Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
DACT
1 9 9 9
CARTAS URBANAS
lgo se mueve, parece obvio. Pero las explicaciones que nos llegan del fenmeno urbano contemporneo son complejas. No es fcil abarcarlo todo ni tener una visin global del fenmeno.
Editorial
Porque, una cuestin es tratar de desenmaraar o explicar lo que ocurre, incluso asumirlo, y otra diferente
es encontrar pautas para intervenir en el espacio urbano. Muchas veces ambas cosas van unidas y no siempre es posible separarlas.
Algunos discursos son enormemente paradjicos, como aquel de atribuir a los urbanistas (quienes y
donde?) una especie de capacidad histrica para controlar el desarrollo urbano y, al mismo tiempo, predicar actitudes tales como la que debe asumir la realidad existente, haciendo una supresin de juicios de valor
de la misma.
La complejidad econmica y sociolgica del mundo actual (parece que no queda otro remedio que
hablar de la aldea global) no permite, a nuestro entender, adoptar una actitud pasiva. Actitudes
de este tipo se acercan mucho a los presupuestos de la sociologa funcionalista que supone que la
ciudad solo sufre disfuncionalidades. Parece haberse olvidado lo ya hace ya muchos aos se
puso de manifiesto: que existen causas estructurales que estn en la propia forma de produccin
del espacio.
Y por otro lado, nos encontramos con la descontextualizacin de los discursos. Existe la tendencia (corren
vientos del oeste) de juzgarlo todo, de forma genrica, sobre la base de la experiencia de fenmenos que
ocurren en lugares muy concretos, sea en USA, sea en el Sudeste Asitico, y a enviar mensajes tales como
que el modelo de desarrollo urbano terminar por contaminarnos, dado el carcter global de las relaciones
econmicas.
Por eso los textos que se incluyen en este numero de CU, pretenden profundizar, con un mnimo de rigor,
en el anlisis de la fenomenologa urbana contempornea.
Ese Aleph de Jorge Luis Borjes que Edwrd Soja recrea en su Tercer spacio (v el Aleph desde todos los
puntos, v en el Aleph la tierra, y en la tierra otra vez el Aleph y en el Aleph la tierra, v mi cara y mis vsceras, v tu cara, y sent vertigo y llor, porque mis ojos haban visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo
nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningn hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo), esa postmetrpolis que avisa de un modelo que se nos avecina, esa ciudad del simulacro (simcity) , esa deconstruccion de la forma urbana (expolis), invita a la reflexin y a la toma de postura sobre fenmenos preocupantes.
En una lnea mas sociolgica que fsica, se nos habla, no ya de la falta de identidad territorial, como de los
comportamientos sociales que trae consigo el desarraigo, la no pertenencia a ninguna parte.
El espacio frugal, inmediato, cambiante, como los anuncios o las luces de nen de Time Square que relata
Christine Boyer. Lo mismo que ocurre con las nubes de Disneylandia que es lo nico que nos deja ver Sorking de este lugar, como si se tratase de trasvasar su influencia mas all de su propia localizacin. O la situacin dispar y, a veces aberrante, de todas esas ciudades de las postales de Sudjick.
Contrasta ello, de forma muy peculiar, con el discurso de Peter Marcuse sobre los gettos, vallas con alambre de espino limitando espacios, la marcada segregacin social que se producen en nuestras ciudades. Las
nuevas murallas, la recreacin de los arrabales de la ciudad islmica. Efectos y consecuencia de la defensa
de privilegios.
No deja de haber un cierto sentimiento fatalista que recuerda a a Lewis Munford cuando en los aos treinta nos relataba la evolucin de la ciudad hacia la necrpolis, ahondando en la tendencia de Spengler, Ortega y Toynbee. Ahora no son guerras y calamidades; es confusin, cambio, atemporalidad: el mundo, se
dice, de la postmodernidad.
DACT 5 2
omething is in the air. That is more than clear. However, the explanations are not simple. Urban life
is complex. There is no easy way of giving an overall picture of what is happening in the city of our
times.
Editorial
It is quite one thing to explain what is happening also but quite another to do something about it. Often the
two activities go hand in hand and it becomes impossible to separate the one from the other.
Some of the discourse is absurdly paradoxical such as when the town planners are made historically
responsible for the total control of urban development (who and where?) whilst, at one and the same time,
preaching the need to assume the existing reality and to suppress all value judgements with respect to the same.
The economic and sociological complexity of our present day world (it seems that there is no other
alternative but to speak of the global village) does not allow for one to lie back passively and accept what
is given, in our humble opinion. Attitudes of this type are very much in line with the hypotheses on which
functionalist sociology is based and which would categorise the city as suffering from mere
dysfunctionality. It would seem that we have forgotten the lessons of the Past that there are structural
reasons for all of these problems which are produced as a result of the mere activity of producing space.
There is also a certain problem with respect to the decontextualisation of the discourse on this topic. There
is a trend (which blew in from the West) to judge everything, generically, on the basis of the experiences
such as has been given in very specific places, whether this be in the USA or Southeast Asia and to send out
doomsday warnings that the model of urban development will eventually get to us all, given the global
nature of economic networks.
The texts, then, which are included in this edition of Cartas Urbanas are an attempt to delve a little deeper
into the analysis of the phenomenon of our contemporary city.
This is the Aleph of Jorge Luis Borjes as reconstructed by Edward Soja in his Third Space ( I saw Aleph
from all of its different perspectives, I saw the Earth in Aleph, Aleph in the Earth and the Earth in Aleph yet
again, I saw my face and my innards, I saw your face and I felt dizzy and I cried becuause my eyes had seen
this secret and conceptual object, whose name was used by Man but which no man had ever seen: the
inconceivable Universe), the post-metropolis which is the warning of the model which awaits us, the
simcity, the deconstruction of the city (exopolis): this is what we should meditate upon for the Future.
Motre in line with sociology than with physical geography, the various authors talk to us not so much about
lack of territorial identity as about social behaviour produced as the result of a general uprooting, of nobody
belonging to anywhere any longer.
They talk to us of frugal space, of immediate consumption, of a world in flux, changing like the neon lights
and the flashing ads of Times Square as described by Christine Boyer. Or they talk of the fantasy clouds of
Disneyland in the same place, in the words of Sorking, which flit across the skies everywhere, invading
territory outside the confines of the Park itself. And Sudjic gives us the terrifying and disparate vision of his
picture postcards from around the world.
All of these contrast quite potently with the discourse of Peter Marcuse who talks about ghettoes, barbed
wire boundaries and the marked social segregation which our cities produce. He talks about the new
citadels and the reconstruction of the walled cities of Islam which are the results and the logical
consequence of the defence of our privileges.
All of this smacks of a certain fatalism reminiscent of Lewis Mumford who, in the Thirties, told us how the
city was evolving towards becoming a necropolis much as Spengler, Toynbee and Ortega had said before
him. This is no longer the result of wars or general calamities but rather the product of confusion, change
and detachment from Time: the world of Postmodernism.
3 5 DACT
DACT 5 4
Now we talk paradoxically of the death of Space: the no-place (news from nowhere).
Evidently many of the adjectives which are used to describe this new situation only make sense when seen
within the context of speculative sociology. However, there are people that hope to make of them tools
which will modify our material reality.
Paul Virilio in a recent interview said (and I quote):
What do we lose? Do we lose anything with the division of the city? Most of the town planners deny the
reality of a virtual city of a development in real time. Either that or they say, no, no, that wont work, its
something else. Its the real city which is important, its material reality which counts and this is the root
of the question which is never asked and which I ask now. I mean, there will be two cities, one in real
time and one in real space and we will have to bring the two together or forever accept that they are
divorced.
Perhaps, by way of an antidote to all these evils, we should remember that the geographical definitions are
the roots of our cultural identity, to which we can make recourse if all else fails.
We should be alert but not alarmed. We should not deny what so many people are warning us of but we
should analyse and observe, remembering always who we are and where we come from, conscious always
of our culture and geographical roots. Its that simple and that complicated.
5 5 DACT
Edward W. Soja
Department of Urban Planning.
Universidad de California.
Los ngeles.
Between the Watts riots of 1965 and what are now called the Rodney King or Justice riots of 1992, the urban
region of Los Angeles experienced one of the most dramatic transformations of any comparable region of the
world. For the resident Angelenos of the early 1960s a radically different, an Other Los Angeles seemed to
be developing beyond their control or understanding. And it would increasingly, over time, replace many
more familiar urban worlds with shockingly new ones. Over the same period of about thirty years, a group of
local scholars have been trying to make practical and theoretical sense of this radical restructuring of Los
Angeles and to use this knowledge to understand the often equally intense urban transformations taking place
elsewhere in the world. What I would like to do here is draw upon the work of what some, perhaps
prematurely, have begun to call the Los Angeles School of urban studies, and to argue that the transformation
of Los Angeles represents both a unique urban experience and a particularly vivid example of a more general
sea change in the very nature of contemporary urban life, in what we urbanists have called the urban process.
Some have been so entranced by this urban restructuring that they proclaim it to be the most extraordinary
transformation in the nature of urbanism since the origins of the city more than 6,000 years ago. Others, only
somewhat more modestly, describe it as the second great urban transformation, after the timultuous
emergence of the nineteenth century industrial capitalist city. I tend to see it as the most recent of a series
of dramatic crisis-driven urban restucturings that have been taking place over the past 200 years. But
however one interprets the magnitude of the current changes and sets them in a comparative historical
framework, there can be little doubt that something quite exceptional has been happening to the modern
metropolis during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Making sense of these new urban processes on
the basis of how they differ significantly from the past thus becomes, in my view, even more necessary than
tracing origins in an unfolding history of urbanization and urbanism as a way of life.
I have recently chosen to use postmetropolis as a general term to accentuate the differences between
contemporary urban regions and those that consolidated in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The
prefix post thus signals the transition from what has conventionally been called the modern metropolis to
something significantly different, to new postmodern forms and patternings of urban life that are increasingly
challenging well-established modes of urban analysis. As will become clearer in my discussion of the six
discourses, there are other post-prefixed terms and concepts packed into the postmetropolis, from the notion
of postindustrial society so familiar to sociologists to the more recent discussions of post-Fordist and postKeynesian political economies and poststructuralist and postcolonial modes of critical analysis. Before
turning to these discourses, however, I want to make a few more general introductory observations.
First, as I have already suggested, the changes that are being described or represented by these six discourses
are happening not only in Los Angeles but, in varying degrees and, to be sure, unevenly developed over
DACT 5 6
En el periodo de tiempo que transcurre entre las manifestaciones de Watts de 1995, y lo que se ha denominado ahora
como el Caso Rodney King o los disturbios por la Justicia, de
1992, la regin de Los ngeles, experiment una de las transformaciones ms radicales que sufriera cualquier regin
comparable del mundo. Para los residentes en Los ngeles de
principios de los sesenta, un OTRO Los ngeles, radicalmente diferente, pareci desarrollarse ms all de su control
o entendimiento. Y este reemplazara, con el paso del tiempo, a muchsimos mundos urbanos familiares por otros escandalosamente nuevos. Durante este mismo periodo, que comprende unos treinta aos, un grupo de eruditos de esta ciudad
ha tratado de comprender desde la teora y la prctica, esta
radical reestructuracin de Los ngeles y utilizar este conocimiento para entender las transformaciones urbanas, igualmente intensas, que ocurren en otras partes del mundo. Lo
que me gustara hacer aqu es contribuir al trabajo de lo que
algunos, quiz prematuramente, han comenzado a llamar La
Escuela de Urbanismo de Los ngeles, y argir que la transformacin de Los ngeles representa tanto una experiencia
urbana nica y un ejemplo particularmente vvido de un
space and time, all over the world. Although they take specific forms in specific places, they are general
processes. Furthermore, these processes are not entirely new. Their origins can be traced back well before
the last quarter of this century. It is their intensification, interrelatedness, and increasing scope that makes
their present expression different from the past. I also want to emphasize that when I use the term
postmetropolis as opposed to the late modern metropolis, I am not saying that the latter has disappeared or
been completely displaced, even in Los Angeles. What has been happening is that the new urbanization
processes and patternings are being overlain on the old and articulated with them in increasingly complex
ways. The overlays and articulations are becoming thicker and denser in many parts of the world, but
nowhere has the modern metropolis been completely erased.
What this means is that we must understand the new urbanization and urbanism without discarding our
older understanding. At the same time, however, we must recognize that the contested cities of today and
their complex relations between social process and spatial form, as well as spatial process and social form
-what I once called the socio-spatial dialectic- are increasingly becoming significantly different from what
they were in the 1960s. While we must not ignore the past, we must nevertheless foreground whats new
and different about the present. Looking at contemporary urban sociology, this suggests that we can no
longer depend so heavily on the new approaches that flowered so brilliantly in the 1970s with such
classic works as Manuel Castellss The Urban Question (1977;
French ed. 1972), David Harveys Social Justice and the City (1973),
My argument, however, is basically that the changes
and the pioneering world systems sociology of Immanuel
have been so dramatic that we can no longer simply add
Wallerstein. These were, and remain, powerful and incisive
our new knowledge to the old. There are too many
interpretations of the late modern metropololis, Castellss
monopolville and ville sauvage, the wild cities that consolidated
incompatibilities, contradictions, disruptions.
during the post-war boom and exploded in the urban crises of the
We must instead radically rethink and perhaps deeply
1960s. But the late modern metropolis, to coin a phrase, is no longer
restructure -that is, deconstruct and reconstitute- our
what it used to be.
7 5 DACT
Another preliminary observation complicates things even further. While urbanists continue to debate about
just how different the new metropolis is from the old and precisely how much we must deconstruct and
reconstitute our traditional modes of urban analysis, the postmetropolis itself has begun to change in
significant ways. Beginning in the eventful year of 1989 in Berlin, Beijing, and other major world cities, and
punctuated in Southern California by the Spring uprisings in 1992 and the postmodern fiscal crisis of Orange
County in 1994, the postmetropolis seems to be entering a new era of instability and crisis. There are
growing signs of a shift from what we have all recognized as a period of crisis-generated restructuring
originating in the urban uprisings of the 1960s to what might now be called a restructuring-generated crisis.
That is, what we see in the 1990s may be an emerging breakdown in the restructured postmetropolis itself,
in postmodern and post-Fordist urbanism, and also perhaps in the explanatory power of the six discourses I
will be discussing.
My last introductory comment refers to some recent developments in critical urban studies, an exciting new
field that has grown from the injection of critical cultural studies into the more traditionally social scientific
analysis of urbanism and the urban process. While I consider my own work to be part of this increasingly
transdisciplinary field, I have recently become uneasy over what I perceive to be a growing over-privileging
of what has been called, often with reference to the work of Michel de Certeau, the view from below studies of the local, the body, the streetscape, psycho-geographies of intimacy, erotic subjectivities, the
micro-worlds of everyday life- at the expense of understanding the structuring of the city as a whole, the
more macro-view of urbanism, the political economy of the urban
Understanding the postmetropolis requires a creative
process.
The six discourses I will be presenting are aimed at making sense of the
whole urban region, the spatiality and sociality of the urban fabric writ
large. They are precisely the kinds of discourses being hammered at by
those micro-urban critics who see in them only the distorting, if not
repressive, gaze of authoritative masculinist power, the masterful
view from above. A primary tactic in fostering these often
reductionist critiques of macro-level theorizing has been a kind of
epistemological privileging of the experience of the flaneur, the streetwandering free agent of everyday life, the ultimate progenitor of the
view from below. There is undoubtedly much to be gained from this ground level view of the city and,
indeed, many of those who focus on more macro-spatial perspectives too often overlook the darker corners
of everyday life and the less visible oppressions of race, gender, class, and sexuality. What I am most
concerned with, however, is the degree to which such micro-level critiques have been unproductively
DACT 5 8
ta. Si bien no podemos olvidar el pasado, hemos, no obstante, de poner de relieve lo que hay de nuevo y diferente en el
presente. Si observamos la sociologa urbana contempornea, sta sugiere que no podemos depender tan en exceso de
los nuevos puntos de vista que florecieron tan brillantemente en los setenta; mencionaremos los trabajos clsicos de
Manuel Castells La cuestin urbana (The Urban Question, 1977, Edicin francesa, 1972), el trabajo de David
Harvey Justicia Social y Ciudad (1973), y la sociologa pionera de Immanuel Walterstein. Estos trabajos son, y siguen
siendo, interpretaciones poderosas e incisivas sobre la tarda
metrpolis moderna. Las monopolville y ville sauvage de
Castells, son las ciudades salvajes que se consolidaron
durante el boom urbano de la postguerra y que explotaron
en las crisis urbansticas de los sesenta. Pero la tarda metrpolis moderna, por acuar una expresin, ya no es lo que
sola ser.
Muchas de las percepciones a las que llegaron estos tericos
y analistas siguen siendo aplicables, y adems, la poltica
radical que stos promovieron sigue siendo posible. Mi tesis
se resume, no obstante, en que los cambios han sido tan radicales que ya no podemos limitarnos a aunar nuestros nuevos
conocimientos a los antiguos. Existen demasiadas incompati-
polarizing critical urban studies, romancing agency and the view from below to the point of labelling all
macro-level perspectives taboo, off-limits, politically incorrect.
The six discourses I will now turn to are, in part, an attempt to recapture and reassert the importance of a
macro-urban tradition, not in opposition to the local view from below but drawing on insights that come
directly from the significant work that has been done on the microgeographies of the city by a variety of
critical urban scholars. Understanding the postmetropolis requires a creative recombination of micro and
macro perspectives, views from above and from below, a new critical synthesis that rejects the rigidities of
either/or choices for the radical openness of the both/and also. With this little plug for an explicitly
postmodern critical perspective and after a more extensive introduction than I had originally planned, we
are ready to begin examining the six discourses.
The six discourses are already familiar to most of you and, in one form or another, they weave through a large
number of the papers presented at this conference of the British Sociological Association. I have discussed them
before in a chapter in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, edited by Sophie Watson and Kathy Gibson, and they will
be elaborated at much greater length in my forthcoming book, Postmetropolis2. I list them below with brief
descriptions and a selection of subthemes drawn from what will be six separate chapters in Postmetropolis.
1. FLEXCITY: on the restructuring of the political economy of urbanization and the formation of the more
flexibly specialized post-Fordist industrial metropolis.
2. COSMOPOLIS: on the globalization of urban capital, labor, and culture and the formation of a new
hierarchy of global cities.
deduce que, en los noventa parece haber un colapso emergente de la misma postmetrpolis reestructurada, en el urbanismo moderno y post-Fordista, y tambin quizs, en la capacidad de poder dar una explicacin a las seis disertaciones
que voy a presentar.
Mi ltimo comentario preliminar se refiere a algunos de los
recientes avances en los estudios crticos de urbanismo, que
han dado lugar a un nuevo campo muy interesante que parte
de la inclusin de los tradicionales estudios crticos en los
anlisis cientficos sociales y del proceso urbano. Aunque
considero que mi propio trabajo forma parte de este campo,
cada vez ms transdiciplinario, me he vuelto hace poco, reticente a que se le haya dado una excesiva importancia a lo
que se ha llamado, con referencia al trabajo de Michel de
Certau: la perspectiva desde abajo, que abarca lo que nos
es prximo: el cuerpo, el paisaje de las calles, las psicogeografas de la intimidad, las subjetividades erticas, los micromundos de la vida diaria- a costa de la comprensin de la
estructura de la ciudad como totalidad, la mayor macrovisin del urbanismo y de la poltica econmica del proceso
urbano.
Las seis disertaciones que voy a presentar tienen como fin
entender la totalidad de la regin urbana, as como la evi-
9 5 DACT
3. EXOPOLIS: on the restructuring of urban form and the growth of edge cities, outer cities, and
postsuburbia: the metropolis turned inside-out and outside-in.
4. METROPOLARITIES: on the restructured social mosaic and the emergence of new polarizations and
inequalities.
a new sociologism?
widening gaps and new polarities
the truly disadvantage and the underclass debate
the new ethnic mosaic of Los Angeles
5. CARCERAL ARCHIPELAGOS: on the rise of fortress cities, surveillant technologies, and the substitution
of police for polis.
cities of quartz: Mike Daviss Los Angeles
further elaborations: interdictory spaces in the built environment
taking an Other look at The City of Quartz
6. SIMCITIES: on the restructured urban imaginary and the increasing hyperreality of everyday life.
Rather than going over these discourses in detail, I will use what I have just outlined to select a few
issues that I think may be of particular interest to a gathering of urban sociologists. Given the challenge
of brevity, the critical observations will be blunt and stripped of appropriate (and necessary)
qualifications. My intent is not to offer a well-rounded critical presentation of the discourses but to use
DACT 5 10
them to stimulate debate and discussion about how best to make sense of the contemporary urban
scene.
The first discourse, on the post-Fordist industrial metropolis, rests essentially on the continued intimate
relation between industrialization and urbanization processes. In Los Angeles and in many other urban
regions as well, it has become perhaps the hegemonic academic discourse in attempting to explain the
differences between the late modern (Fordist) metropolis and the post(Fordist) metropolis. It has also entered
deeply into the recent literature in urban sociology as a theoretical framework for understanding the social
order (and disorder) of the contemporary city. In Savage and Wardes book on British sociology, for example,
there is a clear attempt to redefine and reposition urban sociology around this post-Fordist industrial
restructuring3.
In some ways, this has been a peculiar embrace, for urban sociologists have contributed relatively little to
the industrial restructuring literature and to the conceptual and theoretical debates that have shaped the first
discourse. They have instead been content primarily with detailed empirical studies of the new capitalist
city, leaving its theorization and explanatory discourse to geographers, political economists, and other nonsociologists. How can we explain sociologys apparent retreat from playing a leading role in conceptualizing
the new urbanization processes and the postmetropolis, especially given its pre-eminence in explaining the
development of the late modern metropolis in the post-war decades?
Part of the answer may lie in a persistent if not growing sociologism, a retreat back into tried-and-true
disciplinary traditions of both theoretical and empirical sociology. Even when seeming to reach beyond
disciplinary boundaries for theoretical and practical inspiration, such sociologism tends to seek ways to
make what is new and challenging old and familiar, that is, absorbable without major paradigmatic
disruption or radical rethinking. I think something like this has been happening in sociology with respect to
the new discourse on post-Fordist urban-industrial restructuring in particular, and more generally with many
other post-prefixed discourses. One vehicle for this retreat back into the disciplinary fold in the face of new
challenges has been the continued appeal, especially in the US, of one form or another of the postindustrial
society thesis developed within sociology decades ago. Continued use of the term postindustrial is jolting to
a discourse built upon the persistent importance of industrialization and the production process. What has
been happening to the industrial capitalist city is much more than the decay of manufacturing industry and
a shift to a services economy. Deindustrialization has been occurring alongside a potent reindustrialization
process built not just on high technology electronics production but also on cheap-labor intensive forms of
craft production and the expansion of producer-oriented services and technology. These shifts, often to more
flexible production systems and denser transaction-intensive networks of information flow, are creating new
11 5 DACT
industrial spaces that have significantly reshaped the industrial geography of the late modern or Fordist
metropolis. Continuing to see the new urban restructuring processes through the eyes of the postindustrial
thesis makes it difficult to comprehend the more complex and still production-centered discourse on postFordist urbanization.
Similar problems arise from continued attachment to the politically more radical traditions of urban
sociology that developed in the 1970s and early 1980s, especially reflecting the pioneering work of Castells
and others on urban social movements and the politics of collective consumption. Here too a lingering
consumptionist emphasis makes it difficult to comprehend the production-centered discourse on postFordist urbanization and industrial restructuring. That much of this post-Fordist discourse also centers around
explicitly spatial concepts and analyses complicates matters still further, given the recent attempts by such
British sociologists as Peter Saunders to de-emphasize space and spatial analysis in the conceptual
frameworks of urban sociology. Such efforts have been particularly constraining with regard to the
participation of sociologists in the wider debates on postmodernism and critical cultural studies, both of
which have experienced a pronounced spatial turn since the late 1980s. But this takes me into another
discussion that I cannot expand upon here.
Sociologists have played a much more important role in the second discourse, on globalization and world
city formation. In some ways, despite their interrelatedness and complementarity, the first and second
discourses have often developed in competition, each seeing itself as the most powerful explanation for the
new urbanization and urbanism. This constrains both discourses, but I will comment here only on how the
discourse on global cities has been weakened by an inadequate understanding of the industrial restructuring
process as well as by a touch of the sociologism mentioned above. I can summarize my comments around
a playful phrase I once used to express my discontent with the approaches being taken to the study of New
York as a dual city standing at the apex of the world hierarchy of the global capitals of capital4. The
phrase was the vanity of the bonFIRES and it referred to what I saw as an overconcentration on the
command and control functions of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate) in the global cities
literature and a closely related overemphasis on two tiny sites where these commanding bonFIRES appear
to be burning most brightly, Wall Street in Manhattan and The City in London, along with their tributary
yuppified offshoots (Battery Park City, the World Trade Center, South Street Seaport, Canary Wharf, the
Docklands).
There are several weaknesses I see arising when the discourse is narrowed so tightly. First, there is a
tendency to see world city formation as creating an increasing sectoral and geographical detachment from
manufacturing industries on the one hand and the productive base of the regional economy on the other.
DACT 5 12
dedicado ms bien a contentarse principalmente con los detallados estudios empricos de la nueva ciudad capitalista, dejando la teorizacin y las disertaciones aclaratorias en manos de
gegrafos, economistas especializados en poltica, y en manos
de otros tcnicos ajenos al campo de la sociologa Cmo
podemos explicar el aparente desinters de la sociologa en llevar la voz cantante en la conceptualizacin de los nuevos procesos de urbanizacin y de la postmetrpolis, dada esencialmente su preeminencia a la hora de explicar el desarrollo de la
tarda metrpolis moderna en las dcadas de la postguerra?
Podemos encontrar parte de la respuesta en un persistente si
no creciente sociologismo, una retirada hacia las tradiciones disciplinares probadas como ciertas, referidas a la sociologa terica y emprica. Incluso cuando parece que se traspasan los lmites disciplinarios, en busca de inspiracin terica y prctica, dicho sociologismo tiende a buscar medios
para realizar lo que es nuevo y para desafiar lo que nos es
viejo y familiar, esto es, lo que es absorbible sin interrupciones paradigmticas o reformulaciones radicales. Opino que
algo as est sucediendo en la sociologa con respecto a la
nueva disertacin sobre la reestructuracin urbano-industrial
del post-Fordismo, en especial, y de manera ms general, respecto a las otras disertaciones postprefijadas. Un medio que
This may fit well to the postindustrial and deindustrialization models of urban change and accurately
describe some of what has been happening internally within New York City and London. But it distorts the
general debate on globalization and world city formation, especially with regard to such postmetropolises
and major manufacturing regions as Tokyo and Los Angeles (and, I might add, the reindustrializing regional
hinterlands of Greater New York and London).
I do not want to deny the importance of these research and interpretive emphases, but rather to note the
dangers of a sort of Manhattanized or Londonized myopia. In addition to oversimplifying the connections
between the financial and industrial sectors, and between the central city and the larger metropolitan region,
such myopia also tends to inhibit more comprehensive and sophisticated understanding of the spatiality of
globalization and the new cultural politics of identity and difference being spawned in global cities. This, in
turn, widens the breach between more sociological studies of globalization and the increasingly spatialized
cultural studies approaches to interpreting the postmetropolis.
The third discourse focuses on what I have described as the formation of Exopolis, a process that on the one
hand points to the growth of Outer Cities and Edge Cities and other manifestations of the rather oxymoronic
urbanization of suburbia; and on the other to a dramatic reconstitution of the Inner City brought about both
by an outmigration of domestic populations and the inmigration of Third World workers and cultures. The
social and spatial organization of the postmetropolis seems as a result to be turning inside-out and outsidein at the same time, creating havoc with our traditional ways of defining what is urban, suburban, exurban,
not urban, etc. Perhaps no other discourse is raising such profound challenges not only for urban sociology
but for all of urban studies as it has been conventionally constituted.
A few examples from Los Angeles can be used to illustrate this deconstruction and reconstitution of urban
form, and of the traditional vocabulary developed to describe it. Such classic examples of American
suburbia as the San Fernando Valley and Orange County now meet almost all definitions of being urbanized.
They are highly heterogeneous agglomerations of industrial production, employment, commerce, cultural
and entertainment facilities, and other characteristically urban qualities such as gangs, crime, drugdealing, and street violence. To continue to label these areas suburban is to misrepresent their
contemporary reality. Similarly, most of what we continue to label the Inner City of Los Angeles -including
the urban ghettoes and barrios of South Central and East Los Angeles- would appear, especially to those
familiar with cities in the eastern US, Europe, and Asia as characteristically suburban.
I have used the term Exopolis to describe this discourse because of its provocative double meaning: exoreferring both to the city growing outside the traditional urban nucleus, and to the city without, the city
Problemas similares pueden aparecer a partir del apego a las tradiciones polticamente ms radicales de la sociologa moderna
que se desarrollaron en la dcada de los setenta y a principios
de los ochenta, en especial las que se infieren del trabajo pionero de Castells y de otros trabajos sobre movimientos sociales
urbanos y sobre la poltica de consumo colectivo. Tambin
aqu, el nfasis persistente en el consumismo dificulta la comprensin de la disertacin centrada en la produccin de la urbanizacin post-Fordista y en la reestructuracin industrial. An si
cabe, esta disertacin post-Fordista est, en gran medida, centrada explcitamente en los conceptos espaciales cuyos anlisis
complican estos temas an ms, dados los recientes intentos de
dichos socilogos britnicos como Peter Saunders, de restarle
importancia al espacio y al anlisis espacial en los lmites conceptuales de la sociologa urbana. Dichos esfuerzos han resultado ser, particularmente, constreidores respecto a la participacin de los socilogos en debates ms amplios sobre postmodernismo y sobre estudios crticos culturales, los cuales han
experimentado un giro en la concepcin del espacio desde finales de los ochenta. Pero esto me lleva a tratar otro asunto que
no quiero desarrollar extensamente aqu.
Los socilogos han desempeado un papel mucho ms
importante en la segunda disertacin, que versa sobre la glo-
13 5 DACT
that no longer conveys the traditional qualities of cityness. This radical deconstruction/reconstitution of the
urban fabric has stimulated many other neologisms for the new forms emerging in the postmetropolis. In
addition to those already mentioned, including Exopolis, there are postsuburbia, metroplex, technopoles,
technoburbs, urban villages, county-cities, regional cities, the 100 mile city. It has also spawned self
consciously new appproaches to urban design, such as the New Urbanism in the US and, in Britain, the
related neo-traditionalist town planning so favored by Prince Charles; and, at the same time, much darker
interpretations of the social and environmental consequences of the restructuring of urban form, exemplified
with noir-like brilliance in the work of Mike Davis. Here too, then, the discourse has begun to polarize in
potentially unproductive ways, creating the need for more balanced and flexible, yet still critical and
politically conscious, approaches to interpreting the changing built environment and social geography of the
postmetropolis.
The fourth discourse explores the restructured social mosaic and is probably the discourse that has attracted
the largest number of urban sociologists. It is especially attuned to the intensification of what I describe as
Metropolarities: increasing social inequalities, widening income gaps, new kinds of social polarization and
stratification that fit uncomfortably within traditional dualisms based on class (capital-labor) or race (whiteblack) as well as conventional upper-middle-lower class models of urban society. As with the discourse on
urban spatial form, the discourse on the changing social forms and formations in the postmetropolis has
instigated a new vocabulary. Yuppies (including such extensions as yuppification and guppies, or groups
of yuppies) and the permanent urban underclass (or the truly disadvantaged) head the list, but there are
many other related terms: dinks (double-income/no kids families), upper professionals, the new technocracy,
the working poor, the new orphans (both youth growing up fatherless and motherless and the elderly
abandoned by their children), welfare dependent ghettoes, hyperghettoes, and so on.
Whereas the first two discourses tend to present themselves as capturing (and effectively theorizing) the most
powerful processes causing the restructuring of the late modern metropolis, the second pair concern themselves
primarily with the empirical consequences of these processes. A more explicitly spatial emphasis is infused
within the discourse on Exopolis and this, I would argue, creates closer ties to the practical and theoretical
insights of the discourses on post-Fordist industrialization and globalization. The discourse on metropolarities,
while certainly not spatial, seems to be developing with a relatively simplistic perspective on the complex
spatiality of the postmetropolis and, in part because of this, with an inadequate understanding of the links
between cause and effect or, more specifically, the restructuring process and its empirical consequences.
Perhaps the best example of this conceptual gap has been the work of American sociologist William Julius
Wilson and his associates, which today dominates the contemporary representation of the Chicago School
DACT 5 14
balizacin y la formacin de la ciudad global. De varias formas, a pesar de su interrelacin y complementariedad, la primera y la segunda disertacin se han desarrollado las ms de
las veces compitiendo entre s, porque cada disertacin ha
sido considerada segn los socilogos como la explicacin
ms convincente de la nueva urbanizacin y urbanismo. Esto
lleva a la constriccin de ambas disertaciones, pero lo que
har aqu, tan slo, es comentar como la disertacin sobre las
ciudades globales se ha debilitado debido a una comprensin
inadecuada del proceso de reestructuracin industrial, y a un
retazo del ya mencionado sociologismo. Puedo resumir mis
comentarios en una expresin que juega con las palabras, y
que emple una vez para explicar mi insatisfaccin por los
puntos de vista que se emplearon a su vez en el estudio sobre
Nueva York como una ciudad dual, situada en el pice de
la jerarqua mundial de las capitales de capitales4. La
expresin acuada fue the vanity of the bonFIRES, y se refera bsicamente a lo que entend como una sobreconcentracin del mando y de las funciones de control del sector FIRE
(entendido en ingls como la abreviatura de Finanzas, Seguros y Bienes Inmuebles, en la literatura de las ciudades globales), y a una exagerada importancia estrechamente relacionada con esto, de los diminutos emplazamientos donde los
of urban studies. While there is much to be praised in this work on the permanent urban underclass and the
truly disadvantaged, it is filled with oversimplified notions of post-Fordist industrial restructuring, location
theory, and the relations between urban spatiality and the urban social order. Much of what I noted earlier
about the constraining effects of sociologism is relevant here, as are my comments on the growing
disjunction between theoretical and empirical work in sociological studies of the postmetropolis. Not all of
urban sociology suffers from these constraints, to be sure, but I suspect they are more widespread than most
of you think.
If the first pair of discourses on the postmetropolis emphasizes the causes of urban restructuring and the
second pair its empirical spatial and social effects, the third pair explores what might be described as the
societal response to the effects of urban restructuring in the postmetropolis. In Los Angeles as well as in many
other urban regions, the fifth discourse, on what I call the emergence of a Carceral Archipelago, has been
dominated by the work of Mike Davis. In City of Quartz (1990) and other writings, Davis depicts Los Angeles
as a fortified city with bulging prisons, sadistic street environments, housing projects that have become
strategic hamlets, gated and armed-guarded communities where signs say trespassers will be shot, and
where the city is surveilled and patrolled by a high-tech space police. What his work suggests is that the
globalized post-Fordist industrial metropolis, with its extraordinary cultural heterogeneity, growing social
polarities, and explosive potential, is being held together largely by carceral technologies of violence and
social control, fostered by capital and the state.
What I want to question here is not the validity of Daviss depictions of Los Angeles but the degree to which
his work has been romanced by other urbanists, especially on the left, to the point of narrowing all the
discourses on the postmetropolis to his politically appealing radical view. I once described City of Quartz
as the best antitheoretical, antipostmodernist, historicist, nativist, and masculinist book written about a city.
For those who eschew abstract theorization because it takes away from good empirical work and radical
political action, who find the whole debate on postmodernism and postmetropolises inherently conservative
and politically numbing, who feel much more comfortable with the good old historical materialism of Marx
rather than this new-fangled spatial and geographical stuff, who appreciate the gritty streetwise pluck of the
truck driver-flaneur operating on his home ground, and who recoil from the presumed excesses of
postmodern feminist critiques, Mike Davis has become a heroic figure. I can only add here that such
romancing seriously constrains our efforts to make practical, political, and theoretical sense of contemporary
world, and weakens our ability to translate this knowledge into effective radical action.
Finally, we arrive at the sixth discourse, on the postmetropolis as Simcity, a place where simulations of a
presumably real world increasingly capture and activate our urban imaginary and infiltrate everyday urban
DACT 5 16
peligros de una miopa Manhattanizada y Londinizada. Adems de la sobreimplicacin de los vnculos entre los sectores
financieros e industriales, y entre el centro de la ciudad y la
an mayor regin metropolitana, dicha miopa tambin tiende a inhibir, ms an, la comprensin exhaustiva y compleja
de la espacialidad de la globalizacin y la nueva poltica de
la identidad y diferencia que se estn engendrando en las ciudades globales. Esto, en cambio, ensancha la brecha entre los
estudios de la globalizacin ms sociolgicos y los puntos de
vista de los estudios culturales cada vez ms especializados,
a la hora de interpretar la post-metrpolis.
La tercera disertacin se centra en lo que he descrito como la
formacin de la Expolis, un proceso que, por una parte,
seala el crecimiento de las ciudades exteriores y de las ciudades perifricas (Outer cities y Edge cities), adems de
tener en cuenta otras manifestaciones de la ms bien contradictoria urbanizacin de las reas perifricas; y por otra parte,
tambin se ha puesto el acento en una radical constitucin
del centro de la ciudad, que se ha dado gracias a poblaciones
emigrantes o del lugar en cuestin, y tambin, gracias a la
inmigracin de trabajadores de pueblos y culturas del Tercer
Mundo. La organizacin espacial de la postmetrpolis parece resultar un producto de un cambio al derecho y al revs,
al mismo tiempo, lesionando de gravedad nuestras concepciones de lo que es urbano, suburbano, exurbano, y no-urbano. Quiz ninguna otra disertacin est propiciando tan profundos desafos no slo a la sociologa urbana, sino a todos
los estudios urbanos, ya que sta ha sido aceptada convencionalmente.
Algunos ejemplos entresacados de la ciudad de Los ngeles
pueden emplearse para ilustrar esta deconstruccin y reconstitucin de tipo urbano, y del vocabulario creado para describirlo. Tales ejemplos clsicos de barrios perifricos en Los
Estados Unidos son el del Valle de San Fernando y el de
Orange County, los cuales renen ahora todas las definiciones del hecho urbanstico. Son lugares, en gran medida, heterogneos, que constituyen aglomeraciones de produccin
industrial, empleo, comercio, con servicios de cultura y ocio,
que adems poseen otras caractersticas propias de las urbes,
tales como las bandas criminales, el crimen, el trfico de drogas y la violencia callejera. Seguir denominando estas zonas
con el calificativo de suburbanas es malinterpretar su realidad actual. Del mismo modo, la mayora de los seguimos
hablando del casco urbano (Inner city)5 de Los ngeles,
incluyendo los guetos y los barrios de South Central, y los de
Los ngeles Este, pueden parecer, especialmente para aque-
life. A key concept here is that of the simulacrum, roughly defined as an exact copy of something that may
never have existed. Stated bluntly and with a nod to the work of Jean Baudrillard, the argument is that such
simulations and simulacra, and the hyper-real worlds they define, are more than ever before shaping every
aspect of our lives, from who and what we vote for to how we feed, clothe, mate, and define our bodies.
With this expansive blurring of the difference between the real and the imagined, there is what Baudrillard
defines as a precession of simulacra, a situation in which simulations increasingly take precedence over
the realities they are simulating. Our lives have always been shaped by these hyper-realities and by the
specialized manufactories that produce them, from religious institutions to Hollywood and Disneyland5.
Most of the time, however, one chose to go to these manufactories, usually passing through some gate and
paying for admission. Today, again more than ever before, hyper-reality visits you, in your homes, in your
daily lives.
At the very least, this Simcity discourse needs to be addressed seriously in contemporary urban studies, not
just at the micro-scale of everyday life but also in macro-scale analyses of urbanization and the social
production of urban space. My own work has increasingly focused on this precession of simulacra and the
growing hyperreality of urban life in the postmetropolis, in part because I suspect that this restructuring of
the urban imaginary is playing a key role in the emerging mode of social regulation associated with what
the French regulation theorists define as the new regimes of capitalist accumulation (arising, I might add,
primarily from the processes described in the first two discourses). There is so much to be discussed here,
but too little time and space to do so. I offer instead some telling vignettes on what I call the scamscapes
of Orange County.
Orange County is one of the richest, best educated, and most staunchly right wing and Republican counties
in the US. It has been a focal point for the local discourse on post-Fordist industrial restructuring and an
exemplary case for my own discussions of the formation of Exopolis and the increasing hyper-reality of
urban life6. In the hyper-real worlds of Orange County there has developed a particularly effulgent
scamscape, my term for an environment in which the real and the imagined are so blurred that it
encourages fraud and deceit as appropriate if not routine forms of behavior. Orange County was one of the
centers for the notorious Savings and Loans scandal that is costing the US untold billions of dollars to
resolve; and it has been the most active area in the country for Defence industry frauds. In one recent case,
it was discovered that a plant making fuzes, switching devices that control whether or not nuclear
missiles would explode, failed to test their products primarily because everyone genuinely believed the
sign posted on the factorys walls: We make the best damned fuzes in the United States. If so, why bother
to test? Just confidently tick excellent after every government query. Also representative of the scamscape
are the boiler rooms, sort of high tech sweatshops that are centers for all kinds of telemarketing frauds
llos que estn familiarizados con las ciudades del este de Los
Estados Unidos y de Asia, como tpicamente suburbanos.
He empleado el trmino de Expolis a fin de describir esta
disertacin por su provocativo y doble significado exo- en
referencia a tanto la ciudad que crece fuera del tradicional
ncleo urbano, y la ciudad que est por fuera, la ciudad que
ya no implica las caractersticas tradicionales para su denominacin como tal. La radical desconstruccin/reconstitucin
del entramado urbano ha propiciado la creacin de otros
muchos neologismos para las nuevas formas que se originan
en la post-metrpolis. Adems de las ya mencionadas, dentro
de las que se incluye la Expolis, tambin encontramos la
post-suburbia, el metroplejo, los tecnopolos, los tecnoburbios,
las aldeas urbanas, las ciudades condado, las ciudades regionales, y las ciudades de cien millas. Tambin han aparecido
puntos de vista en s conscientemente nuevos, de diseo urbano, tales como el Nuevo Urbanismo de Los Estados Unidos, y
en Gran Bretaa el relativo a la planificacin de la ciudad
segn el Neo-tradicionalismo, tan promocionado por el Prncipe Carlos de Inglaterra, y, al mismo tiempo, han aparecido
interpretaciones mucho ms pesimistas de las consecuencias
sociales y medioambientales de la reestructuracin de tipo
urbano, ejemplificada con una brillantez sombra en el traba-
jo de Mike Davis. Aqu, tambin, la disertacin ha comenzado a polarizarse de maneras potencialmente improductivas,
creando la necesidad de puntos de vista ms flexibles y equilibrados, y sin embargo, todava crticos y polticamente conscientes de interpretar los cambiantes entornos construidos y
las cambiantes geografas sociales de la postmetrpolis.
La cuarta disertacin explora el mosaico social reestructurado
y resulta ser quiz la disertacin que ha atrado la atencin de
un mayor nmero de socilogos urbanos. sta se encuentra en
consonancia con la intensificacin de lo que yo mismo denomino Metropolaridades; es decir, las desigualdades sociales en
aumento, los incrementos acusados en las diferencias de
renta, los nuevos modos de polarizacin social y de estratificacin que no encajan bien dentro de los dualismos tradicionales basados en parmetros tales como la clase (capital frente a trabajo) o la raza (raza blanca frente a la negra), adems
de los modelos de clase convencionales segn los criterios de
alta-media-baja en la sociedad urbana. Con respecto a la
disertacin sobre la forma espacial urbana, la disertacin
sobre las formas sociales en cambio y las formaciones de la
postmetrpolis han creado la necesidad de crear un vocabulario nuevo. Los ejecutivos o yuppies (que incluyen tambin
lugares donde stos se establecen, y los guppies o grupos de
17 5 DACT
and scams. Nowhere are there more of these boiler rooms than in Orange County, and they are reputed to
make higher profits than the drug dealers. In one of these busy hives of hyperfraud, a sign was found that
captures the core of the scamscapes deceitful honesty. It said: we cheat the other guy and pass the savings
on to you!.
In late 1994, the Orange County scamscape exploded in the largest municipal/county bankruptcy in
US history. Exposed in the aftermath of this stunning declaration was a system of county and municipal
governance that routinely ran the countys public economy as if it were a form of the popular computer
game, SimCity, with a simgovernment serving simcitizens in what was essentially a simcounty. Making
the bankruptcy even more hyper-real was that the key figure, the county tax collector who was
gambling the simcountys money in the financial cyberspace of exotic derivatives and leveraged
synthetics, had a more than appropriate Orange County name: Citron! In this bastion of the new fiscal
populism and small government is better government, this fountainhead of entrepreneurial unregulated
capitalism, home of both Disneyland and the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace, the proud
center for the foundational achievements of an ultraconservative postmodern politics that cheats the
other guy and passes the savings on to you, the simulation game broke down and there was no button
to push to reboot.
Also revealed by these events is the extraordinary degree to which government, politics, and civil society
in the US are being shaped by the precession of simulacra and a spin-doctored game of simulations. And
from what I know of Thatchers legacy, Britain today cannot be too far behind. This leads me to some brief
conclusions. Like it or not, we are all living in an increasingly postmodern world that is creating new
contexts and new challenges that cannot be effectively responded to by clinging to older ways of thinking
and acting politically. The city and the urban still remain sites of contestation and struggle, but the social
processes and spatial forms, and the spatial processes and social forms that define these struggles are now
significantly different from what they were even ten years ago. Moreover, there are now some ample signs
that the predominantly neoconservative and neoliberal forms of postmodern society and the postmetropolis
that have consolidated from three decades of global and local restructuring are beginning to explode from
their own success/excess. Such events as the Los Angeles Justice riots of 1992 and the Orange County
bankruptcy of 1994 are not just local, isolated disturbances, but part of what may be emerging as a
restructuring-generated global crisis. This makes it even more urgent for the Left and all other progressive
thinkers and actors to resolve their internal divisions and act together to create an effective and
emancipatory postmodern politics and a conceptual framework for an also explicitly postmodern critical
urban studies that is appropriately and effectively attuned to the realities and hyper-realities of the
contemporary moment.
DACT 5 18
Mike Savage and Alan Warde, Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity, New York: Continuum, 1993.
References to simulacra abound in the Bible and throughout the practices of Christianity. For faithful Catholics,
statues of the Virgin Mary or Christ on the cross are not
merely symbols but real presences, just as the communion
host and wine are Christs body and blood. One must
actually behave as if these simulations are real.
empricos de sta, el tercer par explora lo que podra ser descrito como la respuesta de la sociedad a los efectos de la reestructuracin urbana de la postmetrpolis. En Los ngeles, adems de en otras muchas regiones urbanas, la quinta disertacin, que versa sobre lo que yo denomino como la emergencia del Archipilago Carcelario, ha sido denominada por el
trabajo de Mike Davis. En City of Quartz (1990, La Ciudad
de Cuarzo), y en otros ensayos, Davis nos retrata a Los ngeles como una ciudad fortificada, llena de prisiones atestadas,
de panoramas callejeros sadistas, de proyectos de viviendo
que se han constituido en aldeas estratgicas, de comunidades
que gozan de guardia armada y de viviendas cerradas a cal y
canto con verjas en donde los letreros ponen A LOS INTRUSOS SE LES PROPINARN DISPAROS; en esta ciudad, adems, la vigilancia y el control se efecta por una policia especial de alta tecnologa. Lo que su trabajo sugiere es que la
metrpolis industrial post-Fordista, globalizada, con su heterogeneidad cultural extraordinaria, sus polaridades sociales crecientes, y su potencial explosivo, se mantiene, en gran medida, gracias a las tecnologas carceleras que usan la violencia
y el control social, promovidas por el capital y el Estado.
Lo que quiero cuestionar aqu no es la validez de las descripciones de Davis sobre Los ngeles, sino el grado en que su tra-
19 5 DACT
DACT 5 20
sobre la formacin de la Expolis, y de la creciente hiperrealidad de la vida urbana7. En los mundos hiperreales de Orange County se ha desarrollado un falsaje particularmente efulgente, trmino que he acuado para describir un medio
ambiente en que lo real y lo imaginario resulta tan confuso
que alimenta el fraude y el engao, considerndose como formas apropiadas, o bien si cabe, como formas de conducta
rutinaria. Orange County fue uno de los enclaves en que se
han producido escandalosos desfalcos de dinero en compaas inmobiliarias (Savings and Loans), los cuales, Los Estados
Unidos han podido saldar, mediante una inapreciable cantidad de miles de millones de dlares; Orange County ha sido
la zona de Los Estados Unidos ms proclive a que se den fraudes en la industria de defensa. Por poner un ejemplo, tenemos el caso reciente del descubrimiento de una planta que
produca fusibles, artefactos que se activan y que se encargan de controlar que los misiles nucleares exploten o no. En
esta planta, se dej de probar los productos, bsicamente porque todo el mundo crea a pies juntillas lo que deca un letrero pegado en los muros de la fbrica PRODUCIMOS LOS
CONDENAMENTE MEJORES FUSIBLES DE LOS ESTADOS
UNIDOS. Si es as, por qu molestarse en probarlos? Tan
slo bastaba con ponerle la etiqueta de excelente calidad a
estos productos, para acallar las dudas del gobierno. Tambin
son especialmente representativos del falsaje las salas de calderas, que en cierto modo resultan ser fbricas donde se
explota al obrero y centros donde se produce todo tipo de
fraudes y de chanchullos de telemrquetin. En ninguna otra
parte hay ms salas de calderas que en Orange County, que
tienen la reputacin de obtener mayores beneficios que los
traficantes de drogas. En una de estas bulliciosas colmenas
del hiperfraude se encontr un letrero que capta lo esencial
de la engaosa honestidad de los falsajes. Este rezaba as:
ENGAAMOS AL OTRO TO Y TE PASAMOS A TI LOS
AHORROS.
A finales de 1994, el falsaje de Orange County explot,
declarndose la bancarrota municipal/condal ms importante
de la historia de Los Estados Unidos. Haba un sistema de
gobierno condal y municipal expuesto a las consecuencias de
esta declaracin pasmosa, el cual administraba la economa
pblica del condado a modo de un juego de ordenadores
popular; era realmente una falciudad, con un falgobierno que
serva a unos falciudadanos, en lo que era un falcondado.
Reforzando lo que de hiperreeal tena la bancarrota, estaba el
hecho de que la figura clave, el cobrador de impuestos del
condado, que estaba jugndose el dinero del falcondado en
el ciberespacio financiero de derivados exticos y en productos sintcticos bien posicionados, tena un nombre muy apropiado para Orange County: Citron!8. En este baluarte de
nuevo populismo fiscal y de gobierno diminuto, resulta mejor
gobierno esta fuente de capitalismo empresarial sin regular,
asentada tanto en Disneylandia como el lugar de nacimiento
de Richard M. Nixon, y en la biblioteca que lleva su nombre,
el orgulloso centro de los logros fundamentales de la poltica
ultraconservadora que engaa al otro to y te pasa los ahorros, el juego de simulacin que se ha colapsado y del que no
queda ninguna tecla por accionar para volver a arrancar.
Tambin qued al descubierto por estos acontecimientos la
extraordinaria medida en que el gobierno, la poltica y la
sociedad civil de Los Estados Unidos se estn formando por
la precesin de los simulacros y por su juego trucado de
simulaciones. Y tambin, por lo que s del legado de Margaret Thatcher, Gran Bretaa tampoco se queda a la zaga.
Esto es lo que me induce a llegar a algunas conclusiones breves; nos guste o no, estamos viviendo en un mundo cada vez
ms postmoderno que est creando contextos nuevos, y
nuevos desafos, a los que no se puede responder, en efecto,
a base de agarrarse a las antiguas formas de pensar y de
actuar polticamente. La ciudad y lo urbano siguen siendo
an emplazamientos que propician la contestacin y la
lucha, pero los procesos sociales y las formas espaciales, y
los procesos espaciales que definen estas luchas son ahora
3
4
Postcards
London
Deyan Sudjic
Director del Departamento de
Arte, Ciudad y Territorio.
Catedrtico de Urbanstica
y Ordenacin del Territorio.
Provided you ignore the boarded up shop windows and the bedraggled figures selling the Big Issue, the
architecture of Britains town centres looks much as it did twenty years ago. There has been nothing like the
invasion of shopping malls, multistorey car parks and crude new office buildings that wreaked so much
havoc in the 1960s. Conservation has stopped the tidal wave of demolition; facades at least are all but
untouchable now.
Appearances however are seriously misleading. The fact that nothing new is happening in the city centre is a
sign not of stability, but that the action has moved elsewhere. Behind the carefully preserved crust of stone
and brick, the town centre is threatened by the greatest challenge it has ever had to face. The 1960s may have
left it looking uglier, but at least it still had a clear purpose. The city then was still the centre of social life, the
place in which institutions naturally gathered, where ambitious corporations believed that they had to have
their headquarters, even if they built them in Brutalist style. They were places in which we all looked for the
kind of public life that gives cities their special quality. City centres were the places to find exotic food stores,
specialist bookshops, and the chance meetings and random, unexpected social accidents of urban life. They
were characterised by the cafe, and the courthouse, as well as the cinema and the university.
The city centre was also the place that could accomodate the awkward, not always very picturesque aspects
of urban reality that suburbs find too uncomfortable to deal with, the homeless, the sex industry, the
subcultures of the gay life, of immigrants and drugs.
New patterns of urban life are bypassing the old town centre altogether. The changes, social as well as
technological, of the 1990s are threatening its very existence. A whole range of issues that apparently have
nothing to do with urbanism have come together to transform the city. Cash dispensers and telephone
banking are making marble banking halls redundant, just as our loss of faith has left the churches empty and
our changing tastes in alchol threaten the survival of the traditional pub.
Refrigeration and container lorries have already killed off Covent Garden and Dockland. Trade union reform
and new technology in the newspaper industry put paid to the old Fleet Street. Even the sex club is migrating
from its traditional home. Londons first lap dancing establishment is not in Soho, but on an industrial estate
just off the North Circular.
Most of us now live miles away from anything remotely recognisable as a traditional city - a fact that has
deeply disturbed the Campaign for the Preservation for Rural England. The majority of new housing is being
DACT 5 22
built not on derelict inner city sites, but in and around the green belt. And these new homes, typically planned
with no provision for public transport, are utterly dependent on the car. We shop in giant exurban shopping
centres, not corner shops, whose role the filling station is doing its best to usurp. The decision in the late 1980s
by the big retailers, Marks and Spencers, Sainsbury and Tesco, to concentrate their investment in giant stores,
where customers can park at ground level, had enormous consequences for the future of the city. Meanwhile,
the British Airports Authority which now makes more money as a retailer than it does out of the airlines is
presenting Heathrow as the ideal family shopping location a place in
The fact that nothing new is happening in the city centre
which passengers spend up to an hour with nothing to do but consume.
23 5 DACT
Even if Gummer could find a convincing justification for halting new out of town shopping centres, the price
of keeping retailing in the city centre might yet prove to be its destruction. To tempt the big commercial
names back into the town centre, parking on the same scale they can offer out of town to soothe the fears
of commuters terrified by stories of muggers haunting multistorey car parks will have to be made available.
And cities are going to have to be reshaped to make room for the giant boxes that retailers demand.
The conventional commercial solution to the problem of the decline of the city is the managed high street,
that is to say an attempt to run a city centre as if it were an enclosed mall which is all very well, but
presupposes the survival of city centre retailing. Those retailers that have a chance of survival in the city
centre will cater to the markets extremes. Everything in between will sooner rather than later disappear from
the city centre.
At one end are the new generation of bargain basement groceries offering baked beans rather than kiwi fruit,
that cater for those too poor, or too feckless to get to the big shopping malls. At the other end of the scale
are the ever more specialised and opulent luxury stores.
Retailing of this kind is becoming ever more like an off shoot of the
entertainment industry. Harrods is already a place that people go to
videotape each other buying the groceries that they could get back
home because it has skillfully turned itself into an event. Now the
Disney and Warner stores blend merchandise with entertainment.
Nor is the hypermarket the only pressure eroding the vitality of the old city centre. It is calculated by some
analysts that shopping via the Internet will spell the end for something up to one third of existing high street
shops before the next century gets into its stride.
Some urban strategists are attempting to follow through the logic of the information revolution, and thinking
about ways in which technology could be used to reinforce the urbanity of a city in which a substantial
percentage of the population is able to work from home. They envisage neighbourhood classrooms linked
electronically with others across, or clubs and cafes with same facilities, mixing both computer and physical
contact.
But despite these optimistic predections, the logic of events is still pushing many British cities down the same
path taken by America where some cities cases have lost half their population in a decade. In Houston, even
the Salvation Army has relocated to suburban shopping malls, leaving the streets to the sad, and the mad.
DACT 5 24
manido de camuflar el deterioro estructural con una tratamiento cosmtico de piedras de granito, verjas hechas con
traviesas de ferrocarril recicladas, as como cestos de flores
colgantes an se aprecia. El mayor mal es la peatonalizacin,
que en muchos casos conlleva ms perjuicios que beneficios.
La exclusin del automvil degrada el ambiente vital y con el
la actividad que resulta esencial para mantener despierta a las
ciudades, lo que lo convierte en un entorno horrendadamente artificial.
Los problemas que sufren los centro urbanos se vern agudizados y acelerados. John Gummer, ministro britnico de
fomento, intenta contener la marea de los hipermercados
como si nuestras experiencias fueran originales, pero sencillamente el Reino Unido est un paso por delante en el proceso que el resto de los pases europeos siguen. Por qu
lograr tener xito Gummer en invertir la marea que ha podido con todas las clases de economas y sistemas polticos? Y
al respecto, qu hace un gobierno que est tan comprometido con la idea de la supremaca del mercado que est dispuesto a privatizar las crceles, intentando dictar donde pueden comprar el pollo congelado sus ciudadanos?
Bien es cierto que la mayor parte de las ciudades britnicas, y en realidad de Europa occidental, pierden poblacin
Some American downtowns are even beginning to welcome factory outlet stores as a sign of hope. Actually
they are evidence that land values have fallen so low that there is nothing to stop the centre of a city
becoming the same kind of formless desert as its periphery.
With the old city in its death throes, a new kind of city has begun to take its place. Tourism, services,
leisure and the arts are the usual mantras, repeated endlessly by those charged with finding solutions
to this apparently intractable problem. But not every city centre can become a tourist honeypot. And
even those that do succeed in becoming playgrounds for visiting tourists dont always relish the
experience. Its a dubious fate that has already overtaken many cities: Central Edinburgh looks
overflowing with life in the short Scots summer, but how many of the people crowding Princes Street
will be there for longer than three days? And can an economy based on fringe theatre, taran and
shortbread sustain the city throughout the year. And other cities have it far worse. After six oclock, the
centre of York is as quiet as a theme park whose gates have been locked shut for the night. Walk around
Windsor on a summer weekend, and you find yourself in a world which exists solely to cater for people
who never spend more than a few hours in the place. To buy everyday necessities you have to drive to
the shopping sheds of Slough. Windsors high street contains only fast food restaurants to feed the
hordes who have just finished the tour of the castle. Groups of Italians, Japanese and Americans cross
and recross on their way from Pizza Express to McDonalds, attempting in vain to stave off that sense
of emptiness which comes from the realisation that travel and movement cannot provide more than a
temporary distraction.
These are places which have lost the sense of vitality, but they are at least economically successful.
The response to those cities that have rebuilt themselves through the process that is usually referred to as
gentrification; the so-called cappuccino culture that has breathed new life into the old centre of Glasgow,
more patchily in Liverpool, and to parts of central London, has been
even more ambiguous.
It represents the conversion of the city into a playground
This a process that goes far beyond the conversion of dour working
creation of a city whose main purpose is the
class pubs into brasseries, and the substitution of exotic bottled beers
from Mexico and China for real ale. It represents the conversion of the
consumption, rather than the creation, of wealth.
city into a playground for those affluent enough to afford its attractions,
the creation of a city whose main purpose is the consumption, rather than the creation, of wealth. It is an
economy based on the taking in of each others washing, writ large. And it presupposes a city whose streets
are entirely devoted to hairdressers, bistros and expensive clothes shops.
25 5 DACT
Judging by the epidemic of ever larger fashionable new restaurants that Britain is building, eating out has
turned into its last remaining heavy industry. But while this future for the city may ensure its continuing
survival, it brings with it the potential destruction of the citys traditional meaning through an ever sharper
social segregation. The city centre was once shared by every group in the community, and the exclusive
preserve of none -look for example at the way that Belfasts centre was neutral ground during the troubles,
while the security fences segregated one working class suburb from the next. The future for the city centre
looks as if it will see it become ever more narrowly divided turf.
There will be areas visited only by tourists, others that are the preserve of the very young, for gays, or office
workers. The fad for loft life for example while it may fill empty urban buildings, is a pursuit enjoyed by the
childless. It has already soaked up the remains of the victorian workshops. Now the redundant office
buildings of the 1960s, are being coopted too, as white collar jobs follow city centre blue collar jobs to
oblivion. In place of mixed working communities is a homogenous residential area, In London the old Soho
was raffish, down at heal, and sometimes squalid, but it was a centre for both the young and the old,
criminals, and affluent diners. The new one is a thriving, but increasingly narrowly defined gay community.
It is this atomisation that perhaps represents the greatest threat to the future of the city, and it is the one for
which there are as yet no answers.
DACT 5 26
Las Vegas
By the standards of Las Vegas -the new Hard Rock casino, with its rusty
fragment of the aircraft in which Otis Reading crashed hanging over
the slot machines like a relic of the true cross, counts as a model of
tasteful restraint. Set beside the hulking green monster across the street,
the MGM Grand, with its trademark lion pumped up to 10 stories high,
and at more than 5000 rooms, not so much the largest hotel in the
world, as a town, complete with monorail station, shopping mall,
sports arena, and theme park, its all but invisible.
On the adjacent corner the Excalibur Hotel and Casino is smaller than
the MGM Grand, but no less conspicuous. Its tricked out with red,
white and blue candy floss turrets. A mechanical dragon clambers out
Es esta atomizacin la que representa quizs la mayor amenaza para el futuro de la ciudad, y la nica para la que an
no existen respuestas.
Atlanta.
En Atlanta, hogar del Klu Klux Klan y la Coca-Cola, los smbolos tienen una gran importancia, pero nunca quedan intactos durante mucho tiempo. De la misma forma que las voluptuosas curvas al estilo Mae West en la botella original de la
Coca-Cola se han transformado en una lata anorxica de aluminio reciclable, en el nombre de una progresista especulacin Atlanta siempre ha estado dispuesta a deshacerse de un
smbolo por otro, de hecho vamos a poner tu nombre en este
espacio.
El emblema original de la ciudad mostraba un tren en honor
al papel desempeado por la epnima Western and Atlanta
Railway en la fundacin de Atlanta. Un fnix ocup su lugar
en 1865, indicando la determinacin de Atlanta por imbuir lo
que Henry Grady, el primer promotor de la ciudad, denomin la despreocupacin del General Sherman y el ejrcito de
la Unin con todo su fuego.
27 5 DACT
DACT 5 28
built on dry land in the city itself. New York and Chicago have both toyed with the idea of legalising casinos,
while Americas Indians have prospered by opening ever larger casinos on the reservations, free from the
constraints of the white mans law.
Las Vegas, with its lucrative monopoly under threat is fighting back, by building of a new generation of
casinos. Their scale has been inflated enormously as fantasy has been piled on top of fantasy. For a casino
to qualify as a serious contender now, the bizarre trappings of virtual baroque are essential: Atlantic Citys
Trump Mahal showed what the outside world could do in the struggle to catch up. But it is not just America
that is looking to Las Vegas. Australia shed the pervasive atmosphere of a perpetually bleak Scots Sunday
29 5 DACT
Urban Scene,
Las Vegas (USA).
DACT 5 30
afternoon, complete with early closing and the indelible scent of meat pies long ago. But it clung to a
Calvinist prohibition on gambling until the 1980s. Now, in the interests, it is claimed of the economy in
general, and urban renewal in particular, the Australian state governments have granted a series of
monopolies to casino operators. Conscious of all those Chinese high rollers on Australias doorstep around
a pacific rim that still frowns on gambling: each state capital has licensed a single, vast casino: supposedly
designed to attract money from overseas Melbournes new casino, is the largest construction project in the
city. In Queensland, the new legitimacy of gambling is symbolised by the conversion of Brisbanes Old State
Treasury into a Casino. Even Christmas Island, the tiny speck of Australian territory in the middle of the
Indian Ocean, has legalised gambling, and offers a complementary visa to any gambler flying in from Jakarta
less than an hour away, much to the fury of Perth which previously had the lions share of the Indonesian
gambling trade. In fact Australias vast casinos have been characterised more by half wild children left to
their own devices in the family Holden in the car park, while their parents gamble, than by jet set roulette
players. And there is a nagging doubt that Australia is doing itself no favours by seeking to become Asias
biggest offshore casino.
Nevertheless, the Las Vegas strip is thick with fact finding missions from New South Wales, and from New
Jersey, eager to pick up ideas to take home. In this renaissance of the architecture of gambling, New York
New York will undoubtedly turn out to be the Vatican, and Versailles all rolled into one. In a city in which
Caesars Palace has recreated a Roman piazza in the form of a shopping mall, with a lighting cycle that takes
you from twilight to dawn in twenty minutes, thats no small boast. And New York New York has to compete
not just with Caesars Palace, but with the Mirage Hotel which offers regular volcanic eruptions, featuring
tidal waves of water cascading down the prefabricated rocks that overlook its 300 feet wide frontage on the
strip, and a conflagration of flame that threatens to engulf passing cars. It must also contend with Treasure
Island which stages sea battles between a pair of fully rigged galleons, culminating in the sinking of a British
man of war.
Mary McCarthy wrote an elegant little book about the impossibility of finding anything new to say about
Venice. She could just as well have been talking about Las Vegas; a city which has over the last 50 glory
years at least been picked over by an even greater density of literary tourists, from Tom Wolfe to Noel
Coward and Hunter Thompson. All of them identify the essentially industrial character of the place, with the
polyester clad hordes toiling grim faced around the clock on the production line slot machines. Most also
point out the resemblance of Las Vegas to Lourdes: the terminally sick, the obese and the hideously
deformed journey here from across America, in search of redemption and the chance to touch for a fleeting
instant, the dream of riches and gold on which the city is built. And yet, unlike Venice Las Vegas is not dead:
it continues reinventing itself. The first casinos were small rooms along Freemont Street, the old Las Vegas
por cumplir su papel. Afirmaba ser la Nueva York y la Chicago del sur, de modo que construy los rascacielos gticos y
el neoclsico barrio financiero y legal para demostrarlo.
Capt la verdad esencial del enfoque desenfadadamente brutal de la lista anual de la revista Fortune acerca de las diez
principales ciudades de negocios que alimenta el temor, normalmente ignorado por las ciudades contemporneas, de que
Ms que nunca, lo que haces est influido por donde vivas.
Como comenta sin tacto alguno Fortune: Pobre de aquellos
idiotas con sede en cualquier callejuela de ciudad donde los
gastos de oficina son desorbitantes y slo los temerarios se
aventuran despus del atardecer. Rezad por los bobos con
una gran fbrica en cualquier pueblucho donde la mano de
obra est infestada de macarras, drogatas y ladrones. La nica
solucin para las empresas atrapadas en el lugar y el momento equivocado es el traslado.
Atlanta siempre se ha esforzado por presentarse exactamente
como el lugar adecuado en el momento adecuado. Incluso en
1970, cuando no poda presumir ms de que un slo vuelo
internacional desde su aeropuerto, Atlanta afirmaba ser la
prxima gran ciudad internacional. Ha comprendido que
para continuar el progreso debe convertirse en una ciudad
internacional, no todo eran palabras. Atlanta realiz dos
31 5 DACT
DACT 5 32
The city announces itself now, not with pop art cowboys, but with the laser beam slicing through the
heavens from the top of the Luxor Hotel: the notorious larger than life replica of the great pyramid visible
from miles away across the empty desert. With an obelisk and a sphinx for a port cochere, its haunting
silhouette rises through the heat haze over the mothballed Boeings parked on the edge of the citys airport.
Alone of Las Vegass giant hotels it has managed to integrate theme with structure. All the rest are let down
by the need to incorporate the countless thousands of windows that reflect the essentially bureaucratic
nature of all those hotel rooms strung along corridors. The Luxor, with
its smooth black glass skin makes the windows vanish as if by magic.
The spectacular crowd pulling attractions of the Mirage
The Excalibur by comparison with the Luxor is a picture of pathos,
and Treasure Island next door give Las Vegas the kind of
overwhelmed by an avalanche of tiny windows that reveal the reality
pedestrian street life that the rest of America has lost.
of the fantasy with pitiless frankness.
The other focus is the strip east of the MGM. Planet Hollywood advertises its presence at Caesars Palace
with a rotating globe impaled on a giant chrome Corinthian column, like the approach to a Shanghai
industrial estate. The spectacular crowd pulling attractions of the Mirage and Treasure Island next door give
Las Vegas the kind of pedestrian street life that the rest of America has lost. It is this section of the strip that
is solidifying into the urban core of the city, despite the attempts of the casinos outside the pale to bolster
their own sites. A mile east, toward the now rotting downtown of old Las Vegas, an over-optimistic
developer is struggling to make amuck from the Stratosphere tower, an eruption of concrete almost as tall as
the Sears Roebuck tower in Chicago. If it had been around 40 years ago, its 1000 foot high revolving
restaurant would have provided an awesome view of the nuclear tests that kept the Nevada desert busy just
70 miles away. But it is a monumentally futile gesture: the casinos
have no interest in allowing their gamblers to spend their time looking
Within this relatively dense central core, Las Vegas is
out of the window. The Stratosphere already has the look of a busted
rapidly acquiring the characteristics of what might be
flush. Within this relatively dense central core, Las Vegas is rapidly
called a real city: pavements, beggars, even a public
acquiring the characteristics of what might be called a real city:
pavements, beggars, even a public transport system, MGM and Ballys
transport system, MGM and Ballys already operate a free
already operate a free monorail between the two casinos, a mile appart
monorail between the two casinos, a mile appart
mimicking a utopian public transport system just as New York New
mimicking a utopian public transport system just as New
York mimics the big city. Yet much of what passes for reality in Las
York New York mimics the big city.
Vegas is beyond mimicry. Sitting eating phillysteak lunch at the Nile
Deli, inside the Luxor Isee the barges come into view on the Nile River
ride packed with tourists from Japan, and India. They are taking in archaeological points of interest such as
the half scale version of King Thuts tomb. You notice that a buxom belly dancer keeps emerging from a
clump of artificial bullrushes to undulate for the benefit of each passing barge. The dancer massages the head
Brisbane.
Brisbane, el ltimo asentamiento penal australiano y fundada
en 1824, no es una ciudad que con anterioridad haya figurado de manera destacada en la escena mundial. El extravagante liderazgo de Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, quien crea en una
Queensland blanca, heterosexual y temerosa de Dios, conserv intacto el espritu de los aos 50 de un sistema de
soporte vital alimentado por la corrupcin mucho despus de
que se hubiera extinguido en el resto de Australia. Incluso los
ms entusiastas llamaban a Brisbane la mayor poblacin rural
australiana: amable, pero aletargada y provinciana. Lo ms
perjudicial es que Queensland, en su conjunto, sola llamarse el profundo norte, la versin australiana de Alabama, econmicamente retrasada y con un sistema poltico y cultural
equiparable. Sin embargo, todo ha cambiado en la ltima
dcada, pues Brisbane es la ciudad de mayor crecimiento en
Australia, y su manera de enfrentarse al crecimiento debe
interesar a una nueva generacin de ciudades de todo el
mundo.
Brisbane se ampla en anillos concntricos de bungalows y
centros comerciales. Los concesionarios de Holden y los parques de negocios por todo el paisaje de Queensland meri-
33 5 DACT
of at least one male per barge. She works on a shift system. While she is back in the bushes in the gap
between two passing barges, you see a white hand emerge to pick up a courtesy phone. Clearly it is the
signal to leave before her replacement arrives. And she duly emerges to vanish off into the crowds.
Meanwhile, Luxors security men patrol the carparks and pools outside, disguised as late 1980s yuppies,
riding mountain bikes and kitted out in pink polo shirts, white shorts, and with an incongruous Smith and
Wesson on their hips.
The latest incarnation of Las Vegas represents an entirely new urban form. For the first time the strip has
encountered a new ingredient. Until now the casinos have, more or less followed each other in a double
file along the strip heading steadily westward. Architecturally they have been called upon to do little more
than present a frontage coherent enough to impress passing traffic. Now Las Vegas has acquired a
crossroads, a three dimensional urban space on which the casinos are not just a big front, but show off their
sides as well, and have to deal with the previously unknown problem for the casinos of addressing a corner.
The Tropicanas clump of larger than life size Easter Island heads stakes its claim to attention. It faces the
Excalibur, which in turn confronts the MGM. And the MGM Grands lion will glower across eight lanes of
traffic at a third scale version of the Statue of Liberty, erupting from a lake, traversed by the Brooklyn Bridge
which will take guests to the hotel itself, fashioned from a clump of replica Manhattan high rises, all at third
scale. Ilia and Neal, the architects havent stuck just to the obvious towers, Chrysler, and Empire State, there
is a third scale version of the Seagram Building and of Saarinens CBS tower. To bring the complex to life,
a roller coaster ride will take visitors on a tour of the property, ripping out of a mock Plaza hotel, like the
Alien emerging from the belly of a star trooper.
Visitors to Las Vegas, waddling back and forth in the sunshine are not easily impressed. But the model is
constantly the focus of attention. The matrons with the displacement of super tankers, and the balding types
who insist on scraping the remains of their hair into pony tails fall silent in awe.
Atlanta
In Atlanta, original home of both the Klu Klux Klan and Coca Cola, symbols matter a great deal. But they
never stay the same for long. Just as the buxom Mae West curves of the original Coke bottle have
metamorphosed into an anorexic recyclable aluminium can, so in the name of enlightened self-interest
Atlanta has always been promiscuously ready to jettison one symbol for another: to put your name in this
space in fact.
DACT 5 34
Londres pierde poblacin desde su centro, mientras que ciudades como Cambridge, Bournemouth, Bristol y Swindon se
encuentran en auge. Francia observa como sus industrias de
primera fila se trasladan a la zona templada mediterrnea. En
los EE.UU. las ciudades que crecen son las sorprendentes
Denver, Phoenix y Las Vegas, mientras Nueva York y Boston
permanecen estancadas o estn en declive.
A los australianos les atrae Brisbane no slo por los empleos
que genera cualquier economa urbana en auge, sino tambin
por el estilo de vida que hace posible habitar en una ciudad
con un verano perpetuo y en la que incluso los menos adinerados pueden permitirse el lujo vivir en zonas residenciales
tan frondosas que pueden acoger a pjaros exticos y ualabis;
y an as se sitan a slo un cuarto de hora en coche de las
torres de oficinas que distinguen el centro urbano de Brisbane, incluso durante las horas punta. No existen all zonas
urbanas deprimidas, no se ve a indigentes atrapados por una
vida en las calles dentro de cajas de cartn sobre la acera, ni
atascos de trfico, ni existe la sensacin de lucha diaria que
supone pasar una hora cada maana en un tren subterrneo
abarrotado de camino al trabajo que deprime al ms redomado optimista. Los manglares sobreviven en las cercanas de
los relucientes rascacielos, al igual que las reliquias restaura-
35 5 DACT
$2 billion on the summers games, an essentially frivolous event that allow a troupe of athletes to run around
a race track for just 16 days. Enough money to build Heathrows Fifth terminal, to complete the skyscrapers
of Canary Wharf. And yet so seriously was the event taken that three prime ministers turned up to lobby the
International Olympic Commission in Tokyo in 1990: the culmination of a four year orgy of lavishly funded
public relations and rather less well funded strategic planning that accompanied the last stages of the IOCs
attempt to make up its collective mind about where to stage the 1996 Olympics. Even the losers didnt
begrudge the cost, reckoned at the very least to run into several millions of pounds each. Bob Scott who got
nowhere in 1990, started work on Manchesters second shot at staging the games in the year 2000
immediately the decision to go for Atlanta in 1996 was announced, claiming that the mere fact of bidding
was worthwhile because it had raised the citys international standing, and would act as a catalyst for
restoring pride and confidence.
Atlantas answer to Scott is Billy Payne, a property lawyer, and one time football player. And he speaks from
what sounds like exactly the same script as Scott. For Payne, who swung Atlantas former mayor Andrew
Young, Coca Cola, and the rest of the city establishment behind the bid for the 1996 Olympics, the most
pressing reason to stage the games, was to prove to the rest of the world that the city exists it at all. The
Olympics will he has claimed establish Atlanta as one of the top cities in the world, right up there with
the Parises and the Tokyos and the New Yorks and the Moscows and the like. We are in for a quantum leap
in terms of image and reputation. Not bad going for a city whose history began on the day in 1837 when
a party of surveyors working for the Western and Atlantic Railroad hammered a marker post into a featureless
landscape almost at random, pricking the thin Georgia soil just enough to define what would one day be a
junction between the main trunk lines running north, and west and which served as the reference point from
which the citys boundaries would be laid out. At the time, nobody believed that the place would amount
to much.
Even Colonel Stephen Long the railways chief engineer claimed that the junction might at best support a
tavern, a blacksmiths shop, a general store, and nothing else. Ever since then Atlanta has done everything
it can to prove him wrong, to persuade the rest of the world to take it seriously. That involves treading an
uneasy path between looking back and looking forward. Atlanta supplanted Milledgeville as Georgias state
capital after the civil war when hotel keepers in the old capital refused to accommodate black delegates
elected to the state assembly.
But Atlanta was the national headquarters for the Klu Klux Klan, and in the 1930s for the American
Blackshirts. It is the city which claims in its civic propaganda, to be too busy to hate. But it was also the
place in which a lynch mob several thousand strong murdered a Jewish business man in the early years of
DACT 5 36
minutos, inundado por el olor de los ctricos mientras se conduca a travs de los naranjales con el cap abierto. Incluso
hace veinte aos era un sueo que se encontraba al alcance
de la clase trabajadora californiana.
Durante su perodo de crecimiento extra rpido, nadie se dio
cuenta de que el encanto de Los ngeles pudiera ser tan transitorio y tan frgil. Slo ahora cuando el sueo californiano se
ha evaporado, la ciudad ha advertido lo que perdi. Las
viviendas de clase media asequibles se encuentran tan al interior del desierto californiano que el desplazamiento por las
nuevas autopistas al trabajo supone levantarse a las 4:30 de
la maana, y el agua escasea tanto que se trasvasan ros tan
lejanos como el Colorado. Incluso los californianos ricos ya
no se sienten seguros en la ciudad de los disturbios, los terremotos y los incendios. La aristocracia de Hollywood se muda
a los Hampton. Es el destino de Los ngeles ms que cualquier otra cosa el que ha alertado a los polticos de la escasa
permanencia del entorno urbano, y del fenmeno de paraso
temporal.
Parece que las ciudades, o nacen con rapidez, o mueren con
rapidez. Luego se desarrollan alocadamente en sus mejores
aos, para luego estancarse. Posteriormente, muchas sufren
un pronunciado declive. Si tienen suerte, podrn evitar la
cada en picado hasta experimentar una especie de renacimiento tal y como han vivido Glasgow y Barcelona, y a lo
que Liverpool aspira. Desde los disturbios, los teremotos y los
incendios forestales, Los ngeles se enfrenta a un grave declive. Los recin llegados que atrae en la actualidad son ms
pobres de lo que solan ser. La ciudad ya no disfruta de prosperidad econmica, as que quedan menos trabajos para
ellos. Los contratistas militares y aerospaciales han sufrido en
especial este revs, y ya la ciudad no cuenta con el atractivo
fsico de antao. El smog fue la primera y ms aterradora
seal de su cada desde el edn. Las plantaciones de ctricos
se han visto devoradas por las viviendas, y los primeros
suburbios, en muchos casos, han cado en el abandono y la
decadencia.
Brisbane an se encuentra a cierta distancia de esta fase del
ciclo urbano.
En los aos 70 y 80 sus promotores an se devanaban los
sesos para encontrar frmulas que atrajeran a nuevos inversores. La Expo que se celebr en 1988 fue el momento cumbre, pues la ribera sur del ro Brisbane se recuper del abandono. La feria no en s no pasar a la historia, pero dej tras
s como legado una serie de instalaciones recreativas enormemente populares como bares, restaurantes, e incluso una
the twentieth century. Atlantas skyscrapers define the essence of the new south, but it is also the home of
Stone Mountain, on which confederate war heroes are immortalised on a scale that would have bemused
Albert Speer.
For its first century, Atlanta struggled to persuade the rest of America that it was not some hick town
dependent on cotton, quarries, and a railway junction, but a national centre. And from the 1920s it did its
best to try to look the part. It claimed to be a New York or a Chicago of the South. And it built the gothic
skyscrapers, and neo classical financial and legal district to prove it.
It grasped the essential truth of the casually brutal approach of Fortune magazines annual top ten list of
cities for business which gives flesh to the fear, normally left unspoken among contemporary cities that
More than ever, where you are determines how you do. As Fortune tactlessly puts it, Pity the poor fool
with his headquarters in some mean streets town where office costs are out of sight, and only the reckless
venture out after dusk. Say amen for the chump with a big plant in some backwater where the workforce is
riddled with thugs, druggies and thieves. The only answer for most companies stuck in the wrong place at
the wrong time is to get out.
Atlanta has always been determined to present itself as being exactly the right place at the right time, Even
in 1970, when it did not boast so much as a single direct international flight from its airport, Atlanta was
claiming to be the next great international city. It has grasped that to continue to prosper, it must become
an international city. It wasnt all just talk. Atlanta made two very important architectural contributions to
the history of the post industrial city. The first of them was the re-invention of the atrium hotel by the Atlanta
architect and developer John Portman, realised most spectacularly with the Peachtree Plaza Hotel, the tallest
building in the city when it was completed in 1974, which still makes an indelible landmark on the city
skyline today. Portmans jaw dropping interiors, a recreation of city spaces as the great indoors made a bud
impression around the world. As did his way of wrapping them up in mirror glass. For a while this was the
very personification of modernity, and he went on to repeat the formula everywhere from Singapore to San
Francisco.
Then there was the High Museum, designed by Richard Meiers in the glacial all white style, which became
as indispensable in the 1980s and 1990 as an Armani jacket for ambitious cities in a hurry to make their
mark. Atlanta built the first of the species, and demonstrated in the process that it was committed to culture,
the essential prerequisite for a world city. And now it has the Olympics: The point for a city in staging the
Olympics is very much the same as it is for Addidas or Nike, for Swatch or Longines to get to have their
name indelibly linked with the Olympic rings. Addidas or Nike sell running shoes to couch potatoes with
37 5 DACT
images of grainy sweat soaked athletic triumph. Their over weight customers are able to bask in reflected
glory. To reinvent themselves as athletes. In the same way, Atlanta becomes, not a humdrum railway
junction, but as a centre for all the hopes and dreams of the world. And its citizens see themselves
transformed in exactly the same way.
The fact is that the city is a product like any other. To prosper it has to attract people, if it is grow physically
in size, to tempt visitors and investment. And that depends on the image a city can project. There was a time
when that was primarily about the creation of physical spaces. But the Olympics dont work that way
anymore. Even in Barcelona in 1992, which used the games to kick start a vast transformation of the city
pulling it out of Franco era torpor, into state of the art renewal, the
The fact is that the city is a product like any other. To
image that will most be remembered from the Olympics is that of an
arrow streaking across the Montjuic stadium apparently to ignite the
prosper it has to attract people, if it is grow physically in
Olympic flame, captured on the television screens of the world. This it
size, to tempt visitors and investment. And that depends
has a fake of course.
Kuala Lumpur
Something remarkable happened to the global balance of cultural power this year. Competing teams of
Korean and Japanese contractors working continuously by swelteringly humid tropical day and arc lit night
for three years finally topped out the twin towers of the Petronas building in Kuala Lumpur. With their
DACT 5 38
A no ser que ciudades tan exitosas como Brisbane se enfrenten a problemas de apariencia tan irreconciliable, sus atractivos resultarn efmeros. A las multinacionales sin arraigo les
encantan los parasos temporales. Equiparando otros aspectos, es la ciudad con atractivo fsico en vez del caduco pueblucho la que la empresa eligir para construir una nueva
fbrica o situar su sede central. En la actualidad las empresas
deciden su traslado segn lo que puedan parecer los motivos
ms triviales: la calidad de los restaurantes o el tamao de las
viviendas que los directivos intermedios se pueden permitir.
Sin embargo, su presencia acarree efectos negativos y positivos, pues las nuevas oficinas facilitan el comienzo de la congestin en las carreteras y la popularidad internacional dispara el precio de la vivienda. Los impuestos se incrementan, y a
largo plazo las empresas desarraigadas se vuelven a desplazar, dejando tras de s los escombros de su ocupacin. De
esta forma, el tratamiento de las ciudades como envases no
retornables supone la utilizacin ms derrochadora de recursos imaginable, y promueve la ilusin de que resulta posible
escapar de las realidades de la vida urbana simplemente con
el traslado. Si no se hace frente al problema del crecimiento,
dentro de poco nos quedaremos sin ni siquiera los parasos
ms temporales.
Cantn.
Las nuevas ciudades asiticas no le deben nada al concepto
europeo de urbanismo, no son como la visin de postal ideal
de ciudades toscanas, y an menos aspiran a parecerse a los
bulevares parisinos del siglo diecinueve. En cambio, son densas, brutales, caticas y, sobre todo, son inmensas; cuentan
con centros comerciales y rascacielos, aeropuertos y parques
de negocios. Pero todas estas construcciones aparentemente
familiares se han visto trastocadas por realidades diferentes a
las de sus originales occidentales. Los arquitectos locales tienen debilidad por brillantes azulejos blancos, cristal reflectante y cromo, como si pretendieran desinfectar el hedor de
la antigua Asia. Los espacios pblicos, la planificacin a gran
escala y el sentido de lo pintoresco prcticamente no existen;
puede que se observen como restos del pasado que todava
no ha asumido la misma importancia que en occidente.
Europa se ha olvidado lo que implica vivir en una ciudad en
la que la poblacin se duplica y cuadruplica en una generacin, en donde la cuadrcula de un topgrafo marcada con
estacas en campo abierto se puede transformar en un horizonte de rascacielos con una urgencia que sugiere la fotografa secuencial. Sin embargo, es lo que sucede en la cuenca
Bangladeshi workforce earning just dollars a day, collapsing exhausted to sleep in site hut beds newly
vacated by the next shift, directed by Australian foremen, and German engineers, they had done it at last.
For the first time since the gothic cathedrals were built, the worlds tallest structure is no longer in the West.
From the centre of what was once a sleepy colonial city the towers erupt skyward like fireworks, leaving a
trail 85 floors high that dominates every view of the horizon from Kuala Lumpurs elevated high ways as well
as its twisting lanes where rains storms still leave cars ankle deep in red mud. With heavy nods to Islamic
geometry, it looks uncomfortably like a couple of giant extruded pineapples, tempered by a spidery bridge
at the 41st floor that comes straight from a sword and sorcery strip cartoon.
39 5 DACT
The design is the work of the same Argentine born, American architect Cesar Pelli who built Britains tallest
structure as well as Manhattans World Financial Centre. But this is not, primarily an exercise in architecture.
It is the assertion of political power in steel, marble and glass. The Petronas Centre has eclipsed Chicagos
Sears Tower, previously the worlds tallest building, for the express purpose of demonstrating in the most
conspicuous way possible the determination of the Malaysian prime minister Mohammed Mahattir to be
taken seriously as a figure on the world stage. In the process, the development has swallowed up the elegant
race course at the heart of a city that is frantically reinventing itself as a metropolis. It has also provoked
serious worries among international bankers, that Mahattirs edifice complex may signal that Malaysias
decade long boom is turning to bust. Exactly who is going to occupy all those millions of square feet of office
space?
For America, which invented the art of skyscraper building the prospect of Malaysian hubris is little
compensation for being overtaken by an upstart Asian nation of just 19 million people. Skyscrapers are as
much an essential part of Americas identity as the Coke bottle, baseball and the Marlboro cowboy. At the
end of the nineteenth century they were the counters by which Chicago and New York slugged it out in their
battle for urban supremacy. Whatever one did, the other would do its best to top. The golden age of
skyscraper building up to the 1930s saw the construction in New York of the gothic skyrocket of the
Woolworth Tower, the chromed steel art deco Chrysler tower, and the massive Empire State, all of them
icons of America. In the early years of the twentieth century, they were the essence of modernity. The rest
of the planet went green with envy, and rushed desperately to acquire this extraordinary American
invention, the price of entry so it seemed, into the modern world. And none of them could. They might
manage to put up cartoon copies of the original, but they didnt fool anybody. The Americans alone had the
secret of building high. They had the conviction to make not just the giant refrigerators that so many
European attempts at building high turned out to be, as laughably unconvincing as east German television
sets and hi-fi systems. Above all Americans packed their skyscrapers close enough together to create
completely different ideas of what the city could be. But, the completion of the twin tower - the first
occupants are not scheduled to move in until next year, is a development as humiliating for America as that
which faces Britains cricket teams. It is an act of economic and cultural humiliation like that suffered by
European car makers when they realised that the Japanese were just as capable of building cars with
charisma as Jaguar or Ferrari. We will be listening to Korean rock and roll next.
And that us exactly what Malaysia wanted. The whole exercise began shrouded in almost as much deceptive
vagueness as the Iraqi supergun. In an attempt not to alert any of the dozen or more competitors all around
the world also, when the designs were first published, Pelli would say that the tower was going to be big,
but not exactly how big.
DACT 5 40
There is of course something ludicrously childish about the utterly irrational urge to build high simply for the
sake of being the worlds highest. It is the kind of activity small boys conduct in the illicit privacy of the
playground bike shed. And yet, the idea of extreme height shows no signs of relaxing its grip on the imagination
of the world. The kind of people who invariably present themselves as hard headed rational businessmen, who
exercise infinite caution and calculation in every decision that they make, millionaires who will travel economy
rather than business class, rush headlong into attempts to build ever taller structures. These are moreover,
structures that make no economic sense. Extreme height inevitably carries cost penalties, and creates buildings
that are hard to use efficiently. You cannot lease them out until they are completely finished, so large sections
remain empty, earning no revenue until they are completely ready. And extreme height also means a much
larger percentage of each floor being devoted to lifts and structure than is the case for more modest buildings.
But these are considerations that everyone from Mahattir to Donald Trump shrug off without a thought, so
hypnotised are they by the thought of the atavistic pleasure of owning the tallest object on earth. Not
surprisingly, Robert Maxwell was keen on the idea of acquiring the Sears tower in Chicago, provided that he
could put his own name on it, and also invested in a plan to build a tower just as tall in Paris.
It is perhaps the uncomfortable revelation of the more basic impulses behind human nature that skyscrapers
reveal that maks architects so ambivalent about them. They may be the best chance an architect ever gets to
make a land mark, but they are rarely the kind of mark that an architect would like to make. For the most part
architects have found very little to get a handle on in the design of the skyscraper. You are reduced to the vapid
object. There is very little of interest going on inside, just endless repeated floor plans. The facade is a clipped
on cosmetic. And there is a curious loss of scale. Once past the first 20 or so stories, the architect faces
diminishing aesthetic returns. The difference between a tall building, and a very tall building, is simply the
difference between a refrigerator, and a fridge freezer, between one large anonymous bland box and another.
What made Pelli attractive to the Malaysians was his skill at resurrecting the essentials of the old skyscrapers
of the era of Gotham City, and recycling them for a modern audience. He has gone around the world
designing evocations of the 1930s skyscrapers. In less skilled hands it is a recipe for disaster, a trick akin to
building those roadsters, that ape the imagery of the great days of sports cars in monstrously crude fashion.
Hong Kong has them in spades. In Hong Kong, the Wanchai centre, after Kuala Lumpur the tallest tower in
Asia, is flashy art deco neon at night that evokes in the most heavy handed way the Empire State building.
Now, its own attempt at leap frogging the tallest tower in the world is a planned 500 metre tower that looks
like a crude cartoon version of the Chrysler building.
The Prince of Wales once asked Cesar Pelli, of Londons relatively diminutive dockland giant, the Canary
Wharf tower, less than half the height of the Kuala Lumpur towers, why does it have to be so tall? The
partiendo de cero en 1988. La tienda junto a la sucursal central del Banco de China en Zhuhai tiene una vitrina llena. Un
Remy Martin dentro de una petaca de porcelana blanca de
Limoges con forma de castillo francs se vende por 6250
yuan, unos 450$, ms o menos lo que un campesino del interior espera ganar en un ao. No sorprende que existan controles cada diez kilmetros en la autopista desde Cantn a
Zhuhai, ideados para mantener alejados a emigrantes de la
China ms msera, no para contener a sus ciudadanos.
A los ms afortunados se les permite trabajar como peones, y
soportan condiciones que resultaran conocidas para los trabajadores irlandeses que construyeron gran parte de los canales y ferrocarriles de la revolucin industrial; aquellos que
acudieron en masa para construir el Aeropuerto Internacional
de Zhuhai, a menos de diez minutos de vuelo de Chek Lap
Kok, y pensado para soportar un trfico de doce millones de
pasajeros.
Qu sentido tiene este torbellino que cambia las vidas
incontables de millones de personas en ciudades a miles de
kilmetros de distancia? Quizs existe un propsito en mirar
al pasado adems de hacie el futuro. Durante un breve
momento, Manchester en Inglaterra era la Cantn, la Shanghai, la Yakarta de hoy en da. Exager las caractersticas ms
41 5 DACT
answer that Pelli was too polite to give was that the docklands development needed a skyscraper as its
centrepiece for entirely irrational, and yet essential purpose of impressing the sceptics. It made nowhere
suddenly into somewhere. That is of course hardly a serious reason to invest billions of dollars into
constructing huge ecology busting high rises, that can be home to tens of thousands of people. But it is
exactly what is happening on a global scale. It is now the booming cities of Asia in which the rush for
height is concentrated. The tallest towers in the world are now planned for cities few in the west could
place on a map, let alone pronounce. Pusan in South Korea, Tainjin and Guanzhou in China are all
planning towers bigger than anything in America. And even the twin towers of Kuala Lumpur will not
remain as the worlds tallest for long. A structure that will top them is already under construction in
Shanghai. While three more projects are on the drawing board that would be taller even than that. In
Moscow, in Beijing, and, most recently, the plan newly unveiled for Melbourne for a 2000 foot high
structure, designed by Denton Corker and Marshall, which would tower over the Chicago sears tower by
the height of the Nat West tower in London.
Brisbane
Brisbane the last of Australias penal settlements, established only in 1824 is not a city that has previously
figured prominently on the world stage. The eccentric leadership of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who believed in
a white, heterosexual, god fearing Queensland, kept the spirit of the 1950s alive on a corruption-fuelled lifesupport system long after it had died out everywhere else in Australia. Even its enthusiasts called Brisbane
Australias largest country town, amiable, but sleepy and parochial. More damagingly, Queensland as a
whole, used to be known as the Deep North, Down Unders version of Alabama, economically backward,
and with a political and cultural system to match. But all that has vanished in the last decade: Brisbane is
now the fastest growing city in Australia, and how it deals with that growth is of concern to a new breed of
cities all around the world.
Brisbane is spreading concentric rings of bungalows and shopping malls, Holden dealerships and business
parks across the landscape of southern Queensland so fast that it could leapfrog Melbourne to become
Australias second city even before the country becomes a republic. To the south it is sprawling down the
Pacific Highway, past the suburb of Beenleigh toward the Gold Coast, threatening to merge with the high
rise apartments of the burgeoning beach city of 250.000. To the north it has reached the Moreton Bay coast,
at Redcliffe and Scarborough while its eastern suburbs are stretching inland past the Gap, and Kenmore.
Brisbane is already home to approaching two million people, not because it has a particularly high birth rate,
or because its a magnet for overseas immigrants; it isnt, but because Australians are leaving dusty remote
DACT 5 42
Kuala Lumpur.
Este ao sucedi un hecho destacado en el equilibrio mundial del poder cultural: durante tres aos equipos rivales de
contratistas japoneses y coreanos trabajando sin cesar durante el da bajo el trrido calor tropical e iluminados por arcos
volticos de noche a lo largo de tres aos lograron culminar
las torres gemelas del edificio Petronas en Kuala Lumpur. Por
fin lo haban conseguido, dirigida por capataces australianos
e ingenieros alemanes, al igual que con obreros de Bangladesh que ganaban unos dlares al da y caan agotados para
dormir en camas dentro de chozas construidas sobre el terreno y que acababan de dejar libre el siguiente turno.
Por primera vez desde que se construyeran las catedrales
gticas, la estructura mundial ms elevada ya no se encuentra en occidente. Desde el centro de lo que en su poca fue
una aburrida ciudad colonial, las torres surgen hacia el cielo
como fuegos artificiales y dejan una estela de 85 pisos de
country towns, and the fading southern cities to come here. And its not just ambitious individuals who come,
growing companies, and international investment inevitably drawn to such places.
It is a phenomenon that is far from being confined to Australia. All over Europe and America, the fastest
growing, most dynamic urban economies, are not the old metropolises, scarred by industrialisation and
blight, but smaller, pleasanter, gentler cities. Thus London is still loosing population from its centre, while
places like Cambridge, Bournemouth, Bristol and Swindon are booming. France is seeing its sunrise
industries moving into its Mediterranean sunbelt. In America it is such unlikely cities as Denver, Phoenix
and Las Vegas that are growing, while New York and Boston are static or declining.
indicar el principio del fin de la dcada del boom econmico malayo. Exactamente quin va a ocupar todos esos millones de metros cuadrados de espacio para oficinas?
Para los EE.UU., que invent el arte de construir rascacielos,
la perspectiva de orgullo malayo supone una nfima compensacin por verse superado por una nacin asitica emergente de slo 19 millones de habitantes. Los rascacielos conforman una parte fundamental de la identidad norteamericana, al igual que la botella de Coca-Cola, el bisbol y el
vaquero de Marlboro. A finales del siglo diecinueve se convirtieron en las fichas con las que Nueva York y Chicago
dilucidaban su batalla por la supremaca urbana. Cualquier
cosa que uno haca, la otra haca lo mximo por superarla.
La edad dorada de los rascacielos hasta los aos 30 contempl la construccin en Nueva York del cohete gtico de la
Torre Woolworth, el acero cromado de estilo art dco de la
torre Chrysler y el enorme Empire State, todos ellos smbolos
de los EE.UU. A principios del siglo XX, se consideraban la
esencia de la modernidad. El resto del planeta se vio corrodo por la envidia y se apresur desesperadamente a adquirir
esta extraordinaria invencin norteamericana, el precio de
entrada en el mundo moderno, o as pareca; y ninguno fue
capaz. Puede que se las arreglaran para levantar burdas
43 5 DACT
Australians are drawn to Brisbane, not just by the jobs that are part of any booming urban economy, but also
by the way of life that is possible in a city in which it is always summer, in which even the not particularly
prosperous can afford to live in leafy suburbs lush enough to shelter wallabies and exotic birds, yet just a 15
minute drive away from the office towers that mark Brisbanes centre even during the rush hour. There are
no inner city wastelands here, no homeless street people trapped in a life of cardboard boxes on the
pavement, no traffic jams, no visible pollution, and above all, no sense of the daily struggle for existence
that spending an hour in a packed underground train on the way to work every morning will give even the
sunniest of optimists. Mangrove swamps survive within sight of the glossy new skyscrapers, and the elegantly
restored relics of colonial architecture. There are unspoiled white sand beaches, tropical rain forests and
coral islands within easy reach. There are affordable restaurants mixing cuisines from all over Asia with
Europe, there are parks in the city centre, new art galleries, and well regarded schools and universities.
The anxiety now is that none of these things can survive continuing growth for much longer, and that
Brisbane will succumb to all the usual ecological nightmares: photochemical smog, the destruction of
natural habitats, water shortages, sewage and waste pollution, and to the social ones as well. In Brisbane,
like anywhere else, endless anonymous suburbs will extinguish the diversity and freedom that the city offers.
Mothers with small children end up trapped in their homes, and some suburbs become places in which
disaffected teenagers run riot.
It is a concern that goes far beyond anything that could be called Nimbyism, and has more to do with
encouraging cities to grow in appropriate ways, than stopping them from growing at all... Brisbane has, in
short, all the essential characteristics of that newly identified urban
phenomenon: the temporary paradise. Like a string of other cities
Brisbane, a city whose natural attractions have
across the world, Brisbane, a city whose natural attractions have made
made it a success, is faced with the dismaying
it a success, is faced with the dismaying realisation that its very success
realisation that its very success may destroy
may destroy everything that made it attractive in the first place. At State
everything that made it attractive in the first place.
and City level, Brisbane is struggling to find ways of planning growth
in a way that will mitigate its worst effects. Even at the national level,
the former Keating government was concerned enough to set up an urban design task force which reported
on ways of strengthening old centres, and building new suburbs without the worst qualities of placelessness.
Brisbanes planners confer anxiously with their counterparts in Seattle, and Vancouver in the Pacific north
west, geographically a world away, but with very similar opportunities and difficulties. They swap
experiences and strategies aimed at staving, off the seemingly inevitable destruction of the essential
character of their cities. These are cities which are also experiencing the temporary paradise effect. The clear
DACT 5 44
waters and green forests around Seattle have attracted disaffected Californians, expatriate Hong Kong
Chinese and even Bill Gates. Like Brisbane it is a former backwater, an enclave of provincialism that has
been brought to life by an influx of newcomers.
The point is not to support wealthy home owners in their struggle to stop their view being spoiled by blue
collar housing spreading up the hill, but to plan the whole city in such a way that it does not destroy itself
in the way that Los Angeles the urban dystopia from which so many of the refugees in Oregon and
Washington State have fled, has done. Los Angeles was a temporary paradise itself once. For most of this
century, it was a city which seemed like the promised land. Curiously few town planners realised just what
an attractive place it was until it was too late. They always presented Los Angeles as a textbook example of
what not to do urbanistically. The sprawl, the freeways, the mushrooming strip growth of boulevards
seventeen miles long were regarded as planning horror stories. Looked at with the prejudices of Europe, with
its belief that Florence with its piazzas and pedestrian streets is the only model for an authentic city, Los
Angeles seemed hardly to be a city at all. In fact it was actually an enormous success for almost a century.
It was a sensuous city with a remarkable landscape, and a climate that offered its citizen enormous freedom
as well as jobs and homes. It was a city in which you could get from you ocean front patio house to your
workplace in ten minutes, overwhelmed by the scent of citrus fruit as you drove through the orange groves
with the top down. Even 20 years ago it was a dream that was still within reach of the Californian working
class.
During its period of ultra rapid growth, nobody yet realised that Los Angeles charm could be so transient,
and so fragile. It is only now that the Californian dream has evaporated, that the Californian dream has
woken up to what has been lost. Affordable new middle class housing is so far out into the Californian desert
that commuting on the new freeways means getting up at 4.30 am. And water is in such short supply that
rivers as far away as Colarado are being diverted. Even Californias rich no longer feel secure in the face of
the riots, the earthquakes and the fires. The Hollywood aristocracy are moving to the Hamptons. More than
anything else, it is the fate of Los Angeles that has alerted politicians to the impermanence of the urban
environment, and to the temporary paradise phenomenon.
Cities it seems, are either busy being born, or busy dying. They grow furiously in their glory years, then they
stall. Many subsequently go into steep decline. If they are lucky they can pull out of the nose-dive to
experience some kind of rebirth as Glasgow and Barcelona have done, and Liverpool hopes to. Los Angeles
since the riots, the landslides and the forest fires is facing serious decline. The newcomers it attracts now are
poorer than they used to be. The city is no longer economically buoyant, so there fewer jobs for them.
Aerospace and milirary contractors have been particularly hard hit. And the city is no longer as physically
45 5 DACT
attractive as it was. The smogs were the first and most horrifying sign of the fall from Eden. The citrus groves
have been swallowed up by houses. And the early suburbs have in many cases declined into squalor and
decay.
Brisbane is still some distance away from this point in the urban cycle.
In the 1970s and 1980s its boosters were still scrabbling around for ways to make it more attractive to new
investors. The Expo it staged in 1988 was one turning point. The south bank area of the Brisbane River was
reclaimed from dereliction. The fair itself might not have been particularly memorable, but it left as its legacy
a series of hugely popular recreational facilities, bars restaurants, even an artificial beach. And it gave the
city a new airport. Every year for the last decade, passenger numbers
have grown by 14 per cent at Blisbanes airport. Until last year, you
Taxes rise, and in the long term, the footloose companies
were still able to sniff sea salt in the air on the way across the tarmac
will move on again, leaving behind them the wreckage of
into the international arrivals building. This autumn, Brisbane opens a
their occupation, treating cities as disposable in this way
new terminal, snuffing out sea smells, and marking another step in the
is the most wasteful use of resources imaginable. And it
path of its steady progress toward becoming a city just like any other.
en el mapa. Desde luego, esta razn es poco seria para invertir miles de millones en la construccin de enormes torres de
apartamentos de gran impacto ecolgico que pueden albergar
a miles de personas y, sin embargo, sucede a escala global.
La carrera por la altura se concentra en la actualidad en las
florecientes ciudades asiticas. Las torres ms elevadas se
proyectan ahora en ciudades que pocos occidentales podran
situar en un mapa, o siquiera pronunciar; Pusan en Corea del
Sur, Tainjin y Cantn en China preparan edificios ms altos
de los existentes en los EE.UU.
Incluso las torres gemelas de Kuala Lumpur no durarn
durante mucho tiempo como las altas, pues ya se construye
en Shanghai una estructura que las sobrepasar, mientras que
ya existen tres proyectos en preparacin que superarn incluso a sta ltima. En Mosc, en Pekn y por ltimo en Melbourne un proyecto recin presentado de 2.000 pies de alto
que rebasar a las torres Sears de Chicago en la altura de la
torre NatWest de Londres.
DACT 5 46
roads that have the effect of generating yet more traffic rather than easing congestion. In Los Angeles, where
an extensive street car system was deliberately sabotaged in the 1940s by the road lobby the suburbs are so
spread out, and built to such a low density, that it is too late to adapt them to public transport. Their very
structure makes railways of any kind uneconomical -and it is that realisation that has pushed the city into
drafting draconian local laws aimed at the introduction of zero polluting electrically powered cars by the
end of the century.
Unless cities as successful as Brisbane face up to these apparently irreconcilable problems, their attractions
will turn out to be short lived. Footloose multinationals love temporary paradises. Other things being equal,
it is the physically attractive city rather than the time expired backwater that a company will choose in which
to build a new factory, or locate its headquarters. Companies decide where to go for what can seem the most
trivial of grounds - the quality of the restaurants, the size of the houses that middle managers can afford.
But their presence has negative as well as positive effects: new offices make the roads start to clog up with
traffic, international popularity pushes up local house prices. Taxes rise, and in the long term, the footloose
companies will move on again, leaving behind them the wreckage of their occupation, treating cities as
disposable in this way is the most wasteful use of resources imaginable. And it provides the illusion that it
is possible to escape from the realities of urban life simply by moving on, If we dont face up to the problems
of growth, we will rapidly run out of even the most temporary of paradises.
Guanzhon
The new Asian cities owe nothing to the European ideal of urbanism; they are nothing like the picture post
card views of Tuscan hill towns, still less do they aspire to replicate the nineteenth century boulevards of
Paris. They are dense, raw, chaotic, and above all, they are vast. They have shopping malls and skyscrapers,
airports and business parks. But all of these apparently familiar landmarks have been subverted into
something very different from their western originals. Architects here have a weakness for glossy white tiles,
mirror glass and chrome, as if they are attempting to disinfect the squalor of old Asia. And public space,
grand planning, and a sense of the picturesque are all but non-existent; these may be seen as reminders of
a past that has not yet assumed the same significance that it has in the west.
Europe has forgotten what it is like to live in a city in which the population doubles and redoubles in a single
lifetime; where a surveyors grid laid out with pegs and string in open fields can mushroom into a skyline of
skyscrapers, with an urgency that suggests time lapse photography. But that is exactly what is happening around
47 5 DACT
the Pacific Rim in a building boom not seen since London and Paris turned themselves into the largest cities that
the world had yet seen during the nineteenth century. And by comparison with the nothing short of apocalyptic
transformation of Asia, Europes contemporary anxieties about inner city decay and sprawl look trivial.
The Zhuhai jetfoil is 15 minutes late as it splutters out of Kowloons China Ferry terminal; the red flag of the
Peoples Republic fluttering from its battered Thunderbirds-style stern. It may look like a grubby relic of the
Sputnik era, but this aged blue and white tub has acquired a new lease of life as a makeshift floating mass
transit system for the worlds newest metropolis, a sprawling monster city, still in the throes of a violent birth
that doesnt yet have a name.
Chain smoking commuters cross and recross the Pearl River to run the factories that Hong Kong has built in
Chinas special economic zones. There are a sprinkling of westerners on the ferry too in search of bargain
basement manufacturing deals, or pedalling high tech equipment to entrepreneurs in the making. From the
other direction come teenaged hustlers lugging suitcases of pirated software, clutching mobile phones.
The two sides of the river are as inextricably linked, and as uneasy about each other as the north and south
bank of the Thames, as Manhattan and New Jersey. In the last decade an increasingly affluent Hong Kong
has exported a non stop stream of jobs to the low wage economy across the border, investing billions of
dollars in the process. Even before the colony officially reverts to Chinese control, the Pearl River is already
a single, giant city, spilling uncontrollably across international frontiers like a huge ink stain.
This nameless conurbation its only close competitors are Shanghai and Jakarta is exploding towards what
has become the benchmark population for a new generation of turbo-charged metropolises. Within a
decade, if it continues to expand at its present rate, this new city will become home to 40 million people,
leapfrogging Tokyo-Osaka and Mexico City to become the largest in the world. A population greater than
most of the individual states of Europe will be packed into an area not much larger than the greater London
region. And all he reference points by which we traditionally measure cities will have become irrelevant.
Once a citys geography was determined by the endurance of its pedestrians. It expanded to accommodate
road and rail commuters. But a city of 40 million people is a different kind of organism altogether. Its
economic power is such that it makes the nation state redundant, so long as it can retain the cohesion that
cities need to be workable entities.
Hong Kong and Shenzen, the special economic zone set up on what was still empty farmland in 1970,
have dissolved into a single urban soup. Shenzen has a casino of a stockmarket to make some of its citizens
DACT 5 48
rich, and a surrealistic theme park studded with scale models of the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera
House to amuse them. And it is surging towards Guangzhou, 100 km up the Pearl River with the speed of
air rushing into a punctured vacuum to meet a parallel firestorm of urbanisation raging on the other side
of the delta. A continuous ribbon of concrete high rises, industrial sheds and hotels is now snaking all the
way down to Macao and enveloping Shenzens less famous twin, Zhuhai. This is more than a chaotic
spectacle, a one-off by product of the Chinese rediscovery of capitalism. The Pearl River represents the
future of the modern metropolis -a decisive shift away from European and American ideas of what the city
should be.
Fuelled by its exploding economy, coastal Asia is building a new city the size of London every six months.
Europe has been left behind in its dust, to dwindle into a picturesque backwater, where the rich go shopping
for Louis Vuitton, and Airbus, and to launder their money.
As the Zhuhai ferry moves away from its berth, anxious men continue barking into mobile phones as they
line up to buy Luco Zang Zhong Jian mineral water at the buffet. They hardly give a second glance to the
view through the salt streaked windows. Every inch of the shoreline has been built on; a solid mass of dry
docks, and container terminals, overlooked by slabs of high rise apartments stretching up into the hills. The
water itself is so thick with traffic, that it too has became part of the
Fuelled by its exploding economy, coastal Asia is building
city, it might as well be a giant Tarmac apron. A little way out, the ferry
skirts the towering concrete piers of the half built suspension bridge
a new city the size of London every six months. Europe
linking the still not complete runways of the new airport that Britain
has been left behind in its dust, to dwindle into a
will bequeath its last serious colony.
Mary McCarthy escribi un elegante librillo sobre la imposibilidad de encontrar algo nuevo que contar sobre Venecia.
De igual manera podra haberse referido a Las Vegas, una
ciudad que, al menos durante los ltimos cincuenta aos de
gloria, se ha visto inundada con una mayor densidad de turistas literarios, desde Tom Wolfe a Noel Coward y Hunter
Thompson. Todos ellos identifican la naturaleza bsicamente
industrial del lugar, con las hordas de trabajadores vestidos
en polister sudando la gota gorda las 24 horas en las lneas
de produccin de las mquinas tragaperras. Muchos tambin
sealan la similitud de Las Vegas con Lourdes; los enfermos
terminales, los obesos y los horriblemente deformes viajan
hasta all desde todos los EE.UU., en busca de redencin y la
oportunidad de tocar durante un efmero momento el sueo
de riquezas y oro sobre el que se construy la ciudad. Sin
embargo, y a diferencia de Venecia, Las Vegas no est inerte,
continua reinventndose. Los primeros casinos eran pequeos salones en Freemont Street, el antiguo centro de Las
Vegas construido en los aos 20. Bugsy Seigel y su band de
mafiosos se alejaron fuera de los lmites de la ciudad para
construir el Flamingo, de 200 habitaciones, con lo que se creara el strip en los aos 40. Ms tarde lleg la extravagancia
del nen en los aos 60, ejemplificada por el Caesar Palace y
49 5 DACT
This is the shape of the future every bit as much as Silicon valley, or the Internet, but it is still a raw, violent
place.
Fortunes are being made here, which may account for the fact that Chiona has now become the largest
importer of French brandy in the world, coming from nowhere in 1988. The shop next to Zhuhais main branch
of the Bank of China has a glass case full of it. Remy Martin in a white Limoges porcelain flask shaped like a
French chateau sells for 5.250 Yuan, or just over $450 - roughly what a peasant from inland China can expect
to earn in a year. Small wonder that there are checkpoints every 10 kilometres on the highway from Guangzhou
to Zhuhai, designed not to keep the Chinese in, but to keep out migrants from the desperately poor Chinese.
The lucky ones are allowed in to work as unskilled labourers, and endure conditions that would have been
familiar to the Irish labourers who built many of the canals and railways of the industrial revolution. They
flocked here to built the Zhuhai Interational Airport, less than 10 minutes flying time
from Che Lap Kok, and designed to handle 12 million passengers.
How do we make sense of this maelstrom that is changing the lives of countless millions in cities thousands
of miles apart. Perhaps there is some purpose to looking back as well as foreward. For a brief moment,
Manchester in England was the Guangzhou, the Jakarta, the Shanghai of its day. It conflated their most
extreme characteristics into a spectacle that was both horrifying in its squalor, and exhilarating in its
exuberance. It was a city that looked like no other city before it, and one that demanded a way of life like
that of no earlier city. What made it so powerful, and glamorously alarming was that it seemed to represent
the future. And to Ruskin and Morris, the future looked terrifying.
The world was both rivetted and appalled in a way that we can only now begin to fully appreciate as the
cities of Asia go through the same vertigo-inducing sense of awe at a state of continuous urban flux that the
industrial revolution once provided. Manchester increased its population by 40 per cent every ten years. It
became a gigantic mechanism for the creation of wealth and the transformation of rural migrants into city
dwellers. Manchester invented the factory, the railway station and the back to back house. Asias vast new
cities are doing the equivalent for the new century.
We dont yet know what life will be like when these new monster cities mature. We can only speculate about the
impact of affluence. Jakarta for example currently has car ownership of 16 per cent. And its roads are already
impassible for much of the day. And in Bangkok, where just 24 per cent of households have cars, traffic delays are
so bad that banks routinely provide their managers with cars equipped with fax machines and portable lavatories.
Yet these cities are alive and growing, and contain within them the seeds of success as well as catastrophe.
DACT 5 50
el da de cobro para tirar su dinero en las mquinas tragaperras, no puede competir con los nuevos casinos. El Golden
Nugget y el Vegas Vic, el famoso vaquero de nen de veinte
metros, no eran rival para los encantos del mundo empresarial del Las Vegas Lite.
La ciudad no se anuncia hoy en da con vaqueros de arte
pop, sino con el haz lser que penetra en el cielo desde la
cspide del hotel Luxor, la destacada rplica mayor que el
original de la gran pirmide visible a varios kilmetros desde
el vaco desierto. Con su obelisco y una esfinge a modo de
guardian de la puerta, su imponente silueta se eleva por
encima de la calima y de los apolillados Boeing aparcados
en el lmite del aeropuerto de la ciudad. Es el nico de los
megalticos hoteles de Las Vegas que ha logrado integrar
tema con estructura. Todos los dems defraudan por la necesidad de incorporar las incontables miles de ventanas que
reflejan la naturaleza esencialmente burocrtica de todas
esas habitaciones de hotel alineadas en pasillos. El Luxor,
con su cubierta de elegante cristal oscuro logra que las ventanas se esfumen por arte de magia; en cambio, el Excalibur
es una pattica imagen, abrumado por una avalancha de
ventanillas que descubren la realidad de la fantasa con una
franqueza despiadada.
51 5 DACT
Traffic in Democracy
Michael Sorkin
Columbia University New York
The gold standard of urbanity is propinquity, the fact of being together in space and the currency of
propinquity the measure of the citys intensity -is exchange. City politics is inscribed in strategies of
propinquity, in the legibility and tractability of routines of circulation and contact. We confront a crisis today
because the dimensions of these routines are changing dramatically as virtual systems increasingly supplant
physical ones as the sites of human interactivity.
It can be pretty scary: great anxiety marks the clear threat of the decline of space as the primary medium of
urban exchange. What will happen when neither wealth nor information nor happiness is exchanged face
to face? More quantitatively, how many layers of human mediation can be stripped away before a sense of
connection collapses? Clearly, contemporary strategies of the virtual compete with historic ideas of location
as the basis of propinquity: the fundamental epistemology of the city will be transformed if the body creases
to be the privileged means of participation and enjoyment of urban life.
Lets not be too apocalyptic: my own disquiet is less over the way in which virtuality reconfigures urban space
in traditionally constituted cities than with the accelerating metastasis of the intersitital city, the predominant
new form of urbanism at the millenium and, to my mind, a fundamental blight. Although cybertechnology
offers only a fractional account of the rise of this edge city, its clear that cities are changing from a deeply
place-based construct to one in which alternative modes of motility and contact supplant face to face or body
to body relations. Whatever else it represents, the edge city is cyburbia made form.
I do not worry about cyber-technology as a supplementary means of communication and exchange. And, in
a certain sense, I do not worry about traditional urban centers where the answers seem clear. The traditional
city is less at risk from virtual space than from its own extent: apraxic places like Mexico City or Cairo have
been crushed by a sheer weight of numbers that no amount of prosperity can ever redress in place. The only
answer here is dedensification. If cyber-technology can contribute to the contraction and aeration of such
dysfunctional centers, so much the better. And, there is considerable evidence visible a variety of
community preservation and environmental struggles that strategies for reclaiming the spatial logics of
traditional cities are being reacquired.
Real estate development, migration, and cyburbanization are too much seen as simple growth models which
only picture cities in terms of their territorial expansion and contraction. We need to de-link the increase in
urbanization from the necessary expansion of all cities. As the world population continues to burgeon and
as the strangulation of existing cities intensifies, the need for numerous new cities is unmistakeable. Theres
Trfico en democracia
DACT 5 52
a funny myopia here. Because the building of new cities is so radically absent from our agenda, we
somehow believe that were not already engaged in the largest project of urban construction ever
undertaken. All over the planet, the outcome is sprawl as we never imagined it, the expansion of urban
peripheries to elide in a continuous globe-girdling fabric, a mondopolis. And this is how the city will finally
disappear, into a tangle of non-coinciding pathways, like a nest of snakes. Or simply into an infinity of cells,
each stuffed with a monad watching a Sony TV or with a driver looking
out the windshield at the field of heads look out the windshield at ...
Theres a funny myopia here. Because the building of
Although I dont believe in a universal urbanism, I think weve got one
new cities is so radically absent from our agenda, we
on our hands.
While the genius of the city is its resistance to the simultaneous description of all its processes and
components, this is no excuse not to think comprehensively. Its not just that things are growing out of
control or that the almost purely economic models that produce urban character nowadays are deadening,
the crisis is even more fundamental. By failing to produce an urbanism of our best hopes, we are sacrificing
our own pleasures and possibilities. And we are missing a chance to improve and preserve the conditions
of our democracy. As the world is increasingly governed by the supranational circuit of capital, cities are
ever more critical bulwarks of a sense of locality and participation and as logical units of production and
democracy sites of resistance to the locationless behavior of the world economy.
Any theory of the human character of cities begins with the face to face. From the citys styles of intensifying
such intercourse descends any description of the urban economy and its politics. Id like to talk today about
traffic as the medium of this commerce. Traffic is the sum of those instrumentalities of motion by which
propinquity is effected, the means by which humans are physically enabled to enjoy different encounters and
circumstances within the city. Of course, no theory of movement will make a difference if the character and
53 5 DACT
ENY.
variety of places between which such circulation occurs is inadequate. Still, the dialogue of intersection between
public and private is mediated and in part invented by the available means of circulating between them.
Traffic today is thought of as mere technology, saddled with its myths, pinioned between visions of tractability
and autonomy. In such fantasies, technology becomes a second nature, a system with its own rules and
animation, like Frankensteins monster, growing and operating beyond our control. For many, this view has
displaced the predecessor myth, of technologys universal panacea which, in America at any rate, is now
viewed with skepticism, part of a more general rejection of scientistic modernism. Modernist urbanism
crashed, after all, in its stoned thrall of the scientific, whether in the form of technology, of social science,
DACT 5 54
ENY.
or merely in its dreary mimesis of tech-forms. When in reaction to this cities ceased to be planned in the
old physical sense, the space of such activity was taken over by what is called infrastructure, by something
underneath, invisible, in common, agreeable. Planning for traffic was simply subsumed in this onedimensional view, becoming the favored visibility of planning, the thing which could tolerably be seen.
The foregrounding of the means of motion in the building of cities has been a disaster. Part of the difficulty
is the relative autonomy of technology. Science is neither the revealed truth nor pure social construction: we
do not always get the technology we either deserve or desire. As a result, cities have too long been obliged
to play catch-up with existing technologies of transportation, successively refitting themselves with systems
55 5 DACT
that do not love them, rent by railway cuttings and freeways, clogged with pollution and lethal metal. The
facilitation of motion itself has displaced the reasons to get together.
The appeal of motion-based urbanism, however, is obvious. Traffic at once represents a sort of freedom the
freedom of movement that in engineering language amounts to a perverse reduction of more fundamental
freedoms like that of association and also models the economic relations of the circuit of capital. These
correspondences, though, are more metaphorical than real, never quite able succinctly to embody the shifting
interactions of time, space, and treasure. It is, however, also true that urban motion is the defining mode of
urban connection. And it is precisely for reasons of its consequentiality that we must cease simply to fit the
city to existing paradigms of movement and try to reimagine questions of circulation from first principles.
Traffic is the relationship between speed and flow. In a reformed view, human locomotion becomes not the
sole but the privileged mode, the top of the hierarchy and the crucial measure of speed and of dimension.
Whatever the pleasures of the ride (not something I consider trivial) it must have a teleology, a sense that the
means serve the end of a decent and desired propinquity. Mere multiplication of motion (to paraphrase
Marinetti) is not enough, particularly if the rationalization of such means reduces the possibility of accident.
In our culture of flow, the possibilities for literal mobility are greatly enhanced: there is no place on the
planet we cannot go by the end of the day. On the other hand, neither urban mobility nor the fundamental
formats of face to face encounter have been effectively increased since Catal Huyuk.
Modern culture is increasingly characterized by capsules of intermediacy, by trains, planes, automobiles,
and elevators. These instrumentalities are now joined by time spent in front of the screen, by electronic styles
of mobility. Just as the view from the railway car window forever altered not simply the landscape but
fundamental perceptions of time and space, so the window of the monitor represents a shift in our perceptual
and psychical relationship to exteriority. Such virtual travel also embodies a remarkable economy of energy
as the experience of motion is efficiently stripped from actual mobility, efficiently making all of us unmoved
movers.
Again, Im not crying apocalypse: as an architect and urbanist I am trying to figure out what to do about a
new spatial reality to which the city must respond, an encapsulization that characterizes the experience of
both literal and virtual travel, an ineffable space where we sit suspended like Trekkies in the Transporter
Beam. Ive long had a fascination for the late Walter Hudson, record holder as the worlds fattest man,
seemingly a hero of space, the person who holds the distinction of having taken up more of it than anyone in
history. Ironically, though, Hudson is also the avatar of spacelessness. So huge that be could not move,
Hudson remained confined to his specially reinforced bed, contact with the world limited to electronic media.
DACT 5 56
una teleologa, una idea de que los medios sirven para alcanzar una propincuidad decente y deseada. La mera multiplicacin de movimiento (parafraseando a Marinetti) no es suficiente, particularmente si la racionalizacin de tales medios
reduce la posibilidad de accidente. En nuestra cultura de circulacin, las posibilidades para una movilidad literal se ven
incrementadas enormemente: no hay lugar en el planeta al
que no podamos llegar al finalizar el da. Por otro lado, ni la
movilidad urbana ni los formatos fundamentales del encuentro cara a cara han aumentado desde Catal Huyuk.
La cultura moderna se caracteriza cada vez ms por cpsulas
de transporte de un punto a otro, por trenes, aviones, automviles y ascensores. A estos medios mecnicos se les une
ahora el tiempo que pasamos ante la pantalla, con estilos
electrnicos de movilidad. De la misma manera que la perspectiva desde la ventana del vagn del tren est siempre alterada, no solamente el paisaje, sino las percepciones fundamentales del tiempo y el espacio; la ventana del monitor
representa un cambio en nuestras relaciones fsicas y de percepcin con el exterior. Este viaje virtual tambin representa
una economa enorme de energa a medida que la experiencia de movimiento se desliga eficientemente de la movilidad
real, convirtindonos en viajeros inmviles.
De nuevo, no predico el Apocalipsis: como arquitecto y urbanista estoy tratando de averiguar qu hacer con respecto a
una realidad espacial ante la que debe responder la ciudad,
un encapsulamiento que caracteriza la experiencia de tanto
el viaje literal como el virtual, un inefable espacio donde nos
sentamos suspendidos como Treekies en el rayo transportador. Siempre me he sentido fascinado por el difunto Walter
Hudson, que ostentaba el rcord al hombre ms gordo del
mundo, aparentemente un hroe del espacio, la persona que
posee la distincin de haber ocupado ms de l mismo que
nadie en la historia. Sin embargo, irnicamente, Hudson tambin es el avatar de la inmovilidad. Tan inmenso que no se
poda mover, Hudson permaneca confinado en una cama
especialmente reforzada, su contacto con el mundo limitado
por los medios de comunicacin electrnicos. No obstante,
Hudson consigui sin siquiera estar presente ser increblemente visible, y se hizo figura de culto por los medios de
comunicacin que le convirtieron en un anuncio emblemtico para una Norteamrica obsesionada con respecto al consumo del espacio. Hudson era el otro lado de la anorexia, la
neurosis espacial emblemtica de la poca. Se sent en el
cruce de los deseos construidos de una nacin: comparemos
el lujoso consumo del espacio de Hudson, por ejemplo,
Westside Left.
Westside Right.
57 5 DACT
Nevertheless, Hudson managed without ever being present to be incredibly visible, lavishly attended to by
the media who made him a poster child for Americas prurient obsession with the consumption of space.
Hudson was the flip side of anorexia, the emblematic spatial neurosis of the age. He sat at the nexus of the
constructed desires of a nation: compare Hudsons luxurious consumption of space, for example, with
those ubiquitous airline ads for business class travel seats, images of the immobilized traveller, strapped and
wired in, stuffed like a Strasbourg goose, cruising through never-never land on the way to a distant place
which he or she will be increasingly at pains to distinguish from the place left twelve hours ago and half a
world away, his or her status and comfort reduced to a consideration of inches.
The risk is that the problems of urban circulation will be solved by eliminating the reasons to move, whether
through Walter Hudson style immobility or through the suppression of evocative qualities of difference in
the environment. Location today is under intense competition from position, that is from location emptied
of locality, proximity defined through virtual relations with other entities disposed around the globe and with
others who live their real lives entirely within the net. Location still rules but more and more at the expense
of place. A tremendous re-scaling is under way and with it an accelerating culture of post-adjacent
propinquity, configured at global scale.
The idea of pleasure in mobility, however, is ancillary to the principal ideology of traffic planning, the idea
of flow, a quality that has by now obtained a quasi-metaphysical status. Flow, for the planners, is instituted
in terms of the flow of the apparatus, only secondarily in terms of the flow of people. Like the circulation of
capital, the circulation of traffic is most perfectly efficient when it is
ceaseless, when it attains the status of a constant - perpetual motion.
The consequences are dramatic: nodal architectures
But, while stasis is the enemy of a flowing system of perfect efficiency,
subsumed by strategies of flow are predominant in the
it is also indispensable to its functioning. The node, after all, is the
creature of flow, implying not simply centrality (and therefore
American landscape, the strip, the shopping mall, the
directionality) but cease, that place where motion stops, enabling
suburbs, the edge city, everything.
transfer (to foot, to another means, to another purpose...). Although
there is an interesting sub-history of fantasies of on-the-fly transfer,
which is another story, the notion of flow imposes its own idea of efficiency, always calibrated to keeping
going, not stopping, overcoming impedence and resisting inertia. The consequences are dramatic: nodal
architectures subsumed by strategies of flow are predominant in the American landscape, the strip, the
shopping mall, the suburbs, the edge city, everything.
The example of the car is instructive. In America in particular, the car occupies a powerful psychical and
functional position. Cars are surrogates for our own identities and our sense of rights has become identified
DACT 5 58
59 5 DACT
Consider Los Angeles, the omega (and the end of the road) of the American line of the spatial city and the
prototype of the city of the edge. Los Angeles and cities like it seek to create a consistent culture of the
particle, in which an ostensibly egalitarian set of relationships of property are matched to a similarly
conceived strategy of circulation. The experiment conducted with the use of cars not just the dominant but
the virtually exclusive mode of motion in Los Angeles offers a succint recapitulation of Thomas Jeffersons
Cartesian fantasy of the organization of American space. The grid the instrument of an equality achieved
by the surrender of difference in space or rather by the reduction of the arena of difference to a rigidly
circumscribed territory functions only if there is an even distribution of use, or if it runs like clock work
no caesurea, no surcease and if there are no intersections. This was Jeffersons fundamental error: be saw
the grid as constituted purely of the aggregated surfaces of infinite squares, their boundaries inmaterial, pure
edge.
The Los Angeles grid, however, is a compound of both territories and intersticies, each square producing not
simply its own surface but also four extra-territorial intersections which it is obliged to share and which
become the motive basis for the active relations of the implied democracy. The conundrum arises because
an intersection is both a deterrent to flow and a necessity for contact. Democracy implies the need
continuously to give ground to the other. As a practical matter, the system only works at very low loadings
where the possibilities of conflict are extremely reduced. As anyone who has driven the LA grid late at night
knows, this kind of geometrical freedom in which one encounters
Zoning by class and by function, as well as the extremely
public space as almost purely private can be exhilarating. At higher
rates of utilization, though, contact becomes impediment.
uneven distribution of energy and motion over the
In cities like Los Angeles, the loadings on the grid are thrown into
profound disequilibrium by the inequalities of use that culture imposes
on the systems. Zoning by class and by function, as well as the
extremely uneven distribution of energy and motion over the diurnal
cycle, distorts the stable, static, relationships that are at the core of the Cartesian fantasy: Thomas Jefferson
never imagined the rush hour. The history of the planning of Los Angeles is a history of successive failed
panaceas for this problem. Coordinated traffic signals are one strategy for introducing hierarchy, great blocks
of traffic shifted around the gridded zones, like trains of space. Urban expansion is another, but such growth
that old hankering after infinity reaches its limits in LA, the edge of the continent. The emblematic solution
was to introduce the next order of physical gridding: the freeway.
Freeways are a symptom of both the spatial and temporal disequilibrium of real life, an attempt to impose a
technological fix on a conceptual difficulty. Again, they try to solve the difficulty from the position of the car.
DACT 5 60
la red de Los ngeles por la noche, este tipo de libertad geomtrica en la cual cada uno encuentra el espacio pblico
como algo casi puramente privado, puede ser emocionante. A
niveles elevados de uso, sin embargo, el contacto se convierte en impedimento.
En ciudades como Los ngeles, las cargas en la red autoviaria caen en un profundo desequilibrio por las desigualdades de uso que la cultura impone al sistema. La zonificacin por clases y funcin, as como la extrema desigualdad
en la distribucin de la energa y el movimiento en el ciclo
diurno, distorsiona las relaciones estables y estticas que
son el ncleo de la fantasa cartesiana: Thomas Jefferson
nunca imagin algo como la hora punta. La historia del planeamiento de Los ngeles es una historia de panaceas fracasadas de forma sucesiva a este problema. Las seales de
trfico coordinadas son una estrategia para introducir una
jerarqua, grandes bloques de trfico se movilizan alrededor
de las zonas de la red, como trenes de espacio. La expansin urbana es otro mtodo, pero tal crecimiento que es ese
anhelo antiguo de la infinidad llega a su lmite en Los ngeles, el lmite del continente. La solucin emblemtica ha
sido la introduccin de una nueva distribucin fsica: la
autopista.
Weed.
Freeways like other concentrating means of motion attempt to reconcile the actual nodality of the system
with the fantasy of a continuos fabric of equalized relationships. In this sense, Los Angeles traffic very effectively
models the condition of American democracy in which dynamism flows from the conflict between an
egalitarian model of social relations and a rapidly expanding system of privileges ultimately at odds with it.
Because the undergirding model of LA does not work at the scale the city has now achieved, LA must be
viewed as a transitional form, lying between the traditional city of centrality and the burgeoning condition
of pure interstice. Electronic technologies with their suppression of literal motion are crucial enablers of
this form of order. Los Angeles is seminal in the invention of the city of the interstice, with its primitive dream
Las autopistas son un sntoma del desequilibrio real y temporal de la vida real, un intento de imponer una solucin tecnolgica a una dificultad conceptual. De nuevo, tratamos de
resolver el problema desde la perspectiva del coche. Las
autopistas, como otros medios de concentracin de movimiento, intenta reconciliar la nodalidad presente del sistema
con la fantasa de una fabricacin continua de relaciones
igualitarias. En este sentido, el trfico en Los ngeles representa de una manera eficaz la condicin de la democracia
norteamericana en la que el dinamismo surge del conflicto
entre un modelo igualitario de relaciones sociales y un sistema de privilegios de rpida expansin en total desacuerdo
con el primero.
Debido a que el modelo que subyace en Los ngeles no funciona a la escala que la ciudad ha alcanzado, Los ngeles
debe verse como un modelo de transicin, descansando entre
la tradicional ciudad de la centralidad y la condicin creciente de puro intersticio. Las tecnologas electrnicas, con su
supresin del movimiento literal, son capacitadores cruciales
de esta forma de orden. Los ngeles es fundamental en la
invencin de la ciudad del intersticio, con su sueo primitivo
de la anonimidad y su asociacin de esta anonimidad con el
paraso, con dejarse llevar en un verano interminable. Los
ngeles es tambin una moraleja sobre como puede desaparecer la ciudad: no con su aniquilacin fsica sino con su
transformacin en el continuo tejido de la anti-ciudad que,
realizando lo que queda de la funcin de la ciudad, finalmente cubrir la tierra.
El libro nacional de las virtudes de Estados Unidos celebra las
fronteras y sita nuestra autonoma en la propiedad, la posesin literal del espacio. En la frontera, la calidad del espacio
reside en su carcter ilimitado y nuestra parte debe por tanto
compartir esta infinetud. En un sistema de dimensiones generosas, del cuadrado de una milla, por ejemplo, nuestra intimidad puede ser electiva y absoluta. Despus de todo, si
nuestro vecino es siempre invisible, nuestro territorio puede
parecer infinito. Esto es crucial. La poltica norteamericana de
la ciudad no est fundada en la fantasa de la colectividad,
sino en el derecho a estar aislado. La lucha actual sobre la
inmigracin es sintomtica, reflejando de nuevo la angustia
sobre la prdida de espacio y la excesiva visibilidad del otro.
Donde Alberti conceba la ciudad familiarmente como una
casa ampliada, la casa norteamericana sumariza la nacin, la
familia aislada en su pequeo territorio. Tal visin se refleja
en el cuerpo de la propia ciudad, bien sea en la conversin
matemtica del territorio en valores (cunto se puede obtener
61 5 DACT
of placelessness and its association of the placeless with paradise, with going with the flow in an endless,
limitless, summer. Los Angeles is also a cautionary tale about how the city will disappear: not with its
physical obliteration but with its transformation into the continuous texture of the not-city which
performing what remains of the function of the city finally covers the earth.
Americas national book of virtues celebrates the frontier and situates our autonomy in property, the literal
possession of space. On the frontier, the quality of space lies in its boundlessness and our share must thus
also share in this infinitude. In a system of generous dimensions the mile square grid, for example our
privacy can be both elective and absolute. After all, if our neighbor is always invisible, our domain will
appear infinite. This is crucial: American polity is not founded on the fantasy of collectivity but on the right
to be left alone. The current fight over immigration is symptomatic, again reflecting anxiety over the loss of
space and the excess visibility of the other. Where Albert familiarly conceived the city as a magnified house,
the American house summarizes the nation, the family isolated in its dominion of space. Such a vision is reread back onto the body of the city itself whether in the mathematical conversion of territory to value (how
much can be extracted from a fixed area) or, more darkly, in the strategies of enclaving and exclusion that
dominate so much of our contemporary place-making.
Its no coincidence that Disneyland first occurred in or rather near Los
Angeles and there is no question that Disneyland represents a model
solution to the problem of Los Angeles. Disneyland forsakes the grid in
favor of the node, located at a place which exists only at the conjunction
of freeways. It might be argued that this simply raises the idea of the grid to a higher level. And this is surely true.
But again, the system has a quality of intermediacy. After all, the freeway grid is predicated on the prior existence
of nodes and lacks the geometric rigor of the Jeffersonian counterpart, reversing its priority of dispersal by
searching out the intersection, seeking concentrations. Disneyland also invokes the next order of grid making (or
rather intersection making) by its conceptual understanding of geographical and cultural space. In its
juxtapositions of simulated versions of different historical and cultural moments, Disneyland signals the
possibility of departure from traditional strategies of time and space of location and therefore harbingers in the
territory of the physical the sorts of possibilities now everywhere actualized by strategies of the virtual.
One hears that history has ended. The worst fear now is that after history comes Disneyland. Here we return
to one of the lessons Disneyland absorbs from LA. As an expressive system, LA offers a strategy of hemmed
latitude. The image of an infinity of tiny lots each with its homes-of-the-stars fantasy of predigested selfexpression remakes the city in the image of television and its endless striving to achieve the parity of bits, a
rump democracy of meaning. Heres an image of real post-modern Jeffersonianism, emulated at Disney with
DACT 5 62
Tokaj.
tero. Hay algo que aprender aqu. Parece innegable que para
todas sus depravaciones, toda su reglamentacin, vigilancia y
control, parte de lo que experimentamos como divertido en
Disneylandia en realidad es el viaje a travs de un entorno de
densidad urbana en la que la textura fsica y los medios de
comunicacin no son simplemente entretenidos, sino que
contrastan enervantemente con las disfuncionales versiones a
las que estamos acostumbrados. Uno extrae esperanza de
Disneylandia, el ejemplo persuasivo de que la peatonalidad
en conjuncin con medios de transporte colectivos de corto
recorrido puede ser a la vez eficiente y divertida, puede vivir
en el entorno completamente constituido de otra manera, y
que el espacio de circulacin suficientemente desacelerado
puede convertirse en el espacio de intercambio de encuentros. Pero, definitivamente, slo si no estamos simplemente
de paso.
El trfico democrtico desfavorece la circulacin y favorece la
eleccin. Para promover esta desaceleracin, las ciudades
deben adoptar una serie de estrategias de gestin de transporte donde se favorece la parte del suministro. Esto no es necesariamente sencillo. Nuestra cultura que favorece la publicidad 24 horas al da, hace un fetiche de la demanda, el sistema
entero se alimenta de una necesidad creada innecesariamen-
te. Lo que pasa desapercibido en todo esto es que la vociferante insistencia en estas demandas es el signo no de la autonoma de nuestros anhelos, sino de su silencio; estas demandas slo revelan cmo nos hemos atrapado en el sueo
empresarial de otro. Comenzar de nuevo significara reconsiderar el lugar del cuerpo en la democracia. En su mayor parte,
la democracia no trafica en cuerpos; en vez de eso su teora se
basa en trminos de incorporeidad: la decapitacin del
monarca, el vaco del lugar central de poder, el establecimiento de imparciales tribunales intangibles de justicia pblica y dems. Ciertamente es una locura tomar la incorporeidad
de forma literal, como la mera escisin del cuerpo fsico del
espacio democrtico, porque es una limpieza radical de viejas
nociones del cuerpo y una invitacin a reinventarlo. Dependiendo de la energa con la que perseguimos esta reinvencin
y reprivatizacin, las consecuencias pueden ser tremendas.
La red predice un movimiento de monocultura, y monocultura es tirana. El movimiento debera reflejar en la variedad de
sus medios disponibles un pluralismo de estilos de participacin en la vida urbana y promover una accesibilidad ms universal. Una diversidad de sistemas tambin producira una
diversidad de suministradores y permitira a pequeos productores, especialmente locales, disfrutar de una posicin
63 5 DACT
its patronage of superstar architects whose work is interleaved with the anonymous but comparable
constructions of the Imagineers. In such a recombinant system, we are no more surprised to find Robert Stern
next to Frank Gehry next to Space Mountain than we are to find Lassie
next to General Mladic next to O.J. on TV. As culture is reduced to
As culture is reduced to entertainment and work is
entertainment and work is transformed into leisure, citizenship
transformed into leisure, citizenship becomes lifestyle.
becomes lifestyle.
Disneyland is a playground of mobility, its entertainments largely those of pleasurized motion. These is
something to be learned here. It seems undeniable that for all of its depradations, all of its regimentation,
surveillance and control, part of what we experience as enjoyable at Disneyland really is the passage
through an environment of urban density in which both the physical texture and the means of circulation
are not simply entertaining but stand in invigorating contrast to the dysfunctional versions back home. One
extracts from Disneyland a shred of hope, the persuasive example that pedestrianism coupled with short
distance collective transport systems can be both efficient and fun, can thrive in the midst of an environment
completely otherwise constituted, and that the space of flow sufficiently decelerated can become the space
of exchange. But ultimately only if were not just passing through.
Democratic traffic deprivileges flow and favors choice. To foster this deceleration, cities must adopt supplyside transport management strategies. This will not necessarily be easy. Our culture nursed on advertising
round the clock makes a fetish of demand, the whole system thriving on spurious need. What goes
unrecognized in all of this is that the vociferous insistence on these demands is the sign not of the autonomy
of our desires, but of their silencing; these demands only reveal how thoroughly entrapped we have become
in someone elses entrepreneurial dream. To begin again will mean reconsidering the place of the body in
democracy. For the most part, democracy does not traffic in bodies; it is theorized instead in terms of
disincorporation: the beheading of the monarch, the emptying out of the central place of power, the
establishment of body-blind tribunals of public justice, and so on. Yet it is crazy to take the disincorporation
literally, as the mere excision of the physical body from democratic space, for it is rather a radical clearing
of old notions of the body and an invitation to invent it anew. Depending on the nerve with which we pursue
this reinvention and reprivatization, the consequences could be tremendous.
The gird predicts a movement monoculture, and monoculture is tyranny. Movement should reflect in the
variety of its available means a pluralism in styles of participation in city life and promote more universal
accessibility. A diversity of systems will also encourage a diversity of suppliers and enable smaller producers
especially those locally based to enjoy a more competitive position in the market for motion. But the issue
is not technological in the gee-whiz sense: what is needed is not a technical fix. Rather, the task is rationally
DACT 5 64
cedida al trfico a motor, en cualquiera de su formas, alcanza el 70% y ms an. Se ha concedido una franquicia gigantesca a los coches sobre el uso de este espacio tanto para la
circulacin como para su almacenaje.
Recientemente, trabajando en un plan para una urbanizacin
de Nueva York, nos preguntbamos sobre qu mnima intervencin podra ser la que pudiera recapturar el orden de la
urbanizacin de las garras del trfico a motor para promover
un reverdecimiento radical y reforzar nuevos patrones de
relativa autosuficiencia. La respuesta, decidimos, era plantar
un rbol en medio de una interseccin. Anticipamos diversas
consecuencias. El espacio dedicado al automvil se reducira
y la creacin instantnea de cuatro calles sin salida tendra
ciertamente un efecto balsmico en el trfico. El rbol en la
calle obligara al trfico a encontrar un mtodo colateral de
circulacin. Finalmente, anticipamos que la vida en la calle,
con su comercio poco atenuado hasta la inutilidad, sera densificado en una serie de centros sociales y comerciales a escala local que restauraran la legitibilidad, conveniencia y la
convivencia a un lugar que haba llegado a ser destartalado,
inasequible, inaccesible por su desubicacin.
Si insisto en problemas de movilidad , es porque la cultura de
encapsulamiento, el neo-monadismo del hogar y el corazn
to remix available possibilities and to produce select additions to the possibilities for getting around, all in
suitable deference to the primacy of traffic on foot.
If the city is the logical increment of production, sustainability, democracy, and resistance within the global
system, the neighborhood measured by people on foot is the building block of the city. Like the city in
the world context, the ability of neighborhoods to act autonomously must be enhanced. Indeed, the solution
to the traffic problem is not continuously to model its operations at larger and larger scales but to radically
disconnect locality from larger systems which, on balance, ill serve it. Indeed, for many places, the only way
to come to terms with the hegemony of the automotive system is to secede from it. In inner city areas, starved
for useful public space and clotted with traffic, the most logical and effective step is to reduce the area
actually available to the car. Roadways constitute the major portion of the commonly maintained public
realm in cities: in some American downtowns the area given over to motor traffic in one form or another
reaches as much as 70 percent and more. Cars have been given a gigantic franchise on the use of this space
for both circulation and storage.
Recently, working on a plan for a New York neighborhood, we wondered what a minimum intervention
might be which would begin to recapture the order of the neighborhood from motor traffic, to promote a
radical greening, and reinforce new patterns of relative self-sufficiency. The answer, we decided, was to
plant a tree in an intersection. We anticipated several consequences. The space devoted to the
automobile would be reduced and the instant creation of four dead-end streets would certainly have a
calming effect on traffic. The tree in the street would oblige traffic to find collateral means of circulation.
Finally, we anticipated that street-life, with its sparse commerce attenuated into useless, center-crushing
linearity, would be densified in a series of locally scaled commercial and social centers that would restore
legibility, convenience, and conviviality to a place ragged and over-large, inaccessible for its failures of
where.
If I dwell on questions of mobility, its because the culture of encapsulation the neo-monadism of the
electronic hearth and home couple with consumer strategies of individuation to shape expectations of
domicile, of public space, and of the character of connection between and among them. Likewise, the
dramatic revision of expectations in the realm of work powerfully reconfigures the possibilities of the city.
As America ships increasing amounts of its industrial production to low wage countries abroad and focuses
its energies on technology and services, the paradigm of employment though not yet the fact devolves
more and more on the idea of the home as workplace. Of course, this idea will not exactly be fresh to the
billions of women who have, over the years, been obliged to work uncompensated in such environments.
Now, though such a notion has become the ultimate post-Fordist fantasy for all of us.
ciudad comienzan a emerger. De hecho, un transporte mejorado para servir al movimiento de objetos podra de forma
concebible estabilizar y mejorar las relaciones entre personas.
Mientras que es verdad que el movimiento actual para dispersar la produccin al hogar es todava ms publicidad que un
hecho, el movimiento de descentralizacin actualmente refleja otra localizacin radical: la concentracin de poder en las
salas de direccin de las multinacionales.
La ciudad es un distribuidor, un medio para distribuir cuerpos,
energa, espacio, movimiento y orden. Aunque, todo esto necesita un segundo pensamiento de los principios bsicos, la ciudad histrica es el depsito de muchas de las buenas respuestas que tenemos que buscar. Por ejemplo, la ur-ciudad anteriormente mencionado, Catal Huyuk, no tiene calles, un sistema radicalmente alternativo que ha demostrado su viabilidad a
travs de los siglos. La cuestin es simplemente esta: hay otros
medios de organizar el trfico, la distribucin de lo urbano y el
regulador de extensin, que una red de circulacin de flujo creado por una serie de territorios con fronteras.
Qu tipo de ciudad acomodara elaboracin y cambio,
ampliando las posibilidades de interaccin y encuentro, sin
los imperativos de un crecimiento continuo y con un carcter
radicalmente sostenible? Y cmo sera el ejemplo democr-
65 5 DACT
But, contained within this possibility is a better prospect. If the working environment becomes discretionary
and if brute mass production gives way to more flexible craft, skills, and information intensive modes; and
if transport technology is diversified to provide both more bespoke and attractive means of human mobility
and more efficient movement of things; and if a far more self-sufficient version of sustainability is instituted
which seeks to contain commercial traffic within localities, the contours of a new relationship to the city
begin to emerge. Indeed, enhanced connectivity to serve the movement of things might conceivably
stabilize and enhance the relations of people. While it is true that the current move to disperse production
to the home is still more hype than fact, the move to decentralize actually reflects another radical
localization: the concentration of power in the boardrooms of the multinationals.
The city is a distributor, a medium for deploying bodies, energy, space, movement, and order. Although, all
of this needs to be rethought from first principles, the historic city is the repository of many of the good
answers we require. For example, the ur-town itself, the aforementioned Catal Huyuk had no streets at all,
a radically alternative system that has demonstrated its viability
through the millenia. The point is simply this: there are other means of
In America this has yielded the dual system
organizing traffic the urban binder and the regulator of extent than a
of poor inner cities surrounded with wealthy,
grid of flow created by a series of bounded territories.
DACT 5 66
ta cantidad de dificultad y resistencia. Dios nos libre de ciudades en las que es imposible perderse.
Imagine en cambio una ciudad de pluralidad rampante en la
que el estilo de vida sea genuinamente electivo y susceptible
de invencin no simplemente escogido de una lista comercializada de fantasas sancionadas y de marca, la vida en un
logotipo. En la ciudad del futuro, el estilo de vida dejar cualquier relacin directa con la clase, perdindose en una profusin de elecciones cuyos significados definitivamente tendr
que ver preferencias de intimidad arcana (quiero ser la joven
Roseanne esta semana, quiero cambiar al estilo provenzal,
vamos a hacer mermeladas con las recetas de pap, vivamos
entre los rboles ...). El problema (ms all del espacio limitado de roperos) ser la compatibilidad de significativa ciudadana espacial con tal extrema heterogeneidad. El peligro definitivo es Disneylandia, la produccin de mendaciudades, ciudades que engaan a sus ciudadanos enmascarando la falta de
autntica eleccin en una profusin vaca de estilo.
La estructura de la ciudad ser obligada a traer un sentido a
toda esta diferencia de manera no irnica, a proporcionar un
armazn formal para la creacin de saludables fantasas cvicas y privadas. El grial es eleccin sin irona: se imagina si
cada analizado pensara que es Napolen ... o Manson. Des-
Imagine instead a city of rampant plurality in which lifestyle is genuinely elective and susceptible to
invention, not simply chosen from a commercialized list of sanctioned, brand-name, fantasies - life in a
logo. In the city of the future lifestyle will cease any direct relationship to class, becoming lost in a profusion
of choices whose meanings will ultimately devolve on preferences of arcane privacy (I want to be the young
Roseanne this week, Im in the mood for Provence, lets produce jams from dads recipe, lets live among
the trees ...). The problem (beyond limited closet space) will be the compatibility of meaningful, spatial,
citizenship with such extreme heterogeneity. The ultimate danger is Disneyland, the production of
mendacities, cities which lie to their citizens by masking lack of real choice in an empty welter of style.
The structure of the city will be obliged to make sense of all this difference in a non-ironical way, to provide
a formal armature for the creation of healthy civic and private fantasies. The grail is choice without irony:
imagine if every analys and thought he or she were Napoleon ... or Manson. Unfortunately, irony is postmodernitys best solution to the problem of difference. Irony is the
Unfortunately, irony is post-modernitys
humor of anxiety and anxiety is an insufficient basis for architecture.
Although we believe that everything has an origin, consumer culture
best solution to the problem of difference.
seeks to hide it in its haze of Homes of the Stars and in its promiscuous
televisual juxtaposability. But life is more than etiology and citizens need more than the possibility of pursuing
their own private pleasures. The ultimate expression of this fantasy is the as of right city in which collective
action completely disappears and the city becomes the product of pure accident, reinventing the grid as the
Exquisite Corpse. The frequency and quality of accidental encounters in the city are one of the crucial
measures of its metabolism. But who determines the limits of those rights? As an administrative fantasy, its
understandable. Yet it tells us nothing of the boundaries of rights.
If not by abstraction, how should the city be divided? In the age of identity politics, what is the meaning of
the ghetto? Is it possible to produce elective, non-exclusionary differences within cities? While we think of
the ghetto as carceral, we know it can also have great dynamism, an energy bred of common experience,
tempered by mutual adversity and festivity. The Ghetto begs the question of the boundary, of the
morphology of difference. In a city dedicated to free circulation, how is it possible to construct the
boundaries that will make variety both legible and accessible.
The antidote to the ghetto is the neighborhood.
Neighborhoods, as Ive suggested, are the centers of urban life, the logical increment of both local
democracy and of urban environmental accountability. Neighborhoods must be bound to the body, both by
increasing human scale and human possibility and by acknowledging the bodys constraints. They must
67 5 DACT
be meaningfully physical, configuring the blend of the social and the dimensional. While the idea of
neighborhood necessarily resists precise description, neighborhoods must be both legible and tractable,
producing difference without onus, based on non-exclusionary fantasies. The art of the urbanist is in
finessing the mix both within and among neighborhoods by providing enabling physical differences and apt
legibilities.
The logic of the neighborhood is not to exclude but to provide a meaningful and distinct set of internal
relations that can become the objects of tractability and choice. Neighborhoods must be provisioned and
ordered to have a weight that carries through in the competition with both local and global forms of
organization, giving their individual publics satisfying and meaningful roles in creating the mosaic of
urban public life. Strong neighborhoods make strong cities and strong citizens.
The edges of neighborhoods will be crucial as will the edges of the city. As zones of mutation, they will
become the laboratories of fresh possibilities of both form and gradient, constantly rexamining. The nature
of urban permeability and transition. These spaces of mutation will be bulwarks against the argument for a
single form of the city and against the idea that invention and memory
are on a course of mutual annihilation. Their resistance will be to a
The nature of urban permeability and transition.
choice restricted to nostalgia or the tabula rasa, Disneyland or urban
These spaces of mutation will be bulwarks
remewal.
But we need also to look very closely at large scale processes -a purely
inductive model does not automatically become the leader when
deduction is overthrown. Traffic and ecology are the relevant models,
traffic (and other forms of distributive infrastructure) because it
attempts to comprehend urban form in a spirit of both tractability and perfectibility (however benighted its
agendas) and ecology for its complexity, its vision of the dialectic of homeostasis and change, and its
identification of the urban as the extension and not the antithesis of nature.
Recognizing the vast web of global and environmental relationships the ecology of the city represents, it
is nevertheless logical that strategies of account be extremely local. Think globally, act locally is no
empty bromide but the necessary mantra of global interdependence. The loft city will strive for a
condition of self-sufficiency, recognizing that the paradigm (if not the fact) is the most ultimately
desireable economic, environmental and political condition for urbanity. Fortunately, pollution simply
isnt an issue any longer, a least conceptually. The physical inventory of such local production should at a minimum include food, oxygen, waste disposal, water, thermal regulation, education, recreation and
DACT 5 68
the continuous process of import replacement that lies at the core of urban economic dynamism and
autonomy.
Many contradictions will have to be resolved. For me, one of the pleasures of a recent trip to Japan was the
surprising sight of agricultural fields in the heart of the city. The anomaly of these interpolated,
inappropriate gardens is sustained by what might strike us as a completely artificial, unnatural,
economic means: by any normal criterion of urban development, such fields have no right to exist. Yet such
activity at the heart of the city is both wonderful and useful and only points up the foolish hegemony of a
model in which city land is valorized by a too limited set of criteria.
Such dominant economic models of the city are predicated on endless growth (growth understood as
expansion rather than change), on that old fantasy of infinity based here on the endless capacity of land to
absorb value (like the right of all Americans to grow infinitely rich on their particles) and on the ephemerality
of that value when the city moves speculatively on. Whatever one thinks of the dynamism and the aesthetic
of cities so produced and this comes from someone who adores New York the sheer waste of energy is
idiotic. GAIA does not believe in a 30 year depreciation cycle.
Cities do evolve and, like all species, they also reach a form of completion. For its own sustainability
and for its own art, it is not simply possible but necessary to conceive of a city as more or less finished
formally. This hedge against the terrors of anti-social instability will itself be saved from the static
oppressions of universalism by the variety of forms it might take. New cities based on the intimate
particulars of culture, history, bio-regional circumstances, site, choice, and a million accidents will find
their differences. Sustainability and taste and democratic urbanity requires a consensual standard of
taste will signal conclusion. Its time for a social model to replace fashionable models of perpetual
flux.
Architecture both begins and ends with the social. If a metaphor is wanted, lets take in from the foresters.
When they speak of a forest at climax, they refer to a form which has achieved a condition of homeostatis,
a steady state. Climax forests like the great vanished stands of American redwoods out west are identifiable
not simply via the measure of their internal dynamics but in their form. Cities, neighborhoods, and
architectures at climax think of Veneice, Prague, Fez, Osaka, Las Palmas are much the same. Their
dynamic shifts from one of large-scale invention to one of internal adjustment and renewal, signalling the
possibility of a steady state should that be our choice. The great and creative tasks of designing more
fundamental formal solutions will be found at the edge and in the freshly imagined, entirely new cities that
will contain the circumstances of our future.
rio normal de desarrollo urbano, tales campos no tienen derecho a existir. An as, tal actividad en el corazn de la ciudad
es maravillosa y til a la vez y slo seala la hegemona estpida de un modelo en el que el terreno de la ciudad se valora mediante unos criterios demasiado limitados.
Tales modelos econmicos dominantes de la ciudad estn basados en un crecimiento ilimitado (crecimiento entendido como
expansin ms que como cambio), en esa vieja fantasa de infinidad basada aqu en la ilimitada capacidad de la tierra para
absorber valor (como el derecho de todos los norteamericanos
de enriquecerse infinitamente en sus partculas) y en la efemeridad de tal valor cuando la ciudad progresa de forma especulativa. Sin tener en cuenta lo que uno piensa sobre el dinamismo
y la esttica de ciudades as producidas, y esto viene de alguien
que adora Nueva York, el desperdicio total de energa es estpido. Gaia no cree en un ciclo de amortizacin de 30 aos.
Las ciudades evolucionan y, como todas las especies, tambin alcanzan una forma completa. Por su propia sostenibilidad y por su propio arte, no es simplemente posible, sino
necesario concebir una ciudad como ms o menos terminada formalmente. Este proviso contra los terrores de la inestabilidad anti social se salvar a s misma de las opresiones
estticas de universalismo por la variedad de formas que
69 5 DACT
Things must be twice-told in order to be safely redeemed from time and decay1.
The contemporary space of Manhattan is suffering from a series of Disneyfications and Theme Park simulations.
Christine Boyer
Professor of Architecture and
Urbanism School of Architecture
Princeton University.
Times Square/42nd Street, for example, the meeting of two triangles that form an X at 42nd Street, was
once was the popular entertainment district of vaudeville and the Broadway theater.
This rowdy playground has been the central public place where New Yorkers have celebrated New Years
Eve since the early twentieth century.
Frequented by thousands of daily commuters who arrive via its labyrinthian subway system, Times
Square/42nd Street is intimately linked to the entire metropolitan region.
It has been, as its name designates, the location of great newspaper and radio headquarters.
But at this very moment in time, Times Square/42nd Street is being rendered by Disney and turned into a
wax museum with the likes of Madame Tussaud.
It is being regulated by guidelines that call for a requisite number of Lutses [Light Units in Times Square] and
controlled by urban designers who have planned its spontaneous unplannedness. Times Square/42nd Street
is becoming Disneys New York Land.
Patrolled by private policemen, its garbage picked up by private collectors, and its signage refurbished by
private allocations under the general guidelines set down by its Business Investment District [BID] it is
becoming as clean and pure as a whistle.
How have we let this happen to such an iconic place of popular culture? Will Times Square/42nd Street
survive, will its competitive chaos and tough-guy allure be able to hold out against this latest onslaught of
improvement schemes?
Or has a grand mistake been made - and this disfunction junction mauled by disimprovement policies
amending its authentic nature instead of its corruption?
Has Times Square/42nd Street become another non-place instantly recognizable from the images that
circulate on our television and cinema screens but a space that we never experience directly2.
DACT 5 70
Las cosas han de decirse dos veces para ponerlas a salvo del
tiempo y la decadencia1.
El espacio contemporneo de Manhattan est padeciendo
toda una serie de Disneyficaciones como si se tratara de un
parque temtico de atracciones.
Times Square/Calle 42, por ejemplo, la interseccin de dos
tringulos que forman una X en la Calle 42, fue en su da el
rea de entretenimiento de masas, donde se daban cita la
picaresca del vodevil y el teatro de Broadway.
Este bullicioso patio de recreo ha sido el principal lugar pblico al que, ya desde comienzos del siglo XX, acuden los neoyorquinos a celebrar el Fin de Ao.
Times Square/Calle 42 recibe diariamente a miles de transentes de todas las zonas de la ciudad, que llegan a travs del
laberntico sistema metropolitano, ntimamente ligado a todo
el rea subterrnea.
Ha sido, como su nombre indica, la razn social de grandes
peridicos y emisoras de radio (New York Times, por ejemplo).
Pero en este momento de la historia, Times Square/Calle
42 se est convirtiendo en un escenario de Disney o en un
Acaso puede ser este un lugar para las artes visuales, donde
emergen industrias electrnicas, un lugar verdaderamente
conectado al resto del mundo?
Como eje de varios medios de comunicacin, Times Square/
Calle42 ha padecido una crisis de personalidad desde que en
1961, la compaa New York Times vendiera su torre triangular de 24 pisos, la torre de Times Square, construida en 1904.
Incluso la Gran Va Blanca, el embrujo frentico de los
grandes carteles de nen que, desde mediados de los aos
20, han hecho de las luces nocturnas de Times Square un parque de atracciones tipo Coney Island en medio de la ciudad,
la han estropeado al exigir que todas los nuevos edificios tengan un cartel de nen.
Se ha dado carta blanca al nmero, por exceso, de Lutses:
una ordenanza de 1987 establece la cantidad de carteles
luminosos y el grado de iluminacin que como mnimo
deben tener los nuevos edificios.
La razn por la que la ciudad quiere que estos nuevos carteles sean tan resplandecientes como sea posible, y por la que
la publicidad est claramente permitida, reside en la esperanza de ocultar el hecho de que Times Square se haya convertido en un can sombro y oscuro ladeado por inmensos rascacielos, resultado no pretendido de los incentivos fiscales
71 5 DACT
Artkraft has put up about 99% of the signage in the square or more than 200 miles of neon.
Today it is responsible for Joe Boxer at 42nd and Broadway -a 6000 square foot lighted bottom strip that
continuously unfurls birthday greetings, marriage proposals sent to the World Wide Web address or emailed to the underwear company Joe Boxer. Artkraft also has designed the fast paced triple zipper on the
Morgan Stanley building on Broadway between 47th and 48th street that tells the spectator the latest
financial data and stock quotes.
There is plenty of new signage to be seen in the Square: In fact Times Square is now so bright at night that
not only can you see its glow from lower Manhattan looking up 7th or 8th avenue, but a new ball was
required for New Years Eve in 1995 because the old one no longer stood out in the blaze of lights.
But a cry has been heard on the inter-net that this traditional media center is losing its vitality and will never
survive the electronic media revolution.
As a cultural pulse-point, Times Square/42nd Street is doomed to become a ghetto for quaint neon signage
and saccharine musicals like Cats or Beauty and the Beast for the operative word on the square is nostalgia
or staged chaos not reconceptualizing the future.
Instead of retro signage and sculptural camels smoking cigarettes, Times Square needs a dozen fast past flexface billboards that change every 30 seconds.
And it should become an incubator space for the new electronic arts rather than the proposed format of yet
more shopping and still trying to have some fun.
All of these so-called improvements have taken place under the watchful eyes of three redevelopment
organizations who keep an eye on that brew of the electric, vital, colorful and ... aesthetic chaos, that
spells the gestalt of Times Square:
But will all of this improvement activity salvage the trashy, glitzy raffish quality of the underbelly of life that
once defined Times Square? Or is that desire only blatant nostalgia, what has been called romanticizing the
gutter?
As the 1933 musical movie proclaimed 42nd Street (1933) was a naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty place
already well in decline when it lent its iconic title to the film opening at the Stand Theater, five blocks away.
DACT 5 72
concedidos desde 1982 hasta 1987 para construir en el territorio que rodea la plaza.
Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation, empresa de carteles luminosos, ha mantenido vivo el competitivo esplendor de Times
Square desde que en 1908 descendiera por primera vez sobre
Times Square la gigantesca bola iluminada que hoy da forma
parte de la tradicin de la Noche Vieja neoyorquina.
Incluso han sido los responsables del famoso anuncio del
camello que arrojaba anillos de humo sobre la plaza, o la
pantalla luminosa que rodea la Torre de Times Square desde
1928.
Y es que Artkraft ha colocado alrededor del 99% de los luminosos que hay en Times Square o, lo que es lo mismo, ms de
320 kilmetros de nen.
Hoy da se encarga del Joe Boxer en la Calle 42 y Broadway,
una franja luminosa de ms de 550 m2 que despliega constantemente felicitaciones por cumpleaos o propuestas de
matrimonio enviadas a la pgina web de esta empresa de
ropa interior o a su buzn de correo electrnico. Tambin ha
diseado Artkraft la pantalla luminosa triple situada en el edificio de Morgan Stanley en Broadway, entre la Calle 47 y 48,
que informa al espectador sobre los ltimos datos financieros
y las cotizaciones de la bolsa.
Even so, 42nd Street was still the most imaginary yet glamorous street in the world, it was the hub of the
entire theater world for thousands who dreamed about being an actor or dancer.
That little thoroughfare in the heart of old New York, invites the spectator to come and meet those
dancing feet and as the heroine begins her tap routine, the chorus line in one of Busby Berkeleys great
production numbers turns it back and mounts the stairs enabling the spectators to see the placades that form
an animated image of the New York skyline. While the buildings sway, the chorus line begins to exit along
the prone body of the Empire State building.
The movie had that lean, hungry, underlit look of gangster films of the same era a hardboiled Musical as
Hollywood called it for it had a social message that spoke to the times.
The spectacle of 42nd Street, the act of putting on a play, or a show within a show, is largely about securing
a job in the theater. In fact, the movie was called ... the Times Square of the assembly line.
The narrative of the play points out that ... the machine could not pause to brook over the destinies of the
human beings that are caught up in its motion. Machines are impersonal things not given to introspect and
retrospect. All that driving force was pounding relentless toward one goal - a successful premier on FortySecond Street.
The movie captured the ethos of the Depression years. Its opening coincided with the inauguration of
Franklin D. Roosevelt as President, and opportunistically, Warner Brothers advertised the film with the
slogan Inaugurating a New Deal in Entertainment.
Upon taking office, Roosevelt said If I have read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we
have never realized before our interdependence ... If we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and
loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline.
Cooperation was the new deal and Peggy Sawyer, the heroine of the movie, embodies this new sense: she
works hard, resists temptation and gets her break but she does so as a cog in a vast machine, cooperatively
following orders.
Commenting on Americanism and Fordism in the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci noted that American
industrialists are concerned to maintain the continuity of the physical and muscular-nervous efficiency of
the worker.
Todas estas mejoras se han llevado a cabo bajo la supervisin de 3 organizaciones de desarrollo, que vigilan la elaboracin del caos electrnico, enrgico, lleno de color y ... esttico que representa el conjunto indivisible de Times Square.
Pero podrn estas mejoras recuperar aquella calidad disipada, ostentosa e intil de la vulnerable vida que en su da
alberg Times Square? O es que ese deseo no es ms que
pura nostalgia, lo que se ha dado a llamar romantizacin del
barrio bajo?
Como se afirm en la comedia musical de 1933 La Calle 42,
ste era un lugar pcaro, picante, hortera y libertino que ya
estaba en decadencia cuando prest su simblico ttulo a la
pelcula estrenada en el Theater Stand, a cinco manzanas.
A pesar de eso, la Calle 42 todava era la calle ms fantstica
y con ms glamour del mundo; era la Meca del teatro para
miles de personas que soaban con ser actores o bailarines.
Esa pequea va pblica en el centro de Nueva York invita al espectador a venir a ver esos pies de bailarn, como
reza la cancin, y, mientras la herona comienza su rutinario
claqueo, la lnea de coro, en uno de los nmeros del famoso
coregrafo Busby Berkeley, nos da la espalda para subir las
escaleras permitiendo a los espectadores ver los carteles que
forman la imagen animada del perfil de Nueva York. Mientras
73 5 DACT
It is in their interests to have a stable skilled labor force, a permanently well-adjusted complex, because the
human complex (the collective worker) of an enterprise is also a machine which cannot, without
considerable loss, be taken to pieces too often and renewed with single new parts.
The New Deal in Entertainment, was a lullaby on Broadway, a dream world of escape, from the repetitions
and fragmentations of the conveyor belt and the assembly line.
But now as the global economy shifts and turns, information or data-processing has replaced the production
of goods, the computer stands in for the machine, and leisure time not work time is on the rise.
Thus Americanism has turned into consumerism transforming the landscape of cities into new imagescapes
for the display of commodities.
While leisure time has been utilized to stitch the worker into a commodified network of pleasurable and
innocent entertainments.
Long ago, Walter Benjamin noted that architecture was always consumed by the collectivity in a state of
distraction; all acts of forgetting take the form of distractions never allowing the essence of a thing to
penetrate perception.
Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects
counted and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society.
The unclouded, innocent eye has become a lie, perhaps the whole naive mode of expression sheer
incompetence. Today the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement ... For
DACT 5 74
Pero ahora, con el cambio de la economa mundial, la informacin o el procesamiento de datos ha reemplazado la produccin de bienes, el ordenador suple a la mquina, y el
tiempo de ocio, no el tiempo de trabajo, va en aumento.
As, el Americanismo se ha convertido en Consumismo, por
lo que el paisaje de las ciudades se ha transformado en escaparates donde se exponen artculos de consumo.
Simultneamente, el tiempo de ocio se ha utilizado para incitar al trabajador a formar parte de una acomodada red de placenteros e inocentes entretenimientos.
Hace ya tiempo, Walter Benjamin hizo notar que la colectividad siempre consuma la arquitectura en un estado de distraccin; todos los actos de olvido adoptan la forma de distraccin, por lo que nunca se percibe la esencia de las cosas.
Por tanto, no debera sorprendernos que Times Square/Calle42
sea el ltimo reducto urbano que queda por ser modelado por
el capitalismo global o que sustituye carteles de lo real por lo
real.
Distrados, olvidamos qu papel pudo haber desempeado
en su da la arquitectura de la ciudad.
Por qu debemos ser crticos con la nueva imagen de Times
Square, orientada ms bien a ser televisada que experimentada? Walter Benjamin ya nos advirti:
the man in the street, however, it is money that ... brings him into perceived contact with things. And the
paid critic, manipulating paintings in the dealers exhibition room, knows more important if not better things
about them than the art lover viewing them in the showroom window ... What, in the end, makes
advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving read neon sign says - but the fiery pool
reflecting it in the asphalt.
Benjamin was arguing that the tempo of modern life no longer facilitated the old style of rhetorical
convincing but required a new form of picture-writing taken from advertising.
Advertising was a peculiarly America event, and Le Corbusier surmised its origin lay in the great size of the
country - its millions of citizens stretched over vast open spaces had constantly to be informed that this or
that existed.
Yet advertising was banal and without plastic quality, he would ban it from the streets of the city ... the
traffic lights cause vertigo; in the streets and along highways immense, shining, and as it were cellophaned,
posters - young men and young women of the pure American type, exuberantly healthy, their cheeks
provided with useful reflections - fruits shining and also cellophaned, with all their reflections; boxes of
various products, bottles, cars, always cellophaned and supplied with reflections ... M. Ingres, raising his
finger, said to his students: Gentlemen, reflections are unworthy of great art.
But the lights of Broadway were seductive. Le Corbusier admitted that
... I cannot pass by the luminous advertising on Broadway. Everyone has heard about that incandescent
path cutting diagonally across Manhattan in which the mob of idlers and patrons of motion pictures,
burlesque shows and theaters moves.
Electricity reigns, but it is dynamic here, exploding, moving, sparkling, with lights turning white, blue, red,
green, yellow. The things behind it are disappointing.
These close-range constellations, this Milky Way in which you are carried along, lead to objects of
enjoyment which are often mediocre. So much the worst for advertising! ...
And on Broadway, divided by feelings of melancholy and lively gaiety, l wander along in a hopeless search
for an intelligent burlesque show in which the nude white bodies of beautiful women will spring up in witty
flashes under the paradisiac illumination of the spotlights.
DACT 5 76
Far from pitting desire against rationality, the compelling advertising image against the purities of high art
opposing forces that lead nowhere Walter Benjamin noted instead that
The commodity ... celebrates its incarnation in the whore. She is both cunning saleswoman and item for
sale and sets up a burning desire that can never be quenched. She is the one who leads the stroller of city
streets astray by enticing him to step over the threshold of lust into oblivion.
And so the destabilizing forces of desire must be eradicated from Times Square if it is to be transfigured into
a pleasurable, innocent, or enchanted but never seductive locale - a place that will incorporate and use
productively the very play with advertising signs that simultaneously threaten its existence with disruptive
impropriety.
Since the decline of legitimate theater along 42nd Street or The Deuce as the block of 42nd Street braced
by Times Square and Eighth Avenue is called, Times Square/42nd Street has seen the spread of pornography
and a sordid undercurrent of crime and prostitution take over its terrain.
But we should be reminded that the last legitimate stage production on 42nd Street closed in 1937 and most of
that streets theaters became movie houses shortly after the Brandt Organization bought them in 1933. Of the 13
fabled theaters that once adorned 42nd Street all built between 1899 and 1920 there are only 5 survivors.
Beginning in 1982 when John Portmans 50 story Marriott Marquis Hotel was built, the city has waged a war
to clean up the area.
But Times Square has always had its burlesque shows, its B-rated movies, its fleapit paradises and it has also
had other improvement crusaders, vice squads, and prohibitions
-so why do we continued to tell tall tales of the decline, danger and sordidness of Times Square and its need
for redevelopment? Why erase this popular good time place from our collective memory?
No other American place stands out as a monument to raucous commercial enterprise more than does Times
Square.
After two decades of debate, this famous space has been placed in a state of suspension and we wait to
discover whether it has been weakened beyond repair, or been given a new lease on life. Will the city be
strong enough to over-ride these disimprovements and invade its sanitized domain?
azules, rojas, verdes, amarillas ... Sin embargo, las cosas que
estn detrs son decepcionantes.
Estas constelaciones de poca extensin, esta Va Lctea en la
que estamos envueltos, nos conducen a objetos de ocio
generalmente mediocres. Con diferencia, lo peor de la
publicidad!...
Y en Broadway, dividido por sentimientos de melancola y
alegra, deambulo en busca de un espectculo burlesco inteligente, en el que los blancos cuerpos desnudos de bellas chicas resaltan en divertidos destellos bajo la paradisaca iluminacin de los focos.
Lejos de anteponer el deseo a la racionalidad, la irresistible
imagen de la publicidad a las purezas del arte sublime (fuerzas opuestas que no llevan a ninguna parte), Walter Benjamin
hizo notar:
El artculo de consumo... celebra su encarnacin en la prostituta. Ella es tanto la astuta vendedora como el producto en
venta, y provoca un deseo ferviente imposible de sofocar. Ella
es la que descarra al viandante de las calles de la ciudad tentndole a cruzar el umbral de la lujuria para entrar en el olvido.
Y por eso, las fuerzas desestabilizadoras del deseo deben ser
erradicadas de Times Square si se quiere convertir este en un
lugar complaciente, inocente o encantado, pero nunca
77 5 DACT
The New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp points out that the goal of the $20 million plan [of
42nd Street, Now!] is not so much to overhaul the street physically as to reconstruct peoples perception of it ...
A lot of time, money and public relations have gone into constructing the image of 42nd Street as a squalid
corridor of horrors that can only be redeemed by ripping it apart.
The image is not unconnected to reality. The decay, crime, drugs, pornography and prostitution are real, and
no one thinks that these are civic assets.
... even in its most blighted state the street continued to draw people who came to enjoy the bright lights,
crowds and budget movie tickets. And it has never been clear that real estate development is the ideal
deterrent to squalor or crime.
We could claim that New York City Real Estate values and the mid-town zoning district that operated
between 1982-1987 and allowed taller and bulkier skyscrapers from Time Square to Columbus Circle along
the Broadway spine killed Times Square and turned it into a corporate office Park.
Or we could mention the competition with the Wall Street area in lower Manhattan that favored Times
Square as this new office park because it lies near the citys most densely populated mass transit hub and is
in close proximity to commuter rail lines at Grand Central Station and Penn Station.
And of course there has been the citys economic development policies that have pushed family- style
entertainment for the masses as a tourist incentive and demanded that the gutter sordidness and notorious
vice zone of Times Square be erased by reallocating sex to safety zones on the periphery of the city.
After this law goes into effect in November of 1996, Times Square and its architecture of ludic pleasures will
be considerably diminished. It will keep, for the sake of nostalgia, 6 to 10 of its original porn shops -but more
than 10 evidently would tip the scales and produce sordid secondary effects such as crime, drugs, and
declining real estate values.
Narrating the story of disappearance: Real Estate values alone do not tell us why the void exists in Times
Square that enables us to tell tall tales about crime, prostitution, drugs, and illicit businesses.
Perhaps, instead, we should examine the role this public space has held in the popular memory of the city,
for we will find that a double gap has occurred in our memory devices one in the late 1940s and another
in contemporary times facilitating the telling of twice-told stories.
DACT 5 78
La imagen, a decir verdad, no est desvinculada a la realidad. La decadencia, la delincuencia, las drogas, la pornografa y la prostitucin son reales, y nadie piensa que sean
valores morales.
... incluso en su estado de mxima ruina, la calle segua atrayendo a gente que vena a disfrutar de las resplandecientes
luces, del bullicio y de las pelculas baratas. Y nunca ha estado claro que el desarrollo de bienes inmuebles sea el freno
ideal a la miseria o la delincuencia.
Podramos afirmar que los criterios referentes a los bienes
inmuebles de la ciudad de Nueva York, junto con el control
sobre el uso del suelo que se llev a cabo en el centro de la ciudad entre 1982 y 1987 y que permiti que se construyeran edificios ms altos y voluminosos a lo largo de Broadway desde
Times Square hasta Columbus Circle, aniquilaron Times Square y lo convirtieron en un conjunto de edificios de oficinas.
O tambin podramos mencionar la competencia que surgi
con la zona de Wall Street en el bajo Manhattan, que favoreci el que Times Square se convirtiera en este nuevo centro
de oficinas debido a que est ubicado cerca del ncleo con
ms trnsito de masas de la ciudad y a que est muy prximo
a las lneas ferroviarias de cercanas de las estaciones Grand
Central Station y Penn Station.
These gaps enable a distinction to be made between realistic representation and simulated effects. And this
distinction, in turn, engenders a twice-told story that lingers nostalgically over the memory of Times Square
trying to keep it from change and destruction.
Deleuze argues that any-space-whatever began to proliferate after WWII - they were demolished or
reconstructed towns, places of undifferentiated tissue or underutilized and fallow lands such as docklands,
warehouses or dumps.
Represented in film, these any-space-whatevers became spiritual spaces: an amorphous set that eliminated
that which happened and acted in it, a non-totalizable space full of shadows and deep black holes.
They were pessimistic sites, offering no promise of comfort or retreat. Times Square was a quintessential
postwar any-space-whatever.
In postwar America, when the first memory gap occurred and the first story was told, central places such as
Times Square were beginning to be threatened with disappearance.
As a result, Times Square, along with other important places of the city, were reduced to representational
images that could stand-in for places no longer explored by pedestrians nor remembered from the details of
direct encounters.
This was a way of memorializing their loss, without committing them to nostalgic re-enactments.
A certain degree of command and control over these unknown terrains could be effected, however, by
narrating a series of technical facts and enumerating their characteristics.
The detective story and the police narrative are devices that offer an illusion of reality in narrated form.
They can be used to focus on, underline, point out and re-member parts of the city that have been covered over
by mysterious events. They presented an imaginary centered and legible city and thereby enabled the spectator
to cognitively map or gain command and control over a place that was no longer experienced directly.
Kevin Lynch used the terms cognitive map in The Image of the City (1960) to explore how mental images
not only affected a spectators sense of identity, well-being and belonging to a particular city but also made
the city memorable or imageable.
Y, por supuesto, hay que mencionar las polticas de desarrollo econmico de la ciudad, que han introducido para las
masas el ocio al estilo familiar como reclamo turstico, y han
exigido que la sordidez barriobajera y el evidente vicio de
Times Square sea erradicado, realojando el sexo en zonas
ms seguras de la periferia de la ciudad.
Despus de que en noviembre de 1996 entrara en vigor esta
ley, Times Square y su arquitectura de ldicos placeres se
habrn reducido. Se mantendrn, por consideracin con la
nostalgia, entre 6 y 10 sex shops, aunque si quedasen ms de
10, evidentemente se desequilibrara la balanza y se produciran terribles efectos secundarios tales como delincuencia,
drogas y declive de los principios que rigen los bienes
inmuebles.
Narrando la historia de la desaparicin: Los principios que
rigen los bienes inmuebles en s no nos dicen por qu existe
este vaco en Times Square que nos da pie a contar historias
exageradas sobre delincuencia, prostitucin, drogas y negocios ilcitos.
Quizs, en lugar de eso, deberamos examinar el papel que ha
desempeado este lugar pblico en la memoria popular de la
ciudad, ya que descubriremos que se ha producido una doble
laguna en nuestros mecanismos de memoria: uno a finales de
79 5 DACT
Fredric Jameson argues that this cognitive framework enables a spectator to project an imaginary image of
the total city even where it might be broken in parts. The spectator is able subsequently to gain a sense of
place and to construct a composed ensemble that can be retained in memory, and used to map and remap
the city along flexible and changing trajectories.
But this was the problem in postwar cities: the relationship between the spectators perception of the physical
structure of the city had been shattered and a cognitive map could no longer be based on direct experience.
Some other device had to mediate between the two and render the city readable. A cognitive map could
be produced, for example, by images of cities depicted in films and photographs.
The semi-documentary The Naked City (Jules Dassein, director 1948) provides an excellent example of such
mediating devices that cognitively map the city because it not only stars the streets and landmarks of
Manhattan as its main feature attraction, but utilizes voice-over narration in an unusual manner.
Voice-over narration helps to illustrate the case history of police work and to tie together the 107 different
locations filmed in the streets and buildings of New York City.
From its beginning, the spectator is presented with a birds eye view of the city, stretched out below and
waiting for inspection this is a truthful story, the Naked City whose facts will be exposed, whose crimes will
be revealed.
The narrator/director Mark Hellinger is above all a story-teller who maps out the space of New York while
simultaneously directing the flow of the narration.
His voice over remarks on the next move, informs the viewer of police routines and offers background
information on the characters. It enables the spectator to dip in and out of representative New Yorkers
minds as they go about their daily routines.
Then the narrator omnisciently withdraws to a higher level where he weaves together the montage of images
and story lines as the camera constantly shifts its visual and narrative focus.
He tells the young detective Halloran who is staring out a large window that looks out over the city,
[t]heres the layout, Jim. The man who killed Jean Dexter is somewhere down there. Cant blame him for
hiding can you?
DACT 5 80
Como resultado, Times Square, junto con otros lugares importantes de la ciudad, fueron reducidos a imgenes representadas que podan suplir esos lugares que ya no seran explorados por los viandantes ni recordados por los detalles captados
en encuentros directos.
Este era un modo de memorizar la prdida de estos lugares,
sin hacer reconstrucciones nostlgicas.
Sin embargo, se podra ejercer cierto mando y control sobre
estos terrenos desconocidos mediante la narracin de una
serie de datos tcnicos y la enumeracin de sus caractersticas.
Las historias de detectives y las novelas policacas son mecanismos que ofrecen una versin de la realidad en forma de
narracin.
Se pueden usar para examinar, destacar, sealar o recordar
partes de la ciudad que han sido empaadas por acontecimientos misteriosos. En ellas se presentaba una ciudad imaginaria centrada y legible y por lo tanto brindaban al espectador la posibilidad de mapear cognitivamente un lugar que
ya no era experimentado directamente, o adquirir control
sobre este.
Kevin Lynch emple los trminos mapa cognitivo en The
naked city (1960) (La ciudad desnuda) para investigar cmo
las imgenes mentales no slo tenan sus efectos sobre el sen-
tido de identidad del espectador, su bienestar y su pertenencia a una ciudad concreta, sino tambin hacan que la ciudad
se pudiera recordar y estructurar con imgenes.
Fredric Jameson argumenta que esta estructura cognitiva permite al espectador proyectar una visin imaginaria de toda la
ciudad incluso donde sta pudiese estar fragmentada en
varias partes. Como consecuencia, el espectador puede
adquirir un sentido de orientacin y construir un conjunto
ensamblado susceptible de ser retenido en la memoria y de
usarse para mapear y remapear la ciudad siguiendo trayectorias flexibles y variables.
Pero este era el problema de las ciudades en la posguerra: el
modo de percibir la estructura fsica de la ciudad que tena el
espectador haba sido hecha aicos, por lo que un mapa cognitivo ya no poda estar basado en la experiencia directa.
Le corresponda a algn otro mecanismo la tarea de mediar
entre el espectador y la ciudad y hacer que sta fuese legible.
Se poda producir un mapa cognitivo por ejemplo, empleando las imgenes de la ciudad que aparecen en las pelculas y fotografas.
El semi-documental The Naked City (sic Jules Dassein, director 1948), es un excelente ejemplo de mecanismo mediador
que mapea cognitivamente la ciudad, puesto que el papel
It is up to this detective to make the connections that solve the mystery just as he slowly blocks out one street
after another street on his sectional map of lower Manhattan searching step by patient step for the killers
address.
Camera shots that follow the detective as he walks through the city, that capture him mapping out block
after block on his map, plus skyline panoramas and views out over the city, in addition to the invisible lines
of telecommunication,
cognitively map the city for the spectator trying to offer a synoptic view that spatial fragmentation both
the reality of the postwar American city and the filmic process of montage increasingly renders impossible.
To explore another manner in which the title of The Naked City and even the process of mapping have
been replayed, it should be noted that the title for Hellingers movie was taken from
a 1945 book of photographs entitled Naked City by Weegee, the sensational crime photographer. Before
the title adorned a Hollywood movie and its subsequent television series, it was Weegee who turned the
prying eye of his camera on the bizarre and disorderly life of New York City.
He recorded the spectacle of its streets: the cruel and violent life of murders, fires and accidents and the
compelling scenes of loneliness, homelessness, and poverty.
His sensational snapshot of a car accident (1945), published in Naked City, captures a police mans futile
gesture towards a paper-covered corpse while a movie marquee ironically announces the Joy of Living.
The quickness of this image and its jarring juxtapositions inhibit the auratic potential of photography which
otherwise endow it with a timeless quality.
Instead, this Street photography sets up a virtual monument to the death of the city, the withdrawal of life,
money and people from communities that were being killed by the bulldozer.
The dark photographs of Naked City map this death, this twilight of the life of a great city and the blackness
that smothers it and can not be erased.
By the summer of 1957, the MIBI (Mouvement Internationale pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste one of the
precursors of the Situationist International ) had re-appropriated the title for a map of Paris created by Guy
Debord.
DACT 5 82
principal no slo lo desempean las calles y puntos destacados de la ciudad, sino tambin una voz narrativa empleada
de un modo un tanto inusual.
La voz narrativa ayuda a ilustrar el caso que sigue un polica
y a vincular los 107 lugares diferentes que se filman en las
calles y edificios de la ciudad de Nueva York.
Desde el comienzo, se le brinda al espectador una vista de
pjaro de la ciudad que se extiende bajo la cmara en espera de ser examinada: esto es una historia real, la Ciudad Desnuda cuyos hechos sern expuestos, cuyos crmenes sern
revelados.
El narrador / director Mark Hellinger es sobre todo un cuenta
cuentos que mapea el espacio de Nueva York al tiempo que
dirige el decurso de la narracin.
Su voz en off comenta el siguiente movimiento, informa al
espectador sobre la rutina de la polica y ofrece informacin
acerca de los personajes. Permite al espectador recorrer las
mentes del estereotipo de neoyorquino en el devenir de sus
vidas cotidianas.
Entonces, el narrador omnipresente nos atrae a un nivel superior, donde entreteje el montaje de imgenes con el argumento mientras la cmara cambia constantemente su foco
narrativo y visual.
This map, like its predecessors, underscored a developing crisis in both the construction and perception of
contemporary urban form.
By now a well-known image, the map consisted of 19 cut-outs from a pocket guide to Paris that were printed
in black ink with red directional arrows linking each sections.
The cut-outs depicted what Guy Debord defined as a unity of atmosphere a special place such as the
Luxembourg Gardens, Les Halles, the Ledoux Rotunda, or the Gare de Lyon often a wasteland or an old
districts left behind in the wake of modernization which contained unusual attractions for strollers and
enabled unknown encounters to occur.
The arrows on the other hand illustrated tendencies of orientation for a stroller who might cross the area
devoid of specific intentions.
This was an experimental map representing a system of playful spontaneity enabling sensitive participants
to experience the citys many marvels, to recode and repossess its terrain. Thus the map of The Naked City
becomes a heterotopic narrative of open possibilities where each follower must choose different paths
through the city and overcome the obstacles the city presents.
As the film entitled The Naked City strips Manhattan bare, enabling its
streets and landmarks to become the stars of the film, so the sectional
cutouts are the stars of Paris.
If the city of New York offered only tiny clues to be used to overcome
the obstacles it presented against its many unsolved crimes, then Paris
too yielded only tiny clues to a future narration of new possibilities.
And if the film inverted the synoptic view of mapping the city, only adding to its fragmented reality and its
threatened dis-memberment, then so too Debords map fragments the experience and perception of the
pedestrian who drifts from one selected unity of atmosphere to another without knowing either how these
juxtapositions are connected or how they might present an illusion of the city as a totality.
The maps self-reflective intention is to actualize and thus to make the spectator aware of the artifice of
spatial construction, of the city planners arbitrary creation of spatial districts, and their imposition of a false
unity on the face of the city.
quien apunt el ojo fisgn de su cmara en la extraa y turbulenta vida de Nueva York.
Grab el espectculo de sus calles: la cruel y violenta vida de
los asesinatos, incendios y accidentes y las imponentes escenas de la soledad, el desamparo y la pobreza.
Su magnfica instantnea de un accidente de coche (1945),
publicada en Naked City, capta el intil gesto que pone un
polica ante un cuerpo sin vida cubierto de papel de peridico, al tiempo que, irnicamente, desfila en un panel luminoso la frase Joy of Living (el placer de vivir). La rapidez de
esta imagen y sus yuxtaposiciones discordes inhiben el potencial aurtico de la fotografa que, por otro lado, la dotan de
una calidad atemporal.
En cambio, esta fotografa de la calle erige un monumento
virtual a la muerte de la ciudad, la retirada de la vida, el dinero y la gente de comunidades que estaban siendo destruidas
por los bulldozer.
Las grises fotografas de Naked City mapean su muerte, este
crepsculo de la vida de una gran ciudad y la negrura que la
apaga y que no se puede suprimir.
En el verano de 1957, el MIBI (Mouvement Internationale pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste, uno de los precursores de
la Internacional Situacionista) se haba reapropiado el ttu-
83 5 DACT
Narrating a twice-told story about Times Square: As we have seen, the first told story relied on a taste for realistic
representation that grew out of a failure of memory effected by the disappearing or increasingly invisible city.
But now we must draw a distinction between these 1940s and 1950s realistic representations of urban space
and our contemporary representations that display a taste for simulation, for delight in wax museums, theme
parks, retroarchitectural splendors, and the suspension of disbelief that planning can create the appearance
of the unplanned in the redevelopment of Times Square.
In other words the contemporary production of spaces such as Times Square is a twice-told story that
depends on a second memory gap and creates a different effect.
We are no longer searching for photographic realism, for mapping techniques, for documentary rendering
of a city that is beginning to disappear from our lived experience and collective memory.
Now the technical apparatus that can produce the illusionary reappearance of Times Square or The Great White Way is
foregrounded enabling the masterful display of this artistry with all of
its theatricality, pretenses and tricks to become the show.
This re-enchanted world depends on the power to simulate and distorts the proclaimed purity and objectivity
of representative realism.
In order to explore this twice-told story, let me turn briefly to the late nineteenth century when simulation
as a means of popular entertainment achieved its full height.
Three-dimensional tableaux vivants, along with panoramas, dioramas, magic lantern shows, photographs
and stereoscopic views, offered the nineteenth century spectator a new kind of visual realism utilizing the
most advanced technical means.
they relied on technical means or an apparatus of vision to organize, manage and produce their effects be
it the dissolves of a magic lantern show or the three-dimensional illusions of a stereoscope.
It was not just representational realism but mechanical or instrumental realism that enthralled spectators in
the late nineteenth century. They flocked to theatrical spectacles which were produced by mechanical
means and thrilled at scenographic appearances being magically transformed by machines and devices.
DACT 5 84
This was one way that Victorian society could become accustomed to living with machines and mechanical
processes.
Modern realism enabled the world to be described in factual form, uncompromised by theory, values or magical
events. Paradoxically, however, once the world had been deprived of wonder through its instruments of realistic
vision, once occult and supernatural effects had been destroyed through too much understanding, the nineteenth
century then re-enchanted this view in theatrical events, visual spectacles and quasi-magical shows.
It simulated the enchantment of inexplicable processes and magical effects, hiding the apparatus of display
and highlighting the technical artifice of recreation.
On the other side of rational and instrumental control over material reality lay the willing suspension of
disbelief and the pleasurable immersion in fantastical simulated worlds.
Pleasure resided not just in seeing the world duplicated in realistic exactitude, an act demonstrating that one
could appropriate that world, master it, map, project or reconstruct it _ but pleasure arose as well from the
ability to simulate that world and this entailed an apparatus or technician to create such special effects and
to reveal an instrumentalists control over physical reality.
So we might say of contemporary Times Square whose simulated
arrangements have produced an ontological confusion in which the
original story has been forgotten and no longer needs to be told.
Simulation plays on this shifting of ground and is enhanced when an
unstable relation exists between representation and experience.
Times Square, by now, is known only through its representations, its sign systems, its iconic cinematic
presence. Pleasure now derives from experiencing the illusion of The Great White Way by simulating its
Lutses [Light Units in Times Square], by planning its unplannedness, by foregrounding the apparatus that
produces these manipulated representations.
Since the need for realistic representation that provides a cognitive map of unknown terrain has declined,
the pressure for simulation as a twice-told story increases. Now the narration of stories resides in the
combinatorial replay embedded in the codes of a computer memory, in the technical apparatus of
simulation, in the regulatory controls of urban design.
85 5 DACT
So we have allowed Times Square as a quintessential public space of an American city to be redesigned as
a simulated theme park for commercial entertainment.
Once Robert A. M. Stern was put in charge of the interim plan for 42nd Street Now!, giving the project a
decidedly razzle-dazzle orientation, it was hoped that architects would remember that the real star of the
show was Times Square _ our most democratic good-time place.
Drawing from a ubiquitous series of already determined and ordinary advertisements, signs and billboards,
and even relying on the potential drawing card of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck,
Times Square has been incorporated into a larger sense of assembled space, where all of its simultaneity and
immediacy can evaporate into astonishing imagescapes.
Here, as the earlier commercial entertainments of the diorama, panorama, and lantern slide shows
demonstrated, spectators thrill at the re-creation of the real, wondering at the technical procedures which
convincingly transport them into an experience that may never have existed in reality.
Like any successful magic show, spectators are doubly thrilled when the illusion is produced by invisible
means, when the prosaic world can be re-enchanted and disbelief suspended albeit for a moment.
Revealing Nostalgia in Public Place: Any-space-whatever, represented in the film The Naked City and its
various serial replays, presented an image of remembrance that moved across space in many different
directions, that was reconnected to different layers of time that confronted each other.
It was the texture of the memory of the city that was important _ the weaving together of its temporal and
spatial particularities that mapped out an ordinary day in the life of the city.
Yet this gesture to remember the space and time of the city in its act of disappearance did not reach out to
actually preserve or arrest the flow of time in the city as it moved smoothly forward, for time that passes can
never be recalled.
DACT 5 86
Instead the virtual images of cinema stood-in for our memories or for actual images, they even competed
with personal recollections of how it might have been.
In this imaginary space, real images and actual images running after each other, referring to each other,
reflecting each other, met along a borderline where they began to blur.
On the other hand, 42nd Street, Now! is a nostalgic mapping, erecting a simulacrum substituting for the real.
It reflects a form of melancholy hovering over our cities that pines for places and styles of life, values and
existences that have been lost or eliminated decades ago.
Freud outlined two modes of grieving melancholy and mourning
noting that the melancholic griever when confronted with the loss of
something or someplace that was valued, refuses to let go, refuses to
accept that which is no longer possible.
Thus the task of mourning is arrested, the task that enables new symbolic worlds to be imagined
Now we know that nostalgia is a particular postmodern dilemma if we allow Times Square to be our prime
example.
Apparently, those in charge of its restoration will not acknowledge the fact of its loss, will not draw up a list
of no longer possibles..
Disavowing that anything was ever erased, fragmented, or dismembered, they are compelled to repeat this
trauma over and over again by erecting substitute forms, by holding onto images that have disappeared, by
fantasizing the unity of its appearance.
But there is another more critical side, a rhetorics of mourning, that marks the postmodern critical landscape.
Here there is a recognition of loss and dismemberment, of fragmentation and wounds, gaps and fissures, of
the hole in the heart of the city.
Postmodern critics invite readers to mourn the shattered fantasy of the whole and the one that has haunted
the Western imagination.
87 5 DACT
Instead we must learn to tolerate unpredictable conjunctions, instabilities and chaos of social arrangements,
and hybrid forms of personal identities.
If there is to be a new geometry on which the city might be imagined, new space and time transformations
that might enable us to envision creative potentialities
that something new pushing us toward experimentation and improvisation when we come in contact
with the real
then it must be based not on the simulated displays and descriptive signs of our contemporary
imagescapes the result of a severed relationship between meaning and place
but instead on the open-ended display of any-space-whatever and the conjunctive and between virtual
and actual images that allows a playful remembering and improvisational excess.
DACT 5 88
repetir este trauma una y otra vez mediante la ereccin de formas sustitutas, la conservacin de imgenes que han desaparecido e idealizando la unidad de su figura.
Pero existe una faccin an ms crtica, una retrica del
lamento que caracteriza el paisaje posmoderno.
Aqu, se reconoce la prdida y el desmembramiento, la fragmentacin y las heridas, los vacos y las fisuras que se han
producido en el corazn de la ciudad.
Los crticos posmodernos invitan a los lectores a lamentar la
fantasa hecha aicos del conjunto y la unidad que ha cautivado la imaginacin de Occidente.
En lugar de eso, debemos aprender a tolerar las conjunciones
impredecibles, las inestabilidades y el caos de los acuerdos
sociales y las formas hbridas de identidad personal.
Si ha de existir una nueva geometra sobre la que se pueda
imaginar la ciudad, nuevas transformaciones espaciales y
temporales que nos permitan entrever nuevos potenciales de
creacin (algo nuevo que nos empuja hacia la experimentacin y la improvisacin cuando entramos en contacto con lo
real), entonces debe estar basado no en carteles descriptivos
e imgenes simuladas de nuestros paisajes urbanos contemporneos, resultado de la relacin rota entre propsito y
lugar, sino en la representacin sin lmites preestablecidos de
Planning y Postmodernidad
Joaqun Casariego
Catedrtico de Urbanstica
y Ordenacin del Territorio.
La crisis que en los aos sesenta y setenta se desencadena en el entorno de lo que tradicionalmente se ha
entendido por planning1 no es un hecho aislado sino que est inscrito en un fenmeno bastante ms amplio
y complejo que afecta a los pilares de lo entendemos por modernidad2. El planning es precisamente uno de
los rasgos caractersticos de la modernidad, o podramos incluso decir, uno de sus efectos ms directos. El
afn por disponer de una disciplina con capacidad para racionalizar los efectos territoriales del comportamiento social y programar sus resultados, lgica inquietud entre aquellos que en torno a la razn centraron
la explicacin del mundo, catapult, como en muchos otros ejemplos, una nueva rama del saber. En este
caso, un saber dirigido a la accin, al progreso y al control del futuro.
Lo moderno, que se haba cimentado sobre la base del progreso econmico, la racionalizacin administrativa y la diferenciacin del mundo social, trajo consigo la formacin del estado industrial capitalista. La
modernidad puede ser vista, por tanto, como aquel trmino sumario que incluye las transformaciones econmicas, polticas y sociales que en torno al siglo dieciocho tuvieron lugar en el seno de lo que llamamos
la cultura occidental.
Algunos autores han entendido que el sistema de valores que se cimienta en este periodo y que se hace fuerte durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX y la primera del XX, puede estar sufriendo ahora cambios de suficiente magnitud, como para que aquella relacin entre planning y modernidad, haya comenzado a quebrase, afectando, as, al proceso de maduracin, si no a la esencia, del planning mismo.
Modernidad y planificacin
Como sabemos, este proceso acumul un esfuerzo intelectual extraordinario por parte de los pensadores de
La Ilustracin para desarrollar una ciencia objetiva, una moralidad, una leyes universales, y un arte autnomo y desvinculado de cualquier atadura que no fuera su lgica interna. La idea era usar la acumulacin
de conocimientos generados por muchos individuos trabajando libre y creativamente para lograr la emancipacin de la humanidad y el enriquecimiento de la vida diaria. La dominacin cientfica sobre la naturaleza prometa libertad a partir de la escasez, las necesidades y las arbitrariedades de las calamidades naturales. El desarrollo de formas racionales de organizacin social y de pensamiento, prometan la liberacin
de las irracionalidades del mito, la religin y la supersticin, y tambin del uso arbitrario del poder y del
lado oscuro de nuestra propia naturaleza humana. Slo a travs de un proyecto de tal calibre, podan revelarse las cualidades universales, eternas e inmutables de toda la humanidad. (David Harvey, 1989).
DACT 5 90
In the 60s and the 70s the crisis that was triggered in what
we have traditionally known of planning1 was never an
isolated fact. Since it formed part of a wider and more
complex phenomenon which affected the very basis of what
we understand of as modernity2. Planning is precisely one of
the characteristic factors of modernity and we could even say
one of its most direct effects. For desire to have a discipline
capable of rationalising the territorial effects of social
behaviour and to program its results is logically of concern for
all the people who centred the explanation of the world on
reason. This as in many other cases produced a new branch
of knowledge. In this case a branch of knowledge based on
action, progress and control of the future.
The modern, which had formed the basis of all economic
progress administrated rationalisation, the differentiation of
the social world brought with it the formation of a capitalist
industrial state. Modernity, therefore can be seen as the
summarising term which includes economic, political and
social transformations which took place in the XVIII century
in Western Culture.
En este contexto, Hegel fue el primer filsofo que desarroll un concepto claro de modernidad. Fue quien
a finales del dieciocho, tuvo realmente conciencia de que tres siglos atrs habamos entrado en una nueva
era y que nos amenazaban nuevos y turbulentos tiempos; quien estableci las relaciones entre modernidad
y racionalidad. Cuando la modernidad deviene consciente de s misma surge una necesidad de autocercioramiento que Hegel entiende como necesidad de filosofa, e introduce el principio de subjetividad, como
previamente Kant lo haba hecho con el de razn: conceptos ante los que ha de justificarse todo lo que en
general se presente con la pretensin de ser vlido. Razn y subjetividad, dos dimensiones sobre las que se
basa la Filosofa de la Reflexin de Hegel servirn para comprender en torno a qu principios la modernidad se asienta y se desarrolla. (Jrgen Habermas, 1989)
A la Filosofa de la Reflexin de Hegel se contrapuso la Filosofa de la Praxis de Marx. Ambos filsofos, que
en principio coincidan en la confianza de que una sociedad liberada de sus ataduras histricas, poda servirse de una voluntad colectiva para cooperar, renunciaron a esta posibilidad, distancindose as de las
utopas socialistas. Con la Filosofa de la Praxis, y la introduccin de los conceptos de accin, autogeneracin y trabajo, los seguidores de Marx, se alejarn ms y ms del concepto de razn o de racionalidad:
se alejarn ms y ms de Hegel. Slo con el desarrollo posterior del pensamiento marxista y el cambio de
paradigma de la actividad productiva por el de la accin comunicativa3, dice Habermas, vuelven a conectarse estas dos tradiciones, ... pues la teora de la accin comunicativa establece una relacin interna entre
praxis y racionalidad. Investiga las suposiciones de racionalidad inherentes a la prctica comunicativa cotidiana, y con el concepto de racionalidad comunicativa, da razn del contenido normativo de la accin
orientada al entendimiento4. Racionalidad, subjetividad y accin comunicativa, son, por tanto, segn
Habermas, los conceptos que garantizan la continuidad del proyecto moderno.
Todo lo slido se desvanece en el aire, dir Marshall Berman, robando una frase de Marx, e intentando
comprimir en una sola idea todo el espritu de la modernidad. Aquello que de ruptura con el pasado, de
vanguardia, de cambio, de proyecto de futuro, le es atribuido a la modernidad. Esa especie de vrtigo, de
sensacin de estar al borde del precipicio y al tiempo de confianza en la razn y en la ciencia como vehculos para situarse en ese futuro. El hombre moderno, inquieto ante un devenir confuso y amenazante, es
incapaz de acomodarse a un solo rol en su presente; es al tiempo autocomplaciente y dudoso de s mismo;
contradictorio, y capaz por tanto de mostrar su lado ms enrgico, vibrante e imaginativo, y al instante volverse contra s mismo, cuestionase y negarse rotundamente. Ser moderno, dir Bergman, es ser a la vez
revolucionario y conservador, vitales ante las nuevas posibilidades de experiencia y aventura, atemorizados
ante las profundidades nihilistas a que conducen tantas aventuras modernas, ansiosos por crear y asirnos a
algo real aun cuando todo se desvanezca. Podramos incluso decir que ser totalmente modernos, es ser antimodernos...5 (Marshall Berman, 1988). Habermas y Berman, representan, por tanto, la lnea continuista
historical bonds which could use collective will towards cooperation later were to reject this possibility and to become
distance from socialist utopias. With the philosophy of praxis
and the introduction of the concepts of action, auto-generation
and work the followers of Marx work to become more and
more distance from the concept of reason and rationality. They
were to become more and more distance from Hegel. Only
with the later development of the Marxs thought and the
change of the paradigm of productive activity for
communicative action3, Habermas was to say, would the two
traditions become connected again since the theory of
communicative action establishes an internal relationship
between praxis and rationality. It investigates the presumptions
of rationality inherent in everyday communicative practice and
with the concept of communicative rationality it bestows
reason on normative contents of actions orientated towards
understanding4. Rationality, subjectivity and communicative
action are therefore, according to Habermas, the concepts
which guaranteed the continuity of a modern project.
All is solid melts into air, said Marshall Berman, taking a
sentence from Marx, and trying to compress all of the spirit of
modernity in one sole idea. That of a vanguard movement of
change of a project for the future, all of this and more is
91 5 DACT
del proyecto moderno, y se situarn entre los que piensan que la modernidad es bsicamente un proceso
inacabado.
Este concepto lo desarrollar mejor Fredric Jameson (1996), cuando lo separa del de modernizacin. Jameson sealar algunas posturas contradictorias entre el modernismo como corriente artstica, intelectual y
social, dominante en el cambio de siglo, y ese otro concepto ms permanente de modernizacin, entendido como innovacin, cambio de valores y mejora gradual de las condiciones econmicas y sociales. As
pues, buena parte de las corrientes de la poca, por ejemplo, el naturalismo (Back to the Land, landscape gardening,...) irn en contra de la modernizacin, entonces caracterizada por el desarrollo industrial,
la racionalizacin de la produccin, la democracia parlamentaria etc. Seran, por tanto, modernismos antimodernos, que ...son ante todo, simblicos y, sobre todo, a finales de siglo, implican eso que a veces se
identifica con una nueva ola de reacciones antipositivistas, espirituales e irracionales, contra el progreso y
la razn triunfantes e ilustrados6. Jameson nos va a recordar, no obstante, que tal vez lo ms caracterizador de todos los modernismos de la poca no sea tanto su hostilidad hacia las tecnologas que, por ejemplo, los futuristas abrazaron profundamente, sino su aversin al mercado.
El mercado es uno de los grandes descubrimientos y dilemas de la modernidad. Marx, uno de los grandes
modernos, desarrollar, como sabemos, todo su discurso no slo para mostrarnos la complicada red de relaciones que caracteriza a la sociedad capitalista y el comportamiento
del mercado, sino la inutilidad de pensar en l como un vehculo para
Jameson nos va a recordar, no obstante, que tal vez lo
el
logro de una sociedad libre e igualitaria. En su diatriba contra los
ms caracterizador de todos los modernismos de la
socialistas proudhonianos, reflejada en el Grundisse, Marx intenpoca no sea tanto su hostilidad hacia las tecnologas
tar hacernos ver, a travs de la articulacin entre los conceptos de
que, por ejemplo, los futuristas abrazaron
ideologa y realidad, cmo la sociedad burguesa se comporta. Cmo
la igualdad y la libertad, pilares bsicos de la revolucin burguesa y
profundamente, sino su aversin al mercado.
del modelo de la sociedad de mercado, deben verse englobadas en el
mbito de la ideologa y no en el de la realidad; cmo sta se encuentra inherentemente trabada y ocultada por aquella, en respuesta a las necesidades de su propia estructura7. Los deseos de libertad e igualdad,
dir Jameson, ...todo el mundo quiere quererlos, pero no pueden ser realizados. Lo nico que puede ocurrirles es que el sistema que los genera desaparezca, aboliendo as los ideales, junto con la realidad
misma8. (Fredric Jameson, 1996)
Otros entendern que no se trata tanto de abolir el mercado como de domesticarlo y aprovechar sus dinmicas internas. La teora de la regulacin, desarrollada por Michel Aglietta en Rgulation et Crises du Capitalisme (1976)9, mostrar cmo las dinmicas del mercado son aprovechadas por algunas sociedades
DACT 5 92
nacientes, para impulsar su proceso de modernizacin, a travs de las leyes de acumulacin de capital y de
la competencia. La regulacin es entendida, entonces, no como algo en contra del mercado, sino como
el sistema de medidas tendentes a racionalizar los procesos que, a partir del mercado, es necesario introducir para alcanzar los mximos niveles de desarrollo. Uno de los ms genuinos representantes de la
corriente regulacionista, otro gran moderno, F. W. Taylor10, mostrar cmo en base al estudio sistemtico
del funcionamiento del mercado y del anlisis cientfico de la organizacin de las empresas, se pueden
alcanzar mximos niveles de rendimiento econmico y de estabilidad social. Muy al contrario de las posiciones ms claramente liberalizantes de defensa del mercado a ultranza, mantenidas por Adam Smith y John
Stuart Mill, ante las que la modernidad ser generalmente refractaria.
Al principio de regulacin, se adscribir el concepto de planificacin, que Aglietta define...como un proceso prescriptivo que regula las mltiples decisiones que han de tomarse cotidianamente para que el capital se valorice. Este proceso intenta ordenar jerrquicamente las prcticas, y fijar la sucesin de decisiones.
(...) La planificacin expresa la estrategia de la empresa segn unas normas a partir de las cuales el funcionamiento de la organizacin unifica las prcticas de gestin. La planificacin establece prioridades a partir
de las cuales orienta un proceso de reasignacin de recursos en funcin de la evolucin anticipada de las
condiciones de produccin e intercambio11.
La modernidad en el siglo XX se va a cimentar, por tanto, sobre dos formas diferentes de reaccionar ante el
mercado y, en consecuencia, sobre dos formas distintas de entender la planificacin. Una primera, como
reaccin contra aqul, es decir, como forma de suplantarlo, sustituyendo todo el sistema por otro con base
en el Estado, que derivar en los procesos revolucionarios de principios de siglo y en la formacin de las
sociedades colectivizadas (o de economa planificada), y otra como un proceso dirigido a su racionalizacin, como una forma de alcanzar la mxima eficacia sin poner en peligro el sistema, asegurando, tambin
a travs del Estado, su reproduccin mediante leyes de regulacin. Tanto en un caso como en otro, la planificacin jugar un papel fundamental en la materializacin de ambos modelos.
DACT 5 94
capitalist society and the behaviour of the market, but also the
uselessness of thinking of it as a vehicle for a free and equal
society. In its diatribe against Proudhonian socialist reflected
in the Grundisse,
Marx was to attempt to allow us to see in its articulation of the
consensus of ideology and reality how bourgeois society
behave, how freedom and equality, the basic pillars of the
bourgeois revolution and of the model of the market society
could be included within ideology and not in reality. How
reality was inherently entangled in ideology in response to the
needs of its own structure7... The desire for freedom and
equality, said Jameson, is something that everybody wants but
cannot be achieved. The only thing that can happen to us is
that the system that generates some disappear, therefore
abolishing the ideals together with the reality itself8 (Frederic
Jameson 1996).
Others were to understand that it was not a matter of
abolishing the market but rather of taming it and making use
of its internal dynamism. The theory of regulation developed
by Michel Aglietta in Regulation and Crisis of Capitalism in
19769 was to show how the dynamics of the market have
been taking advantage off by some societies to drive their
process of modernisation, via laws of accumulation of capital
los Estados-nacin, que l mismo experiment en el caso concreto de la Alemania post-prusiana, slo era
posible si ambos procesos, el democrtico y el burocrtico, eran al tiempo robustecidos. Pues bien, uno de
los mbitos donde esta articulacin comenzaba a tener mayor importancia, era en su relacin con los procesos de formacin de las grandes ciudades: es decir, con los problemas de expansin que las ciudades estaban experimentando impulsadas por el desarrollo industrial que sufran los pases ms avanzados; especialmente Inglaterra y Estados Unidos. Los antecedentes de este proceso de cambios que tanto en el campo
poltico como en el campo administrativo, se produjeron durante este periodo, fueron ordenadamente
expuestos en 1.963 por el arquitecto y profesor italiano Leonardo Benvolo en su ya clsico ensayo Le origini dellaUrbanstica Moderna12. Benvolo vendr a mostrar, precisamente, cmo en paralelo a las dificultades de entendimiento entre los problemas emergentes de la gran ciudad y las propuestas de nuevas
comunidades, se daban los primeros pasos hacia la formacin de un nuevo corpus disciplinar dirigido
en principio a resolver problemas puntuales (de suelo, de vivienda,...) pero que empezaba a tener cabida y
capacidad operativa bsicamente all donde las democracias burguesas estaban siendo consolidadas sobre
la base de los nuevos Estados-nacin. La centralizacin administrativa producto del robustecimiento de los
Estados-nacin, permita afrontar, mediante el desarrollo burocrtico, nuevas medidas para regular el crecimiento de las ciudades.
Posteriormente, algunos analistas contemporneos de extraccin marxista como Manuel Castells (1974) y
David Harvey (1977), cuyos estudios de los procesos de urbanizacin significaron la apertura de un amplio
campo de investigacin sobre las relaciones entre la sociedad y la ciudad, mostraron cmo a medida que
estos procesos se hacan ms y ms complejos, el Estado se impona como nueva dimensin mediadora.
Cuando los conflictos derivados del desarrollo urbano comienzan a poner en peligro la estabilidad del sistema (capitalista), el Estado gradualmente va introduciendo formas precisas de intervencin reguladora.
Desde el momento en que se comienza a observar a la ciudad, no slo como el mbito donde se lleva a
cabo la confrontacin social (la lucha de clases), sino como lugar donde se realiza el plusvalor, y esto puede
poner en peligro la reproduccin del sistema (de dominacin), medidas reequilibradoras son enseguida
necesarias para garantizar dicha estabilidad. Efectivamente, tanto la confrontacin social como las
expectativas econmicas del desarrollo industrial sern, desde esta perspectiva, los dos temas bsicos en
torno a los cuales las grandes ciudades se van a debatir durante aquel cambio de siglo.
La tesis de Peter Hall (1988)13 es, en este mismo sentido, que los movimientos de protesta reclamando la
participacin activa del Estado que se desencadenan en Inglaterra durante esos aos, se debe a algo ms
que a la situacin de miseria infinita en que se encuentra sumida la clase obrera y a las condiciones de inhabitabilidad de muchas zonas de la ciudad, sobre todo de Londres, la ciudad, entonces, ms poblada del
mundo. La participacin del Estado es reclamada por el progresivo desarrollo de un proletariado urbano
95 5 DACT
consciente, que se va fortaleciendo a partir de las movilizaciones que se generan en aquel contexto de creciente concentracin de poblacin indigente, Fueran cuales fueran las causas, no haba ninguna duda
sobre los efectos. Durante la segunda mitad de 1.880, se notaba en todas las ciudades, pero sobre todo en
Londres, una sensacin de cambio cataclismtico, incluso violento14.
Pero el conflicto real es el que generan las expectativas urbanas que desencadena el desarrollo industrial.
Primero, dir Carlo Aymonino, por la necesidad de localizar fsicamente los nuevos medios de produccin
(y representacin) industrial, y segundo, por las reagrupaciones geogrficas de poblacin que este proceso
est impulsando. Es todo el territorio lo que se est transformando, no slo las ciudades entendidas como
concentraciones poblacionales individuales. El proceso que se pone en marcha no ha de entenderse como
algo unidireccional, es decir, como la atraccin que la ciudad (activa) ejerce sobre el campo (pasivo), sino
como un solo fenmeno en el cual todo el territorio entra en el juego, y cada punto en su interior adquiere un valor. (Carlo Aymonino, 1971)
As, la dificultad que Max Weber advierte en la formacin del nuevo estado alemn, por la confrontacin
de intereses entre los latifundistas y la nueva burguesa industrial, Franco Mancuso (1980) la lleva al territorio para explicar la formacin de la ciudad alemana. La primera dificultad consistir, dir Mancuso, en
conciliar los intereses entre los propietarios del suelo y los promotores de las nuevas actividades industriales, es decir, entre aquellos que quieren aprovechar la renta directa del suelo y los que lo necesitan para
promover el desarrollo. Pero ms complicaciones vendrn cuando se pongan en relacin los intereses de
los latifundistas con los promotores de las viviendas, por la vinculacin de este sector a un nmero mayor
de actividades econmicas y por el componente social y representacional de aquellas. La mediacin
se hace necesaria por cuanto son intereses contrapuestos que se reflejan en la clase poltica, es decir, en
el seno de un Estado que necesita el desarrollo econmico para equipararse al resto de las sociedades industriales. Lo que estaba empezando a ponerse sobre la mesa, en el fondo, eran las consecuencias polticas de
una relacin econmica conflictiva entre los valores del suelo y la nueva dimensin de la ciudad.
En Amrica, la problemtica no es esencialmente distinta, aunque Estados Unidos, durante el siglo XIX, es
un pas muy extenso y escasamente urbanizado. Los primeros pasos del proceso de industrializacin son
mucho ms de colonizacin de nuevos enclaves que de crecimiento urbano y mucho ms caracterizado por
la problemtica de los pequeos industriales que por la participacin de la fuerza de trabajo. Pese a las crisis intermitentes de la ltima dcada, la conflictividad urbana, que sin duda se acrecentaba a medida que
el fin de siglo se aproximaba, siempre estuvo amortiguada por la euforia de la prosperidad econmica y por
la garanta que para el sistema significaba la presencia de una corriente continuada de emigrantes: un autntico ejrcito industrial de reserva en absoluto dispuesto a renunciar a su parte del botn. Las ciudades, sin
DACT 5 96
embargo, comenzaban a pagar los mismos costes del desarrollo industrial que eran observados en Europa:
congestin, caos, insalubridad y degradacin social. En Norteamrica, esto era visto como el reverso del
equilibrio y el orden que se observaba en la naturaleza, el reverso de los valores que la tica jeffersoniana
haba grabado en las mentes de los nuevos pobladores. La descomposicin social de las ciudades era el
reflejo de su desorden fsico, de las deficiencias del medio ambiente tal y como se haba construido (Christine Boyer, 1983). Esta tendencia a la pobreza y al crimen, a la vida funesta y degradada, ellos argan,
podra ser disciplinada por condiciones ambientales apropiadas. Un ambiente saneado y bien ordenado
podra confinar estos rasgos indeseables de modo que un hombre natural y socialmente responsable saliera del vicio y de la privacin. Si el ambiente exterior era tolerable, la pobreza se cuidara de si misma.15
97 5 DACT
namiento social, cientfico y poltico que la sociedad haba sido capaz de alcanzar. En eso consista parte
de la modernidad. Por eso el planning, en su nacimiento y primer desarrollo, fue esencialmente un proyecto moderno.
Y por eso el planning tuvo siempre tantas dificultades prcticas. El planning comprehensivo17, aquel que
alcanza mayores niveles de complejidad tcnica y procedimental y cuyo desarrollo y sancin exige mayor
esfuerzo tcnico e infraestructural, ms dilatado periodo de elaboracin, y mximas dificultades en el
campo de los acuerdos polticos y sociales, es la forma que normalmente termina identificndose con el
planning propiamente dicho. Es, durante la primera mitad del siglo XX y en el mbito de las sociedades occidentales, la modalidad de planning ms generalizada. El planning comprehensivo, cuyos ejemplos paradigmticos se materializaron en el Plan Regional de Nueva York de 1.929 y en el Plan del Gran Londres de
1.944, fue realmente el canto del cisne de lo que la sociedad moderna, en trminos de planning, haba
sido capaz de conseguir. Planes que an conteniendo excelentes estudios sobre problemas de gran complejidad, y an llegando a ser buenas guas en relacin con algunos aspectos del desarrollo de aquellas
metrpolis en formacin, fueron, sin embargo, instrumentos de capacidad muy limitada y de escasa utilidad respecto a los problemas de la construccin de la ciudad y respecto a las demandas urbanas de unas
democracias ya maduras. (Scott Campbell, Susan S. Fainstein; 1996).
Otras propuestas, por su mayor concrecin y su menor ambicin tcnica, que igualmente contribuyeron al
nacimiento y primer desarrollo del planning, como fueron el zoning y la ciudad jardn, parecan adaptarse
mejor a aquellas demandas crecientes: ambas resolvan alguno de los complejos problemas que la gran ciudad estaba planteando, y ambos se adaptaban (tanto como sugeran nuevos caminos), a los intereses de la
naciente burguesa industrial.
El zoning, que naci paralelamente en Alemania y en los Estados Unidos, tena unos objetivos en sntesis
muy concretos: delimitar los usos y regular la edificacin. Haba que regular los usos para el desarrollo y la
expansin de la ciudad y haba que disponer de suelo para facilitar el emplazamiento industrial. Adems
de esto, tenan que resolverse las relaciones de vecindad entre una edificacin cada vez ms densa y voluminosa. El planning, por tanto, tena que resolver los problemas derivados de los costes del suelo que la
demanda industrial estaba generando en la periferia, y los problemas que la congestin estaba generando
en el centro. Ambos conflictos eran afrontados a travs del zoning mediante mecanismos fcilmente abordables y comprensibles. Las propuestas de 1.891 para Francfort y de 1.916 para Nueva York fueron, en cada
contexto respectivo, realmente anticipatorias, por la efectividad del mecanismo. Mecanismo que muchas
ciudades europeas y americanas con rapidez adoptaron como forma de regular su crecimiento (Franco Mancuso, 1980).
Emergence of Planning
DACT 5 98
La ciudad jardn, fue, sin embargo, un invento inicialmente britnico y responda a dos preocupaciones clsicas de los comienzos del planning: la descentralizacin urbana y el problema de la vivienda. La ciudad jardn, entendida como forma de afrontar la suburbanizacin residencial, no tanto en su acepcin
howardiana, era, adems de un negocio creciente, un nuevo vehculo para la materializacin del sueo
moderno de integracin entre campo y ciudad. Toda la tradicin briSin embargo el planning como una disciplina que se
tnica de la Sociedad Fabiana y la colectivizacin de los problemas
de la vivienda, junto a movimientos tipo Vuelta a la Tierra (Back to
deseaba autnoma, cientfica y operativa, siempre se
the Land) o el landscape gardening, se unan a la filosofa del Golintent fundar sobre los principios del planning
den Day norteamericano y a la tradicin agraria y naturalista afirmacomprehensivo. Su fortalecimiento como tal se entenda
da all durante el siglo XIX. Lo que otros han llamado, el componente
pastoralista del despegue industrial de Amrica. La traduccin matecomo un camino hacia el perfeccionamiento progresivo
rial del concepto de ciudad jardn, es decir los proyectos y las realizade un mtodo pretendidamente universal que permitiera
ciones concretas, fueron en sus inicios tanto inglesa como norteameobtener todos lo datos, en base a los cuales tomar
ricana y rpidamente se comenzaron a llevar a cabo modalidades
decisiones que seran objetivamente beneficiosas para
diversas a partir de aquel impulso germinal (Francesco Dal Co, 1975).
99 5 DACT
DACT 5 100
Hall, ha mostrado hasta que punto la confianza en el planning comprehensivo se va a incrementar durante
este periodo, y cmo las nuevas ciencias y tcnicas en desarrollo, contribuan a su robustecimiento terico.
Cmo el crecimiento de las vocaciones por el planning, se vera reflejado en las universidades ms avanzadas y en las administraciones ms robustas. Pero tambin, cmo, a medida que esto ocurra, la disciplina se
iba distanciando ms y ms de sus objetivos programticos enunciados a principios de siglo. El planning se
desligaba de la ciudad, se desligaba de los ciudadanos y lo que es ms, se desligaba de la economa (Peter
Hall, 1996). Pero an siendo esto importante (o quizs slo fuera una consecuencia), lo que realmente se
estaba poniendo en crisis eran los fundamentos que haban informado el nacimiento y el desarrollo del planning mismo. La hiptesis que aqu se plantea es que aquellos principios que dieron soporte al modelo de
sociedad que se hace fuerte durante los aos que transcurren entre la segunda mitad del XIX y primera del
XX, en los cuales se consolida el proyecto moderno, o lo que hemos entendido como modernidad, sufren
una quiebra sustancial que aunque no afecta al modelo de sociedad propiamente dicho, tiene mltiples consecuencias en la instancia poltica, econmica y cultural, a las que el planning no puede ser ajeno.
La hiptesis de la postmodernidad
Gianni Vattimo, uno de los filsofos que recientemente ha propuesto una discusin sobre la postmodernidad, entendida como aquel fenmeno socialmente emergente que se define como opuesta a la modernidad,
y que, en este sentido, la sustituye, afirmar, que este concepto estaba ya, de forma quiz no tan explcita,
en la filosofa de Nietzsche y ms contemporneamente en Heidegger. Dicho de otra manera, as como
Hegel y Marx fueron, segn Habermas, los filsofos modernos por excelencia, Nietzsche y Heidegger sern,
segn Vattimo, los primeros filsofos postmodernos. (Gianni Vattimo, 1996)
Vattimo nos vendr a decir que con la crisis de verdad iniciada por Nietzsche en su obra Humano, Demasiado Humano, escrita en 1.878, y la muerte de Dios, se entrar en un periodo nihilista, con el que realmente se comienza a salir de la modernidad. Es decir, se trata del fin de la metafsica y la moral platnicocristiana, concepto que Heidegger intentar exponer, segn Vattimo, a travs de su obra Identidad y Diferencia: La Verwindung19, entendida en todos estos (sus) significados, define la posicin caracterstica de
Heidegger, su idea de la funcin del pensamiento en el momento en el que nos encontramos que es el
momento del fin de la filosofa en su forma de metafsica20. Ambos pensadores, estn apuntando, por tanto,
al final de una etapa y al principio de otra; al sealamiento de lo que Vattimo llama el fin de la modernidad.
Otro gran filsofo francs, formado en el campo de la Filosofa de la Praxis, Georges Bataille, pronto comenzar a distanciarse de aquellos modelos homogeneizantes cuyas formas de vida se iban paulatinamente
The proposals of 1891 for Frankfurt and 1916 for New York
were in each respective context a premonitory due to the
effectivity of their mechanisms. Mechanisms that many
Europeans and American cities adopted quickly as a way of
regulating their growth (Franco Mancuso 1980).
The city garden was however initially a British invention and
responded to two classic concerns at the beginning of
planning: urban decentralisation and the housing
problem. The city garden understood as a way of solving
residential suburb development and not so much in its
Howardian sense was, besides being a growing business a
vehicle for the materialisation of the modern dream of
integration between country and city. All the British tradition
of the Fabian Society and the collectivisation of the
problems of housing together with movements of the type
Back to the Land or landscape gardening came together in
the philosophy of the north American Golden Day and the
agrarian and naturalist tradition which became predominant in
the XIX century. What others have called the pastoralist
component of the industrial development of America. The
material translation of the concept of the city garden, that is
the projects and specific realisation of the same were both
British and North American at the beginning and quickly
101 5 DACT
adaptando a la intervencin metdica de las ciencias. En su huida intencionada de los postulados bsicos
de la modernidad, Bataille har una diseccin crtica del subjetivismo por sus consecuencias en una sociedad cosificada y totalizante; as como de la racionalizacin tica, que, segn Bataille, somete la vida social
en su totalidad a los imperativos del trabajo alienado. Con el principio de heterogeneidad, uno de los conceptos sobre los que construir su teora, el autor se opondr a lo que llamar un exceso de produccin
de la modernidad o, por el contrario, una escasez de rebasamiento, de transgresin y de profanacin. (Jrgen Habermas, 1989)
Ser, no obstante, ms adelante, durante los aos sesenta y setenta, cuando se desarrollan las tesis ms elaboradas sobre la quiebra de los principios de la modernidad. Una de las ms influyentes nos la va a proporcionar el filsofo francs Michel Foucault. Foucault rechaza la sistematicidad, es contrario a cualquier
forma de teorizacin global, y se resiste a todo anlisis totalizante. Por tanto se opondr a las explicaciones
globalizadoras (metanarrativas) propias de las construcciones tericas propuestas por Hegel y Marx
(Madam Sarup, 1993). Las metanarrativas son simplificadoras por globalizantes, y reducen obsesivamente el conocimiento mediante la reduccin progresiva del campo a travs del razonamiento cientfico. La
bsqueda de la verdad a partir del mtodo subjetivo y de la razn, limita los niveles de complejidad y
reduce el afloramiento de una serie infinita de posibles discursos a uno solo, aquel que se ajusta a interpretaciones propias e interesadas. La historia, uno de los temas que se repite en los trabajos de Foucault,
no es una sucesin continuada de acontecimientos vistos desde un sola perspectiva, sino una pluralidad de
discursos que, sin ley ni orden, emergen para volverse a sumergir (Jrgen Habermas,1989). El apparatus,
otro de los trminos utilizados por el autor para construir su teora y su visin de la historia, dir, es ...un
armazn de elementos heterogneos formados por discursos, instituciones, formas arquitectnicas, reglamentaciones, leyes, medidas administrativas, declaraciones cientficas, proposiciones filosficas, morales y
filantrpicas, en fin, lo dicho como lo no dicho. Tales son los elementos del apparatus. El apparatus es el
sistema de relaciones que puede establecerse entre estos elementos21.
Pero Foucault nunca hablar de postmodernidad.
Lo postmoderno, as definido, ser enunciado de forma muy temprana en el influyente trabajo de JeanFranois Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne, publicado en 1.97922. La tesis de Lyotard se centrar en el
paradigma de que el conocimiento cientfico ha dejado de representar la totalidad del conocimiento: siempre ha existido en competencia y en conflicto con otro tipo de conocimiento, que l denomina relato. En
las sociedades tradicionales, hay una preeminencia de las formas narrativas; y las narrativas (historias populares, mitos, leyendas y cuentos) otorgan legitimidad a las instituciones sociales y aportan modelos de integracin a las instituciones establecidas. Lo que el autor denomina el lazo social se constituye por una serie
DACT 5 102
between the second half of the XIX century and the first of the
XX century when the modern project was consolidated or
what we understand as modernity suffered a substantial
setback which although it did not affect the model of the
society as such had long-lasting consequences at the cultural,
economic and political level at which obviously had its
repercussions on planning.
de reglas que se transmiten a travs de formas narrativas: no se puede hacer solamente a travs de procedimientos abstractos como los asociados generalmente a la ciencia.
Para Lyotard, la condicin postmoderna es aquella en la que las grands recits de la modernidad (la dialctica del Espritu, la emancipacin del trabajador, la acumulacin de capital, la sociedad sin clases) han
perdido credibilidad. No hay metalenguajes: el arte, la moralidad y la ciencia, forman lenguajes separados y autnomos. La fragmentacin de juegos de lenguajes es una de las caractersticas de nuestro tiempo:
nadie puede comprender lo que est ocurriendo en la sociedad entendida como un todo. Y este es el
punto en que Lyotard se encuentra en frontal discordancia con las tesis de Habermas, quien en una especie de nuevo metalenguaje, reflejado en su conocida y difundida obra Theorie des Kommunikativen
Handelns (1981)23, propondr de nuevo un discurso unitario englobando a otros de carcter cognoscitivo,
tico y poltico. (Jean-Franois Lyotard, 1994)
Habermas acepta el concepto de postmodernidad, aunque sin renunciar a construir un discurso de la
modernidad a partir de los postulados iniciados por Hegel y Marx. Para Habermas la modernidad es un proceso que se inicia con ellos y que debe ser completado en base a una reconsideracin crtica de los discursos de aquellos; por tanto, aun estando en desacuerdo con algunos de sus preceptos, Habermas bebe en
Hegel y en Marx y se resigna al discurso postmoderno. No abandona el empeo de Marx por la emancipacin, aunque rechaza los medios revolucionarios y positivistas que ste propone para lograrla. El capitalismo se realiza en una clase social, Habermas coincide, y la racionalidad burocrtica y propositiva, tiene
un dominio creciente sobre la vidas individuales; pero es importante, cree Habermas, no equiparar el sistema autorregulado cuyos imperativos ignoran la conciencia de los miembros integrados en ellas con el
mundo de la vida24: el mundo de la conciencia y de la accin comunicativa25. Es decir, Habermas cree
en una salida a la continuidad del proyecto moderno, a partir de lo que l entiende como un proceso de
comunicacin de reconocimiento intersubjetivo, que mediante el entendimiento, puede llegar a acuerdos;
dicho de otra manera: un proceso interactivo basado en el consenso. Y esto es lo que los postmodernos
radicales ven menos posible. Sobre esto, Lyotard dir enfticamente, El consenso obtenido por discusin como piensa Habermas? Violenta la heterogeneidad de los juegos del lenguaje. Y la invencin siempre se hace en el disentimiento. El saber postmoderno no es solamente el instrumento de los poderes. Hace
ms til nuestra sensibilidad ante las diferencias, y fortalece nuestra capacidad de soportar lo inconmensurable. No encuentra su razn en la homologa de los expertos, sino en la paraloga de los inventores26.
Finalmente, Fredric Jameson establecer lo que l mismo llama una Teora de la postmodernidad, tal vez
la construccin terico-filosfica ms completa y de mayor alcance de las realizadas sobre este concepto.
En Postmodernity or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984)27, su obra central, Jameson tratar de dar
103 5 DACT
un paso sobre los trabajos de Lyotard y de Habermas, intentando superar los argumentos basados en la negacin de las metanarrativas pero rechazando el planteamiento radicalmente continuista del filsofo germano, situndose, admtaseme la expresin, a medio camino entre ellos. Aunque su exposicin sobre la
muerte del sujeto no deja de ser realmente disgregadora, puesto que el autor pone el acento en un periodo moderno caracterizado por la necesidad de individualidades carismticas (el genio, el profeta, el demiurgo) y uno postmoderno, ms democrtico y colectivizado, donde el fenmeno se ira diluyendo, lo que
Jameson quiere plantear es la posible existencia de un discurso postmoderno, sin tener por qu exigir para
su fundacin, ni la ruptura radical con la modernidad (ruptura cultural s, pero no econmica) ni la negacin absoluta de aqul. Para nuestros fines, sin embargo, su diseccin sobre el mercado ser su aportacin
ms enriquecedora.
Aceptando una sentencia simplificadora, diremos, que si la modernidad fue beligerante con el mercado, la
postmodernidad se rendir definitivamente a sus exigencias. Aunque renunciando, dir Jameson, a su ms
preciado valor, es decir, a su supuesta libertad de eleccin: resultando un mercado dirigido, selectivo y
homogeneizador. Una nueva estructura totalizadora con capacidad, por tanto, para proporcionar un
modelo de totalidad social. Una nueva metanarrativa (de base interpersonal e invisible) que en clave de
mercado, terminar desplazando a la metanarrativa de la produccin de Marx y a la del poder de
Weber. Un nuevo escenario que slo es posible entender, por el desarrollo revolucionario de los mass
media y por la identificacin (por no decir, la fusin) entre stos y el mercado mismo. Por fin la utopa
realizada? Ni la utopa socialista, ni la utopa capitalista. Ambas han tenido que renunciar respectivamente
a sus intentos de planificacin burocrtica, en un caso, y de desregulacin sistmica, en el otro. Jameson, un marxista al fin y al cabo, terminar diciendo, Lo que se necesita es un gran proyecto colectivo en
el que participe una mayora activa de la poblacin, algo que le pertenezca y construya con sus propias
energas. El planteamiento de las prioridades sociales (conocido tambin en la literatura socialista como planificacin28) tendr que ser parte de este proyecto colectivo. Aun as debera de quedar claro que, casi por
definicin, el mercado29 no puede ser en absoluto un proyecto30. (Fredric Jameson, 1996)
DACT 5 104
que poda ser generalizado a otras regiones europeas y asiticas, y no slo al mundo desarrollado, sino tambin a numerosas reas de lo que denominamos el tercer mundo. Al trmino ciudad y al trmino ms
generalizado de metrpolis, entendida como la gran ciudad, se le sumaba un nuevo concepto con pretensiones de dar un paso ms: el de definir la estructura de aquellas regiones compuestas por un universo
de concentraciones urbanas de diversa escala y condicin que, sin embargo, se constituan, en s mismas,
como una unidad funcional. (Jean Gottmann, Robert A. Harper,1990).
Otros trabajos posteriores han mostrado cmo aquella unidad funcional era probablemente ms psicolgica que real, y cmo el territorio ha ido evolucionando hacia formas ms complejas en las que diversas unidades de variado, y en algunos casos contradictorio carcter conviven en un magma extensivo y escasamente articulado (Joel Garreau, 1988; Stefano Boeri, Arturo Lanzani,1992,1993) . Los modelos clsicos
del comportamiento territorial que durante aquellos aos haban contribuido a la comprensin de la ciudad y haban fomentado el desarrollo del planning, tenan problemas para convalidarse (Peter Hall, 1996),
y el capital comenzaba a perder la confianza en la capacidad de ste para regular procesos de tal creciente complejidad (Richard E. Foglesong, 1986).
Por otro lado, la composicin social de estas grandes reas en expansin se haca ms y ms inabordable:
en primer lugar estaban las olas inmigratorias desde los pases subdesarrollados o en vas de desarrollo y el
multiculturalismo ascendente de estas nuevas sociedades; en segundo lugar, el papel cambiante de la mujer
y su repercusin en el campo laboral y social; y en tercer lugar, la estabilizacin de una poblacin marginal permanente con mltiples consecuencias en la economa de las ciudades. Procesos todos en progresin
que llevaban implcita la emergencia de un nuevo fenmeno: la multiplicacin de las minoras urbanas y
el desarrollo de un nuevo tipo de conflictividad social, hasta entonces inexistente. (Jordi Borja, Manuel Castells, 1997)
El planning comprehensivo intentaba, no obstante, abarcar coordinadamente todas las escalas territoriales,
desde la regin hasta la pequea ciudad, y todos los problemas sociales. De hecho, la estructura administrativa que en torno al planning se desarrolla durante esos aos en Europa, y que ha continuado desarrollndose hasta nuestros das, sigue siendo en esencia de estructura piramidal, por mucho que la corriente
dominante sea ahora tendencialmente descentralizadora32. Pero la crisis del planning no era un problema
de escala ni de organizacin administrativa, era una crisis conceptual y sobre todo una crisis de mtodo.
Era el propio mtodo como criterio, lo que se estaba poniendo en crisis.
Son muchos los autores que sealan el artculo seminal de Charles E. Lindblom, The Science of Muddling
Through, publicado en 1959, como la primera y la ms influyente advertencia sobre las dificultades de
105 5 DACT
poner en prctica el planning comprehensivo33. En l, Lindblom tratar de demostrar cmo las administraciones que en realidad aceptan en abstracto el modelo comprehensivo (root method) cmo vlido, actan en
la prctica con lo que l denomina el sistema de comparaciones limitadas y sucesivas (branch method). La
propuesta de Lindblom era demoledora y la resuma en los siguientes puntos: a) la seleccin de objetivos y
el anlisis emprico de las necesidades no estn separados unos de otros, sino que estn fuertemente entrelazados, b) (por tanto) la supeditacin de los medios a la previa formulacin de los fines, como propugna el
mtodo comprehensivo, es inapropiada o limitada, puesto que los fines
no
estn desligados de los medios, c) una buena poltica, no es el
Este posicionamiento crtico se basaba sobre todo
medio ms apropiado para un deseado fin, sino simplemente la que un
en el exceso de distanciamiento que la prctica
grupo de analistas encuentra y directamente acuerdan que es la ms
del planning estaba mostrando en relacin
apropiada, d) el anlisis no puede ser comprehensivo, no todos los faccon sus postulados tericos: el incremento
tores relevantes pueden tenerse en cuenta, de hecho muchos resultados, polticas y objetivos importantes son abandonados, y e) la depende complejidad y de pureza tcnica lo alejaba
dencia de la teora es frecuentemente reducida o eliminada por una
de la capacidad real de sus promotores y de la agilidad
sucesin de comparaciones prcticas (Charles E. Lindblom, 1959). De
y efectividad de las decisiones, muchas veces
esta crtica surgir una primera rama o submodalidad del planning que
contaminada por la instancia poltica.
es conocida como incrementalist planning.
Este posicionamiento crtico se basaba sobre todo en el exceso de distanciamiento que la prctica del planning estaba mostrando en relacin con sus postulados tericos: el incremento de complejidad y de pureza
tcnica lo alejaba de la capacidad real de sus promotores y de la agilidad y efectividad de las decisiones,
muchas veces contaminada por la instancia poltica. Pero es ms, y sta era la base del segundo posicionamiento crtico, el planning comprehensivo estaba siendo un instrumento exclusivo de las administraciones locales y regionales, supuestamente legitimadas por representar el inters pblico, y esto era visto
desde algunas instancias como una falta de sensibilidad hacia una sociedad plural, con intereses tambin
plurales, y por tanto, como un exceso de tecnocracia. Esta postura fue expresada enrgicamente por Paul
Davidoff en un artculo publicado en 1.965 y titulado Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning.
Davidoff, cuya denuncia estaba extrada bsicamente de la experiencia norteamericana, defenda que el
planning unitario perpetuaba un monopolio sobre el poder del planning y reprima la participacin. Si el
planning tena que incluir a todos, no poda pretender que una sola instancia representara los intereses de
una sociedad conflictiva y divergente. El planning tena que promover el pluralismo abogando (en latn
dar voz) por los intereses de los no integrados. El planning tradicional creaba al menos dos barreras para
el pluralismo efectivo, a) las comisiones gubernamentales (planning commissions) no eran democrticas,
y estaban pobremente constituidas para representar los intereses en competencia de una sociedad pluralis-
DACT 5 106
ta, y b) el planning tradicional se concentraba en los problemas del planning fsico, marginando lo social y
por tanto rechazando los conflictos de la sociedad y la desigualdad en la ciudad (Paul Davidoff, 1965). En
este sentido, la llamada de Davidoff para un cambio desde un planning fsico a un planning socio-econmico, refleja tambin aquel esfuerzo ms general en contra de la ideologa tecnocrtica de los primero
planes que veamos en Lindblom. De aqu surgir el advocacy planning.
Ms tarde, muchos planificadores impulsaron lo que se ha llamado el planning estratgico (estrategic planning), como un nuevo modelo, que se tomaba prestado del mundo empresarial y militar. Su atractivo para
los planificadores descansaba en lo directo y eficientemente enfocado de los cometidos especficos, en contra de los muy vagos y multidireccionales de los planes comprehensivos. En un periodo de fuerte inclinacin privatizadora, como fueron los aos ochenta, el planning estratgico se generalizaba y no slo se aplicaba a aspectos concretos, como el transporte, la sanidad y otros, sino que se llevaba hasta las instancias
ms complejas como puede ser la escala regional. Esta modalidad haba sido ensayada con indudable xito
en la reconversin de las empresas, sobre todo las empresas americanas, durante los aos sesenta, y su finalidad era bsicamente evaluar la potencialidades, debilidades, oportunidades y amenazas de las mismas,
cara a los cambios que se prevean en un futuro inmediato. Las empresas se preparaban as para mejorar su
competitividad y esa era la palabra mgica. En un mundo basado en la competitividad, las comunidades, las ciudades y las regiones, tenan que programar su futuro para ser ms competitivas dentro de cada
sistema respectivo. No haba duda de que el planning estratgico acumulaba una considerable experiencia
en este campo, ahora bien, la pregunta que algunos analistas se hacan era si la competitividad, algo que
en tanto que inevitable tienen que explotar y sufrir las empresas, deba ser vista igualmente por las comunidades, cuyo objetivo es buscar la forma de compartir soluciones. (Jerome L. Kaufman, Harvey M. Jacobs,
1987).
Finalmente hemos de considerar una cuarta modalidad, conocida con el trmino ms genrico de planning
democrtico (democratic planning), cuyos orgenes se remontan a los movimientos sociales de carcter reivindicativo de los aos sesenta, y cuyos fundamentos se asientan tambin en una crtica al planning comprehensivo, en este caso alegando una falta de participacin de la base social: no tanto de una clase o grupo
especfico, sino de la comunidad entendida como totalidad. El slogan que se transmita era from a topdown to a down-top process, y el empeo se centraba en encontrar un modus operandi distinto que permitiera una mayor articulacin y transparencia entre planificadores y sujetos del planning: un proceso continuado de cooperacin entre los diferentes sectores implicados. Este modus operandi tendra que basarse en una comunicacin constante entre los planificadores y el colectivo social, que realmente tomara las
decisiones, sealando en cada momento lo que es, o no es, de inters pblico. (Susan S. Fainstein, Norman Fainstein, 1996)
DACT 5 108
Pero sta (cualquiera de las planteadas ms arriba) es la crtica planteada desde las posiciones liberales, es
decir, desde aquellos que entienden el planning como un sistema corrector de los desequilibrios o las
desigualdades propias de una sociedad de libre mercado, tanto sea mediante la accin de la mayora, de
las minoras, o simplemente mediante la mejora del mtodo, es decir, mediante las tcnicas propias del
planning. Ahora bien, todava habra que hablar de los que piensan que es la lgica del mercado la que
debera corregir, los desequilibrios del planning34, que no trataremos aqu por obvias razones de espacio,
y los que defienden que el planning es slo un instrumento para la reproduccin del sistema de clases, que
veremos a continuacin.
109 5 DACT
trabajadora, necesaria para la reproduccin del sistema. Cuando el Estado, nos dice Castells, asume esta responsabilidad, se produce una transformacin del proceso de consumo, desde el consumo individualizado
resuelto a travs del mercado, hasta el consumo colectivo organizado a travs del Estado. Esta transformacin supone no slo una expansin del rol del Estado, y de ah el desarrollo del planning, sino tambin una
politizacin del proceso de consumo, que Castells observa como una dinmica subyacente de conflictos
urbanos. (Manuel Castells, 1972)
Posteriormente se han venido produciendo toda una serie de trabajos que ponen en relacin la intervencin del
Estado con el ambiente construido y que explican el desarrollo del planning por la incapacidad del mercado
para responder a las llamadas inversiones de capital fijo (viario, infraestructuras, espacios libres, etc.), entendido ste, el capital fijo, como un medio de produccin (David Harvey, 1975; Marino Folin, 1976). Un trabajo ms cercano, On Planning the Ideology of Planning, publicado en 1.985 y desarrollado por el analista
David Harvey, intentar abordar, desde esta perspectiva, las relaciones que en las democracias occidentales se
han terminado articulando entre los tres conceptos bsicos: es decir entre Estado, mercado y planning.
La primera preocupacin del planning, dir Harvey, es considerar cmo cada clase, o fraccin de clase, se
relaciona con el ambiente construido. Aunque hoy ni la clase capitalista, ni la trabajadora, son homogneas, podemos decir, que la clase trabajadora mira al ambiente construido como un medio de consumo
y como un medio para su propia reproduccin, y por tanto, es sensible al costo y a la disposicin espacial
(al acceso) de algunas de sus partes constituyentes: vivienda, educacin, ocio, servicios, etc.; mientras que
la clase capitalista mira al ambiente construido por dos razones, a) como una serie de valores de uso que
incrementa la produccin y la acumulacin de capital, es decir, como capital fijo, b) como un mercado de mercancas y de servicios que genera una demanda a la produccin.
Si en relacin con el ambiente construido, tanto los diferentes subsectores de la clase trabajadora, como
los de la clase capitalista, pueden entrar en conflicto de intereses entre ellos, as como estar todos de acuerdo, alguna forma, tiene que encontrarse, para asegurar un flujo de inversiones en el ambiente construido
y asegurar que las decisiones de inversin individual son coordinadas en el tiempo y el espacio para que
las necesidades de los productores capitalistas sean cubiertas35.
Esto se puede afrontar a) a travs de mecanismos de mercado, pero son muchas las externalidades y
muchos los bienes pblicos que no pueden ser apropiados; lo que hace que en ningn pas el ambiente construido sea dejado enteramente en manos del libre mercado, b) a travs de una gran empresa que,
por su tamao, puede internalizar las externalidades y, de este modo, tomar decisiones ms racionales
desde el punto de vista de la inversin, y c) mediante la intervencin del Estado, una figura omnipresente
DACT 5 110
en la produccin del ambiente construido, ya que los elementos pblicos que no pueden ser apropiados
privadamente, son afrontados por la inversin directa del Estado. Las numerosas externalidades han dirigido siempre a todos los pases a regulaciones estatales del orden espacial para reducir los riesgos provenientes de las inversiones a largo plazo. Esta es la explicacin fundamental de la existencia del planning.
(David Harvey, 1985)
Finalmente. Richard E. Fogleson, expondr los rechazos que son inherentes al sistema, o lo que l denomina las constricciones del sistema, en relacin con el planning. Fenmenos que se derivan del doble
papel que el sistema juega en relacin con el ambiente construido: en primer lugar, como interesado en
el carcter social del suelo, entendido como un bien colectivo, y en segundo lugar, como defensor del
derecho privado, entendido como una mercanca.
Segn Fogleson esto genera dos contradicciones, que en pases de economa muy liberalizada, como los
Estados Unidos, hacen muy difcil la prctica del planning: la contradiccin de la propiedad y la contradiccin capitalista-democrtica. Aunque ambas perviven y actan entrelazadamente , la primera es
interna al sistema; se establece entre diversos grupos de capitalistas, bsicamente dos: los ligados al sector de la construccin (promotores, constructores e hipotecarios), que se resisten al control social del suelo,
y por tanto al planning, y los otros, (industriales, comerciantes, etc.) para los cuales es beneficioso el papel
del Estado en la ordenacin de la ciudad y en la construccin de las infraestructuras.
La segunda es externa al sistema y se origina entre la estructura econmica y la estructura poltica de la
sociedad capitalista-democrtica. ...una contradiccin entre la necesidad de socializar el control del espacio urbano para crear las condiciones de permanencia del capitalismo, por un lado, y el peligro para el capital de llegar, democratizando, a una socializacin real del suelo urbano36.
Concluyamos entonces que, desde esa perspectiva, la mayor o menor intervencin del Estado, no est,
como antes hemos visto, separada de los intereses de grupo, por tanto, las relaciones entre las dos contradicciones de Fogleson estarn siempre latentes, limitando extraordinariamente la prctica institucionalizada del planning. (Richard E. Fogleson, 1986)
111 5 DACT
influencia en el planning, como en muchos otros campos de la vida cultural y social, de los postulados de
los filsofos franceses formados en el clima del 68 y adscritos a lo que se ha llamado el postestructuralismo, ha sido enorme. En otro lugar hemos estudiado cmo la visin que desde esta perspectiva se tiene del
espacio, y en concreto del espacio urbano, genera nuevos paradigmas: se habla entonces de transparencia,
de flexibilidad, de discontinuidad, de fragmentacin; se habla tambin de ruptura de (o por lo menos de
dificultad de interpretar) el orden tradicional; y se habla, sobre todo, de la aparicin de nuevas geografas que desafan la simple generalizacin categrica. Las dualidades
clsicas: campo-ciudad, centro-periferia, compacto-diseminado, pero
y se habla, sobre todo, de la aparicin de nuevas
tambin otras: interior-exterior, abierto-cerrado, pblico-privado, se
geografas que desafan la simple generalizacin
diluyen, o por lo menos, se ponen en entredicho37.
DACT 5 112
This is the central thesis but it does not mean that the Marxist
discourse on planning is one sole discourse. There is a wide
variety on the contrary of contemporary trends which exist as
we can see in the following paragraph which propose not
exclusively critical interpretation but rather integrative
interpretation.
The critical contributions perhaps which we can consider to
be the first was that made by the Spanish sociologist Manuel
Castells in his classic work The Urban Question published in
1972. Here Castells says that planning and the intervention of
the state appear because the market system cannot cover the
needs of consumption for the reproduction of the system.
When the state, says Castells, takes on this responsibility there
is a transformation of the process of consumption organised
through the state. This transformation means not only an
expansion of the role of the state and therefore the
development of planning but also a politicization of the
process of consumption which Castells sees as a dynamic
underlying urban conflicts (Manuel Castells 1972). Later a
whole series of works have been produced with respect to the
intervention of the state with the built environment which
explain the development of planning due to the incapacity of
the market place to respond to the calls for investment of fixed
planning, diversifica, y por tanto debilita, la interpretacin clsica de inters pblico. No se ve fcil el
inters pblico de una sociedad urbana tan amplia, tan compleja y tan diversificada: no se ve fcil, sobre
todo, que el sistema no termine representando a unos intereses pblicos ms que a otros. Ms que un
inters pblico, se tiende a ver diversos intereses pblicos: el inters publico de una sociedad plural
tendr que ser una pluralidad de intereses pblicos.
Efectivamente, los cambios han sido profundos y en todos los campos. Manuel Castells (1997) habla de una
nueva era: la era de la informacin. Una era donde las funciones y los procesos dominantes se organizan
en torno a redes, y donde la difusin de su lgica de enlace modifica no slo los procesos de produccin,
sino la experiencia, el poder y la cultura. Un fenmeno nuevo que
Tanto las posiciones de la crtica social generadas a partir
alcanza a toda la estructura social y que, asegura, ...provoca una
determinacin social de un nivel superior que la de los intereses sociade la discusin sobre el otherness (pluralismo,
les especficos expresados mediante las redes: el poder de los flujos
multiculturalismo, feminismo,...), como la divisin entre
tiene prioridad sobre los flujos de poder41. David Harvey (1989) en
los propios tericos del planning (desarrollada en el
esta misma lnea, observa un autntico proceso de reestructuracin
apartado anterior), desencadenada por la controversia
econmica y un reajuste permanente en el campo poltico y social
dominado por una gradual flexibilizacin en todos los campos de la
que se provoca en relacin con sus destinatarios, los
produccin: es decir, en los procesos de trabajo, en el mercado de tradestinatarios del planning, diversifica, y por tanto
bajo, en los productos y en los modelos de consumo. Como tambin
debilita, la interpretacin clsica de inters pblico.
en la apertura de nuevos mercados, en la desaparicin de otros y en
No se ve fcil el inters pblico de una sociedad urbana
general en la aceleracin de un proceso de creciente globalizacin e
internacionalizacin de la economa. Finalmente, Peter Newman y
tan amplia, tan compleja y tan diversificada: no se ve fcil,
Andy Thorney (1997) sealan (para Europa, pero aplicable con matisobre todo, que el sistema no termine representando a
ces, a otros contextos geogrficos y polticos), cambios importantes en
unos intereses pblicos ms que a otros.
la actitud de los Estados y los gobiernos locales tendentes a privilegiar
polticas sectoriales de desarrollo dirigidas a mejorar la competitividad
econmica de las regiones o las ciudades, ms que las polticas de redistribucin propias del planning tradicional, as como la incorporacin de nuevas modalidades de fomento urbano a partir de partnerships
entre la iniciativa pblica y la privada; proceso que, segn estos autores, ha dirigido a una extraordinaria
fragmentacin del planning.
Puede ser esta la direccin de un supuesto planning postmoderno?
Un excelente artculo de Robert A. Beauregard, publicado en 1.989, y titulado Between Modernity and
Postmodernity: The Ambiguous Position of U.S. Planning, nos viene a plantear, que el planning postmo-
113 5 DACT
derno, puede ser en el mejor de los casos una tendencia, pero, bajo
ningn concepto, existe hoy un cuerpo terico, y mucho menos una
prctica institucionalizada, suficientemente desarrollado que justifique
la utilizacin indiscriminada del trmino.
El planning comunicativo, una ambiciosa, compleja y novedosa modalidad de planning, basada en la Teora de la accin comunicativa de Habermas y cuyos fundamentos tericos y prcticos se generan a partir de
DACT 5 114
los planteamientos de los filsofos postmodernos, ha sido desarrollada, bsicamente por John Forester
(1989) y Patsy Healey (1992), y en sntesis propone ...una forma argumentativa y respetuosa de planning
a travs del debate adecuado a nuestro reconocimiento de los fallos del concepto de razn pura de la
modernidad, buscando todava, como hace Habermas, una continuacin del proyecto de progreso democrtico de la Ilustracin, a travs de argumentos intersubjetivos y razonados entre ciudadanos libres43.
La propuesta reconoce los progresos del planning comprehensivo como superacin de los primeros planes
de corte paternalista basados en la forma urbana, para introducir mecanismos de compleja formalizacin
con la finalidad de racionalizar los procesos de planning, y llevar a cabo sus objetivos y estrategias, as
como la reconsideracin sucesiva de ellos mediante los llamados procesos de feed back, pero, al tiempo,
critica que la participacin de los ciudadanos sea siempre a posteriori, es decir, cuando los objetivos de
planning ya han sido previamente definidos. Mejora el sistema, en tanto que racionaliza el discurso y modifica las prioridades, pero no introduce ningn mecanismo que permita la crtica del discurso mismo. Tambin considera positivos los avances del advocacy planning introducido por Davidoff44 y del incremental
planning propuesto por Lindblom45, pero as como discrepa del primero por basar la confrontacin en una
mera relacin de poder entre los participantes, y no en un esfuerzo de argumentacin intersubjetiva
entre ellos, discrepa del segundo por buscar la simple mejora del mtodo, ms realista y operativo, efectivamente, pero sin modificar el fondo del discurso del mtodo comprehensivo. As como el primero da un
paso hacia la mejora de la participacin, el otro lo da hacia la mejora de la tcnica, pero ninguno pone
en crisis los fines, es decir la esencia misma del planning.
En el planning comunicativo no se puede predefinir la serie de cometidos que el planning debe afrontar,
pues estos deben ser especficamente descubiertos por el entendimiento y el aprendizaje a travs del proceso intercomunicativo.
El planning basado en la accin comunicativa, debe escapar de los confines del racionalismo cientfico, e
incluir varios sistemas de moralidad y tradiciones culturales especficas con experiencias estticas explcitas. Acciones buenas y malas, son las que se acuerdan en cada situacin particular de tiempo y espacio, a travs de visiones diferentes sobre condiciones materiales de bienes, convicciones morales, y culturas y expresiones explcitas. No necesitamos el recurso a ideales o principios fundamentales comunes de
buena organizacin social para guiarnos. El planning y sus contenidos, en esta concepcin, son un modo
de actuar que podemos elegir, a partir del debate46.
No se trata de llegar a un consenso dominante (ni ningn otro tipo de metanarrativa). Cuando el flujo
de la accin comunicativa acta, el entendimiento mutuo y los acuerdos alcanzados son revisables. La tesis
115 5 DACT
de Patsy Healey es muy clarificadora cuando seala que las diferencias que se trata de consensuar no
son slo de carcter econmico o social, ni estn solamente relacionadas con bienes o necesidades especficas, sino que se refieren tambin al sistemas de significados, es decir, juega con interpretaciones diferentes conducidas por marcos diferentes de referencia en relacin con el mundo. Los sistemas de significados y los marcos de referencia cambian y evolucionan en respuesta a tales encuentros. Pero no se puede
construir un consenso estable en torno a cmo vemos las cosas, slo una acomodacin temporal, de diferentes, y diferentemente adaptadas, percepciones47.
En resumen, el planning as entendido, es un proceso interactivo e interpretativo dirigido a decidir y actuar
dentro del sistema complejo, pero multidimensional y lleno de sentido prctico, en oposicin a otras aproximaciones ms disciplinares48. Rechaza las tcnicas clsicas de anlisis y de diseo por cuanto las considera un discurso muy restringido y estrecho, abogando por un planning enriquecido por una discusin
abierta y permanente donde quepan todo tipo de experiencias esttiDe hecho podramos decir que el planning forma parte de
cas y convicciones morales. Por tanto, la concepcin del planning
como una empresa comunicativa contiene la mayora de las promeese proyecto, como podramos incluso llegar a decir que
sas para una forma democrtica de planning en el contexto contemel planning es la expresin ms completa y determinante
porneo. (Patsy Healey, 1992).
Conclusiones
A partir de lo dicho, creo que se puede aceptar la existencia de una cierta unanimidad entre los que piensan que los paradigmas de lo que estamos entendiendo por modernidad han estado en el origen y en el proceso de formacin y maduracin de lo que estamos entendiendo por planning. El planning, es algo estrechamente ligado al concepto de modernidad. El clima social y cultural en que se genera, los principios que
lo fundan, los objetivos que persigue y los procedimientos que se establecen para llevarlo a cabo, estn
estrechamente vinculados al proyecto moderno, tal como lo hemos definido. De hecho podramos decir que
el planning forma parte de ese proyecto, como podramos incluso llegar a decir que el planning es la expresin ms completa y determinante de la modernidad en trminos de ambicin de ciudad, o si se quiere, de
proyecto de ciudad.
Ahora bien, a no ser que no queramos sealar nada sustantivo, hablar de planning moderno, un concepto ms discriminador y arriesgado, implica aceptar: a) la existencia de un planning pre-moderno, cosa difcilmente inscribible en el contexto de esta discusin, puede que no en otros, o b) la existencia de un planning post-moderno; y esto nos llevara al centro de la temtica que estamos planteando aqu, puesto que
117 5 DACT
esta segunda opcin supondra la aceptacin, en primer lugar, de la presencia de fenmenos de carcter
social, cultural, etc., que permiten hablar de algo posterior a lo que hemos definido como modernidad, no
sabemos hasta que grado, y en segundo lugar, que existe una modalidad diferente de planning, en coincidencia temporal con ese despus, no sabemos si influido o no por esos cambios.
La pretensin, como es fcil pensar, no es terminolgica, sino conceptual. Nos interesa saber, a) si se puede
hablar de cambios sustanciales, o simplemente epidrmicos, respecto al tipo de sociedad que se hace fuerte en Occidente en torno a los grandes paradigmas (en relacin con el racionalismo cientfico, el desarrollo industrial y el proceso de formacin de las grandes ciudades) que impregnaron de un nuevo clima al
mundo poltico e intelectual, durante los ltimos doscientos aos: periodo durante el cual se formaron los
grandes Estados-nacin, se asentaron las democracias parlamentarias y se consolidaron las burocracias
administrativas, como frmulas dominantes de organizacin social, y b) si las transformaciones que sufre la
ciudad (o si se quiere, la gran ciudad), como expresin bsica de este periodo, tienen el suficiente grado
de significacin para pensar que el sistema tcnico e institucional a travs del cual sta se proyecta hacia
el futuro, es decir, el planning, se mantenga dentro de los lmites conceptuales y organizacionales con los
que se origin y madur; o, por el contrario, con los cambios, ste se haya ido diluyendo en frmulas de
diverso alcance y contenido. Proceso a travs del cual el planning habra ido gradualmente deslegitimndose y, por tanto, remitindonos a su re-formulacin.
Jrgen Habermas y Marshall Berman, entienden que no. Que el proyecto moderno, es un proyecto incompleto, y que los cambios en la economa, en la cultura, en la tecnologa, incluso en el espacio, no determinan una concepcin sustancialmente distinta del modelo de sociedad que se forj durante esos aos.
Por el contrario, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Gianni Vattimo y Fredric Jameson, piensan que s, que los cambios, si no son sustantivos, s son lo suficientemente significativos como para poder hablar de un modelo social sensiblemente diferente, que nos permite definirlo con un nuevo trmino, y que ellos denominan postmodernidad. La dicotoma ha sido buena, pues ha permitido profundizar sobre la modernidad, y
tener visiones alternativas y enriquecedoras sobre sta, no tan monolticas como las que hasta ahora se nos
haban transmitido. Sin embargo, las confrontaciones terminolgicas son poco fructferas y terminan etiquetando y esquematizando los fenmenos, hacindonos perder el sentido de la discusin. Los argumentos mantenidos por pensadores contemporneos de la talla de Nietzsche, Heidegger y Foucault, y por gegrafos y economistas en activo como Castells, Harvey y Soja, sobre la sociedad y sobre el espacio, al margen de los paradigmas en torno a los cuales cada uno de ellos haya centrado sus respectivos discursos, y
al margen de las etiquetas con que esos discursos hayan sido divulgados (y si se quiere comercializados),
nos permiten considerar los cambios observados en las ltimas dcadas, como un fenmeno tericamente aislable.
DACT 5 118
La cada de los grandes mitos generados durante el periodo de la Ilustracin que constituyeron las bases del
pensamiento decimonnico, como son el concepto de razn, de sujeto, de ciencia, de verdad, de clase,
etc., y la disolucin de los metadiscursos, en mltiples y a veces contradictorios escenarios, es hoy fcilmente comprobable en el campo, por ejemplo, de la poltica, de la filosofa y del arte. El cambio de paradigmas que desde lo vertical, lo unitario, lo sistmico, lo continuo, lo homogneo, o lo slido, se ha producido hacia lo horizontal, lo fragmentario, lo casual, lo discontinuo, lo diverso o lo paradgico, que en
mltiples manifestaciones y dimensiones de la vida social, es experimentado, confirma las tendencias a definir un nuevo fenmeno y establecer puentes de conexin disciplinar para fundamentarlo.
As en el campo de la economa, se hablar de una autntica revolucin de los sistemas tradicionales. De
un modelo basado en la empresa de corte industrial ligada (funcional y fsicamente) a las grandes cadenas de produccin, que mantiene la estabilidad social a travs de una mejora gradual de la condiciones
laborales, a partir de la mediacin del Estado, se ir pasando gradualmente a otro de gran flexibilidad, cuya
estructura empresarial es mucho ms compleja y variada, con empresas de diverso tamao, funcin y duracin, y mucho menos condicionada por un espacio geogrfico preciso, menos perturbada por las reivindicaciones laborales, y menos protegida por la actuacin directa del Estado, ya que su funcionamiento est
fuertemente ligado a la mundializacin de los sistemas de relacin que introduce la tecnologa informacional y la revolucin de las comunicaciones.
La ciudad, trmino que va progresivamente perdiendo su significado tradicional, es un fenmeno, por
cualidad y por cantidad, cada vez ms difcil de definir. En primer lugar por el tamao que la mayor parte
de los grandes centros de control econmico (Nueva York, Tokio, Londres), y otros situados en los pases
en desarrollo, (Mjico, Shanghai, Calcuta) llegan a alcanzar. La extensin y la influencia funcional de estos
grandes centros es de tal magnitud, que se hace poco menos que imposible identificarlas con un solo sistema; sea ste de carcter social, funcional o morfolgico. Pero en segundo lugar, porque se estn reflejando en ellas tal mezcla de procesos espaciales disjuntos, expresin de las mltiples iniciativas pblicas,
privadas o mixtas, que en ellas confluyen, provenientes, de forma sobrevenida, tanto de la instancia poltica, como econmica o social (o combinaciones entre ellas), que convierte en esquemtica cualquiera de
las categoras con que normalmente las hemos representado. La gran ciudad ha llegado a ser una suma
de tal cantidad de complejas espacializaciones que deshace y vaca de contenido cualquier modelo expresado a travs de un universo jerarquizado de centros o de una mancha de aceite.
Todos estos fenmenos, si no son absolutamente nuevos, s se han hecho patentes en las dos o tres ltimas dcadas. Y ello nos debe permitir aceptar aquellos planteamientos que tienden a reunirlos y a establecer puentes disciplinares entre ellos. La ventaja de la dicotoma modernidad-postmodernidad, es su
119 5 DACT
carcter globalizador y por tanto su capacidad de afrontar el problema desde un mayor nmero de angulaciones49.
Otra cosa distinta, y esta es la segunda parte de la discusin, es su vinculacin a la crisis del planning. Y si
ello permite hablar de una divisin entre un planning moderno y un planning postmoderno.
Si por planning estamos entendiendo, no slo el conjunto sistematizado de frmulas y procedimientos tcnicos
dirigidos a afrontar los conflictos derivados de las transformaciones de la ciudad y del territorio (en resumen, los
planes), sino tambin el sistema de normas de carcter poltico-administrativo, y hbitos sociales de todo tipo,
que desde su fundacin, se han ido desarrollando durante estos aos50, el planning, sustancialmente, ha cambiado muy poco. Han cambiado, como hemos visto, las diversas modalidades de planning. Desde un modelo tradicional entendido como un proceso totalizador, autoritario, sistemtico y burocratizado, el llamado planning comprehensivo, se ha ido evolucionando, en paralelo al desarrollo de ste, hacia otras modalidades ms
sectoriales, dinmicas, operativas o sociales. Pero es todo el conjunto, tanto el proceso de nacimiento-maduracin-diversificacin, como su institucionalizacin, lo que caracteriza y define al planning. Y es todo ese entramado de tcnicas, procedimientos y normas, por tanto, el planning mismo, lo que est en crisis.
Lo que se est experimentando en los ltimos aos es una desconexin entre ese conjunto de tcnicas, procedimientos y normas, y los fenmenos anteriormente descritos, cuyos fundamentos tericos y filosficos
hunden sus races en el siglo XIX y cuyos cambios se traducen tanto
Lo que se est experimentando en los ltimos aos es una
en la poltica, la economa y la cultura, como en su expresin espacial
ms significativa: lase la ciudad. Una desconexin entre lo que
desconexin entre ese conjunto de tcnicas,
hemos aceptado en llamar la postmodernidad, y lo que hemos definiprocedimientos y normas, y los fenmenos anteriormente
do como planning.
Por otro lado, existen, igualmente institucionalizadas, frmulas diversas de operar sobre la ciudad y el territorio, (proyectos urbanos, iniciativas pblico-privadas partnerships -, operaciones puntuales de tipo
Conclusions
DACT 5 120
comercial e industrial) que en nada se podran incluir en esta definicin genrica de planning, y que, sin
embargo, forman parte de polticas urbanas actuales de gran capacidad transformadora, incluso globalmente consideradas.
Solamente algunos planteamientos muy recientes, podran considerarse realmente alternativos, pues exigiran una transformacin total de la estructura actual del planning. El llamado planning comunicativo, el ms
desarrollado y divulgado, ha sido elaborado a partir de los postulados tericos de Jrgen Habermas, pero su
ambicin y complejidad procedimental, a partir de la puesta en prctica de un complejo sistema de toma
encadenada de decisiones mediante la instalacin de un proceso de comunicacin intersubjetiva y permanente entre una pluralidad de culturas, solo permite vislumbrarlo a muy largo plazo. Es una esperanza, pues
el planning comunicativo, no conlleva una discontinuidad total con los supuestos globalizadores del planning tradicional, y sin embargo, rompe con la confrontacin de poderes, supone una sociedad ms compleja y plural, e instituye un procedimiento ms abierto, ms transparente y, por tanto, ms democrtico.
121 5 DACT
Planning, tal y como aqu lo utilizaremos, es una simplificacin rutinaria de la definicin britnica de Urban and
Regional Planning o la americana de Town and Country
Planning. El concepto de planning no es fcil de definir,
pero as y todo hemos preferido mantener el trmino en la
lengua de la cultura en que se origin, puesto que es la
forma ms usada, no slo en las comunidades de habla
inglesa, sino en muchos pases del mundo. Aunque pen-
4
5
6
7
DACT 5 122
ment.
11 Michel Aglietta (1979). Regulacin y Crisis del Capitalismo. Siglo XXI.
12 Traducido al castellano en Leonardo Benevolo (1967).
Los Orgenes de la Urbanstica Moderna. Tekne.
13 Peter Hall (1988). Cities of Tomorrow. Blackwell. En castellano Peter Hall (1996). Ciudades del Maana. Serbal
14 Peter Hall. Opus Cit.
tledge.
samos que su significado general (la complejidad de asunel tiempo) se va aclarando a lo largo de la lectura del art-
tiva. Taurus.
Modernidad. Taurus.
Trotta.
nificacin centralizada.
19 Vattimo expone en la obra sealada, cada una de las posibles acepciones del trmino Verwindung, que para nuestros objetivos puede ser traducido por fin de la metafsica.
20 Gianni Vattimo (1996). El Fin de la Modernidad. Gedisa.
21 Michel Foucault (1980). Power / Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972 1977. Phanteon.
22 Traducido al castellano en Jean-Franois Lyotard (1994).
La Condicin Postmoderna. Ctedra.
23 Traducida al castellano en Jrgen Habermas (1987). Teora de la Accin Comunicativa. (I) y (II). Taurus.
24 Con el mundo de la vida (lifeworld en la traduccin
inglesa), Habermas quiere expresar, segn Letche, el
ambiente inmediato del actor social individual. Vase
John Letche (1994). Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers.
Routledge. Pag 186.
25 Vase John Letche (1994). Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers. Routledge.
26 Franois Lyotard (1994). La Condicin Postmoderna.
Ctedra.
27 Traducida al castellano en Fredric Jameson (1996). Teora
de la Postmodernidad. Trotta.
28 El subrayado es nuestro.
29 El subrayado es nuestro.
47 Idem.
123 5 DACT
Referencias
Dal Co, Francesco (1975). De los Parques a la Regin. Ideologa Progresista y reforma de la Ciudad Americana en
Bescs, Alfredo; Cceres, Eduardo (1980). Urbanstica e Ideologa. Materiales de Trabajo N3. Departamento de
Urbanstica. ETSA de Arquitectura de Las Palmas.
Beauregard, Robert A. (1989). Between Modernity ad Postmodernity: The Ambiguous Position of U.S. Planning.
Environment and Planning D. Society and Space. Vol. 7.
Pion
Foucault, Michel (1980). Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972 1977. Phanteon.
Press
Social. Paids
chain decisions via the installation of a process of intersubjective and permanent communication between the
plurality of cultures, only allow us to see its possibilities at on
a very long term scale. It is a hope since communicative
planning does not necessarily consist in a total break with the
globalizaing hypothesis of traditional planning and, however
it breaks with the confrontation of power systems and moves
towards a more complex and plural society instituting more
open, transparent and, therefore more democratic
procedures.
DACT 5 124
REFERENCES
Aglietta Michel (1979). Regulacin y Crisis del Capitalismo. Siglo XXI
Aymonino, Carlo (1978). Orgenes y desarrollo de la Ciudad Moderna.
Gustavo Gili
Berman, Marshall (1988) Todo lo Slido se Desvanece en el Aire.
S.XXI
Bescs, Alfredo; Cceres, Eduardo (1980). Urbanstica e Ideologa.
Materiales de Trabajo N3. Departamento de Urbanstica. ETSA de
Arquitectura de Las Palmas.
Beauregard, Robert A. (1989). Between Modernity ad Postmodernity:
The Ambiguous Position of U.S. Planning. Environment and
Planning D. Society and Space. Vol. 7. Pion
Benevolo, Leonardo (1967). Los Orgenes de la Urbanstica Moderna.
Tekne
Borja, Jordi; Castells, Munuel (1997). Local y Global. Taurus
Boyer, M. Christine (1983). Dreaming the Rational City. MIT Press
Boeri, Stefano; Lanzani, Arturo (1992): Gli orizzonti della citt diffusa
en Cassabella N 588
Boeri, Sfefano; Lanzani, Arturo (1993): Le tre citt della regione
milanese en Cassabella N 607
Boeri, Stefano; Lanzani, Arturo (1993): Nuovi spazi senza nome en
Casabella N 597-598
125 5 DACT
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
(*) Alfredo Bescs Olaizola died on 13th February 1997. He was one
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
DACT 5 126
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
There is a version of globalization1, which one might call "glossy globalization, which presents the process
only in a favorable light. According to this version2, it promotes technological progress, stimulates capital
investment, increases the productivity of labor, and results in more goods and seivices for the world's
people. As it really exists, however, globalization has less desirable attributes, at some times and places:
increased unemployment, lower wages and labor standards, homogenization of cultures, environmental
degradation, social polarization, racial animosities, the "new urban poverty."
I would suggest the ingredients of really existing globalization are at least four:3
Changes in the technological aspects of the production of goods and the production of services.
A growing interconnectedness-internationalization of the connections between certain sections of most
cities and the outside world, with impacts on all quarters of the city; and
An increasing concentration of private ownership and control of economic activity and its benefits,
manifest at all levels of economic activity: local, regional, national, and international;
A privatization of public power, which may appear as but is not a decline in the economic role of the
state; it is rather a shift in the direction of its activities. It is reflected in a declining level of local control
over such activity.
Each is linked to the other. Technological changes in methods of production include greater automation,
greater replacement of labor by capital, streamlined production techniques, more effective and rapid
communication. They enable both internationalization and concentration to take place. Technological
changes are heavily stimulated (perhaps only occur) when the economically effective demand for them
exists; there is thus an internal linkage between the Fordist stimulation of mass demand for consumption and
the development of the technological means to produce for that consumption4.
Definitions of globalization can be tricky, and a note on the usage here is necessary. Four separate concepts
are involved:
"Globalization" in its conventional usage is, in the words of the World Bank, the global integration of
national economic systems. Such a definition is ambiguous; it may carry any of the meanings below;
DACT 5 128
Existe una versin de la globalizacin1 que podramos denominar globalizacin deslumbrante porque analiza el proceso slo bajo una perspectiva favorable. Segn esta versin2,
fomenta el progreso tecnolgico, estimula la inversin de
capital, aumenta la productividad de la mano de obra y da
como resultado una mayor proporcin de bienes y servicios
para toda la poblacin mundial. Sin embargo, ya que su existencia es un hecho, la globalizacin posee atributos menos
deseables en algunos lugares y en determinadas pocas tales
como: aumento del desempleo, salarios reducidos y psimas
condiciones laborales, homogeneizacin de culturas, degradacin medioambiental, polarizacin social, hostilidades
raciales y la aparicin de la nueva pobreza urbana.
Dira que existen, por lo menos, cuatro ingredientes de la globalizacin actualmente en vigencia3:
Cambios de los aspectos tecnolgicos en la produccin de
bienes y servicios.
Una creciente interconexin internacionalizacin de las
conexiones entre ciertas zonas de la mayora de las ciuda-
Really existing globalization, as used in this paper, means that form of globalization that has developed
in the world as we know it since about 1975; it is necessarily linked to post-Fordist structures of
production and regulation;
Glossy globalization is the presentation of really existing globalization as if it were of general benefit;
it has more to do with marketing and ideological legitimation than with analysis. ."Globalization narrowly
defined" comprises only the first two components of really existing globalization, to wit, technological
advance and internationalization;
Potential globalization refers to an alternate form (or possibly more than one alternate forms) that
globalization narrowly defined, and thus separated from its post-Fordist linkages, might take.
These definition fudge a number of questions:
1. Whether globalization is an absolute or a relative term, that is, is there a sharp line dividing a non- (or
pre-) global period from a global period, or is it a continuum, and if a continuum, is there some point at
which quantity turns into quality and one can really speak of a "new global period5.
2. If post-Fordist trends are considered separately from globalization narrowly defined, it would aid
clarification of the causes and nature of really existing globalization. Specifically, it is arguable that the
cause of really existing globalization is a combination of two ingredients: globalization narrowly defined
and a shift in the balance of class forces that is essential to a post-Fordist regime of accumulation.
Globalization narrowly defined may be considered to be an essential ingredient in dissolving the linkage
between mass production and mass consumption within a single national economy that was a hall-mark
of the classic Fordist system, permitting a shift in class relationships that then supports the concentration
of private economic power and the changed regulatory function of the state, the other two ingredients
which, together with globalization narrowly defined, make up really existing globalization. The linkage
between globalization and post-Fordism remains to be further explored.
Technoloqical Change
Technological change involves not just change in physical processes, but also in social ones. Taylorism was
a major technological development that had rnuch to do with the success of Fordism, and flexible
production techniques may be playing a similar role in tne international post-Fordist economy. The
129 5 DACT
relationship between scientific technoloyical progress in the physical sciences and "progress" in social
organization is a much debated one6 whether the relationship is internal or not, it is clear that the two have
moved in parallel paths over the last hundred years.
Post-Fordist technological developments are somewhat differently stimulated; in part by the tapping of the
Third World, and more recently the Second World, as mass markets for conventional consumer goods, but
also in part by the demands of those promoting internationalization, concentration and centralization for
more developed instruments with which to implement their desires. Not only computer technology and
communications development7 but also the more refined division of labor, now strikingly global in scale,
and the techniques of flexible production8, fall in the category of post-fordist technological development.
Both the phrase post-industrial society" and the formulation of the shift as one from manufacturing to services
are fundamentally misleading descriptions of the impact of post-Fordist technological advance on the economy.
Manufacturing production continues in the global economy today as it did before, producing in fact more goods
than ever before; it is the way in which that production is carried out, not its scale, that has changed. The
conception of a new "service economy" is likewise misleading; as Storper and Walker point out, the new
services have little to do with "serving" anyone directly... Rather, their function is to serve capitalist
industrialization by raising labor productivity, multiplying the number of products, circulating commodities
faster and more effectively, circulating money and providing credit, and administering an increasingly
complex system all aspects of capitalist economies that go back to the dawn of industrialism9.
Internationalization.
Internationalization, in turn, is in a sense simply the next step up in the eniargement process that has
characterized economic activity since the beginning of recorded history and represents the continued
expansion of the connections between economical activity in different geographical regions, made possible
but not simply produced by technological progress Internationalization is a process that affects all cities,
everywhere, if to varying degrees, small cities as well as large, Third World cities as well as First World,
formerly state socialist cities as well as traditionally free market ones.
Both technological change and internationalization are inherently socially neutral. They may even
theoretically be considered to be more benign than not; theoretically, as classical economics logically holds,
improvements in the efficiency of the productive processes and in the freedom of exchange, the theory of
Cambios tecnolgicos
DACT 5 130
No slo se refieren al cambio de los procesos fsicos sino tambin al de los sociales. El Taylorismo se convirti en un desarrollo tecnolgico de suma importancia que tuvo mucho que
ver con el xito del Fordismo, de igual manera las tcnicas de
produccin flexibles podran estar desempeando un papel
similar en la economa post-Fordista internacional. Esta relacin entre progreso cientfico y tecnolgico en las ciencias
fsicas y progreso en la organizacin social ha sido debatida en profundidad5; ya sea la relacin interna o no, es evidente que los dos han recorrido caminos paralelos durante el
ltimo siglo.
El desarrollo tecnolgico post-Fordista ha sido estimulado de
una manera diferente; en parte, debido a la explotacin del
comparative advantage, should produce more net wealth available for distribution among the inhabitants of
the world. If the same goods can be produced with less labor, or if the same labor can produce more goods,
the whole pie has grown, and it should be possible for everyone to be better off. That does not seem to be
the case today. The reason it is not has to do with the other two
ingredients of real globalization, whose tendency today is rather
The reason it is not has to do with the other two
malign: the concentration of private control over economic activity
ingredients of real globalization, whose tendency today
and the decline-defeat may be a better wordof public control over
is rather malign: the concentration of private control over
such activity, particularly public control at the local level.
Private concentration of economic activity is the well-established and century-old drive towards economic
growth and market control, ultimately monopoly, as a method of increasing profits. State-established
monopolies were a characteristic of the mercantilism that goes back to the seventeenth century; the recent
spate of Wall-Street manipulated mergers and acquisitions is its most recent phase. The result is, of course,
increasing concentration of both power and wealth in the hands of a smaller and smaller group. It is an
interesting question whether developments in China today do not reflect, within that country (they certainly
do in terms of trans-national impact) a similar concentration of control of economic activity which may be
regarded as as much private as public.
The increasing private concentration of economic power is not an automatic consequence of either
technological progress or internationalization of the world's economies, although some presentations permit
of that interpretation. Concentration of power is enabled, but not determined, by technical progress.
Centralization of certain activities may in fact be an accompaniment of technological progress and
internationalization, but there is a sharp distinction between those processes that are productive (whether of
goods or services; that distinction is indeed one which could be abandoned with little loss) and those that
simply expand the range of ownership and the accumulation of profit. The former are, as has been suggested
above, neutral if not socially positive, the latter are, socially, negative10.
The concentration of economic activity has losers as well as winners. One can see both within a few miles
of each other in any major city in the world: abandoned buildings in the shadow of New York's World Trade
Center, squatters across the Second Ring Road from the new central business district in Beijing, gypsy camps
on the outskirts of Frankfurt's cluster of towers, Mercedes horning their way through donkeys in most Third
Internacionalizacin
A su vez, la internacionalizacin es slo, en cierto sentido, el
siguiente paso en el proceso de extensin que ha caracterizado la actividad econmica desde los principios de la historiografa y representa como la continua expansin de las
conexiones entre la actividad econmica de distintas regiones
geogrficas hicieron posible, pero no se produjeron slo por
el progreso tecnolgico. La internacionalizacin es un proceso que afecta a todas las ciudades en toda su extensin y a
varios escalas diferentes, tanto en ciudades grandes como en
pequeas. Tambin las ciudades del Tercer Mundo sufren el
mismo proceso, ya sean ciudades con un anterior rgimen
socialista o de libre mercado por tradicin.
Tanto el cambio tecnolgico como la internacionalizacin
son, de una manera inherente, socialmente neutrales. Incluso
se pueden en teora considerar ms beneficiosos que perjudiciales; en teora, como sostiene la escuela clsica de forma
lgica, la mejora de la eficacia de los procesos productivos,
el librecomercio y la teora de la ventaja comparativa debera
producir una mayor riqueza neta disponible que se pudiera
distribuir entre la poblacin mundial. Si se produjera la
misma cantidad de mercancas con menos mano de obra o,
si, la misma cantidad de mano de obra pudiera producir
mayor cantidad de bienes, toda la grfica se ampliara y se
hara posible que se elevara el nivel de vida de una manera
global. No parece ser este el caso actual. No es que la razn
est relacionada con los restantes dos ingredientes de la globalizacin real, cuya tendencia actual es algo perjudicial: la
concentracin del control privado sobre la actividad econmica y la reduccin-aunque se debera aplicar el trmino
derrota-del control pblico sobre dicha actividad, en particular del control pblico a nivel local.
131 5 DACT
World cities. In the developed countries, the statistics are at hand, and show an increasingly hour-glass
(more realistically, bowling-pin) shaped configuration of the income distribution is also by now well
known11. Recent studies of the results of the 1990 census in the United States reflect it, as does the
discussion of the "two-thirds" society in Germany12. Australian researchers are finding a similar pattern,
based on the 1991 figures13. Glossy globalization prefers to see the cause as a change in the job
requirements derived from changes in technological methods of production: a greater need for higher skills
and a lesser need for lower skills. Training is thus the simple answer,
non-controversial and hurting no one. But that is only part of the
Concentration, internationalization, and technological
picture, for there training programs where employers in fact seek
progress, the first three ingredients of really existing
workers with particular skills, and the difference in skills of those at the
globalization, contribute to a drastic change in the
economic top from those at the bottom are not as disproportionate as
their incomes are to the incomes of the unskilled. The increasing
balance of power between the rich and the ordinary, a
differentiation comes from the increasing concentration of control, and
change which is reflected in the balance between public
of wealth that goes with it, supported by the increasing bargaining
power and private economic activity, the fourth
power given those in control by the technical possibilities of
communication and movement and the mobility of capital derived
ingredient of real globalization today.
from its internationalization.
Concentration, internationalization, and technological progress, the first three ingredients of really existing
globalization, contribute to a drastic change in the balance of power between the rich and the ordinary, a
change which is reflected in the balance between public power and private economic activity, the fourth
ingredient of real globalization today.
133 5 DACT
developers have the upper hand most of the time15. And the possibilities for grass-roots democratic political
influence on development, given the power and prestige of global concerns and the protective coloration of
glossy globalization, is small16.
What appears to be a decline in public power is not, however, a reduction in the role of the state; to the contrary,
it may even be an increase in that role, measured either by state expenditures or the extent of the activities of the
state. They rather shift direction, from a social and redistributive to an economic and growth or profit-supporting
purpose. At the same time, they shift from a public, in the sense of democratic or popular, instrument, to an
instrument of private business purpose; thus in the negotiations over GATT, it is hard to differentiate between the
private interests and the government interest, the latter being essentially a representative of the former.
The debate over the role of the state in Africa flounders on this confusion between "public" and "state." Chazan
et al., for instance, correctly notes that the postcolonial state in Africa has been depicted, alternately, as weak
and powerful, as repressive and feeble, as fragile and absolutist, as dependent and autonomous, as expanding
and as collapsing17. But both sides of the picture are true; states (and not only in Africa) are becoming both
softer" and harder," but in different spheres, for different purposes and in different interests. The peasantry in
Africa may be "uncaptured18 by the state, but the modern sector of industry and services is heavily influenced
by it; some parts of society are excluded from, some heavily integrated with, the state. Foreign capital neither
weakens nor strengthens "the" state in Third World countries; it weakens their capacity or their desire to act
in the social sphere, and their capacity to limit private market expansion, but it may well strengthen their role
in subsidizing private economic activities and/or supporiing and coordinating such activities.
It is the combination of technological change, internationalization, economic concentration, and the
privatization of the political, that has produced the global cities so much under discussion today19.
DACT 5 134
La privatizacin estatal
El declive del poder pblico parece un rasgo cotidiano del
actual paisaje urbano. Las ciudades no pueden controlar el
desarrollo en sus propias jurisdicciones ya que las empresas
pueden amenazar con trasladarse y, otras ciudades que compitan entre ellas sacrificarn el control pblico para atraer a
dichas empresas13. La misma pauta se traduce a nivel regional, estatal y nacional. Los controles sociales resultan los ms
perjudicados ya que son los que se cancelan desde Maastricht,
se les abandona en ZONAS ECONMICAS ESPECIALES y no
se incluyen en la NAFTA. De hecho se siguen produciendo
negociaciones que piden exacciones privadas para inters
pblico, pero los promotores privados llevan ventaja la mayora de las veces13. Y, son pocas las posibilidades de una
influencia popular de la poltica democrtica sobre el desarrollo, dado el poder y prestigio de los problemas globales y la
proteccin colorida de la globalizacin deslumbrante14.
Sin embargo, lo que parece ser una disminucin del poder
pblico no es una reduccin del papel que ejerce el estado;
por el contrario, puede resultar un aumento de dicho papel
medido tanto por los gastos estatales como por el alcance de
las actividades estatales. Sera mejor un cambio de rumbo
well known20. Recent studies of the results of the 1990 census in the United States reflect it, as does the
discussion of the "two-thirds" society in Germany21. The cause is in some part a change in the job
requirements derived from changes in technological methods of production: a greater need for higher skills
and a lesser need for lower skills. But that is only part of the picture, for there is no inherent reason why those
with lower skills cannot be upgraded, and those at the top do not possess skills as much higher than those of
the unskilled as their incomes are to the incomes of the unskilled. The increasing differentiation comes as
much from the increasing concentration of control, and of wealth that goes with it, and from the increasing
bargaining power given those who control capital by the possibilities for the mobility of capital derived from
its internationalization. The movement of jobs from high-wage to lowwage countries, after all, has nothing to
do with higher physical productivity, but only greater economic profit: transportation costs plus lower skills
make third world production technically less efficient, but such movement both increases profits where it
takes place and constitutes a potent threat even where it does not. The Australian pattern has been described
in detail22. Concentration, internationalization, and technological progress, the first element in our model,
have thus lead to a drastic change in the balance of power between capital and labor, leading to the futher
enrichment of the former and the increased impoverishment of the latter, the second element in our model.
"Two-thirds society" hardly grasps the nature of that change, however, because it suggests a two-way division,
lumping everyone in either one or the other of two extremes. That is not the case. I have suggested above a
five-way divisions. Others have other, more complex, categorizations. The important point for present
purposes is not just what the range of divisions in society is, but rather that there is an increasing division at
the bottom, between what used to be called the "working class" and those poorer than they, largely excluded
at least from the formal economy. more and more often impoverished and even homeless. I desist from using
the term "underclass " for reasons eloquently argued elsewhere23, but the intuitive resonance the term has
found suggests it refers to a widely perceived new reality. Let me substitute the term "excluded; I would then
argue that the new changes in wealth and poverty have had different effects in at least five categories of
people:for the owners of wealth and the decision-makers of power, increases in wealth and power; for
professionals, technicians, managers, the winners (together with most owners) in the process of economic
change, a large increase in numbers, and often in income and privilege, but accompanied by some insecurity
as to status24; for the old middle class, civil servants, skilled workers, semi-professionals, a decline in numbers
and a loss in status and security; for the old working class, a continuing erosion of their standard of living and
decline both in their economic and their political bargaining power; and, most important for our purposes:
for the excluded and the marginalized, the victims of economic change, the very poor, squeezed more and
more out of the mainstream of economic activity, presumptively no longer needed even as a "reserve army of
the unemployed," with no perceptible long-term prospects of improving their situation through normal
economic channels, and used despite themselves as a threat to those better off. Just how and to what extent
desde un propsito social y redistributivo hasta uno econmico y en crecimiento o uno que se vea respaldado por el
beneficio. Al mismo tiempo, existe un cambio desde un instrumento pblico en sentido democrtico o popular a un instrumento privado; as, en las rondas de negociaciones del
GATT se hace difcil diferenciar entre intereses privados y
gubernamentales, siendo estos ltimos en esencia representantes de los primeros.
La discusin sobre la actuacin estatal en frica, oscila entre
la confusin pblico estatal. Por ejemplo, Chazan et al.
advierte muy corrientemente que el estado postcolonialista
en frica se ha venido describiendo alternativamente como:
dbil y poderoso, represor y aperturista, frgil y absolutista,
dependiente y autnomo y en crecimiento o colapsado15.
Pero, ambas percepciones de la situacin son correctas: los
estados (y no slo ocurre en frica) se convierten en una
dualidad ms tnues-ms estrictos pero en diferentes esferas y con propsitos e intereses distintos. Puede que el estado africano no acapare al campesinado16, pero el sector
moderno de la industria y servicios se ve fuertemente
influenciado por l; el estado excluye a algunos sectores
sociales e integra a otros de manera total. El capital extranjero, ni debilita ni refuerza el papel del estado en los pa-
135 5 DACT
each group will be affected in these ways depends on the relationships of power and the related distribution
of wealth among them and the manner in which each deal with the inevitable conflicts involved. In those
conflicts, both space and race have played key roles in the United States.
DACT 5 136
status in the work force, in formal law, or in contribution. It is a stigmatization in this sense unconnected
with class, although it increases the vulnerability to victimization by economic change particularly of
working class and young African Americans, and of African American women25.
Where such a stigmatized group exists, repression and segregation are a much more readily available
alternative to those in power for the treatment of the new victims than were the victims appear to be
arbitrarily selected and "just like everyone else. The tendency to stigmatize victims is a general one-to
differentiate between the deserving and the undeserting poor. The welfare state is an expensive and
unpopular approach with many. If increasing stigmatization can save money by justifying repression without
risking loss of social control, then it is an alternative likely to be chosen.
The possibility of spatial separation, i.e. ghettoization,increases the likelihood of repressive treatment of the
victims of change dramatically. Gunnar Myrdal, remarkably, laid out the scenario succinctly fifty years ago:
[Racial segregation createsl an artificial city... that permits any prejudice on the part of public officials to be
freely vented on Negroes without hurting whites26. The ultimate point is arrived at when victimized and
segregated become identical. Is that not the ultimate implication of William Wilson's shift from "underclass"
to "ghetto poor" -by equating the two, spatial location becomes the defining characteristic by which the
victims can be identified (it being remembered that, in the United States context, "race" and "ghetto" are also
inseparable concepts. But a non-ghetto or a non-racial underclass is not considered important for
discussion27. The outcast is defined by his/her connection with the outcast ghetto. It is the history of racism
that makes this extreme form of spatial ghettoization possible in the United States. Yet the tendency towards
spatial segregation exists even absent racism, if in significant!y attenuated form. Wacquant speaks of
"territorial fixation and stigmatization" of the marginal, of a "stigma of place", of "penalized spaces."28.
Marginalization and then exclusion, created as a result of economic relationships, become transmuted into
spatial ones: "social polarization through the field of collective consumption29.
The selection of the victims of the particular form of economic change now taking place will help determine
how those victims are treated by government. The treatment of the victims. There are two possible ways a
society more specifically, a state can deal with the victims of such changes: through welfare benefits
distributed by the state, or through repression and rigid external control. While both can and generally are
used together, they are conceptually and politically very different.
Welfare state benefits are expensive. They are paid for by taxes, taxes which those in the upper echelons of
the economic hierarchy would always rather minimize, and which those in the lower echelons can generally
be counted on to resist as well. One might well argue that welfare state benefits are a means of last resort to
mino indica que se refiere a una nueva realidad ampliamente percibida. Djenme sustituir el trmino excluidos. Argumentando al respecto que los nuevos cambios en la riqueza
y pobreza han deparado efectos diferentes en, por lo menos,
cinco tipos de personas: para los propietarios de riquezas y
los poderes fcticos se produce un incremento de la riqueza;
en cuanto a profesionales, tcnicos y empresarios, los ganadores (junto a la mayora de los propietarios) en el proceso de
cambio econmico se produce un aumento en las cifras y a
menudo, en la renta y privilegios que a veces va acompaado de algo de inseguridad respecto al status22; para la aeja
clase media, funcionariado, proletariado y semiprofesionales
un descenso en las cifras y una prdida de status y seguridad;
para el viejo proletariado, una erosin continuada de su nivel
de vida y una disminucin tanto de su poder econmico
como de negociacin; y, lo ms importante respecto a nuestros propsitos, para los excluidos y marginados, vctimas del
cambio econmico, los pobres perennes excludos cada vez
ms de la corriente econmica y presumiblemente ya ni
siquiera considerados ejrcito de reserva de los desempleados no existe perspectivas perceptibles a largo plazo de
mejorar su situacin a travs de canales econmicos normales y son usados, a su pesar, como una amenaza para aque-
137 5 DACT
deal with the problems of the victims of economic change. We deal with the political forces that lead to the
provision of welfare state benefits below; the primary force is probably the difficulties encountered by
choosing the only real alternative, repression.
Repression in some form or other is a characteristic of all societies to date, whether it is in the blatant forms
adopted by dictatorships using concentration camps or death squads or in the more refined form of criminal
proceedings, sentences, and prison terms. In modern democracies such repression is not seen as targeted to a
particular group, but rather as provoked by certain types of acts. Yet in the United States today we have the
highest number of prison inmates of any advanced country in the world, per capita, and those who fill our
prisons are overwhelmingly African-American and almost all were very poor at the time of their arrest and trial:
The concern about rising rates of criminality suggest that the response of repression through incarceration is
likely to be an on-going and even growing one. The calls for law and order that resulted in the election of a
former criminal prosecutor like Rudolph Guiliani as Mayor of New York City is another symbol of the
increasing reliance on repression as a cure for the social problems created by economic change.
Segregation is another form of repression; ghetto walls function much like prison walls as a restraint on a
population. I have elsewhere dealt extensively with the reality and the metaphor of walls within the city as
reflective of the hierarchical divisions of a society. Such walls can range from the old cliche of the railroad
tracks that divided the "good" part of town from the "bad", to the modern superhighways that separated and
divided the riot-torn areas of Los Angeles from their middle - and upper class neighbors. Sometimes they are
only walls of distance, separating a particular community, a particular suburb perhaps, from the rest of its
region. Segregation, as I am using the term here, is involuntary, forced on a population by those have more
power; it is a form of confinement, a form of repression. It is another possible answer to the problem of what
to do with the victims of economic change: segregate them, confine them, repress any danger they may
cause to others.
The repressive approach to the victims of economic change has ramifications up and down the line of the
economic hierarchy. For the line between the working class and the excluded is a fluid one; if the
segregation of the excluded is to be legitimated by reference to their own weaknesses and evils, as it is, the
working class will seek to separate itself from them. But so will the middle class; and seeing the fluidity of
the line separating com-mon workers from the excluded, the middle class will seek to separate itself from
both. Both those at the top of the hierarchy and the professionals, technicians, managers, directly responsible
to them, will also be concerned about their separation from those below; in seeking their own security, they
will, and do, attempt to differentiate themselves and separate themselves from all below. The pattern of a
quartered city is a result.
DACT 5 138
comparte en diversos grados sin importar su posicin. Cuanta ms probabilidad exista de que la mayora de la poblacin
se convierta en vctima, ms posibilidad de recibir un mejor
trato.
Sin embargo, si se pudiera catalogarlas por grupo, por ejemplo por raza, la situacin resultara algo diferente. Los AfroAmericanos en Estados Unidos,los Turcos en Alemania, Argelinos en Francia y Paquistanes en Inglaterra se han visto estigmatizados en el pasado; es cierto que en los Estados Unidos
existe una antigua tradicin de opresin y racismo que hace
que los AfroAmericanos hayan sufrido ms que cualquier otro
grupo y, lo han hecho sin importar su status actual como
mano de obra, en las leyes comunes o en su cotizacin. En
este sentido, es una estigmatizacin sin conexin alguna con
la clase social, aunque potencia la vulnerabilidad hacia la
victimizacin por un cambio econmico del joven proletariado AfroAmericano, sin importar si es hombre o mujer22.
Cuando existe tal sector estigmatizado, la represin y segregacin componen una alternativa muchsimo ms vlida para
aquellos que controlan el trato de las nuevas vctimas que si
stas parecieran estar seleccionadas de manera arbitraria e
igual que el resto de la poblacin. Esta tendencia a estigmatizar vctimas es generalizada y sirve como medio diferen-
Between these two polar responses (welfare state or repression) to the growing number of victims of
economic change, I suggest that the selection of the victims that will bear the social costs of economic
change will primarily determine the response.
If this model specifies the logic of the impacts that might be anticipated from the pervasive process of real
globalization, it does not indicate what factors will bend the direction of victimiztation towards particular
groups or leave them distributed more evenly by economic location. The specific working out of the more
general logic of globalization will differ according to the parlicular national history, geography,
demographics, etc., of each country, and can only be determined from empirical examination.
Can anything, then, be done at the level of the national or local state to reverse, avoid, or ameliorate the
likely consequences of globalization suggested above? In looking at the options, we draw on a case study
of South Africa afler apartheid as a classic example both of the issues and the possibilities.
DACT 5 140
ciador entre los inopes, merecidos o no. El estado del bienestar resulta un enfoque caro y nada popular para un sector bastante amplio. Si una estigmatizacin en alza puede ahorrar
algn dinero mediante la justificacin de la represin sin
arriesgar la prdida de control social, entonces se convierte
en una alternativa susceptible de ser elegida.
La posibilidad de una separacin espacial, por ejemplo la
guetizacin aumenta la posibilidad de que se produzca de
manera drstica un cambio en el trato represor a las vctimas.
De manera significativa, Gunnar Myrdal dispuso el escenario
suscintamente hace cincuenta aos: (la segregacin racial
crea) una ciudad artificial...que permite a los gobernantes
pblicos descargar cualquier tipo de prejuicio con total libertad sobre los Negros sin daar a ningn blanco23. El punto
esencial llega cuando tanto los victimizados como los segregados se confunden. No es que la implicacin final del cambio de clase inferior a los pobres del guetto de William
Wilson haga que la localizacin espacial se convierta en la
caracterstica definitoria por la cual se pueda identificar a las
vctimas (se debe recordar que en el contexto norteamericano raza y ghetto son tambin conceptos inseparables).
Pero una clase inferior no calificada como ghetto o racial no
se considera importante en el contexto del debate24. Se defi-
ne al paria por su conexin con el ghetto marginado. Es la historia del racismo la que hace posible esta forma extrema de
ghetizacin espacial en los Estados Unidos. An as, la tendencia hacia la segregacin espacial existe incluso con
ausencia de racismo aunque de forma significativamente atenuada. Wacquant habla de fijacin y estigmatizacin territorial de lo marginal de un estigma de lugar, de espacios
penalizados25. La marginalizacin y, ms tarde, la exclusin
originadas como resultado de las relaciones econmicas se
llegan a transmutar en espaciales: la polarizacin social por
medio del campo del consumo colectivo26.
La seleccin de las vctimas mediante el cambio econmico
que tiene lugar en la actualidad ayudar a determinar cmo
el gobierno trata a esas vctimas. El trato de las vctimas. Existen dos vas posibles para que una sociedad y, de forma
especfica, un estado pueda relacionarse con las vctimas de
tales cambios: a travs de la asistencia social que distribuye
el estado o por medio de represin y un rgido control externo. A pesar de que ambos se usan de manera conjunta, son
muy diferentes poltica y conceptualmente.
Las ayudas del estado del bienestar resultan caras. Se pagan
por medio de impuestos, impuestos que aquellos que se
encuentran en los escalafones superiores de la jerarqua eco-
nmica preferiran minimizar y que, aquellos en los escalafones inferiores tambin confan en poder resistir. Adems, se
podra argumentar que tales ayudas son una ltima salida respecto a los problemas de las vctimas del cambio econmico.
Hablar de los grupos polticos que conducen a la disposicin de las ayudas ms abajo; la fuerza primordial sera con
toda probabilidad las dificultades con que se topa la nica
alternativa real: La represin.
Sin importar la forma que adopte, la represin es una caracterstica de todas las sociedades actuales, ya sea bajo el aspecto
agresivo de las dictaduras y sus campos de concentracin o
escuadrones de la muerte o, en la forma ms refinada de los procedimientos criminales, sentencias y prisiones. En las democracias modernas, tales tipos de represin no se ven dirigidos a un
sector en especial sino que estn provocados por determinados
tipos de actos. As, Estados Unidos en la actualidad, posee la
cifra ms alta de presidiarios per cpita de cualquier pas desarrollado del mundo y aquellos que abarrotan nuestras prisiones
estn siendo abrumadoramente AfroAmericanos y una gran
parte de ellos eran del todo pobres en el momento de su arresto y posterior juicio. La preocupacin por el aumento de las
tasas de criminalidad sugiere que la respuesta represiva por
medio del encarcelamiento es probable que siga su tendencia
actual de aumento. Las llamadas a la ley y al orden que se produjeron en la eleccin del anterior fiscal criminal, Rudolph Giuliani, como alcalde de Nueva York es otro smbolo de la creciente dependencia de la represin como cura de los problemas
sociales originados por el cambio econmico.
Otra forma de represin es la segregacin: los muros de los
ghettos funcionan de la misma forma que las murallas carcelarias ,como control restrictivo de la poblacin. Tambin me
he ocupado de este tema en profundidad con la realidad y la
metfora de los muros dentro de la ciudad como reflejo de las
divisiones jerrquicas de una sociedad. Dichos muros pueden
variar desde el antiguo clich de las vas frreas que dividan
la ciudad en dos mitades: buena y mala, hasta las modernas
superautopistas que separan y dividen las zonas desgarradas
de Los Angeles de sus vecinos de clase media y alta. A veces,
slo son muros de distancia que separan una comunidad particular, quizs un suburbio peculiar del resto de los de su
zona. La segregacin, tal como uso el trmino aqu, resulta
involuntaria y la imponen aquellos que tienen ms poder
sobre el resto de la poblacin: es una forma de confinamiento, de represin. Es otra posible respuesta al problema de las
vctimas del cambio econmico: segregarlas, confinarlas y
evitar cualquier dao que puedan causar a otros.
141 5 DACT
labor by capital cannot be the major aim of progressive policies; rather, they must seek to distribute the benefits
of technological progress equally across the social landscape, and make sure the aggregate benefits exceed the
aggregate costs. That may well involve local public decisions as to industrial location plant closing legislation,
for instance as well as national policies for education, training, and human resource development32.
Ultimately, of course, redistribution lies at the heart of the problem. The phrase is ambiguous; it can cover
both redistribution of the sources of inequality, or redistribution simply of its results. Both are needed. The
first is more difficult than the second, but is ultimately inescapable. On the way there, however, a direct
confrontation with the simple and obvious fact that a significant improvement of those at the bottom of the
economic ladder can only in the short term come about by a reduction in the consumption of those at the
top is essential. As Samir Amin says,
The conditions for ...progress are:
... a redistribution of wages and such benefits as education to the great majority, financed by reducing
the status of a lot of whites who are well-compensated but are wastefully employed (the overall
development of the country cannot support the First-World consumption level of its unproductive
whites)... 33
Other related necessary measures are well known, and require no extensive further discussion. They include
measures like land reform, centralized state ability to redistribute resources through taxation and
expenditure, strong labor laws, etc. Their adoption may be politically more difficult in an age of global
business, but their essence is not different from what it was before the recent spate of globalization.
DACT 5 142
se distribuya ms equitativamente segn la localizacin econmica. El ejercicio especfico de una lgica ms general
para la globalizacin ser diferente segn la historia nacional,
geografa, demografa, etc. de cada pas y slo puede venir
determinada va previo examen emprico.
Por lo tanto, se puede hacer algo para invertir, evitar o mejorar las consecuencias de la globalizacin sugeridas anteriormente? Al observar las opciones, establecemos el caso de
estudio de Surfrica tras el apartheid como ejemplo clsico
tanto por sus temas como porsus posibilidades.
capturing portions of internationally ("off-shore) produced income. Banking regulators have intimate
knowledge of both intra-state and inter-state transactions. The limits of control thus far are rather in an
unwillingness to exercise jurisdiction than in the inability todo so. As long as business people live
somewhere have families, homes, friends, cultural ties, language familiarities, that are stronger in one piace
than another, there will be some place, some nation, that can assert jurisdiction over them. It is only a rare
Robert Vestro that will take up citizenship outside his homeland,and even he will seekto return
throughgoone strategem or another. Saskia Sassen and others have pointed out that nation-state control over
immigration remains firmly in place, subject to internal rather than external constraints. Given the
sophistication of electronic transactions, the possibilityof their control is equally sophisticated; bank transfers
can be followed no less than human movements, and national criminal laws can still sanction an accounting
firm that aids in bypassing national regulation.
The importance of military production to the national economies of many of the advanced industrial
countries gives further leverage to the national governments of those countries in dealing with theeconomic
behaviour of their corporations. From Dwight Macdonald to Manuell Castells34 the importance of war
production to the stability of the United States has been rightly stressed; Ann Markusen has worked out many
of its implications in subtantial detail. One implication not frequently referred to is the possibility of using
thegranting or with holding of contracts for the suppply of military goods or services to the military to enforce
particular desired forms of behaviour on corporations: minimurn wages within or outside the country,
recognition of the rights of their workers inor outside of the country to organize, etc.
The same possibilities exist as to regulation of banks and financial institutions. Even at the local level, the
business decisions of government as where to place its deposits, whose services to use in arranging
borrowing, have been used toifluence the actions of banks wheredirect regulation was not feasible or
perhaps even constitutinally permitted of a local government over an interstate corooration. But such
regulation has been effective, e.g. in equal hiring, equal lending, holding branches open in underserved
areas, etc.35. How much more power would a national government desiring to do so have using those
tools!
And the positive role of a new protectionism" should not be ignored36. Even the United Nations General
Assembly aproved (only the United States voting to the contrary) the far-reaching proposals of the United
Nations Economic Commission for Africa37 which includes intelligent and sophisticated suggestions for the
differential treatment of different sections of the economy in regard to restrictions on international trade,
suggesting for instance strong protectionism as to the production of the necessities of life domestically, high
tariffs on the import of luxury goods, etc.
La redireccin de la globalizacin
Esta ponencia ha defendido que la globalizacin es una combinacin de ingredientes diferentes, algunos de los cuales
143 5 DACT
145 5 DACT
Zoning. Zoning can establish separate, exclusive communities, as many years' experience in the United
States has unfortunately shown. But inclusionary zoning can also be done. It involves conscious zoning
for mixed use districts, permitting ample multi-family zoning to bring down land costs and permit rental
mixed with owner-occupied single-family housing, zoning bonuses for (economically) integrated
housing, exemptions from local charges, levies, or taxes for integrated housing, making variances or zone
changes dependent on the desired socio-economic composition, and similar techniques. They have been
used successfully in the United States; they should help elsewhere also.
Housing policy in South Africa, for all its efforts and all its probably successes in some areas, has been
singularly devoid of attention to location, and thus to integration. A policy of subsidizing private
developers wherever they build, provided the units built are available to targeted families, is likely to
perpetuate apartheid patterns: land in areas already occupied by poor households is likely to be cheaper,
DACT 5 146
mientras que inicialmente era regional) con mayor probabilidad a travs de una legislacin vinculante. La Unin Europea
nos muestra como funcionaran dichas polticas: Al poseer el
poder para evitar las subvenciones a empresas privadas, la UE
tuvo la oportunidad, por ejemplo, de limitar las condiciones
generosas planeadas para Daimler-Benz que le habran transferido uno de los lugares de Berln con mayor lugar potencial
a un porcentaje nimio de ese valor. Los limitados y condensados incentivos interestatales a la industria no nos son desconocidos y la judicatura americana ha intervenido, en ocasiones, para evitar obsequios del sector pblico al privado
aunque vengan justificados por argumentos competitivos.
Siempre se puede pensar en otras alternativas.
Las polticas de desarrollo econmico a veces bajo el nombre
de polticas industriales en Estados Unidos pueden resultar
herramientas eficaces para tratar los efectos negativos de
algunos ingredientes de la globalizacin. La sustitucin del
trabajo por el capital no debe ser el objetivo prioritario de una
polticas progresivas; en vez de ellas, se debe intentar distribuir de manera equitativa los beneficios del progreso tecnolgico a lo largo y ancho del paisaje social y asegurarse de
que los beneficios aadidos superen los costes agregados. Eso
debera involucrar tambin a la decisiones pblicas locales,
1. Polarization has increased substantially since approximately the early 1970's, at least in the developed
countries41.
2. The mobility of capital has tremendously enhanced the power of capital:
a) Capital's independence of democratic (state) control is enhanced by its ability to relocate;
b) Capital's ability to bargain with labor is tremendously enhanced by its ability to seek out lower
wage labor at distant locations;
c) Labor seeks to enhance its position by its own mobility (immigration), but does not come near to
matching the mobility of capital.
3. The enrichment of capital is to a significant extent at the expense of the impoverishment of labor.
a) To the extent that income determines spatial patterns, the market will lead to increasing segregation
under post-Fordism.
b) That segregation may, under particular circumstances, find its legitimation in racism, and produce
patterns of racial as well as class segregation.
D. The third reason to expect spatial change within cities is the expansion and despatialization of markets.
1. Given the polarization of wealth, the Fordist linkage of production-high wages-consumption is
broken; low wages at home and consequent limited consumption at home can be offset be expanded
consumption in the world market.
2. Declining incomes of the majority of urban residents is thus not dysfunctional for the mainstream
economy, as it earlier was.
a) That decline may be relative (as in Europe) or absolute (as in the United States).
3. The spatial consequences of declining incomes for the majority include a widening gap between
environmental conditions in different parts of the city, accentuating other forces for segregation.
E. The fourth reason to expect spatial change within cities is the decreasing domestic need for unskilled /
low-paid labor within urban centers.
1. The drive to substitute capital for labor within the developed high-wage economies is an ongoing one.
2. Although there continues to be a need for substantial unskilled/low wage labor in urban centers, to
service both the production and consumption needs of the centers of the post-Fordist economies, that
need will be very substantially less than the need for such labor under Fordist conditions;
3. Even that need will be unequally distributed across cities, concentrating in those most integrated into
the global economy; As a result, a pool of unneeded" (in terms of profit-driven economic activity, not
social need) labor is created and grows, posing a problem of social peace and social control;
5. Segregation to the point of ghettoization is functional for the mainstream economy for the control of
such social problems.
147 5 DACT
F. The fifth reason to expect spatial change within cities is the changing role of the public sector in the
shaping of built form and the distribution of its benefits and burdens.
1. The strength of capital, and the weakness of labor, and the interests asociated with each, change the
balance of power in the determination of government policies.
2. The direction of change will be towards the reduction of welfare state benefits, of taxes, and of
publicly-provided residential services.
3. The consequences will result in changed spatial patterns within cities.
II. There have always been divisions within cities.
A. They have historically run along three dimensions:
1. Functional: the separation of church, government, market, guild, agriculture;
2. Cultural: the separation by religion, ethnicity, place of origin, life style;
3. Status: the separation by class, caste, wealth, political power.
B. It is characteristic of capitalism in general that it promotes the separation by status, implemented through
the market.
C. It is characteristic of post-Fordist capitalism that, in creating increasing divisions by status, divisions by
culture come to reinforce divisions of status, with relations of political and economic power superimposed
on differences of culture and function. The divisions of the city under post-Fordist capitalism are here, for
convenience, referred as the quartering" of cities.
III. Ghettoes and Enclaves have existed for centuries, but there is a New Urban Ghetto today.
A. They have historically run along three dimensions:
1. Functional: the separation of church, government, market, guild, agriculture;
2. Cultural: the separation by religion, ethnicity, place of origin, life style;
3. Status: the separation by class, caste, wealth, political power.
B. It is characteristic of capitalism in general that it promotes the separation by status, implemented through
the market.
1. Industrial Capitalism thus represents one of the key turning points in the evolution of urban spatial structure42.
2. It comes about because for the first time residences are separated from work-places, thus allowing a
different ordering of the one from the other.
DACT 5 148
IV. It is characteristic of post-Fordist capitalism that, in creating increasing divisions by status, divisions by
culture come to reinforce divisions of status, with relations of political and economic power
superimposed on differences of culture and function. The divisions of the city under post-Fordist
capitalism are here, for convenience, referred as the "quartering" of cities.
A. A ghetto is an area in which space and race are combined to define, to isolate, and to limit a particular
population group held to be, and treated as, inferior by the dominant society.
B. An enclave is a confined area in which members of a particular population group, defined by ethnicity
or religion or otherwise43, congregate in a particular space as a means of enhancing their economical,
social, political and/or cultural development.
C. Two factors differentiate the ghetto of today from older ghettos:
1. The convergence of lower class with race (although in pre-capitalist times there had been similar race
or caste based ghettos, the phenomenon is new as a creation of capitalism, which, if anything, has in
its earlier phases led to an equalization of labor as a commodity).
2. The exclusion of the residents of the ghetto from the mainstream formal and informal economy of the
cities in which they live - the lack of dependence of the economy on their actual or potential labor.
V. These changes are part of a broader change: Economic forces have lead to an increasing division of
classes, with widening distance between them.
A. The increasing divisions accompany the change from the Fordist to the post-Fordist city: about 1970. [We
are not concerned with the precise definition of Fordist" and post-Fordist here; we find the term useful,
and take the development from one to the other to include/parallel the movement from Keynesian to
"post-Keynesian policies, away from the post-war arrangements that were embodied in the welfare state,
from one mode of regulation to another, from a less to a more integrated world economic system, from
a less to a more technologically developed and information-centered economy].
1. Cities are places, not agents or actors; in this sense "cities" do not win or lose, benefit or suffer, except
perhaps if defined as built environments. Benefit or suffer refers to the lives of people within cities,
and will not apply uniformly to all; it is the divergence in effect that is in fact the center of the issues
discussed here. For the above categorization, benefit and suffer are in terms of some measure of
average economic prosperity, needing to be defined.
B. The divisions of classes are multiple, not simple; they are more nearly in quartered or five-part form than
dual. [Again, we are not concerned here with the precise definition of "classes"; we find the general
necesidad de un proceso de propuestas de desarrollo racionalizado y no burocrtico por el otro, con una presin implcita sobre los planificadores para que acten rpida y positivamente ante estas propuestas, particularmente si llegan
desde fuentes internacionales. Los urbanistas deben, en mi
opinin, resistirse a estas presiones. Y la resistencia no debe
ser meramente defensiva, una simple confianza en los viejos
clichs sobre desarrollo equilibrado o planificacin firme. Los
planificadores deben acercarse al problema con actitud positiva y agresiva. Deben empaparse en el tema del desarrollo
econmico; deben examinar los efectos a largo plazo de un
desarrollo globalmente orientado, las fluctuaciones y las crisis a las que son proclives las ciudades, la distribucin, a
veces terriblemente injusta, de los beneficios y costes resultantes de dicho desarrollo, las consecuencias medioambientales a largo plazo, las alternativas de desarrollo local que
dichas propuestas puedan excluir, los usos alternativos de
fondos pblicos ( o rentas pblicas precedentes) que a menudo se solicitan en apoyo del desarrollo globalmente orientado. No es una tarea fcil y ste no es un territorio bien explorado. Los buenos modelos son difciles de encontrar, aunque
existen unos cuantos39, y sus descubrimientos deberan divulgarse. Conferencias como sta, que tratan claramente la rela-
149 5 DACT
conceptual model of a society divided into classes by economic position accompanied by cultural
differentiation useful, but wish to avoid the debate as to the exact nature of each class or the boundaries
between them except to the extent that the empirical examination of the divisions within cities requires
it]. The following are working categories:
1. a globally-oriented upper class, the owners and ultimate decision-makers of major business
enterprises and financial resources;
2. a growing professional, managerial, technical class, responsible for significant but ultimately
derivative business decisions and their implementation;
3. an educated, stably employed, middle class, consisting both of whitecollar and skilled blue-collar
workers;
4. a traditional working class, both white and blue collar, subsisting not far above the poverty level, but
part of the formal labor market (whether at the moment employed or not);
5. an excluded class, the victims of the post-Fordist restructuring of society, permanently outside of the
formal labor market and marginally occupied in the informal sector. (Advanced marginality).
C. These class divisions have changed in their nature, their size, and the relations between them.
1. Divisions have changed in the direction of greater inequality, towards increasing gap between the
highest and the lowest income category. The change creates a new set of victims and reinforces a preexisting group of winners. Although that result is not inevitable, it remains the prevalent model. In it,
the top two categories are winners, the bottom two losers, the middle group varies conjecturally.
2. The major changes in nature have been the increased international mobility of the business interests
of the upper class, the increased importance of the p.m.c., and the permanence and submarginality of
the excluded (advanced marginality).
3. The major changes in relative size have been in the expansion of the p.m.c., (with concomitant
expansion of life-style patterns, demographic characteristics, desire for urbane locations, and double
incomes) the decline of the middle and working class, and the expansion of the number of victims.
4. Mobility between groups has declined, most sharply between the excluded and the working class, but
also between the working and the middle class.
D. Demographic changes parallel class and spatial changes:
1. In the luxury city and among the elite, primarily 2-person households, mobile, many household needs
spatially internalized and privatized.
2. The gentry increasingly singe-person households or couples without children, both partners working.
3. Smaller families in the middle class.
4. The largest families in the tenement city.
DACT 5 150
5. Among the excluded, more older persons, many female-headed households, racial minority (in a few
cases majority) group members where exclusionary tendencies are strong, some ethnic minority group
members.
VI. The new divisions in the economic structure of society are reflected in divisions of space within cities,
which may be seen as part of a new exclusionarv tendency.
A. Broadly, one may speak of the following divisions of the residential space of cities, divisions discrete
enough in the United States to be virtualiy separate residential cities:
1. The luxury city of the upper class is largely non-spatial; it is likely to consist of small clusters (vertical
or horizontal) of units, near to the central business district, or on the outskirts of the city, privately
managed and insulated from the rest of the city. It is non-spatial to the extent that its occupants are
thoroughly mobile and likely to have several residences, although wishing to have one located within
or near one of a limited number of centers of international business activity.
2. a gentrified city, occupied by the professional, managerial, technical class (the gentry), located either
(depending largely on household composition) in older areas very near the central business district,
either in rehabilitated and upgraded or in new buildings (the gentrified inner city) or in exclusive
exurban areas (the gentry-occupied exurban city);
3. a middle-class or suburban city, located either (depending largely on household composition) near the
central business district but outside the gentrified city (the inner middle-class city), or in the nearer
suburbs (the suburban middle-class city);
4. a tenement city, occupied by a blue or white collar working class, located in a belt of deteriorated
older housing near the central business district and/or in a cluster of cheaper housing immediately
outside the inner middle-class city;
5. an abandoned city, occupied by the excluded, the victims of the post-Fordist restructuring of society.
a) Advanced homelessness emanates from, but is spatially not confined to, the abandoned city.
B. An outcast ghetto will develop under certain circumstances, usually somewhere in the middle ring
surrounding the center city, and radiating outward.
1. Such a development will be manifest in extreme form only if the following conditions exist:
a) Entrenched racism affecting a significanl minority of Ihe population;
b) Spatial reflection of that racism in a pattem of residential segregation;
c) Weak or defeated forces supporting a welfare state.
2. The tendency towards the formation of such a ghetto results from general developments affecting all
cities, and its possibility can be seen in most cities affected by globalization.
DACT 5 152
tanto, la integracin han carecido particularmente de atencin. Una poltica que subvenciona a los inversores privados sin importar lo que construyan, dado que las unidades
construidas slo estn disponibles para determinadas familias facilitar que los patrones del apartheid no desaparezcan: la tierra en las reas ya ocupadas por habitantes
pobres tiende a ser ms barata; el extraradio es menos
deseable para los blancos con mejores ingresos. Como
mnimo seran necesarios estrictos controles pblicos
sobre los emplazamientos de viviendas privadas subvencionadas pblicamente. Lo ms apropiado sera la construccin pblica directa con el control directo sobre el
emplazamiento que eso conlleva.
Regulacin del mercado de viviendas. Como mnimo, controles de desalojo y de ejecucin; prcticas claramente
imparciales en la legislacin imparcial de vivienda. Lo
mejor, un control estricto de arrendamiento podra tener
un efecto muy positivo.
El emplazamiento de instalaciones pblicas puede planearse de forma cuidadosa, con la participacin de toda la
comunidad para as evitar el posible reforzamiento de los
ghettos; entre las herramientas ms tiles se encuentran la
unin de costes y beneficios o los acuerdos imparciales.
El traslado en autobs a las escuelas ha sido ampliamente utilizado en los Estados Unidos aunque con resultados
polmicos. Lo mnimo en este caso, es la inscripcin abierta, el traslado en autobs es lo mximo hasta que cambien
los modelos de vivienda. No deberan existir ventajas educacionales por vivir en ciertas reas segregadas.
Las acciones conscientes de vivienda por raza se recomiendan a menudo por parte de las legislaciones antidiscriminatorias para mejorar las cuotas41. Su impacto puede
ser ambiguo como ilustran las recientes controversias
sobre acciones afirmativas que incluyen tanto sus defensores como a sus detractores42. En cuanto al apoyo de las
polticas de integracin espacial, en ausencia de oportunidades econmicas y de estructuras polticas necesarias
para superar las poderosas fuerzas de la marginacin, las
polticas de dispersin estn condenadas al fracaso43
El hecho de trazar lmites en las jurisdicciones pblicas
puede tener un efecto positivo; las propuestas actuales de
Johanesburgo, con su nfasis en la equiparacin de la posicin de Soweto dentro de la jurisdiccin metropolitana,
muestran tanto las posibilidades como las dificultades44.
La poltica de urbanizacin puede influir en los modelos
residenciales y en la segregacin de modos muy distintos
C. A luxury enclave, hi-tech and hi-cost, is likely to form at the other extreme parallel to the formation of
an outcast ghetto.
D. The tendency towards these divisions exist in cities throughout the world.
1. In the welfare-oriented societies of Western Europe, the number of the excluded is still small,
proportionately, and the line between the working class and the excluded is not sharp. Spatial patterns
reflect these facts.
2. In the major cities of the Third World, the division between the two upper and the two lower classes
is great, the number of those excluded large, and the size of the middle class small. Spatial patterns
reflect these facts.
VII. Residents of each division of the city seek to separate themselves from too great contact with the city
below them, and in some cases from displacement by the residents of the city above them.
A. People are not the passive victims of major economic changes, but some actively implement them, others
actively resist44.
B. Tensions are increasing between these divisions of the city.
1. Turf battles among residents are increasing.
2. Both public and private planning (in a new symbiotic relationship) affirmatively structure separation
among the parts.
C. There is a tendency in each division ta reinforce its separation from other divisions below them, and
move towards assimilation into other divisions above them.
D. The selection of public facilities and private shared facilities within each division reinforces boundaries
(occasionally it may reinforce aspirations towards upward movement); thus retailing is geared to the
market level of each division and located near the centers in each, public services are geared to the level
of demand and reinforce the differential attractiveness of each.
E. Walls between divisions are another form of reinforcement of spatial divisions. They may be artificial or
natural barriers (highways or railroad tracks, hills or rivers), architectural barriers and indicators (the forms
of housing, the placement of public facilities), or individually constructed (community walls, barbed wire
fences, doormen and security systems).
que abarcan desde los controles de afluencia hasta las subvenciones de emplazamiento de negocios en emplazamientos prioritarios. En el pasado, dicha poltica ha tenido
como meta prevenir las urbanizaciones negras. La abolicin de dichos controles permitir, por supuesto, un
aumento rpido del nmero de aquellos emplazamientos
urbanos previamente escogidos. Pero, cules son estas
ciudades? y qu emplazamiento dentro o cerca de estas
ciudades? La poltica debe tener alguna influencia, as
como la tendrn las ayudas por emplazamientos a empresas, pero como muestra la experiencia internacional en el
pasado, no debe ser decisivo. Mientras el mercado dicte el
xito o el fracaso de una empresa, esa empresa sopesar las
desventajas del emplazamiento (es decir, la presin para
situarlo en un lugar destinado a actos sociales pblicos o en
una destinado a negocios privados). Este factor se situar
frente a la cantidad de subvencin en trminos estrictamente financieros y slo seguir adelante si el equilibrio es
positivo y volver a trasladarse en cuanto el equlibrio sea
negativo. Se necesitan anlisis empresariales sofisticados
para calibrar con exactitud las subvenciones, pero otros
ingredientes de la poltica de urbanizacin se pueden aplicar ms facilmente: planificacin del uso de la tierra (regio-
153 5 DACT
VlII. The exclusionary tendency, reinforced in the new conservative state, tends to produce changes in each
of the five quarters of the city.
A. At the top, the luxury city is more non-spatial than ever, not that it has no physical reference point or form, but
in that it is located in many places even for each household, movement is constant, and the points at which
residential locations settle down will be largely isolated from their broader surroundings, not spatially dependent
on their position in the urban fabric, rather creating and controlling their own environment at the micro level.
B. The gentrified city is larger, closer to the tertiary center, more dominant of its surroundings, and more
likely to cause displacement, than before.
C. The suburban city remains largely in its previous patterns, although perhaps in part relocated to subcities, fringe cities, within the metropolitan area, and less connected to metropolitan centers.
D. The tenement city is proportionately more composed of immigrants and ethnic (and variably racial)
minorities than before, forming enclaves often ethnically defined in older parts of the cities, and, in
proportion to the rest of the city, smaller than before. If the exclusionary tendency is weak, immigrants
and their neighborhoods will, after a possible initial period of tension, be integrated into the urban fabric,
and locations of individuals will follow a class trajectory; where the exclusionary tendency is strong,
downward movement towards the abandoned city is possible.
E. The abandoned city will be directly dependen on the strength of the exclusionary tendency more and
more an outcast ghetto, usually in the middle ring surrounding the center city, and radiating outward.
IX. The quartering of cities is inherently dynamic.
A. Restructuring of the space of cities is a constant characteristic of cities under capitalism.
1. Only in the upper quarter is there a motivation to change, rather than solidify, the spatial structure of
cities, accompanying the growth dynamic of capitalism (slum clearance, urban renewal, gentrification,
conversion from residential to business uses).
2. In the middle two quarters, there is resistance to change from below (invasion, deterioration,
rezoning for denser use).
a) There is not resistance to change from above; upgrading.
b) There is not reluctance on the part of residents to move to other neighborhoods; turf allegiance is
weak, except in defense to change from below.
DACT 5 154
3. In the bottom quarter, there is a new form of turf allegiance, a resistance to change, including change
from-to above, gentrification, up-grading with changes in occupancy.
a) The resistance is in part defensive: to avoid displacement.
b) The resistance is in part also based on defense of space as a source of strength.
c) This may be cultural in definition, but is political and economic in cause and hoped-for
impact45.
B. New in the post-Fordist phase of urban restructuring are both the way change is produced and the ways
in which change is attempted to be handled
1. The spatial process of restructuring has changed
a) Change in earlier periods was largely by growth rather than reuse or reoccupancy of existing
built-up areas of the city, resulting often in a leap-frogging of development.
b) Change today is largely by displacement in already built-up areas.
c) Movement entirely out of the city represents a pattern common throughout the period of capitalist
development.
(1) Perhaps it existed even earlier, e.g. in the location of palaces and residences of the aristocracy.
(2) It differs from earlier periods in that the tendency to suburbanize is offset by a newer tendency
to gentrify.
2. The social implementation of restructuring has changed.
a) Tensions around restructuring are thus greater today than in previous periods.
(1) The tensions were prefigured by conflicts about redevelopment in the 1950's, in which
displacement was energetically opposed by those being displaced; but in the earlier period, the
provision of substitute and decent housing was an acceptable solution and the target of the
demands of the displaced.
(2) Slum clearance activities even earlier, from the turn of the century on, reflected much the same
pattern, if on a smaller basis, and with less sophisticated governmental means.
(3) For the first time today, demands for the continued occupancy of group turfs are the targets of
opposition to displacement: not better housing elsewhere, but continued housing there, is a
central demand.
(a) The concept of turf as such is significantly new; it can be distinguished from the older and
more traditional concept of community.
(b) The goal of restructuring is directed more towards stability of the resultant patterns than it
has been in the past.
(c) The growing use of walls and the reinforcement of boundaries is evidence of this drive
towards rigidity of te newly established spatial structure.
actualmente en vigencia, que se esconde tras su lustrosa mscara, en el festn que la globalizacin potencial podra ofrecer. Pero creo que su bsqueda debera ser el prximo y
necesario punto en la agenda de los acadmicos, planificadores, movimientos ciudadanos y asociaciones de trabajadores as como de los polticos.
Apndice A
I. Teora: El Supuesto Nuevo Orden Espacial en las Ciudades.
A. Nuevo como se usa aqu, se refiere al perodo post-Fordista del capitalismo.
1 Mientras los elementos post-Fordistas estuvieron presentes en los ltimos aos, ha habido cambios importantes en la naturaleza de los procesos econmicos talvez a mediados de los setenta.
2. Los datos clave del cambio se basan en modelos globales, pero impactarn en distintos paises o tal vez en
ciudades dentro de esos paises, a diferente escala.
B. La primera razn para esperar el cambio espacial es las
ciudades es la naturaleza cambiante de las economas de
aglomeracin.
1. En el perodo Fordista, la aglomeracin de instalaciones de produccin fue eficiente; hoy, dadas las mejoras en transporte y control, la produccin se puede
trasladar de modo efectivo a lugares generalizados.
2. La mayor centralizacin de funciones de control y su
mayor sofisticacin tecnolgica hacen que la aglomeracin de las funciones de control (incluidas las operaciones financieras, legislativas y polticas) produzcan
nuevos beneficios de aglomeracin.
3. Por lo tanto, las economas de aglomeracin, corazn
de las economas de urbanizacin, continuan pero en
actividades diferentes de distintos grupos.
C. La segunda razn para esperar el cambio espacial en las
ciudades es el cambio en la relacin de la riqueza (polarizacin) que acompaa al postFordismo.
1. La polarizacin ha aumentado considerablemente
desde, aproximadamente, principios de los setenta al
menos en los paises desarrollados48.
2. La movilidad de capital ha mejorado tremendamente
su poder:
a) La independencia del capital del (estado) control
democrtico mejora por su habilidad para volver a
situarse;
155 5 DACT
Bank
uses
it:
the
global
integration
of
that is, is there a sharp line dividing a non- (or pre-) global
Routledge.
DACT 5 156
b) La habilidad del capital para negociar con los sindicatos mejora tremendamente por su capacidad de
buscar mano de obra ms barata en emplazamientos alejados;
c) Los trabajadores intentan mejorar su posicin por
su propia movilidad (inmigrantes) pero no coincide
con la movilidad del capital.
3. El enriquecimiento del capital es, en su mayor parte, a
expensas del empobrecimiento de los trabajadores.
a) Ya que en gran medida los ingresos determinan los
modelos espaciales, el mercado puede llevar al
aumento de la segregacin durante el postFordismo.
b) Esta segregacin puede encontrar, bajo circunstancias especiales, su legitimacin en el racismo, y crea
modelos de segregacin tanto raciales como de clase.
D. La tercera razn para esperar el cambio espacial en las
ciudades es la expansin y la desespacializacin de mercados.
1. Dada la polarizacin de riqueza, la cadena de produccin-salarios altos-consumo del Fordismo, se rompe;
los salarios reducidos nacionales y el consecuente bajo
consumo nacional pueden compensarse gracias al
consumo en el mercado mundial.
Sydney.
14 For some vivid case studies, see Paul Goodman, The Last
Entrepreneurs.
Blackwell.
157 5 DACT
moderate suggestions.
33 Amin, Samir. 1993. South Africa in the Global System.
Monthly Review, vol. 45, n.. 2, p. 6.
Clavel.
DACT 5 158
where after the riots the curfew zone was defined by the
del desarrollo del uno al otro, el movimiento de las polticas Keynesianas a las postKeynesianas, sin tener en cuenta los acuerdos de la postguerra que se incorporaron en el
estado de bienestar, de un modo de regulacin a otro, de
un sistema econmico menos integrado en el mundo a
otro ms integrado, de una economa menos desarrollada
tecnolgicamente y menos centralizada informativamente
a otra ms desarrollada y ms centralizada).
1. Las ciudades son lugares, no o agentes o actores; en
este sentido, las ciudades no ganan o pierden, no se
benefician o sufren, excepto tal vez si se definen como
entornos construdos. El beneficio y el sufrimiento se
refieren a las vidas de la gente de las ciudades y no
debe aplicarse uniformemente a todo; de hecho, la
divergencia en el efecto el tema central aqu tratado.
En la categorizacin anterior, beneficio y sufrimiento necesitan definirse en trminos de medicin de
media de prosperidad econmica.
B. Existen mltiples divisiones de clase, no una sola; se acercan ms a una divisin en cuatro o cinco partes que una
dualidad.
(Otra vez volvemos a quitarle importancia a la definicin
en s de clases; el modelo conceptual general de una
sociedad se divide en clases debido a la posicin econmica a la que acompaa una til diferenciacin cultural,
pero nos gustara evitar debates sobre la naturaleza exacta de cada clase o los lmites entre ellas excepto en el caso
de que un examen emprico de las divisiones en las ciudades lo requiera). Las siguientes categoras son las que se
utilizan en el trabajo:
1. una clase alta orientada globalmente, los propietarios y
los poderes fcticos en empresas importantes o fuentes
financieras;
2. una clase profesional, directiva y tcnica en aumento,
responsable de decisiones empresariales importantes,
pero al fin y al cabo poco originales, y de su realizacin;
3. una clase media educada y con trabajos estables formada tanto por administrativos como por artesanos;
4. una clase trabajadora tradicional, tanto administrativa
como artesanal, que subsisten no muy lejos del nivel
de pobreza pero forman parte del mercado formal de
trabajo (ya estn desempleados o no);
5. una clase excluida, son las vctimas de la restructuracin
de la sociedad del postFordismo, permanentemente
fuera del mercado formal de trabajo, ocupando marginalmente el sector informal. (Marginalidad avanzada).
159 5 DACT
DACT 5 160
4. una ciudad de barriadas ocupada por la clase trabajadora, tanto administrativa como artesanal, emplazada
en una zona de casas antiguas deterioradas cerca del
distrito empresarial central y/o en un grupo de viviendas baratas situado inmediatamente despus de los
barrios cntricos de clase media;
5. una ciudad abandonada ocupada por los excluidos,
las vctimas de la restructuracin postFordista de la
sociedad.
a) Vagabundeo avanzado que emana de la ciudad
abandonada, que no se encuentra espacialmente
confinado a ella.
B. Un gueto marginado se desarrollar bajo determinadas
circunstancias y, normalmente, en algn lugar del anillo
central que rodea el centro de la ciudad y hacia afuera.
1. Este desarrollo se manifestar de forma extrema solamente si se dan las siguientes condiciones:
a) Racismo inamovible que afecta a una minora
importante de la poblacin;
b) Reflejo espacial de dicho racismo en un modelo de
segregacin residencial;
c) Fuerzas de seguridad dbiles o derrotadas salvaguardando el estado de bienestar.
2. La tendencia hacia la formacin de este tipo de gueto
resulta de las evoluciones generales que afectan a
todas las ciudades y su posibilidad se puede ver en la
mayora de ciudades afectadas por la globalizacin.
C. Un enclave de lujo de precios altos avanzado tecnolgicamente, tiende a formarse al otro extremo, paralelo a la
formacin del gueto marginal.
D. La tendencia a estas divisiones existe ya en ciudades de
todo el mundo.
1. En las sociedades dirigidas al estado del bienestar del
oeste de Europa el nmero de excluidos es todava proporcionalmente pequeo y la lnea entre la clase trabajadora y los excluidos no est bien definida. Los
modelos espaciales reflejan estos hechos.
2. En las ciudades ms importantes del Tercer Mundo, las
dos clases altas y las dos bajas estn bien diferenciadas, el nmero de excluidos es grande y el tamao de
la clase media es pequeo. Los modelos espaciales
reflejan estos hechos.
VII. Los residentes de cada divisin de la ciudad intentan
separarse de un contacto demasiado estrecho con la ciudad vecina y, en algunos casos del desplazamiento ejercido por los residentes de la ciudad que est por encima
de ellos.
A. Las personas no son las vctimas pasivas de los cambios
econmicos importantes mientras algunos los llevan a cabo
activamente, otros se resisten a ellos enrgicamente51.
B. Las tensiones aumentan ante estas divisiones en la ciudad
1. Las luchas entre los residentes por los espacios verdes
se incrementan.
2. Tanto la planificacin pblica como la privada( en una
nueva relacin simbitica) estructuran afirmativamente
separacin entre las partes.
C. Hay una tendencia en cada divisin para reforzar su separacin frente a otras divisiones inferiores y, para dirigirse
hacia la asimilacin de otras divisiones por encima de ellos.
D. La seleccin de instalaciones pblicas e instalaciones
comunales privadas dentro de cada situacin marca mejor
los lmites (podra ocasionalmente reforzar las aspiraciones de un movimiento de ascenso), por tanto, el comercio
forma parte del nivel de mercado de cada divisin y se
localiza cerca de los centros de cada una; los servicios
pblicos forman parte del nivel de demanda y refuerzan el
diferente atractivo de cada divisin.
E. Las paredes entre las divisiones son otra forma de refuerzo de las divisiones espaciales. Pueden ser barreras artificiales o naturales (autopistas o vas de tren, colinas o ros),
las barreras e indicadores arquitectnicos (las formas de
vivienda, el emplazamiento de instalaciones pblicas), o
las barreras construidas individualmente (paredes comunitarias, vallas de alambre de pas, porteros y sistemas de
seguridad).
VIII. La tendencia de exclusin ms marcada en el nuevo
estado conservador tiende a producir cambios en cada
uno de los cinco barrios de la ciudad.
A. En primer lugar, la ciudad de lujo es ms no-espacial
que nunca, no porque no tenga un punto de referencia
fsica sino porque se localiza en muchos lugares incluso
para cada habitante; el movimiento es constante y los
puntos en los que los emplazamientos residenciales se
asientan se aislarn perfectamente de sus alrededores ms
amplios no dependientes espacialmente de su posicin en
la estructura urbana ms bien creando y controlando su
propio entorno a un micronivel.
B. La ciudad burguesa es ms grande y se sita ms cerca del
centro terciario, dominando ms sus alrededores y con
ms disposicin a crear desplazamiento que antes.
C. La ciudad suburbana conserva casi por completo sus
modelos previos aunque quizs en parte reestructurada en
subciudades, ciudades perifricas en el rea metropolitana y ciudades conectadas a los centros metropolitanos.
D. La ciudad de viviendas est compuesta proporcionalmente
por ms inmigrantes y variedades tnicas (y racialmente
variables) que antes. Forman enclaves, a menudo tnicamente definidos en las partes viejas de la ciudad y, en proporcin al resto de la ciudad, ms pequeos que antes. Si
la tendencia a la exclusin no es muy fuerte, los inmigrantes y sus barrios se podrn integrar, despus de un posible
perodo inicial de tensin, en la estructura urbana y los
emplazamientos individuales seguirn una trayectoria de
clase; si la tendencia de exclusin es muy fuerte el movimiento negativo hacia la ciudad abandonada es posible.
E. La ciudad abandonada estar directamente relacionada
con la tendencia de exclusin; guetos ms y ms marginados, normalmente en las afuera del centro de la ciudad,
extendindose radialmente hacia afuera.
IX. La divisin por barrios de la ciudad es intrnsicamente
dinmica.
A. La reestructuracin del espacio de las ciudades es una
caracterstica constante de las ciudades capitalistas.
1. Slo en los mejores barrios hay motivacin para el
cambio ms que para la solidificacin; la estructura
espacial de las ciudades acompaa al crecimiento
dinmico del capitalismo (desmonte de barriadas,
renovacin urbana, aburguesamiento, conversin de
usos residenciales a empresariales).
2. En los barrios de las dos clases intermedias hay una
cierta resistencia al cambio que viene de abajo (invasin, deterioro, rezonamiento para usos ms densos).
a) No hay resistencia para un cambio a mejor; prosperidad.
b) No hay reticencias por parte de los residentes para
mudarse a otros vecindarios; la lealtad a la tierra es
dbil, excepto en el caso de un cambio a peor.
3. En el barrio ms pobre ha surgido una nueva forma de
lealtad a la tierra, una resistencia al cambio, incluso al
cambio para mejor, al aburguesamiento, a la prosperidad con cambios en la ocupacin.
a) La resistencia es en parte defensiva: para evitar el
desplazamiento.
b) La resistencia tambin se basa en parte en la defensa del espacio como fuente de su fuerza.
c) Esto puede ser por definicin algo cultural, pero en
realidad es un asunto poltico-cultural que espera
causar impactos.
B. Tanto el modo en que se produce el cambio como las formas en las que se intenta conducir son fases nuevas del
postFordismo en la reconstruccin urbana.
1. El proceso espacial de reestructuracin ha cambiado.
a) Los cambios en periodos anteriores se producan en
su mayor parte por crecimiento ms que por reuti-
C.
X.
A.
B.
161 5 DACT
DACT 5 162
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
163 5 DACT
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
DACT 5 164
54
55
56
57
58
59
Editorial
Edward W. Soja
Postcards
22
Deyan Sudjic
Traffic in Democracy
52
Michael Sorkin
70
Christine Boyer
Planning y Postmodernidad
90
Joaqun Casariego
DACT 5 166
128
SANABRU SATRAC