Urban Futures

Critical Commentaries on shaping Cities

Tim Hall, Malcolm Miles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134499908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Urban Futures brings together commentaries from a wide range of contemporary disciplines and fields relevant to urban culture, form and society. The book concerns cities in the broadest sense, not just as buildings and spaces, but also as processes and events or sites of occupation, in which meanings are constructed in many ways. The contributors draw on their specialist areas of research to inform current debate, but they also speculate as to how cities will be shaped in the 21st century.
Specific areas of research include homeless people's organisations and restoration ecology in brownfield sites in the USA, post-industrial urban landscapes, post-industrial economics, tourism and cultural planning. The book allows each writer to state their own conclusions, but together they suggest that tomorrow's cities will, while remaining locations of difference and contestation, be rapidly evolving systems in which dwellers assume increasing responsibilities and power.

PART I
Framing

Broken columns in front of a converted warehouse, Manchester, UK (Photo: Malcolm Miles)

INTRODUCTION

This part includes three critical reflections on images or texts which serve as points of departure for a wider reconsideration of change in cultural and urban histories. Each, then, begins from a study of specific imaginaries as manifest in visual or verbal cultures, in order to investigate questions of temporality and spatiality, of difference, and of narrative, and how these are perceived in ways which themselves convey the tensions and fluidity of urban conditions and psyches.

Jane Rendell cites Walter Benjamin on a painting by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1928, Israel Museum, Jerusalem): an angel, emblem of thresholds, caught at the threshold of time, merging past and future in the instant. Benjamin writes of this image in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, completed in 1940 (Benjamin, 1992: 255–66), the first passage of which offers an image of an automaton playing chess, always winning but its strings in fact pulled by a hidden, hunchback expert player. He likens the automaton to historical materialism, the philosophy of determination by circumstance which Marx criticises as lacking a principle of active intervention to make the dialectic. Part of Benjamin’s intention is to reintroduce, in but also beyond dialectical materialism, a sense of immanent (pervasive) rather than imminent redemption: ‘only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past’ (passage III). This is in the face of the technologically achieved devastation of the 1914–18 war in Europe and the rise of fascism; the state of emergency is ‘not the exception but the rule’ and the task in hand ‘to bring about a real state of emergency’ against fascism (passage VIII).

For Rendell, reading Benjamin viewing Klee, the moment at which time is stayed is the point of dialectical contradiction, the argument stilled and paradoxically eased into motion in the tension of its polarities. Rendell sees in Benjamin’s work a creative tension between sub-title and content, repositioning the new in the old, for which the emancipatory angel is a metaphorical figure between theory and practice.

In 1922, Benjamin took the name Angelus Novus for a proposed journal, though it was seen by the publisher as commercially non-viable and never appeared. And he was forced a few years later to withdraw, or have failed, his Habilitationsschrift (the final doctoral thesis required in Germany for an academic career) which the examiners found incomprehensible (Gilloch, 2002: 15). Its subject was German seventeenth-century tragic drama (Trauerspiel), in which for Benjamin history is likened to a process of natural decay, represented in this genre as fragmentation, ruination and mortification (Gilloch, 2002: 15). This is close to elements of his (much later) theses on history, which Richard Wolin in Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, singling out the passage on the angel, summarises as depicting ‘a vast heap of ruins that grows incessantly higher with the passage of time’ yet which is lit from the future by ‘a redemptive hope’ (Wolin, 1994: 61). Wolin adds that such an understanding can be communicated only in metaphorical terms. Esther Leslie, too, in Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, sees the angel as standing on ruins, ‘staring in half-disbelief at the ruins, devastated by the failure to co-operate, made manifest in the sheer destructive capacity of technological progress’ (Leslie, 2000: 7). Benjamin’s doctoral study was eventually published in 1928–now translated in English as The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In it he refutes criticism as (definitive) interpretation, which assumes a power relation, and instead proposes an immersion in the material on which reflection takes place, a heightening of consciousness in which the truth of the work speaks and the work itself is extended, again through the oblique medium of metaphor. Rendell, adapting categories used by Benjamin, describes her text as angelic in form, situated between subjectivity and objectivity, between critical and creative writing. Its form is, unlike any other essay in this book, that of a creative rather than simply discursive practice, structured as ten meditations on images of emptiness followed by a reiteration of the first heading as coda. Those images–for instances the photographs of Rut Blees Luxemburg and Catherine Yass, or Tacita Dean’s work on abandoned (because out-dated) technologies of surveillance–are in keeping with Benjamin’s understanding of history as ruin, but also as what we have.

Dorothy Rowe, in another way, uses an intersection of text and visual imagery, from Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth (2000) and the work of artists Sonia Boyce, Zarina Bhimji, Sutapa Biswas, and others. Rowe adapts Griselda Pollock’s idea of differencing the canon of art history, mapping categories of race and gender as well as class onto contemporary cultural production, specifically in London. Drawing, too, on David Sibley’s Geographies of Exclusion (1995), Rowe adds that difference is not only a position constructed in marginality but potentially an enabling one as well, a making of visibility, literally and metaphorically, for difference. This would accord with the refusal of assimilation in favour of group identity formation for which Iris Marion Young argues (1990), as referenced by Malcolm Miles in the third chapter in this section. The argument for a dispersal of conventional structures of power through a reconfiguration of the centre–margin model, then, as a multiplicity of sites in contending, contesting and contingent relation but in which the concept of hierarchy is deconstructed through positive recognition of difference, occurs in both cultural and political stories. As Rowe states, the transgression of boundaries is a tangible point of assertiveness.

Rowe cites the exhibition Shamania: The Mughal Tent (1991, Victoria and Albert Museum, London) devised by Shireen Akbar as addressing the cultural and educational issues facing British South Asian women and children. This draws in another kind of threshold, that of mass migration, which is sometimes seen as specific to late twentieth-century globalisation. While isolation and loneliness are frequently recurring images in this collective textile work, Rowe notes, too, the type of an imagined homeland as characteristic of a diasporic culture. This is not a nostalgic notion, but prob-lematises questions such as where is home, how the site of domesticity and everyday life is transported yet always somewhere else, something other (not least from the dominant culture). Rowe agrees with Anthony King’s (2000) case that urban studies needs a language in which to address otherness, arguing that it is in visual culture’s representations of difference that this can be found.

In the third chapter, Malcolm Miles offers a critical reconsideration of the disaster scenario as informing and perhaps coercing urban trajectories. Drawing on Edward Soja’s (2000) critique of Mike Davis’ well-known writing, he notes the invisibility for Davis of resistance, the absence of voices from margins, and the overwhelming gloom of an analysis positively identifying contradictions in neo-liberalism’s happy fiction but subsumed in an apocalyptic myth which has its own adrenalin-producing attractions. There may be a cold war on the streets, but its representation goes uncomfortably close to the genre of the (men’s) war comic. And if narratives influence how the plot evolves, and what parts people might play in it, then it seems that the construction of narratives, rather than their pronouncement as interpretations of the world for others, is a necessary site of intervention.

Miles draws on postmodern and feminist geography (Massey, 1994, for instance), as well as radical planning (Sandercock, 1998a) and political science (Young, 1990), to piece together something of an alternative set of positions. Thinking back to Rendell’s use of Benjamin, and Benjamin’s redemptive history read back, as it were, from the end, the disaster scenario in urban writing, both academic and fictional, posits a bleak absence of any such hope; neither the cold war on the streets nor the threat of toxic conflagration or civil disintegration promises any lamp to illuminate the present’s ruin. In contrast, accepting a kind of non-integration in which difference is seen as a category in planning and political life, and through assertion of identity formation, the immanence of Benjamin’s critical project might be translated into, in part, a reconfiguration of the idea of a public sphere. That is, into a location not so much of that informal mingling of citizens projected perhaps nostalgically onto spaces such as the commons (in North American history) but more a mental and communicative space in which the subject’s self-understanding derives from its perceptions of and by others–at root an Arendtian concept (1958) but one which can be enhanced through postmodern frames of difference, contiguity and recognition of the transformative aspects of everyday lives.

1 JANE RENDELL
Where the Thinking Stops, Time Crystallises…

I THE ANGEL OF HISTORY

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Benjamin, 1992: 259)

Starting with Walter Benjamin’s comments on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, this chapter looks at the present as a place between past and future, a place where past actions and future intentions meet. Angelus Novus shows an angel caught at the threshold of time, allowing the coming together of the past and the future in one instant. Occupying a threshold position in space, time and consciousness: between history and myth, between dream and awakening, between antiquity and modernity, Klee’s angel was a key image for Benjamin. The figure of the angel is dialectics at a stand-still–a frozen moment encapsulating dialectical contradiction. At this moment, the present is allowed access to the past. Here the past and the future, the ‘has-been’ and the ‘not-yet’, come together in a single configuration creating, for Benjamin, a ‘monad’.

In One-Way Street, Benjamin created dialectical tensions in his own work; he played on the juxtaposition of subtitle and content in each of his prose pieces, using the subtitles to bring to life hidden meanings in the prose text. For art practice using techniques of juxtaposition may involve using text or titles to displace perceived meanings, or placing an object in a site in order to recontextualise meaning. Here the positioning of something new into an ‘old’ or existing context may work to displace certain preconceived meanings of the past, creating alternative histories and suggesting new futures.

For me, the angel provides an emancipatory impulse for thinking between places, times, people, things and ideas. Referencing the figure of the angel as a messenger or threshold figure works metaphorically as a device for moving between theory and practice, as well as across disciplinary boundaries between architecture, art, critical theory, geography and philosophy. This chapter is not structured as part of a linear and progressive argument, but rather as a collection of self-contained pieces, with similar themes that overlap and reiterate notions of the angelic as ‘the between’. The chapter is angelic in content and form. The style is angelic thinking, a mode which is both subjective and objective, critical and creative. The structure is an angelic topography, an architecture with a complex pattern that can only be compared to the intricate structure of a snowflake not discernible to the naked eye, or a multifaceted crystal that changes in the light, or even to a kaleidoscope that fragments an existing view of the world. Angels are not simply messengers, they are also figures of transformation. In their status as flux, as ever-changing, they challenge traditional modes of representation and offer opportunities to think about space and time differently. In this case, an angelic temporality is one where memory is not nostalgic but imaginative, and which chooses neither to look backwards nor forwards, but to focus on the potential offered by engaging with the present moment.

From Rut Blees Luxemburg, Katherine Yass and Uta Barth, to Tacita Dean, Jane and Louise Wilson and Victor Burgin, contemporary artists working in photography and video seem obsessed with capturing the present as a frozen moment, often in relation to permanently or temporarily abandoned buildings. Images of buildings in the architectural press are rarely cluttered by inhabitants or even traces of inhabitation. This current fascination with places devoid of people is different. In these photographs of architecture, the emptiness is not about keeping the details clean, the gesture is more generous. Here the emptiness is not created in order to view the object better, but in order to provide a place for the viewer to imagine. These images are suggestive. These places have not always been and will not always be empty. Their very emptiness in the present passing moment allows us to project all kinds of alternative scenarios onto them–past and future. Like detectives we search for clues, traces of past occupations; like script writers, we set up props for future activities.

A similar kind of interest can be found in the work of artists intervening in abandoned spaces, such as Ann Hamilton; dealing with material expressions of absence and presence, such as Rachel Whiteread; or exploring decay and transience, such as Anya Gallaccio. Here we have insertions into found spaces, not simply as the presence of a gaze, but as the physical action of placing something material in a site. Whether inside a traditional gallery, or in the urban realm outside the gallery, these artists tend to engage closely with the situations and contexts they find themselves working within. The kinds of objects they ‘place’ in these spaces do not necessarily operate through dialectical juxtaposition, but through the insertion of moments which allow time to expand. In this way their tactics are analogous to the work of those making photographic images. In both cases, despite the differences in media, the viewer is asked to engage with the object they are presented with in such a way that they have no choice but to become conscious of the passing of time.

II LUSTRE

• the quality or condition of shining by reflected light
• a sheen or gloss
• an iridescent metallic decorative surface on ceramics
• the glaze used to produce this
• a thin dress fabric with a fine cotton (formerly also silk or mohair) warp and worsted weft
• a glossy surface
• any fabric with a sheen or gloss
• to make attractive be or become lustrous.

III GOLD SHEEN

… like the febrile light with which Blees Luxemburg’s photographs are suffused, is a reality rendered artificial in the brief suspension of time.

(Bracewell, 1997: 11)

Caliban Towers I and II is one in a series by Rut Blees Luxemburg, entitled London: a modern city. It images two high-rise buildings aspiring to touch the skies. Luxemburg’s photographic technique, shooting at night with a long exposure, gives the inanimate architecture a strange luminescence. Empty façade...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• URBAN FUTURES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• GENERAL INTRODUCTION
• PART I: FRAMING
• PART II: MOVING
• PART III: PRACTISING
• PART IV: SHAPING
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY