Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis

Abstract

Several decades ago, the urban--viewed as the sum of productive practices and historical experiences--was seen as the vehicle for new values and an alternative civilization. Such hopes are fading concurrently with the last illusions of modernity. Today it is impossible to write with the lyricism and modernist ecstasy embraced by Apollinaire: Paris nights are drunk with gin And blaze with electricity Green fires, flashing along their spines Tramways up and down their rails Shed tunes of mechanical folly.(1) Eventually the critique of the modern city dovetails with the critique of everyday life in the contemporary world. And yet, this conclusion leads immediately to several paradoxes. The first is that the more the city is extended, the more its social relations deteriorate. Since the end of the 19th century, cities in most developed countries have experienced an extraordinary growth, kindling considerable hopes. But, in reality, city life has not produced entirely new social relations. Everything occurs as if the expansion of older cities and the establishment of new ones served to preserve and protect relations of dependence, domination, exclusion, and exploitation. In short, the framework of everydayness was slightly modified, but its contents were not transformed. And due to the expansion of urban forms on the one hand and the explosion of traditional forms of productive labor on the other, it is plausible to claim that the condition of city dwellers (citadins) was degraded even further. These consequences are intertwined. The appearance of new technologies leads simultaneously to new ways of organizing production and to new ways of organizing urban space. The latter interact in ways that are mutually detrimental rather than beneficial. There was a time when city centers were active and productive, and thus belonged to the workers (populaire). In this epoch, moreover, the City (cite) operated primarily through its center. The dislocation of this urban form began in the late 19th century, resulting in the deportation of all that the population considered active and productive into suburbs (banlieues), which were being located ever further away. The ruling class can be blamed for this, but it was simply making skillful use of an urban trend and a requirement of the relations of production. Could factories and polluting industries be maintained in the urban cores? Nevertheless, the political benefit for the dominant classes is clear: the gentrification (embourgeoisement) of city centers, the replacement of the earlier productive centrality with a center for decision making and services. The urban center is not only transformed into a site of consumption; it also becomes an object of consumption, and is valued as such. The producers, who had earlier been exported--or more accurately deported--to the suburbs, now return as tourists to the center from which they had been dispossessed and expropriated. Peripheral populations are today reclaiming urban centers as places of leisure, of empty and unscheduled time. In this way the urban phenomenon is profoundly transformed. The historic center has disappeared as such. All that remains are, on the one hand, centers for power and decision making and, on the other, fake and artificial spaces. It is true, of course, that the city endures, but only as museum and as spectacle. The urban, conceived and lived as a social practice, is in the process of deteriorating and perhaps disappearing. All this produces a specific dialecticization of social relations, revealing a second paradox: centers and peripheries presuppose and oppose one another. This phenomenon, which has deep roots and infamous historical precedents, is currently intensifying to such a degree that it encompasses the entire planet--as illustrated for example in North-South relations. Hence emerges a crucial question that exceeds that of the urban. Are new forms arising in the entire world and imposing themselves upon the city? …