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Improbable cities
Rodrigo Cardoso
No report about cities is
complete and plausible: it will overlook as much about the city it refers to as
say a lot about particular aspects that belong to many other cities. Reports
about inexistent cities aggravate this condition, as they describe things that,
by not being there, are a bit everywhere. Building on this failure as a
starting point, three illustrations, three futures in the shape of a city are
proposed here. None is very credible, of course, because cities are never told
through a single story; these reports are rather a glimpse into some unresolved
loose ends: they describe absurd futures in order to illustrate things that we
can lose and might be missed (or can simply change their nature until they
become unrecognisable): freedom (and abuse), place (and erasure) and history
(and power). However, since cities will do the opposite of what we tell them,
these three could be called improbable cities.
Freedom. Assangia, transparent city
“Don’t think. If you have to think, don’t
speak. If you have to speak, don’t write. If you have to write, don’t sign. If
you do all of that, don’t be surprised.”
Joke
told in the former Soviet bloc.
Anyone
wishing to see Assangia, the transparent city, should arrive very early, when
the morning light is clear and, say those who saw her, the magnificent crystal
domes and glass walls that built the city glitter the most. Nothing is left
today of that old splendour: Assangia is buried under what seem to be
innumerable records, archives, artefacts recounting every minute of her and her
inhabitants’ history. But what disappoints the anxious visitor means luck (or
boredom) for the archaeologists digging up the city: there is no mystery, all
is registered, and the death of Assangia could be reconstituted as follows.
Some
citizens deliberated one day that it was illegitimate to keep secrets in
Assangia. Since omission, or the opportunity for omission, was unwarrantable in
absolute, every gesture and step of the governance in the city became
immediately exposed, regardless of consent or prior contextualisation. Lacking
the essential tools of reconsideration, diplomacy, negotiation and compromise,
soon the political power declared itself unable to govern. In response, the
same citizens deliberated that, in any case, it was illegitimate for them to be
governed.
This set
off a period of arbitrary management and fierce persecution of the notion of
privacy, always mistaken for secretiveness and omission. Soon it was decided
(tacitly since there was no government) that the heavy stone walls of Assangia’s
buildings were a temptation for secrecy. Therefore, after a huge investment,
the city was entirely demolished and rebuilt in glass and transparent
materials. Assangia was now an open book, but every afternoon the western sun
burned. A collection and registration service was created so that every
commercial transaction, private conversation, furtive encounter and declaration
of love could be thoroughly put on record, advertised for thirty days in a
public area (which made no sense because everywhere was a public area) and then
archived. As in the exorbitant map of another empire, the amount of information
in material archive ended up matching the actual amount of communication, in
any form, that occurred or had ever occurred in Assangia.
Rumours
in neighbouring towns had it that Assangia was a living gossip magazine.
Historians suggested a transparent iron curtain. There was certainly a vision
of the kind, but the apparent extinction of power structures made it impossible
to know where it came from. The public sphere of the city stopped being based
on mutual tolerance to be forced to immediate approval, through self-censorship
and political correctness, and without the notion of privacy, the idea of
individuality was quickly eroded. Assangia’s inhabitants led two lives: one was
oral and public, immediately scrutinised, and the other was mental, which they
kept to themselves. If they would have spoken, Assangians would have praised
their highly enhanced imaginative powers. But all human relations quickly
ceased, and silence and immobility ruled. Before long, Assangia died, buried
under tons of archives.
Place. ___________, urbanalised city
“Even in Kyoto / Hearing the cuckoo’s cry / I
long for Kyoto”
Matsuo
Basho
Mr G.
lived in __________. Well, he lived there but really didn’t because, as Mr G.
would often notice, it felt like his city was gradually disappearing before his
eyes, and was being replaced by an unfamiliar landscape, vague and generic,
that looked like everything but a city.
Mr G.
was convinced he suffered from some kind of mental problem that led him to
confuse memory with the observation of reality. Whatever he forgot about
_________ truly ceased to exist in his real experience. In other words, Mr G. could
see what he remembered and stopped seeing what he forgot. If he didn’t remember
the colour of his usual coffee shop table, it would seem transparent when he
returned; if he didn’t remember any specific path, building or detail in the
city, it would literally disappear from the map. The real city would only
resist while it still had a correspondent imprint within his memory.
This
turned Mr G. into a very nostalgic person, because the city he remembered was
really very beautiful - and besides it was home. But there were things that he
would inevitably forget and he knew he would not see them again. At least that
was his interpretation: the difference between subject (himself and his
memories) and object (the city and its reality) was erased inside his mind.
Such an
effort could not last forever, and one day reality just overtook him. Mr G.
left home and found himself immersed in a generic landscape of anonymous
buildings, grey streets and indistinguishable masses of people. That’s where he
lived after all, and then it struck him - his real problem was attention
deficit. The space around him was so vague and indifferent that it didn’t even
produce enough excitation for Mr G.’s senses to apprehend it. And since the
brain abhors a vacuum, this context was immediately replaced by the much richer
memory of __________. When the mental strain became too much, Mr G.’s mind
apparently lowered the bar, and he finally understood that __________ was in
its entirety a memory from his past, and city longed for but already gone –
what was it called anyway? – whose identity kept flowing from his memory at a
slower pace than it had actually flowed from the face of the earth.
History. ANODYNE, subverted city
There
were no street names in ANODYNE. There were also no monuments, preserved
historical buildings or squares. The city’s buildings and public spaces seemed
to have no intentionality, only serving their strict functions. In contrast
with this austere scenary, ANODYNE was served by an extraordinary
infrastructure. Roads, tunnels, railways and even cables, ducts and pipes
justified themselves and proudly appeared in broad daylight, extremely well
planned, designed and kept.
This
happened because in that city, worn out as many others by decades of
disagreement and conflict, people followed this reasoning: if historical
narratives are the source of different interpretations, interpretations are the
source of ideologies and ideologies are the source of conflicts, then it makes
sense to erase, to the possible extent, the city’s memory and history, so that
they can stop constraining people’s behaviour, thus stopping that tragic chain
of events. The process of dismantling ANODYNE’s history started there, together
with the erasure of all that could suggest ideological visions or ambiguous
memories. Even the name of the city had to be written in capital Times New
Roman, to avoid any suggestion of intentionality in the font design.
Obviously,
this led to a redefinition of the focus of public policies, the purpose of
investments and the imagination of ANODYNE’s architects. Hence the emphasis on
infrastructure, which, as we know, has no ideology: it is democratic, equitable
and immune to interpretation conflicts. It is what it is and means the same to
everyone. Who would think of ‘interpreting’ the colour of a pipe or the asphalt
of a road?
But
emptying out meanings in the city retrospectively does not avoid the creation
of new meanings that cling insidiously wherever they find an opportunity. When
new lifestyles are stabilised, new practices are materialised, based on the new
and specific urban conditions. And soon infrastructures acquired the ambiguous
role that seemed impossible. Intentionality does not simply emerge, it is
offered to spaces and objects, and, just like the squares and monuments of
ANODYNE, also the ideologically empty infrastructure could soon be
personalised, privatised, specialised and used as a source of power.
To enjoy
this new segregationist potential was too big a temptation. Now used as a form
of control, transport networks started to be managed in real-time to determine
the accessibility of certain populations to certain places: the system allowed
for temporary changes to define the amount of freedom that people had to move
freely around the city. Sometimes, entire neighbourhoods were kept adrift from
mobility for indeterminate periods and timetables were changed to impose a
curfew to specific groups. This worked for other networks, from the control of
water supply to the availability of wireless communication, as long as it
served the exercise of power and the definition of rules. In response,
ideological conflict returned, now based on the negotiation of access and the
social significance of infrastructure. Street protest was achieved through
cybercrime and the sabotage of the digital systems controlling infrastructure.
The
people of ANODYNE failed to see several issues: first, friction, conflict and
their syntheses are a creative force that makes cities resist; second, they are
also factors of aggregation and belonging; third, ambiguous meanings and
symbols of power can be attributed to any material space: like parasites, they
will look for their next host and use its potential. In the end, ANODYNE was
still a city of conflict, but now it had also lost the memory of how to
reconcile it.
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IMAGES
Images 1 and 2 from author. Image 3:
http://www.travelandlifestylediaries.com/2013/04/miradouro-da-vitoria-fantastic-viewing.html
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Rodrigo
Cardoso is a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of
Planning in London (FCT doctoral grant), where he is preparing a thesis about metropolisation
processes in European second-tier cities, supervised by Professor Sir Peter
Hall. Between 2002 and 2011 he worked as an architect in a variety of projects
in Portugal. He has an architecture degree from FAUP (Porto, 2001) and a
Masters degree from the Metropolis Program at UPC (Barcelona, 2009).
