Presented in 2015 at: Flux & Flow: Explorations of Movement and Change, AHGSS, Carleton University
The city is on the move.
The story of human settlement has written a long arc of centralization and concentration of life, but the dense matter of the city is far from still life.
It vibrates.
It oscillates.
It moves to and fro.
And even the sleepiest cities are never really at complete rest. This paper also oscillates. It moves to and fro. The intension is to arrive somewhere, but movement can be so seductive, like driving on an expressway, or better yet a parkway, with its pretence of communion with nature, we may go quickly through the idea of the circulation city. The somewhere of this text is not an elucidation of specific components of the city and their relationship to its circulatory function, be it of plastic goods or human excrement.
The destination is an understanding of how circulation may be overwhelming the city itself, but we may get caught up in this contradiction: in the contemporary experience of circulation what does it mean to arrive?
How do we find pause in circulation city?
How will interruption reveal the ungraspable form of perpetual movement?
Like a drive on the parkway, and its short hand experience of nature, we will only have the slightest of glances at the world as we speed through it, but we do have somewhere to get to, and if we must drive then lets take the parkway…
Despite the current rhetoric of the rise of the city, the archipelago of urbanism the world over is nothing without the waters between. The inner life of the city requires an overlapping circulation system with the world outside. The goods of agriculture once moved in a denser orbit around our cities, but like global capital and with it manufacturing of all kinds, the denser spheres of movement have expanded and now systematically encompasses the world. It is not to say that we have witnessed the extinction of nowhere. There is quite a lot of nowhere left, but our focus seems to have turned toward a network of somewheres. Significant somewheres can be identified through their role as hubs or nodes on a global circulation network.
Take for instance the port city as a significant somewhere in global circulation of any kind. Although the title port city may be a problematic label for the most active nodes in this global network of shipping and receiving. In a circulation city like Rotterdam water traffic is an undeniable organizer of global networks, and ports have become the most significant nodes in the network of circulation of things.
A question that might become increasingly pressing is how to reconcile the image of the city of Shanghai or Rotterdam with the material reality of the port city that moves, in the case of Shanghai, upwards of 35 million container units or over 530 metric tonnes of things every year1, which is the somewhere that matters in the circulation cit..
Interruption
In 1990 a group of Mexican and American artists serve a dinner at the edge of two nations. End of the Line begins along divided lines, nations each to their side in San Diego and Tijuana, but slowly the boundary becomes porous and the meal breaks through the state barriers. Enabled by food these moments attempt to weave together a false interruption in the circulation of people.
20 years later artist and architect Teddy Cruz develops a project for the same area with the same focus2. However, the nature of movement at the border makes almost any lineage to the engagement of the Border Art Workshop near impossible. Instead of a communion, 60 Linear Miles of Transborder Conflict is a detailed representation of the role the border plays in shaping, defining and controlling the lives intersecting with this border.
This textual interruption serves to divert the narrative underlying the circulation city. Parts of the city are on the move, of this there is no doubt, but mobility is far from a universal experience for citizens of any city. This short story of creative interruption begins in reverse. It starts with two poetic attempts to break through those specific places where the deliberate and complex control of circulation has been put in place.
We should start again after that interruption…
The contemporary city of the western world is frequently contrasted with the Roman Civitas and its Urbs and the Greek Polis. It grounds us in a certain history of the city, but also provides a distant and constructed model to contrast our lived city against.
In his book, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli outlines a contrast between his understanding of the city of antiquity and his reading of the modern metropolis as an economic instrument. Aureli differentiates between this distant idea of the city, with its roots in both the Civitas and Polis, from our condition of ‘urbanization’, which he grounds in Ildefones Cerdà, The General Theory of Urbanization in 1860.
Although Aureli characterizes the development of the city from the tenth century onward as “couched in a fundamental network of economic transactions” (Aureli, 8), it is with the Spanish engineer and planner, Cerdà, that he identifies a clear crystallization of the emergent condition of the city as a machine of production. In Cerdà’s plan for Barcelona (figure xx) Aureli foceses on the shift away from an understanding of “…human habitat as framed within the ideological and historical concept of the city as centrality, but as a potentially infinite space that extends beyond the centre of cities according to the technological and economic capabilities of a productive society.” (Aureli, 11) It is the grid which becomes the physical manifestation of this increasingly instrumental conception of the city.3
The singular and symbolic city accelerates its evolution into a distributed and functional condition. Aureli views Cerdà’s plan for Barcelona as the turning point towards what we know as urbanization, expressed here through the grid as an economic instrument, which values circulation and production over representation and meaning.
The ideal of Cerdà’s plan would face the many real layers of the European city. Each one a palimpsest of civic materials requiring immense political power to redraw. Significant re-imaginings of the city would be difficult to realize until after the Second World War when the devastation of the conflict would force a different kind of Tabula Rasa. George Baird follows this thread of planning thought in Europe in the final chapter of his book The Space of Appearances. Baird identifies the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) as the vanguard of modern planning ideas, and explains that as far back as 1920 (8 years before its official formation) CIAM members had been developing radical and simple principals for urban development. Along with the postwar reconstruction came opportunities for realization of these principals. Among CIAM’s four broad organizing principals (living, working, recreation, circulation), it is most interesting to focus specifically on the weight given to circulation in rebuilding European cities. “It is of particular significance to note how, as part of this process, circulation attained for the first time in the history of planning in Europe, a decisive land use status of its own. It was a corollary of this pivotal event that circulation became dissociated from the historic urban form of the street.” (Baird, 309)
Baird traces the evolution of CIAM’s urban ideas throughout the group’s history. The most radical embrace of circulation would come from the break off group Team 10, who seemed wholly seduced by the potential of mobility in the city.
Not all within the CIAM conferences expressed this preference of motion over stasis, and Baird describes a discussion from the 1959 CIAM conference, where Italian architect Ernesto Rogers questions Robert Smithson on a project called London Roads – a traffic scheme for the British capital dominated by radical decentralization through circulation. “I understood that you accept the main directions, what you call the streets. But then do you accept the streets only as directions?” (Baird, 321) Rogers criticism envisions the dominance of urban circulation over the city street, perhaps he feared the atopia Rem Koolhaas depicts half a century later in Junkspace (Koolhass, ).
The essay is a sprawling textual vision of the world consumed by an endless indoor/outdoor public space. In Junkspace the city is beyond its domination by circulation, but is simply entirely transitory – Junkspace is perpetual motion sickness rather than infinite bliss.
We have missed an exit however. In this speeding through the cityscape, collapsing its history with delightful velocity, we have bypassed an important interchange. Let us go bac
Interrupted again
Disruption of the circulatory function of the city is not new. The history of the carnival and the festival can tell us of moments when we are united by the desire to turn the everyday world of the city on its head. Rio Janeiro and its Carnival and New Orleans and its Mardi Gras are hyperbolized versions of moments of collective transgression when the life of the street is completely and utterly inverted. Various annual Pride parades overlap with the inversion of the carnival but the collective element is of a different nature. The LGBTQ parades have developed a collective space, pushed into the public realm, that relies on presenting or presencing itself to the rest of the world, if only temporarily. The interruption is not the protest oriented toward a specific gain, but evolving and open celebration of being a member of the community or simple supporting its existence. But like most protest actions of this nature they are most often state sanctioned. A permit is issued for the activity. Police are assigned to manage to process of interruption. Organization of the event often gives warning to various bureaucracies of the state to minimize the interruption into a known inconvenience and an invitation to join the pause in circulation.
Deliberate and politically motived interruption of the unexpected and unsanctioned kind is increasingly rare in Canada and the United States. Here, in these written moments we will not draw conclusions on the state of protest in our time, but it is difficult for me not to ponder, whether the complicated global nature of problems made confrontation on the street seem irrelevant and minuscule? Or whether the state increased its powers to control the movement of people while lowering their tolerance of dissent? Or simply have we become more complacent and less involved politically? These are very loaded and biased questions4.
In discussions on circulation and the city, the automobile is often a metonymic stand in for a range of complex interconnected apparatus.
They stand in for commuters and their suburban dwellings, for the highways and the possibility of escape, for urban freeways and the inevitability of congestion, for large scale shopping facilities and the parking lots that support them.
There is an undeniable interdependence between the technological development of the car and the expanded space of circulation in the United States and Canada, but the causal relationship has been put into question many times. Consider Los Angeles, a kind of advanced species of the circulation city, leading the way through the early twentieth century of a decentralized urban landscape exploding with car ownership. However, it was the not the automobile that shaped the civic structure of Los Angeles. Peter Hall tells us, in his comprehensive history of city planning, that the foundation was forged on the concentration and expansion of the electric rail network.
Henry E. Huntingdon purchased and amalgamated seventy-two light rail systems into the Pacific Electric Railway connecting Los Angeles, Long Beach, Pasadena, Glendale, and Santa Monica. The system, however, was not simply to service the existing cities, like many other suburban developments of the early twentieth century, the expansion of rails was a means to further profitable housing developments.
The real estate expansion during the years of the Pacific Electric Railway would initiate the momentum for Los Angeles’ development in the twentieth century, but mass transit would quickly fade from the story. California would be among the early adopters of the automobile for city living.
Starting in 1915, Los Angeles car ownership was five times the national average, and even as ownership rose exponentially Los Angeles kept pace at this level. Hall suggests it would take America into the nineteen-fifties to reach this same penetration, and that European cities would not arrive at this until well into the nineteen-eighties. Made possible by the seductive possibilities for movement made available by rail technologies, the early adoption of the automobile then transformed Los Angeles into perhaps a truly American city.
This is the city that the English art and architecture historian Reyner Banham encounters in his celebratory text Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Banham traces the layers of circulation in the area deeper than Hall, beautifully describing a transportation palimpsest on which Los Angeles has developed, echos of movement written in the material of each new layer added to the circulation city. His intellectual embrace of the automobile as the ultimate metonymy of American technological wonder helped shift criticism away from circulation cities, and embrace the spirit of movement and speed.
In the new forward to the 2001 edition of the book Joe Day remarks on the prescient qualities of Banham’s Los Angeles, however what seemed once to be the sublime Banham’s ‘Autotopia’ is now made quaint by the incomprehensible developments around the worl
Interruption
Let us return to a consideration of the line that interrupts. First, in 1976 and the monumental project from Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Running Fence, an 18 foot high 24 and half mile fence running through California. While the final artist act was the most decisive intervention in the landscape the project was also a series of interruptions that spanned public hearings and court rooms. To arrive at such a powerful point of interruption required almost three years of logistical interventions into legal and bureaucratic intuitions including the Superior Court of California. The poetic line emerging from the pacific ocean winds into the hills and the determination needed to bring this work to material reality could be telling of what is at stake in acts of interruption. The temporary poetic fence crossed landscape that was rural, and most importantly leaving space for the continued circulation of 14 different roads including those in the town of Valley Ford.
For a line of interruption of a completely different kind consider the much loved New York City Highline designed by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio & Renfro. Cutting through the city it reimagined faded circulatory infrastructure as a winding moment of diversion moving through the city. (It would be unimaginable to suggest the kind of interruption to the city scape necessary for such an incredible span of useless space, but the existing paths of circulation made it possible. ) The Highline, like The Running Fence, is perhaps only an illusion, the stakes of circulation in the city are too high for either temporary or permanent interruption, and so we have only diversion and distraction as respite from the movement of the city. Is it important for the shared space of the city to open themselves up for interruption? How are we to understand what it is to be together if the spaces we share are programmed to endless movement?
Cities seem to expand endlessly, unfolding like the universe propelled outward from an explosive singular moment.
It’s momentum of expansion consumes the edges of its self, but it cannot do this without the infrastructure we provide.
This infrastructure, which could be considered some of the most significant human endeavours the world over, is barely recognizable as a somewhere.
Aside from the general and common sublimation of the human scale, what is memorable about moving the through the $22 billion dollar Big Dig project in Boston? Or the $2.5 billion Woodrow Wilson Bridge between Washington D.C. and Alexandria?
Perhaps you can more clearly place yourself in Denver’s $5 billion dollar airport, but that may be because of Luis Jiménez’ colossal ‘Blue Mustang’?
These are specific and incredible instances of the investment of both private and public funds into movement at a hyperbolic scale, but their exceptional qualities do not betray the larger picture.
Consider the same measurable thinking from the macro scale. For instance in the United States, transport is a category of federal government spending that occupies almost the same fiscal space as education5.
In the search for this information one encounters positions from all political perspectives suggesting that America’s investment, and really the entire world’s investment, in the infrastructure of movement is critically lacking.
They all put forward a persuasive imperative of repairing, expanding, building, rebuilding, redesigning the freeways and subways and railways and runways and seaways with little if any mention of what is being expanded to where.
The use of the connection, and particularly the efficiency of its circulation, is prized above all. How many will move? How fast will they go?
These are the most important questions. It has become difficult to assess the outward momentum of the city. What may have been more clearly defined as an attraction to the appearance of autonomy, which was always on offer at the edge of the city, has become muddied in the waters of movement. Can we located the edge anymore? Can we find a limit to define an inside or outside? Have we been consumed by circulation?
This is perhaps the central thesis of Rem Koolhaas’ Junkspace. I say perhaps because the text is itself a circulatory infrastructure of ideas about space without any recognizable narrative journey, or even a paragraph break, to ground us.
The text goes nowhere, or is rather always going somewhere but never arrives. It is perhaps the only way to truly demonstrate the all encompassing condition of circulation as living. Forty years earlier, in Reyner Banham love letter to Los Angeles, he was drawn to the surprising capacity of his adopted city to be distinctly urban but in an unrecognizable city form. In hindsight perhaps it could be suggested the while LA made material many of the aspirations of modernity and we clearly recognized ourselves in it (some with terror and others delight).
We could see the possibilities of our desires being fulfilled, in concrete and motorways carrying us effortlessly between the city and the foothills. Koolhaas’ Junkspace is a perverse evolution of Banham’s Autopia, and it is both completely recognizable as the world around and completely disorienting.
The movement itself is seductive, but to draw any kind of distinct sense from it is impossible. It is as if to extract any particular portion would reveal even less to us of its central ideas. Akin to examining a section of the freeway to understand where it goes, we are best to leave it in our peripheral vision to be examined obliquely for fear we get lost in its acc
Interruption as continuity
This final interruption returns to where we began, with the sharing of food. The creative act in this case is directed at the symbolic sight of circulation. Of the many artist that engage food as a creative material, the line of two thousand diners created by Seitu Jones is one of the most wondrous. Assembling almost a half-mile of continuous dining along Victoria Street in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the site of circulation becomes a specific place of gathering and sharing. The work is sincere and generous and stands neither in opposition or in support of the cynical realism of Koolhaas’ Junkspace. It simply orients itself otherwise. At work in Junkspace is the reflection of the overwhelming scale of our circulation infrastructure, the sublimation of the human scale seems reflected in the disorienting and encompassing textual field. Koolhaas masterfully expresses his observation of the contemporary condition, but both in form and content it becomes inescapable and distant and pessimistic.
Despite the significant and impressive achievement of such a shared food experience the scale of Jones’ work is insignificant against even the average infrastructure project of the day. However, this most sincere interruption defined a sense of place within the perpetual motion of the circulation city. A table formed a line that both divided and united, an interruption that created continuity. Jones’ act of dining is reminiscent of one of Hannah Arendt most elegant metaphors, “To live together in the world means essentially a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.” (Arendt 2006)
It is perhaps only possible to briefly interrupt the powerful movement of people and things in the global Junkspace that expands out from circulation city, but this beautiful echo of Arendt reminds us of the very important spaces in-between. If the world of things is in perpetual motion how can we grasp what unites and defines us?
1 http://www.portshanghai.com.cn/en/newsDetail.do;jsessionid=72AB7C9F7271AF060181061C43F971D2?nid=248
2 http://estudioteddycruz.com/index1.html#!prettyPhoto/4/
3 The context of the grid in America, however, was quite different. While the seemingly limitless “empty” space of the continent plays a significant role in defining that difference, Richard Sennett, in The Conscience of the Eye, also describes a “neutral city” which calls into question the simple characterization of the grid as an instrumentalizing economic force. While not denying the motivations of 19th century capitalism to rationalize the city for its efficient use, Sennett also elaborates on the relationship of the Puritan settlers to the foundations of the American understanding of the city. The religious construction of the world through the Puritans perspective (as well as similar Protestant sects fleeing Europe to settle in America) saw the outside as only “exposure, disorder and cruelty” (Sennett, 44). The grid played a key role in controlling these negative forces of the world.Through the 19th and 20th centuries the realization of urbanization across the “Tabula Rasa” landscapes of America would involve stripping away the significance of places, combined at times with the literal elimination of the first peoples living there before them.
4 This nrrative of a de-politicized public is far from all encompassing. There are incredible exceptions the most obvious of which include the Occupy Movement and here in Canada the student protests in Montreal in 2013. Despite these and other exceptions the larger arc of protest through disruption has altered its path significantly. I believe these, albiet loaded questions have an importnat ressonance, the answers to the questions however may be surprising.
5 OECD (2014), “Infrastructure investment” (indicator).
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/b06ce3ad-en
(Accessed on 01 March 2015)