"A city can only exist for those who can move around it": Edgar Pieterse and Teresa Caldeira, Views from the Periphery

Melanie Boehi considers the possibilities of reconfiguring city-space in her response to Teresa Caldeira and Edgar Pieterse

How do city forms influence demonstrations? How do we think about urban forms and citizen engagement? What connects desires and design sensibilities? These and other questions were addressed in a panel hold on Tuesday, June 25, at the Goethe Institute. Teresa Caldeira presented an interpretation of the unfolding political protests in Brazilian cities and Edgar Pieterse talked about the need to better understand the functioning of infrastructure and networks in slum urbanism. 

In early June 2013, the Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement) called for a demonstration in São Paolo that was quickly followed by a series of large demonstrations all over the country. While the first demonstration focused on the demand for free public transport, subsequent demonstrations also asked for changes regarding corruption, investments for the FIFA World Cup, LGBT rights, pensioner’s rights and racism, and highlighted a class conflict between poor and middle class protestors. The police countered violently and politicians and the media reacted to the demonstrations with expressions of surprise and quickly labelled the marchers as vandals. In response to the inadequate reporting, the demonstrations became spaces of dialogue between what politicians and the press said and what people posted on the internet. Demonstrators carried messages on cardboards directed at the TV audience and social media users. The press was constantly contested and the main TV station hindered from covering the events in the streets.

According to Caldeira, the unfolding demonstrations emerged in two contexts. The first one is the demonstrations occuring globally since the beginning of the Arab spring. Demonstrators’ posters frequently express solidarity with other cities of protest. The second one is the prevalence of mass gatherings at cultural events in contemporary Brazil that have emerged over the past ten years and are now increasingly politicised, e.g. music and theatre festivals, demonstrations, gay parades, evangelical demonstrations. In São Paolo, the form of the city influenced the peripheral organisation of the demonstrations. Since the 1940s, migrants who couldn’t afford the city built houses in the periphery. With their social upward mobility, these houses were upgraded and urban social movements successfully demanded the supply of infrastructure such as water and electricity. The city had arrived in the periphery. In the 1990s, a series of negative factors affected life in the periphery, marked by economic downturn, youth unemployment and crime. Crime decreased after 2000, accompanied by an increase of artistic and cultural movements that embraced the notion of the city as a space for circulation. “A city only exists for those who can move around it” became a prominent slogan. Unlike elsewhere, the demonstrations in São Paolo did not focus on a square but were mobile. In a city with 11 million inhabitants, 7 million motor vehicles and an incredible amount of traffic, circulation was issue around which mass protest was first mobilised.

Image: Melanie Boehi

A different basis for mobilization for city changes exists in the slums in which 62 % of sub-Saharan Africa’s urban population live, where urban life is marked by low and erratic household incomes, small tax bases and dysfunctional politics. Negative trends accumulate to an urban polycrisis, affecting the ecosystem, supply of water, energy and food, land distribution, employment and violence. According to Pieterse, participatory development is essential but insufficient to tackle the challenges of slum urbanism. Participatory development becomes ineffectual when the scope of challenges is vast, goes beyond urgent short-term concerns and includes high levels of complexity. It is therefore necessary to recognise the importance of city-wide networks, apply systemic thinking and take design seriously. Pieterse emphasised that much work needs to be done to understand the auto-constructions of urban slum citizens – desires, aspirations, affective registers, as well as focus on the understanding of networks, including the ones shaped by religious belief systems.

Image: Melanie Boehi

Melanie Boehi is a PhD student at the University of Basel, Switzerland
A more detailed discussion of Teresa's critique can be found here http://kafila.org/2013/07/05/sao-paulo-the-city-and-its-protests-teresa-caldeira/

Commoditising Architecture

Aditi Surie Von Czechowski critiques the sublimation of architectural form by capital in her discussion of Joshua Comaroff's lecture, "Poor Form". 

Josh Comaroff’s talk on “Poor Form” asks us: “what do we learn about the life of forms, when form itself appears to be challenged?” Comaroff started by foregrounding the oft-incommensurable relationship between architectural practice and the requirements of capital. What does it mean when architectural form fails? In other words, moments in which architecture is awkward, comical, menacing, or tragic; when architects fail to unify the elements of function or scale with design, or when the values to which they are committed are at loggerheads with the logic of rentierism embodied by the buildings themselves.

Comaroff picks moments of “articulate” failures: failures of form that emerge under specific historical circumstances and tell us something significant about their genesis. For an architect, form means something quite specific: the transformation of the functional and technical requirements into a coherent aesthetic form using architectural vocabulary. Most architects see form as inseparable from function, but understand it as a medium for molding all parts of the building in harmony. This holistic idea of form, according to Comaroff, is what is under pressure today, when the relationship between the form of a building and its interior contents often seems arbitrary and contingent. Architecture like this, where there is no notion of form as following function, is emerging globally, particularly in places like China. The building as commodity begins to exert continual pressure on form, as seen in the example of the protean blob with its vast and highly profitable interior, aestheticized as a signifier of high design, but nevertheless vulgar; or in the cases of buildings that exemplify the tensions of tailoring size, density and repetition to high real-estate value and the requirements of investment. The picture below - Thames Town in China, a reproduction of an entire English style town close to Shanghai -  for instance, shows the end result of the logic of repetition and reproduction; a spectacle of architectural mimicry, it embodies the unheimlich:

Comaroff draws on a dazzling array of architectural examples across a spatial and temporal spread, from the Chicago loop to semi-detached houses in Singapore to point to the effects of commodification on the built environment. Architecture, as a commercial enterprise, can no longer use form to subordinate the technical and economic core of a building, or its relationship within a larger context. An example of formal failure might be novelty architecture, or a building of such sheer scale and numbers that an architect cannot express anything but quantity. These awkward forms, then, show the effect of market logic on formal proposition. They show, in Comaroff’s words: “the violence that value asserts on the built environment” – whether thought in the purely rentier terms of maximizing profit at the expense of dead space, or in terms of the maximization of value and the corresponding scales of density in the production of affordable housing.

The title, “Poor Form” is perhaps more adequate than Comaroff originally imagined: it points to both the poverty of forms as well as the both the economic and aesthetic poverty engendered by the move away from architectural formalism – the “drift in which architecture, under the sway of its evolution as an economic substance, floats away even from architecture itself.” Indeed, within the architectural profession, some have espoused the idea that the responsibility and centrality of the architectural profession has suddenly moved away from form.

Like Massimo Cacciari, Comaroff demands that we become aware of what is incommensurable in advanced capitalist societies – that we recognize, rather than sublate, the tragic and farcical elements of modern culture, that we treat these moments as a sort of analytical technique. But whereas for Cacciari, negative thought resides in the “Metropolis,” Comaroff’s architectural examples, though determinedly of the modern city, seem to float somehow above or outside of it as forms in and of themselves. In fact, buildings come to resemble cities in boxes – what he terms “potted urbanism.” Recalling Arjun Appadurai’s opening talk at JWTC, can we connect our understanding of the functioning of financial capitalism and real-estate speculation to the very real problems of architectural form? That is, rather than removing the C from Marx’s M-C-M, can we put it back in with a renewed force?

Comaroff described his intellectual enterprise as a kind of sleight-of-hand – but we can also see the crisis of form in the sleight-of-hand performed by terms like “sustainable architecture” or “architectural renewal” – that is, times when forms do not quite fail, but become entirely beholden to the logic of making capital(ism/s), rather than anything else, sustainable. Here, forms appear adequate, even perfect, but their appropriateness conceals their intended purpose. I am thinking of places like the High Line Park in New York, a gorgeous, once-abandoned railway track that has been rehabilitated into a lovely mid-city-level park. It now draws in hordes of tourists, pushing up real-estate values in the neighbourhood, and “revitalizing” formerly uncared-for areas near the West Side Highway and undesirable parts close to midtown transport hubs. Similarly, parts of East London, the construction of sporting, travel and accommodation infrastructure for the Olympics has brought in a surge in real estate investment and a corresponding exodus of large numbers of working class Londoners who can no longer afford to live there. How are we, then, also to approach the innovation of forms as those which are welcome, but disguise something menacing in the promise of a better-designed, functional-yet-prettier future?

Aditi Surie Von Czechowski is a PhD Candidate in Middle East, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University