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Journal of Urban Design

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The Contemporary City in Four Movements

Mitchell Schwarzer
a a

California College of Arts and Crafts, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107, USA Version of record first published: 04 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Mitchell Schwarzer (2000): The Contemporary City in Four Movements, Journal of Urban Design, 5:2, 127-144 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713683960

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Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 5, No. 2, 127 144, 2000

The Contemporary City in Four Movements

MITCHELL SCHWARZER
ABSTRACT At the onset of the 21st century, cities are larger, more complex, and less easily designed than ever before. After many modernist proposals to remake the city in the guise of some rational system, postmodern architects, planners, and thinkers have begun to accept (and in some cases, even celebrate) the city for its unreadable and uncontrollable aspects. This paper proposes a discursive approach to the contemporary city. Instead of analysing existing arguments and proposals and then coming up with a new comprehensive and exclusive reading of the city, why not engage the city through the plural and con ictive debates of our era? In what follows, four such urban movements traditional, marketplace, social, and conceptual are examined, contrasted, and then juxtaposed with the aim of theorizing a city of difference. Todays cities no longer make sense. Maybe they should not make sense. Like post-modern society at large, cities are paradoxical and ambiguous, constantly mutating under the impact of new life-styles, fashions, technologies and viewpoints. They are the site of highly diverse interactions, rapid uctuations of capital, hazy physical boundaries and seemingly irreconcilable architectural and urban movements. The purpose of this article is to consider four of these movements, and, by doing so, advocate an awareness of the contemporary city amid its diverging yet interlocking theories. Despite the fact that cities are among the most uncontrollable of human creations, the existing eld of urban theory and design is saturated with generalizations. Several decades after the abandonment of the architectural Modern Movement,1 one of the most daring attempts in history to reorder the city, urbanists continue to issue tight statements on what the city is or should become, although they have toned down their rhetoric and changed their focus. In the wake of seminal critiques during the 1960s and 1970s by Lynch (1960), Jacobs (1961) and Venturi (1972), all of whom encourage looking well beyond the Modern Movements technological and functional reading, todays urbanists extol the image, variety and complexity of the existing city. It is still commonplace, however, to hear the city described in terms much narrower than our varied experiences in it. Over the past 20 years, a set of urban designs and theories has emerged that illustrates the ongoing tendency to encase cities within exclusive systems. Encompassing the works of architects, planners, historians and critics, they may be grouped under the following movements: (1) traditional urbanism, which strives to renew the golden age of city building at the turn of the century overshadowed by the Modern Movement and the automobile age; (2) marketplace scenarios that ask us to accept the unplanned, vehicle-impelled and
Mitchell Schwarzer, California College of Arts and Crafts, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA. Fax: (415) 703 9524. Email: Mschwarzer@ccac-art.edu
1357 4809 Print/1469 9664 Online/00/020127-18 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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immensely popular growths on the edges of metropolitan areas; (3) social analyses that seek to impart heightened critical awareness of the injustices of capitalist urban development; and (4) conceptual designs that aim to exceed customary frames of understanding in order to recognize and accelerate the citys prodigious inventiveness. Formulating these urban movements is a tricky endeavour. Several of them can only be loosely de ned as movements; they more closely approximate shared paths of inquiry. Concentrating on these four movements also excludes other recent speculations on the city such as ecology and feminism.2 Nevertheless, assembling and contrasting these four movements has the potential to create a mixed reading of the contemporary city, one that captures its astonishing diversity and endless turmoil. The city, I believe, can be found not within one movement or another, but only amid the con ictive and shifting relations between movements. At rst glance, the four movements seem to share little with each other; there is obvious discord as to how the city should be designed and how it should be understood. The city is represented alternatively through indigenous typology, popular desire, civic critique and transgressive performance. Traditional and market-place urbanists tend to take a prescriptive and normative orientation. Social and conceptual urbanists are likely to be theoretical and open-ended. Yet, amid these differences are some important commonalities. All of the contemporary movements refrain from resolving urban problems in a utopian gesture that would eradicate the existing city. Nor do any of them posit urban design or theory as an autonomous, scienti c discipline. Stepping back from the totalizing approaches of Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, todays city is confronted from within its existing details and particulars as well as its ongoing transformations. As Rowe & Koetter (1978, p. 6) write from now on, let us desist from intellectualist vanity and let us be content to replicate things as they are, to observe a world unreconstructed by the arrogance of would-be philosophers but as the mass of humanity prefers it to be useful, real and densely familiar . In what follows, I will closely examine the four movements introduced above, and investigate how their divergent approaches constitute a new terrain for reading the city through its differences the city over owing itself. Within the space of opposition between these movements we may begin to grasp aspects of the gap between the city revealed in closure (i.e. the exclusive proposals of an individual movement) and the city open to arguments, counter-arguments and digressions (i.e. the assembled discourse of movements). Today, the US city is a thickly marked canvas; where the languid porch swings and picket fences of Victorian America look out onto roads that lead to nervous ribbons of car commerce; where persistent inequalities of societal wealth coexist with dreams of perfect technological futures. The city yields no singular presence or message. The city, like language, as described by Wittgenstein (1953, p. 82) is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about . Railroading Tradition The rst contemporary urban movement appeals to nostalgia for a traditional urbanism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Abandoned is the futurism of the Modern Movement. Substituted is a glance back to an age of grids, public

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squares, moderately dense housing and pedestrian corridors: the middle-class commuter suburb or small town as it appeared in the USA before the widespread adoption of the car and modernist architecture. Such attitudes are the basis for the movement consecrated by the architect Leon Krier and known alternatively as neo-traditional planning or the new urbanism. (They have recently been embraced by the Disney Corporation for its new town at Celebration, Florida.) Traditional urbanism is structured around an opposition between the placelessness of the modern vehicular city and the meaningful places of the 19th and early 20th century town or commuter suburb. Almost all of its designers or writers complain of the post-Second World War automotive suburbs privatized environments. Sexton (1995, p. 15) tells us that Automobile suburbia is a manifestation of the devolution of community from a shared realm with shared purpose to an amalgamation of closely bunched, independent mini-estates . Instead of gated compounds, repetitive chain stores, desolate of ce parks and interminable traf c arteries, traditional urbanists envision towns of abundant public parks and relatively dense housing, towns centred around rail depots and cosy civic and retail town centres. For at least one of the movements principal architects, Peter Calthorpe, the residential and commercial density encouraged by railways is the route to contemporary urban salvation. He proposes an overhaul of far- ung suburbia according to the wisdom of city design during the era of rail transportation. The urbanized region should, Calthorpe (1994, p. xi) writes, be like a neighborhood, be structured by public space, its circulation system should support the pedestrian, it should be both diverse and hierarchical and it should have discernible edges .3 His recently completed The Crossings neighbourhood in Mountain View, California, demonstrates these ideas on the site of a former 1970s shopping centre. The other principal traditionalist architects, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, concur with Calthorpe that automotive suburbia disrupts community and prevents human-scale architecture. Through traditional neighbourhood district (TOD) projects like Seaside on the Florida Panhandle the set for The Truman Show (1998) or Kentlands in Maryland they underscore the `natural logic of Victorian-era neighbourhood design and its public squares and grids. Over the past decade, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have designed a large number of pedestrian towns, articulated by commercial centres and village greens and often surrounded by nature preserves (Duany & Plater-Zyberk, 1991, 1993). Like their most famous predecessor, the UK town planner Raymond Unwin, these Miami architects believe that inef ciency and ugliness result from a dearth of rigorous planning and standards of architectural conduct. Unwin (1909) earlier proposed that good city design should reorder the misshapen modern city by way of rules that worked in the past. Likewise, through legislated design codes that mandate everything from optimal neighbourhood size to street/block patterns and residential building materials, Duany and Plater-Zyberk proclaim that town planning is an important route to meaningful community.4 To much the same extent as their modernist antagonists, who blamed urban chaos on a lack of planning, traditional urbanists believe in the power of design to change urban behaviour. Yet, traditionalists resituate their urban ideal from the future to the past; their urbanism is to be realized from old-fashioned buildings and plans instead of technological dreams. The neo-traditional town looks a lot different from its modernist (or suburban, for that matter) counter-

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part. Mixed-use districts replace functionally differentiated zones. Back yards shrink in size as public parks multiply. Fine-grained historicist design extending from blocks to lots, buildings, porches and the smallest ornamental detail takes the place of sweeping superblocks or enclosed, housing-only subdivisions. Although traditional urbanists proclaim the importance of conscious precepts for city building, they deny that their rules are akin to the abstractions of modernism. They accordingly eschew the avant-garde posture of the architect as creative artist and prophet of unforeseen and great things to come. Traditional planning is depicted as pragmatic and populist, a restoration of the ways and manners of city building that appealed to most people in the past and still make the most common sense. The means by which traditional urbanists hope to restore urban community differ greatly, however, from conditions during their age of inspiration, the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For one thing, in locating their golden age of city design in the era of railways and laissez-faire capitalism, traditionalists advocate a notion of community at odds with earlier sociological de nitions. One hundred years ago, rail-induced industrialization was greatly criticized for creating a vast and explosive metropolitan society (or Gesellschaft ). It was a major reason for a series of calls to arms by sociologists like Friedrich To nnies for the restoration of authentic pre-modern community (or Gemeinschaft ). Likewise, during the 19th century, the capitalist age was lambasted by architectural advocates of community such as A. W. N. Pugin, who sought to resuscitate Catholic, medieval times, and William Morris, who proposed a socialist handcrafts utopia. Paradoxically, traditional urbanists propose to restore community from economic and technological conditions that were rst identi ed with its demise.5 From the new urbanists viewpoint, commerce and rail-in ected urbanism are integral to the values of mainstream Americans, if not Europeans. In this sense, traditionalists promise to tap into an essential, if obscured, reservoir of middleclass US attitudes on urban space. We are given to believe that at one time industrial capitalism combined with village democracy to create the authentic US urban model the traditional town. Presumably, if planners and architects become sensitive to this model, the silent majoritys preference for stable, centred and pedestrian communities will be met. Terms like `common values, `pragmatism and `freedom of choice are also the buzzwords of mainstream real-estate developers. They, too, claim to develop architecture that meets the best interests and desires of the American people. Despite the considerable attention and numerous commissions given to new urbanists in recent years, their historical models, old commuter rail suburbs and small rail towns, continue each year to lose population to new suburban development. The malling and sprawling of the country continues apace. Perhaps traditional urbanism is not the preferred design strategy for most Americans (Feldman & Jaffe, 1992). The Markets Edge Market-place urbanism is characterized by the immense nancial, technological and political energies that are developing the edges of the contemporary city.6 According to Boyer (1996, pp. 138 139), the city today seems to stimulate a complex switchboard of plug-in zones and edge cities connected through an

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elaborate network of highways, telephones, computer banks, ber-optic cable lines, and television and radio outlets . Since the Second World War, a new (sub)urban society has emerged in the USA, one where the fragmented, repetitive and endless plots of television soap operas have replaced storytelling and older forms of face-to-face community (Silverstone, 1997). Understood through vehicular movement and social detachment, marketplace urbanism consecrates the frontier, the lands that once seemed remote from the city centre and insigni cant by comparison. These images are central to Fishmans (1987) Bourgeois Utopias and Garreaus (1991) Edge City. These books capture a mentality that operates within the leading extremities of capital-driven urbanism, those nodes of dynamic intensity coalescing around the intersections of major freeways, atop tens of thousands of acres of farmland or waste land, on the borders of existing cities. The city suddenly seems everywhere, and in some metropolitan regions stretches for over 100 miles. These extensive cities are far less dense and far more functionally strati ed than earlier cities. They are masterpieces of horizontality, hugging the ground and its wires and tyres of infrastructure. Whereas traditional urbanists condemn exclusive reliance on the car, Garreau sees this reliance as the elixir of city life. At the vehicular edge, dwelling, work and shopping break free from their dependency on rail centres and corridors. Edge cities soar beyond inner-city constraints of land assembly, zoning regulation and high tax rates; they exploit fears of crime through privatized space, and desires for comfort and convenience via car-accessible and climatized space. Insofar as traditionalists advocate centric planning, Fishman (1987, p. 185) argues that polycentric, privatized dwelling has replaced the centric downtown: the members of the household create their own city from the multitude of destinations that are within suitable driving distance . More and more, cities resemble collections of linguistic idiolects (i.e. individualized dialects) rather than a collectively understood language. Edge cities, for Garreau, are the third great stage of US urbanism, following the age of centre-focused rail domination (1850 1920) and the initial automotive suburbanization of residence and shopping (1920 1970). Pioneered by Los Angeles, edge cities complete the process of automotive decentralization by bringing business and entertainment to the periphery. Why should such developments be seen as illogical and destructive? As Brodsly (1981, p. 23) tells us, freeways possess their own logic: In an area of sprawling suburbanization and hundreds of randomly attached communities, the freeway serves to evoke a sense of clarity and sharpness, to delineate and integrate urban space . Likewise, Bruegmanns (1992) depiction of the city goes beyond static and centric urban agglomerations organized by elites to engage the relentless dispersion emblematic of the US masses. Strip centres, mega-malls and discount warehouses are simply the most recent manifestations of a popular civilization premised on initiative, commerce and individualized transport. The automotive suburb is revolutionary and at the same time comfortable, engendered by fragmenting drives and desires yet inseparable from all-enveloping consensus. He laments: one cant help wonder why we cant accept designs that accommodate our life today, with its intensive automobile usage, just the way designers did for their own times (Bruegmann, 1992, p. 61). Depictions of edge city and suburbia zero in on the present moment, and reject the xed future of modernism as well as the xed past of traditionalism.

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Still, they are not without their own generalizing system relentless movement. At the edge, the obligatory density of pedestrian or rail urbanity is replaced by the virtual density created by the car, aeroplane television and computer. People, so the argument goes, will create their own communities as they see t the city existing at a distance. Thus, public space is disassociated from objects and places, and reassembled within technologies of motion and communication. This framework implies, of course, a steady attempt on the part of individuals to disassociate themselves from problems that arise from spatial proximity, and, by implication, societal obligation. However, market-place urbanism is not merely a ight from adversity. It also represents a startling confederation of individual desire and commodity sales. As integral parts of the market-place, individuals of the edge city presumably identify their innermost desires with materialistic accumulation, and hence with market forces (Alliez & Feher, 1982). Market research becomes a partner to personal development and imagination. Logically, the physical city that emerges is a mirror of the corporate ego as much as the individual ego. At the edge, the city is formed and deformed by middle-class market pressures a perpetual, de-densifying explosion from the Big Bang of the Industrial Revolution and the birth of bourgeois individuality. In the spirit of bourgeois liberalism, Garreau (1991, p. 222) writes of the creation of edge cities as being problem-driven, not ideology-driven: The developers had spent lifetimes laboring to uncover what they regarded as the veri able, non-theoretical realities that govern human behavior. They had then gone out and built an entire world around their understanding of what Americans demonstrably and reliably valued. Their unshakeable observation was this: if they gave the people what they wanted, the people would give them money. The city is to be designed and built by developers and marketers, the very representatives of urban chaos condemned by the Modern Movement. Traditional urbanists also proclaim ideology-free design. Yet, they speak about pragmatism from within the architectural and planning professions, sharing high modernisms fear of rampant real-estate development. Inasmuch as both traditional and market-place urbanists profess to speak a mainstream, pragmatic urban language, whom are we to believe? Can Pragmatism be identi ed at the same moment with both architect/planners and marketer/developers? For market-place urbanists, the massive scale of suburban development and the economic power of edge cities are proof of their harmony with popular values. No more evidence is needed. Pragmatism is identi ed with what sells. By contrast, traditional urbanists bring up market distortion, the idea that sales strategies stress rst impressions and a super cial satisfaction of desire. New homes, Langdon (1994, p. 63) writes, are choreographed, see-through houses, predicated on the idea that the bigger the view and the more dramatic the progression of spaces, the better the house will sell . Other, longer-lasting needs and desires are thus sublimated to how people will rst see the house and how they will be persuaded to buy it, not how they react to living in it.7 What sells is sizzle and not the beef. Another difference between traditional and market-place urbanists is their respective convictions regarding the appropriate scale and character of community. Traditional urbanists present us with an urban environment of highly

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articulated, pedestrian-oriented spaces that foster high-quality interactions between people. Since stability of place is more important than movement, buildings and spaces that pre-date the privatized late 20th century city libraries, cultural facilities, parks, broad pavements and tree-lined boulevards receive prominence. The fact remains that most of these spaces and institutions were forged within the industrializing city of the 19th century. They represented a reaction to the confusion and alienation that emerged in the new industrial society and a modelling of behaviour on the dwindling court society of the aristocracy. Market-place urbanism cares little for either high European culture or grand public space. In a world of dizzying fashion trends where terms like `lowbrow and `highbrow have blended, traditional urbanisms reverence for history and its hierarchical models are thrown aside. The market-place city is geared to global and temporal simultaneity, and the possibility of all forms coming together in the interests of commerce and entertainment. The market-place citys temporality is not the languid pace of the gilded age, but the relentless velocity and simulated conduct of popular culture and privatized movement. This is an urbanism of City Walk in Los Angeles, the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas or the new Times Square in New York, synthetic non-places that distort any understanding of their historic models or the nearby existing city. Oddly enough, despite their utterly different diagnoses of pragmatism and community, both traditional and market-place urbanists prescribe ideals of continuity. They each paint the contemporary city as a middle-class entity emerging from earlier US mores. For example, the shopping mall can no longer be depicted as the antithesis to the town centre. All over the country, the community-focused and multi-faceted experiences of the traditionalist town centre are being redeveloped for new themed malls. Because of increased economic and entertainment competition, malls can no longer be simply places to shop. They are the full centres of their societies, focal points for diversion, adventure and circumscribed human contact. On the other side of things, the convenient parking and controlled environment of the mall are being copied to redevelop traditional town centres. All in all, the mall may be seen as an outgrowth of earlier socio-commodity relations within new physical scales and technologies of movement. It replicates the self-contained spaces of the traditional city in perimeter centres, creating privatized mercantile environments that displace the retail experience from the unpredictable streetscape to the controlled and climatized garden (Kieran & Timberlake, 1991). At the edge, we experience anonymous freeway rhythms, but also highly ordered places.8 The choice between traditional and market-place urbanism boils down to the persuasiveness of their models of middle-class desire. The market-place position avoids the label of nostalgia by bringing up, over and over again, the evidence of current development patterns. The city should be, so the argument goes, as it is becoming. Still, if we delve deeper, the market-place city is not so easily perceived. As much as traditional urbanism grasps an idealized past, the reality of the market-place city is made up of abstractions. As a case in point, real-estate and economic descriptions of the city rely far less on observations of visible conditions than on modelling techniques that measure potentialities. In predicting the determinates of new suburban growth, for instance, real-estate analysts typically focus on leading indicators that necessarily exclude more than they include.9 The

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city is measured not only through its visible conglomerations of steel and concrete, but also via abstract indicators like tax rates and land-ownership transactions. Furthermore, purchases for investment purposes may precede land development by more than 20 years. This latent image of the city is no less vital than its built counterpart (Pond & Yeates, 1994). Real-estate models of the city, while seemingly encapsulating popular taste, actually track the movements of capital over time. A couple of important questions emerge. If urban continuity and its insinuation of middle-class satisfaction are based on capital movement, should we regard such movement as the true determinate for urban design? Is the edge city the urban future for all people? The Social Impacts of Capital

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Stimulated by delayed reactions to Lefebvres (1974) The Production of Space, a number of economists, geographers and historians would answer those questions in the negative. They paint a discontinuous picture of how capital movements, class division and the reproduction of the social relations of production constitute the city. As Smith (1984) comments, the attraction of capital to new suburban development leads to a denial of capital elsewhere, especially in the inner city and in older suburbs.10 Spatial differentiation and the dramatic wealth of edge cities are products of the unpredictable rhythms of capitalism: uneven development is the concrete manifestation of the production of space under capitalism (Smith, 1984, p. 90).11 While a goal of much middle-class striving, the edge city serves as the antithesis of traditional urban yearning and the alternative life-styles favoured by many of suburbias children. On this note, Harvey (1989, p. 184) writes in anticipation of arguments against the edge city: Most of the vivacity and color of modern life, in fact, arises precisely out of the spirit of revulsion and revolt against the dull, colorless, but seemingly transcendental powers of money in abstract and universal time and space . Like Smith, Harvey depicts the city as a space of structured separations and fragmented desires. Yet, unlike the order imposed by traditional urbanists, Harvey is less sanguine about the possibility of restoring any notion of community in a cosmos rolling to the cadences of middle-class individualism. Social urbanism underscores areas of the city which capital ignores or ees from, the inner cities forgotten or forsaken by the vox populi. These are exempli ed by severely deteriorated and increasingly abandoned places like Gary, Indiana, East St Louis, Illinois, the North Side of Philadelphia or Richmond, California. However, they also take in immense stretches of older cities and suburbs in every metropolitan area. Ever since its creation, the industrialized US city has been an expanding merry-go-round where individuals and groups of people have been constantly leaping toward seats on the periphery or in the few enclaves of upper-middle-class society nearer to the centre. Immigrants, the poor, the elderly and minorities have typically taken the empty seats, pinning their hopes all the while on moving again toward those places where the death-mask of empty hopes and buildings does not reign. In the legacy of earlier works of social criticism, Daviss (1991) history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, is a long indictment against the ongoing denigration of urban life at the hands of unequal capital concentration, relentless business and

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real-estate competition and ceaseless social movement.12 Rather than venerating the bourgeois islands of new community and suburban capital concentration, he casts both historical and contemporary urbanization in terms of power struggles among competing elites. For all but those few people who possess large enough sums of capital to control the game, or those few apostates who opt out, Daviss story of urban life is that of an ominous struggle. The critiques of social urbanists contradict any belief that new urban manifestations for our purposes, the Tysons Corner edge city in Virginia or the new urbanist Seaside in Florida speak the dominant story of urban desire. Instead of encapsulating urbanism, the gleaming periphery and secluded village are seen as frameworks dictated by private interests and state institutions, and legitimized by questionable concepts of ef ciency and beauty (Deutsche, 1991, 1996). In large part, the notion of ef ciency describes market-place urbanisms obsession with speed, movement and convenience. By a similar token, an imitative idea of beauty cements the traditional rail town with the coded pleasures of traditional urbanism. In both cases, the city is seen through the lens of middle-class values: either rapid vehicular access to work, shopping and play; or the desire to walk and socialize with ones neighbours amidst the vernacular adaptation of classical civilization. Absent from both portraits are the inequalities of access to either utilitarian or aesthetic satisfaction. Whereas traditional and market-place urbanists stress continuity with the past or conformity with the present, social urbanists track discontinuity. Echoing certain passages in Edge City, they portray the city as a network of transformative synapses. Sorkin (1992), for example, realizes that Victorian Main Street is now exempli ed by the eight-lane stretches between airports or the simulacrum hollowed out within the Magic Kingdom. Yet, he also remarks on many of the same themes brought up in City of Quartz, noticing the new Main Street obsessions with security, surveillance, segregation and restriction of freedom and individuality, writing: The privatized city of bits is a lie, simulating its connections, obliterating the power of its citizens to act alone or to act together . (Sorkin, 1992, p. xv). For Sorkin, the new city is neither ef cient nor beautiful. It is a fantasy, a consumer theme park, whether stretching along the peripheral freeway or secluded behind the picket fence. Do social urbanists have answers for their troubling questions? Alas, especially after the fall of communism in eastern Europe and the watering down of social democracy in the West, these academics and critics accept more and more the inevitability of continued market domination over urban development. While diagnosing capital ows as the cause of uneven development, they seek to curb only the most destructive aspects of market ows. Still, it would be rash to say that social urbanism excludes all visions of temporal transcendence. In terms almost as futuristic as those of modernism, Sorkin (1993, p. 128) calls for a new collective utopian document for the city, stressing a new genius loci discovered in both the con ict and the companionability of numerous and augmenting physical vectors . Social urbanism, in this sense of formal experimentation, begins to sound like the conceptual urbanism discussed below. On the other side of the spectrum, social urbanism can sound like traditional urbanism. Daviss (1994) prescriptions for the city raise the idea of restoration: natural landscape; mass transit; public space; and social citizenship rights. Even so, aside from brief moments perhaps the City Beautiful Movement, the New

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Deal or the Great Society such city visions were never ubiquitous in US culture. Daviss objects for restoration, like those of the new urbanists, are much more an ideal future than a real past. In the end, social urbanism is driven by an unattainable Messianism. Social urbanists continue Marxian notions of teleological historical destiny. The existing city is unjust and corrupt, the middle position between an earlier state of pre-agricultural paradise and a hoped-for state of post-industrial bliss; it is a foul place that must be reformed. Given the current lack of faith in totalizing systems, developmental history and utopias, however, social urbanists get stuck in their bleak middle position. They present us with a saga that leads to calls for reform yet remains mired in chaos. The citys future is guided by the necessity of utopia, yet has no real hope for that utopia. Given its critique of what should constitute the city and the likelihood that that truth will not be realized, due to the dominion of global capital, social urbanism is a form of tragic utopianism.

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Conceptual Diagrams So far we have discussed three different readings of the city: historicist; consumerist; and censuring. In a formal sense, the city has been described through ne-grained housing, town centres, superstores and four-car garages, or through contrasts between gated communities and abandoned neighbourhoods. Politically speaking, urban theories have been based on middle-class conventions, middle-class consumerism or the rejection of middle-class inequality. A more radical attitude toward urbanism is expressed in the recent proposals of the architectural (neo-)avant-gardes. These conceptual urbanists attempt to shake off assumptions of what the city was, is or should be. Lynn (1997, p. 54) tells us that the classical models of pure, static, essentialized, timeless form and structure are no longer adequate to describe the contemporary city and the activities that it supports . The city can only be described as indescribable. As such, we appreciate the city for its uid instabilities as well as its inertia of material residue (Bell & Leong, 1998). With special reference to Houston, Lerup (1995, pp. 88, 98) sees the post-Second World War US city as endless and oceanic, crude and wild: a partially self-steering, partially spontaneous, yet cybernetic agglutination of forces, pulsations, events, rhythms, and machines . Following the legacy of the Situationist International (a radical journal published 1957 1972) of Guy Debord and Constant, conceptual urbanism is fascinated with immediate encounters with uncharted geographies and unknown histories, the idea that within the given city are an almost in nite number of palpable and psychological provocations. One of the founding texts of conceptual urbanism, Tschumis (1981) The Manhattan Transcripts, displaces understanding of the city from objects to events. Like the frame in cinema, urban space is prepared and experienced moment by moment, shot by shot. Granted, the experience of any given space produces an illusion of immediacy and succession. Yet, these characteristics are continually thwarted: reality is made in nitely malleable, so that emotive, dramatic, or poetic attributes can change and unfold (Tschumi, 1981, p. 12). Perception of the city in Tschumis language of lm is a masquerade of performance that cannot be pinned down to a single perspective. Absent are the aesthetics of traditional urbanism, the populism of market-place urbanism and the dissent of social urbanism.13

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A similar point of view is raised in Virilios (1991) The Lost Dimension. Pre-industrial cities, according to the French urban planner, possessed a horizon of bodily expectations, rm boundaries, entrances through gates or arches and central squares. They resembled the proposals of todays traditionalists. However, the highways and jetways of the modern city changed all of that. Sounding like a market-place advocate, Virilio describes the modern city as a ight from constraints and collective meanings. However, leaving the freeway for the screen, Virilio (1991, p. 13) speaks to a future city of information, where deprived of objective boundaries, the architectonic elements begin to drift and oat in an electronic ether, devoid of spatial dimensions, but inscribed in the singular temporality of an instantaneous diffusion . For this emerging city, neither past nor present will mean anything. Nor will old oppositions between the spaces of public and private or sacred and profane. Extension and duration will collapse onto an optical plane, while the human machine interactions of the public forum and privatized freeway will be replaced by the instantaneousness of the cathode-ray screen (Virilio, 1991). Virilios post-modern city no longer needs Venturis Las Vegas, even if it is increasingly a centre of entertainment capital. Hollywood gives us Las Vegas and much more. Monuments are no longer visible form: they are mobile diagrams. The city, in the spirit of earlier proposals of the UK group Archigram, has become a fast-moving object structured for change (Chalk et al., 1991). In conceptual urbanism, the city is understood through subversions of customary categories and understandings: the perspectival gaze of a static subject that allows depth to be read into surfaces; gure ground distinctions that permit objects to be seen apart from one another; linear temporalities that establish notions of historical authenticity as well as modalities of past present future; and causality that depicts a necessary unfolding of events. Any Archimedean point or system from which to analyse and make sense of the urban condition is unattainable. In the words of architect and urbanist Stan Allen, the city is a bottom-up phenomenon de ned by its intricate local connections: a eld of ineffable effects suspended in an ether of immaterial signs (Allen, 1999, pp. 14, 92). Another, related aspect of conceptual urbanism amounts to a dispersion of the architect or writer into the maelstrom of the city. The suppositions used to design and negotiate the city, in other words, are akin to those of language. The designer or writer, like the word within a language, is both structured and liberated by the ambiguous syntax of city form and space. Architects and urban critics cannot step outside their drawings and words into streets and plazas, and thus cannot claim that their texts bear a closer relationship to the reality of the city than to the language games of urban theory and design. Like cities, urbanists too must become fast-moving objects structured for change. Meanwhile, in both its subversive and linguistic senses, conceptual urbanism engages older notions of the city. For instance, the digital metaphor of the city proceeds out of a attening of the perspectival facade drawings that once constituted Renaissance attitudes to the city as a staged theatre. The city, formerly visulized as a body in boundaried space, is now viewed as a farreaching and amorphous web of electronic synapses. Likewise, the cinematic metaphor of the city challenges perception that unfolds in linear fashion in order to develop new meanings out of fragmentation and contingency. Urban design spirals out from the ssures and sideways glances between frames of vision and

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reproduction. Wired into exile from the past, conceptual urbanism promises a wild journey toward an unpredictable future. In Delirious New York (1978), Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas proposes one such future, a hyper-dense architectural culture opposed to modernist denunciations of congestion. Unlike modernisms vision to resolve the socio-physical contradictions of the city, Koolhaas sees those contradictions as thresholds to new possibilities. The coincidence of New York Citys rigid grid and its outrageous skyscraper verticality is celebrated as an example of urban vitality born out of limits: Through fantastic technology it will be possible to reproduce all situations from the most natural to the most arti cial wherever and whenever desired (Koolhaas, 1978, p. 105). Koolhaas argues that urbanists need to reach out to the immensities of the future from the agitations of the present. Instead of sentimental cities of single-point perspective or steady spatial rhythms, instead of nostalgia for the real and condemnations of simulacra, Koolhaas proposes thundering material agglomerations arising from the white-hot res of technological ux and emotional obsession. Meanwhile, he celebrates individual desire through heightened sociability and not suburban seclusion; similarly, he creates massive concrete, glass and steel structures within deforming and multiple and remote forces of energy and movement. Described in S, M, L, XL (Of ce of Metropolitan Architecture et al., 1995), urban design becomes the staging of uncertainty, concerned not with objects but with the irrigation of territories of potential; focused less on stable information or form than on the creation of enabling elds that accommodate irresolute processes. Koolhaass city embraces a random future, but always a future in excess of the present and the past and in excess of the other. Here too, as in the other urbanisms, there is exclusion. Like post-modern philosophy in general, conceptual urbanisms anti-foundationalism is its foundation. Like most academic endeavours, too these are top-down proposals. Despite calls for connectivity and complexity, conceptual urbanisms refusal of tradition, populism and social ethics is one-sided, not nearly as diverse or paradoxical as the city itself. The City in Discourse The four movements of urbanism re ect a range of methods of design, study and intervention. As I have attempted to point out, these methods and recommendations were not developed in isolation. They grew out of an exchange of ideas both with earlier approaches (e.g. the Modern Movement and the City Beautiful Movement) and with each other. Approached as an interlocking discourse, these movements depict the contemporary city comprehensively yet incoherently. Indeed, the frequent moments of tension between these movements begin to shape the parameters of a discursive urbanism where meaning is not a given, but a constant process of building, alteration and demolition. First off, I would like to mention several alliances among urban movements formed out of disagreement with other movements. Traditional and marketplace urbanists both see themselves as encapsulating pervasive, middle-class values; social and conceptual urbanists critique the emancipated bourgeois individual as an illusion. Elsewhere, traditional and social urbanists join in taking a reformist position; market-place and conceptual urbanists are, for the

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most part, visionaries and much more willing to learn from the current urban scene. Finally, traditional urbanists have more in common with conceptual urbanists with regard to their preoccupation with architectural form and the use of applied theory; market-place and social urbanists are both absorbed with vernacular development from the vantage point of meta-theory. Another way to demonstrate the overlapping differences among the four urban movements is to look into how each of them understands the city within the dimension of time. Distinctive ways are employed to understand where the `now is coming from and leading to. Traditional urbanists advocate re-establishing temporal continuity from an earlier point in history, coupled with a huge dose of design control and planning. From their points of view, temporal continuity without planning has resulted in chaotic motor-vehicle suburbia; yet, planning with utopia in mind resulted in the lifeless projects of the Modern Movement. The temporal sequence of traditional urbanism, in the light of these objections, urges back-pedalling over half a century in order to recover what it regards as a more authentic US urban framework. Then, working from that framework, earlier architectural forms, land use patterns and planning practices condemned by the modernists and superseded by suburban developers are to be redeveloped and extended in continuous fashion into the future. Market-place urbanists advocate temporal continuity without any backpedalling or planning. They look neither to modernisms utopian future nor to traditionalisms authentic past. Instead, they embrace urban development as an ongoing disassociation of its constituent parts and histories, swearing by private initiative and its promise of a democratic alternative to utopian and authoritarian master planning. The market-place vision of city development is tuned to the rhythms of commerce as created by popular demand and accepts the vast stretches of city being continually developed and redeveloped by commercial forces. A loose, open-ended city is announced where time is understood in the present tense and via short-term, fashion-dependent interests. Positioned against the market-place, social urbanists reject the uneven consequences of commodity capitalism. Even more vociferously than traditionalists, they dismiss most aspects of the existing US city and suburb. Given the fervour of their critiques, social urbanist ideas start to resemble the moral imperatives and utopian strategies of the Modern Movement. However, since social urbanists do not propose a utopian city, they depict the city more in the present than in the future tense, and stress urban ills to a greater extent than prognoses for future betterment. Their city vision is the present-focused obverse of marketplace urbanism an ongoing social battleground between the forces of capitalism and the mass of discontented or deceived humanity. In conceptual urbanism, a host of aspects of the existing city, many roundly criticized by social urbanists and traditionalists, are reworked into a strategy for the citys relentless transformation. Unlike the other urbanisms, which denounce chaos and congestion, conceptual urbanists experiment out from disruption and disorder. Furthermore, the dimension of time is not understood for the authenticity of the past, the reality of the present or the necessity of the future. Linear time is dispensed with altogether in favour of other temporalities described through random collage or repetitive reworking. Granted, conceptual urbanists observe the temporal destabilizations of media/technological innovations as much as market-place urbanists. Nonetheless, they oppose a city constructed

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primarily by popular/corporate taste and propose, instead, challenging architectural/urbanistic plans and interventions. During the period when many commentators have complained that the constituent parts of US cities and suburbs are becoming homogeneous links in a great corporate chain, the contemporary eld of urban design and theory has demonstrated pervasive heterogeneity. This heterogeneity in the ordering and understanding of the city leads to a picture of the city over owing itself. Each of the four movements works from certain common criteria of what constitutes a city: the physical product of social interaction, enabled by modes of communication and transportation and resulting in levels of density that exceed those of the countryside. Yet, each movement favours different means of communication/transportation, different levels of density and different de nitions of social interaction. Traditionalists endorse a moderately dense pedestrian- and rail-in ected city where inadvertent and fact-to-face contact is the basis for sociability. Market-place urbanists praise modes of transport (e.g. motor vehicles) and communication (e.g. cell phones) that lead to a sprawling city where people are able to choose solitude (in the home) or society (at the mall). Social urbanists are less particular about their ideal modes of transport or density, and are more concerned with the obstructions that capitalism places in the way of both movement (e.g. congestion and pollution) and gathering (e.g. crime and poorly maintained public spaces). Conceptual urbanists want cities of cutting-edge transportation (e.g. high-speed rail), electronic communication and other infrastructural matrices that facilitate new urban content and expression. Bringing these different movements into order would create a uniform urbanism. Yet, that would be a task too great for any architect or writer or even a grouping of such individuals, as the experiences of the past point out. More importantly, however, it would be a task at odds with the pluralistic tenor of our times and the ceaselessly changing nature of the city. Even if cities are increasingly under the hegemony of global capital, the random and erratic nature of that totalizing gaze manifests itself differently in every local situation. The differences between urban movements on the same issues the dimension of time, the mode of transportation and communication, the level of density and the manner of social interaction demonstrate that contemporary urbanism can be no more a uniform doctrine than the contemporary city a uniform series of buildings, spaces and traf c arteries. The city encompasses a multitude of temporal dimensions that many of us move through on a regular basis: immaculate historic districts, themed parks or malls, placeless real-estate developments abandoned ghost wards (Schwarzer, 1998) virtual screen cities and moments of lofty architecture. Likewise, the city is negotiated by the same people in mixed ways, inclusive of feet, bicycles, buses, trains, planes, automobiles, telephones, web sites and emails. In terms of density, US cities range from the closely packed yet gentrifying tenements of New Yorks Lower East Side to the 2 and 3 acre sprawl of exurbs. Finally, our social lives rotate between increasingly exible de nitions of work and family, and between engagements on a subtle spectrum between intention and accident, whether these relate to consumption, political involvement, entertainment, sex or adventure. Approaching the city in discourse intimates an openness to these and other aspects of the urban condition. Instead of a utopian destiny or historical groundwork, the city in discourse encourages a transient and heterogeneous approach to urban design and theory. Greater understanding is sought, but not

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reductive simplicity; the city is presented via speci c interventions interwoven and often at odds with each other. An important goal of a discursive approach is to problematize and not systematize the city. However, this activity should not be seen as negative. Rather, it supports the creation of openings for mixed messages and their offspring a greater density of urban theory and design. The city is not the best of its parts, the sum of its parts or a whole greater than its parts, but the possibility of new eruptions from among the parts. Advanced is an urban scene visualized through an over ow of viewpoints shot through multiple exposures, developed out of focus and observed at many openings. Such mixed moments open the city to possibilities that would not be apparent in an urbanism of crystalline focus or systematic closure. As Macherey (1978, p. 101) wrote on literary texts, It is not a question of perceiving a latent structure of which the manifest work is an index, but of establishing that absence around which a real complexity is knit . Something similar is true of perceiving and understanding the city. Approaching urbanism from an absence or gap, formed out of the relations between movements, encourages new designs and theories of the city to emerge from what has been said, what has been contradicted and what has gone unsaid. The absence created between these movements is a set of doors leading to other visions of the city. It is a space from which the citys uncontrollable unfolding may be debated (and extended) by theorists and designers from widely different viewpoints. The irregular nature of these discursive gaps or absences encourages nonpolarizing approaches. All too often, as witnessed in the discussions of the four movements above, urban designs and theories ow apart from each other via bi-polar constructions. Positions are established through generalizations and oppositions. Cities must be this or that. They cannot be nostalgic and experimental, enamoured with cars and pedestrian movement, preoccupied with the freedom and catastrophe of capitalism or engaged with form and eld. Because they are set against each other, the cities described or envisioned by each of the four movements are reduced and impoverished. They are far less than the city. Instead of victorious detachment, I am arguing for scenarios where urban movements seek each other out, build upon and pilfer from each other and begin to nd greater interest in messy, ongoing interaction. An urbanism emerging from the gaps in discourse, rather than from an outside foundational position, is always compromised, provisional and collective. Such postpositional creation of (or re ection on) future cities is therefore a work without an ideal structure. It is a work in progress. It is, most of all, a work in common with an other. At the same time, a discursive urbanism would no more accept the status quo of cities than would any of the four movements discussed in this article. I am not advocating an urbanism concurrent with the everyday, with the in nite and unchartable perceptions and experiences of millions upon millions of people, or an urbanism coinciding with raw sensation, that which is prior to thought and language. Such acts would amount to an undiscriminating mirroring of theory with apparent reality. On the contrary, I believe that a discursive urbanism can work toward different realities from a closer engagement with how we perceive and conceive realities. Described in a different context by Levinas (1969, p. 76), discourse or Language does not refer to the generality of concepts, but lays the foundations for a possession in common .

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In conclusion, I have engaged the contrapuntal melodies of four different movements on the contemporary city in order to begin theorizing a discursive space in common that embodies the complexity and otherness behind urban life. If we wish to better align urban theory and design with urban perception and experience, we must become more familiar with the intersections, divides and potential harmonies between these and other urban movements. An intricate physique of attitudes, manners and understandings, the city often falls together where it falls apart. Instead of repressing the dissonances between the urbanisms discussed in this essay and choosing one over the others, we might more fruitfully understand their discord as a recent expression of the phrase Stadtluft, a term that has for centuries associated the air of cities with freedom of thought and action.

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Notes
1. Between the late 1920s and the 1950s, architects like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Jose Luis Sert, acting through organizations like the Congre s Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM), attempted to shape universal urban order out of the chaos of laissez-faire capitalis m (see Schwarzer, 1997). For a discussion of some of these theories, see Ellin (1999). See also Calthorpe (1993). In an analysis of Seasides code, Neil Levine (1991) claims they have achieved precisely this end, noting a turn away from the social escapism encapsulated by the glass picture window of the modern house. By contrast, Seasides codes mandating gridded streets and porch-screens connect the private world of the family and the public world of community. Supposedly, the world of the glance (of myriad architectural details mandated by the code and of social interactions between homes and the pavement) replaces that of the gaze (the isolated view out onto the sea). Traditional urbanists depart as well from the foundational de nition of typology developed by Gottfried Semper in the 19th century. Semper had articulate d typology as a continuum of change responding to the historical unfolding of new spiritual and material conditions. Dating back to the 19th century, US public policy has greatly contributed to suburban development and urban dispersion, as described in Warner (1978) and Weiss (1987). Still, are not the condensed design charettes of new urbanists (lasting usually a couple of days) merely a different sort of hard sell? On the subject of continuity, Garreau (1991) betrays faith in the swirl of freeway vertigo when he writes that edge cities are somehow incomplete. Bringing up the example of unplanned yet immensely beautiful Venice, he predicts that edge cities will someday acquire the complexity, diversity and size of such historic cities. Edge city becomes a continuation of urban history since early modern Europe, only played out in a faster lane. For instance, Ewing (1990) locates potential urban growth through the parameters of critical population mass, number of large employers, continuity under a single master developer and overall population growth of the region. In so doing, he necessarily devalues other possible indicators, such as ethnic make-up, topography, wind patterns and cultural history. In a different vein one which idealizes urbanity in places like Manhattan Sharpe & Wallock (1994) argue that suburbia is a domain largely exclusive of minorities and the poor. These arguments are developed further in Smith (1996). See also Davis (1998). In his description of Parc de la Villette, Tschumi (1994, p. 203) describes an architecture that means nothing, an architecture of the signi er rather than the signi ed one that is pure trace or place of language .

2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

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