The World in a Selfie: An Inquiry into the Tourist Age by Marco D’Eramo

Author:Marco D’Eramo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

But to what does the city’s extraordinary liberatory power owe its existence? To the loosening of social control of the village, obviously. However, this alone does not suffice to explain the fear that the city inspires in its rulers, or their untiring attempt to discipline it. Guy Debord provides us with one cue to answering this question when he says that the repressive effort is concentrated above all in a work of isolation, in blocking the ‘possibilities of encounter’ provided by the city.

Of course, if we look at cities from the outside, with the gaze of stunned Earthologists, then they are probably the most accomplished, most versatile human artefact that our species has ever conceived and produced, an artefact that continues to change while managing to remain very much itself. The city can be thought of as a technological product, a rather complicated mechanism, but its main function has always been that of being an enormous communication factory – a huge ‘dialogue mill’. Communication, dialogue, the interaction of bodies and of words – this was and is the essence of the concept of urbanity. And herein lies its intensely political character.

For this reason, Le Corbusier sends a shiver down the spine when in the 1933 Athens Charter he enumerates four – and only four – functions of the city: ‘habitation/leisure/work/traffic’.*

Once again, as on so many other questions, the much-venerated Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier’s real name) dropped a clanger. He forgets what is perhaps the most important function of cities and has been since their birth, when the first site of encounter was organised in the first open space. Indeed, a city that fulfils only the four functions listed above provides no place, use or function for squares or plazas – only flyovers and roundabouts.

With zoning, CIAM’s urbanism brought to completion what Guy Debord saw as the characteristic trait of the present moment: ‘the self-destruction of the urban centre’.16 Indeed, zoning works against the very objective for which cities were invented and constructed, which was precisely the opposite: that is, humans invented cities in order to have meeting points, points of articulation between heterogeneous human activities. The city was born as a multifunctional, multitasking operation, to join together the different functions, to make contiguous the office, the home, the market, the workshop, the café, the store, the cinema. The city was invented precisely in order to be ‘multi-zoned’ in a single zone. It is thanks to this characteristic that the city has survived and is surviving the repeated declarations of its death and resists all the outsourcing, the remote working, the Edge Cities and the IT revolutions.

Le Corbusier has none of all this. Against any urbanity, he draws up the plan for the ‘self-destruction of the city’ through a threefold reductionism: 1) first, he formulates a reductive sense of the term ‘function’; 2) he then reduces the number of functions; 3) lastly, he establishes a reductive (that is, strictly two-way) relationship between function and space. But the demiurge-urbanist is sure he knows how to put each moment of time and every life in its proper place – in its zone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.