On the City‍

From 1958 to 1962, the forty-eight acre area of Boston known as the West End bares witness, at the hands of eminent domain, to the destruction of approximately 900 buildings, consisting of 2,000 families. At a rate of nearly 1.5  families per day, the City of Boston excavates this tenement district, razing to the ground a low-income, mixed race, high density neighborhood (112 families per acre) in favor of a “New Plan” which features mixed-use zoning and high-rise typologies attuned to the desires of a post-war middle-class America. The severity of this phenomenon, one of many such instances occurring in mid century American cities, has its origins in the early stages of the 20th century. As the scale and mutability of capital rapidly restructures metropolitan areas into landscapes of exchange-value and financial speculation, federal tax provisions–such as the federal corporate income tax of 1916–converge with the industrialist rhetoric of “progress” to produce the origins of an ethos that carry America through World War II and into the second half of the century on a continuous and tumultuous economic wave.

Characterized by Frederic Jameson as “positively and negatively all at once… as catastrophe and progress all together… at one and the same time the best thing… and the worst,” capitalism finds within the paradigm of city planning a protagonist for perpetuating its insatiable thirst for profit: the myth of obsolescence. The planning and legal administrations of the country fortify the myth of obsolescence through totalizing provisions such as the American Public Health Associations Appraisal Method of Measuring the Quality of Housing.  This method evaluates urban districts against “quantifiable” public health and sanitation criteria and synthesizes the results into a single omniscient numerical figure, which is then disseminated into the political sphere as a tool for the “busy public official,” allowing him to operate with same speed and ferocity of land-value speculation which drives the dynamic of the city. The reciprocity between the administrative realm of the city and its existing material conditions is obliterated by the capitalist phenomena of obsolescence:

“What in effect had been in the 1920s an actuarial and political expedient for capitalist building owners became by midcentury a set of mythic beliefs, that short building lifespans characterized modernity and that the simple process of obsolescence underlay the dynamics of change in the modern built environment.” (Abramson 55)

Conceptualizing the West End as a totality, at the moment of of its demolition, we witness a “wasteland of dirt, brick, and ghostly streets,” a whole that is in fact a void, produced by the processes of a myth (Abramson 61). The myth, as unique process for producing totality, is a supremely judicial realm of administration which structures the present only through the forces of its own impetus. It is a nomological structure which does require commensuration with  topological actualities in order to crystallize into the present. In the case of the West End, the “New Plan” is a provision for totalization which reifies the myth of obsolescence, multiplying its moments of creative destruction, financial speculation–indeed the entire history of capitalism–with such pervasive explosiveness that any reciprocity between its own internal laws and the the existing condition of the city are obliterated. A caricature of this effect can be seen in Archizoom’s No-Stop City. Here, the Italian collective dissolve the limits of the totality, and releases the administrative city into infinity:

“No-Stop City proposes a radicalization per absurdum of the industrial, consumer, and expansionist forces of the capitalist metropolis in the form of a continuous city with no attribute other than its infinite quantity”(Aureli 19).

The boundary of the city is finally lifted, resulting in endless repetition of the elements of capitalism, effectively illustrating its demise and deflating its teleological sense of progress. If on the one hand, Archizoom elicits a suspicion of Modernity’s neutrality as a dangerous characteristic, Pedro Martínez Inclán’s adaption of CIAM’s Athens Charter illustrates its capacity for reciprocity. Inclán’s Codigo de urbanismo, simply “added, modified, and excised” the Athens charter to produce a constitution (Hyde 107). Whereas the “New Plan” of Boston’s West End appropriated Modernist planning as a way of perpetuating the myth of obsolescence, Inclán’s Codigo de urbanismo absorbed it as a constitutional decree. While both the myth and the constitution are used a modes of producing totality, the former seeks to validate its origin and historicity, while the latter “consists of a set of presuppositions asserted with a plain regard for their consequence” (Hyde 113). Inclán’s figuration of the city introduces thus sets forth the idea for a city which negotiates the specificity of place (topos) with an ideological definition of law (nomos). This potential for a toponomological totality, or the commensurable city, comes into focus with the Pilot Plan for Havana, which takes as its foundation the Codigo de urbanismo as developed by the firm Town Planning Associates (Sert + Weiner) from 1955-1958. The elements of this masterplan integrate various typologies with varying degrees of autonomy and historicity.

Participating in the circulation between these three antecedents–the Law of the Indies, the Athens Charter, and the 1940 constitution–[Inclan’s Codigo de urbanismo] took on the presumption of a discursive binding between constitutions and architecture but absorbed as well the compound of modernism, history, and nationalism that they together represented (Hyde 107).

Functioning with the concepts of apriorismo  and Quoitismo, the design strategy both projects and extracts onto and from the city fabric. The architects maintained the Havana Vieja street layout established by the grid of the Law of the Indies, while introducing at its core a new slab and tower configurations. This synthesis can be seen to integrate the two canonical forms of urbanism of western civilization as defined by Aureli : the urbs and the polis. The polis as a new autonomous centrality for Havana–the contemporary core which offers density and typology configurations typical of Modernist planning–surrounded by the grid of the Law of the Indies. The maintenance of geometry of the original cuadra, however, is tempered by the introduction of a courtyard, which unfolds into the periphery of the city as a ubiquitous component, coming to structure housing typologies and unit/block/neighborhood hierarchy as an element championed by Sert as a sort of social condenser–as a place for the civic body to act out its collective conscious as a form of reciprocity and commensuration.

This tendency of Modernism to deploy modular systems capable of resolving social values arises in 18th century planning as a response to riots which arose out of the revolutionary ethos endemic to European cities at that time. Riots and their relationship to the functioning of the city can be understood as the temporary recovery of an immediate relationship between the sensuous body and the totality within which it functions (i.e the total even of the riot). The division of labour as the essential framework which maintains bourgeois dominance, is for a moment collapsed into an experience of the intense affirmation of the ego, where the subject’s actions have, finally, a scrutable outcome within the larger framework of the city. Le Corbusier’s famous dictum “Architecture, or revolution” has palpable relevance to the relationship between the square and the riot.

Within the context of the ideological plan and the riot as two divergent ways of overcoming crises,  Benjamin’s theorizations of the 18th century bourgeois city contribute an alternative image of totality. In a field of dead histories, Benjamin purports that contemporary images can be grafted onto ruins, illuminating truths about the present. The grafting of these images is the act of making an idea, a collection of ideas creates a concept, which effectively groups phenomenon together in a critical and distinguishing way thus bringing about “the salvation of phenomena and the representation of ideas”(Eagleton 328). Benjamin’s totality is a network of emerging phenomena, erupting in reference to each other from the broken history of the bourgeois city and into the future. This moment of becoming is the present, a moment in which the phenomenon can’t be envisaged as one whole image, but rather a constellation of many small images, small ideas which must be actively conceptualized with relationship both to their individual histories and their emergent condition within the collective constellation of the present. Benjamin’s totality can’t be understood as a cross-section of the present, but rather as an evaluation of each element of the cross section which must be unpacked, traced back through its processes of permutation. In this way, each element in the constellation has a history that can be archaeologically viewed as it restructures, re-configures, and shifts in deep history. Through an understanding of each phenomenon’s deep structural history, the present can be accurately held in the mind as a constellation–a potential for figuring forth certain specific, yet still speculative futures.

The city of the Captive Globe is an architecturalization of Benjamin’s constellation totality, drawing an analogy between the fragment of the constellation, and the archipelago. Koolhaas’s grid of archipelagos, each with a sub-stratum of generic sameness, has grafted upon it a contemporary image, giving the City a unique sense of emergent totality in the contemporary sense.

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Works Cited

Daniel Abrahamson, “Boston’s West End: Urban Obsolescence in Mid-Twentieth Century America,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Aggregate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 47-69.

Timothy Hyde, “’Mejores Ciudades, Ciudadanos Mejores’: Law and Architecture in the Cuban Republic,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Aggregate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 95-118.

Chapter 12 (“The Marxist Rabbi”) in Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell Publishing, 1990): 316-340.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Toward the Archipelago,” in The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (MIT Press: 2011): 1-46

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