Daily Archives: February 24, 2013

The Right to the City Determined By Identity

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Dharavi, one of the biggest slum settlements, is worth $2 billion. With the booming population of today’s world, and the lack of land to build on, there is clearly a lot of attention to such settlements. David Harvey’s, The Right to the City, talks about the “most precious yet most neglected” human right to build and rebuild the city. (Harvey 35) So, say the government took over the land and moved the people from this settlement, what would that mean for the displaced people? The Indian Constitution states that they have a responsibility to “protect the lives and well-being of the whole population, irrespective of caste or class” – as almost any such document will say. (Harvey 35) Do they even deserve to be there in the first place? The Supreme Court believes that to go by such a ‘responsibility’ would be “rewarding pick pockets”… Harsh comment, but does the Supreme Court have a point? The title of Harvey’s article, Right to the City, can, by nature, be interpreted in many different ways from many different opinions. Who owns this right? 

When talking about New York City, Harvey hypothesizes that there is going to be a “Financial Katrina”, where many of the low income neighborhoods, drowning in debt, will be cleared out. Will this then act as a blank-slate-like environment where those parts of the city could be planned again? Will there be planned developments to these parts of the city for the real-estate companies to make millions over? Thinking towards the sense of identity that is discussed in the excerpt from S, M, L, XL, what would be appropriate for the identity of such a place? Take a look at Dubai; a city which grew in just a decade or two, essentially the quintessential blank slate for an architect’s pen and paper. But what comes from the hundreds of developments and thousands of new homes that are being erected at an unimaginable rate. Dubai is essentially the airport city, “not only multiracial, also multicultural.” (Koolhaas 1252) One can even argue that with the collage of all sorts of projects, it lacks identity.

Look back to Dharavi, and compare it to Dubai in terms of identity. As Koolhaas describes, “The stronger identity .. the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.” (Koolhaas 1248) So while certain parts of New York City may undergo a kind of “Financial Katrina”, and may be more open ended to be able to absorb a variety of developments, what would happen to a place like Dharavi if the government did take over? With clearly a strong sense of identity, how much would this $2 billion land being drooled over but certain professions actually allow to take place? When talking about possibility of even more developments in certain parts of the world, Harvey argues that there have been no “coherent opposition to these developments in the twenty-first century.” (Harvey 39) Yes, there have, in my opinion based on these readings. Dharavi keeps itself from becoming the generic city as described in S, M, L, XL. While the right to the city, whether it’s yours or mine, is certainly there, at times there is a sense of history that has written the course of the natural development of the city.

 

Works Cited

Harvey, David. “New Left Review – David Harvey: The Right to the City.” New Left Review – David Harvey: The Right to the City. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2013.

Koolhaas, Rem, and Bruce Mau. S M L XL: OMA. S.l.: S.n., 1993. Print.

Who does the city belong to?

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Much is discussed about the agency of the people who inhabit a city. In “The Right to the City” David Harvey talks about how “we live in an era when ideals of human right have moved centre stage both politically and ethically…I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city.” (Harvey 23)

This brings up the question about who the city belongs to. Before talking about the who associated with that question it must first be established what ownership of a city means. This cannot be taken too literally or naively and simply be assumed that ownership is in the hands of the city government or police or politics. Although those figure may be an important part of the ownership the focus is still about the citizens, it still begs the question of what ownership is.

Harvey establishes that neo-liberal ideology has led to a circumstance where elites have taken ownership. Some could that elites backed by their money fueled power stole the city  from it’s rightful owner, the aggregate populace. This assumes that ownership is directly correlated to those with unchecked power.

If the idea of ownership is different though, then the elites have do not own the city. If ownership of a city is less a product of power and more a product of identity then the aggregate that develops, inherits, and creates the culture, reputation and identity of a city has ownership. The elites that are the “bridge and tunnel people” do not own a city in this case. (Koolhaus 1249) In this case the city and it’s urban nature are not owned by the elites but instead the city can be though to have adopt the elites.

In this case ownership of the city is not easy to establish because the question of what ownership is is the main concern. This complicates the issue because as power shifts and potentially becomes unbalanced the nature of the city changes to become a populace with a majority being the adopted instead of the who identify with the city.

If the second definition of ownership is followed a discrepancy can develop. A situation occurs where the owners of a city, those who identify with the reputation of a city, no longer become inhabitants of a city.

As power falls in the hands of the elite and those supported by a significant monetary backing the non elite get pushed out of the city. The original identity of cities and their neighborhoods needs to be moved out to accommodate the adopted wealth.

If this is the case, the question of weather or not ownership of a city can exists to non-inhabitants becomes an issue. Assuming this is the case, where does ownership default too? The easy answer become that ownership is left to the new wealthy and elite. But can the adopted populace ever really take ownership? Weather or not the “bridge and tunnel people” can take ownership of the city defines what gives a city its character. Is it those who establish the city and give it it’s uniqueness even though they have become marginalized the true owners or is it powerful who have created a commodification of the urban environment?

Koolhaas, Rem. “SMLXL”.

Harvey, David. “Right to the City”.

City Memory

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“Instead of specific memories, the associations the Generic City mobilizes are general memories, memories of memories: if not all memories at the same time, then at least an abstract, token memory, a déjà vu that never ends, generic memory.”
Koolhaas S M L XL, 1257

Cities play an important role in every urban dweller’s memory. And urban architecture and landscape act as background or even identify our memory. The clear identity of a city strongly influences the memories that contribute to city’s image. Koolhaas uses the metaphor of lighthouse to describe this “identity”—“fixed, over determined: it can change its position or the pattern it emits only at the cost of destabilizing navigation” (Koolhaas, 1248). While after the spread of Neoliberalism and globalization, there are more and more cities from Global South countries tend to become “the Generic Cities”, where both urban landscape and people’s lifestyle move from difference towards similarity, which will finally lead to “memories of memories”(Koolhaas, 1257), the fading of city’s memory.
Beijing, as the city with imperial capital historical districts as well as new developing area, carries complex memories of more than 20 million local residences and migrant workers: old courtyard houses with gardens, vendors selling with verbal advertisement along old alleys, etc. However, these identical memories of Beijing are threatened by building booms towards to a Generic City. After Beijing won the bid for 2008 Olympic games, it’s interesting to see how these new monument building and avant-garde architecture are all from foreign architects whose practices locate in all parts of the world with the trend of Generic City. The conflict between identity city of Beijing and the newly built Metropolis filled with western avant-garde architecture corresponds with the one between general public and emerging economic elite in China. It is because of limited urban space and government’s ambition of rebranding city’s name in the world that Olympic facilities are built on the ashes of old neighborhood, and that eventually turning into “exclusive benefit of China’s emerging elite”. (Broudehoux, 91)
It’s ironic to see how deliriously Beijing is, sacrificing a cohesive and identical memory for most Beijingers, and reconstructing those “abstract token memory” with randomly placed “megalomaniacal architectural objects” that will only lead to a generic memory of a modern metropolis (Broudehoux, 101). However, we have to admit that people do simply enjoy their invention of this Generic City. The examples of protests that Broudehoux provides in the article are still limited to only very minority of people. Most Beijingers, in reality, even become millionaires, who we call “new elite”, by trading their authorities of identical memory with urgent and ambitious governors and developers in order to get the benefit like infrastructure of the new Generic City, which they consider as modern and better life.

Broudehoux, Anne-Marie. Delirious Beijing: Euphoria and Despair in the Olympic Metropolis
Koolhaas, Rem; Mau, Bruce. SMLXL. Generic City

http://news.sina.com.cn/c/p/2007-01-19/154612084451.shtml