Architecture and Revolution
--Kanishka Goonewardena
‘Architecture is a hazardous mix of omnipotence and impotence’,
announce Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau in the first sentence of their
programmatic reverie, S,M,L,XL. The point is well taken.
As Perry Anderson notes in his prescient volume, The Origins
of Postmodernity, ‘no other aesthetic practice has such immediate
social impact, and—logically enough—none has therefore produced
so many ambitious projects of social engineering’. On the other
hand, Koolhaas and Mau assure us that architects, ‘in “shaping”
the world’ by the power of their thought, ‘depend on the provocations
of others—clients, individual or institutional’. It would have
been more precise to specify those clients as ‘corporate or bureaucratic’,
as Anderson does. And, especially in a developing country like
Sri Lanka, we also ought to think about the constraints on the
autonomy of the architect in a different yet complementary way,
in terms of the determinate absence of ‘provocations of
others’—of the other ‘others’, that is to say, the others
who could indeed use some decent architecture to ‘shape’ their
modest lifeworlds for the better, but cannot afford to own land
or to build a house, let alone to pay the forbidding fees of architects
who indeed can only dream of omnipotence in vain.
But it is not only in Sri Lanka that architects must be reminded
of this disturbing dimension of their involuntary impotence.
The structural position of the growing urban underclass trapped
in the ‘inner cities’ of neoliberal North America, which rarely
commissions architects, is not unlike that of our own slum and
shanty dwellers. Capitalism, in other words, makes all
architects impotent—by commissions as well as by omissions—if
only to varying degrees at various locations in the global economy.
From the point of view of urban design and planning, surely, the
striking difference between those American cities and ours is
this: they hide poverty better than we do. In fact, today
few cities do it better than Los Angeles and New York, by a potent
mixture of socio-spatial segregation, media (mis)representation
and police force—currently driven by a brand of urban (re)development
known as gentrification. Which is not to say that the deliberate
production of a positive image of the city in order to render
invisible the ugly symptoms and adverse consequences of ‘free-market’
capitalism is a wholly ‘post-modern’ phenomenon. That trick is
as old as industrial capitalism itself, as Friedrich Engels usefully
reminds us in one of the best books ever written on cities, The
Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. ‘Owing
to the curious lay-out of the town it is quite possible for someone
to live for years in Manchester and to travel daily to and from
his work without ever seeing a working-class quarter or coming
into contact with an artisan. He who visits Manchester simply
on business or for pleasure need never see the slums, mainly because
the working-class districts and the middle-class districts are
quite distinct. This division is due partly to deliberate policy
. . . . To such an extent has the convenience of the rich been
considered in the planning of Manchester that these plutocrats
can travel from their houses to their places of business in the
centre of the town by the shortest routes, which run entirely
through working-class districts, without even realising how close
they are to the misery and filth which lie on both sides of the
road’. Engels does not mince many words on the purpose of such
‘hypocritical’ town planning: ‘hiding from the eyes of wealthy
ladies and gentlemen with strong stomachs and weak nerves the
misery and squalor which are part and parcel of their own riches
and luxury’.
Here we can see Engels answering with characteristic lucidity
a political question of crucial import to architects: how is space
ideological? Or, to put it plainly: how does our urban experience
shape the way we see the world? Throughout history, leading architects
and town planners serving the interests of their ruling classes
have had the occasion to explore this question with remarkable
candor. It has been, after all, in their best interests to ensure
that the masses saw the world in a way that somehow concealed
the injustices meted out to them by the social order and the rulers;
and, therefore, to find out how architecture and town planning
could help produce such a hegemonic view of the world. The relationship
between space and ideology spelled out by Engels clearly points
to a symbiotic link between architecture and power, even if it
is now sidelined in much architectural education and criticism.
But it cannot be avoided by architects in practice—especially
those answerable to ‘clients corporate or bureaucratic’—who encounter
political-economic power as routinely as they breathe. What is
so utterly natural, however, can also become unconscious; what
cannot be avoided can be easily ignored. Thus it is easier for
us to see the connections between architecture and power from
a distance, for example, by observing the dialectical unity of
urban forms and cosmologies projected by them in the ancient cities
of various civilizations, as Kevin Lynch does at the outset of
Good City Form.
Now, if we enter the modern world with the same question about
space and ideology in mind, then we see the first textbook demonstration
of what architecture has to do with power in Baron Haussmann’s
legendary reconstruction of Paris. What can we learn today from
the minister of Napoleon III? The great German philosopher Walter
Benjamin writes in his famous essay ‘Paris, the Capital of the
Nineteenth Century’ (The Arcades Project): ‘Haussmann’s
ideal in city planning consisted of long straight streets opening
onto broad perspectives’, within which ‘the temples of the bourgeoisie’s
spiritual and secular power were to find their apotheosis’. Contemporaries
called it ‘strategic beautification’. Benjamin is quick to point
out that ‘the true goal of Haussmann’s projects was to secure
the city against civil war’ by ‘widening the streets’ in order
to ‘make the erection of barricades in the streets of Paris impossible’.
Here the new grand boulevard perspectives—which, ‘prior to their
inauguration, were screened with canvas draperies and unveiled
like monuments’—were also meant to ‘connect the barracks in straight
lines with the workers’ districts’, to facilitate rapid troop
movement in the event of revolution. Dictating Haussmann’s megalomaniac
monumentalism were not only aesthetics and politics but also economics.
The enabling condition for reformatting Paris, Benjamin notes
proleptically (in view of the role played by global finance
capital in the redevelopment of ‘post-modern’ downtowns some hundred
years later, under the aegis of US imperialism), ‘is . . . Napoleonic
imperialism, which favours investment capital’ as ‘Haussmann’s
expropriations give rise to speculation that borders on fraud’.
What about the expropriated? ‘In 1864, in a speech before
the National Assembly’, reports Benjamin, Haussmann ‘vents his
hatred of the rootless urban population, which keeps increasing
as a result of his projects. Rising rents drive the proletariat
into the suburbs. The quartiers of Paris in this way lose
their distinctive physiognomy. The “red belt” forms. Haussmann
gave himself the title of “demolition artist”, artiste démolisseur.
He viewed his work as a calling’. This is the primal scene of
capitalist urbanism. Haussmann, however, would not be the last
to hear that clarion call. Le Corbusier heard it again in Paris,
as did Robert Moses in New York City. ‘When you operate in an
overbuilt metropolis’, Moses was fond of saying, ‘you have to
hack your way with a meat ax; I’m just going to keep right on
building, you do the best you can to stop it’. But, for us, is
it really a secret that the most ardent—and truly naive—demolition
artists of the so-called City Beautiful Movement have been spotted
not in London, New York or Paris, but among contemporary Third
World politicians-turned-planners attempting desperately to catch
up with the televisual, touristic and strategic beauty of
American cities?
‘“Strategic beautification” is the ur-form of the culture of
the modern state’, writes Susan Buck-Morss in Dialectics of
Seeing. She explains how the optical and political ‘illusions
fostered by this “artist of demolition” [Haussmann] figured heavily
in the mythic imagery of historical progress, and functioned as
a monument to the state’s role in achieving it’. Intrinsic to
the ideological dimension of space has been, of course, the role
played by the city as an advertisement for capitalism as much
as an attraction for capital—speculative or otherwise. On this
point, Mohan Silva has written with admirable wit and verve about
Sri Lankan urbanism in the 1980s, at a time when the whole country
was being subjected inexorably to the forces of globalization
and the ideology of neoliberalism. It was not long afterwards
that radical American geographer Neil Smith proposed the term
‘revanchism’ to characterize the gentrification—displacement of
poor people and neighbourhoods in central cities by upper-class
districts (‘Class Struggle on Avenue B’ as he put it, with reference
to the conflicts over redeveloping Manhattan’s Lower East Side)—of
New York City in the last two decades. ‘The Revanchist City’
concept is derived from the French word revanche, which
means revenge: ‘The Revanchists’ were a reactionary, right-wing,
monarchist tendency that emerged in France at the end of the 19th
century, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, seeking
revenge against not only Germany but also the liberalism of the
Second Republic and the revolutionary politics of the Paris Commune
in 1871, which Haussmann failed to forestall. Revanchism, then,
is an apt description of what has happened most paradigmatically
in New York City in the 1990s—and adopted universally. ‘City
after city’, boldly writes Smith in the prestigious pages of Harvard
Design Magazine (winter/spring 1997), ‘have passed laws against
panhandling [begging], public sleeping and squeegee windshield
washing’, whose local equivalent would ‘informal sector’ work
in the streets. Having originated in ‘conservative cities like
Miami and Atlanta’ in the early 1990s, this trend spread quickly
to even such ‘liberal bastions as San Francisco and Seattle’.
Everywhere the displacement and exclusion—not to speak of internment—of
homeless and other despised people is now executed with coercive
legal and police force for the sake of a ‘good business climate’.
Smith is right: ‘“Urban Policy” today is little more than a euphemism
for the process by which city governments huckster for private
market investments’.
In this dismal state of affairs—where
‘reasonable’ architects and urban designers are committed (if
not cynically resigned) to covering up social antagonisms rather
than eliminating them, as Buck-Morss puts it, by ‘changing the
arrangement of buildings and streets . . . while leaving the
social relationships intact’—we forget too easily that architecture
and urban planning once entertained a revolutionary vocation:
to radically change both space and society. Today, as
the civilization of capital roams the globe behind the sanctimonious
veil of ‘human rights’ draped by the US State Department masquerading
as ‘the international community’ (remember how European imperialists
issued us single-entry visas to the Kingdom of God?), it is
fashionable to dismiss those efforts to change architecture
and the world as the cunning of reason gone mad, as so
many perversions of the laissez-faire spirit by control
freaks. Better to understand what happened. Only then can
we go beyond the poignant question raised by Le Corbusier: ‘architecture
or revolution?’ Then, for once, architecture and
revolution may be one. May they be one!
_________________________________________________________
Prof. Kanishka Goonawardena was trained as an architect in Sri
Lanka and now teaches Urban Design and Critical Theory at the
University of Toronto. (kanishka@geog.utoronto.ca)
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