Cities and Power

Worldwide Perspectives

Göran Therborn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317301561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

What do cities tell us about power? How does power shape cities? These are the main questions answered by a multidisciplinary set of eminent urban scholar in crisp articles on capital cities from around the world, from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Jakarta to Moscow. Focus is on contemporary cities and their manifestations and representations of power, though often with a historical grounding, and the collection also includes an example of archaeological urban analysis, from northern Mesopotamia. Through its variety of approaches by leading scholars of the field, and its variety of cities with their different histories and their diverse national contexts and political organization the book gives a uniquely insightful and easily accessible world overview of cities of power.

This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Urban Sciences.

INTRODUCTION

Cities and power

In one, secondary, sense, this special issue on cities of power is related to an ongoing project of mine on cities of power. As far as I understand, it was the reason why professor In Kwon Park and the editors of IJUS most kindly invited me to guest edit it. Focusing on national capital cities of the globe, the project is interested in how cities over the years manifest and represent power, and thereby also generating contestations of power. It has spawned a small set of publications over the years¹, and currently I have embarked upon writing a concluding book.

As organized human settlements, cities are manifestations of power. The great urbanist Lewis Mumford (1938, p. 3) said that ‘the city … is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community’. Modern nation-state capital cities are, first of all, manifestations and representations of the power of nation-states and of national societies. In order to understand them, urban scholarship has to link up with political theory, political history, socio-economic history, and with the interdisciplinary scholarship on symbolic representation, ranging from philosophy to art history and to the theory and history of architecture.

Urban manifestations of power

Cities manifest power in two different ways, structurally and functionally.

Structurally, in their organization of space, its partitions, its accessibility, its pathways, its neighbourhoods, its clustering of buildings of different kinds, its patterns of ‘zoning’ in modern urban planning parlance, its centres and peripheries, its boundaries; in the patterns of spatial stratification, the ghettos and the gated communities, the formal and the informal settlements.

Historically, we have the ‘cosmograms’ of the great cities of Sinic and Indic civilizations, manifesting a mundane rendering of the order of heaven, still visible in today’s Beijing. There were the dual cities of many feudal (heteronomous) cities, the high city–low city distinction of Edo, Addis Ababa, Brussels, Kyiv, or Prague, for instance, the high city being that of the ruler and his closest vassals, sometimes, like in Kyiv also of the Lord and his church, the low city the site of merchants, artisans, peddlers, and populace. And there was the duality of the colonial cities, where a rule of thumb was that there should be at least 4–500 metres distance between the city of the colonizers and the townships of the colonized. The Belgians theorized that that was the limit of the flying capacity of a mosquito (from the swamp areas left to the colonized).

Functionally, cities manifest power in two basic ways, first, in their functioning in the economy and in the society (of the nation, or, more generally, of the polity): their economic role, of producing or consuming wealth, their location in the social structure of the country, of classes, ethnicities, and religions; second, in their capacity and willingness to provide services, of water, sanitation, electricity, housing, transport, and educational, social, and cultural services, and in their allocation of these services among the inhabitants of the city.

Representations of power

Cities usually try to convey a meaning of power; and capital cities by necessity or definition also represent power. Power needs representation, in order to enlist respect from its subjects or citizens, to assert the legitimacy of its rule, and for ambitious regimes of social change, to indicate the direction and rationale of desirable change.

Representations of power include:

The topographical and size hierarchy of buildings, in particular of public institutions, and private organizations and corporations.

The architectural ‘grammar of power’ (Thiis-Evensen, 1998) where size, height, weight, closure, distance, and symmetry indicate might and authoritarian power.

The architectural style, the meaning of which being largely path-dependent, however, requires a contextual historical interpretation. European neo-classicism was meant to be Republican in the founding of the USA and of Washington DC, for instance, while in Napoleonic Paris and in Tsarist Russia it was aimed at imperial representation. The former had republican Athens and Rome in mind, the latter imperial Rome.

The monumentality being, who and what are commemorated, in statues, sculptural ensembles, plaques, mausoleums and museums.

Toponymy being the naming of streets, squares, neighbourhoods, and institutions.

Cities are not only sites of power, but also, and capitals in particular, of contestations of power. This is sometimes inscribed in the fabric of the city: the papal Vatican in national Rome, the labour movement areas in the Nordic capitals, the counter-cultural “free city” of Christiania in Copenhagen, or the rallying places of leftwing protest in Paris.

Power can be of different kinds. In capital cities it is always political, among other things. Contemporary capitals, as well as other cities, also manifest and represent the power of capital, and not a few moreover express civic power, usually in their preservation of neighbourhoods against political and/or capitalist demolition-cum-“development” projects. Berlin has an institution of local referendum, which in May 2014 stopped a political city project of building on the no longer used central former airport Tempelhof.

Religious power is, of course, pre-modern, but it is often vaunted in contemporary Muslim nation-states and capitals in grand mosques from Moroccan Casablanca and Nigerian Abuja, to Malaysian Putrajaya and to Jakarta. The founding President of the Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouet-Boigny tried to turn his native village Yamassoukrou into the new capital, centred on his construction of the largest Catholic Christian cathedral of the world. Post-Communist Moscow rebuilt the central l9th century cathedral of Christ the Saviour, dynamited under Stalin for a huge Communist monument, which in the end turned out impossible to build.

The above are all features of the city. We should also pay attention to the verbal mediation of urban imagery, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic images of the city, the ‘holy cities’ of different religions, the cities of particular patron-saints, political epithets, like ‘Red Vienna’, the image of a “capital of the world” (contemporary New York, the “capital of culture” (today’s Paris), “world city” the declaration of Tokyo in the late l980s, of London from l990, a “global city” (eagerly adopted by all kinds city boosters and consultants since Saskia Sassen’s landmark book of l991), or, as a future aspiration, very audible from Lagos Nigeria to many Indian cities, a “world class city”.

Nations and their Capitals

The project is looking at how capital cities have developed out of the very different routes to a nation-state in the world, with enduring effects on the ensuing nation, on its urban structuring and functioning, and on its issues of urban representation. There were historically four main routes, shaping national capitals.

The internal – though often overdetermined by external imperial wars – conflict between princes and peoples in Europe. National capitals emerged through mutations of historically evolved princely cities or, along the East-Central strip of Europe, of provincial centres of dynastic empires.

The secession of the settlers of the Americas and, which in all the White British Empire, resulted in new, specifically built capitals, from Washington D.C. to Canberra, in order to balance the settler colonies. In Latin America, though, the national capitals were the former key sites of imperial power.

The emancipation from colonialism by the colonized of Africa and Asia. The colonial capitals were usually of colonial creation, but were nevertheless almost always kept as the new national capitals, with the new national elite moving into the previous site of the colonial, from the High City Plateau of Dakar and Abidjan to the garden cities of New Delhi and Jakarta Weltevreden.

The Reactive Modernization from above by realms is under imperialist threat, of which Japan is the paradigmatic, most successful example, but which also includes Iran, Siam, and Abbyssinia (today’s Thailand and Ethiopia, respectively), and partly the central successors of the Ottoman empire, Turkey and Egypt. Here the construction of paradigmatic modern Western buildings was important as signifiers of modernity, expressed, for instance, in Tokyo station or the new royal palaces of Bangkok.

Some modern nations travelled on more than one road, Russia along the first and the fourth, China combining the fourth and the third with the first (the European import of Communism), Korea starting out as Reactive Modernization but succumbing to Japanese colonialism.

The cities are then followed in their historical trajectories, of state and city regime changes Within their nation-states national populations grew, and not only in numbers, but in resources, of education, industrial skills, income, and civic autonomy. Their ensued Popular Moments, of popular demands and mobilization, affecting the course of cities, their supply of services, and their iconography. Most often they were driven by popular city governments, from interwar Red Vienna to contemporary Mexico City and Jakarta, but they could occasionally be driven by militant grassroots movements, like Amsterdam in the l970s–l980s.

The Popular Moments of public demands and of governance were as a rule strongly contested, and often involved or generated radical regime change, usually accompanied by major urban changes. My work looks into the coming and going of Fascism and military dictatorships, and of Communist revolutions. While the regimes have gone, their urban traces are still discernible, and part of the geology of today’s capitals.

Currently, we are living a Global Moment of cities, of global influences, global competition, and post-national global iconicity. It has a quite complex pedigree, going back to the World Exhibitions of the l9th century, which spawned the world’s first global icon, the Tour Eiffel of Paris, meandering between European architectural modernism and American skyscraper engineering and capital. Today’s Global Moment is the assertion of global real estate and finance capital, mainly manifested in for profit speculative high constructions² (Haila, 2015). Its urban breakthrough can be dated to the early l990s, and the victorious assertion of the Thatcherite development of the London Docklands, coming after the stalled Tokyo world city hype, and after the New York l980s return to growth. Saskia Sassen’s The Global City (l991) was perfectly timed for the launching reception.

A planetary tour of cities

The scholars I invited to this issue do not necessarily agree with the above framework. They were selected on two quite different criteria, excellence in urban study, and geographic dispersion across the planet. So, in another, much more important sense, this journal issue is not connected to my particular project.

What you have here, are 9 of the most brilliant urban scholars of the world.³ As such, they were given free hand, to write whatever they wanted about one or more capital cities and their relations to power. I am very proud of, and grateful to, the galaxy of urbanists brought together here.

Neither as an editor nor, even less so, as a reader, do I believe in introductions rolling out pre-chewed summaries of the contributions to follow, thereby taking all suspense out of them. However, I will give you a brief glimpse of the articles below, and of what they, in my opinion, first of all (among all what they give us) contribute to the problematic of cities of power.

James Osborne’s study of Syrio-Anatolian city-states and of capitals of the Neo-Assyrian empire about three thousand years ago conveys a striking similarity of the questions and puzzles which many archaeologists are struggling with and those which entice historians and social scientists of modern times in their common search for relation between cities and power. What do buildings and their topographical ordering mean? What does the (ruined) built environment tell us about the social stratification of the settlement or of household power relations? How are cities related to their surroundings? Those of us privileged to be able to work with documentary evidence, with interviews of power holders, contestants, and city inhabitants, and to observe with our own eyes cities in operation have much to learn from the ingenuity of archaeologists in answering similar questions as we are by bringing their scanty, silent evidence to speak. (See further, e.g. Osborne, 2014)

At another end of time are three papers, which highlight the dramatic changes of some urban history in the last two to three decades. While urban understanding always requires a historical dimension and the fact that urban change usually has a geological character to it – adding a new layer while not obliterating everything precedent – it is also true that sometimes city change can be swift and brutal, rapidly manifesting new relations of power. Margarita Gutman gives us a graphic contrast of Buenos Aires under a terroristic military dictatorship in the 1970s–early 1980s, and a city of a civilian democracy, celebrating its Bicentenary of Independence in 2010. Alan Mabin treats the profound and rapid, but peaceful transformation of Pretoria, as the capital of a racist settler-nation (South Africa), into Tshwane, the capital of a democratic, multi-ethnic post-colonial nation. The dramatic transformations are analysed with a special vibrancy because the authors wee deeply personally involved. Their analyses also bring forth the contingency of urban change. In all three cases, opposite alternatives were possible in the 1980s–early 1990s.

To urban scholars formed before the post-Second World War process of decolonization, the didactic city of power was the ‘Baroque City’ of European Absolutism. Nowadays, most people would agree tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Cities and power
• 2. Ancient cities and power: the archaeology of urbanism in the Iron Age capitals of northern Mesopotamia
• 3. Hidden and exposed faces of power in Buenos Aires
• 4. Tshwane and spaces of power in South Africa
• 5. Cities of power and protest: spatial legibility and the colonial state in early twentieth-century India
• 6. Power and time turning: The capital, the state, and the kampung in Jakarta
• 7. Planet Moscow, a guide to the changing landscape of power
• 8. City power and urban fiscal crises: the USA, China, and India
• 9. The landscape of Tokyo power
• 10. Cities (and regions) within a city: subnational representations and the creation of European imaginaries in Brussels Carola Hein
• Index