Aaron Betsky

Metropolitan Baroque: Unfolding the Urban Renaissance

Co-review on Richard Rogers' lecture

Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi)



Are cities good? In Lord Rogers' well-argued and persuasive call for their renaissance, he assumes that they are. A city, he says is "an expression of social justice and social needs within a fiscal and legal framework." At the same time, they are "command centers." With all respect to Lord Rogers, I would agree with his second assertion, but raise questions about his first claim.

Do cities really meet our demands for social justice and social needs? Are the slums of our great urban agglomorations, the banlieux of Paris or the East End of London, not to mention the favellas of Rio de Janeiro or the townships outside of Johannesburg, more just than the countryside? No, they are miserable places. The most astonishing horrors of the human condition are urban. It is true that great catastrophes may wrack the countryside, but it is difficult to imagine more sustained scenes of urban misery than one finds in the city. Even at a less extreme level, the lack of light, space, quiet, privacy and other basic creature comforts we hand in to be able to live in cities is astonishing.

One can argue that in the countryside one lives in a rigid social structure, in servitude to the land or its lords, working and thinking according to age-old customs that follow the cycles proper to the earth, whereas in the city one is liberated to find one's own path. That has been the myth of cities since the Middle Ages: "stadsluft macht frei." The city is the place of modernity, where a new conception of the human being arises out of the radical disassociation from place, family and time that is proper to the modern metropolis.

Who are we to say that this situation is better? More just? More adept at meeting our social needs? It may be paternalistic or romantic to argue that the countryside and its manners might be just as just as the city, as it comes close to saying that ignorance is bliss, but is it not also strange to argue that the city is better just because most of us who live in cities are the ones who do the weighing? We may be free, but what does our liberty get us? We are not free to move, we are not free to partake of the fruits of land. We are merely free to work our way through the constraints the city imposes on us.

Cities are also not very efficient. To house all these people, keep them warm, feed them and remove their waste takes a vast apparatus of a technological nature that puts great demands on our natural resources. The suburbs and the countryside might be inefficient because of their spread-out nature, but anybody who has sat in a traffic jam around a city, has watched the digging of new water or sewage tunnels, or has visited such sites as Fresh Kills, the mountain of garbage on New York's Staten Island, will begin to wonder about the wisdom of trying to feed so much material in and out to the condensed cauldron of the modern city.

Cities devastate their surroundings. Since pre-historic times, the city's needs have been the countryside's death. Forests disappear not just to the plow to feed those there, but to fill the markets in towns, and to build its houses. Rivers are dammed and mountains gouged by mining machines to supply the city with water and power. A pall hangs over our cities as it exhales exhaust. We can dream of more efficient and renewable ways of supplying our cities, but the fact remains that they are dense sites of material accumulation that demand the removal of that material in some form or the other from what then become service areas -the back country that, as Jane Jacobs has made clear, is what makes great cities able to reach and maintain that status.

Perhaps as a result of this, cities are violent. Crime statistics are invariably higher in cities, as are figures for such social maladies as domestic abuse. One may argue that these things are not well-reported outside of cities, but then the very focus on this sense of danger, so essential to the excitement of the city, brings with it its own atmosphere of fear and aggressiveness. It may be banal to say, only a few days after the World Trade Center disaster, that the city attracts violence, but it certainly is true.

In sum, the objective case against cities, if there could ever be such a thing, is strong. Not only are poverty levels often comparable to those in the countryside or even worse in the city, living conditions are usually considerably much worse. In the city, human beings often live in extremely close quarters with little connection to the place they inhabit. They try to make themselves at home in rented apartments or houses built by others. They work in rational enterprises far away from where they live. Their families do not work with them. Cities are dirty, noisy and confusing. They are wasteful and destructive of both social bonds and natural resources They produce what the Dutch like to call stress.

It is the price we pay for living in cities. What do we get in exchange, beyond that sense of freedom, of living in a universe we have made ourselves and that reaches as far as the eye can see, out beyond the horizon, up into the sky, and down in the deepest recesses of the earth? Certainly a sense that we can make our own identity, and that we are responsible, all by ourselves, for our own fate. This is the great achievement of the city. It is an accomplishment that is hard to quantify and assess, but it is certainly one that most of us feel is central to our civilization and what makes us human. It is also something individualistic. The city may create the mass, it also atomizes it into countless separate, striving units.

Those individual people meet in the city, and this where Lord Rogers has a strong point: there they find a "meeting place for people -both strangers and friends-and for the exchange of ideas" --though I doubt they were, as he claims, conceived for this purpose. All the great ideas and cultural artifacts by which we define our civilizations (and not just the Western ones) have come out of cities. Art, as opposed to craft, is a thing of the city. Politics, as opposed to clan and family allegiances, is a thing of the city. The very notion of freedom is a thing of the city. Democracy is, as we all no know, a thing of the polis. Those things we (at least I, as an American) hold to be self-evident, that man is created equal, and must be allowed to pursue life, freedom and happiness -these are all urban notions.

In the urban mode, culture stands against cultivation. It is a question of abstraction. We remove ourselves from the land and become from laborers citizens. We remove goods from the earth, and they become units of value to be traded in free exchange. We remove social relations from the cycles of time and place and we become free to pursue our loves and our lusts, our friendships and our antipathies in the labyrinth of possibilities that is the city. The grids of the city allow, as Rem Koolhaas pointed out, for an equal pursuit of total fantasy. Since the last century, we have been able to remove ourselves completely from reality, cocooned on the ninety-ninth floor in the perpetual sunlight of electricity, bathed in air of the right temperature, surrounded by those we want to have around us.

It is this city that Lord Rogers has celebrated in his urban design manifestos, and has crystallized in buildings that make us aware of the complex technologies that feed cities, burnish its elements into highly tuned components, and give us in the end the greatest product of the city: the unknown, the new. Monuments in the great tradition of urban architecture, Lord Rogers' buildings allow us to command a sense of the infinite possibilities of the metropolitan landscape.

This is what the city allows us: complete command and control. We can be masters over our own universe. Moreover, cities abstract that freedom and power. They perform, as Manuel Castells has pointed out, as command, control and communication centers. They are the nodes of an information society in which the flow of data is the life-blood of the culture and its control is power. It is in cities that value is extracted from data, that meaning is made, that information is exchanged and interpreted, that opinion is formed, and that decisions are reached.

That is the essence of what cities are today. Yes, they are homes to many millions, but that itself may be only a relic of the last few centuries, and the mietkazernen that make up the landscape of the city might go the way of the factories, disappearing into anonymous boxes in the countryside. The de-centered city of small gathering points is already a reality in places like Los Angeles, but even a city such as Tokyo functions in this manner. Cities are becoming atomized, sprawling into their surroundings to the point that it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish countryside from suburb from city. The marketplace has disappeared into the shopping mall, and money and power flow effortlessly through high-speed fiber-optic cables.

It would be easy to make the argument that, if this is the essence of the city, we should let it evolve in this manner. Downtown Los Angeles, for instance, is the site for corporate towers, lawyers' offices, city and police headquarters, the offices of largest newspaper, a museum and concert facilities -and not much else. One comes to downtown to engage in command, control, communications and their derivative, which in turn justifies all these activities, culture. Most people live, work, recreate and in general wander around elsewhere.

Yet if this is the abstract essence of what the city does, what remains of it for us to experience? What is in it for us? It is exactly what Lord Rogers has defined as its greatest asset: the meeting place for people and the exchange of ideas. If a company has its headquarters in a city, it is a place for meetings, and a place for the top executives to control the corporation. The bureaucrats in the organization will find themselves housed on the outskirts of town, and the work will take place in some place where the ground is cheap. The city is where the newspaper writers are, while its presses roll in the countryside. The politicians meet in the city, and the lawyers deliberate there. The city is where museums, concert halls and theaters are built and where we come together to make and consume those refined things that make us forget our constraints. The city is also where one finds that nebulous thing called public space, which is no more than a designation for room that is kept from private ownership in the hope that somehow it will be that place where meetings occur.

It doesn't work. Plazas remain empty, and monuments today have few meanings. Only the decision makers meet in the city. Security concerns and price barriers keep most of us out. But here as well the modern city has erected alternatives: the restaurants and cafes, bars and clubs that have taken over from the social organizations the task of bringing people together; the shopping malls where one wanders to find objects from all over the world, and people from other schools, races or social groups; the sporting stadia where one experiences the abstracted mass that the metropolis creates; the airport where one arrives at a city, connects, and, more and more, stays.

The problem, of course, is that these places are not necessarily in the city. Schiphol may call itself the "Airport City," but it is still just a transit point, albeit at a vast scale. The larger meeting places are, of necessity, outside of the city. When areas of cafes and restaurants sprout up in the old urban cores or in suburban nodes, they do so as districts that have little connection with their surrounding, producing a facsimile of urban life reserved for those who can afford to pick up the tab at the end of the evening. One needn't turn to Disney's rather simple attempt to analyze all these components and re-assemble them in theme parks to see that the city is now a series of disassociated elements that do not cohere with the force of nature. One goes from airport portal to inner city conference room and from cafe to stadium to have that urban experience, then leaves for one's safe suburban homes with all mod cons.

What is wrong with this? If we love the city with which most of us grew up, as both Lord Rogers and I do, one experiences a certain sense of loss. This is a romantic feeling, yet it has several very real components. First, the sprawling city is creating its own sense of social injustice and environmental devastation that equals and, some might argue, surpasses that of the city. When over sixty percent of the land area of a city such as Houston is paved road, when people must commute several hours each day, when cities creep into our forests and mountains and meadows, these are not good things. Second, the city of disassociated meeting places reintroduces some of the controls we thought we had left behind in the countryside. Shopping malls and restaurants are, after all, private property, and one owes allegiance, or at least a credit card swipe, to the lord of the land. Sporting stadia transform social ritual into standardized rote rahs. Airports destroy any sense of place.

More than anything else, the disappearance of the traditional city removes the element of chance. It is exactly the chance encounter, the unsought-for confrontation, but also the possibility that one will be something or somewhere or somehow else tomorrow that is at the essence of that freedom that is proper to the city. Risk and reward, opportunity and reinvention are what the modern metropolis has added to what makes us human. Such qualities are more difficult to find, as Lord Rogers rightly points out, when shops disappear into commercial castles, the fun drifts off to the suburb, and the city dissipates, leaving only the command, control and communication center to tell us all what to think and do.

Lord Rogers warns us of "ghost towns." He proposes that we must make our cities smarter and more efficient. We must rely less on wasting resources, the car and the logic of the market place that leads us to ever cheaper land. Yet he also realizes that we need more quiet, more open space and just plain more space. Certainly we can build more efficiently, and we can manipulate our economic system to create incentives for inner city construction. Yet I would argue that this will only plaster over the essential problem: cities are unjust places that tend to concentrate resources, including people, and impose fiscal and legal restrictions upon them. We should and do rebel against these restraints.

How to maintain the meeting place while making the city work? I would argue that the Dutch model has some lessons to offer us. The so-called "Randstad" or "Delta Metropolis" is a poly-nucleated carpet of open and built-up areas. It is a collage of urban elements spread through an area about the size of London. There are specialized districts, such as Amsterdam's themed canal zone, and Rotterdam's port. There are command centers in The Hague, but also in Utrecht. One can bicycle from office tower or distribution center to meadow. The continual movement between these various elements promotes chance encounter. The city has proliferated, fractured and reformed itself in intricate patterns.

Dutch architects and planners, moreover, are promoting hybridity, intensified use, and layering of both form and image as ways of creating a sense of possibilities and confrontations within a limited area. They are building a hyper-modernity. In the work of architects such as MVRDV, OMA, and NL, the meadow can be on the roof, the meeting place in the parking garage, the command center in the cafe. Out of the work of this alphabet soup, a new kind of city might emerge. It may be as environmentally efficient as Lord Rogers would demand, but it might not look like London, Paris or New York. It might be a flat plane of possibilities spread through a truly democratic and socially just society. This, I would argue, is the true polder model that may produce, if not an urban renaissance, an unfolding of the city's freedoms.