On the Form of the Contemporary City
Despite the attempts to simplify them, urban settings always rebel
Giorgio Piccinato
photo Lisa Ariani
The city undone, the city divided, the city fragmented, the city diluted, the no-city city, the non city. These and other such definitions of the post-modern city are to be found in the writings of recent years. Almost the mirrored opposite of the urban conditions that now involve more than half the inhabitants of the planet. Or rather the spatial image of a society so complex as to make it difficult to decode, never mind govern. It is a received notion that the city is the spatial representation of a social form, to the point that there has been no lack, through history, of proposals for a social renaissance departing from the design of the perfect city. A history that comes very close to us if one of the most celebrated, Brasilia, is but half a century old: a fascinating image of a society of equals, where the corridors of power are revealed behind glass walls and the buildings are repeated in series, varying only on the basis of their function. It is a shame that such a city was inaugurated and for a long time made use of by one of the most ruthless military regimes of modern times, and that rather vaster, unplanned, cities have mushroomed on the outskirts, inhabited by those ‘others’ who found no room in the dream set forth by the great architects. In times closer still, and with wholly pragmatic objectives, what is known as technical urban planning strove to reply to the efficiency demands posed by a city exclusively interpreted as a complex of distinct functions, with automotive traffic in prime position: witness the urban motorways which in the 1960s entered the heart of our cities (in London, Madrid, San Francisco) and which today have largely been eliminated, for they only brought noise and air pollution with no benefit to overall mobility.
Often the most carefully planned districts are the ones that today are considered socially at risk
The results of such ‘rational’ planning have been fairly modest, so much so that often the most carefully planned districts are the ones that are today considered socially at risk. This is the case for many popular housing neighbourhoods in Italy, France and Great Britain, not to mention the Americas, where vandalism, violence and crime celebrate their greatest successes.
Basically there exists an extraordinary distance between the imagined city, the treatment it is subjected to, the models that cities and treatment make reference to and an urban reality that appears to reject every attempt at simplification. In reality it is precisely the complexity of urban society that must, in the first place, be deconstructed, exposing its reticular structure without, however, ignoring a fundamental polarization. As it is also necessary to acknowledge, in inequality, the transit of common and potentially destabilizing paradigms.
photo Lisa Ariani
Looking at the city today is also a way of reading society, you just have to know how to recognize the signs, using the fabric of the city as a reference sheet where functions, lifestyles, conflicts, inflexibilities and innovations all merge. We must therefore examine it with an unprejudiced eye, we must see the things that surround us without obscuring them behind the reassuring veil of outmoded (if ever truly workable) theoretical models.
If, on the one hand, the city appears to be blurring into what we were accustomed to consider the countryside, for this is the territory that is being treated to a large part of the functions we once considered urban – commercial sites, venues for entertainment and recreation, major road infrastructures, extending over greater distances in less dense groupings – on the other, new structures, trumpeted by the media, are densely conglomerating, presenting themselves as the emerging city of the future. It is a question of different typologies. The first hosts the headquarters of economic and financial power: burgeoning in old and new world cities – New York, London, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai – they replace, with the communicative strength of imposing architecture, the ancient symbols of political power. Nuclei of gleaming skyscrapers in gold and crystal, where everything is wonderfully tidy and secure (thanks to the omnipresence of private police), where people, cars and goods circulate on networks that never meet, where social control has even eliminated cigarettes, appear to achieve the utopia of a perfect city with no conflicts whatsoever, whether between the activities taking place there or with the surrounding environment: the image of an ideal society.
But one may discern another city-form on the side: the one with the spectacle of consumption and luxury, the one with the ever brighter billboards, with the permanent music and images projected onto the walls of the skyscrapers. This is the city built to induce us to spend, the city of trade and commerce, of constant excitation, of leisure time that must always be spent in consumption – of foodstuffs, goods, shows – where even apparently spontaneous events are carefully programmed by the managers of an urban space that is more private property. Even the architecture here is made for pleasure, to astonish, alluding again to (bogus) improvisation. Such is the case in so many port districts, once abandoned and now brought back to life, as in New York, Baltimore, London, Sydney and all the other cities that year after year lengthen the list.
Looking at the city today is also a way of reading society, we must therefore examine it with an unprejudiced eye, we must see the things that surround us without obscuring them behind the reassuring veil of outmoded (if ever truly workable) theoretical models
Looking at the glossy magazines (or the architecture journals), this might appear to be the destiny of the contemporary city. In fact there is no shortage of indications of homologation on a planetary scale. This, of course, in societies with an advanced economy, and though it may be unjust to deny that this advancement is our common destiny, the unevenness of the timing is evident. It is, however, worth reflecting on the more general characteristics of present and future urban planning. And to remember that, while it is true that the urban population is destined to grow, the overwhelming majority of this population will definitely not appertain to societies with an advanced economy, or, even when they do in registry-office terms, they will be duly relegated to the more economically backward sectors of said societies. The bidonvilles and favelas of Asia, Africa and Latin America will host at least ninety per cent of the new urban population in forthcoming decades. We may discuss how the forms and consequences of the new organization of world economy will affect cities, but there is no doubt that the city of the future will not reside exclusively in the wealthy countries. Even in the glittering cities of globalization, extensive areas exist where the most miserable strata of the population are located: the fear, that plays such a part in the way life is lived in these cities, originates here. So it happens that the city of contemporary life becomes even more socially polarized: on one hand with gated cities, the suburbs where the middle-high income population lives, well protected by guards and barriers that inhibit access by ‘others’, on the other hand the bidonvilles, where the ever-increasing strata of low or middle-low income population live, exposed to constant criminal behaviour. In the gated cities, built primarily with security in mind, life and leisure activities take place in a serene environment, which ceases to be so as soon as the gateways are crossed; in the bidonvilles security ends at the front door, with the upshot that the inhabitants feel free to move only in daylight hours.
In reality what has been said applies only in part to Europe. Here urban living has a rather longer tradition, and social polarization rarely reaches the extremes of the world’s great metropolises. And yet here too insecurity, or at least a perception of risk, is beginning to generate situations very similar to those we have mentioned: the images we receive from the outskirts of Naples, London or Paris are not so different, and in the housing market exclusive and well-protected residential nuclei are ever more successful. It so happens that our fragmented or diluted or undone city also provides an answer, however imperfect, to these concerns, besides signalling the dilation of the urban condition. This dilation, which is structural, is what relates Europe to the great globalization-induced transformation. Here, however, the homologation process clashes with the wealth of an urban heritage that powerfully imposes the theme of localism: will our cities save Europe?
