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The Contemporary City inFour MovementsMitchell Schwarzer aa California College of Arts and Crafts, 1111Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107, USAVersion of record first published: 04 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Mitchell Schwarzer (2000): The Contemporary City in FourMovements, Journal of Urban Design, 5:2, 127-144

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Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 5, No. 2, 127± 144, 2000

The Contemporary City in Four Movements

MITCHELL SCHWARZER

ABSTRACT At the onset of the 21st century, cities are larger, more complex, and lesseasily designed than ever before. After many modernist proposals to remake the city inthe guise of some rational system, postmodern architects, planners, and thinkers havebegun to accept (and in some cases, even celebrate) the city for its unreadable anduncontrollable aspects. This paper proposes a discursive approach to the contemporarycity. Instead of analysing existing arguments and proposals and then coming up witha new comprehensive and exclusive reading of the city, why not engage the city throughthe plural and con¯ ictive debates of our era? In what follows, four such urbanmovementsÐ traditional, marketplace, social, and conceptualÐ are examined, contrasted,and then juxtaposed with the aim of theorizing a city of difference.

Today’s cities no longer make sense. Maybe they should not make sense. Likepost-modern society at large, cities are paradoxical and ambiguous, constantlymutating under the impact of new life-styles, fashions, technologies and view-points. They are the site of highly diverse interactions, rapid ¯ uctuations ofcapital, hazy physical boundaries and seemingly irreconcilable architectural andurban movements. The purpose of this article is to consider four of thesemovements, and, by doing so, advocate an awareness of the contemporary cityamid its diverging yet interlocking theories.

Despite the fact that cities are among the most uncontrollable of humancreations, the existing ® eld of urban theory and design is saturated withgeneralizations. Several decades after the abandonment of the architecturalModern Movement,1 one of the most daring attempts in history to reorder thecity, urbanists continue to issue tight statements on what the city is or shouldbecome, although they have toned down their rhetoric and changed their focus.In the wake of seminal critiques during the 1960s and 1970s by Lynch (1960),Jacobs (1961) and Venturi (1972), all of whom encourage looking well beyondthe Modern Movement’s technological and functional reading, today’s urbanistsextol the image, variety and complexity of the existing city. It is still common-place, however, to hear the city described in terms much narrower than ourvaried experiences in it.

Over the past 20 years, a set of urban designs and theories has emerged thatillustrates the ongoing tendency to encase cities within exclusive systems.Encompassing the works of architects, planners, historians and critics, they maybe grouped under the following movements: (1) traditional urbanism, whichstrives to renew the golden age of city building at the turn of the centuryovershadowed by the Modern Movement and the automobile age; (2) market-place scenarios that ask us to accept the unplanned, vehicle-impelled and

Mitchell Schwarzer, California College of Arts and Crafts, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA.

Fax: (415) 703± 9524. Email: Mschwarzer@ccac-art.edu

1357 ± 4809 Print/1469 ± 9664 Online/00/020127-18 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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immensely popular growths on the edges of metropolitan areas; (3) socialanalyses that seek to impart heightened critical awareness of the injustices ofcapitalist urban development; and (4) conceptual designs that aim to exceedcustomary frames of understanding in order to recognize and accelerate thecity’s prodigious inventiveness.

Formulating these urban movements is a tricky endeavour. Several of themcan only be loosely de® ned as movements; they more closely approximateshared paths of inquiry. Concentrating on these four movements also excludesother recent speculations on the city such as ecology and feminism.2 Neverthe-less, assembling and contrasting these four movements has the potential tocreate a mixed reading of the contemporary city, one that captures its astonish-ing diversity and endless turmoil. The city, I believe, can be found not withinone movement or another, but only amid the con¯ ictive and shifting relationsbetween movements.

At ® rst glance, the four movements seem to share little with each other; thereis obvious discord as to how the city should be designed and how it should beunderstood. The city is represented alternatively through indigenous typology,popular desire, civic critique and transgressive performance. Traditional andmarket-place urbanists tend to take a prescriptive and normative orientation.Social and conceptual urbanists are likely to be theoretical and open-ended. Yet,amid these differences are some important commonalities. All of the contempor-ary movements refrain from resolving urban problems in a utopian gesture thatwould eradicate the existing city. Nor do any of them posit urban design ortheory as an autonomous, scienti® c discipline. Stepping back from the totalizingapproaches of Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, today’s city is confrontedfrom within its existing details and particulars as well as its ongoing transforma-tions. As Rowe & Koetter (1978, p. 6) write ª from now on, let us desist fromintellectualist vanity and let us be content to replicate things as they are, toobserve a world unreconstructed by the arrogance of would-be philosophers butas the mass of humanity prefers it to beÐ useful, real and densely familiarº .

In what follows, I will closely examine the four movements introduced above,and investigate how their divergent approaches constitute a new terrain forreading the city through its differencesÐ the city over¯ owing itself. Within thespace of opposition between these movements we may begin to grasp aspects ofthe gap between the city revealed in closure (i.e. the exclusive proposals of anindividual movement) and the city open to arguments, counter-arguments anddigressions (i.e. the assembled discourse of movements). Today, the US city is athickly marked canvas; where the languid porch swings and picket fences ofVictorian America look out onto roads that lead to nervous ribbons of carcommerce; where persistent inequalities of societal wealth coexist with dreamsof perfect technological futures. The city yields no singular presence or message.The city, like language, as described by Wittgenstein (1953, p. 82) ª is a labyrinthof paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approachthe same place from another side and no longer know your way aboutº .

Railroading Tradition

The ® rst contemporary urban movement appeals to nostalgia for a traditionalurbanism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Abandoned is the futurism ofthe Modern Movement. Substituted is a glance back to an age of grids, public

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The Contemporary City in Four Movements 129

squares, moderately dense housing and pedestrian corridors: the middle-classcommuter suburb or small town as it appeared in the USA before the wide-spread adoption of the car and modernist architecture. Such attitudes are thebasis for the movement consecrated by the architect Leon Krier and knownalternatively as neo-traditional planning or the new urbanism. (They haverecently been embraced by the Disney Corporation for its new town at Cel-ebration, Florida.)

Traditional urbanism is structured around an opposition between the place-lessness of the modern vehicular city and the meaningful places of the 19th andearly 20th century town or commuter suburb. Almost all of its designers orwriters complain of the post-Second World War automotive suburb’s privatizedenvironments. Sexton (1995, p. 15) tells us that ª Automobile suburbia is amanifestation of the devolution of community from a shared realm with sharedpurpose to an amalgamation of closely bunched, independent mini-estatesº .

Instead of gated compounds, repetitive chain stores, desolate of® ce parks andinterminable traf® c arteries, traditional urbanists envision towns of abundantpublic parks and relatively dense housing, towns centred around rail depots andcosy civic and retail town centres. For at least one of the movement’s principalarchitects, Peter Calthorpe, the residential and commercial density encouragedby railways is the route to contemporary urban salvation. He proposes anoverhaul of far-¯ ung suburbia according to the wisdom of city design during theera of rail transportation. The urbanized region should, Calthorpe (1994, p. xi)writes, be ª like a neighborhood, be structured by public space, its circulationsystem should support the pedestrian, it should be both diverse and hierarchicaland it should have discernible edgesº .3 His recently completed The Crossingsneighbourhood in Mountain View, California, demonstrates these ideas on thesite of a former 1970s shopping centre.

The other principal traditionalist architects, Andres Duany and ElizabethPlater-Zyberk, concur with Calthorpe that automotive suburbia disrupts com-munity and prevents human-scale architecture. Through traditional neighbour-hood district (TOD) projects like Seaside on the Florida PanhandleÐ the set forThe Truman Show (1998) Ð or Kentlands in Maryland they underscore the `naturallogic’ of Victorian-era neighbourhood design and its public squares and grids.Over the past decade, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have designed a large numberof pedestrian towns, articulated by commercial centres and village greens andoften surrounded by nature preserves (Duany & Plater-Zyberk, 1991, 1993).

Like their most famous predecessor, the UK town planner Raymond Unwin,these Miami architects believe that inef® ciency and ugliness result from a dearthof rigorous planning and standards of architectural conduct. Unwin (1909)earlier proposed that good city design should reorder the misshapen moderncity by way of rules that worked in the past. Likewise, through legislated designcodes that mandate everything from optimal neighbourhood size to street/blockpatterns and residential building materials, Duany and Plater-Zyberk proclaimthat town planning is an important route to meaningful community.4

To much the same extent as their modernist antagonists, who blamed urbanchaos on a lack of planning, traditional urbanists believe in the power of designto change urban behaviour. Yet, traditionalists resituate their urban ideal fromthe future to the past; their urbanism is to be realized from old-fashionedbuildings and plans instead of technological dreams. The neo-traditional townlooks a lot different from its modernist (or suburban, for that matter) counter-

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part. Mixed-use districts replace functionally differentiated zones. Back yardsshrink in size as public parks multiply. Fine-grained historicist designÐ extend-ing from blocks to lots, buildings, porches and the smallest ornamental detailÐtakes the place of sweeping superblocks or enclosed, housing-only subdivisions.

Although traditional urbanists proclaim the importance of conscious preceptsfor city building, they deny that their rules are akin to the abstractions ofmodernism. They accordingly eschew the avant-garde posture of the architect ascreative artist and prophet of unforeseen and great things to come. Traditionalplanning is depicted as pragmatic and populist, a restoration of the ways andmanners of city building that appealed to most people in the past and still makethe most common sense.

The means by which traditional urbanists hope to restore urban communitydiffer greatly, however, from conditions during their age of inspiration, the late19th and early 20th centuries. For one thing, in locating their golden age of citydesign in the era of railways and laissez-faire capitalism, traditionalists advocatea notion of community at odds with earlier sociological de® nitions. One hun-dred years ago, rail-induced industrialization was greatly criticized for creatinga vast and explosive metropolitan society (or Gesellschaft). It was a major reasonfor a series of calls to arms by sociologists like Friedrich ToÈ nnies for therestoration of authentic pre-modern community (or Gemeinschaft). Likewise,during the 19th century, the capitalist age was lambasted by architecturaladvocates of community such as A. W. N. Pugin, who sought to resuscitateCatholic, medieval times, and William Morris, who proposed a socialist hand-crafts utopia. Paradoxically, traditional urbanists propose to restore communityfrom economic and technological conditions that were ® rst identi® ed with itsdemise.5

From the new urbanists’ viewpoint, commerce and rail-in¯ ected urbanism areintegral to the values of mainstream Americans, if not Europeans. In this sense,traditionalists promise to tap into an essential, if obscured, reservoir of middle-class US attitudes on urban space. We are given to believe that at one timeindustrial capitalism combined with village democracy to create the authenticUS urban modelÐ the traditional town. Presumably, if planners and architectsbecome sensitive to this model, the silent majority’s preference for stable,centred and pedestrian communities will be met.

Terms like `common values’, `pragmatism’ and f̀reedom of choice’ are also thebuzzwords of mainstream real-estate developers. They, too, claim to developarchitecture that meets the best interests and desires of the American people.Despite the considerable attention and numerous commissions given to newurbanists in recent years, their historical models, old commuter rail suburbs andsmall rail towns, continue each year to lose population to new suburbandevelopment. The malling and sprawling of the country continues apace.Perhaps traditional urbanism is not the preferred design strategy for mostAmericans (Feldman & Jaffe, 1992).

The Market’s Edge

Market-place urbanism is characterized by the immense ® nancial, technologicaland political energies that are developing the edges of the contemporary city.6

According to Boyer (1996, pp. 138± 139), the city today ª seems to stimulate acomplex switchboard of plug-in zones and edge cities connected through an

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The Contemporary City in Four Movements 131

elaborate network of highways, telephones, computer banks, ® ber-optic cablelines, and television and radio outletsº . Since the Second World War, a new(sub)urban society has emerged in the USA, one where the fragmented, repeti-tive and endless plots of television soap operas have replaced storytelling andolder forms of face-to-face community (Silverstone, 1997).

Understood through vehicular movement and social detachment, market-place urbanism consecrates the frontier, the lands that once seemed remote fromthe city centre and insigni® cant by comparison. These images are central toFishman’s (1987) Bourgeois Utopias and Garreau’s (1991) Edge City. These bookscapture a mentality that operates within the leading extremities of capital-drivenurbanism, those nodes of dynamic intensity coalescing around the intersectionsof major freeways, atop tens of thousands of acres of farmland or waste land, onthe borders of existing cities.

The city suddenly seems everywhere, and in some metropolitan regionsstretches for over 100 miles. These extensive cities are far less dense and far morefunctionally strati® ed than earlier cities. They are masterpieces of horizontality,hugging the ground and its wires and tyres of infrastructure.

Whereas traditional urbanists condemn exclusive reliance on the car, Garreausees this reliance as the elixir of city life. At the vehicular edge, dwelling, workand shopping break free from their dependency on rail centres and corridors.Edge cities soar beyond inner-city constraints of land assembly, zoning regu-lation and high tax rates; they exploit fears of crime through privatized space,and desires for comfort and convenience via car-accessible and climatized space.Insofar as traditionalists advocate centric planning, Fishman (1987, p. 185)argues that polycentric, privatized dwelling has replaced the centric downtown:ª the members of the household create their own city from the multitude ofdestinations that are within suitable driving distanceº . More and more, citiesresemble collections of linguistic idiolects (i.e. individualized dialects) ratherthan a collectively understood language.

Edge cities, for Garreau, are the third great stage of US urbanism, followingthe age of centre-focused rail domination (1850± 1920) and the initial automotivesuburbanization of residence and shopping (1920± 1970). Pioneered by LosAngeles, edge cities complete the process of automotive decentralization bybringing business and entertainment to the periphery. Why should such devel-opments be seen as illogical and destructive? As Brodsly (1981, p. 23) tells us,freeways possess their own logic: ª In an area of sprawling suburbanization andhundreds of randomly attached communities, the freeway serves to evoke asense of clarity and sharpness, to delineate and integrate urban spaceº .

Likewise, Bruegmann’s (1992) depiction of the city goes beyond static andcentric urban agglomerations organized by elites to engage the relentless disper-sion emblematic of the US masses. Strip centres, mega-malls and discountwarehouses are simply the most recent manifestations of a popular civilizationpremised on initiative, commerce and individualized transport. The automotivesuburb is revolutionary and at the same time comfortable, engendered byfragmenting drives and desires yet inseparable from all-enveloping consensus.He laments: ª one can’t help wonder why we can’t accept designs that accommo-date our life today, with its intensive automobile usage, just the way designersdid for their own timesº (Bruegmann, 1992, p. 61).

Depictions of edge city and suburbia zero in on the present moment, andreject the ® xed future of modernism as well as the ® xed past of traditionalism.

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Still, they are not without their own generalizing systemÐ relentless movement.At the edge, the obligatory density of pedestrian or rail urbanity is replaced bythe virtual density created by the car, aeroplane television and computer. People,so the argument goes, will create their own communities as they see ® tÐ the cityexisting at a distance. Thus, public space is disassociated from objects andplaces, and reassembled within technologies of motion and communication. Thisframework implies, of course, a steady attempt on the part of individuals todisassociate themselves from problems that arise from spatial proximity, and, byimplication, societal obligation.

However, market-place urbanism is not merely a ¯ ight from adversity. It alsorepresents a startling confederation of individual desire and commodity sales.As integral parts of the market-place, individuals of the edge city presumablyidentify their innermost desires with materialistic accumulation, and hence withmarket forces (Alliez & Feher, 1982). Market research becomes a partner topersonal development and imagination. Logically, the physical city that emergesis a mirror of the corporate ego as much as the individual ego. At the edge, thecity is formed and deformed by middle-class market pressuresÐ a perpetual,de-densifying explosion from the Big Bang of the Industrial Revolution and thebirth of bourgeois individuality.

In the spirit of bourgeois liberalism, Garreau (1991, p. 222) writes of thecreation of edge cities as being problem-driven, not ideology-driven:

The developers had spent lifetimes laboring to uncover what theyregarded as the veri® able, non-theoretical realities that govern humanbehavior. They had then gone out and built an entire world aroundtheir understanding of what Americans demonstrably and reliablyvalued. Their unshakeable observation was this: if they gave the peoplewhat they wanted, the people would give them money.

The city is to be designed and built by developers and marketers, the veryrepresentatives of urban chaos condemned by the Modern Movement.

Traditional urbanists also proclaim ideology-free design. Yet, they speak aboutpragmatism from within the architectural and planning professions, sharinghigh modernism’s fear of rampant real-estate development. Inasmuch as bothtraditional and market-place urbanists profess to speak a mainstream, pragmaticurban language, whom are we to believe? Can Pragmatism be identi® ed at thesame moment with both architect/planners and marketer/developers?

For market-place urbanists, the massive scale of suburban development andthe economic power of edge cities are proof of their harmony with popularvalues. No more evidence is needed. Pragmatism is identi® ed with what sells.By contrast, traditional urbanists bring up market distortion, the idea that salesstrategies stress ® rst impressions and a super® cial satisfaction of desire. Newhomes, Langdon (1994, p. 63) writes, ª are choreographed, see-through houses,predicated on the idea that the bigger the view and the more dramatic theprogression of spaces, the better the house will sellº . Other, longer-lasting needsand desires are thus sublimated to how people will ® rst see the house and howthey will be persuaded to buy it, not how they react to living in it.7 What sellsis sizzle and not the beef.

Another difference between traditional and market-place urbanists is theirrespective convictions regarding the appropriate scale and character of com-munity. Traditional urbanists present us with an urban environment of highly

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The Contemporary City in Four Movements 133

articulated, pedestrian-oriented spaces that foster high-quality interactions be-tween people. Since stability of place is more important than movement,buildings and spaces that pre-date the privatized late 20th century cityÐlibraries, cultural facilities, parks, broad pavements and tree-lined boulevardsÐreceive prominence. The fact remains that most of these spaces and institutionswere forged within the industrializing city of the 19th century. They representeda reaction to the confusion and alienation that emerged in the new industrialsociety and a modelling of behaviour on the dwindling court society of thearistocracy.

Market-place urbanism cares little for either high European culture or grandpublic space. In a world of dizzying fashion trends where terms like l̀owbrow’and `highbrow’ have blended, traditional urbanism’s reverence for history andits hierarchical models are thrown aside. The market-place city is geared toglobal and temporal simultaneity, and the possibility of all forms comingtogether in the interests of commerce and entertainment. The market-place city’stemporality is not the languid pace of the gilded age, but the relentless velocityand simulated conduct of popular culture and privatized movement. This is anurbanism of City Walk in Los Angeles, the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas or thenew Times Square in New York, synthetic non-places that distort any under-standing of their historic models or the nearby existing city.

Oddly enough, despite their utterly different diagnoses of pragmatism andcommunity, both traditional and market-place urbanists prescribe ideals ofcontinuity. They each paint the contemporary city as a middle-class entityemerging from earlier US mores. For example, the shopping mall can no longerbe depicted as the antithesis to the town centre. All over the country, thecommunity-focused and multi-faceted experiences of the traditionalist towncentre are being redeveloped for new themed malls. Because of increasedeconomic and entertainment competition, malls can no longer be simply placesto shop. They are the full centres of their societies, focal points for diversion,adventure and circumscribed human contact. On the other side of things, theconvenient parking and controlled environment of the mall are being copied toredevelop traditional town centres. All in all, the mall may be seen as anoutgrowth of earlier socio-commodity relations within new physical scales andtechnologies of movement. It replicates the self-contained spaces of the tra-ditional city in perimeter centres, creating privatized mercantile environmentsthat displace the retail experience from the unpredictable streetscape to thecontrolled and climatized garden (Kieran & Timberlake, 1991). At the edge, weexperience anonymous freeway rhythms, but also highly ordered places.8

The choice between traditional and market-place urbanism boils down to thepersuasiveness of their models of middle-class desire. The market-place positionavoids the label of nostalgia by bringing up, over and over again, the evidenceof current development patterns. The city should be, so the argument goes, asit is becoming. Still, if we delve deeper, the market-place city is not so easilyperceived.

As much as traditional urbanism grasps an idealized past, the reality of themarket-place city is made up of abstractions. As a case in point, real-estate andeconomic descriptions of the city rely far less on observations of visible condi-tions than on modelling techniques that measure potentialities. In predicting thedeterminates of new suburban growth, for instance, real-estate analysts typicallyfocus on leading indicators that necessarily exclude more than they include.9 The

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city is measured not only through its visible conglomerations of steel andconcrete, but also via abstract indicators like tax rates and land-ownershiptransactions. Furthermore, purchases for investment purposes may precede landdevelopment by more than 20 years. This latent image of the city is no less vitalthan its built counterpart (Pond & Yeates, 1994). Real-estate models of the city,while seemingly encapsulating popular taste, actually track the movements ofcapital over time.

A couple of important questions emerge. If urban continuity and its insin-uation of middle-class satisfaction are based on capital movement, should weregard such movement as the true determinate for urban design? Is the edge citythe urban future for all people?

The Social Impacts of Capital

Stimulated by delayed reactions to Lefebvre’s (1974) The Production of Space, anumber of economists, geographers and historians would answer those ques-tions in the negative. They paint a discontinuous picture of how capital move-ments, class division and the reproduction of the social relations of productionconstitute the city. As Smith (1984) comments, the attraction of capital to newsuburban development leads to a denial of capital elsewhere, especially in theinner city and in older suburbs.10 Spatial differentiation and the dramatic wealthof edge cities are products of the unpredictable rhythms of capitalism: ª unevendevelopment is the concrete manifestation of the production of space undercapitalismº (Smith, 1984, p. 90).11

While a goal of much middle-class striving, the edge city serves as theantithesis of traditional urban yearning and the alternative life-styles favouredby many of suburbia’s children. On this note, Harvey (1989, p. 184) writes inanticipation of arguments against the edge city: ª Most of the vivacity and colorof modern life, in fact, arises precisely out of the spirit of revulsion and revoltagainst the dull, colorless, but seemingly transcendental powers of money inabstract and universal time and spaceº . Like Smith, Harvey depicts the city asa space of structured separations and fragmented desires. Yet, unlike the orderimposed by traditional urbanists, Harvey is less sanguine about the possibilityof restoring any notion of community in a cosmos rolling to the cadences ofmiddle-class individualism.

Social urbanism underscores areas of the city which capital ignores or ¯ eesfrom, the inner cities forgotten or forsaken by the vox populi. These are exem-pli® ed by severely deteriorated and increasingly abandoned places like Gary,Indiana, East St Louis, Illinois, the North Side of Philadelphia or Richmond,California. However, they also take in immense stretches of older cities andsuburbs in every metropolitan area. Ever since its creation, the industrialized UScity has been an expanding merry-go-round where individuals and groups ofpeople have been constantly leaping toward seats on the periphery or in the fewenclaves of upper-middle-class society nearer to the centre. Immigrants, thepoor, the elderly and minorities have typically taken the empty seats, pinningtheir hopes all the while on moving again toward those places where thedeath-mask of empty hopes and buildings does not reign.

In the legacy of earlier works of social criticism, Davis’s (1991) history of LosAngeles, City of Quartz, is a long indictment against the ongoing denigration ofurban life at the hands of unequal capital concentration, relentless business and

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The Contemporary City in Four Movements 135

real-estate competition and ceaseless social movement.12 Rather than veneratingthe bourgeois islands of new community and suburban capital concentration, hecasts both historical and contemporary urbanization in terms of power strugglesamong competing elites. For all but those few people who possess large enoughsums of capital to control the game, or those few apostates who opt out, Davis’sstory of urban life is that of an ominous struggle.

The critiques of social urbanists contradict any belief that new urban manifes-tationsÐ for our purposes, the Tyson’s Corner edge city in Virginia or the newurbanist Seaside in FloridaÐ speak the dominant story of urban desire. Insteadof encapsulating urbanism, the gleaming periphery and secluded village areseen as frameworks dictated by private interests and state institutions, andlegitimized by questionable concepts of ef® ciency and beauty (Deutsche, 1991,1996). In large part, the notion of ef® ciency describes market-place urbanism’sobsession with speed, movement and convenience. By a similar token, animitative idea of beauty cements the traditional rail town with the codedpleasures of traditional urbanism. In both cases, the city is seen through the lensof middle-class values: either rapid vehicular access to work, shopping and play;or the desire to walk and socialize with one’s neighbours amidst the vernacularadaptation of classical civilization. Absent from both portraits are the inequali-ties of access to either utilitarian or aesthetic satisfaction.

Whereas traditional and market-place urbanists stress continuity with the pastor conformity with the present, social urbanists track discontinuity. Echoingcertain passages in Edge City, they portray the city as a network of transforma-tive synapses. Sorkin (1992), for example, realizes that Victorian Main Street isnow exempli® ed by the eight-lane stretches between airports or the simulacrumhollowed out within the Magic Kingdom. Yet, he also remarks on many of thesame themes brought up in City of Quartz, noticing the new Main Streetobsessions with security, surveillance, segregation and restriction of freedomand individuality, writing: ª The privatized city of bits is a lie, simulating itsconnections, obliterating the power of its citizens to act alone or to act togetherº .(Sorkin, 1992, p. xv). For Sorkin, the new city is neither ef® cient nor beautiful.It is a fantasy, a consumer theme park, whether stretching along the peripheralfreeway or secluded behind the picket fence.

Do social urbanists have answers for their troubling questions? Alas,especially after the fall of communism in eastern Europe and the watering downof social democracy in the West, these academics and critics accept more andmore the inevitability of continued market domination over urban development.While diagnosing capital ¯ ows as the cause of uneven development, they seekto curb only the most destructive aspects of market ¯ ows.

Still, it would be rash to say that social urbanism excludes all visions oftemporal transcendence. In terms almost as futuristic as those of modernism,Sorkin (1993, p. 128) calls for a new collective utopian document for the city,stressing a new ª genius loci discovered in both the con¯ ict and the companion-ability of numerous and augmenting physical vectorsº . Social urbanism, in thissense of formal experimentation, begins to sound like the conceptual urbanismdiscussed below.

On the other side of the spectrum, social urbanism can sound like traditionalurbanism. Davis’s (1994) prescriptions for the city raise the idea of restoration:natural landscape; mass transit; public space; and social citizenship rights. Evenso, aside from brief momentsÐ perhaps the City Beautiful Movement, the New

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Deal or the Great SocietyÐ such city visions were never ubiquitous in USculture. Davis’s objects for restoration, like those of the new urbanists, are muchmore an ideal future than a real past.

In the end, social urbanism is driven by an unattainable Messianism. Socialurbanists continue Marxian notions of teleological historical destiny. The exist-ing city is unjust and corrupt, the middle position between an earlier state ofpre-agricultural paradise and a hoped-for state of post-industrial bliss; it is a foulplace that must be reformed. Given the current lack of faith in totalizing systems,developmental history and utopias, however, social urbanists get stuck in theirbleak middle position. They present us with a saga that leads to calls for reformyet remains mired in chaos. The city’s future is guided by the necessity ofutopia, yet has no real hope for that utopia. Given its critique of what shouldconstitute the city and the likelihood that that truth will not be realized, due tothe dominion of global capital, social urbanism is a form of tragic utopianism.

Conceptual Diagrams

So far we have discussed three different readings of the city: historicist; con-sumerist; and censuring. In a formal sense, the city has been described through® ne-grained housing, town centres, superstores and four-car garages, orthrough contrasts between gated communities and abandoned neighbourhoods.Politically speaking, urban theories have been based on middle-class conven-tions, middle-class consumerism or the rejection of middle-class inequality.

A more radical attitude toward urbanism is expressed in the recent proposalsof the architectural (neo-)avant-gardes. These conceptual urbanists attempt toshake off assumptions of what the city was, is or should be. Lynn (1997, p. 54)tells us that ª the classical models of pure, static, essentialized, timeless form andstructure are no longer adequate to describe the contemporary city and theactivities that it supportsº . The city can only be described as indescribable. Assuch, we appreciate the city for its ¯ uid instabilities as well as its inertia ofmaterial residue (Bell & Leong, 1998). With special reference to Houston, Lerup(1995, pp. 88, 98) sees the post-Second World War US city as endless andoceanic, crude and wild: ª a partially self-steering, partially spontaneous, yetcybernetic agglutination of forces, pulsations, events, rhythms, and machinesº .Following the legacy of the Situationist International (a radical journal published1957± 1972) of Guy Debord and Constant, conceptual urbanism is fascinated withimmediate encounters with uncharted geographies and unknown histories, theidea that within the given city are an almost in® nite number of palpable andpsychological provocations.

One of the founding texts of conceptual urbanism, Tschumi’s (1981) TheManhattan Transcripts, displaces understanding of the city from objects to events.Like the frame in cinema, urban space is prepared and experienced moment bymoment, shot by shot. Granted, the experience of any given space produces anillusion of immediacy and succession. Yet, these characteristics are continuallythwarted: ª reality is made in® nitely malleable, so that emotive, dramatic, orpoetic attributes can change and unfoldº (Tschumi, 1981, p. 12). Perception ofthe city in Tschumi’s language of ® lm is a masquerade of performance thatcannot be pinned down to a single perspective. Absent are the aesthetics oftraditional urbanism, the populism of market-place urbanism and the dissentof social urbanism.13

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A similar point of view is raised in Virilio’s (1991) The Lost Dimension.Pre-industrial cities, according to the French urban planner, possessed a horizonof bodily expectations, ® rm boundaries, entrances through gates or arches andcentral squares. They resembled the proposals of today’s traditionalists. How-ever, the highways and jetways of the modern city changed all of that. Soundinglike a market-place advocate, Virilio describes the modern city as a ¯ ight fromconstraints and collective meanings. However, leaving the freeway for thescreen, Virilio (1991, p. 13) speaks to a future city of information, whereª deprived of objective boundaries, the architectonic elements begin to drift and¯ oat in an electronic ether, devoid of spatial dimensions, but inscribed in thesingular temporality of an instantaneous diffusionº .

For this emerging city, neither past nor present will mean anything. Nor willold oppositions between the spaces of public and private or sacred and profane.Extension and duration will collapse onto an optical plane, while the humanÐmachine interactions of the public forum and privatized freeway will be re-placed by the instantaneousness of the cathode-ray screen (Virilio, 1991).

Virilio’s post-modern city no longer needs Venturi’s Las Vegas, even if it isincreasingly a centre of entertainment capital. Hollywood gives us Las Vegasand much more. Monuments are no longer visible form: they are mobilediagrams. The city, in the spirit of earlier proposals of the UK group Archigram,has become a fast-moving object structured for change (Chalk et al., 1991).

In conceptual urbanism, the city is understood through subversions of cus-tomary categories and understandings: the perspectival gaze of a static subjectthat allows depth to be read into surfaces; ® gureÐ ground distinctions thatpermit objects to be seen apart from one another; linear temporalities thatestablish notions of historical authenticity as well as modalities of past± present±future; and causality that depicts a necessary unfolding of events. AnyArchimedean point or system from which to analyse and make sense of theurban condition is unattainable. In the words of architect and urbanist StanAllen, the city is a bottom-up phenomenon de® ned by its intricate local connec-tions: ª a ® eld of ineffable effects suspended in an ether of immaterial signsº(Allen, 1999, pp. 14, 92).

Another, related aspect of conceptual urbanism amounts to a dispersion of thearchitect or writer into the maelstrom of the city. The suppositions used todesign and negotiate the city, in other words, are akin to those of language. Thedesigner or writer, like the word within a language, is both structured andliberated by the ambiguous syntax of city form and space. Architects and urbancritics cannot step outside their drawings and words into streets and plazas, andthus cannot claim that their texts bear a closer relationship to the reality of thecity than to the language games of urban theory and design. Like cities,urbanists too must become fast-moving objects structured for change.

Meanwhile, in both its subversive and linguistic senses, conceptual urbanismengages older notions of the city. For instance, the digital metaphor of the cityproceeds out of a ¯ attening of the perspectival facade drawings that onceconstituted Renaissance attitudes to the city as a staged theatre. The city,formerly visulized as a body in boundaried space, is now viewed as a far-reaching and amorphous web of electronic synapses. Likewise, the cinematicmetaphor of the city challenges perception that unfolds in linear fashion in orderto develop new meanings out of fragmentation and contingency. Urban designspirals out from the ® ssures and sideways glances between frames of vision and

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reproduction. Wired into exile from the past, conceptual urbanism promises awild journey toward an unpredictable future.

In Delirious New York (1978), Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas proposes one suchfuture, a hyper-dense architectural culture opposed to modernist denunciationsof congestion. Unlike modernism’s vision to resolve the socio-physical contradic-tions of the city, Koolhaas sees those contradictions as thresholds to newpossibilities. The coincidence of New York City’s rigid grid and its outrageousskyscraper verticality is celebrated as an example of urban vitality born out oflimits: ª Through fantastic technology it will be possible to reproduce all situa-tions’Ð from the most natural to the most arti® cialÐ wherever and wheneverdesiredº (Koolhaas, 1978, p. 105).

Koolhaas argues that urbanists need to reach out to the immensities of thefuture from the agitations of the present. Instead of sentimental cities ofsingle-point perspective or steady spatial rhythms, instead of nostalgia for thereal and condemnations of simulacra, Koolhaas proposes thundering materialagglomerations arising from the white-hot ® res of technological ¯ ux andemotional obsession. Meanwhile, he celebrates individual desire through height-ened sociability and not suburban seclusion; similarly, he creates massiveconcrete, glass and steel structures within deforming and multiple and remoteforces of energy and movement. Described in S, M, L, XL (Of® ce of MetropolitanArchitecture et al., 1995), urban design becomes the staging of uncertainty,concerned not with objects but with the irrigation of territories of potential;focused less on stable information or form than on the creation of enabling ® eldsthat accommodate irresolute processes.

Koolhaas’s city embraces a random future, but always a future in excess of thepresent and the pastÐ and in excess of the other. Here too, as in the otherurbanisms, there is exclusion. Like post-modern philosophy in general, concep-tual urbanism’s anti-foundationalism is its foundation. Like most academicendeavours, too these are top-down proposals. Despite calls for connectivity andcomplexity, conceptual urbanism’s refusal of tradition, populism and socialethics is one-sided, not nearly as diverse or paradoxical as the city itself.

The City in Discourse

The four movements of urbanism re¯ ect a range of methods of design,study and intervention. As I have attempted to point out, these methods andrecommendations were not developed in isolation. They grew out of an ex-change of ideas both with earlier approaches (e.g. the Modern Movementand the City Beautiful Movement) and with each other. Approached as aninterlocking discourse, these movements depict the contemporary city compre-hensively yet incoherently. Indeed, the frequent moments of tension betweenthese movements begin to shape the parameters of a discursive urbanism wheremeaning is not a given, but a constant process of building, alteration anddemolition.

First off, I would like to mention several alliances among urban movementsformed out of disagreement with other movements. Traditional and market-place urbanists both see themselves as encapsulating pervasive, middle-classvalues; social and conceptual urbanists critique the emancipated bourgeoisindividual as an illusion. Elsewhere, traditional and social urbanists join intaking a reformist position; market-place and conceptual urbanists are, for the

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most part, visionaries and much more willing to learn from the current urbanscene. Finally, traditional urbanists have more in common with conceptualurbanists with regard to their preoccupation with architectural form and the useof applied theory; market-place and social urbanists are both absorbed withvernacular development from the vantage point of meta-theory.

Another way to demonstrate the overlapping differences among the foururban movements is to look into how each of them understands the city withinthe dimension of time. Distinctive ways are employed to understand where the`now’ is coming from and leading to.

Traditional urbanists advocate re-establishing temporal continuity from anearlier point in history, coupled with a huge dose of design control andplanning. From their points of view, temporal continuity without planning hasresulted in chaotic motor-vehicle suburbia; yet, planning with utopia in mindresulted in the lifeless projects of the Modern Movement. The temporal sequenceof traditional urbanism, in the light of these objections, urges back-pedallingover half a century in order to recover what it regards as a more authentic USurban framework. Then, working from that framework, earlier architecturalforms, land use patterns and planning practicesÐ condemned by the modernistsand superseded by suburban developersÐ are to be redeveloped and extendedin continuous fashion into the future.

Market-place urbanists advocate temporal continuity without any back-pedalling or planning. They look neither to modernism’s utopian future nor totraditionalism’s authentic past. Instead, they embrace urban development as anongoing disassociation of its constituent parts and histories, swearing by privateinitiative and its promise of a democratic alternative to utopian and authori-tarian master planning. The market-place vision of city development is tuned tothe rhythms of commerce as created by popular demand and accepts the vaststretches of city being continually developed and redeveloped by commercialforces. A loose, open-ended city is announced where time is understood in thepresent tense and via short-term, fashion-dependent interests.

Positioned against the market-place, social urbanists reject the uneven conse-quences of commodity capitalism. Even more vociferously than traditionalists,they dismiss most aspects of the existing US city and suburb. Given the fervourof their critiques, social urbanist ideas start to resemble the moral imperativesand utopian strategies of the Modern Movement. However, since social urban-ists do not propose a utopian city, they depict the city more in the present thanin the future tense, and stress urban ills to a greater extent than prognoses forfuture betterment. Their city vision is the present-focused obverse of market-place urbanismÐ an ongoing social battleground between the forces of capital-ism and the mass of discontented or deceived humanity.

In conceptual urbanism, a host of aspects of the existing city, many roundlycriticized by social urbanists and traditionalists, are reworked into a strategy forthe city’s relentless transformation. Unlike the other urbanisms, which denouncechaos and congestion, conceptual urbanists experiment out from disruption anddisorder. Furthermore, the dimension of time is not understood for the authen-ticity of the past, the reality of the present or the necessity of the future. Lineartime is dispensed with altogether in favour of other temporalities describedthrough random collage or repetitive reworking. Granted, conceptual urbanistsobserve the temporal destabilizations of media/technological innovations asmuch as market-place urbanists. Nonetheless, they oppose a city constructed

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140 M. Schwarzer

primarily by popular/corporate taste and propose, instead, challenging architec-tural/urbanistic plans and interventions.

During the period when many commentators have complained that theconstituent parts of US cities and suburbs are becoming homogeneous links ina great corporate chain, the contemporary ® eld of urban design and theory hasdemonstrated pervasive heterogeneity. This heterogeneity in the ordering andunderstanding of the city leads to a picture of the city over¯ owing itself.

Each of the four movements works from certain common criteria of whatconstitutes a city: the physical product of social interaction, enabled by modes ofcommunication and transportation and resulting in levels of density that exceedthose of the countryside. Yet, each movement favours different means ofcommunication/transportation, different levels of density and differentde® nitions of social interaction. Traditionalists endorse a moderately densepedestrian- and rail-in¯ ected city where inadvertent and fact-to-face contact isthe basis for sociability. Market-place urbanists praise modes of transport (e.g.motor vehicles) and communication (e.g. cell phones) that lead to a sprawlingcity where people are able to choose solitude (in the home) or society (at themall). Social urbanists are less particular about their ideal modes of transport ordensity, and are more concerned with the obstructions that capitalism places inthe way of both movement (e.g. congestion and pollution) and gathering (e.g.crime and poorly maintained public spaces). Conceptual urbanists want cities ofcutting-edge transportation (e.g. high-speed rail), electronic communication andother infrastructural matrices that facilitate new urban content and expression.

Bringing these different movements into order would create a uniform urban-ism. Yet, that would be a task too great for any architect or writer or even agrouping of such individuals, as the experiences of the past point out. Moreimportantly, however, it would be a task at odds with the pluralistic tenor of ourtimes and the ceaselessly changing nature of the city. Even if cities are increas-ingly under the hegemony of global capital, the random and erratic nature ofthat totalizing gaze manifests itself differently in every local situation.

The differences between urban movements on the same issuesÐ the dimensionof time, the mode of transportation and communication, the level of density andthe manner of social interactionÐ demonstrate that contemporary urbanism canbe no more a uniform doctrine than the contemporary city a uniform series ofbuildings, spaces and traf® c arteries. The city encompasses a multitude oftemporal dimensions that many of us move through on a regular basis: immacu-late historic districts, themed parks or malls, placeless real-estate developmentsabandoned ghost wards (Schwarzer, 1998) virtual screen cities and moments oflofty architecture. Likewise, the city is negotiated by the same people in mixedways, inclusive of feet, bicycles, buses, trains, planes, automobiles, telephones,web sites and emails. In terms of density, US cities range from the closely packedyet gentrifying tenements of New York’s Lower East Side to the 2 and 3 acresprawl of exurbs. Finally, our social lives rotate between increasingly ¯ exiblede® nitions of work and family, and between engagements on a subtle spectrumbetween intention and accident, whether these relate to consumption, politicalinvolvement, entertainment, sex or adventure.

Approaching the city in discourse intimates an openness to these and otheraspects of the urban condition. Instead of a utopian destiny or historicalgroundwork, the city in discourse encourages a transient and heterogeneousapproach to urban design and theory. Greater understanding is sought, but not

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The Contemporary City in Four Movements 141

reductive simplicity; the city is presented via speci® c interventions interwovenand often at odds with each other.

An important goal of a discursive approach is to problematize and notsystematize the city. However, this activity should not be seen as negative.Rather, it supports the creation of openings for mixed messages and theiroffspringÐ a greater density of urban theory and design. The city is not the bestof its parts, the sum of its parts or a whole greater than its parts, but thepossibility of new eruptions from among the parts.

Advanced is an urban scene visualized through an over¯ ow of viewpointsÐshot through multiple exposures, developed out of focus and observed at manyopenings. Such mixed moments open the city to possibilities that would not beapparent in an urbanism of crystalline focus or systematic closure. As Macherey(1978, p. 101) wrote on literary texts, ª It is not a question of perceiving a latentstructure of which the manifest work is an index, but of establishing that absencearound which a real complexity is knitº . Something similar is true of perceivingand understanding the city. Approaching urbanism from an absence or gap,formed out of the relations between movements, encourages new designs andtheories of the city to emerge from what has been said, what has been contra-dicted and what has gone unsaid. The absence created between these move-ments is a set of doors leading to other visions of the city. It is a space fromwhich the city’s uncontrollable unfolding may be debated (and extended) bytheorists and designers from widely different viewpoints.

The irregular nature of these discursive gaps or absences encourages non-polarizing approaches. All too often, as witnessed in the discussions of the fourmovements above, urban designs and theories ¯ ow apart from each other viabi-polar constructions. Positions are established through generalizations andoppositions. Cities must be this or that. They cannot be nostalgic and experimen-tal, enamoured with cars and pedestrian movement, preoccupied with thefreedom and catastrophe of capitalism or engaged with form and ® eld. Becausethey are set against each other, the cities described or envisioned by each of thefour movements are reduced and impoverished. They are far less than the city.

Instead of victorious detachment, I am arguing for scenarios where urbanmovements seek each other out, build upon and pilfer from each other andbegin to ® nd greater interest in messy, ongoing interaction. An urbanismemerging from the gaps in discourse, rather than from an outside foundationalposition, is always compromised, provisional and collective. Such post-positional creation of (or re¯ ection on) future cities is therefore a work withoutan ideal structure. It is a work in progress. It is, most of all, a work in commonwith an other.

At the same time, a discursive urbanism would no more accept the status quoof cities than would any of the four movements discussed in this article. I am notadvocating an urbanism concurrent with the everyday, with the in® nite andunchartable perceptions and experiences of millions upon millions of people, oran urbanism coinciding with raw sensation, that which is prior to thought andlanguage. Such acts would amount to an undiscriminating mirroring of theorywith apparent reality. On the contrary, I believe that a discursive urbanism canwork toward different realities from a closer engagement with how we perceiveand conceive realities. Described in a different context by Levinas (1969, p. 76),discourse or ª Language does not refer to the generality of concepts, but lays thefoundations for a possession in commonº .

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In conclusion, I have engaged the contrapuntal melodies of four differentmovements on the contemporary city in order to begin theorizing a discursivespace in common that embodies the complexity and otherness behind urban life.If we wish to better align urban theory and design with urban perception andexperience, we must become more familiar with the intersections, divides andpotential harmonies between these and other urban movements. An intricatephysique of attitudes, manners and understandings, the city often falls togetherwhere it falls apart. Instead of repressing the dissonances between the urbanismsdiscussed in this essay and choosing one over the others, we might morefruitfully understand their discord as a recent expression of the phrase Stadtluft,a term that has for centuries associated the air of cities with freedom of thoughtand action.

Notes

1. Between the late 1920s and the 1950s, architects like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Jose LuisSert, acting through organizations like the CongreÁ s Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne

(CIAM), attempted to shape universal urban order out of the chaos of laissez-faire capitalism (seeSchwarzer, 1997).

2. For a discussion of some of these theories, see Ellin (1999).3. See also Calthorpe (1993).

4. In an analysis of Seaside’s code, Neil Levine (1991) claims they have achieved precisely this end,noting a turn away from the social escapism encapsulated by the glass picture window of the

modern house. By contrast, Seaside’s codes mandating gridded streets and porch-screensconnect the private world of the family and the public world of community. Supposedly, the

world of the glance (of myriad architectural details mandated by the code and of socialinteractions between homes and the pavement) replaces that of the gaze (the isolated view out

onto the sea).5. Traditional urbanists depart as well from the foundational de® nition of typology developed by

Gottfried Semper in the 19th century. Semper had articulated typology as a continuum ofchange responding to the historical unfolding of new spiritual and material conditions.

6. Dating back to the 19th century, US public policy has greatly contributed to suburbandevelopment and urban dispersion, as described in Warner (1978) and Weiss (1987).

7. Still, are not the condensed design charettes of new urbanists (lasting usually a couple of days)merely a different sort of hard sell?

8. On the subject of continuity, Garreau (1991) betrays faith in the swirl of freeway vertigo whenhe writes that edge cities are somehow incomplete. Bringing up the example of unplanned yet

immensely beautiful Venice, he predicts that edge cities will someday acquire the complexity,diversity and size of such historic cities. Edge city becomes a continuation of urban history since

early modern Europe, only played out in a faster lane.9. For instance, Ewing (1990) locates potential urban growth through the parameters of critical

population mass, number of large employers, continuity under a single master developer andoverall population growth of the region. In so doing, he necessarily devalues other possible

indicators, such as ethnic make-up, topography, wind patterns and cultural history.10. In a different veinÐ one which idealizes urbanity in places like ManhattanÐ Sharpe & Wallock

(1994) argue that suburbia is a domain largely exclusive of minorities and the poor.11. These arguments are developed further in Smith (1996).

12. See also Davis (1998).13. In his description of Parc de la Villette, Tschumi (1994, p. 203) describes an ª architecture that

means nothing, an architecture of the signi® er rather than the signi® edÐ one that is pure traceor place of languageº .

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