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INTRODUCTION Indeed, it soon becomes clear that this sort of ‘gentrification’ or ‘exoticisation’ of the city has become the object of planning policy, designed to offer some cultural values to the city – thus local authorities deliberately try to attract sites such as specialist museums, restaurants, galleries, focal-point waterside redevelopments, or even university departments to particular areas, or deliberately encourage ‘themes’ such as exotic ethnic diversity as in ‘Chinatowns’ or restored ‘old quarters’ like the Rocks in Sydney. Of course, any marxists among you may already have your antennae waving at this proposal, seeing it as a way to make cities nice and congenial for the gentry (the middle classes) but wondering what happens to the hoi polloi(the proletariat or the working classes or the ‘socially excluded’) – even Mulgan has his worries here and wants to advocate some remedial action for them to reclaim the cities too, instead of being banished to the suburbs to watch TV all night while the bourgeois frolic in their safe spaces. Unfortunately, his remedial action remains at the level of ‘half-formed vision’ and ‘promises’, programmes to be fleshed out. In fact this sort of approach is but the latest in attempts to plan cities, of course, and, as Donald argues (in Bocock and Thompson 1992), the differences partly reflect the shifting metaphors used to pin down the symbolic meaning of cities and the societies that spawn them. Cities, especially capital or other major cities have long had this symbolic role and have similarly long been read for their symbolic meanings – read, indeed as ‘texts’. Thus to take some examples nicely discussed and illustrated in Donald: 1.
Engels’ account of life among the poor in Manchester probes into
hidden areas of the city, the slum neighbourhoods and the foul
backwaters
and ‘courts’, and describes them as unspeakably awful and degraded,
with
piles of effluent and sewage in the streets, chronic overcrowding, and
dreadful dwellings. In his hands, Manchester becomes a living symbol of
the social divisions produced by aggressive industrial capitalism -
this
appalling squalor is associated with high rents and, above all, a deep
indifference to the fate of the poor who are simply kept out of sight
and
left to cope as best they can (although to be fair, liberal reformers
were
also already on the case, including one whose name is well-known
locally
– Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth). The tradition continued with later works
like Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, I suppose, a tale of
squalor
and degradation among the industrial northern working class, designed
to
alarm and rouse guilt in the bourgeoisie, or the early sociological
works
on ‘slums’ in Manchester or Liverpool. Try a short aside on Simmel and allied issues 4. There has been a recent interest in what might be called the ‘ordinary’ readings of city symbolism too, those performed not by poets or skilled commentators but by the inhabitants. The usual text here, although it is still very abstract, is De Certeau on walking in the city (see Donald again). DeCerteau sees the act of walking as a way of imposing a local and personal narrative on the city, one which operates behind or despite the official maps and routes. This piece is inspired by the need to reassert the power of ‘ordinary people’ to resist the mechanisms of power and control (and, one might add, surveillance). Try another short aside 'applying' this argument 5. Campbell’s article is a useful reminder that much of this sort of work has gone on in major cosmopolitan cities, and she restores the balance, and abolishes some of the poetic sensibility, with descriptions or ‘readings’ of some provincial ones. She has no time for optimistic views of the new kind of ‘service work’ on offer either. I especially liked her description of Basingstoke in the late 1980s… ‘Thatchergrad…a developer with no fear and no flair has bulldozed the ancient and organic heart of this market town…to build a downtown Dallas…the shopping centre [was] built in the genre of brutalism…The citizen is only a consumer…The place dies at night…one of the pioneer privatisers…Culture…seems thoroughly privatised…an evening’s entertainment in Basingstoke [is] "a wine box and a video"… "Each job is very narrowed down, very repetitive and very boring" says an IBM secretary.’SUMMARY So – in summary, let’s render this as a nice pedagogic debate. It is clear that cities are sites of both cultural pleasures, and economic and political power. It is important to avoid overemphasising either dimension. Just seeing cities as places serving economic functions is to miss the dimension of urban attractions, cities as sites of cultural pleasures of various kinds, planned and unplanned. This sort of cultural dimension is apparent even to hard-headed city planners, as well as to flâneurs and visiting commentators, and is leading to increasing amounts of urban tourism or the ‘theming’ of urban environments (including ‘heritaging’ them). On the other hand, reading cities as ‘texts’ can be excessively idealist, and ignore, as is common with such readings, the economic and political functions and origins of those texts – before Portsmouth was a museum, it was a real military city, playing a major part in the military interventions of the British Empire, and providing much of the city with its functions and its work. Its redevelopment owes a great deal to an unholy combination of the Luftwaffe in World War 2, and a collision of planning ideals, as the intention to restore a (modernised) community got overtaken by a phase of laissez-faire capitalism based on a huge rise in urban land values. In a more surrealist mode, to paraphrase a famous 1960s student slogan - beneath the blocks of flats in Portsea lies the red-light district! AN
AMERICAN EXAMPLE -- LOS ANGELES 2.
Soja (1989) has two attempts to map LA in two successive chapters
(chs 8 and 9). In the first one, he also reminds us of the complexity
of
LA (especially of Greater LA), which seems to defy any general
approaches
or models. We could use it to modify Mulgan’s approach, for example –
LA
is indeed a centre for information and culture, but it is also a major
manufacturing base, scientific centre, and a political military and
commercial
centre too. It has a large underground economy too, leading to high
rates
of crime and several urban political movements. It thrives on mixture
of
radical free enterprise and what Soja calls ‘military Keynesianism’
(substantial
federal and local State subsidies aimed at military production but
spilling
over into transport and other services). It is both cosmopolitan and
highly
segregated, both in terms of class and ‘race’, and further fragmented
by
occupational divisions. It has a strong centre and a huge peripheral
ring,
itself building into smaller centres. Organised labour has been largely
defeated, and there is substantial skilled work – but there is also
massive
lowly-paid and unskilled work too, in a fundamentally polarised work
force.
It is a world city in two senses – it is ‘known’ throughout the world
as
some sort of symbol of things to come, and it has imported people from
all over the world, to such an extent that it is as profitable to
manufacture
some goods in the fragments of LA than it is to produce them in the
‘Third
World’ Soja is unsure how best to grasp this complexity, which he sees as the crucial factor. In the first chapter, he opts for a model based on the work of Nicos Poulantzas, a marxist theorist developing out of the Althusserian school, and argues for this complexity as the concrete product of ‘many determinations’ (ultimately traceable to the three ‘levels’ of capitalist society – the economic, political and ideological/cultural levels) see Althusser on the 'levels' . In his second effort he pursues a more literary metaphor, arguing, in effect, that the whole (picture) is not graspable by any of the usual methods but can only be inferred, so to speak, captured as much by poetic techniques of spelling out the meanings of signs and terms as by hardened social scientific techniques. REFERENCES
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