1
II
From the City to Urban Society
I'll begin with the following hypothesis: Society has been completely urbanized. This hypothesis implies a definition: An
urban society is a society that results from a process of complete urbanization. This urbanization is virtual today, but will
become real in the future.
The above definition resolves any ambiguity in the use
of our terms. The words "urban society" are often used to
refer to any city or urban agglomeration: the Greek polis, the
oriental or medieval city, commercial and industrial cities,
small cities, the megalopolis. As a result of the confusion, we
have forgotten or overlooked the social relationships (primarily relationships of production) with which each urban
type is associated. These so-called urban societies are often
compared with one another, even though they have nothing
in common. Such a move serves the underlying ideologies of
organicism (every urban society, viewed on its own, is seen as
an organic"whole"), continuism (there is a sense ofhistorical
continuity or permanence associated with urban society),
and evolutionism (urban society is characterized by different
1
2 II From the City to Urban Society
periods, by the transformation of social relations that fade
away or disappear).
.
Here, I use the term "urban society" to refer to the society that results from industrialization, which is a process
of domination that absorbs agricultural production. This
urban society cannot take shape conceptually until the end
of a process during which the old urban forms, the end result of a series of discontinuous transformations, burst apart.
An important aspect of the theoretical problem is the ability
to situate the discontinuities and continuities with respect to
one another. How could any absolute discontinuities exist
without an underlying continuity, without support, without some inherent process? Conversely, how can we have
continuity without crises, without the appearance of new
elements or relationships?
The specialized sciences (sociology, political economy,
history, human geography) have proposed a number of
ways to characterize "our" society, its reality and deep-seated
trends, its actuality and virtuality. Terms such as "industrial
and postindustrial society:' "the technological society:' "the
society of abundance," "the leisure society:• "consumer society:• and so on have been used. Each of these names contains an element of empirical or conceptual truth, as well as
an element of exaggeration and extrapolation. Instead of the
term "postindustrial society"-the society that is born of in·dustrialization and succeeds it-I will use "urban society;' a
( term that refers to tendencies, orientations, and virtualities,
, rather than any preordained reality. Such usage in no way
"precludes a critical examination of contemporary reality,
such as the analysis of the "bureaucratic society of controlled
consumption."
Science is certainly justified in formulating such theoretical hypotheses and using them as a point of departure. Not
only is such a procedure current among the sciences, it is
necessary. There can be no science without theoretical hy-
From the City to Urban Society II 3
potheses. My hypothesis, which involves the so-called social
sciences, is based on an epistemological and methodological
approach. Knowledge is not necessarily a copy or reflection,
a simulacrum or simulation of an object that is already real.
Nor does it necessarily construct its object for the sake of a
theory that predates knowledge, a theory of the object or
its "models." In my approach, the object is included in the
hypothesis; the hypothesis comprehends the object. Even
though this "object" is located outside any (empirical) fact,
it is not fictional. We can assume the existence of a virtual
object, urban society; that is, a possible object, whose growth
and development can be analyzed in relation to a process
and a praxis (practical activity). Needless to say, such a hypothesis must be validated. There is, however, no shortage of
arguments and proofs to sustain it, from the simplest to the
most complex.
For example, agricultural production has lost all its autonomy in the major industrialized nations and as part of
a global economy. It is no longer the principal sector of the
economy, nor even a sector characterized by any distinctive
features (aside from underdevelopment). Even though local
and regional features from the time when agricultural production dominated haven't entirely disappeared, it has been
changed into a form of industrial production, having become subordinate to its demands, subject to its constraints.
Economic growth and industrialization have become selflegitimating, extending their effects to entire territories, regions, nations, and continents. As a result, the traditional unit typical of peasant life, namely the village, has been
transformed. Absorbed or obliterated by larger units, it has
become an integral part of industrial production and consumption. The concentration of the population goes hand in
hand with that of the mode of production. The urban fabri£
grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian
life. This expression, "urban fabric;' does not narrowly define
4 II From the City to Urban Society
the built world of cities but all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the country. In this sense, a vacation
home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all
part of the urban fabric. Of varying density, thickness, and
activity, the only regions untouched by it are those that are
stagnant or dying, those that are given over to "nature."
With the decline of the village life of days gone by, agricultural producers, "farmers," are confronted with the agricultural town. Promised by Khrushchev to the Soviet peasants,
agricultural towns have appeared in various places around
the world. In the United States, aside from certain parts of
the South, peasants have virtually disappeared, and we find
islands of farm poverty alongside islands of urban poverty. As this global process of industrialization and urbanization was taking place, the large cities exploded, giving rise to
growths of dubious value: suburbs, residential conglomerations and industrial complexes, satellite cities that differed
little from urbanized towns. Small and midsize cities became
dependencies, partial colonies of the metropolis. In this way
my hypothesis serves both as a point of arrival for existing
knowledge and a point of departure for a new study and new
projects: complete urbanization. The hypothesis is anticipatory. It prolongs the fundamental tendency of the present.
Urban society is gestating in and through the "bureaucratic
,ociety of controlled consumption."
A negative argument, proof by the absurd: No other hypothesis will work, no other hypothesis can cover the entire
range of problems. Postindustrial society? Then what happens after industrialization? Leisure society? This addresses
Jnly part of the question, since we limit our examination of
trends and virtualities to "infrastructure;' a realist attitude
:hat in no way circumvents the demagoguery inherent in this
:lefinition. The indefinite growth of mass consumption? Here,
Ne measure current indices and extrapolate from them,
hereby running the risk of reducing reality and virtuality to
mly one of their aspects. And so on.
From the City to Urban Society II 5
The expression "urban society'' meets a theoretical need.
It is more than simply a literary or pedagogical device, or
even the expression of some form of acquired knowledge;
it is an elaboration, a search, a conceptual formulation. A
movement of thought toward a certain concrete, and perhaps
toward the concrete, assumes shape and detail. This movement, if it proves to be true, will lead to a practice, urban
practice, that is finally or newly comprehended. Needless to
say, a threshold will have to be crossed before entering the
concrete, that is, social practice as understood by theory.
But there is no empirical recipe for fabricating this product,
this urban reality. Isn't this what we so often expect from
"urbanism" and what "urbanists" so often promise? Unlike a
fact-filled empiricism with its risky extrapolations and fragments of indigestible knowledge, we can build a theory from
a theoretical hypothesis. The development of such a theory
is associated with a methodology. For example, research involving a virtual object, which attempts to define and realize
that object as part of an ongoing project, already has a name:
transduction. The term reflects an intellectual approach tO:
ward a possible object, which we can employ alongside the
more conventional activities of deduction and induction.
The concept of an urban society, which I introduced above,
thus implies a hypothesis and a definition.
Similarly, by
_revolution" I refer to the transformations that affect contemporary society, ranging from the
period when questions of growth and industrialization predominate (models, plans, programs) to the period when the
urban problematic becomes predominant, when the search
for solutions and modalities unique to urban society are
foremost. Some of these transformations are sudden; others
are gradual, planned, determined. But which ones? This is a
legitimate question. It is by no means certain in advance that
the answer will be clear, intellectually satisfying, or unambiguous. The words "urban revolution" do not in themselves
refer to actions that are violent. Nor do they exclude them.
6 II From the City to Urban Society
But how do we discriminate between the outcome of violent
action and the product of rational action before their occurrence? Isn't violence characterized by its ability to spin out of
control? Isn't thought characterized by the effort to reduce
violence, beginning with the effort to destroy the chains that
bind our thought?
There are two aspects of urbanism that we will need to
address:
1. For years scholars have viewed urbanism as a social practice
that is fundamentally scientific and technical in nature.
In this case, theory can and should address this practice
by raising it to a conceptual level and, more specifically,
to the level of epistemology. However, the absence of any
such urban epistemology is striking. Is it worth developing such an epistemology, then? No. In fact, its absence
is highly significant. For the institutional and ideological
nature of what is referred to as urbanism has-until a
new order comes into being-taken precedence over its
scientific nature. If we assume that this procedure can
be generalized and that understanding always involves
epistemology, then it is clear that it plays no role in contemporary urbanism. It is important to understand why
and how.
2. As it currently exists, that is, as a policy (having institutional and ideological components), urbanism can be
criticized both from the right and the left. The critique
from the right, which is well known, is focused on the
past and is frequently humanist. It subsumes and justifies
a neoliberal ideology of''free enterprise:· directly or indirectly. It opens a path for the various "private" initiatives
of capitalists and capital. The critique from the left, frequently overlooked, is not associated with any so-called
leftist group, club, party, apparatus, or ideology. Rather,
it attempts to open a path to the possible, to explore and
From the City to Urban Society II 7
delineate a landscape that is not merely part of the "real,"
the accomplished, occupied by existing social, political,
and economic forces. It is a utopian critique because it
steps back from the real without, however, losing sight
of it.
We can draw an axis as follows:
0----------------------100%
The axis runs from the complete absence of urbanization
("pure nature," the earth abandoned to the elements) on the
left to the completion of the process on the right. A signifier
for this signified--the urban (the urban reality)--this axis
is both spatial and temporal: spatial because the process
extends through space, which it modifies; temporal because
it develops over time. Temporality, initially of secondary
importance, eventually becomes the predominant aspect of
practice and history. This schema presents no more than an
aspect of this history, a division of time that is both abstract
and arbitrary and gives rise to operations (periodizations)
that have no absolute privilege but are as necessary (relative)
as other divisions.
I'd like to plant a few signposts along this path delineated
by the "urban phenomenon" (the urban, in short). Initially
there were populations that had been identified by anthropology and ethnology. Around this initial zero, the first
human groups (gatherers, fishers, hunters, possibly herders)
marked out and named space; they explored it while marking it. They indicated place-names, fundamental topoi. It
was a topology and spatial grid that peasants, attached to the
soil, later perfected and refined without upsetting the overall fabric. What is important is that in many places around
the world, and most certainly any place with a history, the
existence of the city has accompanied or followed that of
8 II From the City to Urban Society
the village. The representation according to which cultivated land, the village, and farm civilization slowly secreted
urban reality reflects an ideology. It generalizes from what
took place in Europe during the breakdown of the Roman
Empire and following the reconstruction of the medieval
city. It's just as easy to maintain the contrary position, however. Agriculture was little more than gathering, and was
only formalized through pressure (authoritarian) from the
urban centers, generally occupied by skillful conquerors who
had become protectors, exploiters, and oppressors, that is,
administrators, the founders of a state, or the rudiments of
a state. The political dty accompanies or closely follows the
establishment of organized social life, agriculture, and the
village.
It goes without saying that such an assumption is meaningless when it involves endless spaces characterized by a
seminomadic existence, an impoverished itinerant agriculture. It is obviously based primarily on studies and documents concerning "Asian modes of production," the ancient
civilizations that created both urban and agricultural life
(Mesopotamia, Egypt, and so on). 1 The general question of
the relationship between the city and the countryside is far
from being resolved, however.
I'm going to take the risk of locating the political city
at the point of origin on the space-time axis. The political
city was populated primarily by priests, warriors, princes,
"nobles," and military leaders, but administrators and scribes
were also present. The political city is inconceivable without
writing: documents, laws, inventories, tax collection. It is
completely given over to orders and decrees, to power. Yet it
also implies the existence of exchange to procure the materials essential to warfare and power (metal, leather, and so on),
and of artisanship to fashion and maintain them. Thus, such
a city also comprises artisans and workers. The political city
administers, protects, and exploits a territory that is often
From the City to Urban Society II 9
vast. It manages large-scale agricultural projects such as
drainage, irrigation, the construction of dams, the dearing
of land. It rules over a number of villages. Ownership of the
land becomes the eminent right of a monarch, the symbol
of order and action. Nonetheless, peasants and communities
retain effective possession through the payment of tribute.
In such an environment, exchange and trade can only expand. Initially confined to suspicious individuals, to "strangers," they become functionally integrated into the life of
the city. Those places given over to exchange and trade are
initially strongly marked by the signs of heterotopy. Like
the people who are responsible for and inhabit them, these
places are at the outset excluded from the political city: cara-
vansaries, fairgrounds, suburbs. This process of integrating
markets and merchandise (people and things) in the city
can last for centuries. Exchange and trade, which are essential to the survival of life, bring wealth and movement. The
political city resists this with all the power at its disposal, all
its cohesiveness; it feels, knows, that it is threatened by markets, merchandise, and traders, by their form of ownership
(money, a form of personal property, being movable by definition). There is ample evidence that Athens, a political city,
coexisted with Piraeus, a commercial city, and that attempts
to ban the presence of merchandise in the agora, a free space
and political meeting place, were unsuccessful. When Christ
chased the merchants from the temple, the ban was similar,
had the same meaning. In China and Japan, merchants were
for years an urban underclass, relegated to a "special" {heterotopic) part of the city. In truth, it is only in the European
West, at the end of the Middle Ages, that merchandise, the
market, and merchants were able to successfully penetrate
the city. Prior to this, itinerant merchants-part warrior, part
thief-deliberately chose to remain in the fortified remains
of ancient {Roman) cities to facilitate their struggle against
the territorial lords. Based on this assumption, the renewed
10 II From the City to Urban Society
political city would have served as a frame for the action that
was to transform it. During this (class) struggle against the
overlords, who were the owners and rulers of the territory, a
prodigiously fecund struggle in the West that helped create
not only a history but history itself, the marketplace became
centralized. It replaced and supplanted the place of assembly
(the agora, the forum). Around the market, which had now
become an essential part of the city, were grouped the church
and town hall (occupied by a merchant oligarchy), with its
belfry or campanile, the symbol of liberty. Architecture follows and translates the new conception of the city. Urban
space becomes the meeting place for goods and people, for
exchange. It bears the signs of this conquered liberty, which
is perceived as Liberty-a grandiose but hopeless struggle.
In this sense, it is legitimate to assign a symbolic value to
the bastides, or walled towns, of southwest France, the first
cities to take shape around the local marketplace. History is
filled with irony. The fetishism associated with merchandise
appeared along with the rise of merchandise. its logic and
ideology, its language and world. In the fourteenth century
it was believed that it was sufficient to establish a market and
build stores, gateways, and galleries around a central square
to promote the growth of goods and buyers. In this way,
both the nobility and the bourgeoisie built merchant cities
in areas that were undeveloped, practically desert, and still
crisscrossed by herds and migratory, seminomadic tribes.
These cities of the French southwest, although they bear the
names of some of our great and wealthy cities (Barcelona,
Bologna, Plaisance, Florence, Grenada, and so on), were
failures. The merchant city succeeded the political city. At
this time (approximately the fourteenth century in western
Europe), commercial exchange became an urban function,
which was embodied in a form (or forms, both architectural
and urban). This in turn gave urban space a new structure.
The changes that took place in Paris illustrate this complex
From the City to Urban Society II 11
interaction among the three essential aspects of function,
form, and structure. Market towns and suburbs, which were
initially commercial and artisanal-Beaubourg, Saint-Antoine,
Saint-Honore-grew in importance and began to struggle
with centers of political power (institutions) for influence,
prestige, and space, forcing them to compromise, entering
with them in the construction of a powerful urban unity.
At one moment in the history of the European West, an
event of great importance occurred, but one that remained
latent because it went unnoticed. The importance of the city
for the social whole became such that the whole seemed to
shift. In the relationship between town and country, the emphasis was still on the countryside: real property wealth, the
products of the soil, attachment to the land (owners of fiefs
or noble titles). Compared with the countryside, the town
retained its heterotopic character, marked by its ramparts
as well as the transition to suburban areas. At a given moment, these various relationships were reversed; the situation
changed. The moment when this shift occurred, this reversal
of heterotopy, should be marked along our axis. From this
moment on, the city would no longer appear as an urban
island in a rural ocean, it would no longer seem a paradox, a
monster, a hell or heaven that contrasted sharply with village
or country life in a natural environment. It entered people's
awareness and understanding as one of the terms in the opposition between town and country. Country? It is now no
more than-nothing more than-the town's "environment:'
its horizon, its limit. Villagers? As far as they were concerned,
they no longer worked for the territorial lords, they produced for the city, for the urban market. And even though
they realized that the wheat and wood merchants exploited
them, they understood that the path to freedom crossed the
marketplace.
So what is happening around this crucial moment in history? Thoughtful people no longer see themselves reflected
12 11 From the City to Urban Society
in nature, a shadowy world subject to mysterious forces.
Between them and nature, between their home (the focal
point of thought, existence) and the world, lies the urban
reality, an essential mediating factor. From this moment
on society no longer coincides with the countryside. It no
longer coincides with the city, either. The state encompasses
them both, joins them in its hegemony by making use of
their rivalry. Yet, at the time, the majesty of the state was
veiled to its contemporaries. Of whom or what was Reason
an attribute? Royalty? Divine right? The individual? Yet this
is what led to the reform of the city after the destruction of
Athens and Rome, after the most important products of
those civilizations, logic and law, were lost from view. The
logos was reborn, but its rebirth was not attributed to the
renaissance of the urban world but to transcendent reason.
The rationalism that culminated in Descartes accompanied
the reversal that replaced the primacy of the peasantry with
the priority of urban life. Although the peasantry didn't see
it as such. However, during this period, the image of the city
came into being.
The city had writing; it had secrets and powers, and clarified the opposition between urbanity (cultured) and rusticity
(naive and brutal). After a certain point in time, the city
.developed its own form of writing: the map or plan, the
fscience of planimetry. During the sixteenth and seventeen_th
I\_centuries, when this reversal of meaning took
of
· European cities began to appear, including the first maps of
' the city of Paris. These are not yet abstract maps, projections
of urban space onto geometric coordinates. A cross between
vision and concept, works of art and science, they displayed
the city from top to bottom, in perspective, painted, depicted, and geometrically described. This perspective, simultaneously idealist and realist-the perspective of thought and
power-was situated in the vertical dimension, the dimension of knowledge and reason, and dominated and consti-
ffiaPs
From the City to Urban Society II 13
tuted a totality: the city. This shift of social reality toward the
urban, this (relative) discontinuity, can be easily indicated
on a space-time axis, whose continuity can be used to situate
and date any (relative) breaks. All that is needed is to draw a
line between the zero point and the terminal point (which
I'll assume to be one hundred).
This reversal of meaning can't be dissociated from the
growth of commercial capital and the existence of the mar-\
ket. It was the rise of the mercantile city, which was grafted/
onto the political city but promoted its own ascendancy, that
was primarily responsible. This was soon followed by the appearance of industrial capital and, consequently, the industrial city. This requires further explanation. Was industry as-
sociated with the city? One would assume it to be associated
with the non-city, the absence or rupture of urban reality. We
know that industry initially developed near the sources of
energy (coal and water), raw materials (metals, textiles), and
manpower reserves. Industry gradually made its way into the
city in search of capital and capitalists, markets, and an abundant supply oflow-cost labor. It could locate itself anywhere,
therefore, but sooner or later made its way into existing cities or created new cities, although it was prepared to move
elsewhere if there was an economic advantage in doing so.
Just as the political city resisted the conquest-half-pacific,
half-violent-of the merchants, exchange, and money, similarly the political and mercantile city defended itself from
being taken over by a nascent industry, industrial capital,
and capital itself. But how did it do this? Through corporatism, by establishing relationships. Historical continuity and
evolution mask the effects and ruptures associated with such
transitions. Yet something strange and wonderful was also
taking place, which helped renew_dialectical thought: the
non-city and the anti-city would conquer the city, penetrate
it, break it apart, and in so doing extend it immeasurably,
bringing about the urbanization of society a11d the growth of
14 II From the City to Urban Society
(
the urban fabric that covered what was left of the city prior
to the arrival of industry. This extraordinary movement has
escaped our attention and has been described in piecemeal
fashion because ideologues have tried to eliminate dialectical
thought and the analysis of contradictions in favor of logical
thought-that is, the identification of coherence and nothing but coherence. Urban reality, simultaneously amplified
and exploded, thus loses the features it inherited from the
previous period: organic totality, belonging, an uplifting
image, a sense of space that was measured and dominated
by monumental splendor. It was populated
the urban within the dissolutioD._gf
it became
stipulative, repressive,
for
circulation (routes), and signage. It
read
rough draft, sometime.s (lS an
message: it was
imperious. But none of these descriptive terms completely
describes the historical process of implosion-explosion (a
metaphor borrowed from nuclear physics) that occurred:
the tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth,
goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban
reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs;
homes, satellite towns) into space.
The industrial city (often a shapeless town, a barely urban
agglomeration, a conglomerate, or conurbation like the Ruhr
Valley) serves as a prelude to a critical zone. At this moment,
the effects of implosion-explosion are most fully felt. The
increase in industrial production is superimposed on the
growth of commercial exchange and multiplies the number
of such exchanges. This growth extends from simple barter
to the global market, from the simple exchange between two
individuals all the way to the exchange of products, works of
art, ideas, and human beings. Buying and selling, merchandise and market, money and capital appear to sweep away all
obstacles. During this period of generalization, the effect of
From the City to Urban Society II 15
the process-namely the urban reality-becomes both cause
and reason. Induced factors become dominant (inductors).
The urban problematic becomes a global phenomenon. Can
urban reality be defined as a "superstructure" on the surface
of the economic structure, whether capitalist or socialist?
The simple result of growth and productive forces? Simply
a modest marginal reality compared with production? Not
at all. Urban reality modifies the relations of production
without being sufficient to transform them. It becomes
a productive force, like science. Space and the politics of
space "express" social relationships but react against them.
Obviously, if an urban reality manifests itself and becomes
dominant, it does so only through the urban problematic.
What can be done to change this? How can we build cities or
"something" that replaces what was formerly the City? How
can we reconceptualize the urban phenomenon? How can
we formulate, classify, and order the innumerable questions
that arise, questions that move, although not without considerable resistance, to the forefront of our awareness? Can
we achieve significant progress in theory and practice so that
our consciousness can comprehend a reality that overflows it
and a possible that flees before its grasp?
We can represent this process as follows:
Political
city
_____. Mercantile
city
Industrial
city
_____. Critical
zone
0 - - - - - - - - - - + - - - - - - - - - · 100%
transition from agrarian
to urban
l
implosion-explosion
(urban concentration, rural
exodus, extension of the urban
fabric, complete subordination of
the agrarian to the urban)
16 II From the City to Urban Society
What occurs during the critical phase? This book is an
attempt to answer that question, which situates the urban
problematic within the overall process. Are the theoretical
assumptions that enable us to draw an axis such as the one
shown above, introduce directed time, and make sense of the
critical zone sufficient to help us understand what is taking
place? Possibly. In any event, there are several assumptions
we can make now. Lacking any proof to the contrary, we can
postulate that a second transition occurs, a second reversal
of direction and situation. Industrialization, the dominant
power and limiting factor, becomes a dominated reality during periods of profound crisis. This results in tremendous
confusion, during which the past and the possible, the best
and the worst, become intertwined.
In spite of this theoretical hypothesis concerning the
possible and its relation to the actual (the "real"), we should
not overlook the fact that the onset of urban society and the
modalities of urbanization depend on the characteristics of
society as it existed during the course of industrialization
(neocapitalist or socialist, full economic growth or intense
a\:ltomation). The onset of urban society at different times,
the implications and consequences of these initial differences, are part of the problematic associated with the urban
phenomenon, or simply the "urban." These terms are preferable to the word "city," which appears to designate a clearly
defined, definitive object, a scientific object and the immediate goal of action, whereas the theoretical approach requires
a critique of this "object" and a more complex notion of the
virtual or possible object. Within this perspective there is no
science of the city (such as urban sociology or urban economy), but an emerging understanding of the overall process,
as well as its term (goal and direction).
The urban (an abbreviated form of urban society) can
therefore be defined not as an accomplished reality, situated
behind the actual in time, but, on the contrary, as a horizon,
From the C1ty to Urban Society II 17
(.an illuminating virtuality. It is the possible, defined by a
direction, that moves toward the urban as the culmination
of its journey. To reach it-in other words, to realize it-we
must first overcome or break through the obstacles that currently make it impossible. Can theoretical knowledge treat
this virtual object, the goal of action, as an abstraction? No.
From this point on, it is abstract only in the sense that it is a
scientific, and therefore legitimate, abstraction. Theoretical
knowledge can and must reveal the terrain, the foundation
on which it resides: an ongoing social practice, an urban
practice in the process of formation. It is an aspect of the
critical phase that this practice is currently veiled and disjointed, that it possesses only fragments of a reality and a
science that are still in the future. It is our job to demonstrate
that such an approach has an outcome, that there are solutions to the current problematic. The virtual object is nothing but planetary society and the "global city:' and it stands
outside the global and planetary crisis of reality and thought,
outside the old borders that had been drawn when agriculture was dominant and that were maintained during the
growth of exchange and industrial production. Nevertheless,
the urban problematic can't absorb every problem. There
are problems that are unique to agriculture and industry,
even though the urban reality modifies them. Moreover,
the urban problematic requires that we exercise considerable caution when exploring the realm of the possible. It is
the analyst's responsibility to identify and describe the various forms of urbanization and explain what happens to the
forms, functions, and urban structures that are transformed
by the breakup of the ancient
and the process of generalized urbanization. Until now the critical phase was perceived
as a kind of black box. We know what enters the box, and
sometimes we see what comes out, but we don't know what
goes on inside. This makes conventional procedures of forecasting and projection useless, since they extrapolate from
18 II From the City to Urban Society
the actual, from a set of facts. Projections and forecasts have
a determined basis only in the fragmentary sciences: demography, for example, or political economy. But what is at stake
here, "objectively;' is a totality.
To illustrate the depth of the crisis, the uncertainty and
perplexity that accompany the critical phase, an element of
contrast may be useful. Is this merely a question of style?
Yes, but not entirely. Here, I would like to introduce the pros
and cons of streets and monuments. I'll leave other issuesnature, the city, urbanism, the urban-for later.
For the street. The street is more than just a place for
movement and circulation. The invasion of the automobile
and the pressure of the automobile lobby have turned the car
into a key object, parking into an obsession, traffic into a priority, harmful to urban and social life. The day is approaching when we will be forced to limit the rights and powers of
the automobile. Naturally, this won't be easy, and the fallout will be considerable. What about the street, however?
It serves as a meeting place (topos), for without it no other
designated encounters are possible (cafes, theaters, halls).
These places animate the street and are served by its animation, or they cease to exist. In the street, a form of spontaneous theater, I become spectacle and spectator, and sometimes an actor. The street is where movement takes place,
the interaction without which urban life would not exist,
leaving only separation, a forced and fixed segregation. And
there are consequences to eliminating the street (ever since
Le Corbusier and his nouveaux ensembles): the extinction
of life, the reduction of the city to a dormitory, the aberrant
functionalization of existence. The street contains functions
that were overlooked by Le Corbusier: the informative function, the symbolic function, the ludic function. The street is
a place to play and learn. The street is disorder. All the elements of urban life, which are fixed and redundant elsewhere, are free to fill the streets and through the streets flow
From the City to Urban Society II 19
to the centers, where they meet and interact, torn from their
fixed abode. This disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises.
The work of Jane Jacobs has shown that, in the United States,
the street (highly trafficked, busy) provides the only security
possible against criminal violence (theft, rape, aggression).
Wherever streets disappeared, criminality increased, became
organized. In the street and through the space it offered, a
group (the city itself) took shape, appeared, appropriated
places, realized an appropriated space-time. This appropria-\
tion demonstrates that use and use value can dominate ex- i
change and exchange value.
Revolutionary events generally take place in the street.
Doesn't this show that the disorder of the street engenders
another kind of order? The urban space of the street is a
place for talk, given over as much to the exchange of words
and signs as it is to the exchange of things. A place where
speech becomes writing. A place where speech can become .' '
"savage" and, by escaping rules and institutions, inscribe it;/
self on walls.
Against the street. A meeting place? Maybe, but such meetings are superficial. In the street, we merely brush shoulders with others, we don't interact with them. It's the "we"
that is important. The street prevents the constitution of a
group, a subject; it is populated by a congeries of people in
search of ... of what exactly? The world of merchandise is
deployed in the street. The merchandise that didn't make it
into specialized locales or markets (marketplaces, halls) has
invaded the entire city. In antiquity the streets were merely
extensions of places with specialized functions: the temple,
the stadium, the agora, the garden. During the Middle Ages,
artisans occupied the streets. The artisan was both producer
and seller. The artisans were followed by merchants, who, although only merchants, soon became masters. The street became a display, a corridor flanked by stores of various kinds.
Merchandise became spectacle (provocative, attractive) and
1
j
20 II From the·City to Urban Society
transformed the individual into a spectacle for others. Here,
more than elsewhere, exchange and exchange value take precedence over use, reducing it to a residue. Therefore, the critique of the street must be more incisive: the street becomes
the focus of a form of repression that was made possible by
the "real"-that is, weak, alienated, and alienating-character
of the relationships that are formed there. Movement in the
street, a communications space, is both obligatory and repressed. Whenever threatened, the first thing power restricts
is the ability to linger or assemble in the street. Although the
street may have once had the meaning of a meeting place, it
has since lost it, and could only have lost it, by reducing itself,
through a process of necessary reduction, to nothing more
than a passageway, by splitting itself into a place for the passage of pedestrians (hunted) and automobiles (privileged).
The street became a network organized for and by consumption. The rate of pedestrian circulation, although still tolerated, was determined and measured by the ability to perceive
store windows and buy the objects displayed in them. Time
became "merchandise time" (time for buying and selling,
time bought and sold). The street regulated time outside of
work; it subjected it to the same system, the system of yield
and profit. It was nothing more than the necessary transition
between forced labor, programmed leisure, and habitation as
a place of consumption.
In the street, the neocapitalist organization of consumption is demonstrated by its power, which is not restricted to
political power or repression (overt or covert). The street, a
series of displays, an exhibition of objects for sale, illustrates
just how the logic of merchandise is accompanied by a form
of (passive) contemplation that assumes the appearance and
significance of an aesthetics and an ethics. The accumulation
of objects accompanies the growth of population and capital; it is transformed into an ideology, which, dissimulated
beneath the traits of the legible and visible, comes to seem
From the City to Urban Society II 21
self-evident. In this sense we can speak of a colonization of
the urban space, which takes place in the street through the
image, through publicity, through the spectacle of objectsa "system of objects" that has become symbol and spectacle.
Through the uniformization of the grid, visible in the mod-··
ernization of old streets, objects (merchandise) take on the
effects of color and form that make them attractive. The
parades, masquerades, balls, and folklore festivals authorized
by a power structure caricaturize the appropriation and reappropriation of space. The true appropriation characteristic of effective "demonstrations" is challenged by the forces
of repression, which demand silence and forgetfulness.
Against the monument. The monument is essentially repressive. It is the seat of an institution (the church, the state,
the university). Any space that is organized around the monument is colonized and oppressed. The great monuments
have been raised to glorify conquerors and the powerful.
Occasionally they glorify the dead or the beauty of death
(the Taj Mahal) in palaces and tombs. The misfortune of
architecture is that it wanted to construct monuments, but
the idea of habiting them was either conceived in terms of
those monuments or neglected entirely. 2 The extension of
monumental space to habiting is always catastrophic, and
for the most part hidden from those who are subject to it.
Monumental splendor is formal. And although the monument is always laden with symbols, it presents them to social
awareness and contemplation (passive) just when those symbols, already outdated, are beginning to lose their meaning,
such as the symbols of the revolution on the Napoleonic Arc
de'friomphe.
For the monument. It is the only conceivable or imaginable site of collective (social) life. It controls people, yes, but
does so to bring them together. Beauty and monumentality
go hand in hand. The great monuments were transfunctional (cathedrals) and even transcultural (tombs). This is what
22 II From the City to Urban Society
gave them their ethical and aesthetic power. Monuments
project onto the land a conception of the world, whereas the
city projected (and continues to project) social life (globality). In their very essence, and sometimes at the very heart of
a space in which the characteristics of a society are most recognizable and commonplace, monuments embody a sense of
transcendence, a sense of being elsewhere. They have always
been u-topic. Throughout their height and depth, along a
dimension that was alien to urban trajectories, they proclaimed duty, power, knowledge, joy, hope.
36
Introduction: Metropolis,
Megalopolis and Metacity
Brian McGrath and Grahame Shane
INTRODUCTION
With much fanfare, the urban century has
arrived at the very moment that the definitions and meanings of the terms city, metropolis and territory seem to be exhausted.
Manuel Castells (1999) pinpointed the
dilemma when he said that more and more
we live in an urban society without cities.
Even within this Handbook’s brief thirtyyear time frame, architectural theories of the
city have continually readjusted the meaning
of these terms in response to huge shifts in
the geopolitical landscape: the first oil shock
and challenge to American hegemony in the
1970s, the rise of deregulated neo-liberal
globalization and the fall of the Berlin Wall
in the 1980s, the emergence of the internet’s
irrational exuberance and the promise of a
transnational global village in the 1990s, and
the shattering of this utopian moment on 9/11
with the resulting endless US War on Terror
dominating the first decade of the twentyfirst century. And now, the very metabolism
of urbanization needs to be fundamentally
transformed to ensure the survival of life on
this planet and equitable access to its limited
resources. We have witnessed the complete
reversal of fortunes of cities – once seen as
shrinking, dead, shattered or bursting at the
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 641
seams, cities now can be seen as the crucial
spaces of hope for the majority of the world’s
poor and the place in which the environmental and social crises of our times must be
immediately addressed.
For us, the greatest evidence of the dramatic changes over the last thirty years has
been the proliferation of competing models
of urban form, each with its own formal
order, metabolism and role for architecture in
shaping the city. The imperial metropolis,
symbolic centre of a controlled colonial
world order at the beginning of the twentieth
century gave way to the sprawling global
megalopolis and its result the imploding
megacity (see Chapter 38), the monstrous
twin products of the ‘open’ neo-liberal world
(dis)order at the beginning of the twentyfirst. In this chapter, we will present this
extraordinary and unprecedented reversal of
the city/territory as a context for the necessary changes which lie ahead for architectural theory and practice. Therefore, we put
forward a third city model as a synthesis of
the dialectical opposition and social stratification of the metropolis, megalopolis and
megacity: the networked multi-form metacity.
This third urban model will lay the foundation for a theorization of architecture to take
on a more expansive and less hierarchical
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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY
role of critical participation in imagining the
vast structural, social and metabolic urban
transformations required in the decades
ahead.
These three simultaneous and overlapping
city models – metropolis, megalopolis and
metacity – will be examined as competing
theories of symbolic form, social order and
environmental metabolism, each with a
specific role for architecture to imagine,
represent and shape. At the mid point of
the twentieth century, following the collapse
of the colonial world order, the imperial
European metropole gave way to a dominant
new urban form and way of life – the
American Cold War megalopolis. The collapse of the colonial world system also
resulted in the unexpected and uncontrolled
growth of the informal implosion of the
megacity as the flip side of the sprawling
megalopolis. The three theoretical models
coexist concurrently in the contemporary
world, even as they emerged during three
distinct historical periods and constitute distinct arenas for architectural practice and
cultural theory. To illustrate the three models,
Figures 36.1–36.3 represent their simultaneous coincidence in contemporary Bangkok.
We argue here that a more recent shift,
which began with innovations in electronic
communication and financial liberalizations
in the 1980s, produced a radical reassembling of both the fragmented metropolis, the
sprawling megalopolis and the imploding
megacity. This has led to an unprecedented
increase in the scale and interconnection of
urbanization worldwide, a miniaturization of
its metabolism, as well as a geopolitical shift
away from European and North American
hegemony. The metropolis, megalopolis and
megacity are currently being shattered,
dismantled, removed and reassembled at
this moment of crisis following the end of
the oil-based American century. Our last
urban model – the metacity – calls for a
re-assemblage of the social and natural ordering of metropolis, megalopolis and megacity
in the new symbolic form and metabolic
processes through new close-up and remote
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 642
technologies and sensibilities (McGrath and
Shane 2005).
Our three city theories represent very different formal, symbolic and social models
of the city. While the metropolis is legible,
controlled, contained, centralized and radiates out to zoned residential suburbs, satellite
cities, agricultural land and forests, the megalopolis reverses the codes of the metropolis
and is an unbounded, multi-nodal network
of centres for work, living and pleasure
interspersed with patches of farms and wilderness, strung together by landscaped highways. The megacity prefigures the emerging
synthetic model of the metacity as it freely
mixes urban and rural types in archipelagos
of strange clusters through which people,
information and materials constantly flow.
These forms and flows are continually monitored by remote satellites and embedded
sensors on the ground, and interlinked by the
social and logistical webs of mobile phones
and the internet. All three of our urban
models currently coexist and interact in the
contemporary urban landscape but rarely
in the designer’s imagination, as they
become distinct territories of both theory and
practice.
The emergence of the metropolitan and
megalopolitan model both represented radical shifts in the metabolism of the city, as the
biomass feudal city was supplanted by the
coal, steam and railroad based industrial
metropolis, which in turn has transformed
into the decentralized oil-based automobile
city linked by telephone lines and television
broadcasting. While the rural migrants to the
megacity frugally conserve, recycle and
reuse, the necessary metabolic shift to the
metacity can only occur now with the advent
of internet and wireless technologies, which
provide the monitoring, communication,
social network and feedback tools to facilitate
the creations of a global city based on equitable access to renewable natural resources and
energy, sun, wind and geothermal power.
These three urban models also represent
distinct arenas for architects in the shaping,
imagining, representing and modelling of
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INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY
the city. The metropolitan architect alone
commands the symbolic spatial ordering of
the imperial capital, while the org-man, the
corporate architecture firm of the Cold War
megalopolis collaborates with large teams of
landscape architects, planners and multiple
consultants at the new scale and complexity
of global practice while the megacity and
its slums have attracted widespread attention
from social scientists, non-governmental
organizations and global institutions. While
both the metropolitan figure of the signature
architect and the anonymous corporate firm
continue to dominate the practice of architecture, the architect-imagineer, tasked with
branding the thematic identity of a city
through spectacular formal expression, has
also recently emerged (see also Chapter 14).
Meanwhile, the vast majority of city building
is without the help of professionals. Rarely
does the self-built megacity or the anonymous sprawl of the ‘junk space’ of contemporary building production pass through the
professional gaze of the architect. More
recently, the symbolic order of the emerging
metacity is continually inputted, updated and
commented on by millions of digital citizens
through blogs, tweets, text messages and web
cams, creating a collectively imagined and
constantly changing urban image.
The vast scalar disparities between the
close-up and remote systems of sensing,
information gathering, mapping, representation and communication within the contemporary metacity brings into question the rich
archive of representational forms architects
have brought to the metropolis, megalopolis
and megacity: the figure-ground and typomorphological mapping systems that attend
to the historical continuities of urban form
versus the cubist layering of transparent
space that attests to urban mobility, transformation and change. The role of modelling
and design has shifted again in the metacity,
now that embedded information from mobile
phones and internet activity leaves traces of
climatic, social and biotic activity that can be
mapped in real time through geographical
information systems. These maps borrow
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 643
643
from choreographic notation or Situationist
maps that chart the movement of matter, individuals or crowds and which register the
flow of life and events within particular
sectors of the city.
Cinemetric digital video analyses enrich
morphological conditions with on-the-ground
visual information (McGrath and Gardner
2007), while temporal diagrams add another
dimension to 3D modelling simultaneously
providing time formations: the confluence of
spatial and temporal information (McGrath
2008). Such representations underpin the
speculative tradition in architecture that seeks
to imagine, model and project alternative –
utopian, dystopian, heterotopian, simultopian
– futures for cities. They are further enriched
by representations developed in other fields,
such as ethnography, biology and economics.
The conclusion of this chapter seeks to investigate how these different perspectives might
be combined in order to better understand,
imagine and remake the metacity everywhere
here and now.
THE METROPOLIS
The metropolis as a model, symbol and rule
for ordering the city was surprisingly revived
thirty years ago with the publication of
Delirious New York (1978) by architect Rem
Koolhaas and the founding of the Office
of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) with
Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia and Zoe
Zhengelis (1978). During the economic crisis
which followed the first oil shock in the
1970s, Delirious New York provided
epic tales of a vibrant pre-World-War-II
metropolitan architecture reviving the architect’s deflated urban imagination. Koolhaas’
‘retroactive manifesto’ was crystallized in
OMA’s (including Zaha Hadid) winning
proposal for the new Parliament building in
The Hague. Although unbuilt, this project
proposed a radically modernist post-ColdWar building – a hybrid of Russian revolutionary constructivism and Manhattan’s
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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY
Figure 36.1 (Above) MahaNakhon,
under construction, will be the tallest
building in Bangkok when completed,
designed by Ole Scheeren, partner of
OMA, Beijing. The promotional material for the building mistranslated
mahanakhon, part of the royal name
for Bangkok, as ‘metropolis’. In fact the
term signifies the capital of Siam as an
exalted space within a Buddhist cosmology. Scheeren describes the tower as a
modernist slab which is cracked to allow
the messy vibrancy of the Asian megacity
to spiral up from the crowded streets.
metropolitan congestion – in the heart of a
historical European city. This project can be
seen as a continuation of the reconstructivist
impulse of inserting strikingly modern
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 644
buildings within older metropolitan centres,
which had declined in importance relative to
the Cold War suburban sprawl. This impulse
was especially acute, where state reinvestment in older metropolitan centres was seen
as a front against the assault of American
popular cultural intrusions.
A symbolically renewed metropolis revitalized through new heroic architectural icons
has become ubiquitous through the world,
reaching an ironic culmination in OMA’s
monument for China’s state broadcast company, the CCTV Tower in Beijing. Here, state
planners have remodelled the centre of the
city as in Paris’ Grand Projects of the 1970s
through to the 1990s or Barcelona’s Olympic
transformation in the 1980s. The Imperial
city of the Ming Dynasty, transformed by
Mao to a socialist industrial city, has been
reborn as a monstrous mutation of Ebenezer
Howard’s metropolitan ideal, the Garden
Cities of Tomorrow (1902). Spectacular
architectural icons like CCTV, the 2008
Beijing National Stadium and the new Opera
House give legibility to a vast metropolis
with six ring roads, green belts and numerous
satellite cities, planned to house a population
capped at eighteen million people.
This section will examine the political,
social and environmental dimensions of the
revival of the metropolis at this particular
moment in time. While the nineteenth
century metropolis emerged as a way to
make spatially coherent the hierarchical
colonial world system, the peculiarly postmodern phenomenon of its revival through
the agency of architecture represents a new
era. As Foucault has shown, disciplinary
authority is dispersed in the micro-politics of
desire and the technologies of the self
(see Chapter 39). At the end of the twentieth
century, the architect was revived as the
image maker, with multiple tools of print and
digital communication, who can make
the promise of the metropolis spectacularly
seductive again.
Francoise Choay in The Rule and the
Model (1997) sees the nineteenth century
metropolitan order of Ildefons Cerdà’s
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INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY
Barcelona and Baron Haussmann’s Paris, as
combining two architectural theories of the
city: first utopian texts that proscribe an ideal
fixed model and second, general systems of
rules that describe a relatively open generative system for urban design, analogous to an
urban language. A new hybrid between model
and rule forms the legible ‘Rationalist’ system
of the nineteenth century European metropolis, clearly ordered yet dynamic and open to
change. Choay traces these two theoretical
approaches from Plato and Aristotle through
to the Italian Renaissance, contrasting
Alberti’s generative system to Thomas
More’s perfect, frozen model of Utopia. The
metropolitan order is a clear social diagram
of power relations, and Haussmann’s
radiating boulevards connecting national
monuments, cultural institutions and rail
gateways continue to fix the image of Paris.
The balance between rule and model can
temper the stasis or dynamism of metropolitan order. For example, the 1811 grid plan of
Manhattan is a generative pattern whose
rules are constantly readjusted through new
building technologies, corporate demands,
zoning and community input as well as new
forms of social life.
The nineteenth-century metropolitan
hybrid model overlaid a progressive ideal of
efficient, hygienic and easy to police urban
streets with generative rules to create a
diverse array of housing blocks and economic activities masked behind uniform
façades. Le Corbusier transformed this ideal
by reversing the building fabric/street code,
creating his Ville Radieuse of free-standing
slab blocks set in an idealized parkland in
the 1930s (Rowe and Koetter 1978). While in
Good City Form (1981), Kevin Lynch admires
the legibility of the Baroque urban model
favoured in the European metropolis, James
C. Scott in Seeing Like a State forcefully
demonstrates how an authoritative state’s
attempt to use spatial legibility and simplification for authoritative control undermines
city life (1998). This becomes especially
relevant in the postcolonial world of new
nations asserting state control in the absence
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645
of European metropolitan order. Scott mentions Chandigarh and Brasilia in particular,
but he also names the countless internationally funded ‘schemes to improve the human
condition’ that have routinely failed.
Architectural theorists like Le Corbusier and
Koolhaas favoured the metropolitan model
because of its top-down structure which gave
the architect the illusion of control as the
advisor to powerful urban actors, whether
military dictators or freedom fighters devoted
to modernizing their country.
The work of the new metropolitan architects must be situated in the re-articulation of
the social context of architecture that emerged
in the Venice, Berlin, London, New York
theoretical axis which existed in the 1970s –
a period of much architectural theorization
and ‘paper architecture’ as building production itself collapsed in the shadow of the first
oil shock (see Chapter 37). Aldo Rossi’s
L’architettura della Città (1982 [1966]) was
translated and widely distributed through the
Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies
(IAUS), a think tank directed by Peter
Eisenman. The IAUS served as the clearing
house for European architects in New York,
and Koolhaas was able to conduct his research
on the fantastic metropolitan architecture of
Coney Island and Rockefeller Center at the
Institute.
Rossi sought collective, psychological
archetypes to remain constant in the flux of
urban change. He highlighted large urban
institutions that acted as communal mnemonic devices and large fragments that constituted the collective imagination of the city,
while the smaller scale urban fabric around
these cities-within-cities changed within
coded, typo-morphologic parameters. German
Rationalists, like O.M. Ungers and the Krier
brothers in the 1970s also adopted this binary
pattern of fabric and icon and adapted early
American grid plans to their purposes. In the
US, Colin Rowe and the Contextualist School
at Cornell in the 1960s pursued a parallel
generative and figure-ground pattern research,
leading to built projects such as Cooper
and Eckstadt’s Battery Park City design.
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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY
However, New York in the 1970s was a
fragmented metropolis in deep distress, with
much of the regional economic activity
dispersed to the edge cities along the Boston–
Washington corridor that Jean Gottman
identified as the megalopolis (1961).
William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis:
Chicago and the Great West (1992) challenged this presumption of generative autonomy. Cronon radically shifts the understanding
of the metropolis as a rational and centralized
artefact to a regional-global system which
exploits natural resources according to economic and transportation logics at a continental scale. Chicago, a nineteenth century
boom town on the frontier of America, is
situated where the farms of the Midwest and
the forests of the north meet the junction of
the shipping infrastructure of the Great Lakes
at the hub of the continental railway system.
This confluence of history and geography
produced an agglomeration of resources and
demand at this pivotal hub between the
resources of the west and the industrial urban
east. In the case of Chicago, the opening up
of the Great Plains by the railway companies
and mechanized farming created a new breadbasket for the continent and world. This cornucopia was funnelled through Chicago and
the Great Lakes, rapidly creating enormous
wealth and a new boom town metropolis.
Cronon’s portrait of Nature’s Metropolis
can be extrapolated at a global scale as the
world, according to World Systems Theory,
was divided into centres, semi-peripheries
and peripheries (Wallerstein 2004). At the
centre of the metropolitan system there
are relatively few large ‘mother cities’ like
London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Rome,
Moscow, New York and Tokyo. On the
periphery are millions of peasants, tied to the
land, whether under a rigid regime of passes,
like the former apartheid regime in South
Africa, or under similar Stalinist pass-book
systems in Russia or under Mao’s strict
huoku system of residency permits. In all
these cases the majority of the population
was detained as labour on the land away from
the cities, as it was also in the colonial
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 646
regimes of the European powers. Within the
metropolitan and colonial system, rulers
wanted to keep people on the land to supply
the cities and industries with the raw material
they required.
These imperial capitals or global trading
centres stood at the heart of large colonial
networks which fed down through a tree-like
hierarchy of colonial towns, Canberra, New
Delhi, Ottawa, Johannesburg, Hong Kong
and Singapore, etc., in the case of the British
Empire, to colonial territories and plantations. Earlier trading networks, like the Silk
and Spice Routes from China to Europe,
were subsumed within this system, with its
classic ‘choke points’ of vulnerability, the
Dardanelles at Istanbul, Gibraltar, the Suez
Canal, the Gulf of Homuz, the straits
of malacca and the Panama Canal.
Metropolitan theorists highlighted the railways, electricity and coal-fired plants that
still provided the bulk of the energy and
transport in the 1950s.
The metabolism of the metropolis propelled the West to temporarily dominate the
globe and provide a top-down rationalist
social order to the streets. However, a century
of carbon emissions, two world wars, and
countless examples of social strife, revolution and unrest have demonstrated how vulnerable and unsustainable this urban model is
as a global system. It can only support a relatively few urban centres in a world relegated
to subsistence farming, low wages, and the
exportation of natural resources to support the
fortunate few metropolitan elite. In the next
section, the social and spatial dimensions of
the metropolis will be seen as reversed in the
emergence of the post-war megalopolis,
which reduced much of the social conflict of
the top-down metropolis with its open, individualized social system, yet worsened the
environmental impacts on the city, created
fragmented social factions within the city
and created new dimensions of class segregation. As we shall see, the megalopolis also
produced a crisis for the role of the architect
as the controller of the symbolic order and
design imagination of the city.
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INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY
THE MEGALOPOLIS
In Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern
Seaboard of the United States (1961) French
geographer Jean Gottmann exhaustively
maps the string of cities from Boston to
Washington not as distinct metropolitan
centres, but as a linked urban system.
Gottmann, whose research ended just before
the American civil unrest in the 1960s,
celebrated the wealth and productivity of this
new urban system, which housed the most
prosperous, well educated and serviced social
group – a population of over thirty million –
that the world had ever seen. Gottmann asked
his readers to ‘abandon the idea of the city as
a tightly settled and organized unit in which
people, activities, and riches are crowded
into a very small area clearly separated
form its non-urban surroundings’ – in other
words, Gottmann asks us to abandon the
limited image and anachronistic idea of the
traditional metropolis, but unwittingly
he also asks us to ignore the emerging
underclass trapped in the soon to disappear
industrial city.
Gottmann took the term megalopolis from
Spengler, the author of The Decline of the
West (1937), who like Georg Simmel saw
psychological and social dangers in the giant
metropolis of his time (1903). For Gottmann,
Americans appeared to have solved these
problems and moved on to another level of
spatial organization based on an image of
freedom, mobility and interconnectivity
through broadcast media and telephone communication. Entire city systems appeared as
megalopolitan constellations in this analysis,
whose low-rise landscape built on Geddes’
‘Biopolis’ concept with its healthy ‘Valley
Section’ described in his Cities in Evolution
(1915). Reyner Banham saw Los Angeles as
a geographically differentiated open ended
urban megaform stretching across a huge
agricultural basin between mountains and
seaside in his Los Angeles: The Architecture
of Four Ecologies (1971). Banham also
acknowledged ‘The Art of the Enclave’
in the creation of attractors in this new
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symbolic landscape, like Disneyland or the
many malls which constitute his citieswithin-city. He drew on Ian McHarg’s
Design with Nature (1969) that provided a
method for handling huge regional landscapes through a layered geographical mapping analysis. Landscape and highway design
provided the green veil as a new symbolic
order for the sprawling megalopolis.
In Megalopolis Revisited: 25 Years Later,
Gottmann points to Japan as the location
of the earliest and most enthusiastic adaptation of the concept (1987). Tokaido, the
Tokyo-Osaka megalopolis, led the way in
the 1960s, connected primarily by highspeed bullet trains. Similar interest was
shown in the Benelux region and more
recently in Italy (see Chapter 37). However,
the metropolitan imagination emanating
from Paris prevented the French from agreeing to politically re-centring the European
Community around megalopolitan systems.
The megalopolis also seemed logical to
corporate architects working in fast-growing
Asian cities, fuelled by Middle Eastern oil
in the 1960s, who speculated that urban
growth might also take on a new, spectacular,
megaform.
Gottmann’s recognition of a new urban
model that emerged following the end of
World War II was embraced by both architectural theorists and new forms of corporate
practice. The Metabolist Group following
Tange and his megastructural Tokyo Bay
project of 1960 created a new urban language
for the megalopolis. Fumihiko Maki introduced the term megaform and megastructure
in his 1965 article ‘Some thoughts on collective form’, which showed his scheme for a
new urban node at Shinjuku. Paul Rudolph
had similar megastructural fantasies for Robert
Moses’ New York. Reyner Banham’s 1976
Megastructures: Urban Futures of the Recent
Past featured Rudolph’s scheme for a giant,
mixed-use, housing A-frame over a sunken
highway cutting across Soho and Tribeca in
New York, leading to the twin octagonal
towers of his World Trade Center with a huge,
multi-storied mall in the base.
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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY
Theorists imagined such dense megaform
structures as liberating the individual and providing freedom within new vast interior rather
than traditional urban landscapes. Megaform
theory also draws inspiration from the selfgenerative patterns and fine grained scale of
the traditional city. In avant-garde circles this
ideal combined with more libertarian social
agendas as in the work of Dutch Situationist
Constant Nieuwenhuys in his New Babylon
project (1957–1974). Here a huge megaform
structure on pilotis housed a network of small
self-created social spaces floating over the
bourgeois Benelux landscape. Cedric Price’s
Fun Palace (1962–1963) was also a social
utopia that imagined a megaform performance space for self-made cultural events,
constantly readjusted to new social desires.
Archigram’s work in London such as Peter
Cook’s Plug-in City (1964) dreamt of permanent cranes moving housing capsules, all over
a buried highway network. Piano and Rogers’
scheme for the Pompidou Centre in the old
Marais district of Paris together with the
demolition of the old markets to make way of
the Forum Les Halles created a state sponsored high-tech, megastructural style for
contemporary cultural and leisure space.
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 648
Such visions became reality as new
commercial consumer paradises in oil-rich
locations such as Los Angeles or Houston.
Banham’s 1976 Megastructures book also
contained Guy Obata of HOK’s design for
the first American mega-mall with office
towers and a hotel attached, above an Olympic
size skating rink in the Galleria Houston
(1967) five miles from the centre of town.
Around 1990, a new round of cheap oil sponsored a megastructural revival in such schemes
as Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center
(1986–1988) in New York, SOM’s Canary
Wharf in London (1988–1991), Piano’s
Potsdam Platz (1990 onwards) in Berlin and
Foster’s Al Faisaliah Tower complex in Riyadh
(1994–2000), all containing both malls and
towers. Later, high oil prices brought a new
crop of megastructures in oil rich locations,
like the $12 billion Moscow City new CBD
Figure 36.2 (Below) This large expressway interchange constitutes the pulsing
heart of contemporary Bangkok. It was
designed by King Rama 9, in order to
alleviate the chronic traffic congestion
of the sprawling megalopolis.
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INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY
with its Federation Tower outside central
Moscow, or SOM’s design for the Burj
Tower Dubai (2008). Other examples include
Foster’s spectacular, pyramidal Palace of
Peace and Reconciliation (2004–2006) and
conical Khan Shatyry Entertainment Centre
in Astana, Kazakhstan (2006–2008).
Gottmann in his 1961 study of the
megalopolis had noted the sprawling nature
of the new city, referring to its ‘nebulous’
urban form. Urban theorists such as David
Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John Myer in
their View from the Road (1963) stressed the
visual impact and cognitive mapping of the
new highway networks in the megalopolis,
giving rise to a new inner city and suburban
mental geography. Robert Venturi, Denise
Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour in Learning
from Las Vegas (1972) found new urban patterns and symbolic language in the autobased environment of parking lots, casinos
and signage. These new patterns keyed the
break down of the metropolis to the peripheral visual explosion of the megalopolis
experienced at new scales and speeds. Joel
Garreau’s Edge City: Life on the New Frontier
(1991) highlighted the unplanned conglomerations of retail, commercial and office uses
in emerging peripheral centres on orbital
highways, like Tysons Corners outside
Washington, DC.
While the new political reality of the Cold
War world system unleashed megalopolitan
edge cities in the cities of the North, much
of the post-colonial world experienced an
implosion of uncontrolled urbanization in the
global South. The first recognition of the vast
self-built Latin American favelas was by
Janice Perlman, author of The Myth of
Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in
Rio de Janeiro (1976), who coined the term
‘megacity’ and later founded the Mega City
Institute to study these urban conglomerations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The
United Nations recognized these bottom-up
new towns for the first time at the 1976
Habitat I in Vancouver, when self-help NGOs
found an advocate in the work of the
architect-theorist John Turner, author of
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 649
649
Housing By People (1977). In Mexico City,
for instance, the government laid out the
main infrastructural grid for the vast informal
settlement of Chalco or Nezahualcoyotl
(1990) but then left associations and individuals to build the dwellings as best they
could. The World Bank in this period also
encouraged ‘Sites and Services’ developments of local infrastructure, like B.V.
Dhoshi’s self-build Aranya housing in Indore,
India (1989), where families built their own
houses within a service grid.
Such housing projects designed by architects often quickly became gentrified and
middle class, and represent only a tiny fraction of the enormous migrations to cities
which accompanied the collapse of the
European empires. For every new megaform
construction in the developing world (like the
Parque Central complex, Caracas), there was
a shadow group form construction of selfbuilt and temporary accommodations for the
workers (the barrios climbing the mountains
in the planned Caracas green belt.) The partition of the British Raj produced a huge
displaced population in India and both
east and west Pakistan, while the European
power’s creation of Israel fed Gaza and refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, intended
as temporary but now sixty years old. Even in
oil-rich states like Mexico and Venezuela,
cities like Caracas and Mexico City quickly
fell into housing crises despite the best
efforts of modernist architects, sometimes
working for military dictatorships, like Carlos
Villaneuva in Caracas. Peasants moving to
the city had to build their own houses as best
they could in the 1950s, resulting in the
emergence of huge informal barrios and
favellas beside the formal city. Dharavi, in
Mumbai is reputedly Asia’s largest self-built
settlement. In a long established, previously
peripheral informal village, a high-density,
low-rise, mixed-use, highly productive downtown cottage industry enclave now sits across
from the new financial district on some of
Mumbai’s most valuable real estate.
The UN adopted the term ‘megacity’ in
1986 and used it to refer to any city with over
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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY
ten million people rather than in the specific
sense of overcrowded self-built group form
extensions of fast-growing developing cities
as coined by Perlman. This tends to conflate
Tokyo and Cairo rather than see them as
extremely different conurbations which have
emerged coincidentally in the developed and
developing world. While emerging in tandem,
the megalopolis and megacity have considerably different ecological footprints. Dhavari
recycles much of the city’s solid waste and
despite appearances is much ‘greener’ than
the oil-based megalopolis with its lush
maintained foliage.
The megalopolis, while an Eden of
opportunity for corporate architecture, for
the most part remained a dilemma for
independent architects outside of corporate
practice, as they no longer could command
the formal order of the city as they did in the
metropolis. The affluence and prosperity of
the sprawling edge cities across North
America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand
can never be replicated worldwide, as it
exhausts resources at a global rather than
regional scale. The unchecked growth of the
megalopolis with its design megastructures
around the world is also shadowed by the
sprawling group form of the megacities,
which have grown exponentially with the
loosening of the metropolitan colonial
order. In the last section of this chapter, we
will introduce the metacity as a new urban
model, which represents the necessary transformation of the metropolis, megalopolis and
megacity in the coming decades. The metacity radically shifts the role architects must
take in creating the city of the future, based
on a design imagination enriched by new
methods and technologies of collaboration
and communication.
THE METACITY
In his book Manhattan Transcripts (1981)
architect Bernard Tschumi presented a radically different view the-twentieth-century
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 650
metropolis than Koolhaas’ Delirious New
York. While Koolhaas nostalgically looked
back to the spectacular architecture of the
first half of the twentieth century in his retroactive manifesto, Tschumi closely examines
the fragmented, crime-ridden and unrestricted
hedonism of New York City at the moment
of its deep economic distress, social unravelling and crisis of image. Following the
Situationist’s psychogeographic dérives
which critiqued and undermined the
Hausmanian metropolitan order of Paris,
Tschumi transcribes fictional events in
Manhattan’s grid, Central Park and Times
Square at the same time as Robert Moses’
great megalopolitan infrastructure is
beginning to fall apart.
One example of New York City’s state of
deterioration is the partial collapse of
Manhattan’s elevated West Side Highway in
1973. After its closure, the elevated structure,
which ran parallel with the abandoned shipping warehouses which lined the Hudson
River, became an informal linear elevated
park. Pioneer plant species took root, the
homeless camped out and adventurous joggers and dog walkers learned to enjoy the
harbour breezes and river views from the top
of the abandoned highway. While the West
Side Highway and much of the pier buildings
were demolished to make way for the
emphatically megastructural, and unbuilt
Westway project, a small parallel fragment
of an elevated rail-line has been reborn
as a park – the celebrated Highline design
(selected September 2004) by Field
Operations with Diller, Scofidio and Renfro.
The collapse of the West Side Highway coincided with the rise of community activism in
response to Moses’ ambitious plans for a
regionally interconnected Greater New York.
In the 1960s, Jane Jacobs, the author of
Death and Life of Great American Cities
(1961) famously contributed to halting the
Lower Manhattan Expressway which was
planned to run through Soho and the ethnic
neighbourhood of the South Village. In the
1980s, environmental activists stopped the
massive Westway project in court based on
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INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY
evidence of fish spawning in the pilings of
the old piers and set in motion the building of
the Hudson River Park.
The metacity was born in the exhaustion
of metropolitan and megalopolitan urban
models, the rise of the demands of activism
in civil rights and environmentalism and the
emergence of new sensing, communication
and imaging technologies. The revival of
metropolitan architecture appealed to tourist
circuits of global elites and for staging spectacular events such as the Beijing Olympics,
but the controlled world order and legibility
of the metropolis could never be fully resurrected. The megalopolis as well came to a
severe crisis with the growing scarcity of oil,
and the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels finally acknowledged at the
Kyoto Accords of 1998. The term ‘metacity’
appeared in a millennial anxiety about overpopulation and renewed fears of the limits of
growth, and for UN-HABITAT it refers to
cities with a population over twenty million
(2006). But the size of a few extra large cities
is not the important question of the metacity,
and population predictions have been consistently overestimated. For us the metacity does
not refer to an extra-large conurbation, but an
urbanization of the entire planet – including
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 651
651
what was thought of as ‘village’, ‘rural’ or
‘remote’ – through new models of mobility
and communication. The metacity implies
that which exists above and beyond the traditionally defined city, metropolis and territory,
when urban form becomes unbounded,
uncontrolled and at once urban and rural, and
everywhere is both centre and periphery.
If the megalopolis and megacity were
created by the political unbounding of the
colonial world system, the metacity emerged
according to the logic of late global capital
and the new information and communication
technology tools which allowed for new
forms of both concentration and dispersal.
Recent development has been led by aggressive speculation and profit-seeking during a
time of deregulation of global financial
systems. This new global city based on the
Figure 36.3 (Below) Modern Bangkok
has engulfed hundreds of agricultural
villages in its uncontained growth. Ban
Krua, shown here, was given to the
Muslim Cham community outside the
walls of the royal city, but today stands
in the way of a planned expressway to
connect to the spectacular malls of the
Siam Central Shopping District.
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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY
dynamic generation of urban form through
credit, risk and capital speculation has
occurred at a moment where nature itself has
been reconceived in a more dynamic way.
Contemporary theories of disturbance ecology give us an understanding of nature neither in balance nor equilibrium, but in a
constant state of flux. The ecology of the
metacity should be understood as a complex
adaptive system in disequilibrium, and the
social actors of the city are seen as an integral part rather than separated from nature.
Following on Saskia Sassen’s work on
global cities (2001 [1991]) and Peter J.
Taylor’s studies of the global networks,
relationships, ranking and hierarchies of
cities (1995), architects became aware of
the differentiation of functions between
cities and within cities. Urban geographers
like Ed Soja, studying Los Angeles initially
(1989), and later more global systems in
Postmetropolis (2000), emphasized both the
multiple nodes of the global system with its
linked networks, and the differentiation of
patches within cities, as each patch linked in
to different urban systems that had different
global links. Patch dynamics is an urban
ecological framework that emerged at the
same time for modelling urban ecosystems
(McGrath et al. 2007).
Architectural theorists of the city were
slow to spot the emergence of this new
hybrid world because of their preoccupation
with built form in contrast to nature and
natural processes. The interval between
two international competitions for the old
slaughterhouse district of La Villette in Paris
marks a turning point in the professional
design imagination. The first competition
was explicitly metropolitan in conception,
and the scheme by Leon Krier, which received
a special prize, imagines a reconstitution
of the legible residential quarter of the
nineteenth-century metropolis. His plan for
housing development was never developed,
and instead a new competition for a ‘park of
the twenty-first century’ was commissioned.
In both Bernard Tschumi’s and OMA’s
projects there is evidence of a new form of
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 652
architectural practice based in the open space
of the city as a field of unpredictable events
which radically undermined the carefully
constructed nature of Paris’ metropolitan
parks. These projects linked back to Unger’s
City Archipelago projects (1977) for Berlin
that set high density urban fragments into
Berlin’s low rise archipelago of islands, lakes
and forests.
In the data rich social democracy of the
Netherlands, architect Winny Maas together
with MVRDV developed an exhibition and
catalogue Meta City/Data Town (1999) and
became the first architects to theorize the
metacity. Meta City/Data Town examines
the three-dimensional consequences of the
increased urbanization at global, national and
meta scales. Their data town is site-less,
and is modelled directly from statistics on
population trends, needs of water, food
and natural resources, as well as social
experimentation. MRDV used the ‘metacity’
term to describe a city that was primarily
only a pile of statistics and data, recording
the presence of hidden patterns inside a huge
urban conurbation, housing masses of
people. Their idea was that from a properly
organized analysis of these data a cellular,
fractal structure of flows would emerge,
which could be tweaked just a little by the
architect to create a new urban architecture
of flows.
But the metacity thrives in all corners of
the world where data, indoor plumbing
and architectural statements are rare, but electricity, televisions and mobile phones are
ubiquitous. Urban environmentalists were
quick to question the megalopolitan cult of
bigness, and had their own cult of ‘small is
beautiful’ (Schumacher 1973), justified in
part by the rapid miniaturization of electronic
devices that altered energy supply possibilities (making miniaturized solar power and
wind generation possible), beside facilitating
communications between individuals in social
networks (aiding bottom-up organization and
NGOs). Environmentalists were also much
more aware of the differentiation of patches
in the city, as in John Seymour and Herbert
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INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY
Giradet’s Blueprint for a Green Planet (1987)
that rigorously explored urban systems, their
energy sources, their enclaves of production
and consumption, their flow systems, intakes
and exhausts. They emphasized the limits of
the earth’s carrying capacity and measured
urban impacts on ecological systems in an
open, visual and accessible way.
Girardet’s Cities, People, Planet (2004)
places a big emphasis on urban agriculture
and shows how this emerging hybrid
morphology extends from Beijing to Cuba to
Russia, Europe and even North America.
Informal economic systems, farmers’ markets and cooperatives also are acknowledged,
as are self-organizing NGO groups in barrios, favellas and ranchos in South America
that both provide food and education and
seek to improve housing. Terry G. McGee
coined the term desakota (desa=village +
kota=city) studies in the Indonesian
archipelago, showing how different urban
actors chose different mixes of urban and
rural activities, responding to both local and
global conditions, changing quickly and
never well regulated by the authorities
(McGee and Yeung 1977; McGee 1991).
Stephen Cairns (2003) writes that this hybrid
Indonesian archipelago functioned as an
international entrepot based on indigenous
cultural practices, mixing agriculture, urbanization and international trade without
central regulation, creating a powerful, localglobal ‘sorting machine’.
This desakota/rur-urban mixture ranges
from Japan’s rice production areas to China’s
SEZs in the fertile Pearl River and Yangtze
Deltas or Bangkok’s industrialized Eastern
seaboard, forming the fabric of many Asian
megacities. The UN-HABITAT programme
studied design approaches to this hybrid
situation in a variety of Asian cities in its
Urban Trialogues, undertaken with KU
Leuven’s Post Graduate Centre for Human
Settlements (Loeckx et al. 2004). David
Sattherthwaite at the IIES together with
Shanty Dwellers International (SDI) has also
attempted to publicize bottom-up strategies
that can help in this rur-urban fabric in an
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 653
653
up-grading approach, without destroying
their hybrid and mixed nature.
While the European and North American
metropolis ages, sprawls, fragments or
shrinks, Asian, Latin American and African
cities now dominate the urbanizing world.
Only immigrants and their children are
responsible for the continued population
growth of New York, Toronto, Los Angeles
or Vancouver. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan
are at the cusp of a demographic decline
similar to Europe. The global corporate
trading system is currently being restructured
to reflect this demographic shift, with a
redistribution of functions from command
and control systems and centres (London,
New York, Tokyo, etc.) to a new fractal
system of secondary cities and out-sourcing
back offices (see also Chapter 22). Problems
with the scarcity and environmental impact
of oil demand new energy and natural
resource management models that will
greatly impact city life and form. New modes
of distribution mean restructuring highways,
trucking, container ports and airports.
Our theory of the metacity is qualitatively
different than just an extra-large city or big
architecture. It is not just a question of
hybridity and heterogeneity, mixture versus
mono-functional zoning. The difference is
the agency and reflexivity empowered by
new media. Distant people can measure the
differences between mixtures in patches or
islands of the archipelago and make informed
choices about their desires, goals and movement paths. Bottom-up participants play an
increased role in this new city archipelago,
evaluating and trying new mixtures. The
metropolis, megalopolis and megacity are
reconfigured in the metacity as is the role of
architecture in this new multi-form rather
than mega-form environment. Architects find
themselves now designing the relations
between urban islands and monitoring new
mixtures in the reverse archipelago rather
than just focusing on the architecture of the
fragments themselves as Rossi and Rowe
advocated. Most of our metacity is locally
generated or reorganized through bottom-up
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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY
social organization, and it is the relations and
management of these fragments and hybrid
mixtures in heterotopias that is the new horizon for architecture (Foucault 2007 [1967];
Shane 2005; Dehaene and De Cauter 2008).
New media and communications systems –
both close-up and remote – provide tools for
offering architectural services to a wider
range of actors than the current client-based
system of the metropolitan architect or the
corporate designer of the megalopolis.
Representation takes on a new role of persuasion and of altering cognitive images of the
city, rather than in articulating specialized
units of construction.
CONCLUSION
The metropolis, megalopolis and metacity
models each constitute specific theories, representations, and speculations about the city
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 654
as well as distinct ways of theorizing the role
of the architect in shaping embodied urban
experiences and imagination. Our three
models represent world views as well as
attempts to maintain cities as respectively
controlled (metropolis), open (megalopolis),
or complex adaptive systems (metacity).
The metropolis was a primary instrument of
modernization and the uneven redistribution
of resources at a world scale. It emerged
at the height of the European colonial
world system and its metabolism was based
on coal, steam and resource extrapolation
based on a peasantry bound to the periphery.
Figure 36.4 (Below left and right)
Photo collage of the raised plaza in
front of Siam Paragon, one of the
largest shopping centres in Southeast
Asia. The mall fronts the central
exchange station of the Bangkok Transit
Systems Skytrain, and contains a giant
aquarium in the lower levels.
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INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY
It culminated in the architectural splendour
of world capitals – London, Paris, Berlin,
Moscow, Beijing, Mexico City and Buenos
Aires, as well as major trading and industrial
centres – New York, Hong Kong, Singapore,
São Paolo, and Barcelona, but collapsed in
the totalitarian military fascisms centred on
Berlin, Rome and Tokyo.
The spatial imagination of designers in the
metropolis, the symbolic centre for civic
order, was restricted and controlled. While
the old walls that defined the traditional city
came down in Paris and Beijing during the
construction of the modern metropolis, it is
still a conceptually and legally bounded
entity, whose form is strictly maintained by
centralized planning and land use control.
Zoning dictates where the city ends and the
countryside begins, and regulates the relative
importance of institutions and individuals in
a strictly hierarchical social order. Residential,
commercial, industrial and agricultural uses
are ideally separated and coded according to
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 655
655
status, and the city’s growth is controlled by
incremental change in the land use. The
metropolis is top-down and modernist,
a product of enlightenment thinking. It forms
a legible and rational tree structure at a
global scale, a centralized hierarchical colonial world system. The architect is both the
master planner and master builder of the
metropolis, and contemporary urban theorists and practitioners nostalgically embrace
this patriarchal and heroic role. However,
social theories of the metropolis after Simmel
(1903) point to the psycho-social diversity
which emerges within this hierarchical,
closed system, that continually put its ordering systems in crisis and risk. Heterotopias
remain the masked, cloaked or hyper spaces
of change for those people and activities
which are excluded, the metropolitan other.
Designers in the megalopolis sought to house
the complex organizational spaces of the new
socio-economic order of the network city,
with its deregulation, capital accumulation,
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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY
individual freedom and mobility. But its
metabolism is powered by burning oil and its
Cold War politics are based on the continuous supply of natural resources, consumer
products and credit. Both flows of oil and
capital require strict global military management at great expense. Gottmann’s brilliant
re-conception of the metropolis as a city
network imagined the northeast seaboard of
the US as a new spatial model, the megalopolis, even before the interstate highway
system legislated by President Eisenhower in
1956 had its imprint. Gottmann recognized
Boston, New York, Philadelphia and
Washington, DC – BosWash – as a polynucleated network rather than a centralized
system, linked by telephone communication
and television broadcast. The most successful practising architects of the megalopolis
became the org-men who can command the
corporate architectural firms that serve the
commercial and institutional megastructures
of the megalopolis, from Victor Gruen, Eliel
Saarinen to Wallace Harrison and today’s
faceless alphabet soup of global mega-firms:
SOM, HOK, NBBJ, etc. Large fragmentary
heterotopias that had been the basis of change
in the periphery of the megalopolis, malls,
office parks and theme parks, began to
mutate, proliferating everywhere across the
city network, empowered by hand-held and
desk-top informational devices.
The megacity grew in parallel with the
megalopolis, its implosion of growth from
deregulated rural migrations in the global
South reversed the explosion of suburban
sprawl in the global North. The fragmentation of metropolitan order and rise of the
massive scale and logics of the networked
megalopolis led to a new wired spatial
imagination and theories of architectural
resistance – from the PR savvy, radical neighbourhood movement and micro-economics
of Jane Jacobs to the self-reflexive anarchitecture of Gordon Matta Clark. The metacity
grows out of the limits of the fossil fuel
logics of the metropolis and the megalopolis
as well as their structural fragmentation and
unbounding. The new figure of the metacity
5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 656
architect is the designer and communicator
of the relationships between the anarchy of
the fragments, adept at complex urban ecosystem thinking through new close-up and
remote technologies. Now designers’ skills
must also include navigating the ecologies of
our urban dreams and desires, and articulating these dreams as powerful images back in
the collective mediated realm of the city as
desirable public goals.
The following chapters address particular
issues within the tension between these
three concurrent city models. Paola Viganò
describes in Chapter 37 the fragmentation
and dispersal of the new megalopolitan archipelagos around the unbounded European
metropolis; she articulates the morphological
change from metropolis to megalopolis at the
territorial scale which represents new relationships between city, power and nature that
constitute the important urban project for contemporary architects in Europe. Vyjayanthi
Rao in Chapter 38 critiques the discourse of
the megacity slum as theory and instead
points to the megacity as an archipelago of
self generated local systems and sites of
design research and practice. Deborah Natsios
in Chapter 39 looks at the fragmented and
dispersed metacity in a post-9/11 geopolitical context. She cautions on the psychological realm of the political landscape of security
that accompanies the reorganization of the
Cold War megalopolis in a period of America’s
endless War on Terror. She argues for a new
‘open city’ and a new civic commons aided
by the same technologies that seek to reassert
national sovereignty and municipal order.
Together, these three chapters fill in our
sketch of the co-situational emergence of the
metropolis, megalopolis and metacity as a
layered psycho-socio-natural system and provide both detailed substantiation and caution
to the limitations of our models.
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