Seminar: Key Themes

Metropolis to Megalopolis

Aristotle: People gather in cities first for security, remain for economic opportunity, ultimately stay for ‘the good life(style)’

Ford: “We shall solve the problems of the city by leaving the city” In Fordist economy, the city was the place of labor, industry; in the Post-Fordist economy, it has become the place of information, exchange, and the good life(style)--

Themes/

Megalopolis: City of the 21st Century--Region supersedes City

Consumption/Connectivity supersede Labor/Community

Benjamin on desire, commodity, and shopping place (shop, magazin, arcade, department store) (Arcades Project, 1927-40)

Debord’s theory of the dérive and the reimagining of the city (Theory of the Dérive, 1958)

Baudrillard on the strange mixture of fantasy and desire that is unique to late 20c culture and the city (Consumer Society, 1970)

Koolhaas on New York as the birthplace of the technology of the fantastic (Delirious New York, 1978)

Koolhaas on shopping culture (forthcoming)

Koolhaas on Vegas Guggenheim/Hermitage/Venetian (forthcoming)

definitions

role of polis: society, politics, and consumption [desire becomes duty]

role of urbs: accommodating ever-changing activities and desires spatially

merging of polis and urbs in contemporary city

21c City

historical contextualization

ancient polis and u rbs/medieval town/12-18c city/19c metropolis/20c suburb, megalopolis, megacity/21c aeropolis confusions Los Angeles as ‘non-city’ and New York as artificial centrality, sheer ecstacy of being crowded together, congestion city disappearing into multicentered region/administrative, commercial, entertainment cneters replace cities?

21c model: infinitely expanding metropolitan region replaces autonomous city

regional governance

regional infrastructure

regional resources

regional collaboration

regional culture

regional economy

regional politics

regional environmental concerns

endless sprawl or strategy to stablize edge and re-stablize center

limitations on growth

preservation of wild or uncultivated tracts of land

revitalization of inner city cores or old downtowns, regional centers

emphasis on movement and transportation, global connectivity, consumption of goods and information

typologies

megalopolis

megacities (8,000,000 population or more, defined in 1994)

giant cities

metropoli

midopolises (first-ring suburbs) (Kotkin)

nerdistans (Kotkin)

technoburbs

aeropoli (Kasarda)

administrative centers/capital cities

capitals of information (Krieger, 47): incubators and exporters of innovation

convention cities

museum cities--ancestor, Alexandria

sports cities--ancestor, Olympia

shopping cities (aeropoli)--ancestor, trade cities of ancient Near East

entertainment/leisure cities

retirement cities

economies (social, political, economic)

human infrastructure (labor force, intellectual capital, consumer force)

economies of difference: race, ethnicity

economies of class (balkanization, privitization of infrastructure and municipal services)

economy of object versus economy of commodity or product--status of commodities

[what Walter Benjamin wrote about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction Baudrillard applied to all reaches of everyday life]

lifestyle

art/architecture

profession

communication

social relations

political realm

city

country

economies of the sign: advertising, marketing, branding

local markets

global markets

retail industry at all levels: cultivating consumption practices

fulfillment logistics

economy of scarcity vis a vis urban context (suburbs are in big supply; city centers dwindling)

economy of place

economy of connectivity

economies of public and private

infrastructures that have defined urban forms through history

alphabet and writing

ancient land and sea trade/travel routes

ancient Roman roads

seaport and harbor systems

river and canal systems

printing

rail systems

telecommunication systems

automobile, truck, and highway and freeway systmes

air travel and cargo systems

electronic, digital, and satellite imaging and information systems

geographies

center/periphery/region distinctions

cores

downtowns

main streets

concentric rings versus gridded urban fabric

horizontal/vertical distinctions

postindustrial landscape (brownfields)

target of sprawl (untouched natural landscape)

deteriorated urban core (infill and revitalization/redevelopment)

deteriorated first-ring suburbs (reinvestment, connectivity, zoning for mixed use)

monotonous, homogenous, banalized suburbs losing appeal to social imagination

scales

macro

micro

autonomous municipal

metropolitan/county

regional

state

national

global

densities (versus congestion)

high and low density distinctions need reversing as city centers have emptied out

densities vary with 9 to 5, weekend, night schedules

population

industry (productive and consumptive)

information (from invisible electronic communication to “visual inflation” of commercial advertising)

strategies for mediation

positive scenarios

positive imaging/branding

rethinking housing

rethinking office/corporate headquarters

rethinking third space (club environment)

reducing economic segregation (racial automatically takes care of itself?)

defining the nature of ‘urbanity’ (how to live in cities)

role of architecture (connectivity as formal problem)

tectonic shifts (in technology and information) have created new urban forms from earlier ones

Athens/polis

Megalopolis/giant city (defensive purpose, centripetal; transportation infrastructure)

Rome/urbs and capital of empire (roads, sea routes)

Paris/metropolis and capital of nation state (railroad systems)

New York/20c modernist city, ‘manhattanism’, vertical city (density, congestion, connectivity)

Mexico City/postmodern megacity and capital of country (Shanghai, Dhaka) (scale)

Hong Kong/generic city; global city (scale)

Los Angeles/capital of megalopolis of so california, horizontality (highways/freeways/airports)

Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)/aeropolis/triport/information technology center of Asia

psychometropolis (Vidler reading)

psyscho-mechanical urbanism (Rem, Delirious, 62)

typologies: forms of suburbanism

Baudelaire’s ‘banlieue’ or suburb

Apollinaire’s ‘zone’ and ‘zonier’, place and inhabitants of unbuilt ground at periphery

sub-urbanism (consumer driven)

extra-urbanism (lifestyle driven)

post-sub-urbanism (lifestyle driven)

technoburb (technology and economy driven)

development of the San Fernando Valley

incorporated into city of Los Angeles, 1915 (doubling size of city, 168 sq mi, 24 mile triangle)

first seen in 1769 by Fr. Juan Crespi

mission San Fernando Rey de Espana founded in 1797

Rancho San Rafael in 1784

Rancho Encino in 1795

Isaias Wolf Hellman, founded Farmers & Merchants bank in 1871

Isaac Lankershim, John B. Lankershim, I.N. Van Nuys cultivated wheat in last quarter of 19c

Pacific Electric Rail introduced in 1903

Los Angeles Aquaduct brought water to truck farmers in 1913

population doubled between 1930 and 1940, explosive growth after WWII

in 1970, if it were an independent city, would have been 6th largest in the nation!!

nature/culture dichotomy

nature/culture/2nd nature

real/simulation/simulacrum

center(s)/edge/periphery

near order (small grid)/far order (big grid)

congestion, density, thickness/thinness

home/office/third space

city as work/oeuvre, mediation between occupants and nature/culture (materialization of the abstract)

city creates and demands new forms of representation

prodution of cultural significance (polis)

physical fabric of city (urbs) (design guidelines)

memory/monuments versus forgetting/erasure and demolition

historical monuments versus infrastructural and architectural monuments

erasure of production versus production of pleasure (sign of need to escape and its impossibility)

Coney Island and Disneyland/Vegas as fetal NY and LA

multiple synthetic realities compensate for disappearance of real city

cultivation of edge as edge (waterfront, desert)

balkanization, race and class, surveillance and security

individual forms, symmetrical but counter

not disappearance, erasure, rupture, but eclipse (repression), survival, transformation

research methods

sources:

historical documentation

photo archives

clippings files

primary and secondary texts (theory, history, interpretation)

social imaginary

fiction

film

television

research paradigms:

urban archaeology origins, transformations, overlaps (myth and memory)(Benjamin, Klein)

diagramming, mapping of topography, geography, architecture, infrastructure, scale (Gottman, Koolhaas)

environmental, sustainabililty studies (McPhee)

ethnologic studies, urban social conditions (of memory, soliltude, difference, crowding) (Davis)

structural and poststructural analysis, forms of signification, spectacle (Lefebvre, Banham, Venturi, Lyotard, Vidler)

dérive: disorientation to reimagine the city, exploration to remap the city (Situationists, Guy Debord)

technological, infrastructural, economic studies/globalization trends (Koolhaas, Olalquiaga, Kotkin et alia)