Cities and Design

Paul L. Knox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136949166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Design

Cities, initially a product of the manufacturing era, have been thoroughly remade in the image of consumer society. Competitive spending among affluent households has intensified the importance of style and design at every scale and design professions have grown in size and importance, reflecting distinctive geographies and locating disproportionately in cities most intimately connected with global systems of key business services. Meanwhile, many observers still believe good design can make positive contributions to people's lives.

Cities and Design explores the complex relationships between design and urban environments. It traces the intellectual roots of urban design, presents a critical appraisal of the imprint and effectiveness of design professions in shaping urban environments, examines the role of design in the material culture of contemporary cities, and explores the complex linkages among designers, producers and distributors in contemporary cities, for example: fashion and graphic design in New York; architecture, fashion and publishing in London; furniture, industrial design, interior design and fashion in Milan; haute couture in Paris and so on.

This book offers a distinctive social science perspective on the economic and cultural context of design in contemporary cities, presenting cities themselves as settings for design, design services and the 'affect' associated with design.

PART I
Introduction

Part I provides an introduction to understanding and interpreting design in the context of the political economy of cities. Design plays a central role in the circulation and accumulation of capital. It also has to be understood in the context of the cultural and ideological changes associated with the shift from modernization to modernity and Modernism. Urban form, meanwhile, has to be interpreted in the context of the relationships among these changes. Cities and design also have to be understood in the context of the shift from mass production and mass consumption to the competitive consumption and the aestheticization of everyday life associated with ‘romantic capitalism’, the ‘dream economy’, and the ‘society of the spectacle’. Professional design cultures and design movements are introduced within the framework of these economic, cultural and urban changes, together with the role of cities as crucibles of creativity and design innovation.

1
Cities, design and urban life

This chapter introduces design as an important aspect of urban life, in terms of the contributions of design not only to the functionality and aesthetic appeal of things but also to the broader sweep of economic, social and cultural change. Design can challenge, modify or reinforce these changes. Because of the dominance of consumerism in contemporary societies, design is critical to the successful marketing of all sorts of products. Through design, people feel that they can construct their own identities and their class distinction through their environment and their patterns of consumption. Cities are crucial settings for both the production and consumption of design. This chapter introduces concepts associated with the rise of consumerism, the aestheticization of everyday life, and the semiotics of things, and describes the roles of design in relation to modernization, modernity and Modernism.

Design has become a central aspect of contemporary urban life. Design can make things not only more attractive but also more efficient and more profitable. It is deployed not only in the development and redevelopment of neighbourhoods, buildings and interior spaces but also in the production of every component of material culture. Indeed, the claims that can be made on behalf of design extend to every aspect of urban life. Design can make urban environments more legible and can assist people in wayfinding (Gibson 2009). It can help people with physical disabilities through codified ‘universal’ design (Herwig 2008). It can promote and ensure public health (Moudon 2005) and bring order and stability to otherwise complex, chaotic and volatile settings (Greed and Roberts 1998). It can make transportation and land use more efficient (Wright et al. 1997; Levy 2008). It can be deployed for the benefit of women (Rothschild 1999), children (Gleeson and Sipe 2006), elderly people and those with disabilities (Burton and Mitchell 2006), minority populations (Rishbeth 2001) and social diversity (Talen 2008). It can prevent crime, protect built heritage, foster a sense of place, engender community, encourage conviviality, contribute to sustainability and combat climate change. It can signal social status and lifestyle, reflect taste and spearhead cultural change. It can make places more appealing, buildings more striking, clothes more stylish and objects more efficient.

But other important aspects of design concern its wider economic and symbolic value and its roles in supporting and sustaining the political economy of urbanized capitalism (Knox 1984, 1987; Cuthbert 2006). Because design can make places and things more efficient, safer, more functional, more attractive and more desirable, it is a vital dimension of the exchange value of things and a key determinant of their marketability – whether a building, a subdivision, a dress or a lemon squeezer. Because design can embody ideals and signal values, it is potentially a potent element of the dynamics of the political economy of places and nations. Together, these wider economic and symbolic issues are arguably the most significant aspects of design in relation to cities and urban life; they will be the dominant themes of this book.

Design in economic and social context

‘In order to make sense of design’, observes Adrian Forty, ‘we must recognise that its disguising, concealing and transforming powers have been essential to the progress of modern industrial societies’ (Forty 2005: 13). Design has an unambiguous role in facilitating the circulation and accumulation of capital, helping to stimulate consumption through product differentiation aimed at particular market segments. ‘Designer’ as an adjective has come to connote prestige and desirability, while ‘designer’ as a noun has to connote celebrity. Because of the prestige and mystique socially accorded to creativity, design adds exchange value to products, conferring a presumption of quality even though, like the emperor’s clothes, this quality may not be apparent to every observer. Design also plays key roles in social reproduction, in the legitimation of authority, in the creation and maintenance of national identity, and in the absorption and deflection of ideas and movements that are potentially antithetical to dominant values and interests.

Most design historians recognize design as a specialist activity that emerged with the industrial revolution, mass production manufacture and consumer society. Yet, as John Walker observes, ‘There appears to be a deeply-entrenched conservatism among design historians, an unwillingness to confront the relationship between design and politics, design and social injustice’ (Walker 1989). Nevertheless, it is clear that,

since design’s beginning, when it was conceived as an art of giving form to products for mass production, it has been firmly embedded in consumer culture. Design’s first promoters in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Henry Cole in England and Herman Muthesius in Germany, for example, saw it exclusively in relation to the manufacture of products for the market.

(Margolin 1998: 83)

Kenneth Stowell, editor of Architectural Forum in the 1930s, acknowledged that ‘architects … remain ultimately the highly paid employees of realtors and builders or are themselves small businessmen with a stake in the common exploitation’ (quoted in F. Scott 2002: 47).

In the 1950s, the internationally respected designer George Nelson acknowledged that, by giving products a fashionable appearance, designers were virtually guaranteeing that they would seem obsolescent to consumers in a few years, thus continually stimulating demand and avoiding the market saturation. ‘What we need’, he added approvingly, ‘is more obsolescence, not less’ (Nelson 1956: 88). Since the 1950s, the underlying premise of design practice of all kinds – architecture, urban design and planning, interior design, product design, furniture design, fashion, photography, graphic design – has been that success ultimately depends on designers’ sensitivity to the currents of trends and tastes within culture and on their ability to lend traction to capital accumulation by articulating these values and tastes to the promotion of ideas and events, services and products, buildings and cities.

Design, then, is a key instrument in the commodification and formatting of culture; it is fundamentally about styling, coding and effective communication with an audience of consumers. As William Saunders, editor of the Harvard Design Magazine, puts it with reference to architecture:

along with every other cultural production (including music, photography, book publishing, the fine arts, and even education), the design of the built environment has been increasingly engulfed in and made subservient to the goals of the capitalist economy, more specifically the luring of consumers for the purpose of gaining their money.

(Saunders 2005: vii)

Few are as unabashed about these roles as Kevin Kelley, whose architectural practice is advertised to clients as providing ‘perception design’. His firm, he says, helps to

prompt customers to buy through environmental ‘signalling’ that influences their perceptions. In a sense, we are designing the consumers themselves. Brand cueing takes place in the built elements but also the menu, uniforms, logo, aromas, and music plus sensations, and, most importantly, emotions… . We changed the firm’s name to Shook with the tag line ‘It’s All Consuming’. We thus tell people that we eagerly embrace consumerism.

(Kelley 2005: 53)

From a more general perspective, design can be seen as reflecting the zeitgeist of the prevailing political economy while serving, like other components of the system, as one of the means through which the necessary conditions for the continuation of the system are reproduced. Designers’ roles as arbiters, creators and manipulators of aesthetics can be interpreted as part of the process whereby changing relationships within society at large become expressed in the ‘super-structure’ of ideas, institutions and objects. This allows us to see major shifts in design styles as dialectical responses to the evolving dynamics of urban-industrial society: part of a series of broad intellectual and artistic reactions to economic, social and cultural change. It also allows us to see design as a key instrument in the creation of national and metropolitan identities and the creation of class fractions and lifestyle groupings.

Another key role of design within the broader political economy is that of legitimation. Nineteenth-century businesses, for example, drew legitimacy from classical art, which had become closely associated with aristocratic and religious institutions. Hence department stores masqueraded as museums of art, banks were fitted out as ducal palaces, and factories were built to imitate castles. Today there is less imitation; instead, businesses acquire the originals – palazzi, stately homes and works of art – or sponsor museum spectaculars. A major theme in the literature on critical architectural history is the way that architecture has repeatedly veiled and obscured the realities of economic and social relations (Tafuri 1979). The physical arrangement and appearance of the built environment can help to suggest stability amid change (or vice versa), to create order amid uncertainty, and to make the social order appear natural and permanent. Thus there is a ‘silent complicity’ (Dovey 2000; Jones 2010) that exists between architects and the agendas of the politically and economically powerful.

Part of this effect is achieved through what political scientist Harold Lasswell (1979) called the ‘signature of power’. It is manifest in two ways: through majestic displays of power in the scenography of urban design, and through a ‘strategy of admiration’, aimed at diverting the audience with spectacular and dramatic architecture. It must be recognized, however, that it may not always be desirable to flaunt power. Legitimation may, therefore, require modest or low-profile design. Conversely, it is by no means only ‘high’ design that legitimizes the prevailing order. The everyday settings of home, workplace and neighbourhood also help to naturalize class and gender relations. Thus another important function of design is in social reproduction, creating settings and images that structure and channel the values and world-views of different class fractions and that contribute to ‘moral geographies’ that express particular value systems in material form.

Design can also function to commodify critical or antithetical movements, thereby acting as an ‘internal survival mechanism’ of consumer capitalism and allowing the dominant social order to protect itself from opposing ideological forces. Through design, the energy of oppositional movements is diverted into commercialism, so that the movements themselves, having forfeited their raw power, pass quietly away. Think of the student and labour unrest of the late 1960s, for example, that challenged corporate capitalism and flirted with communal lifestyles, anarchism and revolution, only to be ‘smothered beneath a cloying mass of Easy Rider posters and Love-and-Peace sew-on patches’ (Knox and Cullen 1981: 184; see also Hebdige 1979; Frank 1998). Or think of the oppositional energy of the aggressive punk culture that sprang from dole queues and public housing estates in England in the late 1970s and early 1980s, only to be drained away as designers for boutiques, high street retailers and hair salons co-opted punk fashion, and as the strident and rebellious music of pioneer punk groups was drowned out by the catchier and more harmonious sounds of commercial post-punk bands.

More recently, the subversive and transgressive subcultures of rap and hip-hop have quickly been converted into mass markets for giant-sized T-shirts, low-slung baggy jeans and ostentatious jewellery. More substantially, as we shall see in Chapter 3, the radical oppositional impulses of nineteenth-century communitarian social reform movements were translated into professionalized urban design and planning that was charged with the management of urban settings as efficient places for business as well as healthy places for productive workers. And, to take just one more example – to be elaborated in Chapter 4 – the aesthetic of the seminal Modernism of the Bauhaus, originally tied closely to socialist ideals, was quickly co-opted by corporate capital when its leading practitioners crossed the Atlantic.

Design in contemporary society

Today, it seems, everything is designed, and a ‘designer’ aesthetic permeates almost every aspect of urban life:

Few of the experiences we value at home, at leisure, in the city or the mall are free of its alchemical touch. We have absorbed design so deeply into ourselves that we no longer recognise the myriad ways in which it prompts, cajoles, disturbs an excites us. It’s completely natural. It’s just the way things are.

(Poynor 2007: 136)

The reason, of course, is that Western economies have been based for decades on a culture of materialism that has incrementally ramped up the importance of style, fashionability and cool. Economic historians point to the 1920s as the moment when consumers’ purchasing power began to match their aspirations, the mass production and mass consumption logic of Fordism unleashing a new sociocultural phenomenon: competitive consumption. This was also the moment when the idea of the home as a privileged consumer durable became established, with private homes as the stage for materialistic lifestyles and the containers for an extended range of material possessions. In the economic boom after the Second World War, material consumption took on a more expansive form as discretionary spending by the middle classes reached unprecedented levels.

Harvard economist James Duesenberry (1949) ide...

Table of contents

• Routledge critical introductions to urbanism and the city
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II The intentional city
• PART III Designer cities
• References
• Index