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Everything is Solid, After All
Pergamon
PII: S0264-2751(01)00041-5
Cities, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 1–2, 2002 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0264-2751/02 $ - see front matter
www.elsevier.com/locate/cities
Editorial
Everything is Solid, After All There are several things that I had planned to write in this editorial, some of which would now be inappropriate. Not least of my hesitations is that one should not rush to make pronouncements soon after events, such as, for example, the proclamation of the death of irony, by one of New York’s many magazine editors, very rapidly after the events of September 11. While I have no intention of trying to suggest what the cultural legacy of that day will be, it does seem an important omen that the usual spatial metaphors do not apply. Most tragedies are rendered manageable by their reduction to a single marker, that both locates the event and serves to make it more commonplace – Dresden, Hiroshima, Waco, Oklahoma City. Events that are seen as more pivotal take on elements of both time and space – Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 – or transcend both elements. It is generally remembered that John Kennedy’s assassination took place on November 22, 1963 and that it took place in Dallas, but neither is enough to capture the significance of what occurred; we do not speak of Dallas, or of that date, in isolation. It seems though that September 11 will suffice as a marker, perhaps the real end of the 20th century, the millennial moment that had been feared but presumed to have passed. The irony, if there is any to be noted, is that September 11 did have a very real spatial referent. This was an attack upon a symbolic target, upon the very concept of world trade. But it was more explicitly an attack upon two massive structures, upon the people who worked in them and the people who maintained them. It was an attack upon an economic system, but it was also an attack on the premier world city. As the examples that I have already used indicate, cities are always central targets during warfare (Ashworth, 1991). The burning of Atlanta serves as the backdrop to Gone with the Wind. The destruction of Nanking and of Guemica put the world on notice of the era of the total war, and the battle of Berlin ended that war in Europe. Since then, we have worked hard to produce a fiction that such destruction will not occur again, in an era of smart bombs, economic sanctions and professional armies. Yet this is nothing more than a convenient fiction, as even smart weapons do damage – that message was key to the photo essay on Belgrade that was published here two years ago (Perovic´ and Zˇegarac, 2000).
It is not hard to see where such fictions come from. For ten years and more we have swerved into a culde-sac, in which metaphor, like irony, has taken precedence. The city has been reduced to a narrative and it is that textual landscape – rather than its more gritty counterpart – that has come to occupy our attention. Architects and planners have explored the outer reaches of whimsy with flaccid designs and the limpwristed nostalgia of the new urbanism. It is a world in which, we are constantly reminded, everything is a theme park, and yet – here is that irony once more – it is pastiche in reverse, insofar as the same people who own the theme parks, such as the Disney Corporation, of whom more in a moment – now build their own municipalities. To this observer, there is little question that this has taken its toll on the intellectual enterprise. I recently attended the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in Anaheim. The conference theme was “The future of the American city”, although one was hard pressed to attend a session without hearing someone comment on the irony – of course – of having such a meeting in the home of Disneyland. And the future of the city on display, and its analysis, was a pretty bleak one. The choice seemed to boil down to sticking with the Chicago school, which was last fully operative around 1938, or transferring one’s allegiance to the newer LA school. I came away from the ASA meetings feeling, on balance, very critical of the experience. The session in which I was fortunate enough to be involved was one of the most stimulating I had experienced in a long while: most of the others I attended were not. When panelists had something to say about cities, it was usually to reiterate cliche´s about environmental cataclysm, sprawl and so forth. (The usual disclaimers apply – I could not visit more than a tiny fraction of the sessions, but then most of them seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the conference theme.) I have expressed some of this frustration in recent editorials, complaining, for example, that some funded research on urbanism in Europe does not seem to be in much better shape. The only bright spot on the horizon is the new flow of research that is emerging on cities in the developing world, much of it recently summarized in the impressive UNCHS volumes (see May’s review essay at the end of this 1
Editorial
issue). Here, there is no metaphor and little whimsy to be seen. This is grounded research dealing with real people in real cities, the “basic urban order”, as Peter Hall puts it (Hall, 1998): we might summarize some of it as action research, insofar as it is intended to bring about an improvement in those same people’s quality of life. This suggests to me, at least, where the urban frontier is to be found, and it is not in Los Angeles, and it is not in the languid footsteps of the flaˆ neur and his tedious ilk. Contemporary postmodern urbanism has failed us, as it has drawn us away from an understanding of cities and their populations. While we should be devastated by images of death and destruction, we should not be surprised to see a city facing problems of emergency management that have stretched everything to breaking point (see also Williams, 2000). Everyone should have a better understanding of the complexities of urban life, and part of our problem of having lost that instinctive grasp reflects, in some significant part, the abject failure of many academics to maintain the city as a real object of study – not a metaphor, not a symbol, but a very complex system that requires explanation and an equally public discourse. This is surely the challenge that faces everyone in this new moment, a challenge that has been understood in the developing economies and by those who work in them, but something that has, it seems, been willfully misunderstood virtually everywhere else. There would be something very unpleasant indeed
2
about seeming to use a human tragedy to score cheap academic points, and I am working hard here to avoid that appearance. Yet there is a lot more at stake here than who gets the right to interpret reality for everyone else – the issue is about nothing less than reclaiming the city, that robust yet fragile entity in which half the planet’s population lives, from the grip of metaphor and placing it back into the hands of its workers and its residents. As Roger Keil has observed, “the reflexion of urbanization cannot do without participation” (Keil, 1998), but it is clear that much of our theory has incorporated little from the streets and overmuch from the faculty lounge. If this is the start of the new century, then let us make a clear stand for research on the basic urban order. Let us lament the passing of the postmodern era – briefly – and announce a return to urban studies. It is time for funding agencies to send out a clear call for grounded work with positive social outcomes. It is time, as Foucault observed, to once again find the cobblestones beneath the beach.
References Ashworth, G J (1991) War and the City. Routledge, London. Perovic´ , M and Zˇ egarac, Z (2000) The destruction of an architectural culture: the 1999 bombing of Belgrade. Cities 17(6), 395–408. Hall, P G (1998) Cities in Civilization. Weidenfeld, London. Keil, R (1998) Los Angeles: Globalization, Urbanization and Social Struggles. Wiley, Chichester. Williams, G, Batho, S and Russell, L (2000) Responding to urban crisis, the emergency planning response to the bombing of Manchester city center. Cities 17(4), 293–304.
PII: S0264-2751(01)00041-5
Cities, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 1–2, 2002 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0264-2751/02 $ - see front matter
www.elsevier.com/locate/cities
Editorial
Everything is Solid, After All There are several things that I had planned to write in this editorial, some of which would now be inappropriate. Not least of my hesitations is that one should not rush to make pronouncements soon after events, such as, for example, the proclamation of the death of irony, by one of New York’s many magazine editors, very rapidly after the events of September 11. While I have no intention of trying to suggest what the cultural legacy of that day will be, it does seem an important omen that the usual spatial metaphors do not apply. Most tragedies are rendered manageable by their reduction to a single marker, that both locates the event and serves to make it more commonplace – Dresden, Hiroshima, Waco, Oklahoma City. Events that are seen as more pivotal take on elements of both time and space – Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 – or transcend both elements. It is generally remembered that John Kennedy’s assassination took place on November 22, 1963 and that it took place in Dallas, but neither is enough to capture the significance of what occurred; we do not speak of Dallas, or of that date, in isolation. It seems though that September 11 will suffice as a marker, perhaps the real end of the 20th century, the millennial moment that had been feared but presumed to have passed. The irony, if there is any to be noted, is that September 11 did have a very real spatial referent. This was an attack upon a symbolic target, upon the very concept of world trade. But it was more explicitly an attack upon two massive structures, upon the people who worked in them and the people who maintained them. It was an attack upon an economic system, but it was also an attack on the premier world city. As the examples that I have already used indicate, cities are always central targets during warfare (Ashworth, 1991). The burning of Atlanta serves as the backdrop to Gone with the Wind. The destruction of Nanking and of Guemica put the world on notice of the era of the total war, and the battle of Berlin ended that war in Europe. Since then, we have worked hard to produce a fiction that such destruction will not occur again, in an era of smart bombs, economic sanctions and professional armies. Yet this is nothing more than a convenient fiction, as even smart weapons do damage – that message was key to the photo essay on Belgrade that was published here two years ago (Perovic´ and Zˇegarac, 2000).
It is not hard to see where such fictions come from. For ten years and more we have swerved into a culde-sac, in which metaphor, like irony, has taken precedence. The city has been reduced to a narrative and it is that textual landscape – rather than its more gritty counterpart – that has come to occupy our attention. Architects and planners have explored the outer reaches of whimsy with flaccid designs and the limpwristed nostalgia of the new urbanism. It is a world in which, we are constantly reminded, everything is a theme park, and yet – here is that irony once more – it is pastiche in reverse, insofar as the same people who own the theme parks, such as the Disney Corporation, of whom more in a moment – now build their own municipalities. To this observer, there is little question that this has taken its toll on the intellectual enterprise. I recently attended the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in Anaheim. The conference theme was “The future of the American city”, although one was hard pressed to attend a session without hearing someone comment on the irony – of course – of having such a meeting in the home of Disneyland. And the future of the city on display, and its analysis, was a pretty bleak one. The choice seemed to boil down to sticking with the Chicago school, which was last fully operative around 1938, or transferring one’s allegiance to the newer LA school. I came away from the ASA meetings feeling, on balance, very critical of the experience. The session in which I was fortunate enough to be involved was one of the most stimulating I had experienced in a long while: most of the others I attended were not. When panelists had something to say about cities, it was usually to reiterate cliche´s about environmental cataclysm, sprawl and so forth. (The usual disclaimers apply – I could not visit more than a tiny fraction of the sessions, but then most of them seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the conference theme.) I have expressed some of this frustration in recent editorials, complaining, for example, that some funded research on urbanism in Europe does not seem to be in much better shape. The only bright spot on the horizon is the new flow of research that is emerging on cities in the developing world, much of it recently summarized in the impressive UNCHS volumes (see May’s review essay at the end of this 1
Editorial
issue). Here, there is no metaphor and little whimsy to be seen. This is grounded research dealing with real people in real cities, the “basic urban order”, as Peter Hall puts it (Hall, 1998): we might summarize some of it as action research, insofar as it is intended to bring about an improvement in those same people’s quality of life. This suggests to me, at least, where the urban frontier is to be found, and it is not in Los Angeles, and it is not in the languid footsteps of the flaˆ neur and his tedious ilk. Contemporary postmodern urbanism has failed us, as it has drawn us away from an understanding of cities and their populations. While we should be devastated by images of death and destruction, we should not be surprised to see a city facing problems of emergency management that have stretched everything to breaking point (see also Williams, 2000). Everyone should have a better understanding of the complexities of urban life, and part of our problem of having lost that instinctive grasp reflects, in some significant part, the abject failure of many academics to maintain the city as a real object of study – not a metaphor, not a symbol, but a very complex system that requires explanation and an equally public discourse. This is surely the challenge that faces everyone in this new moment, a challenge that has been understood in the developing economies and by those who work in them, but something that has, it seems, been willfully misunderstood virtually everywhere else. There would be something very unpleasant indeed
2
about seeming to use a human tragedy to score cheap academic points, and I am working hard here to avoid that appearance. Yet there is a lot more at stake here than who gets the right to interpret reality for everyone else – the issue is about nothing less than reclaiming the city, that robust yet fragile entity in which half the planet’s population lives, from the grip of metaphor and placing it back into the hands of its workers and its residents. As Roger Keil has observed, “the reflexion of urbanization cannot do without participation” (Keil, 1998), but it is clear that much of our theory has incorporated little from the streets and overmuch from the faculty lounge. If this is the start of the new century, then let us make a clear stand for research on the basic urban order. Let us lament the passing of the postmodern era – briefly – and announce a return to urban studies. It is time for funding agencies to send out a clear call for grounded work with positive social outcomes. It is time, as Foucault observed, to once again find the cobblestones beneath the beach.
References Ashworth, G J (1991) War and the City. Routledge, London. Perovic´ , M and Zˇ egarac, Z (2000) The destruction of an architectural culture: the 1999 bombing of Belgrade. Cities 17(6), 395–408. Hall, P G (1998) Cities in Civilization. Weidenfeld, London. Keil, R (1998) Los Angeles: Globalization, Urbanization and Social Struggles. Wiley, Chichester. Williams, G, Batho, S and Russell, L (2000) Responding to urban crisis, the emergency planning response to the bombing of Manchester city center. Cities 17(4), 293–304.