and that could handle steep grades. When he showed that it worked in practice in hilly Richmond, Virginia, the Sprague system spread rapidly to all parts of the United States. In just three years, two hundred cities had ordered electric railways, 90 percent of them based on Sprague’s patents. His system was the first with a multiple unit control system, in which every car had its own motor. A single car could run by itself or larger trains could be assembled of any length desired. Horse cars disappeared all over the United States, and one of the last lines to close, according to the New York Times, shut down in 1917.5 3

David E. Nye

However, in Manhattan, the Metropolitan Street Railway still ran cable cars, which since 1893 had carried passengers up Broadway to 51st Street, eventually reaching 109th Street. Cable cars, as the name suggests, were pulled by cables buried in the street. A slit ran between the rails, and beneath it a wire cable was moving at all times. When the driver wanted to stop, he disengaged the gripper from the cable, and it halted abruptly. When he wanted to start, the gripper took hold of the cable again and the car jerked forward. The trench and cable system was expensive, costing typically $57,000 dollars a mile and double that for double track. A large stream-driven powerhouse also was required, because fully 80 percent of what it pulled was the weight of the steel cable, not the cars. The Metropolitan Street Railway powerhouse lay roughly in the middle of the line at 50th Street and 7th Avenue. The total cost of such a system was considerably higher than an electrical trolley system, and no street railway ever decided to abandon the electrics for a cable system. The substitution went the other way, and the cable systems only survived where the hills were too steep for a trolley car to climb, as in San Francisco. Even though this cable car system was new in 1893, within a decade the technology was obviously expensive and outmoded. Yet for a brief time, four technologies of urban transportation (driven by muscle, steam [the cable], electric motors, and gasoline engines) overlapped in turn-ofthe-century America. This can be vividly seen in the 1897 photograph of a street scene in Philadelphia that precedes this chapter. Pedestrians, horses, wagons, and streetcars all were in the street together, in what reformers increasingly saw as a dangerous mix. Streets were still social spaces at this time. Paul Strand once placed his camera above and at an angle to an intersection in New York and took a photograph not from a driver’s point of view but from that of a resident looking out a second-floor window. He used strong contrast that made the faces into profiles or cast them into darkness. The people in this way were rendered as representative urbanites, eliminating their individuality. It is hard to assign class status or ethnic origins to almost anyone on this street. From this vantage point, the passing crowd and the bustle 4

energy

of traffic formed a lively scene that was engaging to look at, one that beckoned one to come out and join the urban procession. Indeed, at the time, walking in the city was considered a pleasure, and it was often the subject of magazine articles. Pedestrians constantly ventured into the street, which they shared with the traffic. In this setting, one could buy a newspaper, take a stroll while smoking a pipe, or fall into conversation. These first two examples, of muscle and technological energy, together suggest how forms of movement might be used to construct quite different urban formations. Muscle power, whether human or equine, was the basis of city life, transportation, and commerce during most of the nineteenth century. This was a compact, densely populated, horizontal city. The cable car and electric streetcar could move much faster than a horse car, and a subway or elevated line tripled the distance passengers could travel in the same time as a horse car. This had the effect of expanding the city geometrically. Moreover, the same electrical motors that drove streetcars were harnessed to elevators, making skyscrapers more practical, especially as electricity could also pump a water supply to the upper floors, provide lighting and ventilation, and facilitate the flow of messages via telephone and telegraph. In short, the vertical city emerged simultaneously with the streetcar, which facilitated moving multitudes in and out of city centers. The early electrical city was a dense, layered public space that extended above and below ground. It was accessible to millions of pedestrians, who dominated its core. This was the city of nightclubs, dance halls, enormous department stores, grand hotels, chophouses, and specialized boutiques. Around 1920, it was epitomized by New York and Chicago and aspired to by most other American cities. People thronged to this urban space, as described by David Nasaw in Going Out.6 There were some variations. For example, Boston resisted the skyscraper but built one of the earliest subways, and Philadelphia clung to its streetcars and had fewer early skyscrapers. But in every American city, the pressure of multitudes in the center raised the level of commerce and forced a rationalization of the street. Paved with asphalt, regulated by the new traffic lights, and increasingly 5

David E. Nye

given over to transportation alone, the pedestrian was compensated by the creation of new venues such as department stores, hotel lobbies, and grand railway stations, as well as by new vistas seen from the observation decks of the skyscrapers, the new bridges, the elevated trains, and the sidewalks through the deepening canyons of the streets. Many of the towers had appeared on or near Broadway, notably the Flatiron Building (1903), the Singer Tower (1907), and the Woolworth Building (1913). Broadway had long been the premier shopping street in New York, but increasingly it also served as the major corridor connecting Times Square and the Wall Street area. Jump forward a century and across the continent to Los Angeles. Its freeway system reaches a frenzied apotheosis at the junction of Routes 110 and 105. From a helicopter, the multiple overpasses may seem almost a vast, multilayered sculpture. Having recently driven through this spot, however, I can attest that no aerial photograph suggests the driver’s experience of this site: the traffic is often congested, and getting in the wrong lane can mean a forced exit and a long struggle to get back on the freeway again. Reyner Banham argued that Los Angeles had four ecologies, one of which he named “autopia.” The street, which used to be a form of commons where all citizens met and which was not only for transportation but also for social encounters, shopping, and casual exercise, had become a limited and encapsulated ecology all its own. Banham concluded that “the actual experience of driving on the freeways prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes.” It demanded “a high level of attentiveness” and “extreme concentration” that “seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical.”7 This state of mind is not that of reverie but of an intensive absorption in continual movement that leaves no time or spare mental energy for contemplation. The freeway driver is constantly trying to avoid an accident and is always in a state of imminent danger. One false move, one careless fellow driver, one blowout or one moment of inattention, can lead to maiming or death. Angelenos, Banham found, had to make an “almost total surrender of personal freedom for most of the journey,” during which they are immersed 6

energy

in “an incredibly demanding man/machine system.”8 All over the United States, the new Interstates abolished the immediacy of the neighborhood street or the many distractions of the older highways. The driver on the interstate was not a flaneur who could drop into myriad establishments on a whim. The limited-access highway increased the normal speed in good part by creating a homogeneous environment that did not draw attention to itself, one that was often landscaped into sameness and that was therefore not distracting. Indeed, the problem for the driver on an interstate was boredom, potentially leading to inattention. In Los Angeles, such a road system was built in an area that had remained largely rural until the twentieth century but then suddenly discovered oil literally beneath its feet. By 1910, the city was covered with oil derricks. Add the mass production of automobiles that began in 1913, and apparently all the forces were at work to produce a sprawling urban landscape where half of all the space could be devoted to automobiles. Yet Los Angeles in the early decades of the twentieth century had a vast and profitable trolley and interurban system. It made the fortune of Henry Huntington, who not only controlled the transportation system but also bought real estate in the areas where he planned to expand service. (The fortune that Huntington made through control of streetcars made possible the Huntington Library.) The arrival of the streetcar raised land values, but once the lots had been sold, the trolley system was a less attractive investment. As in most of the United States, streetcars were quite profitable between about 1895 and 1920 but then rapidly lost their attraction as investments. By the 1930s, few lines could compete profitably with the automobile, and the hard-pressed local governments of the Great Depression did not try to save them. Los Angeles grew from fewer than a hundred thousand people in 1900 to the second largest urban population in the United States a century later. New York City’s population density is more than three times as great as that of Los Angeles. But Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and Dallas sprawl far more, and they have less than half the population density of Los Angeles. None has more than forty-one hundred persons 7

David E. Nye

per square mile, and most considerably fewer. Were New York as thinly populated as Phoenix, it would have to expand from 299 to 2900 square miles.9 The scale of this expansion measures the difference that the gas and oil energy regime made in the material culture of newer cities, and it also suggests the enormous technological momentum of that energy regime in the American West, the most urban of all U.S. regions. And yet the sprawling Los Angeles freeways were not inevitable. Portland, Oregon, was growing into a city at precisely the same time, but it chose quite a different urban form. In part this can be explained by the city’s restricted location in a river valley that enforced more density than in some other western cities. Portland had a brief period of horse cars, from 1874 until 1889, when it opened its first electric streetcar system. This operated until replaced by buses in 1940, but streetcars and light rail were reintroduced starting in 1982. Portland rejected the blandishments of the Federal Interstate Highway Program, which, starting in 1955, offered cities 90 percent of the construction costs of limited-access highways. As a result, Portland retained a more integrated downtown area and kept alive its hotels, shops, and cultural life. The decision not to build interstate highways through the city meant, among many other things, that it sustained one of the largest and finest bookstores in the United States, Powells. Portland kept its inner city vibrant during the last decades of the twentieth century, when most urban centers were collapsing. Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago, for example, all built interstates to varying degrees, and by 1970, all lost at least 22 percent of their population to the suburbs. Detroit and St. Louis embraced interstates and lost half of their population in the same period. In contrast, Portland’s population grew by more than 30 percent. There were other factors that affected population growth in each of these cities, but tearing down many houses and slashing neighborhoods in half with six-lane expressways was an almost military assault on them. The new roads brought noise and pollution that made cities less desirable places to live. In contrast, Portland not only installed an aerial tramway but also, in the 1980s, built (and later expanded) a light8

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rail system to serve its suburbs. It was the first U.S. city to complete a modern streetcar system, opened in 2001. The streetcar service runs every thirteen minutes, or nine times during a two-hour period. Moreover, in the central city, the streetcar is free. The aerial tramway runs between the university hospital on the ridge above Portland down to an expansion wing at river level.10 There was no room for expansion on the ridge, and the two sites are thirty-three hundred feet apart, with one more than five hundred feet higher than the other. The hospital and the city together funded the tramway as a practical link between the two facilities. Travel takes only three minutes between them, with ten departures an hour in each direction. The ride has also proven popular with tourists and local residents, and each car can carry up to seventy-nine people, or the equivalent of twenty busloads of people every hour in each direction. It is also fast, taking a direct route that no bus could replicate down the steep hillside. Moreover, bicycles can be taken on board, and the Portland streetcar line stops just opposite the lower tram entrance, making it a viable link for commuters. There is no technological reason why streetcars, tramways, monorails, and other innovative solutions are not more common in American cities. Nor is economics necessarily the explanation for the predominance of roads. It is true that the tramway in Portland cost $57 million, double what a similar tram would cost at a ski resort, and this may seem expensive. But new road construction in urban areas is extremely costly. An Oregon study of such roads found that they often cost more than $10 million for each “lane mile,” due to the expense of building overpasses, purchasing rights of way, and expropriating property.11 Even a simple two-lane road crossing over an interstate and several other highways and then switchbacking up the ridge to the hospital would have required at least four “lane miles,” at a cost of roughly $40 million. Consider, too, that the tramway now pays for itself through four-dollar round-trip tickets; that much of its construction cost was covered by the hospital, not the taxpayers; and that the city did not lose tax revenues in perpetuity for the houses otherwise torn down to 9

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build a road. From the city’s point of view, the Portland tramway may have been a bargain. It preserved the tax base and the density of urban population. It eliminated some wear and tear on existing highways and thereby reduced the cost of highway repairs. Yet the choice was a cultural one, not driven by economic considerations. Moreover, riding the Portland tramway has become a popular tourist attraction and a valued experience for local residents. It provides an unparalleled view of the city and the surrounding mountains as far as Mt. St. Helena and Mt. Hood. It has become a new urban space, where people encounter one another face to face and gaze at sunrises and sunsets and the night landscape of scintillating lights. A new highway could not do that. As a final example, consider a train station, to be completed in 2013 near the intersection of two freeways in Anaheim, California. Nearby is the Los Angeles Angels baseball stadium, and additional buildings are being erected, because offices and apartments will benefit from being close to the new hub. This station is part of a larger initiative to refocus Californian transportation habits by building a high-speed rail service. Not only have the freeways long been choked with traffic, but the air is often highly polluted, and California’s CO2 emissions are well above the national average. The fact that the Anaheim station will be run on solar power underscores the difference between the older and the emergent energy systems, as the public relations material on the website emphasizes.12 The California high-speed railway is part of a growing national reaction against relying on the automobile almost exclusively to solve transportation problems. Regional railway networks have begun to revive, notably in the Boston area. Cultural geographer John Stilgoe has recently developed a book-length argument that cars and trucks are inherently unable to solve transportation problems for large cities, because the land needed to accommodate them is simply too expensive.13 Los Angeles would seem to be a good example. At the Anaheim station, several existing rail lines will intersect with the new high-speed system that is to start in both Sacramento and San 10

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Francisco and run to San Diego, with stops in San Jose and Los Angeles. Most travel in California is still by automobile, and to a considerable degree, the new rail system seems designed with drivers, particularly commuters, in mind. Through much of its extent, the line closely parallels existing roads. The stations may not become nodal points for nondrivers, although the hope is that apartments and businesses will grow up around them. It is too soon to know whether suburban train stations will become focal points for new communities, although they will usefully link commuting and shopping in an appealing synergy. The system as a whole can only gain the benefits of high speed if trains are restricted to a few stops. The expectation is that express passengers can travel the roughly six hundred miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two and a half hours and to San Diego in just under four hours. This will be a faster alternative than flying if a constant high speed is maintained, but in that case many cities along the right-of-way will not get express service. The total cost of this project is estimated to be more than $45 billion, almost $15 billion of which has been allocated by the State of California ($10 billion through a ballot proposition) and the federal government ($4.5 billion). Construction on the central portion of the line began in 2012. This is probably a good strategy: in the 1820s, the Erie Canal was also built by starting in the middle, which spurred demands for completion of links to the major cities at either end. If all goes according to plan, in 2018 California will have trains like those that already exist in Japan, France, Spain, and Germany. As it happens, the railway system of the United States reached its greatest extent almost exactly a century before, in 1916, with 254,037 miles of track, enough to crisscross the United States eighty times.14 At that time, there was good overnight service from New York to Chicago; many more passenger trains existed; and often, trains ran faster than they do today. A full-scale redevelopment of the railroad, coupled with wide adoption of alternative energies, would move the United States onto a new path of greater energy intensity (more GDP produced for each BTU used). An achievable goal would be the level already reached in Denmark or 11

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Germany, where, since the 1980s, energy use per person has only been half that of the United States.

Conclusions

The five examples presented here trace a series of energy transitions between about 1890 and the present: from muscle power to electrification to the internal combustion engine to a modest shift toward alternative energies. Each of these transitions has profound implications for the form and texture of urban life. The muscle-power city relied on human and animal energy to function, and indeed, the number of horses in cities increased during the nineteenth century as a direct result of industrialization.15 But muscle power had reached its limits by the 1880s, and electrification supplied streetcars, elevators, escalators, and brilliant lighting to expand the city upward into the skyscraper, outward toward new streetcar suburbs, and temporally into the evening hours, which became far more useful when illuminated. Americans used electrification to intensify the activities at the urban core and to expand outward to incorporate a larger population. Although electrification increased the density of the city, Americans soon afterward began to use the internal combustion engine to deconcentrate the city, rejecting mass transit for trucks and automobiles. By the 1970s, half of all commerce was located outside the central cities, with a consequent restructuring of American space: many American roads do not permit bicycles; many suburbs do not have sidewalks; many houses cannot be reached by mass transit, making car ownership a necessity. The European city provides a contrast to the American pattern of urban/energy development. In Germany, the streetcars never stopped running, and the automobile did not shape new cities but rather was incorporated into a densely populated city fabric. Munich, Berlin, and Paris already were large cities when the motorcar became important as private transportation. In the United States, there was one automobile for every four citizens in 1929, at a time when in Germany there was only one for every hundred people. In Europe, mass transit and the bicycle 12

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had at least a generation longer to become naturalized as a part of urban life. The urban population remained concentrated, which also meant that shops and services were nearby, and the walking city endured. A few American cities have built environments that are similar, notably Boston and Philadelphia. Yet on the whole, the United States’ per capita energy use is double that of Europe. The United States was once quick to adopt new forms of energy and use them to spur development. It electrified more rapidly than any other nation and embraced the automobile more quickly than any other nation, but since about 1970 it has not been in the forefront. As the example of the California high-speed rail network suggests, however, the automobile appears to be challenged by the high costs of building yet more highways and by new urban patterns linked to rising energy costs and global warming. Precisely what urban patterns might emerge using new energy forms remains unclear, but surely they will also reflect widespread adoption of personal computers, cell phones, iPads, and other mobile communication devices. The current energy transition is quite different from those of the past. Resource scarcity and global warming will urgently force the pace of this alternative energy transition, in which other nations have taken the lead. The question for the future is whether the United States will aggressively seek the more efficient energy future that is already evident in some European countries.

Dialogue on Chapter 1: Energy Miles Orvell: Shall we start with Albena?

It’s more a question rather than a comment. I was just wondering: why do you focus only on transportation, on this particular technology and not on the others? There were more forms of energy circulating in the city, and from an anthropological Albena Yaneva:

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perspective, we might follow some of the parts of those energy flows rather than particular stable regimes of energy. Maybe we could tell a different story about how the street space, for instance, becomes more livable. I mean, it’s inhabited in different ways because there are different flows of energy, not just transportation-dependent energy. I am thinking in the spirit of William Cronon, following the energy flows as he followed the grain from the agricultural lands to Chicago and then how that shaped the city as such. I think a similar story could be told about how energy flows and how particular forms and ways of mobilizing energy in different transportation or in different technological regimes can shape cities in a different way, and therefore Chicago is different from New York, is different from Munich—because of those different paths of energy flows that have been followed. David Nye: Yes, I would agree with that and also how flows that are cut off affect the city. Actually, the book I finished most recently was about when the electricity fails and what things don’t function and how people suddenly realize their dependence on these systems. And ideally, if we had lots of time, we would want to look at this in smaller spaces. Because cities are one thing, but smaller towns emphasize something else. These same technologies have a different effect in the prognosis. I don’t want to claim a universal kind of deterministic effect, as if when we bring in this particular technology suddenly something happens. Mabel Wilson: That’s actually related to what I want to ask. Because I am curious about the forty-year span of these energy regimes that you described and how much of that is the movement from, let’s say, a science to a technology to an infrastructure to a social practice—those are the phases of transition. And the degree to which that happens is based partly on state intervention but also on how the market actually drives the adaptation of one of these energy regimes and how that might be situated in, as you’re suggesting, different places at different moments. And I think that cross-comparison would actually be quite interesting in a way. For example, Los Angeles—as 14

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we all know—had an extraordinary mass transit system, which got dismantled to develop a freeway system, which is now getting overlaid again into a mass transit system. That might be very different from, let’s say, Munich as a site of study and of comparison. And I think it would be really fascinating to see how those kinds of trajectories and vectors then impact the adaptation of these various technologies, these various energy regimes. Nye: Okay, I should say, by the way, that Seattle did get rid of its streetcars and then brought them back within about a forty-year period after they went to buses. So, like Los Angeles, Seattle started to move away from streetcars but thought better of it sooner than did Los Angeles. But there’s no necessary effect of the technologies. And you ask about how are they implemented? In the U.S., it’s classically been by market forces much more than by anything the government does. Except in the Progressive Era, when city officials often took bribes. Wilson: Yeah, that’s why I’m wondering if there’s more of an incentive then to abandon older systems for new. I was in Liverpool two days ago, taking a rail line that probably is over a hundred years old, and I was just fascinated by the degree to which that rail system still exists in some respects. I’m sure there are lines that have been abandoned, but the system has been there for possibly a hundred and fifty years, versus the United States, where you can’t get an Amtrak train to run anywhere other than very limited corridors, even though there was once an extensive rail system in the United States. And that’s what I think is very interesting: what are the vectors that push things forward, to abandon older systems? Nye: Certainly private enterprise pushes government to get things that it wants. In the case of the automobile companies, they pushed the interstate system and they managed to get it implemented. So, the government was suddenly paying 90 percent of all the costs of building an interstate highway. Only 10 percent locally. Many local politicians were saying: “Well, that’s a good deal! We’ll create all these jobs.” But the federal government wouldn’t pay anything for mass transit. If the 15

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Department of Transportation had said that the same amount will be available for either roads or mass transit, that would have surely had a different result. So, the government has at certain junctures had an impact or decided something that—in this case—is still there. The Interstate system is still well-funded, and its perpetual care comes out of gasoline taxes. The logic of this system is such that eventually we could pave over the entire United States because there’s always going to be more gasoline tax money coming in. So we just keep on going with an automotive system. It’s very hard to change that. So that the technological momentum—this term is from Thomas Hughes—gets built into the energy system in many ways. For example, the oil companies get very large subsidies that are about four billion dollars every year, which they now feel belong to them. So that subsidy is built in, and it’s very hard to get that money away from them when they feel entitled to it. And for generations, that’s how the world’s supposed to be. One could imagine that four billion dollars a year going, let’s say, to alternative energies instead. So, you asked, Why does it take forty years for an energy regime change? That partly is because it’s difficult to dislodge an existing, well-developed system. Partly because people, like builders, for example, are fairly traditional. Builders don’t leap out and immediately embrace the most modern, most recent technologies. They say: “What will my customers definitely want? What will somebody buy, if I build a house?” And they are right to be cautious, because they live or die based on whether they sell the house. So, an energy transition takes a while. I saw in my research that architects were still advising people to install both gas and electricity in a new home as late as 1900, because it seemed like both systems were worth having. Of course, today that wouldn’t be the case. Andrew Ross: I think the role of the state is pretty crucial here, even in terms of geopolitics. I mean, the Carter Doctrine more or less made official U.S. policy a function of safeguarding the passage of cheap oil through the Strait of Hormuz, and that particular principle of U.S. foreign policy has had enormous ramifications ever since then. 16

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Ironically, Carter was also the first president to question throwing huge slugs of money into western mega-water projects in the far west— his infamous “hit list,” the backlash which he never really recovered from. . . . I think, more than anything else, Carter’s presidency was severely weakened by the response to his initial efforts to stop funding a lot of the Bureau of Reclamation waterworks in the West. I mention all this because I noticed that water was missing from your list of energy sources—and I just wondered whether you were assuming it would go into the alternative or the renewable categories, about which there is a big debate because many states in the U.S. do include hydro power as part of the renewable energy standards portfolios. And there’s a debate about whether they should be doing that or not. They do it anyway. But it’s ecologically very, very, very harmful, of course, and a lot of the dam building, not just in the U.S. but in many other countries, has not stopped. Not in all countries. Hello, China! And the other thing I wanted to say about water is that certainly the further you go West, past the hundredth meridian, it’s absolutely a crucial component in how cities get shaped and designed and how they grow. In fact, arguably you could say that water supply was as important a factor in the shaping of these western cities as the automobile, especially if you look at density. And I’m going to question some of your density stats there. Because if you look at the density of metro regions, which is the true regional unit of cities, L.A. is the densest in the U.S., and ten of the twelve metro regions are in the Far West. Particularly in these conurbations that we think of as, you know, foster children for sprawl. And a lot of the reasoning has to do with water. It kind of acts as a liquid glue. It does mean that communities are a little more condensed than they would be if they had a much greater water supply. Nye: I made no attempt to get into the question of how power is produced, but on water power, basically it was developed early and there is little more to develop compared to the demand. Otherwise, let me take the last point first. It’s true, if you look at all metropolitan regions, the West is the most urban part of the United States, and 17

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that’s sort of a paradox, because people think of the West, and John Wayne, open skies, whereas most people in the West are actually living in cities. But the statistics I got were from the U.S. Chamber of Congress, and I think they focused on what were technically the urban cores, the part that legally is the City of New York or the City of Los Angeles. So, yes, if you look at the whole urban region, then that changes the numbers somewhat. But I was most interested in places like Phoenix. I mentioned that Phoenix is the one that was really sprawled. Apparently Los Angeles, of the newer cities, was the most densely populated. Ross: Phoenix’s density is greater than—I just wrote a book about Phoenix, so I know the stats—greater than Baltimore’s, Philadelphia’s, Atlanta’s. Nye: Really? Because when I looked it up, it said an average of two thousand people per square mile, while in New York City it was twenty-nine thousand. I have also driven around Phoenix, which seemed the most sprawled-out city I ever was trying to find the center of. Ross: Yeah, New York City, but not the metro region. You have to include Westchester County, you know, the Tri-State metro region. Nye: Well, if I refocus on metro regions, maybe it would be a little different. But if you’re looking at the classic idea of the city. . . . But that brings in an interesting idea, that maybe we should be looking at whole metropolitan regions. The U.S. statistics often are organized that way. Now you brought up the issue about Carter and so forth. The real interesting moment is the Carter/Reagan campaign, where Reagan declares there is no energy shortage, it’s just bureaucrats, it’s just environmentalists getting in the way. Let’s drill Alaska, let’s use our military might, if we have to, Reagan says. There’s plenty of energy out there. There’s no problem. And the American public loves that message, which is: “You don’t have to do anything!” No one needs to change. Meanwhile, Carter had been saying, we’re going to have to change the way we live. Orvell: That raises for me one of the issues that’s underlying your presentation—and that is the whole question of determinism. You 18

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seem not to want to present a deterministic model here, for energy and technology at least, as determining factors in social and economic organization. And yet, there are other determining factors, and they seem in part, at least in the U.S., the result of strong lobbies that determine the laws that are then made by legislators and govern the country. Portland seems an exception here, where a strong citizenry has managed to exert influence over legislation. So, I’m just wondering whether you would reconsider that whole notion and accept that there is determinism here—by lobbies working for corporations? Nye: No, but it is a matter of definition. If people determine something, then that’s not deterministic. Deterministic would be if the technology just forces through a change. But if a group of people deliberate and decide that’s the law or don’t, or accept or don’t accept that, that’s maybe determined, but . . . Orvell: Well, I think we can agree that technology itself is not an absolutely determining force. But don’t we have to introduce concepts of agency and determinism in terms of government response and lobbying and the whole complexity that governs? “People”—the mass of people—rarely determine things; it’s government, which is manipulated by lobbyists and forces beyond the people’s control, and that’s the “determining” factor. Nye: Aren’t you using determinism like somebody is making a determination? And I would agree with that, but then there’s also a moment of drift, though. Once the thing is set up, people tend to just go with it. They don’t necessarily sit back and reconsider the choice to get rid of a certain thing and to replace it with something else. Once it’s been there twenty years, it’s naturalized, and people tend to say “Well, this is the way it is.” Orvell: Yes, exactly—they accept what’s been determined. But it’s like that slogan of Acer, “Empowering people.” It’s like corporations putting out the message that they empower people. Klaus Benesch: Just to this point, because it seemed to me that this issue of technological determinism looms really large in the background 19

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of your talk, and then you broke it down into these two aspects. People decide what kind of power regime they want, and then once it’s been installed, it takes on a dynamic of its own. And it changes public space, and it alters the way we perceive public space and the street and the road and so on and so forth. So, in that sense, some kind of determinism seems to kick in. But I know that you’ve written a book that deals with narratives of technology, and I was wondering, what would be the dominant story here, and how important is the narrative and the story that we construct around these power regimes? I ask especially in light of what’s happening right now, for we are changing very abruptly, actually, here in Germany, where we are downgrading our once favorite nuclear power regime. It makes me wonder: how can that be? I mean, also in terms of your forty-year life span of one particular power regime. Would it be possible to have a cataclysmic paradigm change within those forty years, triggered by a change of discourse, for instance, or narrative? Nye: Well, that’s a big question. But okay, I think we see actually a fundamentally new situation now, because the earlier shifts were motivated by the simple advantages to shifting. It seemed obvious to most people that they would rather not have horsepower when they could have electric streetcars and avoid tons of horse manure in the street. Streetcars move faster, they have heat in the winter and lights in the nighttime. With all these advantages, streetcars still were actually a little bit cheaper to run, whereas the horses were expensive to take care of—they could get ill, they had the veterinarians and big stables for them. They could get hit by an epidemic. There were lots of reasons to change, and nobody seemed to linger with it very long once there was an alternative. The first new electric streetcars were developed in 1887, and three years later, two hundred cities had ordered them. I mean, it’s like everybody wants this as soon as it’s possible. So, that’s the kind of choice people made historically. But being forced to make a choice as a result of shortages has not, historically, been the case: Americans have not often made choices because a particular form of energy was not available. For 20

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example, a coal shortage did not force them to shift away from steam engines. However, that’s what’s happening now with the problems of global warming, resource shortages, and worries about nuclear energy. Suddenly, alternative energy is something that maybe one has to force into gear more quickly. And Americans have been reluctant to do that, because they like to think that laissez-faire market choice is driving change. Even though we’ve all agreed now that politicians are actually quite deeply involved in making technological choices. But nevertheless, the idea that the government should come in and say, “Well, now we’re all going to invest in wind power or solar power” is not popular in the U.S. Ironically, it’s easier for government to dictate such a change in China. China is the emerging leader in these alternative energy areas, because they, in a sense, are growing so fast that they can grow every system at once, whereas America ideally should cut back the total amount of energy it uses and, at the same time, change to a different form of energy production. That’s harder to do than growing into a new energy regime, as China seems to be doing. In the U.S., the technological momentum of the old system is much more of a problem. But—to come back to your point—the question of narratives is really important, because, if people have a narrative which tells them what they’re doing is somehow the “American Way” or this is the best choice for these historical reasons, we can trace it back. So, it’d be interesting to see how change is, in a sense, sold or told about or talked about. And what kinds of narratives the other side deploys in response, for, of course, the people and systems that are being displaced do not go down quietly. They do their best to hang on to the technology that is already entrenched. Benesch: Yes, and in terms of German policy right now, there has been a change in policy. The sales pitch here has been one precisely to overcome the threat of a shortage. If we discontinue nuclear power, there will be power shortages. That’s what everybody says. Despite that kind of threat, we have agreed that, for some reason, we should do it. And I think it has to do with particular kinds of narratives that developed, of course, also over time. 21

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Nye: Well, the apocalyptic narrative of what happened in Japan is quite powerful. Even though Germany doesn’t have too many tsunamis or earthquakes, Japan provides just one example of what could happen. Malcolm McCullough: Well, David, since you brought up technological momentum, can we go back a little bit and look at the side of values and not just the technological performance as a component of the regime? Jimmy Carter came up. He got it wrong. He said: “You’ll have to suffer, you’ll have to do with less. You’ll basically have to sit in the dark and eat muesli.” [Laughter.] Except that what we see is that actually in those other places where they use half as much energy per capita, life’s better. Because you’re not sitting glassed in and freezing on a beautiful Southern California day with too much air-conditioning. And you spend more time with people than you do driving. So, how does the technological momentum mostly consist of values that are based on fear of change? How can there be change presented that’s not cutting back, that’s not sacrifice, but that’s living better? For example, there’s folks that do a “walk score” for urban areas. And my colleague Chris Leinberger has pretty good numbers on the demand for “walkable” urbanism. So, those are some people that are trying to identify that there are cultural values and not just a technological basis for change. I mean, can you read us a bit more Thomas Hughes? Can you say a little more about how values fit in the whole picture of technological momentum? Nye: Yes, I think the values are what lead to people making choices. So that the momentum is what gets built in, so that a residue of previous choices drives cultures along. You’re right, the problem is to create a positive image of the change rather than just seeing it as “losing freedom” or “losing mobility” or “losing” something. A good example is how in Scandinavia they like to light things more dimly. You may remember this, Miles, as you lived in Denmark one winter, that typically houses have fewer lights and people often light candles in the evening, so that the house is dimly lit. And whenever an American 22

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Fulbright comes, the first thing they do is, well, buy more lights. Because that’s part of the American sense of how things are supposed to look. A house has to be very brightly lit. Americans will, for example, install overhead, powerful, fluorescent lights in a kitchen that Europeans would only put in an office. The Danes—with this we are going to get back to the value question—the Danes talk about such dimly lighted areas as being cozy, or the Danish word is hyggelig. Germans have a similar word, gemütlich. McCullough: I thought the Danes had seventeen words for . . . Nye: Yes, but the idea is that it becomes a positive thing that you don’t have too much light. So, that’s an example where a cultural choice can be coded positively or negatively. Even Fulbrighters do not always catch on. I rented my house out to one, and the electric bill that year was double what it had been when we lived in the house. [Laughter.] You’re right, it’s got to do with the values, and your practices are going to be based on what you believe is good for you or appropriate for you. And that’s where the change has to come in the end. Jeff Meikle: I’ve got a comment that I thought was sort of a footnote but actually might be relevant here. And that’s getting back to your brief comment about Reyner Banham, where I thought you had portrayed him as a kind of critic of L.A. auto mobility. But, in fact, I see him as a kind of celebrant. Nye: Yes, he got into it. Meikle: Yes, he talks about learning to drive so he could experience L.A. in the original, just as some British folks learned Italian so they could read Dante in the original. So, he celebrates it, but is there a way— because we’re really talking about how to change people’s minds—and I realize that very few people paid attention to what Reyner Banham had to say. But you’re really talking about ways that even right-living Fulbrighters, liberal Fulbrighters, double the electric bill. So, how does one then get down at that microlevel and reach people and tell them, you know, you’ve got to accept these changes and feel good about them because they will actually improve your life? 23

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Nye: Well, that’s where the humanities comes in. I have been saying this to people in engineering and in the sciences: “You can invent all these nifty, new technologies, but unless you can get people to see a cultural value . . .” Meikle: Well, I just went out and bought a new MacBook Air last week. So how do you get people to feel that way about energy-saving light bulbs and taking the tram? Ross: Following up on that, I just had a quick inquiry for Klaus actually, picking up on the phrase that you used, “We in Germany have decided to do away with nuclear power.” Can you, for the benefit of us visitors, I am just wondering if you could briefly summarize to what extent there was a public conversation and to what extent this was political expedience on the part of the Merkel administration. Benesch: Oh, that’s absolutely true that it is political expedience on the part of the Merkel administration, but there was something fermenting for a very long time. Well, I remember, we all do—When was Chernobyl? In 1986 or something? Nye: It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary. Benesch: This triggered a huge and nationwide debate on the consequences and potential negative consequences of nuclear power. And it has been going on ever since, spawning the Green Movement in Germany. Without that, the Green Party wouldn’t be as strong as it is right now. And what tipped the scale there, it might have been Fukushima, but it makes me wonder. . . . It’s some kind of a developing narrative here that you could sense, that you could feel, that is there in public discourse, and it was not addressed by the powers that be, the reigning party coalition of the CDU and the Liberal Democrats, and then after Fukushima something happened. There seemed to be a kind of national agreement now that this was what we should do. Regardless of the consequences, actually, and this is really what’s striking. And it was striking that it happened on a microlevel in a state that is considered to be one of the most conservative states in Germany and then led to the overthrowing of a forty-five-year-old political establishment. So, I have a 24

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suspicion—it’s not about facts, it’s really about something else. It’s about values, it’s about certain kinds of narratives, I guess, and, of course, the Merkel administration is trying to cash in on that in some ways, and all the pundits now say that it won’t work. We’ll see if they’ll live to regret it or not. I lived for a long time in the state where this happened recently, and I was stunned that this could and would happen. David Lubin: So, much of our discussion has been about places in the West. Germany, Denmark, the United States. I remember being in a huge traffic jam in Beijing, and my host was talking about—I don’t know if I have the numbers right—but I think he was saying that there were a thousand new cars registered in Beijing every day, and he was talking about how in his memory, everybody was going to work on bicycles— and now everybody is going to work in cars. And I remember also being in India and there were many forms of transportation on the road: there was a kind of oxcart, bicycle, moped, cars. But then, part of the social growth in India, or economic growth, has to do with making individual transportation available to every person. And that’s kind of the Indian dream right now. So, we can talk about changing narratives in the West, but it doesn’t really matter. That’s just like spitting in the ocean. Nye: The Chinese now buy more cars every year than the Americans do. Lubin: So, how do we change that? Nye: I don’t think the Chinese are going to listen to us. They’ll just say: “Well, you got them, and we want them too!” But the problem really is not that there are cars, it’s that these cars use gasoline. There’s no free lunch. The energy has to come from somewhere. If you have electric cars you’ve got to burn coal or build nuclear plants or dams. You have to do something to make the electricity, so . . . Orvell: Let me offer three possibilities here for looking at the process of change. I mean, one is, let’s say, Germany, where you have a government that might be responsive to citizen movement and sentiment. Maybe this is totally hypothetical, idealized. The other might be China, where there’s certainly a strong consumer drive, but there is also the ability of the government to basically legislate what might be 25

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best in some overall, total terms and thus rapidly change the course of policy. And then you have the U.S., which seems to be in some ways the least responsive to change and the slowest, because despite the many grassroots efforts and citizen groups and green groups in the U.S., you have the tremendous strength of lobbies, which have such a hold on government policy that it seems to be the least likely to respond to change across this global spectrum. Nye: But see, that’s what’s meant by technological momentum. That these people have invested themselves and often their money in the existing system. So, the Americans were very quick to develop earlier technological systems, but now they are deeply invested into it. Orvell: They are so invested, exactly! The inertia. Wilson: But I would actually add a fourth, perhaps. If you look at places in the global south and places like Nigeria and all throughout the African continent, where you have neoliberal economies with weak states where there really is no public discourse or consensus in terms of how energy regimes are in fact operating, and yet, people have a fantasy about their owning cars. Just like the Chinese, they have the belief that they have to have electric light, although they do it by having generators instead of having larger public infrastructures with a supply of energy. And yet, even within those places, you get these enclaves of oil companies and finance companies that bring in those infrastructures that cut precisely through those cities and properties. You know, that then reproduces those conditions of the global north in these very interesting contacts. So, you get these other, I think, sorts of hybridized conditions as well. And again, Nigeria is a huge exporter of energy to the United States. Or at least of oil. Benesch: This makes me curious. I mean, some people, historians of technology, sometimes say that you can skip certain kinds of inventions, particularly the Africans. Many Africans would go directly from having no phones to having cell phones and skip the fixed lines. So, it makes me wonder if that would be possible with transportation technology as well, in terms of countries such as China. That you would 26

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go from nil to a green car or whatever and skip the oil dependent combustion engine. Nye: Not in practice, but in theory. I mean, in theory, the Chinese, of course, could have continued to use the bicycle or built terrific mass transit. But, curiously, they didn’t choose this path, at least not yet. Orvell: On that “not yet,” we’ll end this first conversation. Dialogue: Works Cited Banham, Rayner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. London: Allen Lane, 1971. Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Hughes, Thomas. “Technological Momentum,” 101-14. In Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merrit Roe Smith and Leo Marx. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Leinberger, Christopher B. The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2009. Nye, David E. When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010.

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The Central Avenue business district skyline in Phoenix, Arizona, October 23, 2005. Photo by Urban. Wikimedia Commons.

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of international leaders to reach binding emission-reductions targets in 2009 at the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen, in 2010 in Cancun, and in 2011 in Durban has compounded the despair that thoughtful people now feel about the future. Even if the political obstacles to carbon policy making were to rapidly dissolve, many have concluded that it may already be too late to take meaningful steps to avert drastic climate change. Better to accept the foreseeable consequences by trying to anticipate and adapt to the worst scenarios. Indeed, any sober reading of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s periodic bulletins about the slow eco-apocalypse already underway would support this very conclusion. Gramsci’s motto—“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”1—was never more relevant than to the uncertain domain of climate politics. Some prominent ecologists, such as James Lovelock, have recently argued that to properly confront the threat of climate change, “it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”2 This belief, that civil liberties should be suspended until action can be taken, has its advocates, especially among those who favor top-down geoengineering schemes involving large-scale technological manipulation of the global energy balance. Certainly, anything is worth considering if we are to win the race to decarbonize, but not if it puts us on an authoritarian death march. For we should be clear about this—the failure to confront the climate crisis is not a failure of democracy, it is the result of the stranglehold of fossil capitalism on democracy. For those of us who are allergic to despair on the one hand and resistant to authoritarian technical fixes on the other, we look to cities for evidence that real advances are being made, and one of the reasons is that

The abject failure

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city governance is relatively progressive. Where national and regional politicians are still in the pockets of the oil, coal, and gas lobbies, city managers have been putting green policies into action for some time now. The Large Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), comprising forty of the world’s largest cities collaborating on extensive decarbonization programs, issued its own Climate Communiqué at Copenhagen, in which mayors pleaded with the national representatives of the carbon powers to “recognize that the future of our globe will be won or lost in the cities of the world.”3 The mayors’ statement reflected a growing consensus that only in dense urban environments could efficient, low-carbon living be achieved on a mass scale. Humans are fast becoming an urban species, and their survival will depend on how we live in cities that already consume 75 percent of the world’s energy and emit 80 percent of the greenhouse gases.4 Even without a decisive shift in energy supply away from fossil fuel, more compact patterns of urban growth are delivering a sizable boost to efforts at decarbonization. In the United States, looking to cities as sites of salvation is an old story, although the script for “city as redeemer” has changed several times since John Winthrop’s 1630 exhortation to the Massachusetts Bay Colony pilgrims that they should build a “city upon a hill.” For the best part of two centuries, American city building was driven by the longstanding Christian equation of godliness with city residence. But the late nineteenth-century rise of the teeming industrial city—routinely depicted by reformers as a miasma of sin, filth, and corruption—turned urban living into a moral trap. The infernal Victorian city of industry was now seen as a threat to the physical and spiritual health of its inhabitants, raising their mortality rate and diluting their humanity. Urban improvers were inspired to redeem this fallen population, first through environmental uplift—in the form of edifying contact with parks and other leafy spaces—and then through planning aimed at decongestion—by dispersing their numbers out to garden cities on the green and airy urban fringe.5 The shift to decentralization and mass suburbanization in the twentieth century had many overlapping causes (some of them clearly governed 30

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by racial prejudice), but it turned on the belief that low-density suburbia was a more salubrious environment than the congested center city. Yet, beginning in the early 1980s, the pattern of outward flight began slowly to reverse itself. Whereas before, moral homilies about ill health had been directed at residents of overpopulated city cores, the new targets for scorn were increasingly the suburbanites, whose automobile-dependent and lawn-loving lifestyle was perceived as fundamentally selfish because it claimed a grossly unfair share of the world’s energy budget.6 Dense cities that used to be seen as parasitical organisms, dangerously out of synch with nature, were now would-be paragons of sustainability, carrying a much lower environmental load per capita than the pastoral suburbs that were created as antidotes to urban ills. How did city officials respond to this sea change? From the early 1990s, urban managers began to set themselves sustainability goals, assessing their progress by performance indicators and demanding that long-term planning be guided by “smart growth” principles. In Europe, where overall or whole city densities are forty to sixty persons per hectare, more than fifteen hundred municipalities signed the 1994 Aalborg Charter and competed for awards as part of its European Sustainable Cities and Towns Campaign. In the United States, where densities are less than twenty persons per hectare, the uptake was much slower and was confined, for many years, to a select group of cities (Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Santa Monica, Austin, Chattanooga). Over time, however, a city’s rise in national sustainability rankings became something for public officials to tout and for the local chamber of commerce to brandish as a competitive advantage in recruiting the kind of high-wage investment that major league cities craved. In recent years, jockeying for position as a “green city” has become the name of the metropolitan game. It has lately supplanted the race to be a “creative city,” a development model that flourished in the early 2000s. Mayors, especially, have found that green is a useful color to attach to their electoral profiles, and it is fair to say that there is even a competition afoot to claim the title of America’s greenest city. More than one thousand 31

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signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement, vowing to reduce carbon emissions in their cities below 1990 levels, in line with the Kyoto Protocol. At this point, there is a thriving “sustainable cities” movement in almost all of the world’s developed countries, and in many developing nations. ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability comprises more than twelve hundred municipalities from seventy different countries, each committed to meeting goals and sharing techniques for green governance.7 A good deal of scholarship has focused on environmental showpieces such as Portland, Curitiba, Reykjavik, Singapore, and Freiburg, so their success in attaining sustainability goals has been much emulated. More vulnerable or recalcitrant places have other things to teach us—how we go about making green decisions or whether we even have the wherewithal to make the right ones. That is why I chose to do my own research on this topic about the struggle of Phoenix to become a resilient metropolis. Faced with larger environmental challenges (and considerably more resistance from its elected officials) than havens of green consciousness such as Seattle or San Francisco, Phoenix may prove to be a more useful bellwether of sustainability. If Phoenix can become sustainable, then sustainability can be achieved anywhere. That is the premise that drove my investigations. Even if Phoenix is not the world’s least sustainable city, it is a close contender, and, in any event, the title is not worth arguing over. More than any other U.S. metropolis in the postwar era, Phoenix has channeled the national appetite for unrestrained growth, and that American habit of growth is consuming a vastly disproportionate share of the earth’s resources, including its carbon allotment. If there is any chance of altering that pattern significantly, then the effort will have to show results in regions like the thousand square miles of urban sprawl in Central Arizona that hosts Phoenix and its twenty-one satellite cities. The challenges are quite formidable. With less than seven inches of rain annually, the region’s most dependable water is pumped three hundred miles uphill from the overallocated and drought-beset Colorado River. The metropolis is deluged with more than 330 days of bright sunshine, yet 32

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less than 2 percent of its energy is drawn from solar sources, and from 1990 to 2007, Arizona increased its carbon emissions faster than any other American state—at a rate more than three times the national average. Once a haven for tuberculosis sufferers seeking respiratory relief, by 2005, Phoenix’s infamous Brown Cloud was drawing the lowest national grades from the American Lung Association for air quality in both ozone and particulates.8 Of all U.S. cities, Phoenix flew the highest in the race to profit from the housing bubble, and it has fallen the furthest as a result of the speculator-driven land crash. Population growth is the only real driver of its economy, and home building stopped in its tracks in 2008. To cap it all, the city, which already boasts the hottest summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, is in the bull’s eye of climate change, predicted to heat up and dry out faster than any other region. Even after decades of lavish federal spending on public works and water infrastructure and decades of defense industry payrolls that underpinned the rise of the Sunbelt, the stark vulnerability of Phoenix’s Sonoran Desert habitat makes it a questionable location for 4 million people, let alone the 9 million predicted to live in the megapolitan region—the Sun Corridor stretching from Prescott to Tucson—in the years to come. Yet many of the world’s fastest-growing cities are also in semiarid regions, and so, as climate change intensifies, they may share the same destiny as Metro Phoenix. The lessons learned from Central Arizona may turn out to be applicable all over the world but especially in the mega-cities of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. To assess the region’s prospects for sustainability and the obstacles that lay in its path, I chose a research methodology that involved a good deal of qualitative ethnography in the field. Aside from its utility as an information source, the advantage of qualitative research is that it offers an alternative to the sustainability indicators that city officials use to rate their performance. These checklists conform to managerial norms of measurement because they are made up of easily quantifiable items: more solar roofs, fewer airborne particulates; more transit riders, less water use per capita; more housing density, fewer golf courses. Metrics 33

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like these convey a purely physical understanding of how cities can be greened, suggesting that the ecological crisis can be fixed by making slight technical adjustments to people’s habits and interactions with their daily environments. By contrast, there are no indexes for measuring environmental justice, no technical quantum for assessing the social sustainability of a population.9 And yet, among the findings of my research was that the keys to urban sustainability lie less in physical or technical fixes than in aspects of social cooperation, such as whether communities can learn how to renounce self-interested hoarding and practice mutual aid. Can the well-provisioned respond in kind to the environmental claims of the poor by strengthening democratic input and inclusion, by promoting access and participation for populations who are habitually ignored by the green marketing of the private sector and by the “green city” campaigning of City Hall? Will officials accept the risk levels of the most vulnerable populations—the canaries in the mine—as the baseline for formulating green reforms and policy making? These are elements of social character, and trying to measure them is like counting grains of sand with a fork. In each of the problem areas I chose to investigate, it was apparent that a large part of the regional challenge lay in building cross-town cooperation and ensuring access and inclusion for populations that are habitually ignored by the green marketing of the private sector and by the “green city” campaigning of City Hall. Time after time, Phoenix turned out to be a textbook illustration of the need to adopt the tenets of environmental justice as the lead principle of green conduct. By contrast, City Hall’s effort at green governance was primarily a recipe for managing, rather than correcting, inequalities. The most obvious example was the distribution of pollution hazards in Phoenix, which showed a long-standing pattern of burden loaded against Indian reservations and poor neighborhoods dominated by minorities. Communities treated as dumping grounds for waste disposal and noxious industry are a world apart from the aromatic desert breeze and mountain preserves of North Scottsdale or Paradise Valley in the upland areas of 34

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the Phoenix Basin. There is nothing sustainable in the long run about one population living the green American dream while, across town, another is trapped in poverty and pestilence. The low-lying geography of South Phoenix hosts one of dirtiest postal codes in America and is home to 40 percent of the city’s hazardous industrial emissions, while the innerring suburbs that hosted the Cold War technology industries are now saddled with their poisonous legacy—some of the worst groundwater contamination in the nation. By contrast, it is to populations in the affluent northern reaches that most of the technical green innovations are being marketed—the solar technologies, hybrid cars, low-impact landscaping, green building techniques and the like—adding to the range of eco-options already available to their affluent residents and making them the environmental equivalent of new apps for their iPhones. How do we prevent these areas from turning into eco-enclaves, hoarding resources and knowledge about resilience and keeping them from others? Surely the green wave has to lift all boats, or else we may find ourselves with the “lifeboat ethics” first described by ecologist Garret Hardin—where those not already on board are left behind.10 A similar lesson applies to the other flash points around which I broke down my research: the urban growth machine, downtown revitalization, water management, and solar energy. In each of these areas, experts are focused on the technical fixes and innovations that are typical of any focus on urban sustainability: water conservation policy, decentralization of energy production and distribution, the transformation of transit and transport, redesign of building and infrastructure, establishment of closed-loop waste systems, growth of a bioregional food supply, and the wholesale transition to carbon-neutral or renewable fuel. But if these initiatives do not take shape as remedies for social and geographic inequality, then they are likely to end up reinforcing existing patterns of what Van Jones, the Obama administration’s short-lived green jobs czar, has called eco-apartheid: “On one side of town, there would be ecological ‘haves,’ enjoying access to healthy, morally upstanding green products and services. On the other side of town, ecological ‘have-nots’ would be languishing in 35

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the smoke, fumes, toxic chemicals, and illnesses of the old pollution-based economy.”11 Indeed, there is ample evidence that neoliberal investment patterns, consumer niche marketing, and government policies favored by moneyed voters are succeeding in fostering showpiece pockets of green living in our big cities, but these oases increasingly coexist with human and natural sacrifice zones on the other side of the tracks, where populations have to fight to breathe clean air and drink uncontaminated water. Policing and zoning, as ever, will minimize the visual and sensory shock flung up by the disparity between the two, but it will be more and more difficult to hide the mounting damage to life, land, and the atmosphere. The last object of my Phoenix investigations—anti-immigration policy— was the one that has sparked the most corrosive public sentiment. U.S. border policy is designed to funnel border crossers into Southern Arizona, because the prospect of dying in its deserts and mountains is supposed to act as a deterrent. The state’s increasingly harsh anti-immigration laws—based on the principle of “attrition through enforcement” (or “make everyday life so intolerable for immigrants that they will leave”)—attracted widespread international attention in 2010 with the passage of Senate Bill 1070, and even more draconian laws are on the way. These laws, buttressed by the brutal policing of county sheriff Joe Arpaio, the so-called “toughest sheriff in America,” are spurred by the anxiety of Anglos about losing demographic and political dominance to the burgeoning Latino population. Their inhospitable responses to migrants are also shaped by neo-Malthusian fears, stoked up by nativist groups, about population pressure on scarce resources. In truth, there is already a causal environmental link between Arizona’s undocumented migrants and their Anglo tormentors. Climate change is fast drying out Northern Mexico, and so some portion of those crossing into Arizona can already be classed as climate migrants. In effect, the carbon emissions of Phoenix residents are responsible, however indirectly, for displacing the migrants from their land and livelihoods. Given that causal link, the border crossers should have a legitimate claim on sanctuary; they should have their own carbon-conscious version of the 36

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retort offered by postcolonials when they settled in cities like London and Paris: “We are here because you were there.” Yet the region’s nativists seem hell-bent on turning the state into the kind of exclusion zone that is distinctive of resource hoarding. It is fair to conclude that Arizona’s bitter fight over immigration is the first real skirmish in the “climate wars” to come, when the threat of global warming will increasingly be used to shape immigration policies around a vision of affluent nations or regions as heavily fortified resource islands. Is this enclave mentality already at work? Internationally, the ugly side of the debate about emissions has centered on who has the right to go on polluting and which portions of the world’s population will be sacrificed. Even as cities in affluent countries compete with each other in the sustainability rankings, the same kinds of triage calculations are being made locally about which populations are to be protected and which will be cut loose. Arizona’s Latinos, who are a burgeoning 30 percent of the state’s population, have been put on notice about which triage category they are destined for, and the trauma and stigma of their criminalization under the new laws may well endure for generations. This guarantee that race relations will be toxic for many years to come does not augur well for social sustainability, and so the lesson offered by Arizona’s treatment of immigration will be instructive to other regions as and when climate migration escalates. On a more optimistic note, consider the case of the Gila River Indian Community, whose reservation is a 360,000 acre chunk of largely undeveloped land standing directly in the growth path of the Phoenix-Tucson mega-region. The Akimel O’odham, or Pima Indians, who are the majority tribal group on the reservation, claim descent from the pre-Columbian Hohokam riverine civilization that subsisted in the region for a millennium. The Pima were oasis farmers in the nineteenth century: among other things, they were lionized for helping to rescue and provision Anglo emigrants bound for the California Gold Rush. In the late nineteenth century, upriver Anglo settlers began to cut off the Gila River’s natural flow, and the Pima were rendered destitute as a result.12 Their health declined 37

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rapidly, and today this small tribal population hosts the world’s highest incidence of adult-onset diabetes. For eighty years, they waged war in the courts to regain their water access, until a 2004 settlement brought a long struggle for environmental justice to a triumphant conclusion. As a result of the settlement, the community won almost 25 percent of the state’s water allocation from the Colorado River, and it intends to use the water rights to restore as much as 150,000 acres of farmland. Delivering justice to the Pima means that a large portion of the region’s available water resources will be sequestered from the growth machine. Instead of supplying a new generation of low-density tract housing, the water can now be used to produce healthy, local food for the population of central Arizona, and, if nonindustrial agriculture prevails, the result will be a double win for carbon reduction. Surely, this is how a green polity ought to act, redressing the claims of those who have been aggrieved and doing it in a way that extends long-term benefits for all. If all responses to environmental injustice were able to follow suit, it would be a welcome model for moving forward. Even if the Gila River example is unlikely to be replicated in other places, its guiding spirit is a sound one. What if the key to sustainability lies in innovating healthy pathways out of poverty for populations at risk, rather than marketing green gizmos to those who already have many options to choose from? These are not mutually exclusive options, of course, but the lessons I took away from my research convinced me of the pressing need for clear alternatives to the eco-apartheid syndrome that afflicts Phoenix and so many other cities. Advocates of green capitalism believe that a low-carbon economy can be built by targeting only the LOHAS demographic (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, the upmarket segment of 40 million, or 20 percent of consumers nationally), but this will end up doing little more than adding a green gloss to patterns of chronic inequality. Likewise, placing all of our faith in clean-tech fixes will cede too much decision making to a closed circle of experts who, regardless of their technical prowess, will have no power to prevent the uneven application or unintended consequences of their solutions. 38

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There is no question that cities are on the front line—35 to 45 percent of the world’s carbon emissions come from cooling or heating cities, and 35 to 40 percent more from urban industry and transportation. Large cities are the first, and possibly the last, places where green action can make an appreciable difference. Urbanization, as Jane Jacobs so firmly believed, is an open-ended process, so the greening of cities is a grand act of improvisation. But cities also harbor a staggering range of inequalities, and they will continue to do so if the greenest innovations are simply additions to the range of consumer goods already available to affluent populations. That is why the road ahead for Phoenix, and for cities like it, does not lie simply in acting out of concern for “our children and grandchildren”—as it is so often phrased. To be on the right path, we should also take directions from the needs and claims of today’s most vulnerable and affected populations.

Dialogue on chapter 2: Sustainability Mabel Wilson: Thank you, Andrew, for a nice overview of the book that I’ve heard about incrementally. So, it’s nice to see what the larger project is, and, I guess, back to the question about architecture, which is where I am sort of positioned to some degree. I was curious, in the book, what your take on LEED is, actually—Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Because it seems to me that LEED is both a consequence of what you describe, as public policy that’s essentially managed by the state, but it’s also an outcome of the market. Architects, you know, become LEED-certified builders, people who build buildings have to pay to become LEED-certified gold or platinum. So, it’s also being market driven. I’m wondering whether or not you saw emerging in Phoenix other ways in which the building industry might lead to new strategies for sustainable 39

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construction outside of what seemed to be the two current models, in which green thinking is percolating down from up as opposed to what you’ve described on the reservation, which seems more bottom up and has to do with social practices and how people on an everyday basis lead their lives. And I would imagine that the building industry in Phoenix is a huge industry. Andrew Ross: Land development is virtually the only industry in Central Arizona. And it fell off a cliff a few years ago. LEED certification has been a small piece of that market, but of course, it is not just a market but something that the government intervenes in, and the place that it intervenes most prominently in is Scottsdale, which is probably the most affluent city in the region. Scottsdale is a national leader in LEED, and it is symptomatic of the priorities of its residents. In Scottsdale, as in every other city, urban managers can cherry pick from an unofficial checklist of sustainability options that circulate informally through every city manager’s office. Do you want farmers’ markets, do you want light transit, do you want LEED incentives for your developers to build in your community, and so on and so forth? Now every community will have a different choice of selections from this checklist. So, an affluent community like Scottsdale won’t want any public transit, for example. Their wants are tailored to individual choices—programs for solar roofs on their custom homes or desert landscaping in their yards. There has been some light transit built in Phoenix and Tempe, but Scottsdale doesn’t want it or anything that smacks of “urbanism.” But for communities that are still deprived of their basic needs, this checklist is almost an insult. Why should urban managers be giving priority to these kinds of items when they’re not providing basic services like adequate education, affordable housing, clean air and water and other needs? As for green design in the homebuilding industry itself, you are seeing green modifications to master-planned communities on the fringe, but for the most part, they are being promoted as selling features to affluent home buyers who might want to feel good 40

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about their living in an exurban place that otherwise will have a high carbon footprint. In the Phoenix area, there are a few “New Urbanist” communities that have popped up on the fringe, or in leapfrog locations way beyond the fringe, like Verrado. Plans for others are welcomed as efforts to jumpstart the growth machine, which is currently stalled. During the downtown boom, there was some market incentive for developers to do more infill in central locations, but all of that ground to a halt with the housing crash, which hit Phoenix worse than any other American city. It flew the highest during the boom, and it’s really fallen the furthest, with some neighborhoods so devalued (as much as 80 percent) that some commentators are close to declaring them “beyond recovery.” As a one-industry town, Phoenix is on track to become the Detroit of the twenty-first century. Margaret Crawford: Could you say more about the future of Phoenix? I mean the apocalyptic scenario. Phoenix has evidently lost population because of the foreclosure crisis or the lack of a sustainable economy, the lack of water, the lack of social sustainability. How is Phoenix surviving? Ross: Very few among my interviewees had an apocalyptic view of the future of Phoenix. Those who did tended to be natural scientists accustomed to look at the potentially self-destructive behavior of species—the inability of species to adapt—and so they viewed human populations in much the same way. For example, they might see that self-destructive conduct in the boom-and-bust, speculator-driven land economy that has characterized the building of the metropolis. The director of the Phoenix Zoo was one of those interviewees—he had a little glint in his eye when he suggested that the regional population should probably shrink to forty thousand in the decades to come. But they were very much in the minority. Unlike New Yorkers, who take a great deal of pleasure in imagining the apocalyptic collapse of their city—there’s a whole library of films and novels about it—I did not find that strain in the public imagination of Phoenix. The region probably has lost some of its population, because 41

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a lot of immigrants have been driven out—an estimated hundred thousand since the Employer Sanctions Act was passed in 2008 and probably even more so since S.B. [Senate Bill] 1070 was introduced in 2010. These populations don’t show up much in the official statistics, so the estimates are speculative. Otherwise, most people can’t leave Phoenix because their housing equity is underwater, and they simply can’t afford to leave town. So the large population churn has just stopped, even though there are still retirees coming to town, as there always will be. This is all quite suicidal to the economy, because it is entirely tied to growth. Now, any time there has been a big housing crash, the real estate industry has come back stronger than ever, and that kind of cyclical mentality has fed into the expectations about the indestructibility of the growth machine. No one has much hope that will happen soon, however, and there is no Plan B. So right now, there is a lot of flailing around for ways of diversifying the economy. As you can imagine, a lot of interest is in renewable energy manufacturing and installation, though the GOP-dominated legislature is not helping. The GOP energy option is nuclear, and they have decided that solar is a Democrat technology. Klaus Benesch: Thank you, Andrew, for a very riveting talk and also a very interesting case study of how urban sustainability may eventually be accomplished. I guess you’re not really sure about that yourself, but it was implied somehow in your talk. Listening to what you had to say about Phoenix and some of its endemic environmental issues, I was reminded of Mike Davis, who, about two years ago, in a seminar for LMU [Ludwig Maximilian University Munich] doctoral students that I moderated, emphasized time and again, in talking about ecological crisis and what we can do about it, that what caused the problem, these dense urban habitats, would also be the only template available to us, the only model for survival, for overcoming this ecological crisis and the challenges concomitant with it. But again, that makes you think: How could that possibly work? So, I was very pleased that you addressed this issue—that so far, greening is about a 42

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minority of the population who, like ourselves, is well off, affluent, and who believes in green politics, and who buys green and tries to reduce its carbon emissions, and so on and so forth. But that’s not enough, and the answer you suggest has to do with community building, social practices, particular forms of socio-urban sustainability. Insofar as your case study of Phoenix is concerned, it pivots also on very specific issues: its water shortages and Native American land rights. My question, then, would be: to what extent can we think of Phoenix as being a more general model? That is, if you think at all it could become such a model. Ross: Well, part of my job was to identify obstacles that lay in the path of implementing a sustainable model, though I’m by no means convinced that models are easily exportable anyway. Arizona State University, in Tempe, neighboring Phoenix, has reorganized its whole research apparatus into the study of regional sustainability, with the aim, in part, of exporting solutions to other parts of the world, in the same way that technology transfer has occurred. Yet solutions don’t arise out of a social vacuum. When they are exported, they carry a lot of local moss with them, and that’s been the history of technology transfer—look at the Green Revolution, which was implemented without any regard for the different social structures of developing countries. One Phoenix solution that has been exported is community organizing for immigrant rights, and it caught my imagination while doing my field research, especially regarding the environmental framework of the immigration debate. We have already seen a lot of environmental migration—there are hundreds of millions who should be classed as climate refugees in various parts of the world. Climate change is already drying out large parts of Northern Mexico—it doesn’t observe national borders by restricting itself to the Southwest U.S.—so some portion of the border crossers who stream into Arizona have been displaced from the land by the impact of high-carbon U.S. lifestyles. If some portion of these migrants are indeed climate refugees, what claim do they 43

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have when they arrive? At the very least, they have a legitimate claim of sanctuary. In reality, the response, of course, has been quite brutal, yet there is an explicit link between the climate migrants and their Anglo tormentors. The carbon pumped into the air by the latter is in part responsible for the presence of the former. As to the exclusionist policies, I see these as a version of eco-hoarding, the first skirmish of the climate wars to come. Affluent communities have already embarked on this program of hoarding, and locally, it manifests itself in decisions to exclude populations as part of a trial triage calculus. This is already happening in the debates around the UN climate summits, which are about which populations have the right to go on polluting and which will be sacrificed. So, globally, you can see triage management being actively discussed, and locally, the same kinds of mentality working its way into our cities, insofar as it relates to the immigration policy. Miles Orvell: I have two general observations that fall into the paradox category that your students don’t like, though I do myself. First, it’s become increasingly obvious that cities are potentially more ecologically sound and sustainable than the kind of sprawl that we have associated with nature. The opposition between nature and civilization, nature and the city, has always favored the assumption that to live naturally is to live outside the city, but it’s become more evident that to live naturally, or at least ecologically, in a way that is sustainable is to live inside the city. My second observation is that we have also associated green, the greening movement, and conservation as somehow opposed to growth and that, in fact, greening needs to be reconceived as part of a growth strategy, so that in economic terms, a green economy is a growing strategy. But these are deeply ingrained assumptions that I think we need to reverse—that cities are unnatural and that green is negative to growth. Malcolm McCullough: A quick J. B. Jackson quip: he noted that Americans live extensively but need to learn how to live intensively. That’s a form of growth, intensification rather than extent. 44

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Ross: Most recently, you will find this promise in the green jobs campaign. One of the very few silver linings in the Great Recession was this promise of launching a new industrial revolution on the basis of renewable energy and through a new generation of green jobs or sustainable livelihoods. That warm vision of reindustrialization still persists in certain countries—maybe Germany is one of them—but it took only eighteen months for the oil and coal lobbies to declare the term global warming all but verboten on Capitol Hill and to denigrate wholesale the green jobs portions of the stimulus funding. The wave of eco-Keynesianism that accompanied the early promise has faded, and we are now locked into austerity budgets, and austerity is one of the very worst climates in which to argue for any green policy making, for all sorts of other reasons. Working people perceive green policies to be a request on the part of the elites for them to make concessions to nature. But for a brief period when green jobs and green economic development were associated with growth and recovery, we were in a realm of the public imagination that had gone beyond the traditional notion of sacrifice—someone has to lose something for green ideas to prevail. McCullough: Here in Munich right now, I see, is the world’s largest solar business fair. Are there people from Phoenix at that talking about their, whatever the measure of sunlight per square meter per year is? Ross: Sure, First Solar will be there. First Solar is the largest solar energy company in the world. It’s headquartered in Tempe but has no manufacturing facilities in Arizona. Its facilities in the developed world are mostly here in Germany and, now, increasingly, in China. But a very interesting thing happened about a year and a half ago in Phoenix: Suntech, a Chinese solar manufacturer and major rival of First Solar, decided to put a manufacturing facility in the Phoenix region, in Glendale, and there was a big hullabaloo about it. It was the first major investment by a Chinese solar producer in the U.S. Yet most of the jobs there will be in assembly. All of the skilled work will be 45

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done in China, and the Phoenix jobs will be in finishing and assembly and packing. For me, that was a very interesting moment, because it marks a reversal of how China has been used by U.S. manufacturers as an assembly platform for the last twenty years or so. Now we are seeing the tables turned, specifically in the renewable energy fields, where Chinese firms will be coming to very sunny regions of the U.S., and they will need low-income assembly workers, the sort that we used to find in China. Even at that, Phoenix will be very happy to see the jobs coming in. Crawford: The example of the Pima Indians that you offered in your paper is instructive, but it’s also really exceptional. In all of your discussions with other people in Phoenix, did you hear any indication that there was a commitment to transforming anything? It doesn’t sound like you did. Ross: Oh, everywhere. It is very easy to find sustainability activists, advocates, and practitioners on the ground, in almost every field. In my interviews, I sought them out. I was wrestling with my inner Mike Davis [laughter] by going out and looking for the people with a passion for changing things. I tell a lot of their stories in the book. They know they’re up against it, but part of my job also was to try and isolate the obstacles that lay in the path of sustainability, which many of them know about. They’re very political in nature, not necessarily technical, but political and social in nature. They also feel that whatever they can have in their own backyards may have an influence far beyond Phoenix. Crawford: But I mean, isn’t that the issue of democracy that you started off with? That in a sense, that’s the obstacle. Ross: I think so. I think it’s a question of scale. If you look at the global level, the climate justice movement is abolitionist in nature. Like most effective social movements, it’s about abolishing the debt that is owed to underdeveloped nations by the polluting nations. But climate justice is also a global version of the environmental justice movement that began in American cities in the 1980s. The action that 46

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people took against injustices found in their own neighborhoods has now been scaled up onto this international stage. There’s a really strong kinship between these two moments. Orvell: Thank you very much. Dialogue: Works Cited Ross, Andrew. Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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Looking north toward the Cabrini-Green housing project, Chicago, 1999. Historic American Engineering, Library of Congress.

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3

the multicultural citY  mabel o. wilson

In a sixth-floor apartment of a twenty-one-story residential high-rise,

my home office desktop sits in front of a ten-foot-long horizontal window that looks onto Manhattan’s scenic Riverside Drive. As I work, my gaze often shifts back and forth between layers of windows that clutter my computer screen to rustic views of Riverside Park and the Hudson River beyond. For two months in the spring of 2011, I followed the Internet broadcast of the demolition of a high-rise building. The website’s video feed documented the removal of the last residential tower of the William Green Homes, part of an ensemble of public housing developments that became known as the “infamous” Cabrini-Green housing projects, on the western edge of the Near North Side neighborhood of Chicago. Located in the community room of a nearby mixed-income residential building erected by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), where one of the Cabrini Extension high-rises once stood, two remotely controlled cameras—one equipped with a wide-angle lens and the other with a telephoto lens for close-up views—were trained on the fifteen-story east facade of 1230 North Burling Street. During the day, I watched the building incrementally pummeled by a wrecking ball. Loaders and backhoes swarmed atop the piles of debris. Their shovels shifted and scooped the rubble to dump trucks that carted the concrete and other building materials off for recycling and disposal. At night, between the hours of 7:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. CST, an enigmatic, stroboscopic light show entertained those who tuned in. Accessing the website at various times during the day and night, I sat transfixed by the poignantly rendered spectacle of urban destruction. Anyone around the world who had Internet access could watch the tower’s destruction, which began in late March and continued through April. By mid-May, the screen was dark and the feed had been terminated. 49

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The broadcast of the demolition was one component of a multimedia, community-based art installation, Project Cabrini-Green, masterminded by Czech-born artist Jan Tichy.1 The live feed and a delayed broadcast could also be seen by visitors to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), also located in the Near North Side, approximately one and a half miles to the southeast along the city’s famous Gold Coast of luxury stores and residences.2 Tichy, a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), collaborated with several community groups; with web, sound, and new media artists; and with students and faculty from the SAIC to create the temporary memorial to Cabrini-Green, a project that was once home to more than fifteen thousand Chicagoans. The CHA assisted in facilitating the public artwork about its last remaining high-rise at the multiblock housing project, and, as part of the artistic process, Tichy and his collaborator, social worker Efrat Appel, educated local youth about the neighborhood’s past, a local history unfamiliar to many of these young Chicagoans. To put the art project in context, the artists also offered the groups a primer on contemporary public, light, and sound art. In workshops, youth, some of whom had lived near the building on North Burling Street, wrote poetry about life in the neighborhood. For them, the area that included the gradually disappearing housing towers was, as Dorothy Garcia poignantly describes, “Gone now/But it was home/Imperfect and conflicted/But it was home.”3 Their poetry would provide a critical component of the public artwork. For the installation, software translated the youth’s recorded poems into binary code signaled by LED lights. Tichy and his team encased these light boxes in bright orange ammunition boxes and then placed them in each of the 134 apartments. With the band of horizontal windows removed from the facade, the staccato pattern of the lights could be seen at night from the street and recorded by the remote cameras. The young poets were alerted to where their boxes had been placed within the housing block. As work crews demolished the building, they also extinguished the light show, hence silencing the voices. During the week, Tichy made daily visits to the site to retrieve the ammunition boxes from the rubble with the assistance of the workers. They managed to salvage forty-nine of the boxes from the debris, with twenty of them still in working condition.4 50

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Even though it abuts one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the world, Cabrini-Green as an urban ghetto was for all intents and purposes invisible to most Chicagoans—except, of course, for those who lived among the towering architectural behemoths. As an artwork, Project Cabrini-Green made the Cabrini-Green buildings visible to nonresidents in a manner they had never been while inhabited—except under the scrupulous eye of the police, reporters, state workers, and researchers.5 Although urban subjects may inhabit and circulate through the same smooth terrains of virtual and physical networks, they do not necessarily possess equal political, social, or economic agency. What counts as “culture” and whose culture becomes visible in the contemporary urban mise-en-scene depend upon where someone falls within a spectrum of power relations—who precisely is looking and what they are looking at. If, as geographer Michael Keith has written, “in the cities of twenty-first-century modernity space curates the social, the economic and the cultural,” then what can we learn about the dynamics of power and culture from Project Cabrini-Green and its transformation of urban/architectural space?6 What are the characteristics of Chicago’s urban morphology—namely, its grids—that withstand dynamic processes of subtraction like the violent destruction of Cabrini-Green? And what can we discern from the complex social, urban, and architectural history of Cabrini-Green, which began with such buoyant optimism about the possibility of ameliorating poverty and overcrowding and ended a half century later in a pile of debris documented by video feed?

City of Grids

“Flattened, geometricized, ordered” characterizes the grid for art historian Rosalind Krauss; “antinatural, antimimetic, and antireal” are the other attributes she observes in this modern spatial and representational technique deployed in modernist art.7 Grids were also a common technique for the modern organization of land and space used in surveying, urban planning, and architectural design. Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance, initiated in 1785, provided a mechanism for dividing the land into parcels, thus effecting a 51

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transfer of ownership in the western territories from the previous indigenous inhabitants to the newly minted American citizens and settlers who were pushing westward in search of wealth. One way station along that trek was Chicago—a city settled on the edge of Lake Michigan and organized in a grid pattern calibrated to the standards of the earlier Land Ordinance. Starting in the nineteenth century, the city’s industry, population, and wealth ballooned. The burgeoning city’s dense tapestry of train tracks sorted railcars of raw materials and resources into manufactured products and processed foods that were eventually transported to all points on the continent. Chicago’s urbanism skillfully negotiated its grid’s two vectors—the vertical and the horizontal. In its horizontal deployment, Chicago’s tidy grid of streets and blocks enabled its metropolitan boundaries to creep outward from the smooth edge of the lake and engulf the surrounding midwestern prairie with its suburban tentacles. In the grid’s vertical axis, blocks organized the steel-framed temples of commerce that eventually populated the Loop. The skyscrapers of the first Chicago School of architects—Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, John Wellborn Root, and William Le Baron Jenney—made the horizontal grid’s parcels financially lucrative by repetitiously stacking them plate upon plate. With the structural steel frame bearing both the dead load of the building’s weight and the live load of the inhabitants, the facade was free to accommodate larger expanses of glazing. The bands of intricate terracotta cladding created an elegant grid pattern around the signature Chicago three-part window. These larger openings allowed light to penetrate deeper into the interiors of the high-rise offices and retail spaces—businesses geared toward the city’s emerging middle class of workers and consumers. In the booming mid-twentieth century, a new round of modernist architectural experiments in verticality gave rise to residential towers. In a several-year collaboration with developer Herbert Greenwald beginning in the late 1940s, German immigrant architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe erected the first International Style residential high-rise ever built in the United States—the Promontory apartments (1946–49) on South Lakeshore Drive. The twenty-story, 122-unit building, with its horizontal fenestration and early use of aluminum windows, allowed for spectacular views of the lake to 52

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the east. The new apartment building’s concrete structural frame, with brick spandrel panels between columns, produced a mat-like grid against the city’s iconic skyline. This first foray into privately developed high-rise modernism was followed by the sublime steel-framed twins of 860–880 Lakeshore Drive, dressed in an ornamental mesh of blackened steel and glass. Mies envisioned residential life for the mid-century elite inside his Lakeshore high-rises as choreographed by aesthetically spare, mass-produced Bauhausian furniture. Wrapped in floor-to-ceiling steel windows attached to the vertical I-beams, each unit’s interiors opened onto a panoramic view of the orderly (at least from this perspective) modern metropolis. Large windows orchestrated the private views outward as well as public views into the apartments—destabilizing and blurring the distinction between those two realms.8 Chicago architect Charles Genther of PACE and Associates, who lived on the twenty-sixth floor of 860 Lakeshore Drive, relished the view precisely because it annihilated distance in the same manner that innovations in communication and space travel had done.9 Illuminated at night by the yellow glow of incandescent lamps, with the windows framing the scene like a television screen, domestic life was put on display to the auto traffic that zoomed up and down Lakeshore Drive. (We should note that the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, with its gridded stone and glass exterior, the legacy of Miesian Neo-Rationalism, sits in the shadows of the two iconic towers in the Near North Side.)

Public Experiments in Vertical Living

In the 1950s, high-rise residential architecture provided a rational solution to the problem of what was initially proposed as transitional housing for Chicago’s poor and working classes in both the South Side and North Side. The poorest section of the Near North Side neighborhood, for many years a way station for immigrants, proved to be an ideal site for publically financed high-rise housing. In early Chicago, German immigrants had first settled in the area before Irish immigrants arrived. Swedish immigrants lived in the area until the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 swept away the neighborhood’s housing stock of wooden tenements. Immigrants from Sicily 53

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would next claim the area, and its territory then received the name “Little Hell” because of intermittent gun battles between rival gangs, as well as the untenable squalor created by a lack of running water and overcrowding in many of the buildings. It remained populated predominantly by European immigrants until black Americans migrating from the South began to settle in the neighborhood, beginning in the 1930s.10 In 1942, the CHA built the two-story Frances Cabrini Homes to provide 586 new units of housing to replace substandard tenements and unsanitary boarding houses. The new racialized population mandates stipulated that the resident composition of the Cabrini Homes be 25 percent black and 75 percent white. It is important to note that ethnic ratios of Sicilians and Irish were not specified; therefore, to the state, all ethnic immigrants fit neatly into the category of “white.” Even with the introduction of new housing, overcrowding persisted. The area’s black population had grown from 20 percent in 1940 to 79 percent ten years later.11 In this neighborhood and elsewhere in the city, such as the South Side, the exponential growth in the number of families dwelling in substandard housing without adequate sewerage and fire protection posed a great risk for outbreaks of disease and human tragedy.12 To alleviate overcrowding in the poorest areas of Chicago, which were predominately black because of restrictive covenants and discriminatory rental policies and practices that limited options, the CHA, backed by a large pool of federal monies, embarked upon the construction of high-rise residential buildings on select parcels in the early 1950s. Even though the CHA’s director at the time, Elizabeth Wood, wanted to disperse residents across the city to alleviate the overcrowding, racist backlash from neighborhood associations and politicians meant that black residents would remain in poor and underserved areas. Therefore, due to limited land availability, building vertically was in many instances the only means to ensure that an adequate number of units would be constructed.13 Mobilizing an army of bulldozers and wrecking balls, the city cleared, in the name of urban renewal, so-called “blighted” areas of substandard housing to open vast tracts for new building projects. The CHA hired Chicago’s top architectural firms to design the new modern public housing. 54

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In 1958, the CHA completed the Cabrini Extension. The fifteen concreteframed buildings, with red-brick infill spandrel panels, were erected in heights of seven, ten, and nineteen stories and dwarfed the adjacent lowscaled Frances Cabrini Homes. “The Reds,” as they became known, were designed by the architectural office of A. Epstein and Sons. These new residential buildings added an additional 1,925 units to the area.14 Increasing the number of apartments by another 1,096 units, the eight buildings of the William Green Homes opened in 1961. These fifteen- and sixteen-story high-rise buildings, “The Whites,” as they were called, shared a concrete frame construction technique and detailing similar to those used in Mies’s Promontory Apartments; however, the spandrel panels that held a horizontal band of aluminum windows were built out of cast-in-place concrete panels instead of yellow brick. This was no coincidence, since both were built by the same firm, PACE and Associates, who served as associate architects for Mies’s Promontory Apartments, Lakeshore Drive Apartments, and other projects, such as the Illinois Institute of Technology’s (IIT’s) campus on the South Side.15 As superblocks, with car parking and wide swathes of open space between the towering housing slabs, the new Cabrini-Green reconfigured the scale of Chicago’s urban grid and fabric in the Near North Side neighborhood. Sanguine about his firm’s architectural endeavors, PACE and Associates principal Charles Genther “thought we were giving people the same thing that the people who lived along Lake Shore Drive had” by providing “good views and livable space in a great location.”16 The views, however, were not the same as those of their Near North Side neighbors, who, like Genther, were ensconced in comfortable upper-middle-class apartments on the Gold Coast; nor was the agency the same for those who gazed out from the windows of Cabrini-Green.

Snipers

Widely circulated photographs of the era captured the optimism of this experiment in high-density housing that would become home to thousands of Chicagoans. These images documented youths playing on the lawns and 55

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pedestrians darting to their destinations in between the hulking gridded facades of the housing blocks. It presented a neat and orderly urban sphere made possible by modern architecture and planning’s deployment of rational design principles. However, these same photographers captured very little of what life was like inside the buildings and apartments for their residents, many of whom became permanent denizens because they were unable to afford rents in privately owned apartments or to purchase homes elsewhere in the city. Life inside a Cabrini-Green high-rise was fictionalized, however, in Norman Lear’s situation comedy Good Times, which ran from 1974 to 1979. As the show’s gritty opening credits displayed, each weekly twentytwo-minute show was set against Cabrini’s “Reds.” (It was also the only successful sitcom ever set in the projects.) At its best, Good Times made it clear that this was life in the ghetto—a black family, the Evanses; their sassy neighbors; and a roster of good-hearted thugs, pimps, and winos confronted a lack of stable employment and material wealth that tested family solidarity once a week. With most of the action occurring in the Evanses’ blue-collar all-purpose living room, viewers followed the comedic travails of Florida, James, J.J., and crew, whose efforts at overcoming the racialized practices of redlining and job discrimination, which continually stymied their upward mobility, provided situations for humor and mirth. Infusing a dose of good ol’ American liberalism, the heartfelt shenanigans of the folks who populated Good Times also peddled black working-class struggles as a bourgeois primer in moral and racial uplift. But life inside the real Cabrini-Green continued to deteriorate, due to unrelenting structural racism. Less than ten years after residents moved into their new apartments in the Cabrini-Green high-rises, a good percentage of the units remained unoccupied because families, many with young children, found the often broken elevators and poorly maintained stairwells impractical for their daily comings and goings. In the Green Homes, for example, PACE and Associates grouped the two elevators in a core on the exterior of the building. This meant that the elevators were exposed to searing heat in the summer and to brutal winter winds that resulted in persistent operating problems and shutdowns. Moreover, since many of the youth living in the complex did not 56

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have adult supervision or adequate recreational programs after school, they resorted to vandalism, often disabling the elevators.17 Photographs of picket lines outside the CHA’s headquarters in the 1970s illustrate that residents were adamant in their demands to the authority that they be given, at least, safe and secure elevators. In response to these dire circumstances, which were causing residents to flee the buildings, the CHA installed closed-circuit cameras in the elevators to monitor activity, but even these measures failed to stem the vandalism and criminal activity.18 But there were other motives and factors underlying the rise of violent activities in the housing development. One melee in the fall of 1968 between hundreds of youths and the police arose because the local high school’s administrators had refused student demands to hire black teachers to teach black history in the classroom.19 Compounding the social problems of residents, nearby factories began to shut down or move out to suburban facilities, thus decimating employment opportunities in the area. One black police officer commented that underlying the rise in crime and violence was the fact that “there are not enough jobs. There is not enough recreation. There is not enough maintenance. There is not enough of anything.” By 1970, the CHA had four hundred empty units throughout Cabrini-Green, even though more than seven thousand families filled their waitlist roster. Compounding the agency’s problems, rents from the units were covering only 30 percent of CHA’s operating expenses for the housing development.20 Cabrini-Green’s experiment in low-income vertical living, with its horizontal expanse of windows, did provide, however, ideal nests for the gun barrels of snipers, a problem that plagued police patrols on a daily basis.21 Gunfire caused by gang violence escalated after the urban unrest of the late 1960s. Although the city’s South Side bore the brunt of rioting in the wake of the murder of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the North Side neighborhood received many residents displaced by the turmoil. In the summer of 1970, Cabrini-Green was the focus of national attention, when two police officers patrolling the housing project were killed and a young boy was wounded by sniper fire.22 At the core of the problem was the view from the towers, which enabled 360-degree surveillance of the housing project’s ground plane, 57

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a view vastly different from the panoramic views from the elite Lakeshore Drive apartment buildings’ ribbon windows, which surveyed bucolic prospects and metropolitan vistas. Behind the violence at Cabrini-Green lay a response by the residents to feelings of disempowerment and neglect. Given the inability of the underfunded CHA to adequately maintain the buildings and grounds of Cabrini-Green, residents felt abandoned by city agencies. Instead of a productive resolution to the many problems that plagued the upkeep of the buildings (including the lack of grocery stores and parks), residents perceived the constant presence of police officers as state-sponsored surveillance and harassment. The mainstream newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, featured headlines charging that Cabrini-Green’s residents were engaged in “guerilla warfare” and that a “reign of terror” had transformed the no-man’s-land between the towers into a “Combat Alley” against local police incursion.23 From outside and by outsiders, Cabrini-Green was labeled “notorious” and “infamous.” In the national imaginary, its name conjured visions of the foreboding inner city and a no-man’s-land of dark, looming towers. The menacing monoliths that had become mainstream America’s worst nightmare even served as a backdrop for director Clive Barker’s camp classic, the interracial “hor-romance” Candyman (1992). The movie’s hookhanded legend terrorizes wayward residents and interlopers from his lair in the derelict crumbling interiors of the Reds and the Whites. By the 1980s, Cabrini-Green had come to be seen by the local media as “a civic embarrassment almost as soon as the first high-rise was occupied,” with the blistering assessment that “the flaw in the dreams of Cabrini-Green’s planners was the city’s deep-running racial divisions.”24 Despite sharing architects and aesthetic and structural affinity with Promontory Apartments and 860–880 Lakeshore Drive, the high-rises of Cabrini-Green did not house bankers, lawyers, and corporate workers. The stranglehold of segregation and decades of antiblack racism had stymied black American economic and political advancement within the United States’ postwar Fordist economy. In their midcentury sociological study of Chicago’s black neighborhoods, The Black Metropolis, Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake observed that the black masses had always been and continued 58

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to be lumpenproletariat—a low-skilled, underutilized workforce in both the U.S. North and South.25 In contrast to those who arrived in Chicago via various networks of international immigration, through which many could find employment and housing, black Americans, after decades of intranational migration, could never gain full access to the wage labor structure of the city’s industrial economy that was fundamental to the acquisition of private property, the backbone of American social progress. For many, Jim Crowism also curtailed their right to cast a ballot, thus making political recourse to fight racism a challenge. These two factors left the majority of black Americans economically and politically adrift by the time Cabrini-Green’s towers were built. Cayton and Drake’s observations still proved accurate through the 1970s. With the beginning of the region’s deindustrialization, which shuttered factories and outsourced jobs in the 1970s, the high-rise’s stacked apartments warehoused the surplus labor that the region’s shrinking economy could never absorb. By the time the city elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983, Cabrini-Green was beyond repair. By the 1990s, little could be done by the city to alleviate the rampant problems that plagued the residents of Cabrini-Green. After years of public debate, the CHA decided to incrementally tear down the high-rises while preserving the low-rise buildings of Cabrini Extension and Cabrini Homes and disperse the dislocated population to other neighborhoods around Chicago. Resisting such tactics, a few residents did attempt to organize and preserve what they called home—which is the reason why the high-rise on North Burling Street was the last of the Green Homes to be torn down. In the aftermath of the demolition, some residents of Cabrini-Green did “move on up” (or rather out) to suburban communities to settle in single-family houses and townhomes next door to other ethnic immigrants, such as East Asians and Nigerians, and many from this part of the Cabrini-Green diaspora tuned in to watch Project Cabrini-Green.26 Other former residents, especially black men, were incarcerated within the “prison-industrial complex” or were killed by the gang warfare endemic to the underground drug economy that arose in the wake of an absence of stable employment opportunities. And many of those residents who were forced from welfare into workfare in the early 59

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1990s, under the neoliberal policies of the Clinton Administration, discovered by the early 2000s that their hard-earned wages left them stymied in a service economy that now competed in a tight global market. With the land cleared of failed public housing, buildings that had replaced substandard housing stock in a round of state-sponsored slum clearance forty years prior, the vacant tracts in the Near North Side became ripe for contemporary public/private redevelopment of “mixed income” neighborhoods. In the early 2000s, the CHA embarked upon the construction of the New Urbanist–influenced Parkside of Old Town. The new urban housing development, with its postmodern contextual details of brick, faux stone, columns, cornices, and a public clock tower, carved up the modernist superblock into smaller increments of the original urban grid. Parkside’s picturesque image of small-scaled urban living supplanted the massive abstract concrete monoliths of Cabrini-Green. The CHA crafted a mixed-income development with a quarter of its initial four hundred condominium and townhouse units set aside as affordable rentals and the rest offered as market rate rentals and condominiums. In this new scenario for urban settlement, income quotas replaced the mid-twentieth century’s racial quotas. What this effort at legislating residential diversity ignored, however, was the way that current iterations of racial thinking and racism operated within neoliberal economies to structure and maintain inequalities. Along with its mixed-income agenda, the CHA defined, as one of Parkside’s allures, its proximity to consumer amenities such as Starbucks, Whole Foods, Best Buy, multiplex cinemas, a host of panethnic chain restaurants, and cultural attractions, including the MCA. One retailer that approached the CHA to purchase and build on land where the last tower of the Green Homes once stood was the Target Corporation, booster of high design at affordable prices. Revealed to the public once the last tower was reduced to rubble, Target’s win-win land swap deal, completed in January 2012, would supposedly provide two hundred jobs (an estimated seventy-five to CHA residents) and a projected $50 million in local investment. The 150,000-squarefoot store would also anchor a housing development of condominiums and townhouses. But in light of Target’s vigorous antiunion campaign against its 60

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workers, who were seeking to organize in order to improve dismal working conditions and stagnant pay, not everyone would be a winner. Moreover, by 2012, only four hundred of the promised twelve hundred demolished lowincome units had been replaced, making the remaining Cabrini-Green residents leery of Target’s and the CHA’s ebullient intentions and projections.27 To conclude, the urban grid, a technique ideal for capitalist development, recalibrates land use and value through processes of subtraction, addition, and reorganization. These transformations—often violent in nature—open new vistas within the global city. “Subtraction is the primary activity in the ecology of building,” writes architectural theorist Keller Easterling, “making space—an operation of practice or capacity that all buildings possess, rather than a by-product of destructive forces.”28 Typically, the cycles of a city’s creative destruction remain unseen, hidden behind scaffolding and tall perimeter walls. What the cameras of Project Cabrini-Green did, however, was expose for two months this process of subtraction through its mechanical and digital technologies of viewing. This was not the sweeping view offered from the gridded facades of Mies’s towers. Nor was it the sort of surveillance from the sniper’s nest or police posts once common in Cabrini-Green’s multiblock housing project. What Project Cabrini-Green’s remote cameras captured—themselves propped up in new market-rate housing and trained upon the last vestiges of the Green Homes—was how political and economic forces re-vision the city. We cannot ignore the social violence inherent in the clearing of land for new construction, processes no longer euphemistically naturalized as the removal of “blight” under the aegis of “urban renewal” but still transpiring under the benign biomorphic metaphor of “redevelopment.” As Easterling astutely observes: “subtractions of planning may be no less violent or deliberate than the subtractions of warfare.”29 Through its multiplatform cultural agenda, Project Cabrini-Green provided a vital public forum to voice the outrage, anger, and loss experienced by those affected by the deliberate destruction of a living community. Or as Project Cabrini-Green youth poet Robert Harrison asks of the municipal protectorate responsible for the demolition of his home: 61

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If you build to destroy, then why do you build. If you build to leave people without homes, then why do you build. Why do you build, if you build to make memories, If you build to break memories, then why do you build.30 We must affirm that the artists behind Project Cabrini-Green were wellintended cultural producers keen on erecting a poignant, living memorial that made visible to a global audience a difficult and disappearing chapter in Chicago and the United States’ history. But we might observe as well that what Project Cabrini-Green’s surveillance technology also accomplished (unintentionally) was to validate current redevelopment policy by making visible and evident the opening up of new territory for incorporation into the global city.

Dialogue on chapter 3: The Multicultural City Margaret Crawford: Thank you, Mabel, for a very fascinating talk,

and I think Cabrini-Green is a very interesting place. (The film Candyman is one of the most amazing films I’ve ever seen; it really is extraordinary.) You discussed the art project on Cabrini-Green, and it would be interesting to contrast it to all of the YouTube videos that residents, teenage residents of the project, also posted. There is a whole range of really interesting commemorative videos that were posted on YouTube. Are there any songs about Cabrini-Green? Mabel Wilson: Yes, there is something called a RapWiki. All of the towers had very particular names and identities associated with gang and rap. . . . So there actually is a thriving sort of rap culture in Cabrini-Green. I was provoked by the initial photographs that were given to me about the

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multicultural city, and what struck me was, in that series of photographs: who was looking at whom? Because there were these celebrity paparazzi images, and so I just became interested in this question—How, within the multicultural city, is visuality structured? And I had just been collecting a huge folder of screenshots of this. I thought, it will give me the opportunity to analyze this thing I myself had been watching, as well, and understand my role as a cultural producer more clearly—because I’m part of that creative class. Albena Yaneva: Thank you, it was really interesting. It made me think about the notion of multiculturalism and question why we actually use this term as related to ethnicity. When we talk about the multicultural city, multicultural design, I think maybe we should broaden a little bit the scope of multiculturalism, because the multiplicity of cultures that you talk about in your theoretical introduction is probably a concept we should consider in the design of every single building. And I thought of a particular example—a Louis Kahn building for a research laboratory in Philadelphia that he designed in the 1950s, the Richards Medical Center, which was a complete disaster, with the users complaining all the time. It was a scientific building, and the concept of light of Louis Kahn was important in the design of this building, but the users constantly complained and put foil on the windows. So there was a clash of cultures, because the space was really not adapted to the expectations of the scientific cultures. It is a story that sounds very similar to the story you were telling. So this is just a question: why, whenever we talk about multiculturalism, do we always relate culture to ethnicity, rather than to the many cultures that a city is made of and the many cultures of the users that a building’s design should respond to? Wilson: No, I think that’s actually a good point. My understanding is that it does come into being because you have all of these transnational migrations that are happening, and consequently, you’re getting people within cities where a kind of cosmopolitan ethos has developed in order to negotiate cultural difference. Part of the reason why I mention that fear

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relates to the book that I just finished, where I discuss the degree to which ethnicity and race were collapsed and African Americans were understood as ethnics, as if to say, we’re not yet American. And so there was a way in which a sense of national belonging, national identity, race, and ethnicity were all knotted up and competing with one another. Though we tend to separate them, historically those things were always tethered together and always up for negotiation. And I think even in this current context, those things are still working against one another in a way. Andrew Ross: I was very interested to see that it was primarily a cultural mobilization around the demolition, and that’s quite distinct, at least as I recall, from what happened around the demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes, completed finally in 2007, which were probably a much larger area of public housing towers. And that was a very politicized mobilization of community organizers and groups, some of whom were fixated on the romance of community, which was being demolished along with the buildings. But also more interestingly, I think, some of them focused on defining a concept of social housing, public housing in general, and they were very worried about the replacement, the successor paradigm, the HOPE VI, which was a mixed-income housing scheme driven by an idea of middle-class civility. But I wonder if there’s anything to be said about the fact that there wasn’t that kind of mobilization around Cabrini-Green. Does this say something about the acceptance in the interim of the mixed-income paradigm model? Or is it something else, some other kind of more fatalistic acceptance of the wrecking ball? Wilson: I don’t know if it had to do with the fact that the Robert Taylor Homes were very much embedded within a poor, working-class neighborhood, with Bridgeport on the other side of the freeway, which was a Polish, Swedish, again working-class community, whereas Cabrini-Green was right adjacent to the second wealthiest neighborhood after the Upper East Side in Manhattan. So, there was probably a sense that there was a different kind of politic about how that land was valued, and perhaps there was an understanding that if these are taken down, something better is going to replace them, versus maybe with the Robert Taylor Homes, where there 64

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was a collective sense of “we’re not sure if this is being valued collectively within the city in the same way.” But it’s interesting that in the last building that was torn down at Cabrini-Green, the residents organized, and they said, “We are a community, we’ve lived here for twenty-five years, we all know each other, we’re gonna stay and we’re gonna stick this out,” and so they hired their own community police, they took care of maintenance, they took over the building and proposed to the city to buy the building and privatize it. But the city said no in the end. And so these were the last groups of people who were evicted in January [2011], and so that is part of the reason why this was the last high-rise building standing. The middlerise buildings had stayed, and the panoramic view of the city from the park encompasses the Loop and the Gold Coast, but then you kind of see the remnants of Cabrini-Green in the distance. Miles Orvell: Your response to the challenge of the multicultural city has made me think and ponder what I meant in the first place, in setting out the term for discussion. [Laughter.] It seems to me now that the very concept is an outsider’s concept, that one can only perceive the multiplicity of cultures from the perspective of being outside, and that from anyone within a culture or within a neighborhood or within a ghetto or within an enclave of elitism or whatever—you’re not really living in a multiple universe of cultures. You’re living within a singular culture. So, it is a perspectival thing just to even conceive of multiculturalism. And then I’m thinking: is this an ideal? I mean, it’s sort of almost an assumption in the U.S. that we love this new multicultural society that we live in, we promote it as an ideal of American democracy. But where do we see it visible? And I think perhaps the only place we see it is in the vanishing public parks, because you don’t see it in a singular neighborhood of an ethnic entity, you don’t see it there. You see it only where ethnicities come together in some place. David Nye: You see it in the food court. Orvell: Yes, I suppose you see it, on a commercial level, in the multiethnic food court. Malcolm McCullough: There are minarets next to the freeway in Toledo, Ohio. 65

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Orvell: So you can see it if you drive by. Crawford: But I think multiculturalism is very alive in the commu-

nity arts. Orvell: In terms of the participants? Crawford: Well, in terms of the conceptualization in which a city is seen as an even band of different cultures, all to be equally celebrated, which is a very questionable understanding because it suggests that they are all good and we all celebrate them, ignoring issues of power, numbers, everything else. And I think that’s a feel-good concept of multiculturalism that’s still really prevalent. Jeffrey Meikle: One addendum to your comment, which I think is fascinating, is that if you have to rise above it to look at it, to see the multiculturalism, what about the person who is embedded in it? And who experiences the other surrounding cultures in his or her own daily life? and how does one interact with them, accept them or oppose them, in situations where you can certainly be aware of a threat? Orvell: Especially in gang warfare, where the turf lines are very strictly drawn between ethnic groups and there’s no sense of “hey, we’re living in a great multicultural society here!” [Laughter.] Klaus Benesch: I find it quite striking how architectural history seems to repeat itself. As Mabel mentioned, Cabrini-Green has not been the first incident where a preeminent modernist building has been demolished—think of the destruction, in 1972, of the Pruitt-Igoe towers in St. Louis that, according to Robert Venturi, ushered in a new paradigm, postmodernism. A place does not simply exist, it is made—we make places by living in them or doing something with them. And in that sense, what you can see in Cabrini-Green is that people really do something with these buildings, they are still alive, there are lots of things happening, lots of cultural practices, rap music, what have you. But still, you know, the city decides against them, so that raises again the question of power, economic power, political power, and so forth. Wilson: I want to respond to something I think you’re suggesting, Klaus, in terms of mobility, because I think architects have a very hard 66

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time in networked relationships. They have a very hard time understanding that structures plug into grids, and I think there is a tendency within the field, as I was suggesting, to see the building always as this autonomous architectural object, this signature thing. That’s why I was shocked to find out that PACE Associates was the architect of record for Mies’s work, including Cabrini-Green. And so those kinds of connections I think are really significant in order to understand this power relation, because I think that architects would say “yes, there is a problem in Cabrini-Green with the poor and with race,” but they never understand how the field itself perpetuates and is blind to, I think, its own relationship to all of these things in the production of its own work. Orvell: On Klaus’s point of how spaces are made into places with local meaning, I have a perfect illustration for you: in Philadelphia, there was a great minipark, part of Edmund Bacon’s plan for the city, right in the middle of Center City, near City Hall, called Love Park—after Indiana’s awful LOVE statue that has occupied it since the seventies. . . . And it was a world-famous skateboard park. It was on every skateboard video and every skateboard game—my son was a skateboarder, and he showed it to me many times. And when John Street came in as mayor, he saw this skater’s mecca as somehow affecting the image of the city, because it really was a teen gathering spot and a multiethnic gathering spot that was almost utopian, that attracted tourists and attracted viewers, and it was the hottest skating spot and the most vibrant place in downtown Philadelphia. And the city closed it to skateboarders in 2002; they destroyed what made it possible to skateboard by installing planters, by removing the stone benches and replacing them with wooden benches that had obstructions on the surfaces; and Mayor Street, who happens to be African American, promised that another skateboard park would be built (ten years later it has yet to be built) and it was just a decision made in the name of civic order, that destroyed a vital public institution. McCullough: I’m just picking up more on this idea of networks. If you imagine that cities are flows of material and energy, it stands to reason that people belong to multiple places, communities, organizations, and 67

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so on. It’s not blood soil, you don’t have one proximate traditional “come over here and I shoot you with my Uzi” kind of thing. So the question is: is “ghetto” the deprivation of the capacity to belong to lots of different communities as the day goes by? And to what extent does access to resources and infrastructure accentuate that? Crawford: I’m wondering, Mabel, if you have any thoughts about what happened to the residents of Cabrini-Green? Do they have Section Eight vouchers? Did they get the “Moving to Opportunity” program? Where did they go, how did they find housing? Wilson: Actually, that I don’t—I haven’t heard, because this is all new. But I would suspect. Crawford: No, I don’t think you could find out the information hidden somewhere. . . . Wilson: It’s very hard to find that out. The Parkside at Old Town development in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood is supposed to house some residents in “public” and affordable housing and others at market rate. This is one of many mixed-income sites of dispersal. I think they were planning to put twelve hundred units total not just at Parkside but at multiple sites, and they have only built three hundred since it was planned in 1999 or 2000. And I do think that some of the former Cabrini-Green people have moved in, but only 25 percent, I think, are for CHA residents, former or current residents, and the rest have been dispersed through Section Eight vouchers, etcetera. And of course the postindustrial economy is such that you hope they find jobs within the service economy, but the guarantee is that wages have become stagnant. Target was emblematic of that, the fact that they’re now having labor trouble because workers’ salaries do not go up and they don’t have health care, they are just barely making beyond minimum wage. And so it’s highly problematic, because the parents may not have been able to get jobs within the manufacturing industries, but now the children barely get any jobs within the service economy. There has probably been almost no so-called upward mobility. Orvell: There is an analogous situation in Philadelphia, where the city’s housing authority demolished most if not all of its high-rises and 68

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installed community housing of a sort that is of much lower density. But interestingly and crucially, there were qualifications for admission to the new housing, so that what you got was an elite group of the qualified being admitted into the newly built affordable housing. The nonqualified were given the Section Eight vouchers and dispersed and disappeared and are untraceable. I think it’s very difficult to tell whether they moved on or moved in with relatives. But the visibility of public housing now is much improved. What happened to the people, you don’t really know. Wilson: Yes, and what’s happening in Manhattan is the New York Housing Authority—they aren’t tearing them down per se, but the land is so valuable that they create infill construction of market-rate and (for most people) luxury high-rises basically within existing housing projects. So you’re finding almost exactly these kinds of mixed developments— with upscale amenities like a Starbucks and a Whole Foods Market on sites in Manhattan that are owned by the New York Housing Authority, because the land is so valuable. And so people within the housing authority projects feel that they are going to get pressured to move out, precisely because the land is now so valuable. David Lubin: The one thing that struck me so much was when you were talking about the journalist who was writing about Cabrini-Green and he said that the bottom-line failure is not the building, it’s racial politics. And that seems to be the elephant in the room, the almost insurmountable problem. Wilson: Yes, and it’s interesting to read the architectural critics, like Rybczynski, just flailing architects on the failure of modern and none of that ever comes up. It’s the building’s problem, and they don’t see the building connected to all of these other sets of relationships. Orvell: Thank you very much. Dialogue: Works Cited Wilson, Mabel O. Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

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Main hall of the Michigan Central Train Station, taken from southern balcony, April 2009. Photo by Albert Duce. Wikicommons.

4

ruins  miles orvell

What is a ruin? Anything in the built environment can fall into ruins:

from houses to Main Street stores, from office buildings to factories, from infrastructure (railroad lines and highways) to utility plants, from gas stations to shopping centers and malls to whole cities (Detroit is the most obvious example, but also ghost towns). The word ruin—at least in the traditional sense—implies a gradual process rather than a sudden catastrophe, an incremental falling into decay. For the present, we are not interested in ruins that have been produced instantaneously, such as the World Trade Center or Dresden after the firebombing; these latter ruins, engendered by war and violence, have a meaning that attaches to their creation, or decreation, and they can gain an almost immediate symbolic significance. The more gradually created ruin devolves piece by piece, changing by degrees until an irreversible moment, rarely marked in any formal way, when the thing—whether building, bridge, town, or city—is marked or remarked through a deliberate verbal or visual response and moves into another category of perception. Taking the long view, we have, of course, had ruins since the beginning of human construction; things are built, they are used, they are abandoned, they fall apart. Within that process, we could elaborate on the rise and fall of civilizations, and Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) and Shelley (Ozymandias) have been our historical and moral guides in previous centuries. There is no dearth of commentary on the history of ruins and encounters with ruins.1 As ruins have proliferated in the last twenty-five years or so, they have initiated a cycle of commentary that seeks to come to terms with the phenomenon, and I am trying today to come to terms with that commentary, so that the question I am asking is, “How do we think about ruins?” 71

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Let us begin with the commonsense notion that ruins are negative, the sign of a dysfunctional social and economic system: we walk through a section of the city with decaying housing and boarded-up windows and doors, or abandoned factories with every window smashed, or train tracks overgrown with weeds—areas that can be found in virtually every major city of a certain age—and think: this is very bad. These areas are dangerous; they are crack houses and dens of other iniquities; they house filth, disease, and crime; they are places to avoid, the visible sign of urban neglect and civic failure. Structures that are no longer viable are, in many cases, simply abandoned, with insufficient motivation or capital to rebuild or reinvest in the land. What has caused these places to fall into ruin? The process can be described historically as a progression: cities that once were manufacturing centers have lost their industrial plants and factories as jobs have moved to areas with cheaper labor costs—whether the Southern United States or Southeast Asia or China. Urban neighborhoods are part of a causal chain that begins with the global economy, for after the factories are abandoned, the workers become unemployed, their unions are subject to dissolution, the houses fall into disrepair and are abandoned, the tax base decays, schools decay, shopping centers suffer, stores close, whites flee to the suburbs, new business avoids the city, the infrastructure decays, and so the cycle goes on until we wind up where we are, in fact, today with the older manufacturing centers of the United States.2 Even where the core of the city has held strong—as in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—we have peripheral areas, previously working-class neighborhoods, that are wastelands, filled with acres of ruins. In other cities, such as Detroit, which are unable to adapt to a late twentieth-century information economy and lack the wax wings of the financial industry, the vital core has sagged disastrously, and the city is a vast ruined landscape of office buildings. (Yes, Marx had it right, anticipating the global markets of capitalism and their effects on the local: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” [Manifesto of the Communist Party].3) 72

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From this perspective, we can see urban ruins as the inevitable product of decisions made at the command level in accordance with the laws of corporations and capital. Insofar as this process involves the destruction of once-vibrant workingclass communities, where wage earners were employed in nearby factories, supporting families, going to church, and so on, it is easy to see it as negative, and the loss of the industrial city—despite the fact that the jobs were often dangerous, exhausting, and mind deadening—seems especially terrible at a time when real unemployment is around 25 percent. I offer this “commonsense” notion of ruins—that they represent a destructive force within the complex dynamism of cities—as a starting point in thinking about ruins. For what I find striking is how, in the last twenty-five years or so, we have come to terms with ruins themselves, assimilating them to a positive view of the process of spatial change. We have naturalized ruins but in somewhat different ways. I want to take three such positive views of urban and industrial ruins and examine them in more detail. 1. That ruins represent a necessary image of our past history and must be respected as such. 2. That ruins represent a rebuke to capitalist notions of endless progress and that the exploration of ruins constitutes an essential resistance to an official aesthetic of order. 3. That ruins are a natural, and therefore inevitable, part of a cycle that relates the process of urban growth and decay to the larger organic forces that govern life generally.

Ruins Represent a Necessary Image of Our Past

Consider first the view that ruins are “necessary”—a point J. B. Jackson famously made in his essay “The Necessity for Ruins,” in which he argues a cyclical view of history that encompasses a golden age followed by decline 73

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and ruin followed by restoration: the farmhouse has to decay before we restore it; “the neighborhood has to be a slum before we can rediscover it and gentrify it.” Writing against the unreality of reconstructed environments that are “purged of historical guilt,” Jackson insists that there has to be discontinuity, interruption, decay, and death before there can be renewal.4 Camilo José Vergara takes up Jackson’s stance in a far more elaborate way in his American Ruins.5 Vergara, one of our greatest contemporary documentary photographers, loves ruins. Of course, Vergara deplores the underlying economic processes that have brought about the great ruins of our North American cities (Newark, Camden, Gary, Detroit, parts of Philadelphia and New York), but he argues that we must remember and memorialize our ruined industrial cities, even to the point of turning them into a living museum of devastation, what he calls a “Smithsonian of Decline.”6 The focus of Vergara’s enthusiasm is Detroit, which he has proposed preserving as “an urban ruins park, an American Acropolis” of once-glorious downtown skyscrapers, reminding us in physical terms of the power and splendor that was America’s automobile city. The skyscrapers are symbols, Vergara writes, “of what led this nation into the twentieth century, and they will soon become invisible.”7 Vergara proposes as well the creation of a medieval-style monastery, to be housed in the ruins of Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, which would function as a kind of living museum. Above all, Vergara argues that ruins should remain as ruins—should continue to crumble—and not be cleaned up and frozen by preservationists. In the face of the continued erosion of these deserted office towers and civic buildings, Vergara’s nostalgia is not so much for the era that they represented when they were flourishing as it is for the ruins themselves—as ruins.8 Vergara’s madcap proposal, deliberately provocative and over-the-top as it is, points nevertheless to a sober reflection: it is hard to imagine what will become of Detroit’s downtown, short of an enormous investment in demolition. And it is not impossible to imagine that the revival of the automobile industry (engineered by the Obama administration) might even 74

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produce an urban renewal, although whatever form it takes would have to either accommodate or obliterate the downtown skyscrapers, remnants of a previous age.9 In the meantime, Vergara’s singular contribution to ruinology has been to document the process by which material structures fall into decline and disappear, and he has done this by photographing, over time, the life cycle of buildings. Structures that have stood in place for a hundred years may fall apart, when abandoned, in twenty years, and Vergara shows us that process vividly, in a species of time-lapse photography that we have not seen before. There are positive reversals, as well, recorded—as when buildings gain a second or third life, transformed into some adapted function: from bank to laundromat, from church to pizza parlor. And sometimes buildings are demolished, the rubble carted away, and all that remains is a vacant spot of land, covered in weeds. Vergara’s mode is the elegy, and in visual terms, he has given us a mournful representation of the life cycle of twentieth-century American capitalism. We might assimilate Vergara’s vision to an even older tradition of ruin gazing that marks Western culture, from the Renaissance on, at least, when the remains of the Roman Empire embodied the grandeur and glory of ancient classical civilization. And ruins—whether Roman or medieval abbeys—were a frequent inspiration for early Romantic artists, beginning with Panini and Piranesi, who found in the remaining stones and foundations a sign of the picturesque and a material embodiment of memory. Ruins, in the Romantic view, must be preserved and even—if they did not exist—created, to provide us with a visible temporal dimension, a symbol of the past that also embodies the break with the past, as well as a vision of the inevitable future. And ruins do offer a unique aesthetic experience—a parallax view whereby we see the ruin as well as the absent form of the whole.10 And they offer, for the romantic, an occasion to meditate on human power and its limitations, as suggested ironically by Don DeLillo in White Noise, in which the main character, a Hitler scholar, reminds a friend that Albert Speer “wanted to build structures that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins. . . . He knew that Hitler would be in favor of anything 75

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that might astonish posterity. He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically—a drawing of fallen walls, half columns furled in wisteria.”11

Ruins As a Rebuke to Capitalist Notions of Endless Progress

Where Vegara takes an essentially touristic point of view, creating an analytic framework in his pictures for understanding the process of urban transformation, there are many who love ruins in a more visceral way—including those whose appetites for mass destruction are driven by an insatiable demand for scenes of implosions (Implosionworld.com, on the Internet, has an archive of spectacular implosions) and others who are committed to urban exploration (UE), which encompasses a taste for trespassing onto a wide range of sites, including ruined buildings, abandoned trains, boats, tunnels, drains, and churches (see infiltration.org, an elaborate online zine for “urbexers” about “places you’re not supposed to go,” featuring Ninjalicious.) This impulse has found its exemplary academic theoretician in Tim Edensor, whose Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality represents the broad societal urge to enter into the ruins themselves.12 Here, I am turning to the second of my three main exhibits, for Edensor’s work embodies not only the urge to explore ruins as a form of resistance to an otherwise impervious official aesthetic order but also the assertion that ruins constitute a rebuke to capitalist notions of endless progress. Edensor, an Englishman, admits his own childhood pleasure in exploring vacant lots and deserted buildings, which offered him the luxury of unregulated and exciting spaces for play. And he has written an elegant book, contesting “the notion that ruins are spaces of waste, that contain nothing, or nothing of value, and that they are saturated with negativity as spaces of danger, delinquency, ugliness and disorder.”13 Instead, Edensor argues that ruins support a variety of ongoing uses and life-forms, and he celebrates the aesthetics of ruins—from foul smells to found trash, 76

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from rotting floorboards to decaying walls—that demonstrate an unspoken kinship to the modernist master builder and aesthetician of junk (or merzbild) Kurt Schwitters. Or rather, Schwitters married to Mary Shelley and Sigmund Freud, for to Edensor, ruins possess “the attraction of decay and death, and to enter them is to venture into darkness and the possibilities of confronting that which is repressed.”14 We are dealing here with a contemporary sensibility, a postindustrial gothic wherein the modern ruin (the Industrial Age ruin) represents impermanence and chaos, rather than the opposite connotation suggested by ancient ruins—which suggest lineage, continuity, and heritage. Those decayed buildings and vacant lots that we might warn our children to stay out of—those are the very places that they want to go, according to Edensor, who celebrates the use of such abandoned spaces for spontaneous raves and parties, for gardening, and for having sex, escaping the “watchful gaze of neighbors and parents”; all are attractive “forms of alternative public life,” for Edensor.15 (This is a more extreme form of the argument made years ago by Richard Sennett in his youthful 1970 work, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life.) Before accusing Edensor of celebrating the natural psychopathology of teenagers and fostering a society of drugs and rape, let us entertain the point of his argument—that in a society of surveillance (and Britain might lead the United States in this), industrial ruins represent a zone of freedom, a rebuke to the “normative aesthetic orderings” of Le Corbusian space and rational, rectangular order.16 Such spaces, Edensor argues, represent “a radical critique of the myth of universal progress.”17 Ruins, from this perspective, represent a higher degree of authenticity, in a culture of bland uniformity and shiny surfaces. Although Edensor accuses modern capitalism of “forgetting the scale of devastation wreaked upon the physical and social world” in its myth of endless progress, he also—somewhat contradictorily—sees ruins as emergent places, where new forms come into being, places of difference and juxtaposition rather than death places.18 And in this respect, his view leads us to my next main point. 77

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Ruins Are Part of a Cycle of Urban Growth and Decay

I am turning finally to examine the view that sees ruins as a natural, and therefore inevitable, part of a cycle that relates the process of urban growth and decay to the larger organic forces that govern life generally. The “natural” argument has been best articulated by Alan Berger in his 2006 book Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America.19 Drawing on Lars Lerup’s concept of “stim and dross” (stimulation point—borrowed from William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer—and waste) and on Ignasi de Sola-Morales’s notion of “terrains vague” (urban wastelands, which the Spanish theorist and architect sees as a positive balance to developed space), Berger argues the positive value of dross: “Dross is a natural component of every dynamically evolving city. This book’s underlying premise and guiding thesis is that as the world’s landscape becomes increasingly urbanized, it is naturally saturated with dross.”20 The key word here is “naturally”—which defines the waste land as part of an organic process of urban growth, decay, and redevelopment. There is, Berger says, “a need to produce dross as [the city] grows.” In fact, dross is an indicator of urban health, according to Berger. Berger also alludes to Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction” as an inevitable part of progress. Of course, this is related to Christine and J. George Fredericks’s post-Taylor notion of “progressive obsolescence” in terms of industrial design—a way to keep the market moving by designating “old” designs as waste, necessitating the consumer’s purchase of new designs, a view that came to dominate the 1930s, when the redesign of consumer objects was used as a deliberate strategy to stimulate demand. Berger’s positive view of “dross” naturalizes the pathology of capitalism and the dysfunction and disorder of urban growth in a free market. Still, the fact is that we do have ruins in our cities, and Berger accurately names the problem of waste sites as the biggest challenge of the twenty-first century, with urban design of the future consisting of locating dross and rethinking its possibilities.21 Berger sees the market as driving change, and he cheers what he sees as the progressive changes in cities that transform obsolete industrial sites and brownfields into sports stadiums, casinos, malls, and 78

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amusement parks—thus implicitly marking the transformation of the city from an industrial center to an entertainment center. We are talking about the cycle of capitalism, or rather of socialized capitalism (our contemporary version), for the expense of the transformation of waste land into useable land is typically borne by the city, state, or federal government—by the taxpayer, in short, in the form of tax subsidies and grants. Berger’s vision of the growth and evolution of drosscape into cityscape, analogous to the back and fill of an artist creating a canvas, rests on two assumptions: that the dross remains in check and does not overwhelm the city (as happened in Detroit) and that public funds are available to assist developers who see a future in the city. Neither assumption, at least at the present, is necessarily correct. Yet, in the broadest of terms, one can see why this vision of transformation—drosscape to cityscape—resembles a “natural” process: it seems to mimic the organic process in a natural habitat—a forest, for example, where trees eventually reach their limit and decay, fall down, to be replaced by new trees. The only problem with this analogy is that nature has a long, long time in which to complete its cycles of renewals, and human beings living in the built environment, or the ruined environment, may suffer an entire lifetime before the forces of renewal take effect, if they ever do. And local change is, in the larger global economy, inevitably now a function of international capitalism, worldwide resources, and politics. Thinking about ruins compels us to think in terms of the realities of change, which include destruction and desuetude, waste and rubble—space that is a part of the growing city. It also forces us to think about who is responsible for waste, and who pays for taking care of it. This is true for households, for cities, for regions, and for nations. Waste looms ever larger as a by-product of global capitalism, and we have accepted and naturalized a model with profound implications—a model in which, once waste is created, it becomes a collective problem and not the responsibility of the landlord who abandons the building or the capitalist who abandons the factory or the industrialist who poisons the earth. (I rather like the attitude of an Atlantic City casino CEO who declared, as he blew up the 79

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Sands hotel to make way for a new $2 billion complex: the challenge is “to compete in this new world, or be the next implosion.” At least he is taking responsibility for the destruction along with the creation of real estate.22) As a more general rule, however, it seems doubtful that we will ever attach responsibility to the practices of capitalism. It goes against the supposed “freedom” of the marketplace and, by extension, against “freedom” in general to think that a capitalist should be responsible for cleaning up his or her mess. Capitalists, in our accepted societal view, are like infants, who do what they please without the expectation that they are responsible parties. Ruins, in the built environment, may be part of an inevitable cycle, but we get it wrong when we naturalize them as part of a larger cycle of decay and growth that governs all life. The analogy of cities and organic life (most famously promulgated by Jane Jacobs) is a strong one, in terms of understanding the complexity and interconnectedness of urban processes, but in terms of agency, we need to break the analogy if we are to understand the nature of agency and responsibility in the built environment.

Dialogue on chapter 4: Ruins Jeff Meikle: I thought it was a wonderful exposition. I really liked

the typological aspect to it, and I look forward to the book, actually. I was struck, maybe because we’re here in Germany, by the ruins created when reunification occurred and the Berlin Wall was almost immediately expunged. Some people thought that aspects of it should be allowed to remain. I think there are some structures that remained, but essentially it was obliterated. And there’s the whole debate over the Palast der Republik, which was a social center as well as a governmental center for East Berliners and had a major, nostalgic part in the lives of people who attended functions there. So, I thought about that when you were talking about Vergara’s notion of “ruins should remain and be allowed to crumble” 80

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and that there’s a certain nostalgia associated with him, and this is a question really about him. But is it his belief that in destroying [ruins], we destroy our own sense of the past and of history? Is that part of it? Miles Orvell: Yes, exactly. His sense is that we need this as a record of what’s past and that we abolish the past so easily and that we need to have a consciousness of it. He presented this, I think, semiseriously, although it has been treated facetiously, and one never knows, but actually he wanted to preserve the city of Detroit as a kind of museum of an industrial city as it was. But, of course, that would cost a fortune, to make those buildings safe. So, yes, to bring it back to the Berlin Wall, to erase the wall entirely would be to erase a piece of the past that needs to be remembered. Meikle: And then the other thing that occurs to me relates to the reference to festival markets earlier and the fact that so many of those are based in old warehouses and wharfs and so on. So there are lots of, if not ruins, potential ruins that have been gentrified and used for other purposes. And there’s a whole question of whether by doing this the authenticity of what those structures were is lost and Disneyfied and commodified. Yet one might view this reuse as a way of mediating between the need to have historical memory and the need to move forward in some way. Cities are in that way a kind of palimpsest, and I’d like to see, I think in the city of London—or any city that’s been around a while—to see if London just built layer upon layer upon layer. Orvell: And that kind of recycling is certainly what many people who think about ruins want to have—that sort of regeneration, revitalization, and also contributing to the new city. But on the other hand, there is also on the part of the people I was looking at a real desire to keep ruins as ruins, because they represent something essential to our society, an oppositional character that is viewed as an essential element to balance the official culture. Meikle: And urban explorers actually want them surrounded by razor wire and armed guards or guard patrols, so it’s still dangerous and risky to get in there. 81

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Orvell: Yes, and for the ultimate urban explorers that is the great fun of it—the challenge of getting in there. I am not an urban explorer. [Laughter.] But this is, you know, an underground sort of culture which has a lively presence on the web. Meikle: But then to gentrify and to reuse will then destroy that whole. Orvell: Yes, yes. David Nye: Thank you for that. I think it was a very good exposition of these various theories about ruins, and I myself would like to take a little more seriously the creative destruction, Marxist kind of approach, but in more detail and say: “Well, who specifically did what?” The case of Detroit is the one I would know the best, where it’s partly incompetence. It’s not that capitalists (in the form of the executives of the auto companies in Detroit) were farseeing and wise and skillfully using their money; they actually fell behind the Japanese. The Japanese came and looked at Detroit and said: “We don’t want to have labor unions, we’ll go south.” And you get a kind of emptying out of Detroit but other areas profiting, not because of some effort they made, but because of calculations by, in this case, Japanese executives. That’s not the only explanation for what happened in Detroit but just as an example. So, you get a kind of withdrawal of the labor force because of the failure on the part of the people in Detroit to keep up with the Japanese in this small-car market. And you could go on and on with this theme; it’s kind of too quick and easy to say: “Well, now we’ve got a ruin, now what should we think about it?” I’d like to stop for a moment and say: “Well, how did this happen? Was that inevitable?” I would say it was not inevitable. In the 1970s and 1980s they could have learned lean production. It took them twenty years. And by that time, the Japanese had gotten a foothold, they had started to build American factories, and so there’s a great loss for the city of Detroit. So, I guess, the third argument, that it’s inevitable, seems to be just silly. It’s another form of determinism, which I always attack. [Laughter.] Orvell: I would agree that Detroit was not inevitable and for the reasons that you suggest. What was inevitable was that events would 82

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occur as a function of a global economy, and how Detroit reacted to it was what brought about the fall of Detroit. But the inevitability is that the local was affected by the global. I mean, you look at a local neighborhood and its destruction and ruin, and you don’t think this is because of anything remote. But in large part, it’s because manufacturing was no longer local; it became global, these jobs disappeared, and this is the result. Nye: But if you look at Munich, where I just happen to have been to an automobile plant yesterday, that plant didn’t get destroyed by the same forces. They responded differently. So, the BMW or the Volkswagen, their automobile industry has not been as severely undermined or destroyed by competition from other companies. Orvell: No, absolutely. The American dilemma is we have this powerful engine of capitalism which is unregulated. In Europe, the greater regulation of government here is allowing things like this to happen, with more oversight, which the American government has not provided. And the products American motor companies were producing—in terms of size and fuel and quality—couldn’t compete on the world market. Only recently, when the government stepped in to “save” the industry with loans and, most importantly, with conditions and stipulations, has the industry begun to recover. Andrew Ross: I think there is another way of framing that, because state intervention has resulted in a major target shift—from the frost belt into the sun belts, a major shift in tax investment credits and so on, which is an intervention by the state which made it very easy for corporations to move out of the frost belt. So, that is not a form of regulation, it’s a form of permission that the state then provides: “This is an offer you cannot refuse.” And then NAFTA comes along, which is an even larger version of that. Orvell: Yes, I agree, and it’s the precise nature of state intervention that needs to be analyzed. Tax incentives (along with reduced labor costs) have played one region against another, with winners and losers. 83

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Nye: Right, and my comment doesn’t invalidate the analysis of ruins, but just that we need to know a little more about why they are there. Malcolm McCullough: So, thanks, Miles, for a piece that is already kind of polished, poetic. Very nice. I didn’t think that you came here to give that piece to talk about land policy, however, did you? Nor I, all this way from Detroit to talk about Detroit. There is something lovely about not talking about Munich, right now, in this building. So, thanks for that. But I still wonder, aren’t there some other motives to this than just that large cultural gesture about not Munich? And maybe it’s some gripe about capital. But maybe it’s wanting to pick up where J. B. Jackson left off on something, or maybe it’s anticipating new categories of ruins, like maybe Andrew can tell us whether the next ruin will be Phoenix, right? More Bruce Sterling: “The frontiers of the twenty-first century are the ruins of the unsustainable.” The next Detroit is Las Vegas, Phoenix, Orlando, Dallas, portions outside Chicago. Isn’t the abandonment of the center city rather temporary, is my question. Orvell: And I should say that there are cities in the U.S. that have vital center cities and in which the regeneration process has occurred. . . . So, I’m not saying that cities are in this inevitable downward cycle by any means. You know, there are many, many examples—even in Philadelphia, which has so many ruins, there have been counterexamples and counter movements, though my sense is that the process has a certain inevitability. And you mentioned Las Vegas and Phoenix and other cities that . . . McCullough: Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Orvell: Okay, yes, but my main point, or at least my concluding point, would be the question of responsibility at the most basic level. That is, how is it that we discharge—and this is my gripe against capitalism—why do we discharge responsibility from the capitalist to the public? Mabel Wilson: I have a comment, and I’m wondering if you’ve read Riegl’s—I think it’s called “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” which was written sometime around 1904 to 1907. Because it’s actually an interesting text by Riegl, who is an art historian who is trying to understand the value of “pastness” in the Prussian state that’s very 84

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quickly modernizing. And it’s very interesting, because he takes these Marxist categories and starts to assign value to “pastness.” And so he works through a number of these categories. And he comes up with an elastic term called “Kunstwollen.” It is a word he made up—something like “the will to art.” So, he uses it to define what the value of something that will become a monument will be. It’s fascinating, because he says that there is stuff, just this quotidian building stuff, that people assign value to. There are things which fall into ruin which should just fall into ruin. But then there are things that should be preserved, and he is trying to weigh these categories of “pastness” in relation to the physical objects he is encountering. And for me, the fascinating thing about that article is that he’s doing this almost as a survey for the Prussian state, which is trying to figure out “What do we do with all this stuff and how do we assess our own history in terms of what the value of ‘pastness’ is to the state and therefore to the citizen?” It’s an interesting article, because it’s trying to figure out what is “pastness” in a modernizing state that’s happening right around the turn of the twentieth century. So, it might be useful to look at as an essay that’s talking about what you’re talking about and starting to think about. In the twenty-first century, what would those categories of valuation be? Orvell: Very interesting! In fact, a lot of what I encountered relates to a view of ruins which comes out of the Romantic eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which savors ruins as part of a continuous history in a line that we can associate with at the same time that we feel the interruption. And some of the contemporary theorists, as I am looking at them, are romanticizing ruins in that way. And that’s the question I am raising about their work: is it legitimate to romanticize contemporary ruins? Wilson: Yes, and another point Riegl brings up is the problem with architecture in itself, which is that as soon as you build something it starts to decay—just because of gravity, because of wear, because of air. So, architects are always fighting the maintenance of the building itself as well. 85

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Albena Yaneva: I am very sympathetic to your argument, but let’s consider that ruins are just one part of the cycle of a building. And it pretty much resonates with the argument of Stewart Brand (How Buildings Learn), which is about how buildings live and what happens to buildings after they are built. And the ruins are just part of this trajectory of the building as living creature in the way a building gets older, which is part of their life cycle. But then there are also buildings, like the Bunkers [anti-aircraft flak towers] in Vienna, which were made in such a way that they cannot become ruins. And they are eyesores, but at the same time they are not ruins. . . . They were meant to resist because of their nature. And their material will make it impossible for them to become ruins, and this cycle of the building, this stage of the cycle, will never happen for them, but they are still eyesores, and Vienna is trying to deal with those buildings as a part of the urban fabric. Klaus Benesch: You don’t find them just in Vienna but also in La Rochelle, Lorient, all along the French Atlantic. The French wanted to take them down but couldn’t. They’ve now become cultural centers, exhibit spaces, performance areas. Yaneva: They can never become ruins in your terms, in your definition, because you can never show images of these particular dilapidated Hitler buildings. Orvell: Yes, exactly, but let me recall again the passage from De Lillo’s White Noise about Speer’s drawings of structures that would “decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins,” buildings that would astonish posterity by crumbling romantically. Margaret Crawford: I want to go back to the capitalism part, and I think that Camilo Vergara is really choosing his examples with an eye for the aesthetic power of particular ruins. If you drive around New England, it is littered with the ruins of the textile industry from the nineteenth century which no one has bothered to remove, and some of them are changed into very low-end uses. Some are made into museums, but very rarely. So, I think if you go anywhere in the country, you will find cycles of capitalism that leave the landscape littered, and I 86

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do think that is one of the most striking aspects of the American built environment that is underrecognized. No one really pays attention to the fact, but they are everywhere, these factories. Orvell: And I think that’s the precise word: litter. We’ve allowed them to litter the landscape. Crawford: My second question is: What do you mean by “the public”? How do we relate to this? Orvell: Yes, exactly: by “we the public,” I mean the “average citizen” who lives within the structure of laws governing industry and land use. These are laws that govern public space, but in many cases, as we all know, these laws have been authored by the industries they are supposed to regulate, via legislators who are willing enough to sell their country to the highest bidder. The “public”—meaning the “common man”—is therefore in an adversarial position vis-à-vis government and its laws and must use the courts to argue constitutionality and so forth. Only we know what the Supreme Court is capable of, so it’s not a pretty picture, when it comes to land use. Crawford: The next question is about the Emscher Park. Are you familiar with the Emscher Park in the Ruhrgebiet? It’s a park where they left the ruins of industry and incorporated them into the park as half-monuments and are using them in various ways. These giant chemical things can become a place where people do underwater activities, scuba diving. And it’s also a full regional strategy for highly selective renovation and deterioration and even commentary, you can say, through art. Which in a way is maybe the best European example. McCullough: I still want to come back to J. B. Jackson. I picture him on his motorcycle and it’s the American Southwest, where things really spread out, where someday Lake Mead will really get low and fires will be bigger than last year and the temperatures will be higher and gas will be nine bucks a gallon. And I wonder what J. B. Jackson would say about these ruins that I can imagine evolving and whether that’s even more poignant than Detroit or not. Maybe it’s just going to fade out. 87

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Orvell: I’ve been interested in ruins for a few years, and I’ve been struck by how many books have come out in the past ten years on ruins. And the reason is, I think, that they are becoming more and more visible. So, to go back to Jackson is to maybe go back to a time when there were not so many visible ruins in the industrial landscape compared to, let’s say the last twenty to twenty-five years. And this continues. It’s a kind of acceleration, saturation almost. David Lubin: I’ve been thinking that since the “grand tour” of the eighteenth century, there’s always been a ruin tourism. And it seems like this is another version of that and it’s trying to make, as Ann Landers used to say, “lemons into lemonade.” But consider two alternative theories to the ones you mentioned: one was to treat ruins as a disgrace, as something horrific, and instead of being nostalgic or aesthetic about ruins, you say, “This is really terrible!” So it’s one thing to visit it and get poetic about it, but imagine living in it or next to it—and that’s just to follow up on the idea that you were articulating at the end of your talk, that there should be some responsibility, some accountability for the ruins in our society. But the other thing I was thinking about are shantytowns in the third world, which are sometimes a very creative use of the detritus and the waste of civilization. Rather than bemoaning the fact that they are living in these impoverished neighborhoods, residents are being very entrepreneurial about them and recycling plastic and batteries and making dwellings for themselves out of the stuff that everyone else is throwing away. And so, again in a kind of policy statement, I mean it seems like rather than putting barbed wire around the ruins and saying keep out, maybe there can be a way that these ruins could be more accessible to people who want to have a creative use of that, to actually use it as a living space. Orvell: Yes, some of these ruined buildings have become squatters’ homes. People who are homeless are living in all kinds of places. In a way, the proliferation of ruins is congruent with the proliferation of homelessness. And this is a solution to homelessness: Just let them live in ruins. I mean that’s grotesque, but in a sense, the widespread 88

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prevalence of both ruins and homelessness both perfectly reflect our values in America. Wilson: I wanted to go back to that question of valuation and how does something become culturally meaningful. Because another example would be, there’s a tower in Johannesburg—and I always forget what it’s called, but it’s the circular tower [Ponte City Apartments—eds.], the tallest residential high-rise on the continent of Africa, and I think the latest images had a Vodafone sign on the top of it, a very iconic image on the skyline. But what’s interesting is that it was built as a residential tower and then abandoned after the fall of apartheid because it was in a part of the city whites fled. And so it was empty, and then it became inhabited by squatters and it fell into ruination. The squatters have now been kicked out, but it’s still sitting there as an empty shell. And it wasn’t that old—erected in 1975. So, in the space of almost forty years, it’s actually gone through all of these cycles very quickly, and it’s a very fascinating example, because it shows the rapid cycle of change that can occur for a building and the change in its meaning. And yet, it’s still identified iconically with the city itself, although its value and meaning have changed, depending on who’s been in power. Orvell: Yes, I think there certainly is that malleability to ruins that is selective, and some do find a kind of reuse; and to some degree it’s just happenstance and haphazard, like everything else, since we don’t have a systematic way of dealing with ruins as we do, say, with nuclear waste. Meikle: Yes, I just want to return to the word litter which came up. When I was flying in to Munich, for a moment the clouds cleared, you could see the landscape below and tidy villages and roads and fields, and somebody sitting behind me said: “This is so neat compared with America.” When you were talking about litter, I was thinking that Vergara is taking ruins that are large and that are spectacular and that speak to an important moment of our history, but if you drive through my part of the country in Texas, every town is littered with ruins. There are houses that nobody has lived in for twenty years, for some reason, or there’s farm equipment rusting over there. There are old signs here, 89

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there’s a closed gas station or boarded up—every main street that hasn’t been turned into an antique town has storefronts boarded up. As a civilization or as a society, we live routinely in a landscape of low-grade ruins. We produce it. It’s litter. And I just wanted to add that it’s nothing anybody remarks on, compared with landscapes in other cultures. We live in a landscape of ruin. Orvell: Yes, and I think that’s a great contrast, because from an anthropological point of view, American culture has accepted this and naturalized it as part of our landscape—exactly. I don’t think Jackson would write “The Necessity for Ruins” today. Benesch: It strikes me that maybe one could look at ruins as just another of the great paradoxes of modernity, as Bruno Latour talks about the fact that we have never been modern, because in terms of this division between different modes of knowledge, modernity allowed modern and premodern forms of knowledge to coexist with modern forms of knowledge. Along the same lines, it seems to me that you could inscribe ruins with both a very productive and creative power to produce new things, as in junk art, but, then, there’s also the other side that ruins spell out: a halt to progress, a reversal of the onward movement of the modern movement. But somehow, they seemed to coexist with the modern and supermodern and futurism, so they are still there. So, something is going on here, I believe, that has to do with us and how we frame the world, and I think that could be something that might be interesting, that you may want to look at when you do further research on this phenomenon. Orvell: And that is in fact what struck me—and that is the postmodern, if I can use that word broadly, adaptation of ruins into a kind of contemporary sensibility. And this is the world we’re living in and it’s . . . “cool.” Benesch: It has not always been that way. Just recall Eliot’s wasteland, Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes (in The Great Gatsby), the apocalyptic tradition in modernism, but then there has always been a creative center, as a counterpart. 90

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Orvell: It’s interesting because—I don’t know whether you get anywhere near this, Jeff, in your talk—but there is a cinematic love of Blade Runner–type “cities of ruins,” which is a future that we have come to adore since, well, Blade Runner was 1982, and Gibson’s Neuromancer, partly inspired by the film, was 1984. Nye: It’s interesting that what you’re doing ties in a bit with some research I’ve been doing on what I call anti-landscapes, that is, spaces which are unlivable, where you literally cannot be there. It would be unhealthy (Chernobyl would be an obvious example), but there is also Hanford, Washington; Rocky Flats is an area outside Denver, where you’ve got nuclear waste stored. There’s a town in Oklahoma in which people have been paid by the government to move out because there is so much lead poisoning there, and so forth and so on. The superfund sites. So, if you put that into the picture, then you could say, well, the cities are just a mild version of the devastation that you find in other places. Orvell: Yes, and I need to talk to you about that, because my broader interest in ruins is not just cities, but a broader landscape of ruins. I just saw an extraordinarily good—and depressing—film the other night, Gasland, which came out in 2010, about the natural gas exploitation and its effects on the landscape. We’re creating yet another landscape of ruins out there—an anti-landscape, in your terms—in rural Pennsylvania. Dialogue: Works Cited Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott, 1982. DVD. Burbank, Calif.: Warner Home Video, 1997. Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. New York: Viking, 1994. Gasland. Directed by Josh Fox. DVD. New York: Docurama, 2010. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. West Bloomfield, Mich.: Phantasia Press, 1984. Jackson, John Brinckerhof. The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Riegl, Alois. “Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, seine Entstehung” [The modern cult of monuments: Its character and origin] (Vienna, 1903). Trans. K. W. Forster and D. Ghirardo. Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 20–51.

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The City of Ambition. Photogravure by Alfred Stieglitz, 1910. Metropolitan Museum of Art, from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.

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spring-like morning in February 2005, I attended a brunch in New York City hosted by a friend whose rooftop apartment overlooks Central Park. We were there to witness the opening moments of an art installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates. At an appointed time, workers stationed along the park’s myriad footpaths unfurled hundreds of silky, saffron-colored cloths affixed to metal rods. It was a spectacular visual experience from twenty stories high, but the follow-up at ground level was equally remarkable, as we joined streams of pedestrians rambling along the pathways, turning this way and that to enjoy ever-shifting views of orange banners blazing in the sun. The park was transformed. Here was a case of an already famously aesthetic space re-aestheticized. But only—and this is most significant—for fifteen days. The Gates went up on February 12, 2005, and came down on February 27. They were not in place long enough to become tiresome or annoying. If a visitor to the park did find them annoying, he or she needed only fifteen days of patience before they vanished into memory.1 That was not the case with another major art installation in New York some two and a half decades earlier. In 1981, the minimalist artist Richard Serra installed, in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, a large piece of sculpture he called Tilted Arc. It was an imposing curtain of raw steel that reached twelve feet into the air and curved through the plaza for 120 feet. Doing so, it ripped the plaza in half, forcing pedestrians to go well out of their way when crossing between federal office buildings. This, too, like The Gates, was public space given over to artistic vision, but instead of providing a colorful series of passageways, Tilted Arc presented a stark impediment. Some office workers objected vehemently to the inconvenience foisted on them. Moreover, the wall wasn’t coming down in two weeks. On a mild,

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Serra justified his disruption of sight lines and foot traffic on aesthetic grounds: “The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza,” he explained, continuing, “as he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer’s movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.” This is not simply an aesthetic account of the installation but a moral one as well. It suggests that by being compelled to circumvent the steel curtain in their daily movement from one section of the plaza to another, walkers will become more perceptive and socially aware, less static in their outlook, more fluid in their opinions, more open to relativity and difference. Nonetheless, in 1989, after eight years of legal wrangling, Tilted Arc was torn down by court order. Proponents of the demolition cheered; advocates of modern art mourned.2 One could argue that Serra’s artistic will to power was more flagrant than Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s in that his art was more top-down, less interactive, and less forgiving than theirs. But one could also argue that it was more straightforward, more transparent in its ideological meanings: in effect, it “occupied” Wall Street thirty years before the start of the recent anticapitalist protest movement by that name. Whereas Christo’s Gates, made of soft and pliable fabric, implicitly celebrated public unity and free will, Serra’s Tilted Arc, constructed of raw steel and embedded in the center of a federal plaza, spoke directly to, and of, the power of the state, brooking no sentimental view of it. Tilted Arc had to go because it annoyed the pedestrian, but perhaps even more so because it insulted the government-sponsored cultural apparatus that had commissioned it. It refused to be nice and pretty and encourage civic pride. Instead, during a period of heightened Cold War tensions, with a right-wing Republican, Ronald Reagan, newly ensconced in the White House, it insolently erected a mini–Berlin Wall on Wall Street. Contrasting the Tilted Arc with The Gates, Martha Rosler points out that the earlier work embraced a “modernist model of public art, which relied heavily on what we might call abstractionist inspirationalism or on architectural or social critique.” The Gates, according to Rosler, relied 94

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instead on a “service/experience model” and, in doing so, “underlined the role of public art as a frame for narcissistic self-appreciation on the part of bourgeois park-goers and city fathers, who may see themselves perambulating through a proud and cohesive body politic. Further, watching others pace through The Gates permitted a grandiose self-recognition, in which participants see each other and acknowledge the (rightful) presence of each on the grand stage with the figure of Nature hovering o’er.”3 Rosler aptly notes a shift in the nature of architectural art installations from feel-bad-because-it’s-good-for-us social analysis to feel-good-becausewe’re-all-so-wonderful social subterfuge. I have felt the latter principle at work (or, if you will, at play) when gazing at my reflection in Anish Kapoor’s mirror-like Cloud Gate (2004–6), a polished-steel “bean” that hovers over the AT&T Plaza in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Everyone beside me appears to be equally absorbed in his or her own reflection, which, depending on where one stands or walks, is made alternately small, tall, comic, or heroic against a mountainous range of skyscrapers that proclaim the city’s power and majesty.4 Here again, as with The Gates, aesthetic space in the metropolis, jewelboxed within a public park, is celebratory, participatory, and self-congratulatory. A shiny sculptural blob that levitates like a landing module over a public plaza sponsored by a telecommunications giant, the cheerfully roly-poly Cloud Gate invites viewers to whip out cell phones and capture their funny or grandiose reflections for instantaneous transmission to associates elsewhere. Indeed, it has become de rigueur, when encountering public art, to take a picture and e-mail it to a friend. Consumption trumps contemplation in the era of social media, and a new sort of “Kilroy was here” impulse has emerged in which tagging your proximity to a piece of art beats looking at it. Is culturally scripted behavior such as this truly a matter of free choice? Or is it instead a kind of rote performance of compulsory modernity? Another public urban space adorned with viewer-friendly modern art is the plaza beneath New York’s famed Seagram Building, which was built in 1958 by the International Style modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. 95

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With his associate Philip Johnson, Mies devised a generously proportioned plaza at the base of the skyscraper, a luxurious gift, as it were, to office workers and lunchtime foot traffic. In his classic 1980 study of pedestrian interactions in the big city, the sociologist William H. Whyte praised the Seagram Plaza as an urban resting place and suggested that the owners of the building deserved credit for its success: “The way people use a place mirrors expectations. Seagram’s management is pleased people like its plaza and is quite relaxed about what they do. It lets them stick their feet in the pool; does not look to see if kids are smoking pot on the pool ledge; tolerates oddballs, even allowing them to sleep the night on the ledge. The sun rises the next morning.”5 By 2006, the Seagram corporation had been absorbed into several large international beverage conglomerates. The current proprietor of the building, a real estate holding company owned by an avid collector of modern and contemporary art, installed an Alexander Calder mobile in the center of the plaza, softening the modernist monochrome of the space with a tasteful splash of modernist color and whimsy. The very title of the work, Ordinary (1969), announces a populist impulse on the part of the new management. More recently, the Calder mobile was replaced by Jeff Koons’s monumental stainless steel Balloon Dog (Orange), again, a populist-seeming gesture that invites the “ordinary” viewer—literally, the man or woman on the street—to find modern art entertaining, whimsical, and nonthreatening.6 In my estimation, the Seagram Building is a greater, more sustainable work of art than the Calder mobile or Koons puppy, and the Tilted Arc than the Gates, because the former in each of these pairings is knottier and more demanding than the latter. This is not to say that authoritarian control of aesthetic space by an artist or architect is necessarily more valuable to viewers—and society as a whole—than art that allows for, even encourages, free circulation and amused conversation within its precincts. It is, however, to suggest that modern or postmodern art that challenges and obstructs viewer-pedestrians is ultimately more provocative and engaging than modernist or postmodernist circus art that flatters and humors them. 96

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The basic conundrum here—whether the role of art in public places is to amuse viewers or instruct them, make them feel good about society or prompt them to make it better—played out a century ago in the ideology and aesthetics of the City Beautiful movement. The idea behind this movement, which flourished from the 1890s to the end of the First World War, was that beautification of the urban environment according to strict aesthetic principles associated with classical civilization and the Renaissance would help stem the urban blight and diminished civic spirit that the movement’s proponents attributed to rising commercialism and unchecked immigration. The guiding principle of the City Beautiful movement, surprisingly similar to that articulated by Richard Serra in his defense of Tilted Arc, was that you could form a better breed of citizens by causing them—forcing them, a critic might object—to move in a prescribed way through aesthetically enhanced public space, making their impeded circulation through that space an edifying experience. Despite the vast differences between Progressive Era and modernist urban ideals or, subsequently, between modernist and postmodernist ways of thinking about public art and architecture, the underlying rationale for public space shaping remains consistent: it will improve the lives/morals/perceptions/experiences of the individuals who inhabit or pass through that space.7 The lofty ideals of the City Beautiful movement were easily appropriated by the private sector to justify the erection of large buildings dedicated to the advancement of corporate commerce. In this regard, New York’s Woolworth Building, begun in 1911 and completed in 1913, was the world’s first City Beautiful skyscraper. Only here, the motifs were neither GrecoRoman nor Italian Renaissance but rather French medieval. The building’s architect, Cass Gilbert, clad his fifty-seven-story modern office tower in Neo-Gothic terracotta facing and adorned it with gargoyles of disproportionate size, the better to be seen from the street. Until the Chrysler Building (1930) and then the Empire State Building (1931) came along, the Woolworth Building, national headquarters for a chain of discount stores, was the tallest building in the world. A thoroughly 97

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modern skyscraper, it exploited the latest construction materials and elevation technologies, and yet, to many observers, it resembled a soaring Gothic church, giving rise to its nickname, the “Cathedral of Commerce.” At a time when Progressive Era critics were seeking to tame the corporation’s increasing hold over American economic life, the Woolworth building proudly offered corporate America a cloak of spirituality. In an anonymously made photograph from 1928, the Woolworth tower seen from above pierces a carpet of cloud, thereby literalizing the term “skyscraper.” Although taken for utilitarian purposes as part of an aerial survey of New York, this is a profoundly Romantic image, calling to mind Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic 1818 painting Wanderer above a Sea of Clouds. Friedrich’s masterpiece depicts a solitary male figure standing atop a mountain ledge and peering into the distance while fog shrouds the earth at his feet. It can be read both as an image of stark human loneliness and as a dramatization of imperial hubris, in which mankind rules the earth. The aerial photo of the Woolworth tower similarly conveys a sense of Promethean daring, as the stand-alone building signifies modern mankind boldly thrusting into the realm of the gods. Insofar as the building in question is an embodiment not of religion but of commerce, the photo also venerates and legitimizes the incursion of business, American business in particular, into every corner of the natural world. By association, the building in the photo stands in for the customer as well. To the extent that retail business and advertising successfully indulge our fantasies and inflate our aspirations and expectations, we experience ourselves as godlike entities. The British sociologist Colin Campbell captured the connection years ago in the title of his book The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, which argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic painters, poets, and composers initiated a language of longing, striving, and heroic desire that stoked concurrent developments within capitalism, requiring increased consumer demand. In terms of the topic of this essay, the aesthetic space of the city—whether on the ground or in the sky—has increasingly been defined as that which incites desire and narcissistic fantasy.8 98

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If the Woolworth tower was New York’s cathedral of commerce, its temple of transportation was Pennsylvania Station, an immense railroad terminal brought to completion in 1910. Like the Woolworth Building, Penn Station was a masterwork of City Beautiful aesthetics. Designed by America’s most prestigious architectural firm, McKim, Mead and White, the facade of Penn Station was serious and sober, guarded by a lengthy colonnade of Doric columns. Inside, the magnificent general waiting room rose to a height of 150 feet. Inspired by the Baths of Caracalla and the nave of St. Peter’s in Rome, it was one of the largest indoor spaces in the history of the world. From the waiting room, one entered a train concourse that was described by an admirer as a “cathedral of light and dramatic motion.” Tall slender steel pillars launched a rhythmic repetition of umbrella arches and glass skylights. In referencing an array of earlier architectural landmarks, such as Chartres Cathedral, the Crystal Palace, and the Eiffel Tower, the concourse claimed an impressive cultural heritage. Indeed, every departure from Penn Station took the traveler on a tour through successive epochs in the history of Western architecture.9 The purpose this served was not purely aesthetic. In the words of architectural historian Hilary Ballon, “McKim tried to temper the brute claims of efficiency with the reassuring comforts of historical tradition. Guided by a vision of civic grandeur, he translated the mundane business of boarding trains into a stately procession, and subsumed the commotion of constant movement and disorganized crowds into the station’s overriding order.” Covering the grand opening of the station, the World reported that “A Frenchman standing beneath the dome of the splendid waiting room sobbed aloud because such a ‘beautiful affair’ was ‘just a railway station,’ while friends explained to him that in this commercial country commerce is idealized in art and beauty.”10 By the 1950s, with the phenomenal postwar upsurge in automobile and airplane travel, the passenger rail business fell on hard times. Less than half a century old, the station had lost its pristine grandeur and become infested with shops, booths, and television monitors, leading architectural critic Lewis Mumford to describe the interior as a “vast electronic 99

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jukebox,” with a “West Forty-second Street garishness and tawdriness.” In the end, the strapped Pennsylvania Railroad Company decided to solve its financial woes by flattening the famed building and selling air rights to the highest bidder. Despite protests by historic preservationists, the station’s glorious facade, waiting room, and concourse were demolished, making way for an economically more profitable, although considerably less attractive, windowless and low-ceilinged underground transportation concourse. Rising above it was a new sports arena named for the fabled Madison Square Garden of an earlier era, which itself had been of notable design by McKim, Mead, and White. An editorial in the New York Times called the 1963 demolition a “monumental act of vandalism.” Invoking the station in its glory days, the Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully commented that previously “one entered the city like a god,” whereas “one scuttles in now like a rat.”11 Large-scale architectural turnover is nothing new for New York, and the city’s callous disregard of its past has long been a source of controversy. As a writer for Harper’s Weekly commented in 1869, “In London or Paris you may see some relics of past centuries; these are reverenced and preserved as long as they endure. But New York is a series of experiments, and every thing which has lived its life and played its part is held to be dead, and is buried, and over it grows a new world.”12 Between 1903 and 1910, the construction of Penn Station, including the train yards that fed into it, involved some of the most extensive architectural death and burial in the history of New York. Twenty-eight acres of the city’s densely populated, low-income Tenderloin district were razed in the process. Enthralled by the massive destruction and rebuilding, George Bellows, a member of the so-called Ashcan School of painting, repeatedly depicted the upheaval on canvas. Some of his renderings are benign in tone and mood, but others, such as Pennsylvania Station Excavation, portray an urban space violently ripped asunder, a gaping wound filled with fresh snow that is almost indistinguishable from the steam belching out of the coal-fueled digging machines. Coils of soot pouring from the roof of a massive building on the horizon blacken the blue and gold resplendence of a winter sunset. The 100

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structure resembles an angry, horned demon rising from the underworld. Bellows sees the birth of the modern city as tortured, agonized, and writhing, a battlefield on which forces such as nature, modernity, and capitalism contend for dominance. The painting allegorizes the physical, mental, and moral upheaval that must take place in order to effect the economic and aesthetic transformation of city space.13 Compare Bellows’s painting of the excavation to the photograph that begins this chapter, a 1910 photogravure by Alfred Stieglitz of a different part of New York, lower Manhattan. Entitled “City of Ambition,” the photo shows a waterfront view of the industrial city in which the four elements of nature—earth, air, water, and fire—are amply represented, either literally, as in the sparkling river below and the vaulted sky above, or figuratively, as in the granite facing of the massive buildings and the fire-generated steam emanating from them. The image is profoundly ambiguous. It can be seen as an exuberantly Whitmanesque celebration of modern industrial democracy, in which man’s awesome accomplishments claim their rightful place in the natural order. But it can also be viewed, in a manner not unlike that of Bellows’s Pennsylvania Station Excavation, as a bleak document of industrial modernity, in which man wages war on nature, attempting with unabashed hubris to equal or surpass or even dominate it. Despite such dark overtones, Stieglitz’s photograph evidences a modernist infatuation with tall-building architecture that continues to this day, now on a global scale. At one point, back in the 1920s and 1930s, some visionaries hoped to merge the conquest of vertical space, as embodied earlier by the Woolworth Building, with that of horizontal space, as in Penn Station. There was talk, for example, of using the Empire State Building as a docking station for dirigibles. Impractical as that proved to be, the “city in the sky” idea persisted well into the late twentieth century, as might be seen in George Lucas’s second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), with its celestial city in the clouds. The ultimate expression of the skyscraper sublime occurred on September 11, 2001, but in a manner completely expunged of utopian hope. Or, let me revise that, there was indeed millennial hope, but only on the part of the 101

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terrorist hijackers, who yearned for an earlier millennium. They, too, it must be said, sought to control the aesthetic space of the city. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was the first and perhaps last Westerner to dare suggest as much. In a widely reviled statement that he made in an interview shortly after 9/11, he characterized the attack on the World Trade Center as “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.” Hyperbolic, no doubt, and certainly ill-timed, the statement nonetheless acknowledges that Promethean ambition, artistic creation, capitalist spectacle, and violent destruction are profoundly intertwined. What is it, if not art, that is capable of instantly reframing reality for us, transforming our self-satisfied dreams of the future into a nightmare of the present?14 Significantly, the Woolworth Building and the Twin Towers were close neighbors geographically but also symbolically, for the latter had come to assume the former’s one-time status as the ultimate architectural expression of capitalism. A more curious link is that in the early days following 9/11, conspiracy theorists surmised that guided missiles had been fired at the Twin Towers from an undisclosed position on the Woolworth tower. However far-fetched that proved to be, it is nonetheless both eerie and sad that the heroic grandeur of the 1928 photograph of the Woolworth spire piercing the clouds anticipated another such view from seventy-three years later, this taken by a NYPD helicopter pilot surveying the clouds of smoke billowing from the destroyed towers adjacent to the Woolworth. In the end, after the smoke had cleared, the romantic exuberance of the Woolworth Building was counterpointed by the romantic ruins of the World Trade Center. Indeed, from its origins at the start of the Industrial Revolution, Romanticism has taken a marked stance against civilization, sometimes violently so. In 1836, the American Romantic painter Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of art and a vehement critic of Jacksonian democracy, envisioned the destruction of New York City, disguised as an ancient Roman metropolis, in an allegorical series of tableaux known collectively as The Course of Empire. One painting symbolically depicts the apogee of urban civilization, the second its destruction by barbarian 102

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“terrorists,” and the third its decay and ruin. The events of 9/11 ran through this sequence in a matter of hours. From a distanced perspective, it is possible to see that al-Qaeda was guided by an extreme version of Romanticism, with its repugnance toward modernity. But modernity too has an annihilative desire. And so did modernism. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier spoke approvingly of modern architecture’s “vacuum-cleaning period”: a time for purging older architectural forms and their encoded social arrangements and starting afresh.15 Bin Laden took this impulse to its most destructive end; his attack on New York was the ultimate act of urban renewal. Like Richard Serra, as well as Serra’s premodernist predecessors in the City Beautiful movement, bin Laden was a man with a political agenda who reshaped the city in a significant way, bending it to his will. And like Christo, he too rolled out his long-dreamed-of intervention in urban aesthetics with a spectacular flourish. Although his goals, unlike theirs, were not artistic in nature, one would have to say that the horrifying performance piece he orchestrated was guided by matters of taste—in this case, disgust and revulsion at perceived Western decadence—and thereby had an underlying aesthetic motivation. In this essay, we have seen the city stamped with an array of personal, political, corporate, and crypto-religious visions. Such visions have often come into conflict with one another, leading to a sort of creative destruction, in which what “goes up” in one period comes down, sometimes violently, in another, not necessarily because it has ceased to be aesthetically pleasing but because its original cultural or political raison d’être has yielded to new, competing raisons d’être. Modern cities rely heavily on aesthetically pleasing or provocative uses of public space to brand their identity, promote civic well-being, and stimulate the economy. But what kind of beauty is called for, and on whose terms, can never be a matter of lasting consensus. This is because, almost by definition, modern cities contain—in both the spatial and the political senses of the word—diversity, competition, and conflict.

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Dialogue on chapter 5: Aesthetic Space David Nye: Thank you for this very interesting talk. First, you use the

word sublime in talking about the Central Park “decoration,” shall we say, but then you move to much more serious considerations of the sublime, but to me that’s like waving the red flag at the bull because I’ve written a whole book about the technological sublime, so, of course, my mind was racing around making connections of various sorts, and I am not sure if it leads to an entirely coherent question, but the thing that I often wonder is to what extent that sublime impulse of skyscraper building, of giant train station building, has perhaps passed away a little bit in American culture. It’s not dead, but it’s weakened, perhaps, and the fascination, as we know, is more with the glowing rectangles of our screen culture, so in a sense we have moved from one thing to the other. So, that’s one area I’d like to hear you say something about. The other was that you showed us images of destruction—not just the destruction of the Twin Towers, but there was also, in a Stieglitz image, the Singer building, which has the peculiar distinction of being the only building, as far as I know, which was once the tallest in the world and which has been torn down and destroyed. Only for six months or a year was it the tallest building, but from the photographs it seems to have had quite a magnificent interior space, as well as a very nice building to look at. It was photographed by Coburn, as well as Stieglitz and many others. So, it was considered to be a landmark building and a place also with an observatory, where you went to the top, just as with the Twin Towers. What I’m getting at is that Americans are quite capable of tearing down a building themselves, even a building as fine as the Singer. David Lubin: A few days after September 11, a friend of mine who has a small plane told me that at flight school there is a simulation program that allows pilots in training to navigate between the Twin Towers. I found that amazing, that such things were already out there before this occurred. It would be crazy to imagine al-Qaeda being inspired by training programs and video games or watching The Towering Inferno and similar disaster movies of the 1970s, although it was intriguing to 104

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hear that when the Navy Seals raided the bin Laden compound, they found all these Hollywood movies available on DVD. André Bazin said that the desire to watch trains crash is at the root of the cinematic experience. That’s really what people want to see: immense destruction. There you have the sublime. It’s seeing industrial mechanisms imploding, exploding. Miles referred to this earlier. So, yes, part of this organic process of city building involves city destroying and immense transfers of space. Edmund Burke was the first modern to identify the sublime as a necessary aesthetic experience that we yearn for, something to galvanize us, to help us get through the flatness of our day. We need these kinds of injections of horror and terror, and that’s what the sublime, in whatever form it takes, provides for people. Was there a second part to your question? Nye: Yes, the other aspect was whether we have moved from an interest in the sublime to something that gives greater value now to something else—the glowing rectangles, the screens people are gazing into. Lubin: Yes, I see this with my students—we live in what I would call a culture of indifference, which is another way of saying a culture of cool. Which means being cool at all costs, being affectless, not getting passionate and emotional, doing your politics via Internet, by Facebook, rather than being in the street and protesting and really making a physical commitment. We live in a very noncommittal society. We do everything we can to avoid commitment. The Richard Serra piece, that was an in-your-face, committed piece of art, and it’s not surprising that it was destroyed, because it didn’t fit with our desire to farm out our emotions to television, to music on our iPods, to live in a vicarious, simulated world. So, going back to your earlier question about the skyscraper aesthetic, and anticipating Albena’s talk about Rem Koolhaas, I think about how hard it would be for any modernist auteur today to make that big statement with a building because it’s—well, talking about Gulliver, the Lilliputians are tying us down in so many different ways that it would be very difficult to have the great modernist or postmodernist structure erected. Nye: So, it’s only possible in Dubai. 105

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Lubin: Yes. [Laughter.] Malcolm McCullough: Thanks, David, that was quite an excur-

sion, and if there’s a thread from those public art pieces to the demolition of Penn Station and then to 9/11, maybe it’s some kind of imposition of taste. My colleagues who study aesthetics all day long—I mean, we are all philosophers, but some people spend all day at it—say that it’s tough to talk about aesthetics without bringing up the T-word. And taste is very difficult to talk about. There is a question of whether it must be acquired. There is a question of whether it only exists when held by an insider circle who can say, “We get it!”—that feathers the aphorism from Clement Greenberg. So how does the imposition of taste fit with a world where, as you say, each person wants to have his or her own experience at a distance and not get all worked up about anything? How can you talk about aesthetics without bringing up taste, I guess, is my question. Lubin: No, I don’t think you can. But for me, the “C-word” is context, and when I am teaching the history of art, I’m trying to investigate the moral, visual, political, cultural parameters that allow works to be ascendant at a given time. What are the conditions, the horizons of expectation, that allow this to happen? Taste happens for political and cultural reasons. Greenberg and people of that generation thought you’re either born with taste or you’re not. These days we recognize that taste is context dependent. Well, maybe back in the old days, you could go to Harvard and study connoisseurship and acquire an education in taste, but ultimately, there was a belief that taste is innate. No one believes that anymore. McCullough: And you would never bring that word up among Harvard architects, or they would think you’re from Ohio or something. [Laughter.] Lubin: How right they would have been. McCullough: So, there’s a follow-up question to this—which is that tastes change, and you can imagine somebody saying that on the site of the Madison Square Garden, and a taste that has changed is that a lot of people regard anything artificial as bad and ugly. I taught a room full of art students in an environment and technology course for a few years, and 106

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I put up a slide of a sublime structure, the Golden Gate Bridge. Wouldn’t this scene be better without that damn bridge? Let’s see a show of hands: how many of you think the Golden Gate, the scene of this beautiful passage, would be better without the damn bridge? Up went most of the hands! I didn’t get much further in that conversation. I love the Golden Gate Bridge. So, what about this turn toward the naturalistic in taste right at the very moment when we know—and this was talked about a lot earlier—that actually cities are the greenest places of all? Lubin: Romanticism is such a huge, important term, and what you’re talking about, a reverence for nature, or what we now call “the environment,” derives from it. These values go back to the early nineteenth century: Thomas Cole, who I mentioned at the end of my paper, is the great Hudson River School painter whose work celebrated unadulterated, untrammeled nature. That was the source for Cole of all civic virtue: connectedness to the land. For him and his followers, every time an architectural structure went up, it potentially drew people away from their restorative connection to the land. And that notion, which, of course, wasn’t unique to the U.S., has reappeared many times and in many places. We do seem to go through these phases of technophilia and technophobia, so it’s not surprising that students would say, “If we could just blot out the Golden Gate Bridge. . . .” It was like people before 9/11 who said if we could just tear down the World Trade Center, we’d have a much greater view of the skyline. McCullough: Once upon a time, in the era of Mies or Richard Serra, or how about Sigfried Giedion, appeals to naturalism were dismissed as Romanticism, and now that’s changed. Now, when I first had rooms full of Harvard architecture students, another question I’d ask is, “How many of you feel that your work is informed by the dynamics of natural systems?” Zero hands went up; they looked at me like I was speaking in Sanskrit or something. And now I think all hands would go up, or many. So, something has changed in which appeal to naturalism can no longer be dismissed as Romanticism. Don’t call it Romanticism that I want to think about hydrology or that I want to know the plants or which direction the wind comes from. That’s not just touchy-feely. . . . 107

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Lubin: Romanticism doesn’t need to be a Manichean either/or—where you have to have either pure, undefiled nature or the sins of civilization. What does it take to be a balanced citizen? That should be the new ideal: to balance nature and technology; to have green, sustainable buildings and not eschew technology and what technology can offer but not go to the extreme [of] fetishization, either, be it of technology or of nature. McCullough: In many ways, the Romanticism is of the technology. Ads of the iPad 2 roll out; that’s a very Romantic act. Lubin: Yes. Jeffrey Meikle: I was interested in your comment about Penn Station and how the neoclassical cladding gets put on as a veneer of culture, presenting travel as a cultural experience, and I am wondering what sorts of aesthetics or structures we have today that somehow clothe or make familiar or introduce us into the pleasures we were just talking about. I am thinking of Roland Marchand’s subtitle for his book on advertising: Making Way for Modernity. How do we do that today? And secondly, I was thinking, as you were talking about Serra’s Tilted Arc and the City Beautiful movement (and the World’s Fair of 1893), that in very different ways, they each shaped the behavior of people or intended to. But I think the most fascinating public park that’s been built recently is the Millennium Park in Chicago, with its unexpected centerpiece, The Bean, by Anish Kapoor. And I remember the series of screens on which I believe images of people who are there are projected. (But that was not working when I was there.) But that is a sort of interactive park, and I wonder if you could talk about that in relation to Serra or City Beautiful or those other top-down views of parks. Is Millennium Park also a top-down, “Let’s shape their behavior” thing? Lubin: Well, that’s a good lead-in, because that was the assigned slide that I left out for time considerations—Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. I was going to contrast it with the Anish Kapoor Bean, which is a big rounded object. As with most of Kapoor’s work, you don’t know if you’re on the inside or the outside, like in an M. C. Escher print. I mean, you can move through and around this space, and the surface is supremely reflective, so you see the Chicago skyline mirrored all around, 108

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you see the Art Institute of Chicago and Michigan Avenue. My original thought was that Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion is fantastic, a crazy, supersized band shelter—I’ve been to concerts there, and it works for that—but it seems to me, in the terms we’ve been using, much more of a top-down work: it sucks you in, you come from various walkways and you’re funneled into the listening space, and it felt like, compared to Kapoor, more of the Serra as opposed to the Christo type of experience. I was talking to one of my students about that Kapoor, and she was saying, “You know, when I’ve been to Chicago, every time I go see that, what I notice is, everybody is pulling out their cellphone and photographing themselves in it.” And that’s true, it’s a kind of narcissistic pleasure bauble. It’s easy and appealing in the way Christo’s Gates are—as a democratic kind of art. But in a selfcongratulating way: “Look how cool we are, look how great we are that we get to promenade in this festival market space or this park space, we’re free citizens of a great capitalist democracy.” That to me is finally the message conveyed: How wonderful we are! It has a kind of funhouse mirror quality about it. It’s distorting, but in a way that inflates the sense of self. Meikle: OK, good, and my other question was: If Penn Station somehow clad the latest transportation technologies in an older culture, is that happening today as well in some way? Lubin: Yes, here’s an example, from today—airports, and I feel that a main role of the modern airport is again flattery of the consumer, as if to say, “You are a cosmopolitan person! You can come and go, you can shop at Prada and eat sushi, and you’ll be in one continent one minute, and half a day later you’re in another continent. Get up and go! Aren’t you sophisticated?” And the language, the visual language, associated with that is lots of glass, lots of steel, lots of high spaces that make you feel you’re a jiving, hopping person in a really exciting techno-alive building. My point of transfer to come here was the Detroit airport. You go underground on these conveyor belts, and there’s a tropical rainforest, and there are little bird sounds and light patterns, light shows, and that scenery occupies you as you go from one concourse to another, and then you come up and there is this fabulous fountain. I love this fountain. I mean, it’s a City Beautiful 109

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fountain in the middle of a twenty-first-century airport, a big round flat fountain with intermittent sprays of water. They shoot out like little jumping fish, in what feels like a random pattern. You see the water come up and dive down again, and then it gets really complex, like a dance routine at Radio City Music Hall. It’s all going on, and then it’s quiet. So you go through tranquility, you go through all those different things, and I was so curious about who was the artist, who did this? There is a tiny little plaque—I had to get down on my hands and knees—at the base, and it said, “Copyright Wet Solutions, Anaheim, California.” And I just realized it’s a corporate-made airport fountain, to give people that Elysian experience, so they can be modern but also have a sense of being in the old world, in the old park. Margaret Crawford: You’re also mentioning shopping malls. That’s their other big project. Lubin: Yes. Meikle: In both cases, then, it’s a kind of narcissistic self-consumption. Nye: And now you’ve answered the question that I had, actually, about what’s taken the place of the sublime. Meikle: But to car-making Detroit, the sublime is that we can machine stuff to tolerances of two mils. Nye: Yes, I agree, that’s another version. Lubin: And there’s another kind of sublime experience today, when your smartphone tells you everything you want to know. This sort of personalizes the sublime: “Oh, wow, is this cool. I can be in the middle of this foreign city and I know exactly how to get to the best restaurant. Aren’t I wonderful? My machine does it all for me.” That’s a kind of sublimity. McCullough: What’s so odd is that architecture still clings to this notion of a zeitgeist as though the goal is to express the moment, because it’s going to lose to any other medium in competition for eyeballs. And then the moment passes on ever so quickly. But of all creative cultural productions, the artifacts of architecture last the 110

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longest, and so it seems to me there are other things that urban space affords that have been figured out for centuries. In fact, it was the Romans who got it right, and a great deal of urbanism, particularly City Beautiful, owes a great deal to the Romans. What an amazing urban passage that is, here in Munich, between the Hofgarten and the Odeonsplatz, the arcade there. Oh, gosh, that’s good. Now, things happened there. [Laughter.] Precisely because we are in urban space. So, maybe the thing to find from the transition beyond Richard Serra to whatever is happening in public art installations today is this element of the contemporary and the timeless, like, for example, the work of Jason Bruge, highly responsive stuff. It plays with affordance and attention, and it’s restorative somehow and invites remembering that some things are of the moment, but some things are timeless. Like the way light plays on water, right? And so it’s a misnomer that architecture would ever be high-tech, and it’s a category that’s been very, very costly to civilization, that architecture would live only in the zeitgeist. And if you ask most people if they would like to have some modern architecture, they’d like that about as much as a Richard Serra sculpture. Or how about listening to some Milton Babbit music? [Laughter.] And yet, not each of these persons is a philistine. Many of them have traveled the world and been in great urban spaces and wonder why they can’t have that. Crawford: To follow up on that, can I ask about abstraction? What you are talking about, Malcolm, is abstraction as impeding the communicative dimension of architecture or art. The City Beautiful designs are really communicative in languages that people are familiar with, whereas the Richard Serra is completely abstract and therefore noncommunicative. So, I am really wondering about the whole notion of abstraction in public art as being not really communicative or effective to anyone who wasn’t trained in modern art and an understanding of contemporary art. Lubin: I mean, that’s a very important distinction you’re making between City Beautiful practices and Serra. Even when I put that comparison up, I thought, yeah, they’re alike, but they’re also unlike, and I think you’ve articulated very well how they’re unlike. Still, consumers 111

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bandy about terms like “mid-century modern” when they’re after a certain type of furniture or home architecture— the “Mad Men” look. What was once strange and troubling has become domesticated and unthreatening. Probably a lot of what strikes people today as radical and difficult and disruptive to sensibility will in time become familiar. The taste in mid-twentieth-century abstract forms has become naturalized, and people now think it’s hip, together with jazz. After a certain lapse of time, the abstraction of one era becomes “Gemütlichkeit” in another. Crawford: But I think midcentury modern has acquired meanings, cultural meanings that are contextual and have been attached to it, whereas I think, it will be very, very difficult to attach almost any meaning to the Richard Serra. So, I think, to me, that’s a cultural divide about meaning. Lubin: Yes, I was thinking of ruins when you were talking about Richard Serra. Because most Richard Serras I’ve seen—there’s this brutal steel that looks like it’s the bones of a dinosaur, but lodged into the corner of a museum or public space. It feels like the detritus of the industrial age thrust in front of us. Could the public accept that or not? This goes back to the taste question, you know. There are lots of people at different levels of taste education. Orvell: I am really taken by your overall framework for this and aesthetic space as a contest of powers. But I also want to propose some distinctions and wonder how you would respond to them, and also it fits with what Margaret just said about abstraction. Because what I am thinking is, there are three agents that you’ve been speaking about. Three agencies. One is the architect, the second is the sponsor of the architect, and the third is the artist. But the artist is the only one who has nearly total freedom, even though he or she has been commissioned. And Serra used this freedom to make an aggressive statement. Christo used that freedom to make a different kind of statement, and Kapoor’s Bean is yet another, but these are all expressions of individual sensibilities in which the artists have said, in effect, “Okay, you have the space, I got the commission, and this is what I’m going to do.” And that’s what the artist does in the city in terms of that competition. The architect, by contrast, is working for a 112

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sponsor, and, despite Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and the architect’s individual vision, he or she is also in the service of the corporate sponsor, the civic sponsor, whatever. And therefore, the architect is often making statements that are not only assertions of power on behalf of the sponsor but also of civic sensibility that can sometimes—as in Penn Station— express a kind of societal exultation and that serve a different aesthetic sensibility and purpose from that of the individual artist, who might want to obstruct that sensibility of exultation for other reasons. So, let me just put that out and see how you respond. Lubin: I spend a lot of time thinking about and going to movies, and there’s an analogy here with commercial feature films, where the director, the producer—nobody has unique authorial control of the end product. It goes through many, many vetting systems and checks. Anything that comes out at the end is going to be very, very different from what went in at the beginning. There are just so many different factors and centers of power, and those centers of power compete with one another for who gets to determine what it’s going to look like or sound like or be like. Even somebody at the level of Richard Serra, so long as he or she is making public art, is also dealing with that. Mabel Wilson: Yeah, that’s what I would also add, that all of those art projects were essentially very similar in terms of the networks that were required to enact those pieces. I mean, they are not in studios fabricating that stuff themselves. I mean, Kapoor works actually with very sophisticated software and fabricators. And oftentimes, these are the people that are working for architects and other people, so they actually are operating within the same network. The sponsors for the artworks are the exact same people who are sponsoring these buildings. And so they are operating within the same networks of capital and, you know, dominant taste cultures. In this sense, a contemporary is very different from, let’s say, older models, like Rodin tapping away. But even Michelangelo had ateliers. McCullough: The parking project that was mentioned yesterday is the more powerful work of art, because millions of people engaged with it, because it was a “happening,” as the Fluxus people call those things. 113

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Lubin: But, excuse me, if quantity alone were the defining feature, then McDonald’s would be the best restaurant in the world. McCullough: Or Hollywood. But participation, I guess, is what I was suggesting. There’s something very distinct about those high modern impositions of taste that say, “This won’t feel good, but it’s good for you.” They do seem very much of a time past, whereas today people are networking and texting their group of friends about what’s been installed in the street: “Do we feel good about this today? Is this something any good? Are we going to let this person get away with this aesthetically? Does this count?” The taste-making process has become less top-down, and the sense-making process has been connected back to the taste-making process in ways that are social. But it’s different from a world of Clement Greenberg. Lubin: Wait, wait, I’m going back to Margaret’s observation that most of the public doesn’t have a taste for abstraction. Does that mean, by the way you are defining it, that abstraction should be voted off the island? McCullough: Ah, no, I am not saying that at all. I’m saying that abstraction shows up in different ways. For example, in Copenhagen, the Berlin studio Realities United has adopted the old Maker Faire favorite of a vortex cannon blowing smoke rings, to create a giant smoke ring on the skyline. Every time, a ton of CO2 is emitted by that plant. Just as an ambient awareness device. And that was something, that the social actor network . . . caused that to be considered legitimate as a public work. It was huge. Very, very . . . and it’s not difficult at first, nor is it social realism, right? Nor is it degenerate art. Klaus Benesch: Just as a commentary—I think we are all aware that when you talk about the aesthetic, it’s a very complex thing, and there’s been a debate ever since Kant’s Critique of Judgment: Is there something ingrained in the piece of art itself that allows you to label it as beautiful and aesthetic? Or is it with the viewer and something external to the thing itself that allows you to make that kind of judgment? We had a conference a couple of years ago that was titled “The Return of the Aesthetic,” and there was a consensus at the end of the conference that something is 114

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going on here, and for some reason people in the humanities, in literary studies and also in cultural studies, more frequently talk about aesthetic issues. And I have the suspicion that one reason could be that with the digital revolution, beyond pure textual information, information has become more visual and therefore attracts more attention to aesthetic issues. I mean, we use PowerPoint presentations. I remember well a time when that wasn’t possible. Nobody would use even a single image to do a presentation or give a talk. (By the way, there are still cultural differences. I participated in a conference in France, in Lyon, on slavery, and I was struck by this entirely different etiquette: People would read for an entire hour from a manuscript and everyone was all ears, listening transfixed.) And so maybe the aesthetic becomes increasingly important because we live in this era of visualization. Lubin: I disagree with your theory, and I’ll tell you why. [Laughter.] First of all, I think that people become less visual with the digital revolution. I mean, maybe we throw slides up, we illustrate things with YouTube. But I think the ability to look is becoming lost. I’m sounding like a Malcolm clone here, but I think, because we hurry through our environment, we cease to look at our environment. People go to art museums, yet studies show that they spend less and less time looking at any given painting. There are more paintings to look at and more competition for your attention and more places you have to be other than where you are. Stand in a room in an art museum sometime and observe, and you’ll see people speed by with a quick look at the label, a glance at the painting, and then move on. It’s not the traditional aesthetic experience, an unhurried, contemplative engagement with a work of visual art. McCullough: It’s Hollywood’s fault. Glitz leaves nothing to the imagination. Lubin: I think it’s capitalism’s fault—checking things off a list and moving ahead. In an earlier version of my paper on the aesthetic space of the city, I was going to talk about how the city has become less aesthetic because of social media. I was just in London, and I noticed as soon as I came up from the Underground, so many of my fellow passengers pulled 115

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out their smartphones and started texting. They’re walking down this incredible street, but all they’re looking at is this little handheld device. It becomes a kind of blinker that people put on. They’re walking down the street, listening to music; they’re not listening to the sounds of the city. Malcolm, you said that you’d bump into somebody on the street and you would want to say, “Be here now.” But in fact, that person was here and now. It’s just a different here and a different now from the one you were occupying. And quickly, Klaus, back to your original point. I have found my students as they become more digitized over the years that I’ve been teaching—three decades now—I feel like students are becoming less visually sophisticated, less able to give a really deconstructed interpretation of an image. They take visual information much more on the surface, as unquestioned reality or pure fact. McCullough: It’s because the mediated world is so low-res. Wilson: I think a lot of what we’re talking about is, what does it mean to be definitive, which then gives meaning, which also gives value, which operates on so many different systems which are economic, social, and epistemological. Klaus’s example of the slavery conference speaks to the problem of representation and visibility, and these things mean different things for different people. One of the projects I’ve worked on was the National African American Museum on the Washington Mall, and our team—which was Diller Scofidio + Renfro, myself, and landscape architect Walter Hood—we had these endless debates over how does one represent African American history within an incredibly loaded representational site such as the National Mall. We ended up with abstraction and we lost. [Laughter.] We got slaughtered, precisely because the public was yearning for the “meaningful” image of the building and regardless of the fact that that image was such a hybridized mishmash of—what? We don’t know. And we chose abstraction exactly because we understood the crisis of representation, but what the public wanted to see was themselves represented within that building. It’s also very interesting how these things somehow are negotiated within both real space and virtual space as well, because a lot of the comments, a lot of the debates were happening online, 116

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and people were sending e-mails, and images were circling globally, but nonetheless it was related back to this very real space in which a building was going to exist for quite a long time. Orvell: David is going to have the last word. If you want it. Lubin: Finality is good. What Mabel was saying made me think back to Klaus’s observation that there has been a resurgence of interest in the aesthetic in the academy. My own personal explanation for that is that it had been banished. From the time I started graduate school, aesthetics was banished as a kind of elite, upper-class interest; you needed to talk about more hardcore economic and social, political, gender matters. To be interested in aesthetics was to risk being labeled a dilettante. All the same, I am convinced we have a deep-seated yearning for transcendence, living as we do in a mundane, dominated, administered world. We’re looking for different ways to get out of that iron cage. Aesthetics is not the only way and maybe not the best way. I mean, you have spirituality, meditation, sex, food. These are all means by which we try to launch ourselves out of the problematic here and now that we find ourselves trapped in, travel being another. For thousands of years, beauty has been something that people really want and need, like food, sex, and sleep. They want beauty. How they define beauty, whether it’s abstraction or representation or kitsch, those are all different things, but the basic need remains for some kind of transcendent experience that an aesthetic encounter can provide. Dialogue: Works Cited Friedman, Ken, ed. The Fluxus Reader. New York: Academy Editions, 1998. Giedion, Siegfried. Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941. Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943. The Towering Inferno. Directed by John Guillermin, 1974. DVD. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Twentieth Century Fox, 2003.

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OMA/Koolhaas, model of Whitney expansion. Courtesy of OMA.

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an ethnography of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam, headed by Rem Koolhaas. Early on in my work, Rem gave me a tour of the office, and the first thing he showed me was the Whitney table. “This is the project of the extension of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. . . this is a table of democracy,” he remarked. It was the most important project for him at the time, as he was dreaming of building in “delirious” New York. Later, I found out that the table of models contained not only scenarios for the future development of the building but also bits of history and traces of past controversies surrounding the building. Eventually I spent two years “living” in this office, just like the anthropologist Malinowski spent years on the Trobriand islands, and I also studied the culture and rituals of an unknown tribe: in this case, architects. Through this investigation of architectural practice, I learned much about how architects, although focused on individual projects, can have an influence on the larger process of designing the city. In 2001, I began

The Practice of Design

On my first day at OMA, I discussed my project with Koolhaas. At one point, he remarked, “Tu veux être la ‘ femme invisible’ à OMA? How would you like to observe us? Would you need a room full of cameras to do so?” I was embarrassed, because he tried to translate immediately my intention to observe his and his colleagues’ everyday practices into architectural terms. He tried to “architecture” my presence at OMA. To be sure, he was joking, a Foucauldian joke if you wish, because I imagined, just for a second, the panoptical horror of sitting in an office full of moni119

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tors “overseeing” architects and designers at work. Then, interrupting me again, Rem added, “It is not a question of offices here.” It took weeks of ongoing participant observation before I was finally able to unravel the meaning of his joke. They were all invisible at OMA: objects and architects, foam cutters, sketches, and maps moved together and changed their positions in relation to each other according to the dynamics of the current architectural projects. In observing the specific routines that distinguished OMA from other architectural firms, I had no intention of grasping the general rules of the design process. I just wanted to be able to follow the details of their day-to-day activities. I wanted to watch the architects draw and handle the models, to see them smoke and discuss the latest development of their projects on the terrace, to listen to their jokes in the kitchen, to feel the pressure in the air when Rem’s tall silhouette appeared in the office—to see all these tiny fragments of daily routine and to be part of that routine. And that is what I did as a participant observer: I followed and described meticulously the design process. To capture this rhythm, I used various techniques of observation that allowed me to stay at varying distances: close to the actors and the course of their actions, intervening and participating in little tasks, and at a greater distance, more detached, so as to be able to translate and decipher traces of actions and speech acts. Many historians and theorists of architecture who have had the chance to interview Koolhaas and spend time in his office would believe that to linger for more than a day with this practice would be a waste of time. For them to “explain” Koolhaas’s design approach or a project like the NEWhitney, it would suffice to refer to the larger theoretical influences on his design: for instance, the impact of surrealism on his early works, or the influence of the modern movement, or his rapport with functionalism, or the theoretical influence of Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier or Russian constructivism.1 Another approach would follow his childhood in Indonesia and his background as a journalist for the Haagse Post and as a screenwriter, connecting his past with his architectural approach and trying to explicate its distinctive features. His fascination with Manhattan and his theory of 120

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the skyscraper, of density and congestion, would then be explained by his “Dutchness” and the fact that the first settlers of Manhattan were Dutch, recreating their land with nostalgia.2 Yet I find it surprising to see architectural theorists trying to understand Koolhaas’s style, idiosyncrasy, and strengths by referring to his individuality as a “creator,” as if we should judge him as a “unique genius” according to factors outside the realm of architecture. Why is it that theorists of architecture are more interested in his big ideas, in the powerful insights that they allow to eclipse the design process itself, the daily practices at the office, as if the latter were not in the least significant for an understanding of his buildings? Why is it that realistic accounts of contemporary architectural practices, of the design worlds, are missing?3 Why is it that in the prevailing analyses, buildings are interpreted independently from both the conditions of their making and the design experience of the architects? I propose a different way to look at the architecture of Rem Koolhaas, a pragmatist one,4 which would aim at understanding practices rather than theories and ideologies, actions rather than discourses, architecture in the making rather than architecture made. That is why I engaged in what might be called an ethnography of design. In doing so, I followed designers at work just as the sociologist of science Bruno Latour, in the 1970s, followed scientists at work to understand the production of scientific facts. To understand the meaning of OMA buildings and Koolhaas’s architecture, I needed to forget (and keep at a distance) culturalist, historical interpretations and to look instead at the conditions of experience, to follow the way in which architects make sense of their world-building activities, to look at routines, mistakes, and everyday choices. In my research, I also included the cooperative activity of architects and support personnel, humans and models, paints and pixels, material samples and plans, all of which, taken together, constitute the design world.5 In other words, I assumed design was accountable, that it is pragmatically knowable, not merely symbolic.

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The NEWhitney

The project I focused on at OMA was the extension of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York—the NEWhitney. The Whitney Museum is a small museum in Manhattan, located on Madison Avenue between 74th and 75th streets. It was designed by the Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer, together with Hamilton Smith, and built in 1966. The building was discussed on the pages of various newspapers and specialist art journals in the 1960s; protagonists in the architectural debates included architectural critics, the museum’s neighbors, museum professionals, architects, ordinary New Yorkers, artists, passersby, and, from 1966 on, visitors. They gathered around the scaffolding of the building during its construction, and its barely visible gray granite fabric provoked controversial reactions in situ. The protagonists in the controversy surrounding the Whitney were mostly concerned with two aspects of the building: its upside-down structure and its windowless front. Although hated and debated in the 1960s, the Breuer building, once built, eventually became a beloved modernist icon. In the 1980s, Michael Graves was commissioned to design an extension of the Whitney Museum. He suggested demolishing the brownstones adjacent to the Breuer building and constructing a replica of the Breuer, along with a huge structure overarching the two buildings. Graves presented three different schemes (in 1982, 1987, 1989), but they were all controversial and failed. A decade of controversy accompanied Graves’s postmodernist proposals, labeled by the New York Times as “the biggest battle in the architectural galaxy.”6 These debates involved recombining a large number of actors and issues according to new, different trajectories: community groups, clients, museum professionals, historical buildings, zoning requirements, street walls, museum philosophy, preservationists, American artists, the architectural community (divided into two camps), the city planning commission, and the city board of estimate. Twenty years later, another star architect—Rem Koolhaas—was commissioned to design the long-awaited extension. The proposal by Koolhaas, called NEWhitney, unfolded from a small footprint in the zoning envelope. 122

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Keeping its distance from the existing buildings, it was of an unusual shape, one reminiscent of a “dinosaur,” according to architects from OMA. In this new, tripartite ensemble, each of the three parts would be subject to modifications and would become to a certain extent renewed: the Breuer building would be restored, and the five Madison Avenue brownstones would be altered comprehensively, with the aim of using the transformed domestic space for the purpose of displaying art. Also, there would be an entirely new Tower Building. The Whitney extension as envisioned by OMA thus pivoted on a reconfiguring and reorganizing of the existing museum and the adjacent buildings, rearranging the extant spaces and reinventing the museum’s program instead of creating ex nihilo an entirely new museum building. In the Koolhaas design, however, the Whitney extension would reconceive entirely the existing Whitney building. What was it about the Whitney building that provoked so many reactions, positive and negative, at the time of its construction and at the time of its extension plans? Why did those extension plans repeatedly fail? What kinds of actors responded to the museum’s design plans and claimed to speak on its behalf? We cannot fully answer these questions if we only look at the aesthetic, institutional, and social contexts of architectural practice. In spite of the fact that the Whitney building has its own visual logic, we cannot simply argue, for example, that it reflects the specificities and the challenges of the modernist movement, particularly the International Style. In planning for its expansion, three architects painstakingly struggled to answer the concerns of clients and communities by a set of distinctive design moves. We cannot ignore these design struggles and simply explain the building as mirroring the differences in their individual creative approaches, backgrounds, styles, and visual languages. Even though, in each case, the design process of extending the Whitney Museum unfolded according to its own proper logic, architectural critics still try to explain the reasons for the final rejections by referring to the chronic identity crisis of the cultural institution itself (the institutional context) and provide explanations relating to the museum’s history. Although these architectural projects did develop according to their own competitive logic, they were 123

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frequently associated with the cultural and political climates of the 1960s, 1980s, and the first decade of the twenty-first century (the social context). Accordingly, the plans to extend the Whitney may be understood to mirror a shift in politics. Eventually, however, the complexity of the Whitney projects resisted all three. As a participant observer studying the working routines and design processes at the OMA offices, I was eventually enabled, along with the designing architects, to open the “black box” of both the postmodern Graves design and of the original Breuer Whitney building. As OMA architects had found out by tracing its historical complexities, the Whitney has an amazing “career,” rich in controversies. To gain access to the repertoire of actions accompanying the Breuer and the Graves plans, they studied the building’s history, the variegated attempts of architects and urban planners to extend it in particular ways, and how various actors had spoken out on behalf of the building. Instead of providing a linear account of the Whitney’s architecture, from Bauhaus to Koolhaas, based on a comprehensive historical investigation, the OMA architects thus analyzed the history of the Whitney museum and its “performance” in public and architectural debates, thereby retracing what might called its building career (to use an expression popularized by anthropologists).7 Put another way, in order to understand the NEWhitney, one also had to unravel its history of design controversies. Following the process in which the NEWhitney models were made, one can witness three major requirements that bound the design experimentation in regard to shape: (1) not to neglect the Breuer Landmark, (2) not to demolish the adjacent historically valuable brownstones, and (3) not to exceed the zoning envelope. The same “not to” requirements had been in place for Breuer and Graves and subsequently shaped their designs. Going back in history to the times of Breuer and Graves to see how these architects answered these questions and interpreted the Whitney and then coming back to Koolhaas will allow us to follow a nonlinear time vector, moving gradually through back-and-forward steps. Retracing the Whitney of Breuer and the Whitney of Graves against the backdrop of the recent design 124

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schemes of Koolhaas, I was working in accord with designing architects who believe that buildings are pragmatically knowable.

Cosmogram of the Protagonists

The controversy triggered by the extension of the Whitney involved a staggering number of actors and resources (even of actors and resources that were not concerned with matters of design nor educated to judge design issues), and new associations can be traced among them. Because it prompted both allies and critics to write letters of support and complain about the design, the Whitney building became an important actor in its own right, as various parties spoke on its behalf and interpreted its “inner” needs and nature. The more people spoke against and in support of this building, the bigger the crowds of visitors and passersby; the more the resources and allies locally available increased, the more its design took on social responsibility. In considering the controversies and the many detours in the architects’ intentions to extend this building, we are no longer confronted with merely one static modernist object but with an object plus its anticipated extensions, presented as design plans, plus a variety of other actors: museum professionals, artists, New Yorkers, passersby, critics, planning commissions, zoning regulations, and so on. The Whitney building is thus transmuted into a “multiple” object, an assembly of contested issues: the brownstones’ destructibility, the zoning rules, the neighbors’ vulnerability, the narrowness of the site, the museum professionals’ fears, and the perennial Breuer building’s intractable presence. At first sight a simple technical or aesthetic object, the Whitney became at each point a sociotechnical, socioaesthetic, sociopolitical issue; from a built (and then largely forgotten) monument to modernism, it became potentially extendable; if originally taken for granted, it became contested. In the end, the Whitney must be seen not as an autonomous, emancipated, or coherent modernist object standing “out there” on Madison Avenue but as a complex ecology, a network of connections. Every extension project, every design plan, is a trail that invites 125

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us to reconsider what a building really is and thus enables us to recognize that many factors combine to produce it. Even though it displays all the attributes of a self-contained entity, the Whitney shows that sometimes the “social” evolves from the panoply of mobilizing actors implicated in the “drama” of a building’s contested architectural history rather than residing outside and above the institution. What the story of the failed Whitney expansion teaches us is that no building can be defined solely by what it is (structurally, programmatically, or symbolically). It must also be defined by what it does: what kinds of disputes it provokes and how it resists or experiences transformation in different periods of time. To understand a building, then, it is not enough to examine the specific figurative languages of its architects or the social contexts of its design plans. One should consider the many transformations and public interactions of a building while it is being designed: how it resists, affords, compels, challenges, mobilizes, gathers, and acts in contending with different communities of actors. Such an understanding of buildings can bring a greater and more acute awareness of the ways in which architecture and design take part in the making of the urban social fabric.

Dialogue on Chapter 6: Designing the City

My question is really a basic one, I suppose, and that is, you are an observer in the firm, and you watched people working on this project. And I’m wondering, if you are working with a single building, it’s very complex, with all these networks, but still it’s a single project, so if you are moving from a single project to a city, that’s one issue. Obviously, it is far more fascinating and complex. But my basic question is, how did Koolhaas’s network of outside actors actually impinge on the process of shaping the design? Jeffrey Meikle:

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Albena Yaneva: Yes, they do impinge on design all the time. I am not trained as an architect, and my position in the office was the one of participant observer of the architectural practices. What struck me at the very beginning was the internal presentations of every architectural project, which included a particular type of “proto-public,” i.e., a well-selected group of potential users of this building, the client, the city planners, etcetera. If it’s a museum, then representatives of artists and museum professionals will be invited. So, this proto-public is invited into the office to evaluate the current design, and it tests the building in different ways and reacts to the models on the table; it literally contributes to shaping and reshaping the models. At the beginning, I thought this was just a spectacle: the star architect presenting the final concept to a well-selected public—and it was all part of a well-orchestrated performance; the building would not change after the presentation. Yet, later, I found out that the reactions and the concerns of the proto-public were seriously taken into account, they did get integrated into the design process, and they did change the way the building would look. So, all those outside actors were in the office when architects at OMA were designing the NEWhitney extension; I also found them in the press clippings from the 1960s and the 1980s I had collected, and that was what made possible the comparison of the three periods of time. The aim was not just to explore the leading role of a star architect putting his signature on a particular building but to recollect the specificity of the “world of design,” i.e., the young architects designing in collaboration with a proto-public, together with journalists expressing reactions, together with all professionals who work with the OMA and take part in design—mechanical engineers, value engineers, stage designers, contractors, and together with models, drawings, and all other visuals that are “actors” in the design process. The table of models itself was an interesting actor in its own right, and sometimes acted as a “manager” of the design project. Every day, the architects from the Whitney team would come in in the morning, and the first thing they would look at was the table of 127

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models, where the last models produced overnight or the last diagrams of the project were exposed; that was where they would find an update of what had been done overnight, as well as instructions of what to do next; that is, the table had a real managing function. So, there were, so to say, nonhuman actors who managed the design process. It is impossible to understand how design happens without exploring the dynamics of the entire world of actors mobilized by design and the complex mesh of their moves. Meikle: If I could ask one follow-up question. You started with the wonderful image of Robert Moses, sort of masterly looking out over this model. Yaneva: Yes, that’s the image that was sent to me. Meikle: Yes. Do the various actors or representatives of different groups who are looking down on the model, do they somehow manifest a sense of masterly control of it? I mean, in other words, does the fact that they are working with a model shape their concept of what the project’s going to be like, in ways that maybe distort what it is the structure is supposed to do? Because they are looking down over a model and manipulating it and moving things around. Yaneva: Oh, yes, this is a completely different cognitive setting. That’s the reason I wanted to compare the table of models at the OMA with “the planner/architect-and-the-model” setting suggested by the famous image of Robert Moses with the bridge model. The OMA way of presenting and communicating the character of a building relies on the multiplicity of models which all present different points of view and different parts of a building-to-be and respond to various concerns of the proto-public. The table of models is all about this, about showing this multiplicity of the building; in presentational setting, there are all sorts of other visuals displayed in different parts of the room—panels on the walls, printouts, small material samples. Sometimes there would be a ceiling model displayed, if the architects were about to make an argument about the way light passes through the ceiling of the Seattle Library, for instance. So, the presentational 128

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setting is not neutral in any way; it is a material setting that will facilitate a particular way of reasoning about the building design; in that sense, it is cognitive. In architectural presentations, the properties of a building-to-be are shown as emanating from, but also detachable from, the materiality and the specificity of the entire presentational setting. Architectural presentations rely on demonstrations and are related to the cognitive potential of the setting. Like other forms of demonstration, presentations in architecture mix technologies of proof and exhibitions of practices, and they include experiment and the display of virtuosity. In the contemporary design and planning process, we do not have “the planner/architect-and-the-model” any longer; we do not witness the specific power relationship of a powerful human overseeing and controlling the agency of an obedient nonhuman (the model). We rather have a multitude of models and visuals that all talk about the building-to-be. The two settings (Moses versus OMA’s table of models) embody different techniques used to mobilize and materially affect a variety of publics, as well as different mechanisms of engaging the architectural audience. Miles Orvell: If I can just pick up on that point, because I’m really curious about this process. I remember when there was a competition for the World Trade Center, and there were maybe ten models that were on display. They were radically different. The public came in, newspaper critics reacted, the public reacted, and some models disappeared entirely, while others remained and evolved. In the case of the Koolhaas design for the Whitney, I’m wondering about the degree to which radical change in the conception was possible. In other words, with the World Trade Center, you just got rid of whole models, totally. Whereas, in what you’re describing, to what degree was change possible in the conception, or was it more a matter of adjusting here and there? Yaneva: In the three Whitney designs—Breuer, Graves, Koolhaas— none of the architects was free to design the museum he dreamt about. There were a number of constraints or concerns that came from the 129

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design brief and traveled through time. For instance, one important condition was “not to demolish the brownstones,” because they were protected buildings. This was one design constraint. Orvell: That was a given to the architect? Yaneva: Yes, this was a “given condition” and continued to be a given all through the 1980s and to the office of Koolhaas. “To respect the Breuer building” was another very important condition. Orvell: Was the word respect used? Yaneva: Yes, it’s a quote. That was the term used in the 1980s in the discussions surrounding the proposals of Michael Graves and also in the controversies I followed in the period of 2002–4 surrounding the design schemes of Rem Koolhaas. Orvell: But nothing more detailed than that? Yaneva: Well, there was a whole discourse about how controversial the Breuer building was at that time. This was again questioned in the narratives of the 1980s and now at the time of Koolhaas. Why was it so controversial? What was wrong about this building at the time of its design and construction in the 1960s? Why was it so hated in the 1960s, and how did it become such a beloved Manhattan icon in the 1980s? And if it was so beloved in the 1980s, how did Michael Graves dare to design an extension non-respectful to the Breuer and which led to the failure of the project? This shift in the reactions of the public was very important, and so were Graves’s mistakes; they were carefully studied by architects at OMA. Hated once, the Breuer building now had to be respected as a modernist icon and integrated as such in the design scheme of Koolhaas. This specific constraint traveled from Graves to Koolhaas: “to build an extension that will be respectful to the Breuer landmark.” And that is what made Koolhaas’s response and design so different from Graves’s! A third important design constraint was “the zoning regulations.” These constraints, or “givens,” were, I would say, the stable conditions of the design experimentation within which the architects worked. In Koolhaas’s case, as you might have noticed, the first design scheme is so different from the second; the first one is a 130

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“dinosaur”-like building, but one that answers cleverly all the constraints and fits very well in the eclectic streetscape of Madison Avenue. Yet, he had to go back to the drawing board, because the sponsor considered the building to be very expensive and its shape—very provocative. They did not want to invest in this building, and OMA was led to design a second scheme, a much more boring, blocklike structure. Thus, although the constraints remained the same, the architects responded differently to those constraints, and the decision-making bodies, such as the museum board of trustees and the sponsor of the project, Leonard Lauder, decided finally not to go ahead with the NEWhitney extensions proposed by OMA. David Nye: I got fascinated by how buildings achieve a meaning for the public, and that’s the issue that comes up when I think of the Eiffel Tower, also the design of the Statue of Liberty. When I think about it, in each case, these buildings achieve a lot of their meaning after they’re constructed; for example, the people who put up the Statue of Liberty—both the Americans and the French—thought that it was a symbol of liberty and not about immigration at all. Immigration, in fact, was explicitly rejected as a meaning when it started to be used. But nevertheless, the American public didn’t care; it has become a symbol very much connected to immigration into the U.S. What I am getting to is that the meaning of monuments, whether it is the Vietnam War Memorial or the Statue of Liberty, is not really defined by the people on the committees who come in and describe it, it’s not defined even by the architect. It’s the public. So, ideally, you’d want to do a study of the other Koolhaas building that was on the table there—the Seattle Public Library. That’s a building that is very popular. It would be interesting to see if it’s been used and understood in the way that Koolhaas imagined, or has it been transformed in the process and become, in a sense, another building? Yaneva: You raise very interesting issues: Is a building an entirely independent object? To what extent can it be connected to the process of experimentation that makes it possible? How can we reconnect practice 131

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and meaning? I think the meaning of the building emerges in the design process and is shaped along with materiality. It is not the public that will define what a building is and what it means after the fact of its design and construction. I studied the Seattle project and some of the other projects of OMA. We can like and dislike the Seattle Library, we can praise it or criticize it, but we cannot fully understand this building if we don’t connect it to some of the design processes, practices, and experimentations that made it possible. What will make us fully grasp the meaning of the Seattle library is the design experience of designers and proto-publics that gathered around the models of the building; evaluated them; corrected, tested, assessed, improved them; and made the building happen. Klaus Benesch: A brief question on this very issue. I find the network theory of design fascinating, but I was wondering at the same time: to what extent is it possible for a sociologist or an anthropologist like you to trace these various kinds of feedback loops and find out to what extent they actually reinforce themselves in terms of a particular idea, a particular design, or end up in something you might want to call mutual annihilation, so that you end up with nothing on your plate, because they neutralize each other? Yaneva: It is possible to follow the reactions of the different protagonists, and I found that the actors’ controversial statements did not flow in a random messy space; they were rather channeled by the design moves of OMA architects and navigate back and forth in time through the various design moves. Margaret Crawford: First of all, as someone who teaches in a school of architecture, I would say that these diagrams would be extremely useful for architecture students to use for comprehending something about how these actors exist around the architectural designing project, which they do not sufficiently understand, and even the way we teach architectural history doesn’t give enough attention to this. My other point is a question about the uniqueness of the OMA model, because I think a lot of offices today would say that using these 132

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physical models, which look like they were made out of cardboard, is pretty old-fashioned, and they do 3-D computer renderings, and so I am wondering: is the use of this old-fashioned but compelling and effective technique linked to the inclusion of these proto-public groups, which also seems to me somewhat unique in terms of an office practice? So, is that the case? Have you compared these practices with other offices? Yaneva: Yes, I agree that OMA models are quite unique, and the materiality of the form is so present in the office. Not only the practice of model making and the foam as a material are so present in the office, but there is also a powerful discourse about how models make architects think differently and how they shape design differently, how models with their flexibility and versatile foam materiality make designers produce particular shapes that they are not able to produce with wood, plexiglass, or cardboard. This discourse was quite powerful at the time when I conducted participant observation and is still quite powerful now, although OMA also started using computers more extensively, and this is quite visible in some of their recent projects. When I conducted my study, OMA architects used computers as a drawing tool, not that much as a design tool, and they all embraced a discourse about computers’ capacity “to distort reality.” This was a very Koolhaas-specific way of making the designers produce dozens of models a day in desperate search of a new shape. Cardboard and foam also differ, as you say, because they allow different modes of inclusion of proto-publics; they have different degrees of openness and flexibility; they mediate design cognition differently. And yes, this is part of the uniqueness of this office. I did not compare it with other practices. Following the OMA, I attempted to answer through observation of practices, questions that have been posed from a different angle by architectural theorists: What does it mean to design? What does a model do? What does it mean to extend a building in New York? Crawford: You talked about the star architect, and I’m just wondering, given the complexity of the process—the number of young architects, 133

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the model making—is the figure of Rem Koolhaas, in a sense, fictional? Is he just the front man for a whole set of other activities? Yaneva: If I were to make a network diagram of the OMA process, Koolhaas would be a small dot on it. He is not that present in the process of design, but Rem’s writings would be certainly a big part of this diagram. “Following the actors” does not mean following Koolhaas as a star architect but all the other actors in the design world. When he is in the office, he would give directions to the design teams, and he would participate in design discussions. When he is physically not there, his books are all spread out on the desks instead; the younger architects ... read them while designing and ... try to find tips on how to design a building in a more Koolhaas-like fashion and how “to make Rem happy.” Both his specific inputs on the table of models and his theoretical influence on the design process will appear as different actors on the diagram that would picture OMA’s design process. Orvell: That’s why it’s important for architects to write books first. [Laughter.] Mabel Wilson: But there actually is a really great diagram in the beginning of Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large that shows everybody who is in the office who has worked on those projects and also manhours for those projects. So, it’s actually a very interesting matrix that maps out exactly how much time Rem spent versus everyone else and also on which project. So, there is a concept that he recognizes: that it’s not Rem, but it’s OMA, and it’s also all of these people who work, and I think what’s interesting is that the research points to the reality of the cultural production of architecture versus this cultural myth of the architectural practice as the product of a single architect. And I’m curious, given your work, why that myth of the single auteur still remains, like we all say “Rem” or “Koolhaas” or, you know, “Gehry,” when they in fact are running these offices—some paid better than others—but a lot of it is underpaid labor, and there is something about why that myth persists and also gets propagated as well within the academy. And I think it’s highly problematic, because it’s also hiding the fact that as 134

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architects start to work on these much larger projects for transnational corporations and states, you end up with this huge matrix of people that you’re constantly negotiating with, which also includes project management firms, and the role of the architect has, in fact, become quite small, relative to all of the other actors that are coming to work on these huge projects around the world. Yaneva: That’s a very good question, but I don’t have the answer, unfortunately. It was very difficult for me to struggle with this question, precisely because Koolhaas is probably the architect who has produced more myths about himself and his practice than any other star architect in the world. To produce a realistic account of a practice that is so much surrounded by myths was challenging indeed. It might be . . . precisely because Koolhaas rejects the myth of the single creator—“it’s not me, it’s OMA”—that this myth still remains. Wilson: But it’s the singular auteur and the architectural object that I always find fascinating. It’s like you only ever see the building, without the larger context. And Elizabeth Diller, from Diller Scofidio and Renfro, gave this great talk last year called “Pointless,” which was actually about the failure to achieve something in the project they did for Lincoln Center, Alice Tully Hall, and in fact, what she was revealing was precisely the matrix of negotiations that she had to deal with: the city changing the zoning codes, the fact that certain technological innovations were failing, companies were lying to each other, lawsuits, whatever. And she just exposed the messiness of this process; but most architects don’t. Yaneva: Yes, most architects will not be interested in discussing the messiness of the process and the many factors that impinge on design and make it drive in different directions. They would prefer a vision of design as being a linear, step-by-step process that progresses according to a given plan. Even for architects at OMA, it was difficult to accept an ethnographic account of the messiness of the design process at the beginning, but eventually they appreciated such an unusual way of picturing the office. 135

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Andrew Ross: I understand that the Whitney is on the verge of abandoning this building and that the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be leasing it. In fact, for at least thirty years, people have been saying that the Whitney was in the wrong location and that it should be downtown, for all sorts of reasons, given the visitor traffic, the kinds of visitors to the museum, the social geography and the political economy, the art world, and other factors, with a building that certainly, probably from the late 1970s onwards, was in the wrong location. And so another narrative about this, what you’ve been describing, is that these architects—Graves, Koolhaas—the failure was not the failure to design on the site: they were designing for the wrong location. And this is something that went beyond the orbit of architects in that process, not to decide on locations but to make suggestions for relocations. It’s kind of ironic, given that Koolhaas is supposed to be sort of a field expert in consumer traffic and so on and so forth, not to have perhaps acknowledged that this building was in the wrong location. But maybe there was some discussion about this? Yaneva: Yes, there was a discussion about the location and the specificity of the site. This was also pretty much present in the discourses of the 1960s; it was discussed whether it’s a good location for the museum or not. The issue appeared again in the discussion at the very beginning of Koolhaas’s project. Looking at the narrowness of the site and the historical constraints, an extension appears to be “mission impossible.” Looking back at Graves and what happened with Graves’s project, it looked again like mission impossible. Yet, OMA architects did not question the brief. They tried instead to cleverly respond to all conditions of the brief. Thus, every time we have one of the best architects of our time commissioned to do the project, a picture of the star architect and Whitney museum director appears on the pages of the New York Times, and it’s great publicity for the museum. It’s a way for the museum to say, “we are still here, we are alive” because of all those important architects trying to understand the museum history, trying to decipher the Whitney as a complex 136

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historical object and trying to extend it on this particular site, given the complexity of the zoning regulations, city planning commission restrictions, and all the committees that have to approve the design. And every time, the process of debating, negotiating, debating, and then rejecting the proposal was quite similar. So in a way, I was eager to meet Renzo Piano as soon as he was commissioned to design the Whitney extension after Koolhaas’s schemes failed and tell him, “it’s not going to happen—look at the other proposals!” But I never did so. Now, relocation is being discussed. It was decided a new branch of the Whitney will be built in the meat-packing district, far from midtown Manhattan. It is somehow surprising that now that the constraints of the site are dropped and we have a tabula rasa terrain, a site where any design is possible, the project that was chosen for the museum branch is the one of Renzo Piano. Orvell: Can I get back to the auteur theory for a moment? Because with computer-assisted design as a leading technique, don’t you still have to start with something? And my sense is that it starts with a sketch by the architect, that the beginning is an artist’s sketch, and from there, the computer-assisted design begins to generate a model. Is that also your sense, that whatever the compromises that result down the line, which might in many ways transform the image of the building, it begins with an imaginative image by the architect which is often embodied in a rough sketch, almost a dreamlike sketch? Yaneva: I think it’s a myth as well, pretty much as big as the myth of the star architect. Orvell: I say this only because I’ve seen these sketches. Yaneva: Yes, it happens in some practices—in Frank Gehry’s office. Orvell: In Venturi’s office as well. Yaneva: I worked with Moshe Safdie, and I have seen this happening in his office as well. There is Moshe in his office, sketching and trying to get a clear image of the building, a perfect vision; then the image, the sketch, goes out and is reproduced many times by the younger designers; it circulates in the practice and gets fine-tuned 137

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many times. In Zaha Hadid’s office, it’s the same. The architects are not just thinking about the building shape according to the constraints of the site, but they are thinking how to get the particular Zaha shade of grey and therefore be able to reproduce the particular Zaha style. So the sketch is an important trigger of design in these offices, but not in the OMA. Orvell: These are signature architects with signature buildings, and even in Koolhaas’s office they are surrounded by Koolhaas books. Yaneva: Yes, but in Koolhaas’s office, the trigger is completely different, and this goes back to Margaret Crawford’s comment on scale models. There is not one sketch design they will start with; at OMA, design begins with model making. The model facilitates the generation of new ideas; to get a different shape of the building-to-be, architects cut foam. And “in the process of cutting, something comes out,” I quote an architect I have interviewed, “and here it is—a new shape.” It is not one sketch but the multiple interactions among designers cutting the foam, fighting with its flexible materiality, and negotiating with other actors that are at the core of OMA design. Malcolm McCullough: Well, wasn’t there some mention of a transition in thinking, away from what architecture is to what architecture does? And don’t many ideas begin from notions of performance rather than of image and form? And don’t those find themselves in networks of expertise quite different than in the past? Hydrology, for example. And then aren’t there provocations that are in experience and performance and atmosphere instead? Like, say, Philippe Rahm. That’s just to answer your query, Miles, about “it shall be thus”—at that pregnant moment at 3:00 in the morning. And therefore, the mediation has a whole lot more to do with simulation of the performance, and what becomes viable and deliverable, which is considerably more powerful than it was before. So that the 1980s might as well be the nineteenth century. Crawford: But also, what about parametric design? In which, really, there isn’t a sketch, but you feed a set of parameters into the computer, 138

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and the computer designs it. I am not sure if you would agree, but to me it’s just an extension of Peter Eisenman’s ideas from beginning in the 1970s, which really isn’t about that kind of authorship. McCullough: But somebody designs the parameterization. Crawford: Yeah, of course they do; there is a black box where somebody designs something in there somewhere. Yaneva: OMA designers were not using parametric tools at the time of my participant observation. The last image I showed was produced with parametric and some postparametric computational tools, and we started by identifying some of the parameters, and we read all the press clippings that were published, and currently, this debate surrounding the 2012 London Olympic Stadium still continues. So, the simulation produced with computational tools allows us to get access to the complexity of this architectural controversy and to grasp the magnitude of design-related social transformations in a city that is about to become Olympic—London. Orvell: Would you say that parametric design is increasingly prevalent, or is it a minor practice? McCullough: Yes, but less so in signature work than in service and delivery work. Wilson: Yes, because I worked on a museum project, a competition proposal for the Smithsonian’s National African American Museum, with Diller Scafidio and Renfro, and literally, the deliverables were astonishing in terms of what you had to guarantee the building would perform under the set of criteria. I mean, it was just pages and pages of things that had to be calculated. And again, these were sets of experts that had to come in on the project to be able to say “we will be able to deliver it on . . .” With these sets of energy criteria, terrorism criteria, I mean, it just went on and on, all kinds of different site parameters. But, you know, software like modeFRONTIER, which allows you then to put in these things and basically run a set of durations, have replaced in many ways how models have traditionally performed. However, if you talk to engineers, they will say, “Yes, we can do these virtual models, but 139

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fundamentally, the physical model is still oftentimes the best measure of the performance of something.” And that that can be often very useful for understanding what closely approximates the final building. McCullough: And then, to bring it to a close, actor network theory becomes an important thing to introduce into studio culture, so that people understand who brings what to the table, because otherwise architects can get very credulous about pseudosciences. [Laughter.] Orvell: There’s one additional point that I wanted to bring in, going back to the idea that we started with, of Robert Moses looking down on the model. And that is, not the architect looking at the model, but the sponsor, the patron who is paying for it. There is an exemplary story about the Philadelphia Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, which is the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and it was designed originally in the late 1980s by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown; it was a functional design put together from the givens and what they had to do—a quite wonderful design. But they couldn’t raise money off of it. So, Rafael Viñoly was brought in to play a different tune. And he constructed, if you know the building, a kind of crystal-like ceiling, a huge, vaulting ceiling. And it’s a wonderful model to look down on, when you’re standing around with patrons and donors. And they bought it. And what they bought now, ten years later, has to be redesigned from the ground up, because the entry on street level was obscured, some of the spaces are unusable, the acoustics are bad, and so on. The Kimmel Center was suing Viñoly for cost overruns and shoddy construction, and they reached an undisclosed settlement in 2006. But it was something that could be sold wonderfully, because it looked great as a model. Wilson: Just one last comment is that oftentimes with competitions, they’ll stipulate that you have to have a perspective from here. And that’s where we can go back to Jeff’s first comment that everything starts to look alike, precisely because clients are specifically asking for certain kinds of renderings so that the notion of even the signature disappears, given how the software is going to produce a certain 140

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aesthetic response. And that’s why in the end, all buildings look the same. Bernard Tschumi gave a presentation of a number of the architects we were talking about, it was a closed meeting of these folks, to kind of say, “All right, what is the state of architecture?” And what he did was just show rendering after rendering after rendering, and you couldn’t tell which were the star architects and which were the smaller firms; I mean, they were literally all the same. There was no signature in the architecture, precisely because the software allows for its own replicational sensibilities. And clients specifically asked for that. Dialogue: Works Cited O.M.A., Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau. S, M, L, XL. New York: Monacelli Press, 1995.

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MIT Daedalus 87 humanpowered aircraft on display in the transit concourse, Dulles International Airport Terminal B, near Washington, D.C., September 12, 2010. Photo by Acroterion. Wikimedia Commons.

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Our centuries-old instincts are shaken by seeing that everything on the road is faster than the horse; but as soon as our senses are educated, we’ll recognize the fact that speed in itself is not dangerous; rather the inability to stop is what’s dangerous. —Anonymous commentator, The Daily Telegraph (1903) The traveller’s space may thus be the archetype of non-place. —Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995)

What do the Baltimore/Washington International and Chicago O’Hare Airports, California's controversial High Speed Rail, the new hub of Florence’s TAV, and the contest-winning models of Transbay Terminal in San Francisco and a new Union Station in Chicago all have in common? If juxtaposed, what are the narratives that unfold from their bold visions of mobility and urban spaces? Put differently, what are the relations between modernity, mobile lifestyles, and the city as we move deeper into what the French sociologist Marc Augé has called the age of “supermodernity”? And to what extent can we use these instances of gigantic hubs and high-speed mass transportation to frame an argument about the future of mobility and the future of urban spaces, both of paramount interest in a rapidly shrinking, globally interconnected and, at the same time, socially and culturally divided world? Obviously, all represent specific forms of mobility and they evoke municipal and regional efforts in organizing and planning mobility vis-à-vis the challenges of unrelenting suburban sprawl and the staggering commuter traffic that has become endemic to twenty-first-century conurbations. To 143

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prevent the foreseeable total breakdown of the latter, the Californian High Speed Rail project, San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal, and the striking new Union Station in Chicago conjoin in proposing new, smarter ways of public transport and nonautomobile traffic. In so doing, they seem to be in perfect agreement that (a) the solution to the problem of increasing mobility under conditions of supermodernity turns on the integration of smart concepts of public mobility and urban planning and that (b) what’s primarily at stake here is our capacity to envision new technological, architectural, and spatial ways to meet the challenges of constant movement on both a local and a global scale. Implementing more democratic forms of decision making with respect to the design of public spaces (as in the public vote on San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal) or proposing new, integrated solutions for complex, diversified forms of mobility—a concern that drives both Florence’s new high-speed network and the daring blueprint for an improved Union Station in Chicago—these projects directly respond to the staggering mobile sprawl and its consequences for the global city. Modern cities, as Augé has pointed out, are “defined firstly by their capacity to import and export people, products, images and messages. Spatially, their importance can be measured by the quality and scale of the highway and rail networks linking them with their airports.”1 Within the context of an ideology of globalization that posits a world without frontiers as an ideal, cities appear to be increasingly defined not by their specific location but by how efficiently they accommodate mobility, the movement to other places as well as between their various suburban fringes and downtown economic centers. Because traditional frontiers between city and country and between suburban development and the inner city have become increasingly blurred, the emerging “third space” of so-called regional or suburban cities feeds to an even greater extent on the mobility of people, goods, and services. Today’s cities often combine, as Dolores Hayden has shown, spread and center, to become “galactic metropolises”: huge, expanded agglomerations along coastal lines and traffic routes.2 As economic and political decisionmaking centers, these new hybrid world metropolises that we now see on every continent are intricately interconnected. Together, they form a global 144

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grid of spatialized power that Paul Virilio calls a “virtual metacity,” a single immense conurbation of planetary proportions.3 So far, the prospect of an ever-increasing mobile sprawl seems unavoidable. What is more, the alleged interdependence of mobility and modernity has all but eclipsed place and rootedness as important factors for the creative production of identity. The extent to which notions of place in social and cultural studies have become “mobilized”—that is, exchanged for more fluid, dynamic models of culture—can hardly be overrated. In James Clifford’s path-breaking essay "Traveling Cultures" (1992), which posits traveling and movement as prime constituents of the formation of modern cultures, both in the center (specifically, the West) and on the postcolonial periphery the traditional view of culture as a “rooted” body that grows, lives, dies, and so on is questioned. Instead, Clifford defines culture as essentially fluid: a mobile cultural ontology that rests on permanent displacement, interference, and interaction of people, spaces, and ideas. In a similar vein, sociologist Zygmunt Baumann defines modernity as determined by quintessentially fluid or "liquid" social structures and the continuous movement of individual citizens4; other critics, such as Stephen Greenblatt, urge us “to rethink fundamental assumptions about the fate of culture in an age of global mobility” and “to formulate, both for scholars and for the larger public, new ways to understand the vitally important dialectic of cultural persistence and change.”5 To this end, Greenblatt proffers “cultural mobility,” the notion of an ongoing exchange and cross-fertilization among different cultures and nations, as a new theoretical framework with which we can reorient our traditional understanding of cultural identity as based on a sense of “at-homeness,” authenticity, and wholeness.6 From yet a different angle, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in an essay titled "Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of Self-Intensification" (2006), equally stresses the import of mobility as a powerful engine of modernization. His interpretation of the present is based on a philosophical kinetics that claims that (1) we are moving in a world that is moving itself; (2) the self-movements of the world not only include our own self-movements but also affect them; and (3) in modernity, the self-movements of the world originate from our 145

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self-movements, which are cumulatively added to world-movement.7 Hence, modernity’s kinetic nature can be defined as an aggregate of the dynamic initiatives accumulated over the past centuries. In whichever form it may manifest itself, modernity—from this perspective—appears to be both a consequence and a cause of a significant increase in mobility and movement. In the following, I want to propose a few—albeit very general—remarks about the role of mobility and its relation to the shifting notion of place in modern societies. In light of the above-mentioned Baltimore/Washington International and Chicago O’Hare airports, I then briefly discuss a recent study by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, in which they envision the new global city as an “Aerotropolis,” the airport as city and inevitable architectural manifestation, according to its authors, “of the logic of globalization made flesh in the form of cities.”8 If airports thus figure as core symbols of the “way we’ll live next,” they are also important, I want to suggest, in allowing us to rethink the downside of unfettered mobility and excessively mobile lifestyles. Designed as transitional or nonplaces (Augé) that transcend the very notion of place, they equally evoke the need of “landing sites” (as articulated in the work of New York architects/artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins9), of spaces of grounding where we reconnect to the physical environment to readjust our worn-out, disoriented sense of place.

Mobilizing Place

Historically, our understanding of place (versus space) has always been conflicted and paradoxical. Although critics have frequently emphasized the importance of mobility as a major driving force of modernization and modernity, resistance to theorizing movement and unfettered mobile lifestyles as positive cultural values has been equally widespread. In fact, the self-imposed lack of mobility, often in the guise of a place-bound, parochial attachment to a particular natural and/or cultural environment, emerged as an equally powerful modern concept, a concept that cut across the realms of philosophy, cultural criticism, political and social thought, religion, and the fine arts. Moreover, both mobility and its alleged antithesis, immobility, 146

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are representatives of a particular notion of space: whereas movement can be understood as an action that unfolds within an extended physical space (it may actually be said to generate that very space), immobility, on the other hand, evokes a nonmovement, a tendency to limit spatial extension, to remain fixed in place. Because of its geospatial limitations, its fixation in time and place, immobility has thus become a harbinger of the end to historical progress and human development, and mobility, as the equivalent of a movement in space, has been increasingly identified as growth, production, and, ultimately, life itself. Just consider the major stages of modern history, the age of geographical exploration and expansion, the onset of industrialization and relentless technological progress during the nineteenth century and, more recently, the availability of affordable mass travel and the advent of global electronic networks. Regardless of their specific historical meanings and contexts, all of these events can be understood as an undoing of the limitations of place by way of mobility and a movement in space. The ensuing privileging of space notwithstanding, place remained an important topic in cultural debates on modernity and also postmodernity. Although often hidden behind the more popular manifestations of space and time, place had never been totally dismissed from critical discourses. In fact, during the latter half of the twentieth century, one could witness a veritable renaissance of place-centered theories, from phenomenology to gender studies, in which place is taken to be essential to an ethics of sexual difference. If space appears to have reigned over much of modernist thought, postmodernism, as Edward Casey has argued, ushered in a new sense of place, “retrieving it from its textual tomb, bringing it back alive.”10 To take place seriously and thereby undo the overpowering presence of chronocentrism in our understanding of modernity has been a recurring motif of French poststructuralist writing, from Gaston Bachelard and Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Honing in on place-space relations as crucial for any analysis of the distribution of power in society, these writers shared an interest in cultural topology that has led to the important insight that the seemingly stable concepts of place and space are historical, 147

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“that fundamental ideas of place and space vary widely from era to era—and from society to society.”11 Moreover, in Foucault’s frequently quoted notion of “heterotopian” space as the cultural dominant of postmodernity, we find a striking conflation of spatial and place-centered metaphors, a blurring of spatial extension with qualities that we usually associate with immobility and a fixation in place. “The present epoch,” Foucault contends, “will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-byside, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersections with its own skein.”12 Foucault’s analysis of our postmodern era evidently rests on a spatial paradox, a conflation of the near and far, of closeness and dispersion. These oppositional qualities converge in a number of places he designates as sites that are constituted solely by their relation with other sites. Due to their existence as part of a sociospatial network, these sites carry the capacity to both mirror and question (or even invert) the set of relations on which they depend. Hence some of them might actually become countersites, places that are absolutely different from the surrounding places they reflect and on which they depend in order to be geographically located. Foucault’s compelling list of heterotopian places—the library, the clinic, the prison, the ship, and so on—notwithstanding, he remains largely opaque regarding the core concepts of place and space. His is not so much a detailed analysis of the complexities of place but a rather sketchy proposal of heterotopology as a new field in which spatial modalities disclose and express specific distributions of power within a given society. In pointing to the intricate relationship between spaces, history, and power, Foucault defines specific heterotopian spaces as at once reflective and constitutive of cultural production. In so doing, he has paved the way for a far-reaching reconfiguration of the role of place—and, by implication, of mobility—in the formation of modernity. Mirroring new, globalized forms of social and cultural organization, the foregrounding of mobility in ethnography, anthropology, and cul148

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tural studies also poses a serious challenge to traditionally place-bound disciplines such as human geography. Geographer Tim Cresswell met this challenge by mobilizing place itself, reconfiguring it as an essentially unfinished, processual space always “in the making.” Relying on critics as diverse as Edward Soja, Judith Butler, and Pierre Bourdieu, Cresswell defines place as “providing the conditions of possibility for creative social practice,”13 that is, as a basically fluid concept, always becoming and in the making, in which place-ness becomes temporally actualized through living practices and practical knowledge (analogous, one might say, to the syntagma/paradigm model in linguistics). It should not go unnoticed, however, that modern and postmodern reconceptualizations of place have sometimes sent mixed political messages. Ecocritics, to whom places matter as repositories of natural resources, are a case in point. Although crucial in strengthening our sense of place, they have for long been entangled in a relentless opposition between nature and culture in which the preservation of natural places, such as a particular desert, a river, or a strip of coastal area, was of utmost importance. In such an essentialist view, “natural” places often figure as authentic and unchanging, whereas their opposite—culture—is seen as merely secondary and destructive. What ecocritical and other conservationist approaches to place are thus lacking is an awareness of the dialectics of nature and culture, as well as of place and space. To overcome the limitations of place, it does not suffice to reify the dubious benefits of being fixed, unalterable, and immobile. Rather, what it takes is to reinscribe place with the paradoxical notion of an immobility that is also creative and thriving, that moves and changes while being anchored in time and space.

Placing Mobility

Airports are interesting in the context of this conversation in that they combine the promises of mobility and its frequent interruption, the freezing of movement by way of landing, interconnecting, and the extended checking-in and preflight waiting periods, which we often experience 149

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as a significant slowing down of our respective journeys. What is more, they increasingly resemble urban agglomerations in their own right: they have or will soon become, as John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay claim, globally interconnected aerotropoli. Rather than being merely transportation hubs, located at the edges of major cities, airports spawn—often in close proximity to their runways—instant cities, which in turn thrive on the staggering airborne traffic of the mobile age. As essentially heterotopian spaces where, in the phrasing of global, postcolonial traveler Pico Iyer, “no one knows where anyone is coming from . . . and no one really knows where anyone is at,”14 airports readily lend themselves to a new sense of place. Even if one does not subscribe to the poignant statement by Ryan Bingham, George Clooney’s character in the movie Up in the Air, “the slower we move, the faster we die,” there can be no doubt that what our urban future might look like depends to a great extent on how we negotiate the growing tension between mobility and stasis, between being up in the air and being grounded in places that have lost their appeal as sites of meaningful, physical interaction and human bonding. Here are some oft-quoted facts: Airports are steadily growing in size, and they wield increasing economic and political power. Dallas–Fort Worth airport, one of the biggest in the United States, houses “a small universe of five terminals, a 36-hole golf course and 400,000 jobs within a 5-mile radius,”15 and the constant expansion of Dulles International, twenty-five miles outside of Washington, D.C., has turned the neighboring Fairfax County into a veritable aerotropolis, wealthier than either Bangkok or New Dehli, and home to headquarters, research and development centers, and foreign bureaus of practically every company that counts in the dot.com era. Most impressive of all, however, is the new Songdo, South Korea’s answer to Hong Kong. Chartered as an international business district, it was planned as a hub for companies working in China, to be built on a man-made island in the Yellow Sea. To make expatriate business people feel at home, “its malls are modeled on Beverly Hills, and Jack Nicklaus designed the golf course. But its most salient feature is shrouded in perpetual haze opposite a twelve-mile-long bridge that is one of the world’s 150

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longest. On the far side is Incheon International Airport, which opened in 2001 on another man-made island and instantly became one of the world’s busiest hubs.”16 Small wonder that Kasarda and Lindsay have chosen Songdo as the new urbanist gold standard for their provocative celebration of the “aerotropolitan” way of life. Aerotropoli such as Songdo, they argue, not only represent “the logic of globalization made flesh in the form of cities”17; they are also the smartest answer yet to how we will navigate the Charybdis of staggering global traffic, on the one hand, and the Scylla of ecological crisis, on the other. However, regardless of whether artificial, instant cities such as Songdo can indeed be templates for both manageable and sustainable global mobility, they obviously fall short of questioning the political, economic, and social underpinnings of a world in motion at large. If “the essence of technology,” to retool Heidegger’s famous phrase, “is by no means itself technical,” modern mass mobility involves more than merely technical or even ecological issues.18 Likewise, there’s no point in trying to avoid mobility and progress altogether. What Heidegger believed is missing in today’s world is a lack of “meditative thinking,” a form of philosophical Gelassenheit vis-à-vis the realm of science and technology. Gelassenheit may signify many different things, but the semantic scope invoked in his eponymous essay of 1959 emphasizes the German notion of los-lassen, that is, to disengage the self from the works of technology (though Heidegger explicitly acknowledges their practical value); it also urges one to “let oneself down” (in the sense of hinunter-lassen), to literally ground the self in “place” (the meaning of the German Bodenständigkeit) and thus to “pit” (ins Spiel bringen) meditative thinking or philosophy against the reigning, calculative modes of thought. “Is man, then,” Heidegger asks, “a defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior power of technology? He would be if man today abandons any intention to pit meditative thinking decisively against merely calculative thinking.”19 If contemporary “Airworld,” as Clooney’s Bingham calls the increasingly urban structures around hubs, has indeed become a template for the 151

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“way we’ll live next,” it is time to rethink the waiting areas, the amnesiac in-between places of jet travel layovers, the nowhere zones we grudgingly navigate but deep down, according to global traveler Pico Iyer, despise because they prolong our flight time and postpone the moment of arrival at our final destination. Although modern architecture opened up a multitude of new spaces by reorganizing the urban centers of nineteenth-century industrial cities, the postmodern transformation of place into cyberspace seems to have reduced architectural design and city planning to mere functions of global economic networks. For architect Martin Pawley, the arrival of the global city network marks a “catastrophic diminution of the cultural status of architecture.” Similar to the fate of painting at the hands of photography and the fate of cinema at the hands of television and video, urban space has become “no more than the detritus of consumption.. . . In the new global city system, the old static arts, literature, painting, music, sculpture and architecture, would have no place.”20 To accommodate universal mobility at even greater speeds undoubtedly poses significant challenges for urban planners and the architects of new supermodern environments. An even greater challenge, however, may well turn out to be breaking with our habit of thinking that everything that slows us down, that suspends movement and brings our restless lives to a momentary screeching halt, spells out disaster. If Kasarda and Lindsay are right that the future of urban planning holds in stock only the limited choices of either “aerotropolis or bust,” it strikes me that what we would desperately also need would be rest zones, architectural landing sites that allow us to occasionally come to a stop and recover a new form of meditative thinking, of Gelassenheit vis-à-vis the overwhelming techno-mobile lifestyles of super-modernity.

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Dialogue on Chapter 7: Mobility Miles Orvell: Thank you for an exhilarating and high-flying

talk. I would be happy to get something off my chest immediately, if you don’t mind—and I don’t mean this to sound like a smart-aleck response, but I kept thinking—and I really loved your talk—where are we all going? And the portrayal of this transformation toward global mobility assumes that we are actually in motion because we are going someplace and because we want to be some place. So that “place” has a very strong meaning as part of mobility. We’re not just going for the sake of movement—or are we? Some of your discussion was about this restlessness, which I think also is characteristic of contemporary attention spans, as well as mobility. And yet, we must be going someplace because we want to be there, right? Or are we just landing? Or is it as Arakawa and Gins might say, landing and then moving off again? Klaus Benesch: Yeah, I think you are quite right, Miles. Being in motion, mobility, movement absolutely involves a notion of space. Now I took my cue for this piece in a way from this book, Aerotropolis, which came out a few months ago and that offers and promulgates a new template for urban planning and for what the city should look like in the future and for the way we would live next. It carries that idea in its subtitle even. A new form of metropolis that has become an aerotropolis. Now the fact that airports, which used to be on the periphery and on the fringes of a city, move to the center, and that instant cities grow around hubs and airports may not seem spectacular. But consider that cities have traditionally grown around a particular place—a cemetery or a church. And then, in the traditional model, there are different historical layers that are added to that, but they are all place bound and they somehow are place conscious in terms of where they are. The region, the weather, all kinds of different things. In the Kasarda book, all of these things are eclipsed and phased out, they don’t count anymore, because the aerotropolis is just one cog, one wheel, in a huge, universal kind of new city machine or conurbation where the only thing that counts 153

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is to be able to have access to a means of transportation that gets you away from the place you live. (I don’t know if you can call this living anymore.) And the book bristled with examples and references to people who don’t have offices anymore. Two-thirds of the executives and upscale staff of AOL, for instance, no longer have an office. They are constantly in the air, shuttling back and forth between business centers worldwide, and so this idea of place changes dramatically. Orvell: Just one follow-up, then. What happened to teleconferencing? What happened to the whole idea that we were not supposed to have to travel anymore because we can do everything by teleconference? Benesch: That’s a mystery to me and, I believe, to many people. Orvell: AOL especially! Benesch: But it seems that you want to do certain things face to face, and so the story that Kasarda tells is to make sure that people can get away as quickly and smoothly as possible. So, the new city allows people to have access to this universal grid, which is the new aerotropolitan way of doing business. So, in that sense something has changed. And one of the premises of my paper is what would we do about it. The images that you provided us with, I believe, in very smart ways, but in very technical ways also, try to deal with this problem by making travel easier, more controllable, more sustainable. But they don’t really question the thing in itself. And it just happened that this morning over breakfast I read the local paper and there was a review of the latest issue of the yearbook of psychoanalysis, a German publication. . . . Orvell: This is what you read at the breakfast table? [Laughter.] Benesch: I read the review, and you know why? Because it drew my attention almost immediately. It dealt with the attention deficit syndrome that’s now diagnosed with so many kids and adolescent people and there seems to have been an ongoing debate for the last couple of issues, how do we deal with this. And there was one—I noted his name because I wasn’t familiar with him—Christoph Türke, a German philosopher, who argued that it is very difficult to frame this kind of phenomenon anymore and to call it a disease, because you can 154

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only call something a disease that is in some way aberrant behavior from the norm. Now the norm has become, according to Türke, that we all are prone to what he calls an increasing unrest that we can diagnose in contemporary society. He speaks of a flickering mode of thought and a vagabond kind of intelligence that controls us. And of course there are many, many problems attached to that—browsing instead of reading and so on and so forth—so, it’s a kind of assessment of the contemporary world as totally gone whack, and we are constantly in motion, and so I think it would be high time to at least put a question mark here and ask, Do we have to give into that? Do we have to come up with an even smarter solution to allow for even more, faster traffic? Or if we do so, I would argue, we definitely need to balance that; we definitely need to have rest zones of some sort. And there are interesting architects who have come up with models, model cities, that have not been necessarily built as of now but that deal precisely with this issue. Albena Yaneva: My comment goes in the direction of materiality and the material support of connectivity. I wonder to what extent it is possible to talk about connectivity, mobility, and these phenomena without questioning their materiality and the particular technologies that make them possible. And because the high-speed rail network was one of these examples, let’s take this example, of how this kind of connectivity you were talking about became possible in Europe. We cannot talk about this without talking about the network that made it possible, about the TGV, the different train innovations, the train station, about Euro Lille, Stuttgart 21, the Calatrava controversies, Liège, and all those material nodes of the network. In other terms, and because we are in the Heideggerian way of thinking, how can we ignore the “thingness” of the networks that makes mobility and connectivity possible. Benesch: I think you are quite right, actually. And I didn’t want to do that at all. However, since you brought that up yourself in terms of, for instance, the German high-speed rail system and Stuttgart 21, it seems as if the public debate is divided into two camps: those who have 155

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a kind of Luddite grassroots antipathy to any kind of remodeling of that railway station, regardless of the fact that it could make a whole lot of sense in terms of transportation, planning, making it more efficient. And people who use particular kinds of connections to that particular railway station know well that it really slows them down and that the network itself is not efficient enough because of this one hub which stands in the way of even faster travel. Now in order to deal with those arguments, I brought up this familiar Heideggarian notion that when you talk about technology, it’s not exclusively defined by things technical, but there is something else involved here, some kind of attitude, mentality, or disposition that then takes on a dynamic of its own and that we have to reckon with. And I think, in that sense, the same may be true of things such as growth. I often talk to economists and people who know much more about the economy than I do, and I ask them, “Why is it that all of you guys believe in growth and tell me that without growth of any sort, be it green or traditional, we cannot survive?” And then they usually come up with all kinds of rationalist explanations why that is so. It has to do with debt and interest rates and all kinds of things. Now, I wonder if that’s really true, and if one cannot ultimately challenge some of these assumptions about progress and growth and mobility. Having said that, I am not promulgating a total standstill, or anything of that sort, but I have a feeling, and I think that’s something that is shared by many people, that it’s a relief to just turn off your computer and not be aware of how many e-mails you are receiving. So this kind of thing—and I mean it may be very naive and, I don’t know, maybe even conservative—but I think to a certain extent, we should have moments where—and particularly because I am a literary scholar and I look at texts and try to make sense of dominant stories, and I think there is throughout modernity, and this is part of the project that I’m working on, there is actually a tradition of articulating moments of immobility and offering them as countermodels to the dominant model of mobility. And you find some of this in Thoreau, you find it in Heidegger, you find it in William Carlos Williams to a certain extent, and in many other 156

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people, and I think that counterstrain should not be neglected in these otherwise very rationalist kinds of discussions. Orvell: In fact, I’ll just add a footnote to your last comment. You find it also in the tremendous interest in Native American literature, folklore, and life. So in the past twenty or thirty years, they have come to represent the exact opposite, a kind of stasis, even though you might say, well, Native Americans are nomadic, but they represent immobility, they represent the sacredness of place over many generations. Benesch: If I may add just one thought. What really fascinates me about people such as Thoreau, for instance, is that to emphasize place does not mean that you subscribe to a notion of confinement or limitation or whatever. This tradition I was referring to tries more often than not to reinscribe place with a new meaning that then often becomes liberating, allowing you to see in place more than just the curtailing of your desire to move on. David Lubin: Thank you, Klaus, because actually your talk, I felt, is drawing upon everyone we heard talk earlier. From energy uses, and ruins, sustainability. So, just a few random snapshot thoughts about this, and first of all, there’s volitional travel, where I gladly accepted an invitation to come a quarter of the way around the world to be at this talk because I love travel, but then I was thinking about all the people who travel because they are refugees or because of necessity. That kind of travel we weren’t talking about as much, but a lot of that Houston traffic jam is people who live on the fringes of the megalopolis who need to get in to do their cleaning service and then go back home at the end of the day, twenty miles into suburbs. So, there is this kind of—I won’t say it’s nonvolitional—but necessary travel that’s involved. And then there’s tourism, where often it borders on neocolonialism, where travelers from the West go to the third world countries and do their sightseeing, spend a little money, but then come back and leave that economy as it was before. And last night, I went to dinner at an Italian restaurant that’s part of a chain, with places all over the world. So, was I in Munich, or could I have been in Torino or in Tokyo? And airports especially are 157

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nearly identical. So, it’s not traveling anymore. It’s the reproduction of a set pattern of experiences that makes it more convenient for people to go from place to place. It feels like we should not be calling it travel or mobility but rather staying in place, going a long distance and spending thousands of pounds of fuel to just basically be where you were before. But if cosmopolitanism is a virtue, what’s the opposite? Is it parochialism? Isolationism? Is it blood and soil politics? Yeah, that’s the bad thing, and then I always want to take cosmopolitanism over that, but then, thinking locally, living locally, living sort of slow food, slow motion, slow travel, knowing your community, knowing your place seems to me a better alternative than running around the world mindlessly, grabbing and taking what we can. Those are the questions that I am trying to struggle with. David Nye: I just have a very quick comment. E. M. Forster wrote this not full-length novel, The Machine Stops, in which people no longer feel like traveling. They can travel anywhere they like for free, on air transport, but everything’s become the same everywhere and so nobody feels like going. But the problem is that then they just sit in their little cell-like rooms and they basically do what we now call sending e-mails. And they just lose touch with everyone. So which is worse? You might want to look at that in the context of this project. Benesch: You are so right. But I don’t have an answer to this. I think the older model, of traveling as an educating and uplifting experience, doesn’t work anymore, precisely because of the things that you mentioned. And I don’t know about the U.S. really, but in Europe, this kind of travel has become a class thing. I mean, the working class now does jet traveling, while people who can afford it go by train, or they take their cars and they go on vacation, not in Israel or in Cuba, where you find yourself in hotel complexes that all look alike. Instead, they try to explore the areas around where they live. But again, I think it’s not an either-or kind of issue. Margaret Crawford: This isn’t so much in response to the more philosophical aspects. I haven’t read the Aerotropolis book, although 158

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it sounds pretty interesting, but it seems to me that there is a whole set of implications surrounding airports that is very complicated. For example, the Hong Kong airport has acquired a kind of sovereign status as an entity whose boundaries extend far into China, because it’s very difficult for Chinese to get Hong Kong visas. So, you can come to the Hong Kong airport and go to this really seedy area, like a bus station, and catch a ferry to go anywhere in the Pearl River Delta. And you don’t get to China until you leave the ferry, so the Hong Kong airport actually goes completely into the Pearl River Delta, and this sort of thing questions the whole notion of borders but in a much more complicated way. But at the same time, it isn’t a nonspace, and once you get on these ferries, you’re in a seedy Chinese world, where you often end up in some urban village. So, I think it’s a much more complicated permutation of the airport system, and I think this is going to happen more and more. Jeffrey Meikle: I was struck by your comment about the German psychologist and attention deficit, which I think we all experience, and this business of being constantly in motion and the speed-up of everything. But in front of the screen, you’re sitting in the same chair while you are doing this. And oddly enough, you’re in some sort of undefined space when you’re online. I don’t know what that space is, but I know that I am in the chair and at the same time, I am really not there anymore. But on the other hand, people who travel and go through these identical airports (forget the business travelers) are looking for and are seeking a sense of place. As Miles said, they are travelling to get some place and hope when they get there to find a real authentic place, something they’ll be able to experience firsthand and pick up something from no matter how superficial that experience is. But they are looking for place in the travel, at the end of the travel. Benesch: I would totally agree, about the business traveler having a destination and wanting to get there. That’s granted, but on the other hand, consider two texts that I used once in a talk about speed in modern culture—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, 1957, and about the same 159

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year, John Barth’s The End of the Road, a wonderful campus novel, in which rocking chairs play an important role. The rocking conjoins this desire to move on without actually moving in space. So in that talk, I was wondering what has happened at this point in time to produce those two books, On the Road and The End of the Road. And my argument was that if you look at literature, you find increasingly towards the end of the century novels which introduce in very intricate and smart and intelligent ways stasis and try to negotiate it. In Cosmopolis, by DeLillo, getting from east to west in Manhattan by car, you get stuck in a huge traffic jam. You are in a car, but you don’t move anywhere anymore. In one of DeLillo’s plays, Valparaiso, which is all about air travel, the exercise bike becomes a very important symbol, and in the opening scene, one of the protagonists is constantly riding this exercise bike in front of twenty or twenty-five color TV sets. So, you know, something seemed to be going on. Or the treadmill in gyms; we go to a gym to do our workout in this kind of device or machine that allows us to be in motion but at the same time pins us down to this one place. So, I am thinking that there are many ways to deal with this problem of motion and stasis, and maybe fiction writers or authors are more prescient being concerned with it. Meikle: If I can add to your comment about The End of the Road, I mean, Jake Horner, the antiprotagonist of the book, is immobilized, he freezes, he can’t move. Benesch: Right—“cosmopsis,” Barth calls it. Mabel Wilson: I have two comments: One, I am currently reading Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, which is actually a really great book, where she talks about the history of walking. And what’s fantastic is, she talks a lot about philosophers and their walks and the relationship of walking to thinking and literally the development of the brain in humans—I am only one quarter of the way through the book, but I think it’s a really fascinating one, in which she talks about the relationship between attention and the mobility of the body in a very physiological sense as opposed to the way in which technologies have enhanced that. 160

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Benesch: But she proposes walking as a way to slow us down. Wilson: Yeah, which I think is actually quite fascinating. But the

other comment is about the population of who travels, including not only the tourist and business traveler but also workers, and there are also occasional refugees who hide in wheelwells or people who smuggle. There is a whole complex network of people and things going in and out that isn’t necessarily registered as legitimate mobility within the system. I just went through Terminal 5 yesterday in London, Norman Foster’s big British Airways Terminal, which was extraordinary. I mean, I could go to Starbucks; I could do a little window shopping at Prada, which showed you the diversification of class that was operating or at least certain kinds of cultural consumption that’s going on in that airport. And it’s completely unrelated to the gate, which I thought was really interesting. You are in this literal territory of consumption that has been distanced from the gate, which for me was a whole new spatial paradigm of how one moves through an airport. They just dump people in a waiting area for consuming and they tell you how many minutes to X number of gates in terminal number 5. And it was just really fascinating how that arena of consumption then gets broken down, because you could sit and have caviar and go to Prada or you could go to Starbucks and do duty-free shopping. But riding on the metro to the airport, they were clearly workers who were coming in and who were servicing various aspects of the airport, too. So, there seem to be very complex networks of people, I think, that also service and also utilize these things. Crawford: There are people who live at Kennedy Airport who are a minor class of homeless people. Benesch: Well, I don’t know if some of you may be familiar with Pico Iyer’s book The Global Soul—and he has a chapter on airports, where he mentions that he himself had, as a kind of fieldwork, lived in various airports for two months and mingled with this new air world community that is made of business people, but also homeless, I mean truly homeless people. But you are so right, Mabel, and I should have come back to what David suggested, that of course, there is enforced 161

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migration and therefore, also, enforced or forced mobility, forms of mobility, which is very problematic and which one has to address. But a couple of years ago in the journal Diaspora, there was a very fascinating article that argued that in postcolonial studies, we doubly discriminate against people who are not hybrids and who do not move, who do not migrate. Nobody is really interested in people living in Africa, where they have been born and raised and they grew up there and so on, but we are interested in people who leave their home places and go somewhere else and then become diasporic, hybrid subjects. And so I found this very interesting, that as an off-spin of this great mobility craze, you know that even in social theory we seem to emphasize people who are mobile, even among the oppressed, rather than those who do not move. Andrew Ross: I join the ranks of those who haven’t read the book either. [Laughter.] But it does sound a little bit to me as if it in part belongs to that genre of entrepreneurial academic writing that pitches the next policy paradigm to city managers who are looking for a turnaround strategy or new model of economic development for their city, and obviously, Richard Florida was the last person who did this in a very physical way. But it’s a tradition that really does go way back. You know, we had the “Meds and Eds” paradigm—growth through universities and hospitals—we had the sports stadium paradigm. At least with Florida, with the chic urban policy, all you needed to do was spend a little money on a few bike trails—because creatives love to bike and they love to drink coffee. The aerotropolis model is very expensive. Benesch: But basically you’re saying, “Don’t take him too seriously.” And I would agree. It’s very suggestive, very convincing to a certain extent, and so it feels very much as if this is where we are going. I mean, you have moments of recollection and revelatory moments on almost every page, if you travel and have been to these places. And so, I don’t know; is this a new template? I can’t really tell, but I think one can use it to speculate, at least. 162

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Malcolm McCullough: A quick comment: I broke a fifteen-month moratorium on flying to come here— Orvell: Was that self-imposed? McCullough: Yeah, self-imposed. And what I learned is just how much of this mobility is very mechanical. And I was reminded of an aphorism from another Nobel laureate, in this case the physicist Arno Penzias, which is that if you don’t want to be replaced by a machine, don’t act like one. Yaneva: A quick point of clarification. I liked very much how you described the transformation from place into space. But I was just wondering whether Gelassenheit can happen in space or in place or in none of them, because you also connected this to Marc Augé’s concept of transportation, where we have the classic example of the Parisian metro and the nonspace, the metro-space, this kind of transportation space as a nonplace rather than a place or a space. I just wonder whether Gelassenheit happens only in this kind of nonspace, non-lieu, in Augé’s terms. Benesch: There is this famous essay of the late Heidegger, “The Pathway,” which, of course, refers to a hiking path outside of the little hamlet where he grew up, and according to his argument there, you have to have concrete places to be able to conjure up this particular attitude. I would argue that we don’t have to really copy or follow Heidegger verbatim; I mean, we can take this as a cue for changing his ideas into something more contemporary and applicable in the face of staggering nonplaces, if you wish: meditative thinking as a form of Gelassenheit, vis-à-vis the mobilization of the planet. A more detached relationship to mobility or technology could be helpful, and that was the way I read him. But the fascinating thing is that in “The Pathway,” Heidegger actually uses a very mobilized kind of thinking; it’s the wandering, the walking, the moving that triggers a particular kind of thinking, but at the same time, it’s always anchored in something very concrete, in a place, and to achieve, to accomplish that, is fascinating, at least when you read it. 163

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Is it applicable in everyday life? I don’t know. I mean, like so many things we talk about and write about. Orvell: Let me close with one final question, if I may, which points toward Jeff’s look at the future, perhaps. But in hearing you describe the aerotropolis future (and not endorse it, but describe it), I’m thinking, where’s the fuel going to come from for air travel? We are getting more fuel-efficient cars, but we are not getting very much more fuel-efficient airplanes, and I see a finitude to air travel—not rail, certainly, but air travel. And so this projection—which seems to go well into the twentyfirst, the twenty-second century—I just don’t see it materially. Benesch: Well, in the introductory chapter to the book, Kasarda points to the recent volcano incident in Iceland, and they registered the economic consequences of that, where air travel came to a halt for a week or so, and the economic costs were enormous. So, they argue, it is not foreseeable in the near future that we will do without air travel, because we depend on it to such a large extent that there is no way around it, and we have to come up with new ways of fueling those engines. They talk about this issue in the book. Orvell: Are there solar airplanes in the works? Benesch: I don’t know. Nye: There is one that’s flown around the world, but it can only carry like one jockey. Orvell: It’s a beginning. Dialogue: Works Cited Arakawa and Madeline Gins. “Landing Site(s).” In Reversible Destiny, 150–63. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Barth, John. The End of the Road. New York: Doubleday, 1958. DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. ———. Valparaiso. New York: Scribner, 1999. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Forster, E. M. “The Machine Stops.” Oxford and Cambridge Review (1909). Rpt. in Collected Stories of E. M. Forster, 108–40. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1948.

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Heidegger, Martin. “Memorial Address.” In Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Iyer, Pico. The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. New York: Knopf, 2000. Kasarda, John, and Greg Lindsay. Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2001. Türke, Christoph. Erregte Gesellschaft: Philosophie der Sensation [Agitated Society: A Philosophy of Sensation]. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012.

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Woman texting outside the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, November 2008. Photo by Ed Yourdon.

8

the digital city  malcolm mccollough

come of age.1 The era of handheld mobile computing brings situated technologies too. Today’s new phenomena of interpersonal navigation, environmental sensing, big data, and grids of smart things have implications at the scale of the city. Recent examples abound: for example, Velib and Zipcar in transportation, Foursquare and Layar in social navigation, Pachube and Sensaris in environmental monitoring. Whether in social, environmental, infrastructural, or political applications, this latest wave of information technologies brings new prospects for participation. Users sometimes even become citizens through acts of tagging, rating, monitoring, sharing, and spontaneous gathering. Yet just thirty years ago, “smart city” meant fashionable dress.2 Just ten years ago, “smart grid” had yet to appear in the mainstream news media.3 This field is new. As urbanists have increasingly noted, the addition of ambient information media transforms the usability of the city.4 A core concept in interaction design, that prominent liberal art of the twenty-first century, usability begins from operation mechanics and form factors, as industrial designers long have known, but then escalates into questions of perception, embodiment, social convenience, and the aesthetics of interface. Whereas formerly such psychological concerns were too easily dismissed by technocentric computer scientists, today the success of smart phones, touch pads, proximity sensors, and all manner of responsive forms means usability might matter to anyone. The city is filling with objects in which computing is but a feature (again, consider a Zipcar, for instance).5 At the foundation of this paradigm shift, the philosophy and psychology of context supplant the exigencies of computation itself (which is ever less costly) as the basis of information-technological experience. This should be of no small interest to architects and urbanists. Urban computing has

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The philosophical core of contextual awareness begins from the condition of embodiment. The paradigm shift in usability has been from detached computational models of mind toward situational awareness through embodied cognition.6 I will say more of this later, but for now, in brief, this latter term describes our use of physical props, settings, and social configurations as active components of mental processes, especially skilled and habitual processes—that is, the practice of everyday life. This is not the moment to unpack the cognitive science of situated actions, but it is clear that the importance of embodied components of everyday awareness has become increasingly apparent across broad fields of inquiry. For today, information technology expands into many more formats and contexts than ever before. It comes along in your pocket. It covers whole walls. It finds ever more ways to attach to things, like the little panels that now clip to the hoses of gas pumps to provide yet one more spot for advertising. In the case of sensors, tags, or microchips, information technology disappears into things, such as door handles; appears as new street furniture, such as bike rental kiosks; operates building components, such as actuated sunshades; and overlays new citywide grids, as in the dynamic pricing of parking spaces. Scale seems important. Display screens, of which the world gets about a billion more each year, grow both ever smaller and ever larger in size and in their situations. On an airplane, you can now watch fourteen bad movies at once on the backs of the seats in front of you. Almost anywhere, the first reaction to a screen becomes touch, for as embodied cognition research explains so well, touch changes everything. Then, amid the diversification, the proliferation, and the immediacy of all these information formats, the urban citizen’s outlook changes. The more ambient media become, the less any one medium can command attention (much less furnish terms of viewing as a spectacle). The more prospects exist for continual change of attention, the more important it becomes for a citizen, or “urban subject,” to participate actively in an ongoing interest rather than passively tuning out. For the more that mediation augments the world, the greater the risk that tuning out will miss the world itself, and something important with it. 168

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Inscribing the City

Tagging, a fundamental act in pervasive computing, serves well to illustrate such change. (It also lets us temporarily put aside many larger questions of digital civics, which lie beyond the scope of this essay.) One core concept here, albeit one easy to recite and difficult to define, involves the capacity to write. The “read/write” city, as a computer scientist might put it, differs fundamentally from a “read-only” one that just pushes media feeds at you. To write the city is hardly a new notion. Political scientists and semiotics theorists have made their attempts at it previously. Always the question arises of who gets to write the city. Today’s Internet 2.0–flavored response—“well, everyone”—hardly solves the issue and, for the moment, sends us back to more basic questions of how and where. So, start at street level. The word tagging has long had many meanings there. Now it also means to affix a piece of information to a location by means of GPS coordinates, quick response (QR) codes, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, and more. By “geo-tagging” a message, comment, or label or, increasingly, by tagging oneself by “checking in” at a proposed gathering point, the culture of mobile communications takes root in its scene. Accumulations of tags, links, displays, and guest logs at particular locations around town soon become something to curate and something to go out and about to be among. Thus, between the age-old extremes of official inscriptions or transgressive graffiti, there arises a new middle ground. Although they may hardly seem like the main form of data in the age of networked telecommunications, inscriptions thus remain important. This seems true whether they are in stone, print, paint, or electronic form, and it is interesting when those interleave. As is evident from scrawled graffiti and chiseled proclamations alike, to tag a place is to assert a stake in it, and to assert oneself, or one’s organization, not just everywhere but within a specific context. As often observed by the late William Mitchell, context remains vital to communication. Context disambiguates phrases that mean different things in different places. Although often purely social, this sense-making role can also be physical. Sites, objects, and props 169

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give meaning to communications embedded in them. Thus, as Mitchell famously observed, the cognitive role of architecture, at least with respect to communications, is to give them a mise-en-scène.7 So, instead of viewing media as portals to someplace else, frames with furnished terms of viewing, and many such similar tropes of cultural theory, consider what happens when media take form in particular contexts and describe, annotate, even activate those contexts. Even many of the always proliferating screens do this; depending on its programming, even the placing of yet another screen can constitute tagging. So here is one way to understand the new soft city: although immediately a richer paradigm than disembodied cyberspace, the read/write city is also more difficult to turn off or tune out; already, it yields unprecedented distractions. At least it proliferates the prospects for overconsumption.

Distraction Reconsidered

Thus—although for “digerati” the cultural prospect quickly turns toward which cool things to go build or what sets of tags to go make, play, and curate—by contrast, for urbanists the most immediate topic becomes distraction. Take a moment to consider the workings of attention.8 Besides planetary change, a superabundance of mediated information may just be the second most distinct aspect of these times. Information superabundance is the quality by which these times differ most from even very recent ones. As everyday environments fill with ever more kinds of information, in many new formats of technology, they sometimes make the world more understandable, even pleasant, but they often prove difficult to escape. Whether carried about in your bag, hung on the walls, playing from the ceiling, or built into everyday objects, media feeds seem to be everywhere, as if people would suffer without them. Unlike the distracting soot and din of a bygone industrial age, many of these feeds have been placed deliberately and are not side effects, and many of them appeal to the senses. Outcry over distraction has thus been escalating. You may mutter “be here now!” as yet another person texting while walking bumps into you on 170

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the sidewalk. You may wonder how urgent those texts must be, that their authors continue to write them even while jaywalking. Meanwhile, in the cars on the street, kids watch seat-back screens and not the world going by. “A third grader should do homework in a room without television,” a standard assignment sheet says, with, sadly, the implied assumption that most of the time, in the homes of most children, somewhere a television is on. Even for discerning adults, personal productivity management gurus do a big business reminding overachievers not to do everything at once and to limit multitasking to situations in which there are actual benefits from concurrency. Of course, one can reach distraction using no more technology than a jug of wine or a pair of dice. Sensitive souls who lived long before computer networks complained of overload.9 “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” asked Erasmus, the first modern editor, in the sixteenth century. (Actually, most places had no books; media were relatively easier to escape back then, at least physically.) The din and dislocation of the modern city produced a less escapable kind of overload, of course, or of underinvolvement, expressed by Durkheim as anomie and Simmel as blasé.10 Distraction has been a core concept in urban sociology ever since. Yet this is an age of unprecedented distraction. Although the human mind naturally tends to wander, never before has it had such abundant means for doing so.11 Simmel’s oft-quoted 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” presumably needs no recitation here, but it may need reconsideration today, after becoming standard fare twenty years ago. For while writing of the experience of early modernity, Simmel uncannily anticipated overstimulation by media today. In his most quoted passage, he points out that “the intensification of nervous stimulation” results “from the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates.”12 A notion of tuning out, “a protection of the inner life against the domination of the metropolis,”13 does seem a strangely prescient anticipation of a later century’s version of overload. Yet, consider 171

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how things have changed since Simmel was rediscovered in the 1980s by critics of an escalating consumerism. Today, the onrushing impressions have become more numerous, more subtle, and more widely distributed. Again, this is the usual qualification to objections that people have always experienced overload: yes, but not so often and not in so many walks of life. Overload may once have been an unintended side effect of industrialization. Now, much more in the flood of stimulus takes the form of intentionally produced, possibly appealing or entertaining, widely distributed media productions. Then, as they become more ambient and less spectacle-like, many of these feeds intersperse. Many more of life’s activities share some kind of interface. Many more interruptions become quick and anticipated. The experience of urban informatics has changed so much since the industrial city or the heyday of broadcast media that it is time to reexamine the urban citizen’s distraction. Participatory, thematic, location specific, pervasive, and ambient, this is not clanking industrial Berlin, nor is it the television age of Reagan. Much of the change has not been under the command of any one information medium. Moreover, much as the city is no longer a steam economy, neither is it an information economy. This problem was famously identified by the information scientist Herb Simon in 1971: “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”14 Watch out for attention theft! There follows a usual stream of objections to panoptic and inescapable regimes of mediation and control. Surveillance alone seems enough to put many people off the prospects of pervasive computing. Still, although emissions alone are enough to put many people off the prospects of automobiles, the technologies and their socializations persist. Today, one of the most distinct socializations of information technology is its ubiquity. One can communicate, shop, distract oneself, or work, just about anytime, anyplace. The trick is keeping the right to opt out.15 172

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For on the darker side of things, big corporations such as Facebook seek to permeate and monetize ever more aspects of human experience. And despite age-old concerns about coercive overseers, the remarkable thing about today’s perpetual media consumption is how willingly people opt in. In comparison to twenty years ago, much less a hundred, the experience of information overconsumption has a much more participatory social infrastructure. It may well have a political economy of its own. (Networked social production is beyond the scope of this essay.16) Simmel was witnessing the rise of one too many commercial media, albeit before electronic broadcast technologies brought them to the center of twentieth-century life. The postmodernists who revived Simmel were witnessing the absurd extremes at the end of one-too-many-media dominance—the 1980s was the last decade of television monoculture. The urban computing pioneers who today translate an interest in Simmel forward to the age of personal, street-level media are witnessing a succession of broadcast culture by manyto-many, or what some are calling “read/write” urbanism. Without such participation, detachment may become much more complete in this age of personalized media feeds. Socially disengaged, always in headphones, seldom in places where encounters are left to chance, indeed, often in search of guaranteed, branded experiences, the posturban subject does not become dulled into retreat from public life. He or she grows up that way. Then, in contrast to these new norms, counterculture consists of tuning in, not out, and of networked participation, not anomie. To someone born into postindustrial sprawl who has rejected it for the relative sanity of walkable urbanism, the city affords more conscious choices regarding attention. The voluntarily urban citizen prizes attention skills, defends attention rights, and takes time for attention restoration.

Beyond Tuning Out

What more and more people seem to be missing, however, is the world itself. The trouble with distraction by information media is the lost opportunity for attention restoration by the world. The less people engage 173

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their surroundings, the greater the risk of imbalance and overload. “We’re motivated by a desire not to miss anything,”17 the design strategist Linda Stone has observed. Stone cautions about “continuous partial attention.”18 She distinguishes this from multitasking and finds both of them voluntary. “Information overload. I don’t think so. Blaming the information doesn’t help us one bit. Information over-consumption. That gets us to the heart of it.” Overconsumption happens when its objects become more prevalent. The sociologist David Shenk cautioned in the 1990s, long before ubiquitous computing: “Just as fat has replaced starvation as the nation’s number one dietary concern, information overload has replaced information scarcity as an important new emotional, social, and political problem.”19 The supply of mediated stimuli is at an all-time high (at least for the luckiest billion humans), like that of food. When a resource becomes so abundant that people instinctively consume wherever possible, because in a natural state it was scarce, overconsumption occurs. As with sugar and fat, so with information: obesity happens. Empty calories exist, most obviously in the echo chambers of Twitter of late, but really anywhere. Indeed, increasingly, there is a feast of apps for just about anything, if only one had the time and attention to use them, the lack of which only adds to the sense of overload.20 Neuroscientists explain that at some base level of brain resource cycles, especially for more complex tasks, multitasking is a myth.21 Monitoring occurs naturally in some ways in your alerting systems but has no pathways to handle perpetual or simultaneous messages. Embodied context is vital to sense making but has been underrepresented in research, for it is difficult to study clinically. Fortunately, it does not take a neuroscience lab to demonstrate the existence of limits to how many distinct foci you can keep. A simple exhibit at San Francisco’s famed Exploratorium asks you to watch a blue square among about a dozen green ones, as they all move about the screen, until it turns the same color green and so seems to disappear among the others. Then a couple of seconds later you are asked to identify which of the squares was once blue. This is trivial with one square, can typically be done with two or three, so the exhibit explains, and is already quite difficult with four or five. So if there were forty squares, and 174

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twelve of them turned from blue to green, you would have to be prepared to miss one doing so. Do not miss the world itself, the researchers of embodied cognition increasingly warn. Too much about human cognitive structure depends on a greater depth and range of contexts to accept media as reality for years on end. Too much about situational awareness is built into the world itself. Too much about a sense of flow, and so about attention management, depends on carefully practiced engagement and tuning of habitual contexts. “The unspeakable eloquence of the world,” as the philosopher Albert Borgman has called it, may be just what today’s perpetually messaging person could miss. There is a difference between information about the world, information for the world, and information as the world, Borgman has explained. “Information can illuminate, transform, or displace reality.”22 Mythology, poetry, and geodata are “about” the world as it is known. Information “for” reality makes bold plans to alter aspects of experience and realizes them through the contingencies of the physical world.23 The enduring, situated doneness of the work gives it its power, especially for orientation and memory. Without contingency or permanence, and without enough difference between things that are made and signs that prescribe them, information would not be “for” reality. Information “as” reality lacks these epistemological anchors. It can be anything, and then it can be something else the next moment. It is sufficient only to those who mistake the map for the territory. Better attention skills and practices depend on a better balance among these kinds of information. In an age of distraction engineering, you have no choice but to manage your attention more mindfully. Leading the focused life benefits from the intrinsic structure of the world.24 Embodiment often supports tacit expertise, often in restorative ways. Furthermore, particular regimens of experience can cultivate particular sensibilities. Affect and percept interrelate. In extreme cases, this might lead toward a capacity to tune out all distractions or to make a chosen sensibility into a world in itself. Some people might imagine this as the quest for a monastic life. But it is the everyday cases of alert sensibility that interest us and that seem more at175

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tainable. As attention restoration research has shown, situations with high fascination but low demands help recharge cognitive capacity.25 Effortless attention, of the sort found in art, sport, or outdoor recreation, can do so as well.26 A biologist might notice plants. A historian might ask for whom the streets have been named. Choosing to notice does, of course, bring some aspects of the city to life and does not, of course, necessarily screen out less pleasant ones, such as jackhammers in the street or sirens roaring by; these are not the point. Instead, the point being brought forward by researchers is that active participation in an ongoing regimen helps avoid passive capture or dissipation of attention. Moreover, enduring context and contingency (in contrast to one’s personalized suite of ever-changeable media) assist a regimen. The most usual phrase for this inarticulable role of context is embodied cognition. Situational awareness, effortless attention, and the everyday play of expertise all depend on embodied cognition. In other words, to insulate oneself in digital feeds, even those of one’s own choosing, however expertly filtered by software and social networks, may just increase the sense of overload. To give up unmediated, restorative fascinations with embodied circumstance and contingency may have more cost than people realize. Anytime/anyplace media do not only leave you no place and do not only mean that distractions are available more or less always; they may also cut into a willingness to notice. So, the question for urban informatics is this: does this latest layer of urban infrastructure help one tune in or just tune out? It must be an oversimplification to say this, but after an age of passively consumed media, people do not even know that they do not know—say, for whom the streets have been named, where their food comes from, the name of any one tributary to the local river, which vegetation is native, the prevailing directions of wind, or what phase the moon is in. Will more participatory ambient information improve such sensibilities? Will it enliven the world or just further eclipse it?

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Dialogue on Chapter 8: The Digital City Andrew Ross: I am a weather fetishist, so every moment I had to

check the weather channel forecast for Munich while being here, and the forecast insisted that it’s raining now, but it never has been. [Laughter.] Which absolutely corroborates what you say. One of my hats is to be a historian of work, and that was the filter through which I was listening to your very interesting comment, and that’s how I’m going to respond to it. One of the great milestones in the history of work is the tract by Paul Lafargue called “The Right to be Lazy,” which was written in 1883, and it’s an antiwork treatise in which Lafargue hectored the embryonic labor movement of the day for insisting on the right to work and thought that was the wrong thing to be insisting on. And in the course of the twentieth century, at least since the movement to reduce working hours stalled in most industrialized countries, it looked as if Lafargue was completely wrong, because most of the after-work hours of working people were consumed with busyness, the busyness of recreation and consumerism and so on and so forth. Partly that was because people had to reawaken their senses after the dullness and the tedium of the workplace had dulled them. But the second important thesis which I’ll point to is the social factory which evolved out of Italian Operaista theorists in the 1970s, that the work and production was moving outside of the factory system and into the interstices of daily life, and more and more production was being generated in everyday life and interacting and encounters, not just consumerism, but all sorts of behavioral conduct. And it’s in that context that I see a lot of the interactive environment that you were describing so well and how much of what you’re describing as overload feeds into all of these efforts. And I don’t see them from a paranoid perspective. I think you lumped a lot of critical responses into a “paranoid” point of view, but I think there are many other critical responses that don’t fit neatly into that category. So, I guess I’m inviting you to comment on how work fits into this picture. I mean, we certainly know about the enthusiasm of employers to give employees 177

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all sorts of IT devices that will extend the work day and the working hour into a 24/7 experience. But there are all sorts of other sophisticated ways of generating unpaid labor from our interaction with technologies. . . . So, how does that overlap with your theories of overload? Malcolm McCullough: There are a lot of good questions. . . . Before I forget, let’s just say that there are some very interesting studies on the social production of economic value over networks. Probably most notably, legal scholar Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. And it’s a true belief for the web 2.0 crowd, but I don’t know if I’m one of them. Second, I would say that I come to this from a long-standing interest in embodied cognition; that’s been the one theme that seems to have carried forward from one of my book projects to the next. And one of my much earlier projects on digital craft was really looking at the personal worth of work. So, it’s certainly something that interests me. And, today, of course, work has left the office, and work and play are just one window apart. And there’s incredible inefficiency and stupidity in the corporate experience. Corporate experience has become less and less palatable for mindful persons, and I’m a refugee from all that. But I will say this: my university, the University of Michigan, has a long, deep expertise in organizational behavior, especially the Interdisciplinary Committee on Organization Studies (ICOS), and there are cognitive scientists who are very interested in this question of whether mediation covers up the latent affordances of expertly configured workplaces for situated actions by committed participants. That’s quite another field, whereas most of urban informatics has been committed to the expansion of information technology beyond the workplace. IBM stood for International Business Machines, but most of what computation is used for now is not business. But you’re absolutely on to how people are tempted to be connected 24/7, and how that’s devastating. And people have this wish for instantaneous response. Ross: Can I just come back to one point: you said you’re a refugee from all of that. And I’m assuming it has something to do with being an academic. 178

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McCullough: I spent time in Silicon Valley. Ross: Right, but the academy is not a place of refuge from that

mentality that we’re talking about. The academic employee is the model employee: the brain worker who has no boundaries, who will not have any sense of boundaries. McCullough: Well, academics can be even more prolix than the military. Ross: Yeah, but a model in all sorts of ways that corporations look very seriously at. Mabel Wilson: My question is somewhat related to Andrew’s but also maybe more about what, then, is the status of architecture, which I wanted to come back to. We both teach design at an architectural school, and this is something that has interested me for a long time and something which I have been teaching in advanced studios which have partially to do with situated technologies and the way they affect certain kinds of social patterning behaviors and routines within homes, which then start to define rooms, which define materials and enclosure. One of the most accessible Deleuze essays I have my students read is “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” This is one of the few where he is basically saying, “Well, Foucault’s paradigm is useful for the nineteenth century in terms of enclosure, but actually what we have is a society of monitoring and modulation and we’re always being monitored in terms of a temporal paradigm as opposed to the notion of enclosure, which is a spatial one.” McCullough: Right, people give cellphones to their kids. Wilson: Yeah, and I would just say, as a shopper, I’m always shopping. You know, I have my apps so that I can always be on Amazon. But in terms of the workplace, we’re not always working. Our office has had a huge problem with Facebook, for example, or people shopping during work hours, or you’re working while you’re at home. The boundaries and spaces of enclosure that define specific tasks, behavior, social practices have become much more blurred, and I’m curious, with regard to situated technologies, what, then, is the consequence for the thick 179

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boundary that we define as “the wall,” or the thing that defines inside/ outside, here and there, citizen/noncitizen . . . ? McCullough: I guess what I’m asking you, since it is wonderful to have a room full of people who share all this background and these assumptions, is to rethink Simmel. And I’m saying that now, what it takes is not distance, it’s not being an ironic reader, à la Certeau. It takes commitment to a focused, thematic, filtered program of engagement to be a citizen, whereas the path of least resistance is to tune out and be entertained, and somehow there is the assumption that everywhere people need to be entertained. There is Pink Floyd coming out of the ceilings at the Whole Foods. So, I’m saying that the boundary is inside, and I’m saying that almost everybody has a little problem with something that they cannot cease doing, whether it’s shopping or gaming or riding on airplanes or Netflix—and I’m saying that the ability to step away from those is a distinct, discerning trait of the citizen. As for home versus workplace versus third place versus the spaces of mobility, those are interesting distinctions still, and what is amazing is the extent to which mediation has permeated all of those. For instance, NYU sociologist Anna McCarthy did a beautiful piece, an ethnography on ambient television, out-of-home television. Wilson: Yes, and the question is, if everything is bound-less, what is boundary? It seems to me that cities (and we were talking yesterday about mobility) traditionally have boundaries of insides and outsides. McCullough: The boundary is getting up and turning off the infomercial in the doctor’s waiting room. The boundary is turning down the music if you are not actually listening to it. The boundary is answering that e-mail later, even though you know the answer now. The boundary is not texting while you’re getting dressed in the locker room at the gym, as I saw some people doing recently. Miles Orvell: I have four questions. McCullough: Oh gosh . . . well, I had four separate pieces. Orvell: OK, I can just put them out there and let you choose, but I’ll just begin with the first one, regarding our use of apps. I have 180

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GasBuddy on my phone; it’s an app that finds the cheapest gas in the neighborhood. And I thought “what a great thing to have,” as gas prices are soaring. And I tried using it once, and it was impossible: I wasn’t going to go another mile out of my way to get gas, and I was thinking, “How many applications of that sort do I have that I never use?” And I’m wondering if you have thought about the threshold of value in terms of our consumption of these things, which we have available to us in abundance. If I wanted to use a ZipCar? then I would locate it, I would use that. But I would say half of my apps are useless. I’ve got a scanner, I can scan anything, I never use that either. McCullough: In David’s book on electrification, there was an advertisement for an illuminated tie. And there was the electrical equivalent of Viagra. Early in a technology, all kinds of stuff get tried. And it’s early in the apps game, and everybody wants to play, and a lot of it’s ridiculous. But, you know, ZipCar is a success story. It takes twenty cars off the street for each ZipCar running. . . . And there are lots of examples in developing world applications about what used to be so-called “tap attendants,” like for charging people’s phones or for water itself, all kinds of places where the flow of resources is intermittent, and there are all kinds of needs to organize and schedule and make micro transactions around that—lest profiteering occur. Next question. Orvell: OK, so the related question is sort of the flipside of that. That is, I am experiencing in myself an inevitable resistance or inability to make use of the abundance of possible electronic resources. On the other hand, I feel myself, and particularly I’d say my children, increasingly molded by an environment which is super-fed with these possibilities and which induces a kind of passivity, and insofar as you argue for the citizen to be an active decision maker in terms of use, well, isn’t that kind of utopian? I like the idea, but aren’t we, in our sensory world, being molded inevitably by these things? And aren’t you wishing for an active response or citizenship that is not going to happen? McCullough: Well, as ever, the mindful or creative or resistant members of a society are the few—that never changes. And reciting 181

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from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “The technology that you’re born with seems normal, the technology that comes along when you’re young seems like a way to make a buck, and the technology that comes along after you’re fifty must be stopped.” [Laughter.] Orvell: But it’s also changing us, right? And that quote demonstrates how it changes us. McCullough: In my book I worked hard to avoid falling into neurobabble. But there is real neuroscience out there, and it is a questionable claim whether there are true “digital natives,” people who claim, because they grew up texting while driving, that they are cool with that. That’s more dangerous than drinking and driving, and you can’t grow up drinking and driving or texting and driving. Likewise there are mainstream arguments whether Google is making us stupid (Nicholas Carr). And to me, there’s no question that, second only to planetary change, the superabundance of information is the most salient aspect of these times. And so, education consists increasingly of abstention. Orvell: You mean ought to. McCullough: It ought to—consist of learning to manage attention. On true education, I’ve been reading The Education of Henry Adams for the nth time. Not schooling, schooling is increasingly useless. Orvell: . . . and as we adapt these technologies in schooling, we’re sort of cooperating with this whole regime. . . . McCullough: Well, schooling is increasingly useless. I educate my kid about noticing the unspeakable eloquence of the world and how light bounces off things and what phase the moon is in and how to sit still and let the desert do the moving. Orvell: Gelassenheit. [Laughter.] Klaus Benesch: I’m really intrigued by your remark about becoming a citizen by saying “no” to options. There are models out there for this, already at the outset of industrialization and capitalism, that speak to this. I was immediately reminded of Melville’s “Bartleby” and of Leo Marx’s wonderful interpretation of Bartleby as a parable 182

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about Wall Street, and also Bartleby “prefers not to.” This is how he articulates his resistance to the modern office environment, and I think you’re absolutely right that at some point this is what it all boils down to, that we have to take certain kinds of decisions, yes or no. Now, you could argue, who is in the position to do that? What does it take to do that? Higher education, a particular kind of social background? I’m not sure about that. But there is something else I want to say about this abundance and overflow of information, which to me seem to manifest themselves by and large as a form of repetition. . . . I’m not sure if it’s at all an abundance and overflow of new ideas, insights, you know, or whether the onslaught of allegedly new information is maybe a sham, a gigantic fraud. There is really a lot of repetition going on in these new electronic environments, a repetition of basically the same information, rehashed and recycled a zillion times. McCullough: The web is largely an echo chamber. Particularly the blogosphere. And you could argue that American civil discourse went south when news went 24/7. So, yeah, there is a lot of repetition, and there is also option paralysis. By the time you’ve booked a hotel room on TripAdvisor, you’ve probably looked at sixty web pages. How many different kinds of toothpaste are there at the drug store? But I think there are also other reactions besides just abstaining from that and not trying to find the best of anything but just only what’s good enough. It takes knowing which things are important and good for you. I think there are also things to say “yes” to, and I insist that one of those—and I could show you the Google Ngram graph for this one—is walking. Occurrences of the word walking and the occurrences of the word quiet in all the text documents that Google has scanned and crawled and so on have increased distinctively in the last twenty years. And I would argue that getting lost in a great city or waking up in a great city—there is a wonderful line from Walker Percy that “all the science in the world won’t explain what it’s like to wake up in a great city”—are on the rise. And it’s easy to take that for granted, but remember that scarcely more than a decade ago, everybody was wringing their hands about cyberspace. So 183

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I bring it back to your question, Mabel—there are still a lot of architects who think that they need to somehow evoke or reveal the post-Newtonian world of the infosphere in built form. One of the slides I passed up in the set we all shared was of a digital model of a high-rise form. A lot of architects think what computers are for is creating novelties in form to express some kind of zeitgeist, as though there is still an avant-garde. Actually, there are thousands or millions of gardes, and avant is down to about fifteen minutes. So, I think the challenge in design education, to get back to your question, is to get people to understand that what architecture has to offer is slowness and endurance and fixity for all this flow. Flow needs fixity, much as a river needs banks. Without banks, a river turns into a swamp. And the fixity of the built environment and the high resolution of it and the patina of it are what is needed and not some kind of seeking of attention. I think that the people dealing with increasing the usability of the city through mediation, as an alternative to just entertainment and social navigation, are in interaction design, which more so than architecture is the design field for these times. David Nye: I don’t think you’ve touched on the sheer quantity of information being generated. And some of it is not really meant as information. McCullough: Right, it’s data. This is straight Richard Saul Wurman epistemology: not all data inform. Just because they have been sent does not mean somebody has been informed, much less that there is knowledge gained. Information is different from knowledge. Also, somewhere, once, there was wisdom. Nye: What I’m getting at is that information overload is a strategy of control. There was a time—maybe it’s utopian in my imagination—but I think there was a time way back when we had a fair amount of control, and over the years this has eroded. McCullough: I think there exist strategies of disinformation as a political control mechanism. Margaret Crawford: I find it interesting that by interaction design, are you talking about people like IDEO? I certainly agree that 184

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IDEO is so much ahead of architecture, and now they’re doing urbanism, they are actually doing urban planning, because the user interface is everything. It’s really the basis of perceiving, which I think is interesting, especially when it goes beyond products. McCullough: Right, and it has moved far beyond a Taylorist model of efficiency and operating machines effectively, which is where interface technology began. In many ways, interaction design has become one of the key liberal arts. Crawford: I want to ask you another question about the connection between information technology and the kind of routine mediation and citizenship, because I’m a big fan of Facebook, and I would say that it has extended my political awareness. For example, I just received a few days ago a notice that Trader Joe’s hasn’t signed on to the Florida farmworkers’ agreement, including information about how to contact the organization and tell them your concerns about this, which is something that I don’t think I’ve seen in any newspaper or anything, and so I think that in a very interesting and relatively painless way, you can actually participate more and differently. So, I’m wondering, if I turned off Facebook, would I lose these political possibilities? McCullough: Let me give a related example. I’m married to a lifelong automobile abstainer. She does not, will not, and has not ever driven a car. That ain’t right. I’m a television abstainer. I know there was this show called Seinfeld and there was this guy called Kramer, but did I ever sit down and watch it? Never did, never would. That ain’t right. So, it’s a question of degree, and Facebook is the media excess du jour. I think people are doing all kinds of things on Facebook because they can. Much as in Orange County, in 1956, they were doing all kinds of things with cars simply because they could. So time will tell, and I’m sure I’ll feel bad that I don’t have Facebook, that because I’m over fifty, I feel that it must be stopped. Crawford: I’m going to ask you a down-to-earth question. My next project is concerning the built environment of Silicon Valley, a place that seems very contradictory in the sense that, for example, most places 185

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like Google have younger employees living in San Francisco and not in Silicon Valley, and so Google runs a private transportation system with buses that pick up the hipster employees and ride them down there, and Silicon Valley is an almost completely suburban environment that depends on face-to-face communication. . . . McCullough: —exurban, it’s not sub to something else. Crawford: Right, it’s actually exurban, because it certainly dominates San Francisco. While the city of San Francisco has shrunk in economic significance, it has become almost a theme park of urban experience for people in Silicon Valley, who would have an apartment in San Francisco where they can go on weekends. So to me, this built environment raises so many questions about our assumptions about urbanism and about technology. McCullough: Sure. I did begin by saying that many Americans are unfamiliar with the proposition that the good life is an urban life and that I spent a lot of my time convincing technologists that urbanism exists. And when I say this, I have Palo Alto in mind. That is not a habitat of democracy. There is a wonderful essay from way back by Langdon Winner called “Silicon Valley Mystery House.” Silicon Valley is beyond comprehension. It’s a place where pace is everything, where blinking is not recommended, whereas the center of San Francisco is a theme park, and so might be the centers of Amsterdam, London, Stockholm, Munich. And most of the people I deal with who are interested in the prospect of urban informatics are either in Northern Europe or in East Asia. For instance, in Helsinki and Stockholm, they had all this Nokia and Erikkson money, and they value urbanism, and they value their—the Swedish must have a word for the term we’ve been using—Gelassenheit. Albena Yaneva: Just a quick question. I was wondering whether slowing down, switching off, or having time for Gelassenheit will make us better researchers, because there is so much data available on the web, which because of the new tools, semantic tools, and new developments in computational design can be mobilized in a clever way. So, it doesn’t 186

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mean that we’ll be reading and just googling instead of going to the traditional library sources, but it means that with these kinds of new semantic tools, we can quickly browse the available data and navigate in this datascape so as to get a sense of what kinds of data are available on a particular topic, and I don’t talk about text only, but about visuals, video material, everything, you can find everything on the web. And I think it’s very important for architects now to be able to use these data when designing. So I would use these data to make better cities, and I would go on the web and try to use them in a clever way, and I think this would make me a better researcher. McCullough: Much as only a fool would watch whatever popped up in front of him, only a fool would research only by the first two pages one finds on Google. Customizable search tools available in any university—and mine’s a leader in this stuff—are astonishing. The number of items that could be found and quickly digested (for as in mining, most rocks that you crack open have no ore in them) is astonishing. So yes, there is amplification for that. But, again, the signalto-noise ratio is bad out there. But I’m really talking more about streetlevel experience. Yes, there are conditions of overload and distraction that come to your desktop that are predominant. But the topic here of this conference is urbanism and the streetscape, and my goal here is to introduce this idea of situated computing, or citizen science, as a counterpart to what’s going on at the moment with street-level social navigation and things like Foursquare. So, for example, someone who is very good at all this, Usman Haque, has been doing this thing called Pachube [renamed Xively—ed.], which is a brokerage platform for crowd-sourced environmental data. Ross: Can you explain what that is? McCullough: So, say for example, you’re using . . . MIT’s Copenhagen Wheel [bicycle], riding around Copenhagen streaming data about noise levels up to some servers. You would like to be able to make that shareable, just the way you would stream photos on to Flickr. So, as Flickr is to photos, there needs to be some kind of brokerage 187

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platform for streamings of casually sourced environmental data. And that’s what Pachube’s a prototype for. Jeffrey Meikle: You talk a lot about the screens we interact with— these glowing rectangles that surround us. Without getting into the neurological dimensions, I’m wondering, what does it mean when an average person, an ordinary, typical person at the street level, has his attention focused on the glowing rectangles? What does it portend for a sense of polity? For a sense of unity, of belonging to a city? McCullough: That’s just the right question, and that’s the one that was in the conference description, wasn’t it? And that’s a more difficult question. I’d say that it’s staggering. Picture pulling into a gas station, kids in the back seat watching screens that are in the seats of minivans. Imagine how a child could find that more interesting than the world going on, and you go to the gas pump and there is NBC right there and there’s a plaquette on the fingered clamps on the hose so there is still more place for ambient advertising. And there’s a ticker going by, and then you go in, get a soda, and there are three separate touch screens on the counter so that three people at once can buy a lottery ticket, and there is a big screen up there with a close-up of a sandwich. And the guy that you need to pay for the soda isn’t there, because he is watching a bank of nine security monitors. That’s just a gas station. I don’t know, some things don’t change, there’s the old hippie idea to “be here now!” When somebody bumps into me on the sidewalk while they’re texting, that is my knee-jerk response: I usually blurt out, “Be here now!” [Laughter.] It’s just a question of whether you are using the glowing rectangle at the moment to tell people you are late for the so-important meeting or to find out where the cheapest gas is around here, because somehow that dollar you save matters. Or whether you’re using it as a cosmos. You know, the lonely person pulls out his phone while sitting alone in a restaurant, to show that he’s not alone. It’s like a sheltering sky, it’s cosmological. That’s a huge cultural question—because didn’t cultures always form cosmologies from their texts? Isn’t that simply “logos” in its latest form? And it’s huge. But the 188

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thing that’s changed, I think, is the number of formats and contexts into which information has proliferated. So, you know, an English gentleman in the eighteenth century could feel information overload, and there are passages in Gulliver’s Travels about gentlemen just memorizing the indexes of books to be ready for salon conversation. But then they went home and overload wasn’t there; it wasn’t on the way home, it wasn’t really back home, overload was only in that literary salon. So the thing that’s changed is how many contexts and formats overload occurs within, like driving down the road. This cuts people off from the world itself. A story I always tell: There was a very beautiful lunar eclipse, exceptionally beautiful one, and I went to the studio and normally I would be the last person to suggest what somebody might want to direct their attention to at the moment. But I said, “Hey guys, have you seen this eclipse, it’s a really great one?” And somebody said, “Oh cool, where?” [Laughter.] How are they going to get in touch with their planet? There’s all this wish to be here now and know your planet, and yet there are people who don’t know what phase the moon is in. They don’t know that they don’t know the plants, they can’t name a tributary to the river that flows through their town. I once did a study with Harvard architects, where after fourteen weeks of working with a riverfront site, there were students who still didn’t know which direction that river flowed, because it had never occurred to them that rivers flow. David Lubin: But I was thinking about bread and circuses, the Roman concept of distracting people from the political situation by continuing a constant stream of entertainment. You know, we live in a hyper–bread and circus world. Orvell: And I’m thinking that your convincing demonstration of information overload doesn’t address the global issue of hunger versus information, two things that don’t seem immediately connected, but perhaps they are. Without getting into the whole question of global inequalities, I’ll just add to David’s remark what seems to be the motto of our time: “Let them eat information.” 189

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McCullough: Jan Chipchase is another amazing character, an ethnographer of media practices at street level. Lubin: I just would like to make one more comment. I think we have to be more careful in what we mean by “information,” because when we say that there is information overload, I think so much of what we were calling “information” is what you, Miles, were calling “dross.” It’s a sort of pseudoinformation. But there is so much of it around, and we’re having a hard time, people have a hard time distinguishing between the one and the other. McCullough: That’s what I teach. I coordinate a visual culture and representation course in my college. We teach architects to cease putting things on a wall that merely resemble information or merely resemble work. Nye: The final thing I’d say is that it reminded me of a great passage in Walden where Thoreau says, “OK, great, now we have people so excited because there are telegraphs and we can talk from one part of the country to the other, isn’t that wonderful. But what does Maine have to say to Texas?” Dialogue: Works Cited Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Random House, 1980. Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. Privately printed in 1907. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic Magazine, July/August 2008. http:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” OCTOBER 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7. Heidegger, Martin. “Memorial Address.” In Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, 52–53. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Lafargue, Paul. “The Right to Be Lazy.” In The Right to Be Lazy and Other Studies, trans. Charles Kerr. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Company, 1989. (1883; online ed., Lafargue Internet Archive, 2000), last modified November 13, 2003, http://www.marxists.org/ archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/. Marx, Leo. “Melville’s Parable of the Walls.” Sewanee Review 4 (1953): 602–27. McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

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Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” In The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford et al., 16-44. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1987. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Trans. Edward Shils. In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, 69–79. London: Routledge, 1997. Originally published as Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (Dresden: Petermann, 1903). Swift, Jonathan. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships. London: Benjamin Motte, 1726. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Norton, 1967. Originally published in 1911 by Harper. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. In The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971. Winner, Langdon. “Silicon Valley Mystery House.” In Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin, 31–60. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Wurman, Richard Saul. Information Anxiety 2. Indianapolis, Ind.: Que, 2000.

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“Future New York: The City of Skyscrapers.” Illustration by Harry M. Pettit. One of a series of similar views published by Moses King in King’s Views of New York, c. 1908–11. Postcard, c. 1920.

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future city  Jeffrey L. Meikle

Future city. The very words have a promising ring, evoking optimism

and more particularly a faith in progress—whether the ever-onward-andupward evolutionary variety of the late nineteenth century or the rational planning invoked by countless utopian visionaries during the twentieth century. Rows of skyscrapers set in healthful green space; separate zones of commerce, industry, and residence; wide boulevards of smoothly circulating traffic; small clumps of pedestrians rendered to afford a sense of scale: all of these comprised parts of the visual vocabulary of urban modernity, whether taken from plans, renderings, and models or photographically abstracted from an always messier reality. More recently, at the end of the last century and the opening of a new millennium fraught with uncertainty, threatened by overpopulation and environmental collapse, and possessed by multiple voices whose insistent diversity overwhelms outmoded dreams of a universal culture, the metropolis of tomorrow seems more likely to be a product of decay and sporadic attempts at renewal; an endlessly sprawling shantytown engulfing gated pockets of wealth whose carefully arranged order echoes past visions of the future; a palimpsest of fragments, survivals, and hesitant or defiant statements of competing individuals and groups; or, especially in the imagined realms of science fiction, Hollywood films, and video games, a dystopian extrapolation whose various representations share a foreboding sense of bleak hopelessness. If the concept future city has been regarded as historically inspired by American utopian prototypes or realized actualities, as in Rem Koolhaas’s clever portrayal of the built reality of Manhattan as a “retroactive manifesto,”1 perhaps that is because America initially seemed a tabula rasa. As John Locke famously observed, “in the beginning all the world was America,” an Edenic emptiness so vast, so extreme, that in his interpreta193

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tion, property, money, and trade lacked any meaning.2 Although this supposed American exceptionalism has been most often interpreted in terms of nature, even the Puritan colonists in New England in the early seventeenth century foreshadowed an insistent American urbanism, with their invocation of a future “city upon a hill.”3 Into the early nineteenth century, both Europeans and Americans dreamed of erecting new societies in the New World’s seemingly pristine landscape, as in the case of Robert Owen at New Harmony, Indiana, or the Fourierist communitarians of Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Just north of Cairo, Illinois, a now mostly derelict town situated on a wedge of land formed by the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, an official highway sign announces that motorists are entering the locality of “Future City.” Set in a landscape of rural blight, this ironic marker suggests an aura of irrelevance, even unreality, that now surrounds most utopian dreams. Local legend explains the name Future City as a corruption of Futrell City, a vanished hamlet supposedly named for Richard Futrell, the area’s first settler.4 That far-fetched explanation seems more a product of long-standing local disappointment and embarrassment than anything else. Just up the road is the similarly nonexistent village of Urbandale, and twenty-five miles to the east is Metropolis, Illinois, population about six thousand. That such expressions of faith in the future were located in downstate Illinois is perhaps appropriate, considering that the first extensive American projection of a future city occurred in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. As is well known, Daniel Burnham, the architect who coordinated planning and construction of the Columbian Exposition, made a conscious decision to abandon the Crystal Palace model of world’s fairs, popular since the first international exposition held in London in 1851, instead mandating a formal assemblage of white neoclassical buildings to house the fair’s exhibits. His choice of this grandiose style, although it marked the emergence of the United States as a cosmopolitan nation of imperial scope, also more practically promoted ease of collaboration among architects who had mostly all trained in Paris in the Beaux Arts tradition. Burnham eventually adopted a uniform white hue for the major buildings, because 194

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it was simpler to work with than his initial plan for a complex thematic color scheme. Although the overall harmony of the expo’s central area thus owed something to chance, its compelling beauty, and the impressive efficiency with which Burnham organized the functional infrastructure of a vast site conjured out of nothing, contrasted sharply with the city of Chicago outside the gates. That all-too-real city was boisterous, competitive, expanding, wasteful, crowded with immigrants, run by corrupt politicians, lubricated by drink and vice, and permeated by the stench from the infamous stockyards. Almost by accident, this vision on the lakefront, this “White City,” as it was universally known, came to be regarded as a full-sized, three-dimensional model of an ideal future city, soon to be approximated through the City Beautiful movement in such varied places as Cleveland, Washington, Manila, and ultimately Chicago, after publication of Burnham’s own plan for the city in 1909.5 Despite the piecemeal real-world legacy of the Columbian Exposition’s future-city moment, world’s fairs continued to convey visions of urban futures to the American public during the first several decades of the twentieth century. The White City was understood more or less as a prototype for detailed emulation, a means of bringing American urbanism to the level of European civilizations past and present. Later world’s fairs, by comparison, tended to offer striking representations and embodiments of more general concepts of a future city no longer dependent on European precedent but instead fully expressive of revolutionary new technological innovations. At Chicago in 1933, for example, the Century of Progress Exposition celebrated the city’s hundred-year evolution from a frontier outpost into a major metropolis. Visitors could experience the fair, as the official guidebook recommended, by first gazing at the actual skyline of the contemporary city of Chicago and then immersing themselves in the historical past by entering a reconstruction of the log stockade of Fort Dearborn as it might have looked in 1833. After meditating on the vast gulf traversed in only a century, they could emerge from the fort ready to explore and enter the bizarre, strikingly colored, cubistic or modernistic structures of the exposition, so similar to the future cities envisioned in 195

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the newspaper comic strips Buck Rogers, then in its fifth year, and Flash Gordon, which was about to begin publication.6 Unlike the Columbian Exposition, which had invited visitors to comprehend it as a real future city, a blueprint for emulation and realization, the Century of Progress came across as more of a provocative visualization. That was also the case with the architecture of the New York World’s Fair of 1939, whose sweeping curvilinear streamlined forms suggested nothing so much as the shapes of recent consumer goods—automobiles, radios, toasters, and so on. A quarter century later, at the New York World’s Fair of 1964, the very word used to reference the expo’s structures—pavilions— suggested not the components of a literal future city but, instead, momentary realizations of whimsy and fantasy appropriate for participants in a consumer culture enveloped by psychologically manipulative advertising. No one was looking to the frothy Populuxe-modernist confections of 1964 to obtain a true glimpse of the future. Instead, visitors sought merely a generalized sense of continuous technological transformation of a sort easily accommodated and absorbed.7 Earlier, however, in 1939, fairgoers had received pins with the legend “I have seen the future” as they emerged from the Futurama show in the General Motors building (pointedly not a pavilion). In contrast to the rest of the mostly superficial exhibits at New York in 1939, General Motors offered a breathtaking alternative by presenting a complexly detailed model of the American urban future. Riding in plush seats on a conveyor-belt train, visitors looked out over vast dioramas revealing efficient, multilane superhighways conducting high-speed, cross-country automobile traffic into and through a future city of 1960, a mere twenty-one years away. This city was well organized, precisely ordered, and stylistically coherent, with widely spaced towers dwarfing extensive parks and low-rise structures. Wide, fast-moving freeways cut across the city, and local streets were depressed below pedestrian walkways at intersections. A careful observer, peering through opera glasses and ignoring the viewing directions of an oversimplified recorded narration, might have spied a few construction cranes on the horizon. For the most part, however, this future city rep196

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resented a fully realized state of perfection, wholly static except for tiny teardrop autos moving in repeating loops along distant ribbons of highway, with tiny pedestrian figures visible only in the final close-up diorama of an urban intersection.8 Those relatively few visitors familiar with modernist architectural discourse would have recognized that the designer of the Futurama, Norman Bel Geddes, had lifted much of this future city from the avant-garde architect Le Corbusier. The latter’s book Towards a New Architecture, translated into English in 1927, projected a future city (wishfully referred to as a “contemporary” city) of widely spaced towers, broad automotive freeways, low-rise garden apartment blocks, and ample green space. Geddes, an intelligent popularizer, brought Le Corbusier’s future vision to millions of people who visited the fair or saw images of the Futurama in newsreels, magazines, and newspapers. However, the industrial designer based his future metropolis on the actual topography of St. Louis, the city itself being wholly, seamlessly, even organically remade; Le Corbusier would have arrogantly superimposed his plan on the bulldozed center of Paris.9 Either way, each of these visionaries presented the future city from an aerial perspective suggesting total control and efficient top-down planning. Such views appeared in endless permutations during the mid-twentieth century. Photographs of modernist planners and architects often portrayed them looking down over models of cities, civic centers, and housing projects. One such photograph, for example, portrays an almost unbelievably young-looking Minoru Yamasaki leaning with possessive assurance over a model of Pruitt-Igoe, a large public housing project in St. Louis that was demolished as uninhabitable less than twenty years after its construction. Even Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright’s antimodern pastoral utopia from 1932, was promoted through a bird’s-eye-view rendering that reduced inhabitants to ciphers in a totalizing vision of static perfection. The first American presentation of this central modernist trope seems to have occurred in a utopian tract written by King Camp Gillette, the inventor of the safety razor. Publishing in 1894, one year after the Columbian Exposition’s White City and probably under its influence, Gillette envisioned a city 197

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called “Metropolis,” to be located close to the limitless (and thus cost-free) hydroelectric energy of Niagara Falls. A population of 60 million people would inhabit domed, atrium-lit hotel buildings portrayed by a maniacally precise diagram and arrayed like pieces on a chessboard. Each structure would be six hundred feet in diameter and located six hundred feet from each of its six neighbors. Scattered at regular intervals among the residential buildings would be specialized buildings, of identical shape, devoted to education, amusement, and centralized food preparation and distribution. Each of the city’s twenty-four thousand apartment buildings would house twenty-five hundred residents in a manner revealed by a series of intricate illustrations exposing progressively smaller-scale details of the plan, no different really from the progression of Le Corbusier’s illustrations from bird’s-eye perspective to individual apartments but more obviously and charmingly naive. No matter how unworkable Gillette’s “Metropolis,” its perspective overview revealed in embryo, or perhaps more accurately in schematic form, the typical modernist future city. As early as 1894, Gillette’s tract encompassed these key elements: a totalizing vision from the planner’s perspective, a corresponding reduction of all humanity to certain universal characteristics rationally accommodated, a graphic portrayal of human beings as insignificant ciphers, an immaculate precision, and a utopian stasis announcing both the attainment of evolutionary perfection and the end of history.10 One of the most obvious—and odd—points about the modernist future city, whether as projected by King Gillette; Le Corbusier; Hugh Ferriss; Norman Bel Geddes; the planners of Greenbelt, Maryland, in the 1930s; or Minoru Yamasaki in the 1950s, is how dated it now looks—with my emphasis on the visual or the aesthetic being entirely intentional. From the final decades of the twentieth century onward, various cultural responses, both elite and popular, have called into question the master viewpoint and narrative of earlier future cities. During the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, for example, the Archigram group in Britain envisioned an ephemeral utopia of disposable plastic plug-in pods dedicated to hedonistic leisure. Their apologist, the architectural critic Reyner Banham, celebrated the 198

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polymorphous synthetic foam and fur environments of the cult science fiction film Barbarella, released in 1968, as the software essential to human survival in a tumbling spaceship. Moving somewhat beyond the ironies of countercultural fun, Archigram’s Ron Herron delivered a barbed attack on the modernist vision with his collage Walking City, which superimposed clunky Wellesian robot pods on the New York skyline.11 More typical of late twentieth-century popular representations of the modernist future city were the dystopian visions of Hollywood filmmakers, beginning with Blade Runner in 1982, whose dark opening panoramic shot of a decaying future Los Angeles zooms in on a structure strikingly reminiscent of one of Gillette’s apartment buildings. Three years later, Terry Gilliam’s satire Brazil portrayed a totalitarian future whose lowrent, high-tech gadgets seemed extrapolated from technologies available in 1939—with computers assembled from old typewriters and early TV sets and cheap little automobiles with bubble domes of acrylic, a material formerly evocative of modern miracles. Gilliam tipped his hand with a visual reference to the New York World’s Fair of 1939 in a key scene revealing odiously visceral utility tubes and coils beneath the grimy modernist surface of the protagonist’s apartment wall, which is itself ornamented with a black-and-white photograph of the fair’s Trylon and Perisphere. The film’s self-consciously retro aesthetic only magnified what was standard practice in movies as diverse as Superman (1978), Dark City (1998), and The Dark Knight (2008)—that is, the portrayal of the future in terms of past visions of the future. Even Tomorrowland, the realm of the Disney theme parks dedicated to envisioning the future, went retro in the late 1990s, as if Disney imagineers had recognized that it was no longer possible to feel innocently optimistic about the future, even on the verge of a new millennium. During those same end-of-century years, the actual urban infrastructure of the United States often seemed ever more decayed and broken, rusted out, tagged and painted over with graffiti, endlessly patched. Homeless people aggressively thrust styrofoam cups at pedestrians as psychiatric hospitals closed their doors and dumped patients onto the streets. However, although the future of the actual city may have seemed bleak to many 199

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people, new digital utopians were conjuring up visions of a bright, clean, virtual world in cyberspace. Coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer, a novel inspired by Blade Runner and published in 1984, the word cyberspace indicated a nonphysical but neurally inhabitable modeling of all the world’s digital databases. As verbally represented by Gibson,12 surfing cyberspace resembled nothing so much as cruising on a moonless night along the interstate beltway around Houston, with millions of tiny lights shimmering in complex patterns as dark, reflective, curving glass surfaces of high-rise office facades shifted over one another in the sinuous flow of one’s vehicle through traffic. Although the pristine virtual world of Gibson’s cyberspace promised a smooth, artificial perfection of surface unavailable to shambling inhabitants of the so-called “meat world,” it was a dark, cutthroat place of cyberpunk hackers versus megaconglomerates. That was hardly the case with other varieties of cyberspace envisioned by promoters and enthusiasts as different as the former Whole Earth communalist Stewart Brand and the architect William J. Mitchell, whose book City of Bits in 1996 invited fellow architects to conceive the affordances and designed limitations required to enable real future people to inhabit and interact with each other in virtual spaces.13 Even so, most commentators on cyberspace and virtual reality never quite worked out whether they were theorizing a spatial actuality to be negotiated by wired bodies or a multilayered, metaphoric extrapolation from the desktop and file folder interface of computer operating systems. It was never clear whether the virtual future city was to be a new parallel reality, an overlay of experience and potential mapped over the physical city, much as Gibson had envisioned, or merely a way of conceptualizing being linked into new devices and social networks. Even people who graphically modeled three-dimensional digital urban futures on two-dimensional monitors, as for example through the popular game Sim City or the virtual world Second Life, typically recreated modernist utopian cities or retro cyberpunk dystopias. Even so, the passing of the universal modernist future city may have freed up conceptual space for less comprehensive, more piecemeal, poten200

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tially more workable visions of bits and pieces of possible urban futures, responding to such perceived needs as green design and technology, alternative energies, new uses for old structures, and solutions to the inevitable challenges of climate change. In New York in 2010, for example, five architectural firms participated in “Rising Currents,” an eight-week architectsin-residence program at the Museum of Modern Art, culminating with an exhibition presenting ideas for accommodating the city to rising sea levels. In response to the challenge, the firm nARCHITECTS envisioned sections of Brooklyn and Staten Island reworked through construction of new piers and artificial islands. Residential neighborhoods would be spaced around deep-dredged channels of water in Sunset Park and, moving outward, over and beyond a continuously changing shoreline, suspended from truss-work roadways over the water. While the project is innovative in concept, its visual appearance seems to suggest a bright, sunny, optimistic world of identical Corbusian apartments, far removed from the complex palimpsest of contemporary Brooklyn.14 No matter how piecemeal or provisional it has become, the modernist future city is still sometimes invoked as a compelling vision. I would like to close by referring to an urban expansion project that has been in the planning stage and under partial construction since 2008 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. If ever completed, this project, branded as La Cité du Fleuve, would place two artificial islands just off the capital city of Kinshasa in the Congo River. My interest here is not the actual reclamation process, which the promoters’ website revealed as still struggling along during the summer of 2011, but a six-minute marketing video produced by Real Image Production, a studio located in Dubai.15 The video employs a clever fusion of real-world footage and fluidly moving views of a computer-generated, three-dimensional virtual model. To the backing of an upbeat, infectious tune by the preeminent Congolese musician Papa Wemba, the video opens with vibrant scenes of life in Kinshasa, “a city on the go, changing by the day, growing at a frenetic pace . . . the region’s economic engine, a hub for trade, a beacon for commerce . . . destined for a place among the greatest cities of Africa.” However, this rising song of praise, expressed in a 201

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stridently optimistic voice-over, reaches its climax and point of reversal when we are told that Kinshasa’s population will reach 18 million people in 2025, making it the largest city in Africa, even larger than Cairo. Fortunately, we learn, “right at the heart of Kinshasa, islands of seclusion are being built . . . restoring a quality of life that has long been forgotten even in the city’s most attractive areas” and bringing to the fortunate residents of this new city built on reclaimed land the blessings of “gracious living, ease of access, boundless space . . . every amenity . . . and of course absolute personal security.” This “new community in sharp contrast to the rest of Kinshasa” is envisioned along the lines of the modernist future city, with a core of tall financial buildings, a civic center, and public plazas arrayed around a lake. Outside that would be a ring of lower commercial structures and a residential zone of apartment buildings and expensive single-family homes. In fact, discounting the palm trees and a marina, the whole assemblage appears remarkably similar to a large urban model of a so-called Democracity located inside the Perisphere at the center of the New York World’s Fair. Whether or not that utopian moment from 1939 influenced a development scheme in the Congo seventy years later, the resemblance is suggestive. Future cities of the sort that dominated twentieth-century architectural discourse, which emphasized aerial overviews and timeless perfection, resonated with the same promise of total control that any private gated community now offers on a local level. Outside the gate, Kinshasa may continue “seething . . . at its frantic pace,” but those inside the gate would be able to “look forward to the peace of river living at La Cité du Fleuve.” This project in the Congo obviously has little in common with the Rising Currents proposal beyond an interest in reclaiming usable land from water. However, if considered together, they suggest that any attempt to envision the future city must now be piecemeal at best and exclusionary at worst. Contemporary urban realities are too multicentered, too culturally diverse, too fragmented, and too dependent on historical remnants and random permutations to be encompassed by any unifying future vision.

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Dialogue on Chapter 9: Future City Margaret Crawford: Thank you, that was a very provocative

presentation, and I agree with much of what you’ve said, but I think the question of scale is really the key here, because in spite of the aspirations of some of these earlier representations, they are always presented as fragments just because of the nature of model making and human perception, so the idea of a bounded enclave as a version of these urban features I think has to do with the translation from model to actuality. And actuality is necessarily fragmented. But I’m really struck by the enclave model as the current realization of those visions. And if we look at places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and some Chinese cities, they are really bringing all of these representations to life in a very dramatic way. And the scale is not that limited, though they’re really based on the notion of the enclave. And certainly the Chinese have looked very carefully at Le Corbusier and have found nothing to criticize there. And even in every real estate office in China, they always have the models. We were talking yesterday about the urban planning museum in Shanghai where they have the giant model of Shanghai, and so that idea of looking down on a model has really expanded there to become a fact of almost every single new development. To me, this is the hot spot where all these things are really happening. And I just also want to mention another strange but potentially more interesting version, contemporary version of the future that I think stands for some of Bill Mitchell’s work at MIT—projects by Mitchell Joachim that are, for example, houses that are made of meat that grow, and it’s another version of sustainability which is much more extreme than having green roofs—which is just the green on top of the Le Corbusier model, and soft cars that will really change the experience of driving, streets, and everything else. So I think that there are some potentially very interesting, more dramatically extreme versions of this that are emerging that perhaps haven’t yet emerged. Jeffrey Meikle: Even someone like Frank Lloyd Wright in his Broadacre City. It’s a little section, but he intended that to be spread 203

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across the entire United States. It seems that something insidious is introduced when we create a model that sets the boundaries—inside the gates and outside the gates. I’ve not been to China, but it’s interesting that they’re still using that model. Crawford: Well, the enclave model is built into Chinese urbanism, I think from the Maoist era on. Miles Orvell: This seems like an important transition, and I’m just wondering when that occurred, that is, the transition from a modernist vision of total and universal transformation to an enclaved model? Andrew Ross: The garden city is an enclave model. Orvell: Yes, it is. Crawford: I think the enclave model has been around for a while. But now it seems like economic and social realities have made it much more significant, . . . I would actually say, in the 1980s, as the result of the economic crisis. In a way, it’s the neoliberal urban form. Orvell: Yes, but actually the garden city was a more universal model. Although it consisted of enclaves, it was designed as a pattern of universal development. Crawford: It was a system of enclaves . . . Orvell: Yes, exactly. Meikle: . . . to be repeated. Klaus Benesch: I was wondering if the same is not true for the enclave model itself? With the aerotropolis, you have these instant, fast-built cities, cities that are supposed to proliferate and spread out and become the one model for the way we live next. It’s a different processing of the same idea, basically. Meikle: But what about the interstices, the vast spaces that are in the periphery of one of those aerotropolis centers? Benesch: On a more general note, I wanted to pick up on your initial comment, where you mentioned that in the images that Miles picked for this topic, the future of the city, that there are no people. And that reminded me of the incapacity of humans to actually envision the future. We’ve been much better picturing the apocalypse, what it’s 204

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like to be in hell, but we have trouble envisioning what the bliss of the future feels like. Just think of Looking Backward and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, and those two have been often juxtaposed and talked about together. Now, if you look at Looking Backward, it’s fascinating, but it’s also blind, I mean, you can’t really imagine what it’s like to live in Bellamy’s New Society, or you don’t want to be there, even if it’s very appealing on a rational level. Reading Mark Twain, however, he really makes you feel what it means to be part of a technological apocalypse. So we’re good at drawing an image or designing an urban compound, and it’s encompassing, gives you a kind of universal idea, but what does it feel like to live in such a place? Tom Wolfe, in his famous critique of modern architecture, refers to this blind spot in the history of modern architecture, this failure to actually factor in emotions and the human. So, I was wondering to what extent that should be a consideration here, when we talk about building the future. It is very difficult to imagine what it’s like to live in one of these future surrounds or environments. In the templates for a perfect future, people are usually missing. Also, I mentioned earlier that in a book I looked at for an entirely different project, Duffy’s The Speed Handbook, there’s an argument that speed had been the only pleasurable experience that modernity provided for people on a personal level. Meikle: Your comment about speed and the experience of modernity and despite the fast movement along the superhighway that is a part of all that suggests that these futuristic visions become ways of overcoming that, of gaining control over the unruly and disconcerting experience of speed, by creating a static, perfect environment in which people are going to be living. David Lubin: Jeff, great talk, great images, and as I found with almost every single talk over the last two days, very upsetting, very troubling, trying to think about what kind of future we are headed for—whether I get to that future or not, I don’t know—but my children, I mean, where is our society going? And your discussion about Kinshasa—realizing that can be multiplied many times over on many continents. As an art 205

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historian, I’m very interested in how ideas are transmitted. It seems like any kind of alternative view of the future that would be viable and that would be socially useful has to be embodied in some aesthetic representation that would encourage people to move in that direction. And I was thinking of three names—Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Goethe—in three different countries more or less at the same time putting forward an aesthetic vision of how man, how woman should live, how the human creature can live and should live. Their visions were hugely influential to architects, to people who were planning cities, and we need such narratives today to be able to move to a future city that would be a livable, sustainable city. Meikle: Perhaps there are future visions that are more appropriate, that would suggest that the future doesn’t have to be static and dull and boring. But I’m struck by the fact that of course nobody can ever predict the future. For example, in the second volume of Gibson’s trilogy Neuromancer, the whole world is flooded with used faxes, fax papers pile up everywhere. And of course that’s a defunct technology. So if you’re literally trying to predict the future, you are never going to come out well. Ross: Having reminded myself of the garden city, I’m also struck by how much all of us in these two days assume that urbanism can only take place and will only take place in large cities and not in towns or villages on a smaller scale. And I want to put that back on the table, because it seems to me that if we’re talking about the look of the future and the spirit of the future, the garden city movement was really the last movement in settlement making on a small scale that had the future in its bones, as it were. Maybe the company town movement also. It was the golden era of planning in many ways: you got to design your own town. You never get to design a whole city. But the fact is that notwithstanding all of these visions of the urban future that we know so well, and you’ve commented on so well, the bulk of settlement building in the U.S. has been in the last century, and still remains, suburban in nature, the suburban subdivision or the master-planned community, all versions in some way of small settlements. Along comes New Urbanism 206

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and claims that this is an alternative future, but it looks neotraditional, it doesn’t look like the future at all, it looks like towns from sixty years ago. There’s a paradox there which we have much commented on, but some of the enclave plans that we’ve been discussing are versions of urban villages too. I mean, the enclave is an urban village to the degree to which it promises self-sufficiency. It’s not a linear city, it’s not a uniform city. So what about the urbanism of small settlements, which can exist in large cities and, in fact, do. Some of our most-beloved large cities are a necklace of urban villages. Meikle: Yes, and there was a lot of PR twenty years ago about the electronic cottage, and not to be utopian about it, but there is a sense in which, if we can be linked in to whatever the Internet brings us, then it is possible for some physically small settled place somewhere to actually be a part of the contemporary world in a way that was not possible before. The provincialism doesn’t have to be there any longer. Ross: And be closer to the sources of food and other basic needs, much closer than the city residents are. Meikle: Exactly. David Nye: Yeah, I wanted to refer a little bit to what Klaus was bringing up, this inability to design new types of utopias today, but I turn in a slightly different direction. Maybe what’s happening is that we’re going from that older top-down dictation of utopia to something that is more from the bottom up. I mean, why couldn’t it be—thinking of the “smart mobs” of Howard Rheingold, the interactive kind of interest in architecture—why could this not lead to a different type of utopia, which is based on what people say they want, a kind of interaction back and forth? I’m not overly optimistic, I realize you can also get plenty of people to game the interaction and control it. But there is a model that I know of that has been used in Texas to decide what kind of energy system they should build. It is called “deliberative polling,” where you take a representative group of citizens, bring them together, and they basically have experts coming with different ideas, you could build nuclear plants, or you could build windmills, 207

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you could build coal-fired plants. So you have various people coming and deliberating. And people do talk, and they decide over a couple of days. And the interesting thing is that what came out of that is that they decided they would like the windmills, which is not what they had wanted when they came in but only as they went through this process. And the utility took this on and actually built the windmills. That’s an interesting example of a decision that was not dictated from the top. The Danes also used this system when they tried to confront new issues. So, maybe there is a way that a modest form of utopianism is possible, a modest kind of interactive deliberation. Meikle: But somehow that’s different from utopianism, it’s planning. . . . Nye: It is, but it has utopian dimensions. We have never had more means, we have so many incredible technological means, and yet we seem to have a poverty of imagination regarding what to do with them. Meikle: But deliberative polling, that’s a concept of James Fishkin, isn’t it? He’s a political scientist who was at the University of Texas and is now at Stanford, who actually tried to get presidential candidates involved with it. And none of them would touch it. That was several election cycles ago. He thought in terms of educating the populace. You would bring in experts, have them lecture a representative group of citizens on the issues, and then bring in politicians and have them present their actual programs and beliefs, not sound bites. Nye: Obviously, much too dangerous! But what I wanted to add is that in the 1920s, when they wanted to get people to electrify their houses, the utilities built very complete houses, not demonstrations but actual houses, fully furnished with electrical devices of all sorts so visitors could go in and look and see what an electrified house would be like. And it seems like we need something equivalent today to present to people, to say, “Here is an actual thing, you could live in a house like this.” They used these at the world fairs, too. Crawford: I just wanted to ask Jeff about the end of his talk, because I’m not clear about this: there was the narrative of progress, and then there was the inversion into the narrative of decline, but where are 208

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you ending up? And that I think relates to the optimism that you were expressing. Meikle: I am not expressing optimism. I’m not very optimistic. I just think about climate change and population growth and food supply, and I’m not sure that we’re headed any place we want to be. Crawford: I would just like to counter that with some optimism. Meikle: Good! I’d like to hear as much optimism as possible! Crawford: Because I actually do think that there was the narrative of progress, which is a kind of arrow going upwards, and then there was the narrative of decline, which is the arrow going ever downwards, but—perhaps I’m wrong, but I sense a new kind of spirit that is around, especially among young people, and about the possibilities of all kinds of change; fragmented, perhaps, but that’s fine, and something that really has to do with issues of participation, democratic decision making, about all kinds of things, very small-scale transformations that are happening in many, many locations. And so, in spite of all the challenging conditions that are around, there is a different spirit, though maybe the spirit is not adequate to the challenges. But just as a teacher, over the past I would say five to ten years, I’ve noticed an enormous shift in students who now want to be activist, who want to be out there doing things in very different ways in the world. Meikle: That’s actually why I ended with the image that’s up there now, of New York envisioned in 1910 as crisscrossed by aerial roads and railways, the sky crowded with flying machines, to get across a sense of chaos, randomness, fragmentation, but also possibility. The vision I was talking about in the presentation, that of the totality, is a vision that led nowhere, but chaotic, random fragmentation is the reality we live in now, and we’ve got to deal with it in whatever practical and pragmatic and piecemeal ways we can. Mabel Wilson: I guess I have a question rather than a comment: who was funding or who is developing the city in Kinshasa? Meikle: I can fill in some details. There is a wealthy white Kenyan investor and a French manager, an entrepreneurial sort, and they started 209

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with three or four million dollars, and it seems to have been organized as a kind of pyramid scheme. The idea was to start marketing and selling housing lots, get enough money coming in to start the project and then keep operating by continuing to get people signing on. And once they had an ever-growing number of investors and participants, critical mass, in other words, they would be able to finish the project. They signed a contract with a South African supermarket chain, and they were going to build a whole shopping center once they had reclaimed several acres of land. From their website, it appears they are still slowly working on this. [Laughter.] Someone I know was involved with it, and when I asked him who are the people expected to be living there, he replied that there are a lot of wealthy Congolese expats who want to go home, but they don’t want to come back to Kinshasa as it currently is. The website shows government ministers attending PR sessions, even a photograph from about a month ago of the current U.S. ambassador coming to take a look at the project. But the person I know who was involved with it resigned eight months ago, and he had come to believe that the project was mostly a scam. Wilson: That would actually make sense, in terms of the enclave, because typically, those enclaves that are built around Africa are coming from a lot of Chinese money, a lot of petrodollars; I mean, they are building them precisely because they are connected elsewhere, and so the fact that expats living elsewhere want a base there sort of makes sense. But I was just thinking through the images of the World’s Fair and also the Le Corbusier images, and I wonder about the degree to which these things were also very particular economic, political, and social structures as much as they were images and places. And I understand, in the Plan Voisin for Paris by Le Corbusier, which Margaret may know, those towers, I think, are actually office towers, and the lower blocks are the residential blocks, and people most often think that those towers are residential. And that’s where the idea of the residential tower in the U.S. comes from, but Le Corbusier’s urban philosophy, which is more clearly explained in the Radiant 210

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City, published in 1935, talks about a complete reorganization of the economic and labor structure and the way in which those cities were what he called “object types,” these incredible machine systems, in a way. And they are really fascinating to study in terms of how he envisioned it, but almost as a total system or total work. Meikle: And there is a sense in which he somehow reduces all people to the same level—the minimum existence level that is necessary. A universally applicable apartment and green spaces in recreational areas will enable individuals to reach their fullest potential. Wilson: Yes, but he was also trying to mediate class conflict as well as national conflict in that, because he saw war as a waste of productive energy as well. Meikle: Architecture or revolution . . . Wilson: Yeah, but the world’s fairs are also interesting in that regard, because a lot of them were simply engines of capitalist production which didn’t get attached to notions of national commemoration, as was the case in Chicago, but they were all financed by robber barons. And again, they were trying to imagine a new society, an advanced American civilization against everybody else, the French, the Africans, the Filipinos. . . . But again, they were imagined as total systems, which I think is very interesting. You could say that they were in fact enclaves as well. Orvell: I want to just add something as an addendum to what Andrew was just saying about the garden city movement and its perennial appeal and sustained influence, a subject I deal with in a book I’ve just finished, on Main Street, and I wasn’t seeing a lot of relevance to it until right now, when it does seem to relate to the present and future, in that there is a continuing choice that people are making to live in New Urbanist communities, and that is why the movement has been so pervasive. And there are millions of people who are trying to rebuild main streets and small towns. I’m not totally optimistic about it, but there is a lot going on at the local, at the smaller-scale level, which is promoting a kind of future which in some ways is contrary to urbanism. The fact that you can connect through the electronic cottage to the larger 211

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world through the media is, I think, what’s making it possible to live in a space which is walkable but also to inhabit a mental space which is much larger than the local community. Meikle: And to inhabit that kind of space that Malcolm was talking about, where you can smell the roses and see the sky . . . Orvell: Yes, and I thought that when you put that slide on at the end, there was something of a relief in your voice, and you allowed us to contemplate the messy vitality of the city as opposed to the sterility of the utopian city, and that the messy vitality is really good. Meikle: Yes, that’s what I intended to convey. Malcolm McCullough: We came here mainly to talk about America, but what everyone knows is that what matters more is what happens to the city in India or Brazil or Iran. And that is neither dystopian nor utopian. It is a series of improvisations, of people making urban villages within megacity agglomerations, in which distributions of infrastructure are very haphazard, and the flows of resources are intermittent, and a lot of the simulations regarding whether you should be optimistic or pessimistic about the planet play on what happens in those places. What happens in America is of less and less consequence. Meikle: So what we’re doing is staring into the jelly bean? McCullough: No, no, no. [Laughter.] I think in order for America to be a player in all this, it must first get its own house in order. Orvell: The city upon a hill? Wilson: We’ve been foreclosed. [Laughter.] Ross: I think that is a good title for the book: Staring into the Jelly Bean. . . . Dialogue: Works Cited Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. Ed. Cecelia Tichi. New York: Penguin, 1982. First published 1888 by Houghton, Mifflin. Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris). The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. First published as Ville Radieuse (Paris: Athens Charter, 1933). Duffy, Enda. The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. 212

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Fishkin, James S. Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984. Kasarda, John, and Greg Lindsay. Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Orvell, Miles. The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Ed. Bernard L. Stein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. First published 1889. Wolfe, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981.

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Architect Minoru Yamasaki (second from right) and PruittIgoe model, circa 1950. Pruitt-Igoe construction completed in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1956; demolition completed in 1976. Photographer unknown.

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Miles Orvell: Let’s now spend a few minutes with some final

reflections on what may have emerged as we’ve thought about things during the last two days, which feels like about two weeks, mentally, and has been quite fascinating. The talks we’ve heard have been so very different, and yet I think we’ve all sensed, at times, the coalescence of lines of thought, with many cross-references appearing. Are there general themes that have emerged? Or any sense of surprise, or feeling something like “I didn’t realize that this was where we were going, but this is where we are.” Malcolm McCullough: I’ll start with low-hanging fruit. There’s been a lot of recognition of creative destruction, perhaps because here we sit amid a production of the Marshall Plan in a city, Munich, where dreadful things happened, and it is now quite wonderful. I mean, this seems to be one of the world’s great cities, so anything can happen, stuff changes. David Nye: Perhaps we could say that there’s been a lot of discussion of political power, the politics of urban form, but I’m not sure I can delineate that. I guess there is this sense in which there are many actors but that perhaps the voices of ordinary people are becoming a little more audible or having a little bit more impact than they did. I don’t know if everyone would agree with that, but it seems like that’s been kind of a subtheme in many papers. Jeffrey Meikle: Another theme, and I used the word twice in my paper, is palimpsest. It’s come up so much that people were laughing when it was spoken earlier this morning. And I mean that in the sense of getting away from the kind of totalizing that I was talking about, recognizing that any city and system, any place, any space is layered 215

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over with various histories and various contending voices and various constructions, some in decay, some under construction, some falling apart. We have to recognize that layeredness. Mabel Wilson: But I would also add—this is in reference to your presentation, Jeff—that what struck me is that almost all of the presentations had a historical dimension, but we also talked about the future reality, in reference to what you showed—the possibility of a city, like what could happen or how people have speculated on what could happen, the projective, the perspective, what can be imagined. And that could be a critical way to position it. What are the possibilities, given the messiness that we understand and how cities unfold? Understanding of course that what can be imagined can be unpredictable, that we can’t necessarily predict the future. Orvell: David used a term at some point, and I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but you were groping toward the notion of “restoring balance” as something that you seemed to be thinking about in recurrent terms. Would that be fair to say? David Lubin: Yes. . . . Well, I feel like in my remarks, both in the group but also during our little coffee hours, I kept saying that I’m feeling a sense of oppression from hearing these wonderful talks, because it seemed like so many intractable problems. Every paper has identified serious critical problems with the urban environment and how it’s going. And then I feel like, we’re talking about having some sort of hopeful ending, but these sorts of pieces of hope that people are throwing out seemed to me kind of like, well, hogwash. [Laughter.] Tiny little things that don’t seem to be of the magnitude of the problems. You know, actually I’m very optimistic by nature, I love that statement that somebody was saying—what was it? Andrew Ross: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Gramsci. Lubin: Gramsci—and I think that is totally modern, that’s how I feel about this whole conference. I’m very pessimistic about all the things that have been put out there. It is messy. We never come up with utopian 216

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solutions, but we do find ways of improving terrible situations. You were just talking, Malcolm, about Germany. And the state of Germany now versus the state of Germany in 1933 . . . McCullough: . . . or 1946. Lubin: Or 1946. So, I don’t have a program here, but it does seem to me that the first step towards any kind of enlightenment is, to use your term again, to pay attention, to look very closely at what problems are and be troubled by them. I mean, it’s good that we’re troubled by problems, and over these two days, what seems to me has been happening here is a series of very incisive identifications of terrible, troubling problems. And perhaps by circulating and identifying problems, that’s how humanity generates solutions to problems. Klaus Benesch: I’m glad you brought that up, this reference to the Enlightenment, and rationality, rationalizing, because to some extent, that had been the original impetus of calling this meeting, as we did originally, “Thinking Architecture,” and in a way, that’s what we’ve been trying to do. Now, thinking has to do with making sense; I mean, we wanted to move beyond the postmodern slogan to “stop making sense.” We were trying to make sense of quite a tapestry of heterogeneous meanings, of linkages between people and the built environment and how they manage and live in it. And I was thinking also of the idea of reading, because reading and thinking are very similar, and in a way, we were trying to read the city and connect things to particular layers of palimpsistic meanings—from ruins to the future. . . . Orvell: I don’t want anyone to feel that we were looking for a master narrative that you have to sign on to. In fact, there is a plurality here, and there is not going to be any necessary unity, but I think that’s OK. I thought, just to pick up on your last point, Klaus, that what we’re doing, “Thinking Architecture” could be subtitled “Defining Narratives of Space,” with a turn on the word defining—that is, we are in the process of defining, and what we’re doing is defining narratives, but we’re also describing narratives that have already defined space. 217

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Ross: I think the question is whether there is anything specifically American about this point in time. I mean, we’re all Americanists, and this has been an American studies meeting, and one of the most progressive tendencies in American studies in the last fifteen years has been the internationalization of American studies, and there really is a responsibility to take up the challenge of internationalization and not along Marshall Plan lines. But the issue really is, does this reflect a certain sensibility of U.S.-based or Munich-based intellectuals that are focused on the U.S. [Laughter.] That yes, the U.S. is collapsing under the weight of its own particular imperial infrastructure, politically and economically, maybe foreclosed, as Mabel muttered, and maybe irrelevant—as we’ve mentioned, the future doesn’t really run through American bones any more, that’s fairly clear. So, is there something specifically about that sensibility that you could say is American right now? That would be my metareflection. Margaret Crawford: I just wanted to say that I’m appreciating a kind of analysis here, that I think is really shared by everyone, which discusses actual economic, social, political power but also is really focused on the nature of human experience, and I think that combination is one of the most valuable shared aspects of this conference. And the second thing that I appreciated is that all of the talks really offered resources in terms of literary references, cultural references, examples, case studies, which I found to be methodologically very, very rich. Conclusion: Works Cited Gramsci, Antonio. “Discorso agli anarchici.” L’Ordine Nuovo 1, no. 43 (April 1920): 3–10.

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contributors

Klaus Benesch is Professor of English and American Studies at

Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and Director of the Bavarian American Academy. He is the author of Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance (2002) and coeditor of Space in America: Theory History Culture (2005); The Power and Politics of the Aesthetic in American Culture (2007); and Scientific Cultures, Technological Challenges: A Transatlantic Perspective (2009). Margaret Crawford is Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses in the history and theory of urbanism. She is the author of Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns and is coeditor of The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment, and Daily Urban Life and of Everyday Urbanism. She appears in this book in the Dialogues only. Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University, is the author of several books on the history of American urban landscapes, including Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism (1976); The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (1995); Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth (2003); and A Field Guide to Sprawl (2004). A former Guggenheim and CASBS (Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences) fellow, she served as president of the Urban History Association in 2010. David M. Lubin, the Charlotte Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, has written several books, including Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James; Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in NineteenthCentury America; Titanic; and Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture 219

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of Images, which won the 2004 Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian American Art Museum for “distinguished scholarship in American art.” His current research examines American visual culture during the First World War. Malcolm McCullough is the author of Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information (2013); Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing (2004); and Abstracting Craft (1996). He is Professor of Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, and he previously served on the design faculty at Carnegie Mellon and at Harvard. He has lectured in many countries on the urbanism of locative media. Jeffrey L. Meikle is the Stiles Professor of American Studies and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. His publications include Design in the USA (2005) and American Plastic: A Cultural History (1995), and he is coeditor of Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture (2009). At present, he is finishing a book on the American scene as represented in postcards of the 1930s and 1940s. David E. Nye is Professor of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark; a by-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge; and a visiting professor at Warwick, Leeds, Harvard, MIT, Oviedo, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and Notre Dame. He received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2005 for contributions to the study of technology and culture and the Dexter Book Prize (1993), Sally Hacker Prize (2009), and Able Woolman Award (1991). His eight books with MIT Press include When the Lights Went Out (2010) and America’s Assembly Line (2013). Miles Orvell is Professor of English and American Studies at Temple University. His books include The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (1989; Franklin Prize, American Studies Association); After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries (1995); American Photography (2003); and The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, 220

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Space, and Community (2012). He is also coeditor of Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture (2009) and served as editor of the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online (2003–11). He received the Bode Pearson Award from the American Studies Association in 2009. Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A contributor to the Nation, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and Artforum, he is the author of many books, including Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City; Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times; Fast Boat to China: Lessons from Shanghai; Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor; No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs; and The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. Mabel O. Wilson navigates her transdisciplinary practice 6Ten Studio between the fields of architecture, art, and cultural history. Her scholarly essays have appeared in numerous journals and books on critical geography, memory studies, art, and architecture. Exhibitions of her work have been featured at major museums and cultural institutions. Her most recent book is Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, published by the University of California Press. As the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor, she teaches architectural design and history/theory courses at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she also directs the graduate program in Advanced Architectural Research. She is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Albena Yaneva is a Reader in Architecture at the University of Manchester and Codirector of the Manchester Architecture Research Center. Her research draws on actor-network theory to explore fieldworks in architecture, industrial design, contemporary art, and museum studies. She is the author of Mapping Controversies in Architecture (2012); The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture (2009); and Made by the Office for Metropolitan Design: An 221

contributors

Ethnography of Design (2009). She is the guest editor of Understanding Architecture, Accounting Society (a 2008 special issue of Science Studies) and Traceable Cities (a 2011 special issue of City, Culture and Society). In 2010, she received the RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University-located Research.

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Introduction

1. Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903), trans. Edward Shils, in Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader In Cultural Theory (London, England: Routledge, 1997), 69–79, 72. 2. See Doug Saunders, Arrival City (Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). 3. Mike Davis, “Who Will build the Ark?” New Left Review 61 (2010): 29–46, 29–30. 4. Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013). 5. Le Corbusier is famous for claiming that “the house is a machine for living.” See his Vers une architecture (1923), translated into English as Toward an Architecture, trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007). 6. One of our presenters, Margaret Crawford, did not submit her paper for publication and appears in the conversations only. 7. Miles Orvell had participated in one of the conversations at the Getty Museum that was organized by Weston Naef and later edited into book form by Judith Keller, and the advantages of such a format had impressed him. See In Focus: Weegee : Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum, edited by Judith Keller (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005). James Elkins’s The Art Seminar Series (Routledge) offered another, more complicated model, but with too many voices for our purposes. 8. See: Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1976); The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981); The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995); Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984); Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Pantheon, 2003). Chapter 1

1. For discussion of technological determinism, see David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 17–32. 2. Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–69. 3. Joel Tarr and Clay McShane, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 57–83. 4. For more detail on the streetcar, see David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), chap. 3. 5. “Last Horse Car in New York,” New York Times, July 29, 1917, 12. 6. David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

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7. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 214–15. 8. Banham, Los Angeles, 217. 9. Campbell Gibson, "Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990," Table 18, Bureau of the Census, 1998, last modified April 23, 2013, http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/twps0027.html. 10. For a video of the tramway in operation, see “Portland Aerial Tram,” YouTube, June 3, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLVIivwnTSE. 11. “Highway Construction Costs: Are WSDOT’s Highway Construction Costs in Line with National Experience?” Washington State Department of Transportation, July 12, 2004, 5, http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/biz/construction/pdf/HighwayCosts.pdf. 12. California High-Speed Rail Authority, last modified February 22, 2013, http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov. 13. John R. Stilgoe, Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). 14. John F. Stover, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (New York: Routledge, 1999), 54. 15. Tarr and McShane, The Horse in the City, 57–65. Chapter 2

1. Strictly speaking, Gramsci said, “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will,” but he is usually quoted as shown in the text. Antonio Gramsci, letter, December 19, 1929, in Letters from Prison, ed. Frank Rosengarten, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 2. Leo Hickman, “James Lovelock: ‘Fudging Data Is a Sin against Science,’” The Guardian, March 29, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock. 3. The Copenhagen Climate Communiqué, last modified June 10, 2011, http://www.c40cities.org/news/news-20091215.jsp. See also the work of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN), last modified February 22, 2013, http://www.uccrn.org. 4. Cited in Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, and Heather Boyer, Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2009), 4. 5. M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). 6. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2001); James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the TwentyFirst Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005); The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). 7. ICLEI was founded in 1990 as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives but now refers to itself as ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability or simply ICLEI. 8. Metro Phoenix ranked eleventh out of the twenty-five worst metro areas in the American Lung Association’s 2010 study of ozone pollution but number one in rankings for dust pollution. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality claimed that the results were skewed by off-the-scale readings from a single agricultural monitor in a dust-beset area of Pinal County. Shaun McKinnon, “Valley Has Worst Dust Pollution in U.S.,” Arizona Republic, April 28, 2010.

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9. The scholarly literature on urban sustainability includes Kent Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic Development, the Environment, and Quality of Life in American Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003); Peter Newman et al., Resilient Cities; Joan Fitzgerald, Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Eugenie Birch and Susan Wachter, eds., Growing Greener Cities: Urban Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Peter Newman and Isabella Jennings, Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems: Principles and Practices (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008); Gwendolyn Hallsmith, The Key to Sustainable Cities: Meeting Human Needs, Transforming Community Systems (Philadelphia: New Society, 2003); Douglas Farr, Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008); Scott Kellogg (with Stacy Pettigrew), Toolbox for Sustainable City Living (Boston: South End Press, 2008); Matthew Kahn, Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006). 10. Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today, September 1974, 38–43. 11. Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (New York: Harper, 2007), 15. 12. David DeJong, Stealing the Gila: The Pima Agricultural Economy and Water Deprivation 1848–1921 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009). Chapter 3

1. The URL for Project Cabrini-Green is http://projectcabrinigreen.org/. 2. At the MCA’s lower-level gallery, visitors could access a computer to find out more about the project and participants. On two monitors, museum-goers could watch live and delayed feeds from the demolition site. 3. Dorothy Garcia, “It Was Home,” Project Cabrini-Green, 28, April 6, 2011, http://www. projectcabrinigreen.org/PCG_poetry.pdf. 4. Jan Tichy, interview by Mabel O. Wilson, November 22, 2011. 5. Tichy, interview. 6. Michael Keith, After the Cosmopolitan? Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism (London: Routledge, 2005), 22. 7. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 9. 8. Literary theorist Thomas Keenan suggests that the publicity engendered by the modern window “tears us from our selves, exposes us to and involves us with others, denies us the security of that window behind which we might install ourselves to gaze.” Thomas Keenan, “Windows: Of Vulnerability,” The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 133–34. 9. Felicity D. Scott, “An Army of Soldiers or a Meadow,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 3 (September 2011): 340. 10. William Mullen, “The Road to Hell for Cabrini-Green: It Was Paved with Good Intentions,” Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1985, 11. 11. Devereux Bowly Jr., The Poorhouse: Subsidized Housing in Chicago, 1895–1976 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 117. For other reviews of Chicago’s history of public housing, see Arnold R. Hirsch, The Making of the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Sudhir Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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notes to pages 54–62

12. Mullen, “The Road to Hell, ” 12. 13. Mullen, “The Road to Hell,” 16. 14. Bowly, The Poorhouse, 117. 15. Established in 1945 by a group of architects, including Charles Genther, who had studied with and worked for Mies van der Rohe, PACE and Associates’ acronym stood for Planning Architecture and Consulting Engineers. See Charles Booher Genther, interview by Betty Blum, September 30, 1983, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Department of Architecture, Art Institute of Chicago, last modified 2003, 17, http://digital-libraries.saic.edu/cdm/ fullbrowser/collection/caohp/id/3572/rv/compoundobject/cpd/3612/rec/1. 16. Mullen, “The Road to Hell,” 17. 17. Mullen, “The Road to Hell,” 12. 18. “CHA Study: Story of Fear: Survey Lists Unmet Needs of Residents,” Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1970, 1. 19. “19 Arrested in Disorders on North Side,” Chicago Tribune, October 1, 1968, 3. 20. Arthur Siddon, “The Police: Looking In from the Outside,” Chicago Tribune, August 16, 1970, A1. 21. Robert Nolte, “City’s Police Face Peril of Snipers Daily,” Chicago Tribune, March 22, 1970, 25. 22. Ronald Yates and William Currie, “Snipers Slay 2 Policemen: Wound Boy in Rifle Fire at Cabrini,” Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1970, 1. 23. “The Reign of Terror in Public Housing,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1970, 16; “Guerilla Warfare in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, August 15, 1970, S8; Philip Caputo, “Police Earn Their Pay in ‘Combat Alley,’” Chicago Tribune, August 16, 1970, S1; Siddon, “The Police.” 24. Mullen, “The Road to Hell,” 13. 25. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harper and Row, 1945). 26. Tichy, interview. 27. Maudlyne Ihejirika, “Vision for Cabrini Target Unveiled,” Chicago Sun-Times, last modified September 24, 2012, http://www.suntimes.com/5134480-417/vision-for-cabrini-target-unveiled.html?print=true. 28. Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 178. 29. Easterling, Enduring Innocence, 162. 30. Robert Harrison, “Why Do You Build,” Workshops, Project Cabrini-Green, 21, http:// projectcabrinigreen.org/workshops.php: If you build to tear down, then why do you build. If you build to break it up, then why do you build. If you build to hurt lives, why do you build. If you build and they have to evacuate, then why do you build. If you build and they have to relocate, then why do you build. If you build and waste materials, why do you build. If you build to tear apart, then why do you build. If you build to break up relationships, then why do you build. If you build to separate families, why do you build. If you build to destroy, then why do you build. If you build to leave people without homes, then why do you build. Why do you build, if you build to make memories, If you build to break memories, then why do you build.

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Chapter 4

1. See Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, eds., Ruins of Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Christopher Woodward, In Ruins: A Journey through History, Art, and Literature (New York: Random House, 2002); Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 2. An abundance of case studies can be found in Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). 3. Alluding to Marx, Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) includes a discussion of Robert Moses and the willful destruction of Bronx neighborhoods in order to make way for “progress”—the Cross Bronx Expressway. 4. J. B. Jackson, "The Necessity for Ruins," in The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 102. 5. Camilo José Vergara, American Ruins (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999). 6. Vergara, American Ruins, 23. 7. Vergara, American Ruins, 206. 8. Vergara, American Ruins, 119, 203. 9. For a more optimistic view of Detroit’s possible future, see Mark Binelli’s darkly exuberant Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012). 10. See Andreas Huyssen, “Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 17–28. 11. Don De Lillo, White Noise, The Viking Critical Library (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 257–58. 12. Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality (New York: Berg, 2005). For a cinematic celebration of industrial ruins and the urge to explore them, see Robert Fantinatto’s meditative documentary Echoes of Forgotten Places (2005). 13. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 7. 14. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 13. 15. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 21. 16. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 73. 17. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 101. 18. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 101. 19. Alan Berger, Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). 20. Berger, Drosscape, 38. 21. Berger, Drosscape, 241. 22. CEO Dan Lee, quoted in Wayne Parry, “Monopoly Lost: Atlantic City’s Rise and Fall,” Chicago Post-Tribune, last modified May 31, 2011, www.posttrib.suntimes.com. Chapter 5

1. See Christo and Jeanne-Claude, On the Way to “The Gates”: Central Park, New York City, with essay and interviews by Jonathan Fineberg and photographs by Wolfgang Volz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004). 2. Quoted in Harriet F. Senie, The Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (Min-

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neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 80. See also Sherrill Jordan, ed., Public Art, Public Controversy: The Tilted Arc on Trial (New York: American Council for the Arts, 1987) and Casey Nelson Blake, “An Atmosphere of Effrontery: Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, and the Crisis of Public Art,” in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 246–89. 3. Martha Rosler, “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part III,” e-flux journal 25 (May 2011), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/culture-class-art-creativity-urbanism-part-iii/. 4. The literature on Anish Kapoor is extensive and rapidly growing. See, for example, Rainer Crone and Alexandra Stosch, Anish Kapoor (New York: Prestel, 2008); David Anfam, Johanna Burton, and Donna De Salvo, Anish Kapoor (New York: Phaidon Press, 2009); and Homi Bhabha and Jean de Loisy, Anish Kapoor (Paris: Flammarion, 2011). 5. William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Washington, D.C.: Conservation Foundation, 1980), 63; see also 68–69 and Whyte’s 1980 documentary film of the same title, produced in conjunction with the Municipal Arts Society and released as a videocassette in 1990. 6. On the real estate magnate and modern art collector Aby Rosen, see Teri Karush Rogers, “A Taste for Timing, and Confrontational Art,” New York Times, August 14, 2004; Phoebe Eaton, “The Art and the Deal,” New York Magazine, February 24, 2008; and Lindsay Pollock, “Jeff Koons’ Orange Pooch Relocates to Seagram Building,” art market views (March 23, 2010), http://lindsaypollock.com/news/jeff-koons-orange-pooch-relocates-to-seagram-building/. 7. For a good overview of City Beautiful aesthetics and ideology, see William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 8. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (New York: Blackwell, 1987). 9. Jill Jonnes, Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels (New York: Viking, 2007), 280. 10. Hilary Ballon, New York’s Pennsylvania Stations (New York: Norton, 2002), 55; “100,000 Persons See Penn Station on Opening Day,” New York World, November 10, 1910, 1, quoted in Jonnes, Conquering Gotham, 292. 11. Lewis Mumford, “The Pennsylvania Station Nightmare,” in The Highway and the City (New York: Harcourt, 1963), 150, 148; “Farewell to Penn Station,” editorial, New York Times, October 30, 1963; Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Praeger, 1969), 143. See Peter Moore’s photographic essay The Destruction of Penn Station, ed. Barbara Moore, with essay by Eric P. Nash (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2000); and Norman McGrath, “A Landmark Dismantled: A Photographic Essay,” in Ballon, New York’s Pennsylvania Stations, 111–49. 12. “Mr. Stewart’s New Residence,” Harper’s Weekly 13 (August 14, 1869), 521, 525–26, quoted in Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999), 13. 13. See Sarah Newman, “Working Life: Pennsylvania Station Excavation, 1907–1909,” in Charles Brock et al., George Bellows (1882–1925) (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2012). 14. On the Stockhausen controversy, see Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliff, Crimes of Art + Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 15. Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) quoted in Charles Jencks, What Is Postmodernism? 4th ed. (New York: Academy Editions, 1996), 25.

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Chapter 6

1. See Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978); Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Jonathan Hill, Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users (London: Routledge, 2003); Thomas Mical, Surrealism and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2005); Jacques Lucan, Rem Koolhaas, and Office for Metropolitan Architecture, OMA–Rem Koolhaas: Architecture, 1970–1990 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991). 2. See Hubert Damisch, “The Manhattan Transfer,” in Jacques Lucan, Rem Koolhaas, and Office for Metropolitan Architecture, OMA–Rem Koolhaas: Architecture, 1970–1990 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 21–33. 3. For sociological analyses of architectural firms, see Judith Blau, Architects and Firms: A Sociological Perspective on Architectural Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984); Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 4. See Albena Yaneva, The Making of the Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). 5. I am following here Becker’s understanding of the world of art as a cooperative activity. See Howard Becker, “Art as Collective Action,” American Sociological Review 39, no. 6 (1974): 767–76; and Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 6. See Albena Yaneva, Mapping Controversies in Architecture (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012). 7. See Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Chapter 7

1. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), vii. 2. Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Pantheon, 2003). 3. Paul Virilio, quoted in Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), xii. 4. Zygmunt Baumann, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). 5. Stephen Greenblatt et al., Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–2. 6. Greenblatt, Cultural Mobility, 3. 7. Peter Sloterdijk and Heidi Ziegler, “Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of SelfIntensification,” Drama Review 50, no. 4 (2006): 36–42. 8. John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 6. 9. Arakawa and Madeline Gins, “Landing Site(s),” in Reversible Destiny (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997), 150–63. 10. Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xi. 11. Casey, The Fate of Place, 298.

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12. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22. 13. Tim Cresswell, “Theorizing Place,” in Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility, ed. Ginette Verstraete and Tim Cresswell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 25. 14. Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (New York: Knopf, 2000), 51. 15. Pico Iyer, “Think of Your Airport as a City—But Nicer,” Time, March 28, 2011, 46. 16. Kasarda and Lindsay, Aerotropolis, 4. 17. Kasarda and Lindsay, Aerotropolis, 8. 18. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1977), 287. 19. Martin Heidegger, “Memorial Address,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 52–53. 20. Martin Pawley, “The Redundancy of Urban Space,” in The Future of Space, ed. Bernd Meurer (Frankfurt: Campus, 1994), 39. Chapter 8

1. On ACM Digital Library, the standard among databases of information technology research, at this writing there are just 150 results (approximately) for “urban computing,” almost all since the IEEE call in 2006. The first repeat use appears to be by Eric Paulos. 2. On Lexis-Nexis, in a word search of “smart cities” in world news media, two-thirds of the more or less one thousand results from the last thirty years are from the last ten years. 3. A search of “smart grid” in world news media on Lexis-Nexis produced many results. After separating out about a thousand items from 1982–2012, we found that half were from 2008–12, and the earliest were from 2003. 4. For example, see Adam Greenfield, The City Is Here for You to Use, 100 Easy Pieces, Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird (blog), December 3, 2012, speedbird.wordpress.com. 5. Mike Kuniavsky, “Information Is a Material,” in Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design (Burlington, Mass.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2010), 43–56. “Just as most consumers do not spend much time differentiating which parts of a device are made of glass, metal or silicon, they do not spend much time identifying which effects they experience are created by hardware, software, or by services. They see the device as a single thing” (46). 6. Two standards on embodied cognition can be seen in Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997) and Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). 7. William J. Mitchell, “In the First Place,” in Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 1–20. 8. For a good general readers’ overview of attention neuroscience, see Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008). 9. Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (January 2003): 11–28. 10. For an instance that such urban sociology has found its way to pervasive computing circles, see Marcus Foth et al., “Pervasive Computing and Environmental Sustainability: Two Conference Workshops,” IEEE Pervasive Computing 8, no. 1 (January 2009): 78–81. 11. Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information (New York: Random House, 1992). See also his foreword to Jackson, Distracted.

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12. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Urban Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 409. See also Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 18. 13. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 409. 14. Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 40–41. 15. Among the participants in the meetings that produced the current volume, much of the discussion around this paper concerned ubiquity and the right to opt out. For example, up came the Marxist standard, prisoner’s lament: Paul Lafargue, “The Right to Be Lazy,” in The Right to Be Lazy and Other Studies, trans. Charles Kerr (1883; online ed., Lafargue Internet Archive, 2000), last modified November 13, 2003, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/. 16. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), http://www.benkler.org/wonchapters.html. 17. Linda Stone, “Conscious Computing,” Continuous Partial Attention (blog), April 20, 2012, http://lindastone.net/. 18. Linda Stone, “Continuous Partial Attention: Not the Same as Multi-Tasking,” Bloomberg Businessweek, July 24, 2008, last modified March 8, 2009, http://www.businessweek.com/ business_at_work/time_management/archives/2008/07/continuous_part.html. 19. David Shenk, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper Collins, 1997). 20. As you will see in the Dialogue section, the discussion led toward this anxiety regarding too many possible ways to participate while any wish for self-determined participation seems utopian. 21. Joshua S. Rubinstein, David E. Meyer, and Jeffrey E. Evans, “Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception, and Performance 27, no. 4 (2001): 763–97. 22. Albert Borgman, Holding on to Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1. 23. The epistemologist Luciano Floridi calls this “instructional information.” Luciano Floridi, “Semantic Conceptions of Information,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, Calif.: Metaphysics Research Lab, 2011), last modified January 28, 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2007/entries/information-semantic/. 24. For a general readers’ overview on the neuroscience of sensibility, see Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). 25. Steven Kaplan, “The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 15 (1995): 169–82. 26. Brian Bruya, Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010). Chapter 9

1. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 2. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1980), 29. Originally printed in 1690 in London.

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notes to pages 194–201

3. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, ed. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 1:199. Written in 1630 aboard the Arbella. 4. Walter Havighurst, “The Way to Future City,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 69 (1976): 224–25, 237. 5. On the World’s Columbian Exposition and the City Beautiful movement, see Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), esp. 73–216. 6. On U.S. world’s fairs of the 1930s, see Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-ofProgress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). The viewing recommendation is from Official Guide Book of the Fair 1933 (Chicago: A Century of Progress, 1933), 125 or 128 (depending on at least two differently paginated but otherwise indistinguishable editions). 7. On pavilions and exhibits see Lawrence R. Samuel, The End of the Innocence: The 1964– 1965 New York World’s Fair (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 91–197. 8. On the GM Futurama, see Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 301–11. 9. The still breathtaking Voisin plan is illustrated not in Towards a New Architecture but in Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (New York: Payson & Clarke Ltd., 1929; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 278–79. Originally published as Urbanisme (Paris: Les Éditions G. Crès & Cie, 1924). All citations refer to the 1971 edition. 10. King C. Gillette, The Human Drift (Boston: New Era, 1894). For diagrams and sketches, see 94–106. 11. On Archigram and Barbarella, see Reyner Banham, Design by Choice, ed. Penny Sparke (London: Academy, 1981), 64–65, 133–36. 12. His capsule definition and description of cyberspace is in William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 51. 13. William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 14. For the announcement of the exhibition and an associated blog, see http://www.moma. org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1031 and http://moma.org/explore/inside_out/category/risingcurrents. 15. For the the project’s website and the video, see http://www.lacitedufleuve.com/project. php and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxSyMoEwpAE.

232

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Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abstraction, 111–12, 114, 116–17 Abu Dhabi, 203 Adams, Douglas, 182 Adams, Henry, 182 Aerial tramway, 1, 8, 9–10 Aerotropolis, xii, 146, 150–54, 158–59, 162, 164, 204 Aesthetic space: and abstraction, 111–12, 114, 116–17; academic interest in, 114–15, 117; and agents and agencies, 112–14; of airports, 109–10; in Chicago, 95, 108–9, 112; and City Beautiful movement, 97–99, 103, 108, 109–11, 195; and context, 106; in New York City, 93–117; and 9/11 terrorist attack on New York City, 101–3, 106; role of art in public places, 96–97; of shopping malls, 110; and sublime, 101–2, 104, 105, 107, 110; and taste, 106–7, 112, 114 Airplanes and air travel, 164, 168. See also Airports Airports: and aerotropolis, 150–51; aesthetic space of, 109–10; Augé on, 144; and globalization, 146; homeless in, 161; in Hong Kong, 159; Iyer on, 150, 152, 161; and mobility, 149–52; similarity of, 157–58; size of, 150–51; social class in, 161; in Songdo, 150–51; for Washington, D.C., 142, 143, 146, 150 Anaheim, Calif., high-speed rail station, 1, 10–11, 13 Anomie, 171, 173 Apocalypse, 22, 29, 41, 90, 204–5 Appel, Efrat, 50 Apps, 35, 174, 179, 180–81. See also Digital city Arakawa, 146, 153 Archigram group, 198–99 Architecture. See Design process; and specific architects and architectural projects Arizona: air quality in, 33, 224n8; anti-immigration laws in, 36, 41–42; Indian reservations in, 34, 37–38, 46; Latinos in, 37; and

nuclear energy, 42; and solar energy, 33, 35, 42, 45–46; water resources for, 32, 35–36, 38, 43. See also Phoenix Arpaio, Joe, 36 Art Institute of Chicago, 50 Art museums, 115. See also specific museums Atlantic City, N.J., 79–80 Attention deficit syndrome, 154–55, 159 Attention restoration, 173–76, 182 Augé, Marc, 143, 144, 146, 163 Automobile industry, 74–75, 82–83, 110 Automobiles: in China, 25, 26–27; in Europe, 12; fuel-efficient automobiles, 164; and gasoline taxes, 16; gas prices for, 181; in Los Angeles, 6, 23; mass production of, 7; necessity of, 12; soft cars, 203; and suburbs, 31; texting and driving, 182; and transportation problems, 10; in United States compared with Germany, 12; Zipcar, 167, 181. See also Interstate highways Babbit, Milton, 111 Bachelard, Gaston, 147 Bacon, Edmund, 67 Ballon, Hilary, 99 Baltimore/Washington International Airport, 143, 146 Banham, Reyner, 6, 23, 198–99 Barber, Benjamin, xi–xii, xiii Barker, Clive, 58 Barth, John, 160 Bauhaus, xii, 53, 122, 124 Baumann, Zygmunt, 145 Bazin, Andre, 105 Beaux Arts, 194 Bellamy, Edward, 205 Bellows, George, 100–101 Benesch, Klaus: on aesthetic space, 114–15; concluding comments by, 217; on design process, 132; on digital city, 182–83; on energy, 19–21, 24–27; on future city, 204–5; introductory essay by, xi–xvi; on mobility, 143–64; on multicultural city, 66; on ruins, 86, 90; on sustainability, 42–43  233

index

Benkler, Yochai, 178 Berger, Alan, 78–79 Berlin Wall, 80, 81 Berman, Marshall, 227n3 Bin Laden, Osama, 103, 105 Blacks, 54, 57–60, 64, 116–17, 139–40. See also Race Blogosphere, 183. See also Digital city Borgman, Albert, 175 Boston, 5, 8, 10, 72 Bourdieu, Pierre, 149 Brand, Stewart, 86, 200 Brazil, 32 Breuer, Marcel, 122–25, 129–30 Broadacre City, 197, 203–4 Brown, Denise Scott, 140 Bruge, Jason, 111 Building industry, 39–41 Bunkers (anti-aircraft flak towers) (Vienna), 86 Burke, Edmund, 105 Burnham, Daniel, 52, 194–95 Butler, Judith, 149 Cabrini-Green housing project (Chicago): Cabrini Extension, 55, 59; community organizing for, 65; construction of, 54–55; demolition of, 49–51, 59–62, 64–65, 225n2; film on, 58, 62; former residents of, 59–60, 68; Frances Cabrini Homes, 54, 55, 59; location of, 64; media coverage of, 58; operating expenses for, 57; photographs of, 48, 55–56, 62–63; problems in, 56–61, 67; Project Cabrini-Green on, 50–51, 59, 61–62, 226n30; racial politics on, 54, 56, 58, 60, 69; rap culture of, 62–63, 66; sitcom set in, 56; songs about, 62; YouTube videos on, 62 Calatrava controversy, 155 Calder, Alexander, 96 California, 1, 10–11, 143–44, 179, 185–86. See also specific cities Camden, N.J., 74 Campbell, Colin, 98 Capitalism: cycle of, 78–79; and democracy, 29; green capitalism, 38; and industrial ruins, 86–87; Marx on, 72; neoliberal version of, xiii, 36, 60, 204; and responsibility, 80, 84; romantic view of, 98; and ruins, 76–77; in United States, 83; and waste, 79–80; and world’s fairs, 196–97, 211 Carr, Nicholas, 182 234

Carter, Jimmy, 16–17, 18, 22 Casey, Edward, 147 Cayton, Horace, 58–59 Certeau, Michel de, 180 Change process, 25–27, 106–7. See also Ruins Chattanooga, Tenn., 31 Chernobyl disaster, 24, 91 Cherry Hill, N.J., 84 Chicago: architects in, 52–53; blacks in, 54, 57–60; Cabrini-Green housing project in, 48, 49–51, 54–69; Century of Progress Exposition (1933) in, 195–96; City Beautiful movement in, 195; grid pattern of, 52–53, 61; history of, 52–54; Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in, 55; immigrants in, 53–54, 59; interstates in, 8; Lakeshore Drive high-rises in, 52–53, 55, 58; Loop of, 52; Millennium Park in, 95, 108–9, 112; Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in, 50, 53, 225n2; Near North Side neighborhood in, 53–55; “New Urbanist” community in, 60; O’Hare Airport in, 143, 146; Parkside of Old Town development in, 60, 68; Promontory Apartments in, 52–53, 55, 58; rioting in, 57; School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in, 50; segregation in, 58–59; skyscrapers in, 5, 52; Union Station in, 143–44; urban renewal in, 49–51, 54, 59–62; William Green Homes in, 55; World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) in, 194–97, 211 Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), 54–55, 57, 58, 60–61, 68 China: alternative energy in, 21; automobiles in, 25, 26–27; change process in, 25–27; dams in, 17; enclave model of cities in, 203, 204; and Hong Kong airport, 159; Maoist era in, 204; solar energy in, 45–46; and Songdo, 150–51 Chipchase, Jan, 190 Christo, 93, 94–95, 103, 109, 112 Chrysler Building (New York City), 97 La Cité du Fleuve (Democratic Republc of Congo), 201–2 Cities. See Digital city; Future city; Multicultural city; Ruins; Urban spaces; and specific cities Citizenship: and Cabrini-Green housing project (Chicago), 65; in digital city, 167, 168, 173, 180–83, 185, 187; in Portland, Oreg., 19; and voices of ordinary people, 19, 65, 215. See also Democracy

index

City Beautiful movement, 97–99, 103, 108, 109–11, 195 City of Ambition, The (Stieglitz), 92, 101 Cleveland, Ohio, 195 Clifford, James, 145 Climate change, xii, 13, 21, 29–30, 33, 36–37, 201, 209. See also Ecological challenges Climate refugees, 36–37, 43–44 Clinton, Bill, 60 Coal industry, 1, 21, 25, 30, 45 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 104 Cole, Thomas, 102–3, 107 Colorado, 91 Columbian Exposition (1893), 194–97, 211 Company town movement, 206 Computer-assisted design, 133, 137, 138–41, 184 Computers. See Digital city Conceptual inventory, xiv Connectivity and mobility, 155–56 Context, 106–7, 167–70, 174–75, 178 Cool, culture of, 90, 105 Copenhagen, 114 Cosmopolitanism, 158 Countersites, 148 Crawford, Margaret: on aesthetic space, 110, 111–12; biographical information on, 219; concluding comments by, 218; on design process, 132–34, 138–39; on digital city, 184–86; on future city, 203–4, 208–9; on mobility, 158–59, 161; on multicultural city, 62, 66, 68; on ruins, 86–87; on sustainability, 41, 46 “Creative destruction,” 78, 82, 215 Cresswell, Tim, 149 Cronon, William, 14 Culture and cultural mobility, 145, 149 Dallas, Tex., 7 Dallas-Fort Worth airport, 150 Davis, Mike, xi–xii, xiii, 42, 46 Deleuze, Gilles, 147, 179 Deliberative polling, 207–8 DeLillo, Don, 75–76, 86, 160 Democracy, xiii, 29, 102. See also Citizenship Democratic Republic of Congo, 201–2, 205, 209–10 Demolition: of Bronx neighborhoods, 227n3; of Cabrini-Green housing project (Chicago), 49–51, 59–62, 64–65, 225n2; of Pennsylvania Station, 100, 106; of Philadelphia public housing, 68; of Robert

Taylor Homes, 64–65; of St. Louis public housing project, 197; of Singer building (New York City), 92, 104. See also Ruins Denmark, 11–12, 22–23, 114, 208 Design process: architect’s sketch in, 137–38; and computer-assisted design, 133, 137, 138–41, 184; and design world, 121; by Graves for Whitney Museum extension, 122–24, 129–30, 136; and Internet research, 186–87; by Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), 119–41; and meaning of building, 131–32; messiness of, 135; model making in, 127–29, 132–33, 137–40; network theory of, 132, 140; for NEWhitney (New York City), 118, 119, 122–41; parametric design, 138–39; and proto-public, 126–28, 133; role of star architect in, 133–35; and sponsors of projects, 131, 140 Determinism, 1–2, 18–20, 82 Detroit: airport in, 109–10; automobile industry in, 74–75, 82–83, 110; interstates in, 8; as ruin, 71, 72, 74, 79, 81, 82–83; skyscrapers in, 74; train station in, 70, 74; Vergara on, as museum, 74, 81 Digital city: and apps, 35, 174, 179, 180–81; and attention restoration, 173–76, 183; and blogosphere, 183; and boundaries, 179–80; citizenship in, 167, 168, 173, 180–83, 185, 187; and context, 167–68; and continuous partial attention, 174; and data, 184, 190; and display screens, 105, 159, 168, 170, 171, 174, 188–89; and distraction, 170–73, 189; and electronic cottage, 207, 211–12; and embodied cognition, 168, 174–75, 178; and employment, 177–80; and information overconsumption/overload, 171–72, 174, 176–78, 184, 187, 189–90; and interaction design, 167; and Internet research, 186–87, 230nn2–3; and multitasking, 174–75; as “read/write” city, 169–70; and smart media, 167; and social media, 105, 115–16, 173, 174, 179, 185; and tagging, 167, 169–70; and texting, 166, 182, 188; and undefined space and being online, 159; and usability, 167; and visualization, 115–16 Diller, Elizabeth, 135 Diller Scofidio and Renfro, 116, 135, 139 Disney theme parks, 199 Distraction, 170–73, 189 Drake, St. Clair, 58–59 235

index

Dross, 78–79, 190 Dubai, 105, 201, 203 Duffy, Enda, 205 Dulles International Airport, 142, 150 Durkheim, Émile, 171 Easterling, Keller, 61 Eco-apartheid, 35–36, 38 Ecocritics, 149 Eco-hoarding, 44 Eco-Keynesianism, 45 Ecological challenges: air pollution, 10, 33, 224n8; carbon emissions, 29, 32–33, 36–38, 43, 44; and climate refugees, 36–37, 43–44; and environmental injustice, 34–39, 44, 46–47; global warming, xii, xii–xiii, 13, 21, 29–30, 33, 36–37, 45, 201, 209; lead poisoning in Oklahoma, 91; ozone, 33, 224n8; in Phoenix, 34–36; toxic waste, 91; water resources, 17, 32, 35–36, 38, 43. See also Sustainability Edensor, Tim, 76–77 Eiffel Tower, 99, 131 Eisenman, Peter, 139 Electric streetcars, 3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 20 Electrification, 5, 12, 13, 181, 208 Electronic cottage, 207, 211–12. See also Digital city Eliot, T. S., 90 Elkins, James, 223n7 Embodied cognition, 168, 174–75, 178 Empire State Building (New York City), 97 Employment: of blacks, 57, 59–60; and digital revolution, 177–80; in factories, 73; green jobs campaign, 45; in service economy, 60, 68; statistics on unemployment, 73; by Target, 60–61, 68 Emscher Park (Germany), 87 Enclave model, 203–4, 207, 210, 211 Energy: capsule history of transportation, 1–13; Carter’s policy on, 16–17, 18, 22; consumer demand on, 1–2; deliberative polling on, 207–8; deterministic model of, 1–2, 18–20; different forms of, 13–14; electrification, 5, 12, 13, 181, 208; Germany’s policy on, 20, 21–22, 24–25; government influence on, 16–18, 21; nuclear energy, 20, 21, 24–25, 42; per capita use of, in Europe versus United States, 11–12, 13; Reagan’s policy on, 18; solar energy, 1, 10, 33, 35, 42, 45–46; and suburbs, 31; and technological momentum, 16, 21–22, 26; values on, 236

22–25; water energy, 17. See also Transportation; and specific countries England: Archigram group, 198–99; London airport, 161; London buildings, 81; London Olympic Stadium, 139; rail system, 15 Epstein (A.) and Sons, 55 Erie Canal, 11 Escher, M. C., 108 Euro Lille, 155 Europe: Aalborg Charter (1994), 31; automobiles, 12; buildings resistant to decay, 86; city densities, 31; government regulation, 83; high-speed train service, 11, 155–56; per capita energy use, 11–12, 13; travel and social class, 158; urban spaces, 12–13. See also specific countries European Sustainable Cities and Towns Campaign, 12, 31 Exploratorium (San Francisco), 174–75 Exurban areas, 186 Facebook, 105, 173, 179, 185 Fantinatto, Robert, 227n12 Ferriss, Hugh, 198 Films and videos: architectural design compared with, 113; commercial feature films, 58, 101, 104–5, 113, 150, 151, 199; documentaries, 91, 227n12, 228n5; marketing video on Kinshasa, 201–2; YouTube videos, 62, 115 Fishkin, James, 208 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 90 Florida, 185 Florida, Richard, 162 Forster, E. M., 158 Foster, Norman, 161 Foucault, Michel, 110–11, 147–48, 179 Foursquare, 167, 187 France, 11, 86, 99, 115, 131 Frederick, Christine and J. George, 78 Freeway systems in Los Angeles, 1, 6–8, 10. See also Streets Freiburg, Germany, 32 Freud, Sigmund, 77 Friedrich, Caspar David, 98 Futrell, Richard, 194 Future city: aesthetic representation of, 206; connotations of, 193, 199–200; in cyberspace, 199–200; in Democratic Republic of Congo, 201–2; and difficulty in envisioning the future, 204–6, 216; and electronic

index

cottage, 207, 211–12; enclave model of, 203–4, 207, 210; Gillette’s “Metropolis,” 197–98; of Le Corbusier, 197, 198; modernist future city, 198–202; and New Urbanism, 41, 60, 206–7, 211–12; utopian prototypes of, 193–94; at world’s fairs, 194–97, 199, 202, 208, 210, 211 “Future New York: The City of Skyscrapers” (Pettit), 193, 209, 212 “Galactic metropolises,” 144 Garcia, Dorothy, 50 Garden city movement, 204, 206, 211 Gary, Ind., 74 Gasland, 91 Gates, The (Christo and Jeanne-Claude), 93, 94–95, 103, 109 Geddes, Norman Bel, 197, 198 Geertz, Clifford, 1 Gehry, Frank, 108–9, 137 Gelassenheit (meditative thinking), 151, 152, 163, 182, 186 General Motors, 196–97 Genther, Charles, 53, 55, 226n15 Germany: automobile industry in, 83; Berlin Wall in, 80, 81; change process in, 25; current state of, xv–xvi, 215, 217; Emscher Park in, 87; energy policy of, 20, 21–22, 24–25; energy use in, 12; Green Movement and Green Party in, 24; high-speed train service in, 11, 155–56; Marshall Plan for, 215; Merkel administration in, 24, 25; Munich arcade in, 111; nuclear power in, 20, 21, 24–25; reindustrialization in, 45; ruins in, 80–81; solar energy business fair in, 45–46; streetcars and automobiles in, 12; sustainability goals of, 32; in World War II, 71 Getty Museum, 223n7 Ghetto, meaning of, 68 Gibbon, Edward, 71 Gibson, William, 78, 91, 200, 206 Giedion, Sigfried, 107 Gilbert, Cass, 97 Gillette, King Camp, 197–98 Gilliam, Terry, 199 Gins, Madeline, 146, 153 Globalization: and aerotropolis, xii, 146, 150– 54, 158, 162, 164, 204; and airports, 146; and Detroit automobile industry, 82–83; ecological and political changes of, xii–xiii; and global city system, 144–45, 152; and

hunger, 189; impact of, on local change, 72, 79, 82–83; and mobility, 144–45, 153; and service economy, 60; and waste, 79 Global warming, xii, 13, 21, 29–30, 33, 36–37, 45, 201, 209. See also Ecological challenges Golden Gate Bridge, 107 Google, 182, 183, 186–87 Gramsci, Antonio, 29, 216, 224n1 Graves, Michael, 122–24, 129–30, 136 Greenbelt, Md., 198 Greenberg, Clement, 106, 114 Greenblatt, Stephen, 145 Green Movement/Revolution, 24, 43. See also Sustainability Greenwald, Herbert, 52 Grids, 51–53, 61, 67 Guattari, Félix, 147 Hadid, Zaha, 138 Hanford, Wash., 91 Haque, Usman, 187 Hardin, Garret, 35 Harrison, Robert, 61–62, 226n30 Harvard University, 106, 107, 189 Hayden, Dolores, vii–ix, xvi, 144 Heidegger, Martin, 151, 155, 156, 163 Herron, Ron, 199 “Heterotopian” space, 148 High-speed rail service, 1, 10–12, 13, 143–44, 155–56. See also Transportation Hinunter-lassen, 151 Hitler, Adolf, 75–76, 86 Homelessness, 88–89, 161, 199 Hong Kong airport, 159 Hood, Walter, 116 HOPE VI mixed-income housing, 64 Houston, 7, 157, 200 Hudson River School, 102, 107 Hughes, Thomas, 16, 22 Iceland, 32, 164 ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability, 32, 224n7 IDEO, 184–85 Immigration, 36–37, 41–44, 97, 131 Immobility, 146–47, 149, 152, 156–57, 160. See also Mobility Implosionworld.com, 76 India, 25 Indian reservations, 34, 37–38, 43, 46 Indifference, culture of, 105 Industrial design, 78 237

index

Industrialization, 30, 147, 172 Industrial ruins, 76–77, 86–87 Infiltration.org, 76 Information overconsumption/overload, 171–72, 174, 176–78, 184, 187, 189–90. See also Digital city Interaction design, 167 International Style, 52, 95–96, 123 Internet. See Digital city Interstate highways, 7, 8, 15–16 Italy, 143–44, 177 Iyer, Pico, 150, 152, 161 Jackson, J. B., 44, 73–74, 84, 87–88, 90 Jacobs, Jane, 3, 39 Japan, 11, 22, 24, 82 Jeanne-Claude, 93, 94–95 Jefferson, Thomas, 51–52 Jenney, William Le Baron, 52 Joachim, Mitchell, 203 Johannesburg, South Africa, 89 Johnson, Philip, 96 Jones, Van, 35 Junk art, 90 Kahn, Louis, 63 Kapoor, Anish, 95, 108–9, 112, 113 Kasarda, John, xii, 146, 150–54 Keenan, Thomas, 225n8 Keith, Michael, 51 Kerouac, Jack, 159–60 Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia), 140 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 57 Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 201–2, 205, 209–10 Koolhaas, Rem, 105, 118, 119–41, 193 Koons, Jeff, 96 Krauss, Rosalind, 51 Kuniavsky, Mike, 230n5 “Kunstwollen” (will to art), 85 Lafargue, Paul, 177, 231n15 Lakeshore Drive high-rises (Chicago), 52–53, 55, 58 Large Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), 30 Las Vegas, 84 Latinos, 37 Latour, Bruno, 90 Lauder, Leonard, 131 Layar, 167 238

Lear, Norman, 56 Le Corbusier, xiii, 103, 120, 197, 198, 201, 203, 210–11, 223n5 LEED, 39–40 Leinberger, Chris, 22 Lerup, Lars, 78 Lincoln Center, 135 Lindsay, Greg, 146, 150–54 Litter, 86–87, 89–90 LOHAS demographic, 38 London, 81, 139, 161 Los Angeles: “autopia” in, 6, 23; freeway system in, 1, 6–8, 10, 15; high-speed train service to, 11; mass transit system in, 14–15; population density of, 7, 17, 18; sprawl of, 7; transportation in, during early twentieth century, 7, 14–15 Lovelock, James, 29 Lubin, David: on aesthetic space, 93–117; concluding comments by, 216–17; on digital city, 189, 190; on energy, 25; on future city, 205–6; on mobility, 157–58; on multicultural city, 69; on ruins, 88 Lucas, George, 101 Madison Square Garden (New York City), 100, 106 Main Street, 211 Malinowski, Bronisław, 119 Manhattan. See New York City Manila, 195 Marchand, Roland, 108 Marx, Karl, 72 Marx, Leo, 182–83 Mass transit: aerial tramway in Portland, Oreg., 1, 8, 9–10; high-speed rail service in California, 1, 10–11, 13, 143–44; lack of government support for, in United States, 15–16. See also Transportation McCarthy, Anna, 180 McCullough, Malcolm: on aesthetic space, 106–8, 110–11, 113–16; concluding comments by, 215, 217; on design process, 138–40; on digital city, 167–90; on energy, 22–23; on future city, 212; on mobility, 163; on multicultural city, 65, 67–68; on ruins, 84, 87; on sustainability, 44–45 McKim, Mead and White, 99, 100 Meditative thinking. See Gelassenheit Meikle, Jeffrey: on aesthetic space, 108–10; concluding comments by, 215–16; on design process, 126–28; on digital city, 188;

index

on energy, 23–24; on future city, 193–212; on mobility, 159–60; on multicultural city, 66; on ruins, 80–82, 89–90 Melville, Herman, 182–83 Merkel, Angela, 24, 25 “Metropolis” by Gillette, 197–98 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), 136 Metropolitan regions, 18 Mexico, 36, 43–44 Michigan Central Train Station, 70, 74 “Mid-century modern,” 112 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 52–53, 55, 67, 95–96, 107, 120, 226n15 Millennium Park (Chicago), 95, 108–9, 112 MIT, 203 Mitchell, William, 169–70, 200, 203 Mobility: and aerotropolis, xii, 146, 150–54, 158, 162, 164, 204; and attention deficit syndrome, 154–55, 159; Augé on, 143, 163; and connectivity, 155–56; cultural mobility, 145; and diasporic, hybrid subjects, 162; diversified forms of, 143–44; and globalization, 144–45, 153; immobility versus, 146–47, 149, 152, 156–58, 160; literature on, 159–61; and modernity, 145–46; older model of travel, 158; and place-space relations, 146–49, 153–54, 163; and progress and growth, 156; of refugees, 157, 161; and rest zones, 152; and ruins, 90; and social class, 158; and status, 159–60; and supermodernity, 143–44, 152; volitional versus necessary/forced travel, 157, 161–62; and walking, 160–61, 163–64, 183. See also Airports; Transportation ModelFRONTIER, 139 Modernity: future city of, 198–202; and mobility, 145–46; ruins as paradox of, 90; and speed, 205; supermodernity, 143–44, 152 Moses, Robert, 3, 128, 129, 140, 227n3 Multicultural city: Cabrini-Green housing project (Chicago), 48, 49–51, 54–69, 225n2; and concept of multiculturalism, 63, 65–66; demolition of Cabrini-Green housing project (Chicago), 49–51, 59–62, 64–65, 225n2; photographs of CabriniGreen, 48, 55–56, 62–63; and Project Cabrini-Green, 50–51, 59, 61–62, 226n30 Mumford, Lewis, 99–100 Munich, Germany, xv–xvi, 45–46, 83, 111, 215

Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA; Chicago), 50, 53, 225n2 Museum of Modern Art (New York City), 201 Naef, Weston, 223n7 nARCHITECTS, 201 Nasaw, David, 5 National African American Museum (Washington, D.C.), 116–17, 139–40 Native Americans, 34, 37–38, 43, 46, 157 Naturalism, 107 Nature versus urban spaces, 31, 44 Network theory of design process, 132, 140 Neuromancer (Gibson), 78, 91, 200, 206 Newark, N.J., 74 New England, 86–87, 194 NEWhitney (New York City), 118, 119, 122–41 New Urbanism, 41, 60, 206–7, 211–12 New York City: aesthetic space in, 93–117; Broadway in, 1, 2, 6; Cole on, 102–3; demolition of Bronx neighborhoods, 227n3; Empire State Building in, 97, 101; The Gates art installation in, 93, 94–95, 103, 109; image of future of, 193, 209, 212; Lincoln Center in, 135; luxury high-rises within existing housing projects in, 69; Madison Square Garden in, 100, 106; Metropolitan Museum of Art in, 136; Museum of Modern Art in, 201; NEWhitney in, 118, 119, 122–41; 9/11 terrorist attack on, 101–3, 106; Pennsylvania Station in, 99–101, 106, 108, 109, 113; photographs of, 92, 98, 102; population density of, 7, 18; Rising Currents proposal in, 201, 202; ruins in, 72, 74; Seagram Building/ Seagram Plaza in, 95–96; Singer building in, 92, 104; skyscrapers in, 5, 6, 92, 95–96, 97–99, 101–2, 104, 192; Statue of Liberty in, 131; strong core of, 72; Tilted Arc art installation in, 93–95, 97, 103, 105, 108, 109; transportation in, during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 1, 3–4; Whitney Museum in, 122–25, 129–30, 136; Woolworth Building in, 97–99, 101, 102; world’s fairs in, 196–97, 199, 202; World Trade Center in, 71, 101–2, 104, 107, 129 New York Housing Authority, 69 Nigeria, 26 Nuclear energy, 20, 21, 24–25, 42 Nye, David E.: on aesthetic space, 104–5, 110; on anti-landscapes, 91; concluding comments by, 215; on design process, 131; on 239

index

digital city, 184, 190; on energy, 1–27; on future city, 207–8; on mobility, 158, 164; on multicultural city, 65; on ruins, 82–83, 84, 91; on sublime, 104 Obama, Barack, 35, 74, 83 “Object types,” 211 Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA; Rotterdam): architects of, 133–35; computers used by, 133; Koolhaas’s role in, 133–34; and model making, 127–29, 132–33, 138; and NEWhitney, 118, 119, 122–41; and proto-public, 126–28, 133; and Seattle Public Library, 128, 131, 132; Yaneva’s ethnography of, 119–21, 126–28, 135 O’Hare Airport (Chicago), 143, 146 Oil industry, 16–17, 26, 30, 45 Olympic Stadium (London), 139 OMA. See Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA; Rotterdam) Orvell, Miles: on aesthetic space, 112–13, 117; concluding comments by, 215–17; on design process, 129–30, 134, 137–40; on digital city, 180–82, 189; on energy, 18–19, 25–26; on future city, 204, 211–12; introductory essay by, xi–xvi; on mobility, 153–54, 157, 164; on multicultural city, 65–69; on ruins, 71–91; on sustainability, 44 Overstimulation, 170–73 Owen, Robert, 194 PACE and Associates, 53, 55, 56, 67, 226n15 Pachube, 167, 187–88 Palimpsest, 81, 193, 201, 215–16, 217 Panini, Giovanni Paolo, 75 Parametric design, 138–39 Paris, 99, 131, 210 Parkside of Old Town (Chicago), 60, 68 Paulos, Eric, 230n1 Pawley, Martin, 152 Pennsylvania Station (New York City), 99–101, 106, 108, 109, 113 Penzias, Arno, 163 Percy, Walker, 183 Pettit, Harry M., 193, 209, 212 Philadelphia: affordable housing, 68–69; demolition of public housing, 68; interstates, 8; Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, 140; Love Park, 67; regeneration process, 84; Richards Medical Center, 63; 240

ruins, 72, 74, 84; skateboard park, 67; streetcars, xviii, 4, 5; strong core, 72 Philippines, 195 Phoenix: air quality in, 33, 224n8; anti-immigration policy in, 36–37, 41–42; building industry in, 39–41; business district in, 28; carbon emissions in, 33, 36–37, 44; climate of, 32–33; downtown in, 35–36; future of, 41–42, 84; land economy of, 33, 40–42; light transit in, 40; “New Urbanist” communities in, 41; pollution hazards in, 34–36; population of, 33, 41–42; solar energy in, 33, 35, 42, 45–46; sprawl of, 7, 8, 18, 32; and sustainability, 32–43, 45–46; urban growth in, 35–36; water resources for, 32, 35–36, 38, 43 Piano, Renzo, 137 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 75 Place-space relations, 146–49, 153–54, 163 Pop Art, 198–99 Portland, Oreg., 1, 8, 9–10, 19, 31, 32 Postmodernism, 90, 147–49, 152, 217 Poststructuralism, 147–48 Pritzker Pavilion (Gehry), 108–9 “Progressive obsolescence,” 78 Promontory Apartments (Chicago), 52–53, 55, 58 Pruitt-Igoe, 66, 197, 214 Prussia, 84–85 Public housing. See Cabrini-Green housing project (Chicago) Rabinow, Paul, xiv Race, 54, 56, 58–60, 69. See also Blacks Rahm, Philippe, 138 Railway system: in early twentieth century in United States, 11, 15; high-speed rail service, 1, 10–13, 143–44, 155–56; train stations, 70, 74, 99–101, 106, 108, 109, 113 Rand, Ayn, 113 Rap culture, 62–63, 66 Reagan, Ronald, 18, 94, 172 Real Image Production, 201 Realities United studio, 114 Rheingold, Howard, 207 Richmond, Va., 3 Riegl, Alois, 84–85 Rocky Flats, Colo., 91 Roman Empire, 71, 75, 86, 111, 189 Romanticism: on capitalism, 98; civilization versus, 102–3; naturalism compared with, 107; and reverence for nature, 107; on

index

ruins, 75, 85, 102; and technology, 108; on Woolworth Building, 98; on World Trade Center ruins, 102 Root, John Wellborn, 52 Rosler, Martha, 94–95 Ross, Andrew: concluding comments by, 216, 218; on design process, 136; on digital city, 177–79, 187; on energy, 16–17; on future city, 204, 206–7, 212; on mobility, 162; on multicultural city, 64; on ruins, 83; on sustainability, 29–47 Rotterdam, 119–20. See also Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA; Rotterdam) Ruins: Berger on, 78–79; in cycle of growth and decay, 78–80, 86; definition of, 71; DeLillo on, 75–76, 86; explorations of, 76–77, 81–82; gentrification of, 81–82; in Germany, 80–81; history of, 71; industrial ruins, 76–77, 86–87; Jackson on, 73–74, 84, 87–88, 90; in Johannesburg, South Africa, 89; and junk art, 90; as living space, 88–89; Michigan Central Train Station, 70, 74; as necessary image of past, 73–76, 80–81; negative view of, 72–73, 88; Nye’s antilandscapes, 91; as paradox of modernity, 90; positive views of, 73–80; postmodern view of, 90; prediction of next ruins, 84; process producing, 72–73; as rebuke to capitalism, 76–77; Riegl on “pastness,” 84–85; of Roman Empire, 75, 86; Romantic view of, 75, 85; and Serra, 112; Sterling on, 84; in Texas, 89–90; and tourism, 88; Vergara on, 74–75, 76, 80–81, 86; and waste, 79–80. See also Demolition Rybczynski, Witold, 69 Safdie, Moshe, 137–38 St. Louis, 8, 66, 197, 214 San Antonio, Tex., 7 San Diego, Calif., 7, 11 San Francisco: cable cars in, 4; Exploratorium in, 174–75; Golden Gate Bridge in, 107; Google employees in, 186; high-speed train service to, 11; and Silicon Valley, 186; sustainability goals of, 31, 32; Transbay Terminal in, 143–44 Santa Monica, Calif., 31 Scandinavia, 22–23 School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), 50 Schumpeter, Joseph, 78 Schwitters, Kurt, 77

Scottsdale, Ariz., 40 Scully, Vincent, 100 Seagram Building/Seagram Plaza (New York City), 95–96 Seattle, 15, 31, 32, 128, 131, 132; Seattle Public Library, 128, 131, 132 Section Eight vouchers, 68, 69 Sennett, Richard, 77 Sensaris, 167 Serra, Richard, 93–94, 97, 103, 105, 107–9, 111–13 Shanghai, 203 Shenk, David, 174 Silicon Valley, 179, 185–86 Simmel, Georg, xi, 171–73, 180 Simon, Herb, 172 Singapore, 32 Singer building (New York City), 92, 104 Skyscrapers: in Chicago, 5, 52; in Detroit, 74; and electrification, 12; Koolhaas on, 121; in New York City, 5, 6, 92, 95–99, 101–2, 104, 192; and sublime, 104 Sloterdijk, Peter, 145–46 “Smart growth” principles, 31 “Smart mobs,” 207 Smith, Hamilton, 122 Social class, 158, 161, 211 Social media, 105, 115–16, 173, 174, 179, 185. See also Digital city Society for American City and Regional Planning History, viii Soja, Edward, 149 Sola-Morales, Ignasi de, 78 Solar energy, 1, 10, 33, 35, 42, 45–46 Solnit, Rebecca, 160–61 Songdo, South Korea, 150–51 South Africa, 89, 210 South Korea, 150–51 Space-place relations, 146–49, 153–54, 163 Spain, 11 Speer, Albert, 75–76, 86 Sprague, Frank, 3 Statue of Liberty, 131 Sterling, Bruce, 84 Stieglitz, Alfred, 92, 101, 104 Stilgoe, John, 10 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 102 Stone, Linda, 174 Strand, Paul, 4 Street, John, 67 Streetcars, 3–5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15, 20 Streets: cost of, 9; freeway system in Los 241

index

Angeles, 1, 6–8, 10; functionalist view of, 3, 5–6; Houston beltway, 200; in nineteenth century, 2–5; paving of, 2; photographs of, 3, 4–5. See also Interstate highways Stuttgart 21, 155–56 Sublime, 101–2, 104, 105, 107, 110 Suburbs, 8–9, 11, 30–31, 144 Sullivan, Louis, 52 Suntech, 45–46 Supermodernity, 143–44, 152 Sustainability: checklists for, 33–34; and cities, 30–32, 39; environmental injustice versus, 34–39, 44, 46–47; European Sustainable Cities and Towns Campaign, 31; exporting of techniques for, 43; extreme versions of, 203; and “green cities,” 31–32, 34; and green jobs campaign, 45; initiatives for, 35; and LEED, 39–40; and Phoenix, 32–43, 45–46; and “smart growth” principles, 31; social cooperation for, 34, 43 Tagging, 167, 169–70 Target Corporation, 60–61, 68 Taste, 106–7, 112, 114 TAV (Florence, Italy), 143–44 Taylor, Frederick, 185 Technique, Wiener on, xiii–xiv Technological determinism, 1–2, 18–20 Technological momentum, 16, 21–22, 26 Technology transfer, 43 Television, 99, 105, 152, 171, 172, 173, 180, 185 Tempe, Ariz., 40, 43, 45 Terrorism, 101–5 Texas: Dallas-Fort Worth airport in, 150; deliberative polling in, 207–8; Houston beltway in, 200; Houston traffic jam in, 157; ruins in, 89–90; sprawl in, 7; sustainability goals of Austin, 31 TGV, 155 “Thick description,” 1 “Third space,” 144 Thoreau, Henry David, 156, 157, 190 Tichy, Jan, 50 Tilted Arc (Serra), 93–95, 97, 103, 105, 108, 109 Tourism, 10, 88, 157, 161 Trains and train stations. See Railway system Transbay Terminal (San Francisco), 143–44 Transportation: abandonment of older systems of, 14–15; aerial tramway in Portland, Oreg., 1, 8, 9–10; bicycles, 12–13, 242

25, 27; buses, 88; cable cars, 4, 5; capsule history of, 1–13; consumer demand on, 1–2; costs of, 9–11; freeway system in Los Angeles, 1, 6–8, 10; future of air travel, 164; government impact on, 15–16; high-speed rail service, 1, 10–12, 13, 143–44, 155–56; horse cars, 3, 8, 12, 20; interstate highways, 7, 8, 15–16; light-rail system in Portland, Oreg., 8–9; and technological momentum, 16, 21–22, 26; at turn of twentieth century, xviii, 1, 3–4; Velib and Zipcar, 167, 181. See also Airports; Automobiles; Mobility; Railway system; Streets; and specific countries Tschumi, Bernard, 141 Türke, Christoph, 154–55 Twain, Mark, 205 Union Station (Chicago), 143–44 United Nations Climate Summits, 29, 44 U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement, 32 Urban exploration (UE), 76, 81–82 Urban History Association, viii Urban renewal, in Chicago, 49–51, 54, 59–62 Urban spaces: definition of, xi; in Europe, 12–13; “galactic metropolises” as, 144; nature versus, 31, 44; smaller scale of, 206–7; as “virtual metacity,” 145. See also Digital city; Future city; Multicultural city; Ruins; and specific cities “Urbexers,” 76 Utopianism, 193–94, 197–200, 202, 207, 208 Values, 22–25 Velib, 167 Venturi, Robert, 66, 137, 140 Vergara, Camilo José, 74–75, 76, 80–81, 86 Vernacular Architecture Forum, viii Vienna, Austria, 86 Vietnam War Memorial, 131 Viñoly, Rafael, 140 Virilio, Paul, 145 “Virtual metacity,” 145 “Walkable” urbanism, 22 Walking, 160–61, 163–64, 183 Washington, Harold, 59 Washington, D.C.: airports near, 142, 143, 146, 150; City Beautiful movement in, 195; National African American Museum in, 116–17, 139–40

index

Waste, 79–80 Water resources, 17, 32, 35–36, 38, 43 Whitney Museum (New York City), 122–25, 129–30, 136 Whitney Museum branch, 137 Whitney Museum extension (New York City): actors in, 125–27; and building career of Whitney Museum, 122–25, 129–30, 136; failure of Koolhaas’s design for, 126, 131, 137; Graves’s plans for, 122–24, 129–30, 136; Koolhaus’s plans for, 118, 119, 122–41; location of, 136–37; models for, 127–29; Piano’s plans for, 137; proto-public for, 127–28; requirements for, 124, 129–31 Whole Earth, 200 Whyte, William H., 96, 228n5 Wiener, Nobert, xiii–xiv Williams, William Carlos, 156 Wilson, Mabel: on aesthetic space, 113, 116–17; concluding comments by, 216; on design process, 134–35, 139–41; on digital city, 179–80; on energy, 14–15, 26; on future city, 209–11, 212; on mobility,

160–61; on multicultural city, 49–69; on ruins, 84–85, 89; on sustainability, 39–40 Winner, Langdon, 186 Winthrop, John, 30 Wolfe, Tom, 205 Wood, Elizabeth, 54 Woolworth Building (New York City), 97–99, 101, 102 World’s fairs, 108, 194–97, 199, 202, 208, 210, 211 World Trade Center (New York City), 71, 101–2, 104, 107, 129 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 197, 203–4 Wurman, Richard Saul, 184 Xively, 187 Yamasaki, Minoru, 197, 198, 214 Yaneva, Albena: on design process, 119–41; on digital city, 186–87; on energy, 13–14; on mobility, 155, 163; on multicultural city, 63; on ruins, 86 Zipcar, 167, 181

243

acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, which provided funding for the conference, and the Bavarian American Academy, which provided space for our meetings. We also want to thank our editor, Robert Lockhart, whose support, enthusiasm, and wise guidance gave wind to our sails.

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