Recording industrial landscapes

Industrial Landscapes. Bernd and Hilla Becher (2002), The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts and London England. ISBN 0‐262‐02507‐8

If Bernd and Hiller Becher were to document the typical forms of early twenty‐first century post industrial landscapes, what would they choose to photograph? It wouldn’t be the mills, mines and cooling towers for which they are famous. Would it be malls, distribution centres and road junctions, or call centres and computers? The question reveals the extent to which they recorded images of a way of industrial work, once taken for granted and now existing only in a reduced form in Northern Europe and the USA. They spent forty years documenting an industrial landscape, recording its common ‘types’ and forms, revealing similarities of production, with minor regional variations. Some of their photographs show abandoned buildings, though most were still in use. The Bechers’ documentation has historic importance, especially as many of the buildings no longer exist. Their photographs record a landscape that was already beginning to change in the 1960s when industries were reorganising, often on a global scale.

The Bechers’ black and white photographs are collected as art, although many admirers would see these images as falling between art and documentary. There are echoes of scientific illustration, and is in the tradition of earlier German photographers, such as Auguste Sander, working in the early twentieth century. He produced ‘types’ of people, based on their class and occupation, who face the viewer directly, without much sign of emotion. In contrast, the Bechers’ photographs of the uncluttered, simple forms of cooling towers, coal mining head gear and gasometers, are photographed without people to distract from the contemplation of the pure shapes of the monumental structures‐though these structures are themselves anthropomorphised, being read as melancholic portraits.

The Bechers’ work is sometimes categorised as conceptual art, and with its emphasis on form and clear, uncluttered lines has links to American minimalist painting. Collectors favour photographs of grain silos and cooling towers, all presented in standard formats in the mode of a documentary archive, with little explanation other than location and date. However, the collection of photographs in Industrial Landscapes (2002) shows the Bechers as important documenters of landscape as well as structures. They describe their photographs as showing objects in the industrial landscape ‘in their entire surroundings.’ The selection of photographs includes Welsh pit villages in the 1960s, dominated by the low‐roofed mines, which stretched between the valleys in the Rhondda like ‘a string of pearls’; disused mines in the Appalachian mountains in Pennsylvania in the 1970s; the Albert Dock in Liverpool in 1966 before its transformation into offices and Tate Liverpool; and heavy industrial plants surrounded by homes in Saarland in 2000.

The variety of these scenes is striking, but so are the similarities in terms of the repetition of standard industrial types. Heavy industries used the same basic technology and the form reflected the use. Similar types are found in family‐owned ‘tipples’ (mining businesses) in the Appalachians or mines managed by small companies in Northern France. However the connection to the landscape was different, depending largely on topography, as the Bechers explain in an interview with Susanne Lange. The shallow seams of coal close in Pennsylvania were easy to extract, but not sustainable in the long term. Small family concerns could remove the coal and sell it in its raw, unwashed state to larger businesses, while they were able to ‘go with the coal.’ The structures of the ‘tipples’ have the impermanence one would associate with small scale, provisional enterprises, structures which could be abandoned once the coal ran out.

Figure 1  Coal Mine, Bear Valley, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, USA 1974.

In contrast, mines in the Ruhr area became firmly established elements of the industrial landscape in the late nineteenth century, when deep shafts were sunk to extract seams of hard coal. This required substantial investment in new and complex technology, with higher towers and head gear. Some buildings were decorated and made to look like fortifications, with turrets and elaborate brick details. Investment encouraged mergers, which were reflected in the conglomeration of built structures and the clustering of related industries, such as coke plants. The growth of the Ruhr area was also stimulated by the railways, linking it to other industrial areas, and facilitating further expansion.

In the interview at the beginning of the book, the Bechers also describe how the urban and rural landscape has been reshaped by the need for labour. Thousands of migrants from the surrounding countryside came to work in the cities from the mid 1870s. They often maintained their small holdings in the country, which could tide them over in times of crisis.

Figure 2  Mines de Joudreville, Lorraine, France, 1985.

Taken together, the photographs reveal patterns of industrial globalisation through the development of a grammar of common architectural forms. For me the Bechers’ urban landscapes are of more interest as visual social documents, than because of the monumental forms they portray. Their photographs both highlight the global spread of technology and industry and suggest its fragility. Despite the size of some of the plants, such as that in Duisburg Bruckhausen in the Ruhr Valley, photographed in 1999, which dominates the town, photographs set in the wider landscape show their dependence on the chance of favourable topography, and their ultimate demise as new technologies emerge and render them obsolete. Even the most monumental of these huge industrial structures will melt back into the natural landscape at some point, just like the provisional structures in the Appalachians. Industrial Landscapes reminds us that the most massive and technologically impressive structures will eventually disappear

It’s the Urban, Stupid!

Tim Butler

Simon Parker (2004) Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City London: Routledge. ISBN 0‐415‐24592‐3, 210 pp, £21.99

I like this book, despite the fact that I couldn’t always answer the highlighted bullet point questions that had been inserted in the text to keep the reader on her/his toes. This kind of user‐engagement is becoming de rigueur in contemporary text books but I find myself wanting a crib sheet to find whether I have got it right.

Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City is well written and I found, rather to my surprise, that I had read the book from start to finish, more or less in one go. It is a text book both literally and metaphorically. My model of a text book has always been Peter Saunders’ Social Theory and the Urban Question because it managed to chart an argument through the literature – even if it was one that I was not particularly drawn to – whilst, at the same time, presenting that literature to the first time student of urban theory in a more or less even‐handed manner. Simon Parker has pulled off the same trick with an analysis which I found rather more to my taste. Quite apart from anything else, this shows how far the study of the urban has moved on since the publication of the second edition of the Saunders text in 1986. Essentially, the argument then was about whether the urban was a spatial or a social concept and its implications for an urban sociology. Was there anything for it to say that didn’t apply more generally to sociology as a whole? Was place anything more than where social processes occurred? Saunders’ book marked the beginning of the end of the ‘new (Marxist) urban sociology’ that was initiated by Castells’ book The Urban Question in the 1970s. Parker’s book is one of a number of recent books that are beginning to develop a new ‘take on the city’ and the nature of urbanism – two notable offerings are Amin and Thrift’s Imagining the City and Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism – neither however could be read so easily by an undergraduate student or non academic reader.

Parker asks, in the context of a discussion the Amin and Thrift book, whether there is anything of society that is not at least inflected by the urban. He argues that the city is something that is open and is cross cut by different kinds of mobilities and flows; it is no longer simply a place and certainly not a phenomenon only to be found in the global North. Following Castells’ more recent work, he argues that the real developments are in the urbanization of the south which is where all the large cities will soon be. It is perhaps a contradiction of the book that he doesn’t actually follow his own prescription; the book is fundamentally a north Atlantic text with a bit of ‘old’ Europe thrown in which nevertheless ends up arguing that urbanization is a global phenomenon. Although it urges us to understand cities as ‘out there’, it relies very heavily on an analysis and history that sees them as largely ‘back here’.

This criticism notwithstanding, Parker deals theory with a light but sure touch; in the opening chapter, he presents the idea of theory as representation and illustrates this with a very lucid analogy to the way in which the tube map of London enables us to read the city. This made me think of Kevin Lynch’s wonderful book The Image of the City, which is mentioned but briefly, and his insistence that the ways in which the city is constructed fundamentally depends on the relationship between ‘people’ and ‘place’. Parker returns several times to this being perhaps the basic notion that underlies the study of the urban. In this respect, I was very taken with his suggestion that Bourdieu’s work – especially his concepts of symbolic capital, field and habitus – at time bears an uncanny resemblance to Thomas and Znaniecki’s account of the relationship between agency and structure in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. The urban – whether theorised or experienced – increasingly seems to be where the interesting questions are being asked about how we ‘become’ particularly in periods of rapid economic change – which Parker refers to as the ‘G’ word. Thankfully, he largely keeps this out of his account although it is clearly there as the uninvited guest for much of the time.

Finally, I want to turn to the four C’s with which Parker begins and ends his book: Consumption, Culture, Conflict and Community. These probably reflect the concerns of the academic literature quite accurately but I want to suggest that there is also another dimension of C’s across which they should be stretched and that is the competition‐cohesion continuum. This is not an original offering, it was after all the title of the recent ESRC Cities Programme. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it offers a policy context for much of the work discussed in the book as well as a grounding for the ‘people‐place’ dichotomy that informs Parker’s approach.

This is an impressive book and one that helped me put in context some of the more recent and highly imaginative accounts of the city by Amin and Thrift and Graham and Marvin. It is an excellent starting point for those who want to explore not only the recent renaissance of some cities but also writing about cities and the urbanity of much of our present society.

Tim Butler, King’s College, London.

DOI: 10.1080/1360481042000313554

Towards the understanding of post‐metropolitan and post‐Soviet cities

Milan Prodanovic

Urban Theory and Urban Experience, Encountering the City, Simon Parker, Routledge, London and New York 2004, ISBN 0521891442.224 pages. £21.99

The Unmaking of Soviet Life, Everyday Economies after Socialism. Caroline Humphrey, Cornell University Press 2002, ISBN 0‐8014‐8773‐0. 265 pages. £14.50

Recently one of the migrants who left the countryside to settle in the city took us over a threshold: more than half the population of our planet is now living in urban settlements. This migrant opened up a dilemma once again – in what way does that move contribute to “cityness” and the achievement of the civility understood as a quality generated by the European Renaissance (accepting Habermas’s argument1)? Did he fulfill his anticipation of happiness based on an imagined better life in the city, or confirm the doubts of researchers about the validity of Wirth’s accepted definition of the urban, founded on settlement size (density and heterogeneity). The definition is now being muddled by the processes of “post metropolitan transition”, where the number of people and settlement size no longer correspond either to quality of life or to the innovative potential of the city. Such doubts and dilemmas require a new understanding, and the need for new conceptual tools is obvious, which are different from the traditional syllabuses of urban studies, conventionally drawn from the rigidly subdivided social, natural and technical sciences.

Parker’s book Urban Theory and Urban Experience – encountering the city, helps to answer some of the dilemmas mentioned. It is a pleasure to be able to say that it does very well for a relatively short book, supporting Stephen Graham’s remark that this is “probably the best guide to the complex currents of contemporary urban theory currently available”. The book is helpful even at the most practical level, suitable for seminar workshops through its suggested “questions to discuss” and “further reading”, as well as its extensive bibliography, notes and index. The awareness that our planet is increasingly living in a way exported from Europe after the Enlightenment, evolving the patterns of capitalist urban industrial society paralleled with many crises which generate constant restructuring, is introduced by Parker’s examination of forms, beliefs, theories and driving forces surrounding urbanization of the past two centuries. Starting with the works of Webber, Simmel, Benjamin and linking it to Lefebvre as well as quoting Marx, to the writings of contemporaries like David Harvey and Manuel Castells and the LA school of urbanism, he traces the key developments of the idea of the city over more than a century. In attempts to theorize, he takes into consideration the impact of new information and communication technologies, and growing trends towards disaggregated urban networks, along with raising important questions about the viability of physical and social identity of the conventional townscape. The argument is stemming out from the experiences of England, the first industrial country to rapidly urbanize, and the book is targeted mostly at English and North American readers, especially the chapter “Between Suburb and the Ghetto” in which Parker makes explicit the experiences within which the major questions have been asked about “urban studies and the search for community in Britain and United States”. Although throughout the book he refers to early urban developments, to urban revolutions in Mesopotamia leading to early experiences of the Polis and to the theories of Ancient Greece, one is inclined to regret the omission of other theorizing on early cites, such as Gordon Childe’s, and maybe Harold Innis’ contributions to communication theory. Such contributions could lead the reader to a richer and broader understanding of the evolution of cities drawing on, for example Soja’s insightful concept, which he defined as “sinekism”2. Explanations of the forces of the cities’ evolutionary social and spatial integration, stemming from the preindustrial city, Parker handles through his valuable reinterpretations of Mumford, Max Weber and Habermas. Stressing the need for the radical widening of scope to understand metropolitan processes of broadening cultural varieties, his argument is backed by the current lack of an adequate explanation on which efficient configuration of the world’s security could rely: on the motivations for mushrooming terrorist activities, or the attempts at civil society reforms (in Afghanistan, post‐Saddam Iraq, or “post‐urbicide” Balkans etc). Patterns which emerge in the modern metropolis turn themselves inside out in “postmetropolitan” urbanization of suburbia, differ from those indicated by mass migration into the central city, as they are characteristic of what one calls a Third World. The chapter “East of Helsinki, South of San Diego” fits well into the plea for a diversification of standpoints for theoretical reflections, related to the variety of experiences of the culturally most heterogeneous cities in history.

For the reader interested in diversified urban experiences, an equally helpful introduction to cities and countries of the post‐socialist era, is presented by the Cornell University Press series “Culture and Society after Socialism” in which the study The Unmaking of Soviet Life, Everyday Economies after Socialism by Caroline Humphrey is a valuable contribution. Although not focusing on cities, the study helps to understand the processes in post Soviet Russia (through an empirical study of a small city in Central Asia) and it points out the difficulties one faces when attempting to use methods of classical Marxism, which does not offer satisfactory conceptual tools for urban analysis. The author goes to great length to explain why the study of culture is important and what forced her to opt for the methods closer to social anthropology (like the “early” Marx condemned as “bourgeois” by “real” and hard‐line Marxists). She points out that “anthropologists have tended to conceive their objects in terms of meaning, that is, requiring interpretations”. Offering an insight into transitional processes affecting the urban question in post‐soviet Russia, the significant argument of Humphrey’s book shows how Tsarist tradition was deeply embedded within Bolshevism, and how it characterized, not only culture, but the “power systems and cosmologies, material practices and social meanings, political economies and the mythic forces that sustain them”. In part, focusing on the culture of consumption, Humphrey shows how new globalizing forces are rendering regional differences, and how cultures are becoming more common among members of the same class, rather than ethnic groups. The conceptual tool introduced as an “ethnography of consumption” when applied to cities in Russia (which could also apply to other post‐communist countries) suggests that “historically global transformations” are related to privatization patterns, but with common characteristics of many types of previous relations of production (socialism, statism) remaining intact. Such a combination of continuity and change of practices in Humphrey’s view, produced new organizations of racketeering, patterns of corruption, bribery, and the persistence of the Mafia. As the state agencies fail to enforce effective law and establish legitimate forms of guarantees and protection, the new “armed protection” of private security guards emerges in the void, using the services of members of the underworld, (former sportsmen, groups called Boxers, Wrestlers, former soldiers, even the ex‐members of KGB) with a “parallel line of power”. The author seeks to understand the way that meanings of state authority and legitimacy are contrasted to people’s “diverse meanings” of the mythicised “law” of the racket, and she connects the protection phenomenon of post socialist society to the particular roots in the patronage structures of the soviet bureaucracy, which are becoming deeply interconnected with the “shadow” economy. On the other hand, her socio‐anthropological standpoint enables Humphrey to use etymology to indicate that authoritarianism is profoundly embedded with concepts of “our master” and “soviet power”, and stand as determinations in Russian thought, based on a socio‐political order of centralized and personified power, not on law, the observance of principles, or the existence of civil society. Even the conception of state (from the Latin roots stato) in the Russian mental model is more related to “domain”, with an inclination to domination and to authoritarian rule. It corresponds well to Russian 19th century thinkers (such as Danilevskii3) claiming that Russian traditions have nothing to do with Roman Law as Romans never reached that far East, but on the contrary they rely on the tradition of Slavic folk culture, common law and popular forms of patriarchal (mostly rural, feudal) democracy and Christian Orthodox spirituality. The combination of “fixity of space” and the vast country, sparsely populated and rich with resources managed from distant cities, forms the basis for the common sense of place and frontiers. Humphrey also attempts to relate such sense of place to traditions of powerful administrative hierarchy of functional departmentalization and territoriality, where subjects are codified as recipients in a redistributive economy. The sense of citizenship and control policies, with residence permits nowadays replaced with even more stringent legislation systems, are gradually forming an emotional identification with place, as an active generator of “aggressive particularism”. Humphrey envisages further disintegrative tendencies, suggesting the possibility of emerging new forms of “defensible territoriality”.

For the urban planner, designer, architect and the reader interested in overall cultural transformations, the insights into the behavior of the emerging New Russian elite (in general disliked by the majority) should be of an informative value. It shows how development in the 1990s of spectacular villas, designed for them on the outskirts of Russian cities in the form of large, individually owned houses for single families, marked not only a new form of real estate, but also launched a new and evolving architectural style. It is eclectic with “kitschy” ornamentation, with spires, bay windows, multiple pitched roofs over staggering plans, etc. But these houses appear hardly populated, as new businessman, tied to time‐bound money flows in Moscow, come to visit them mainly during the weekend. As observed by native neighbors, when they arrive, they tend to imitate closed suburban life (barbeque with plenty of Vodka). Comparison between these new villas and old “dachas” (in etymology meaning “given” by the suzerain, houses of Tsarist and Bolshevik times), shows that the new cottage is a form not previously known in Russia. Among many more observations, the study offers an inspiring range of evidence, reflections and possible guidance for rich and fruitful research on transitional processes affecting the urban question.

Milan Prodanovic is Professor of Urbanism, University of Novi Sad, Serbia.

DOI: 10.1080/1360481042000333589

Are cities resurgent?

A Conference report

Robert A. Beauregard

In April of 2004, the London School of Economics (LSE) hosted an international conference with the title “The Resurgent City.” The official announcement noted the “much heralded” turnabout of cities in advanced societies and the “widespread consensus” that “globalization, more intense quality‐based competition and the rise of the knowledge economy are restoring [their] economic role …” (Symposium Programme, 2004). It portrayed cities as “coming back” and doing so as part of a “new, internationalized and flexible economy.” The purpose of the conference was to bring together knowledgeable individuals from the academic and policy communities to explore the “key requisites” for a resurgent city. Nine themes were proposed: the resurgent city as designed, interactive, communal, safe and secure, sustainable, serviced, habitable, socially‐integrated, and distinctive.

The conference organizers were not engaged in an uncritical celebration of the resurgent city. The official announcement suggested that people might disagree on what characteristics made a city successfully resurgent. Moreover, it acknowledged that current understandings of how a city might achieve this status were, at best, embryonic. Although left unnamed, the “real tensions” that occur as cities develop were also cited.

What the conference description did not do was to problematize the claim that once‐industrial, Western cities had completed their transition from manufacturing to service centers. Instead it implied that the years of population and job loss, shrinking opportunities, and racial and ethnic tensions had ended. These cities – none were named in the conference announcement – were now enjoying the rewards of a robust financial services sector along with the many benefits of the population growth brought about by immigration.

The city that was eventually offered as the prime example of resurgence was London. In his remarks at the closing plenary session, the economic columnist and author Hamish McRae (2004, p. 1) asserted that London was “surely objectively the resurgent European city.” He praised it as “the most international place on earth” and a “hugely open society” (p. 2). Hamish attributed London’s success to the strength of its international financial services sector – supported by educational services, communications, entertainment, and tourism – and to “its ability to attract the best human capital” (by which he meant highly educated labor) from around the world. He made only fleeting reference to London’s earlier troubles, without which resurgence would have been logically impossible. Having emerged from its prior doldrums, London had become a premier global city awash in business opportunities, socially vibrant, and increasingly wealthy. (For a less celebratory and wonderfully rich analysis of contemporary London, see Hamnett (2003).)

Few of the other speakers directly addressed the claim implicit within the conference’s title and, except for Pierre Veltz (2004), no one took on the even deeper premise that city‐regions had replaced national economies as the driving force of the global economy. Instead, they discussed various aspects of resurgence – diversity, sustainability, and so on. Consequently, among other topics, the presentations focused on the economic importance of face‐to‐face interactions (Michael Storper), social capital (Edward Glaeser), crime and violence (Sophie Body‐Gendrot), spatial segregation (Sako Musterd), and architectural identity (Dana Cuff).

Consider the claim that Western cities, having suffered through decades of economic stagnation and social unrest, have resolved those problems and are set, once again, on a trajectory of growth, prosperity, and urbanity. How should we read such a claim? What should our reaction be?

Most every scholar’s first critical response, I suspect, is to take the claim as a plausible, factual assertion and, consequently, to treat it seriously and, of course, skeptically. Is the claim empirically verifiable? To answer the question, we must attend to specific cities and to resurgence as a condition experienced more by some cities than others. The research task is clear: identify one or more indicators of resurgence and gather longitudinal data for a sample of cities.

This is what I did (Beauregard, 2004). For the United States, and using a basic population measure, I attempted to identify which central cities had experienced a sustained period of aggregate population loss prior to 1980 followed by a sustained period of population growth. These cities I labeled resurgent. They included such places as SanFrancisco, Boston, and Seattle. Not surprisingly, few of the country’s large cities fit this definition. Most U.S. cities that had lost population during the early postwar decades are still doing so, though at reduced rates, and most of the cities – mainly in the Sunbelt – that have grown in the last two decades (1980–2000) neither suffered through decline nor experienced chronic stagnation.

A more sophisticated empirical investigation would focus on different indicators of resurgence such as job growth by sector or housing prices. A reduction in poverty or municipal fiscal stress might be substituted for an increase in population or jobs. Yet, even these adjustments are problematic; they posit a “weak notion of resurgence” (MacLennan and Norman, 2004) that assumes a single measure will suffice. Alternative criteria might also be considered; for example, comparing stagnation with growth (or even a falling rate of population loss) rather than decline with growth. And, central cities (which I believe is the implicit reference in all U.S. discussions of decline and resurgence (Beauregard, 2003b)) might be scrapped and city‐regions or metropolitan areas used instead.

Researchers must contend additionally with the periodization of this phenomenon. When was the period of stagnation or decline? When did resurgence begin? Edward Glaeser (2004, p. 1), in his closing comments at the conference, dated the “hopeless decline” of the cities in the 1970s. But one could also mount a case for focusing on the early 1990s, positing the late 1970s and 1980s as the “first” rally against postwar decline and the growth that accompanied the stock market surge of the 1990s as a second wave of resurgence.

As all experienced urban researchers know, finding resurgence should be easy. Any one city is always a bundle of improving and deteriorating conditions and one can select among them to shape a study’s findings. The strategic use of time periods and the decision as to which spatial boundaries to adopt also effect whether one finds more or less resurgence.

A second critical and empirical response might be to inquire as to the consequences of resurgence. (I am leaving aside a third empirical issue: the preconditions and causes of resurgence.) If resurgence, like globalization, brings social polarizations or sprawl, for example, then despite attempts to suppress normative judgment, many scholars would find it difficult to see it in the same way. Glaeser (2004, p. 3), in fact, noted that in the past twenty‐five years, when cities have ostensibly been so resurgent, the quality of life for poor people in these places has been worsening.

Although empirical responses are interesting and increase our understanding of the way Western cities have changed, they also suppress an equally important aspect of the resurgent city claim – its meaning (Stout, 1982). Bruno Latour (2004, p. 232) states this well: “Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern…”.

Proposing that cities have rebounded from bad times has to be seen as a political and ideological act. As well as being an empirical claim, it is a symbol (Edelman, 1964). “Resurgence” is a representation and as such carries with it a complex array of meanings (Duncan, 1996). Consider the rhetorical difference that exists between celebrating a city’s accomplishments as opposed to publicizing its rebound from under‐achievement. With its hint of prior failure and lingering weakness, the latter is much more unstable.

Any claim about the city has to confront its complexity. The city is a loosely packed agglomeration extending geographically beyond municipal, regional, and national political boundaries. Layer onto this the multitude of experiences and intentions that motivate how the city is represented and the task of describing, much less explaining, it becomes formidable. Consequently, when we talk or write about the city we are forced to select from a near‐infinite range of qualities. Do we focus on population growth or business activity? Is a city resurgent because crime has dropped or because the city government is no longer mired in the throes of fiscal crisis? The more elaborate and involved the description, the more ensnared we are in these choices. Each decision creates absences and leaves aspects of the city unattended.

A number of factors shape such decisions; the interests of the observer, the theoretical lens being deployed, current policy debates, and the use to which the claims and its corresponding research are being put come readily to mind. No consensus exists, or will ever exist, as to how best – most accurately, most validly – to describe the city and measure its progress. Rather, such claims are matters for counter‐evidence and intellectual debate. To this extent, the claim of a “resurgent city” is best viewed as a provocation. The objective of any response should not be a yea or nay but rather the pursuit of a deeper comprehension.

Along these lines, one might mount a cynical reading of the claim. Is this simply boosterism? Is it merely a touting of resurgence disengaged from any systematic evidence and meant mainly to establish the belief that resurgence has occurred? Cities have a long history of promotion that includes land developers in the 19th century United States, contemporary tourism bureaus, and mayors whose re‐election depends on inward investment and favorable perceptions. Such boosterism is almost always city‐specific. Boosters are place‐bound actors whose pronouncements, if believed and acted on, will – they hope – yield them benefits. In his remarks at the conference, Duncan MacLennan (MacLennan and Norman, 2004, p. 3) warned against an “over‐optimistic, uncritical, boosterist or even Panglossian view of current city development.”

The accusation of boosterism, however, is useful only if followed by a probing of why boosters are making this particular claim at this particular time and place. Boosterism by itself is so pervasive as to be intellectually uninteresting. What is it about the early 21st century, as seen from such global cities as London, that makes the characterization of resurgence so valuable to its claimants?

One speaker at the symposium, Bob Catterall (2004), did consider why the claim has surfaced at this time and in a city like London. His take was that resurgence was “the latest accession to a long succession of deceptive policy terms” such as renewal, regeneration and renaissance, that arouse false expectations. Catterall offered what he suggested was a more accurate term for what is happening – resurgent gentrification, a phrase borrowed from the work of Elvin Wyly and Daniel Hammel (Wyly and Hammel, 1999). Resurgent gentrification is the remaking of central cities for the rich that further marginalizes and disrupts the lives of less affluent groups. For Catterall, any current resurgence is a continuation of trends whose origins lie back in the 1970s and whose social costs, implications for governance and empowerment, and political intentions are being ignored.

Neil Smith (1996) has offered a similar perspective on U.S. cities in the late 1980s and 1990s. Smith’s term of choice is revanchism – the re‐capturing of the city by the white middle class. This group lost the city in the 1960s when racial minorities, the poor, and criminals took over inner‐city neighborhoods and downtown sidewalks. Revanchism ties together the rise of financial and business services, the spread of gentrification, class conflict, the emergence of conservative local regimes, and a fascination with quality of life. The last is particularly important. Its pursuit involves hassling the homeless, employing crime prevention strategies that sanitize public spaces, and supporting consumption through tourism and entertainment. It does not mean providing good jobs at decent wages for immigrants, fostering tolerance for deviant lifestyles, or engaging enduring racial inequalities and class polarizations. From this perspective, the fact of resurgence, not just the claim, is political. Such critiques move beyond matters of fact to matters of concern (Latour, 2004).

Rather than mount an empirical response to the resurgent city claim or probe its thinly‐veiled ideological and political intentions, one might explore the theoretical consequences of thinking of cities as resurgent. How does “resurgence” help or hinder us in conceptualizing the city and its transformations?

In general, there are benefits to labeling a city with a single adjective and with this adjective in particular. As a provocation, “resurgence” directs our attention to the historical trajectory of cities; it problematizes the inevitability of obsolescence and the irreversibility of stagnation and decline. Too often forgotten is that cities oscillate around conditions of growth and prosperity.

Additionally, a cogent adjective like resurgence compels us to ask why some cities adapt while others falter. Consider the possibility of a renewal function, a cluster of capabilities and resources that cities can mobilize to adjust to changing historical conditions and emerging opportunities. This renewal function will be more or less present over time and will enable certain cities to prosper while other cities fall victim to historical change. Lastly, and if read critically, “resurgence” encourages us to question the political and ideological qualities of such a claim, a point discussed above.

Yet, there are also theoretical costs to such a rhetorical move. The use of a single adjective – the tourist city, the global city – distills the city’s complexity by highlighting only one of its qualities (Amin and Graham, 1997). To the extent that this quality is extensively connected to other aspects of the city and enables a rich investigation, then it has utility. To the extent that its theoretical connections are cramped, understanding is correspondingly constrained. In this vein, two theoretical limitations of resurgence deserve mention: one involves globalization and the other the claim of exceptionalism.

Globalization is a contentious, dangerous, and important concept. Cast as a quality that successful cities must attain, it is both a half‐truth and a distortion of what is significant about city life and urban economies. The danger arises when global competitiveness is the goal (Beauregard and Pierre, 2000). What Hamish McRae celebrated in his plenary session remarks was the (re)globalization of London brought about by the rise of a robust financial services sector dealing in far‐flung markets and the arrival of highly educated immigrants from both the North and the South. With his claim that London was the epitome of the resurgent and thus global city, he revealed the competitive assumptions behind his worldview.

Given this perspective, a city has to be in a relatively dominant global position – whether in commodity chains or migration flows – to thrive. The primacy of competitiveness, though, deflects our attention from the non‐global (what used to be called “local”) activities that are a necessity. It turns our attention outward and away from those areas of the city, those people, and those activities whose global contribution is minimal. The phrase “resurgent city” produces a parallel outcome. Busy focusing on aggregate growth and a few sectors of the economy as well as those who draw their wealth from them, the rest of the city goes unattended.

At the same time, the emphasis on competitiveness reifies the city, casting it as a monolithic actor, while sharply devaluing cooperation in economic, social, cultural, and diplomatic spheres. The notion of global competitiveness recognizes geographic and historical uneven development yet simultaneously hides it. In any competitive situation, there must be losers. Non‐competitive cities, however, seem to be of little concern to those who extol this worldview. It is as if once global stature or resurgence has been achieved, the ways in which dominance over other city‐regions enabled and supports that status can be ignored. Given decades of research on the interdependency of global city‐regions (Scott, 2001), this is an embarrassing position for urban theorists to adopt.

The celebratory tendencies of the claim that one or another city is resurgent, similar to what occurs with the claim of being a global city, narrow urban theory rather than broaden it (Robinson, 2002). The dichotomous nature of resurgence – a city is either resurgent or not – surely simplifies the world. When this simplification is applied to a single city, it also signals a belief in the city’s uniqueness and, consequently, a return to boosterism.

The looming specter here is exceptionalism; the assertion that a city is sui generis (Beauregard, 2003a). This belief often leads to the proliferation of superlatives; for example, statements that publicize the city as having the most diverse immigrants, the largest number of international financial transactions, or the greatest amount of new office space under construction. Superlatives, in turn, are connected to “firsts”: the first city to make the transition from a manufacturing economy, the first city to exceed 10 million residents.

These moves undermine comparative analysis and hinder recognition of the interdependencies that support each city’s fortunes. Once a city has become exceptional, any comparison functions mainly to highlight its uniqueness and reveal the distance between this exceptional city and other, less worthy places. The implicit claim is that London or Los Angeles (Dear and Flusty, 1998) has somehow, on its own, achieved its exalted status. This is theoretically wrong‐headed. No city exists independently of the many intellectual and functional connections that blanket the globe (Rodgers, 1998, pp. 112–208). The degree of connectedness varies, but one would have to look far and wide to find even a nomadic tribe whose remoteness confers splendid isolation.

In these and other ways, the claim of resurgence sets off alarms. Its empirical validity aside, the claim is freighted with political and ideological baggage. Moreover, it harbors theoretical tendencies that weaken urban theory.

No claim, though, is without learning potential. The organizers of the LSE conference deserve credit for articulating the belief that many once‐struggling cities have overcome their core problems and are poised for growth. They deserve further credit for bringing together a stellar array of scholars to reflect on this possibility. That more of them did not do so speaks to the passion with which they hold their scholarship but also points to a general deficit of critical engagement.

In the United States, various organizations from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1999) to the Fannie Mae Foundation have produced reports that probe the possibility of resurgence (Lang and Simmons, 2001; Simmons and Lang, 2001; Sohmer and Lang, 2001). Most of these reports are descriptive, ranking cities on one or more indicators for a decade or two in order to distinguish between cities that remain mired in economic and demographic doldrums and those that exhibit solid growth. These studies stop short of conceptual assessment and their barely concealed desire to find “come‐back” cities borders on boosterism. The claim that cities are resurgent and the numerous theoretical, political, and practical issues it poses deserve better, not only because policymakers might, in their euphoria, ignore the persistence of injustice and the durability of inequalities, but because, as intellectuals, our responsibility is to question received wisdom.

Robert A. Beauregard is a Professor of Urban Studies in the Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School University (New York City). E‐mail: [email protected].

DOI: 10.1080/1360481042000313563

Cities under siege, or, what’s so creative about creative destruction?

Martin Woessner

Review of David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003) ISBN 0‐19‐926431‐7, 253 pp, $ 22.00 and Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003) ISBN 0‐415‐94421‐X, 372 pp, $30.00

There is money to be made in Iraq. Long before the statue of Saddam was toppled on live television, long before the endless munitions of “shock and awe” were dropped on Baghdad, plans were already underway for companies like Halliburton and Bechtel to profit from the reconstruction of cities about to be destroyed by the United States military. A New York Times editorial from April, 2003 referred to the setup as “The Iraq Money Tree.”1 And as time goes by, evidence only seems to mount suggesting that American businesses with a connection in Washington have made, as the saying goes, a killing in Iraq.2 They still are. There is so much money to be made in the destruction and reconstruction of Iraq, in fact, that Washington insiders, as the Los Angeles Times reported, are abandoning their posts for lucrative consulting jobs with firms specializing in new Iraqi investment opportunities.3 Far from viewing this as an example of crass and vile economic opportunism, government officials have actually gone out of their way to endorse such behavior, since the ultimate symbol of Iraq’s recovery is, in their eyes, its transformation into a market economy. The White House has done all it can to bring the free market to Iraq, even sponsoring conferences and lecture tours devoted to investment opportunities in the beleaguered country.4 The message is clear: having effectively crushed Iraq’s urban infrastructure with a deadly combination of embargoes and bombs, the United States is now trying to rebuild it, at a profit. Laying waste to a city in order to drum up business may seem, like a fireman committing arson, pathological, but it has been, sadly, a far from unfamiliar affliction in the history of urban life. Often more than once, modern cities have been violently dismembered only to be reconfigured in new and more economically rewarding ways at a later date. Berlin, Baghdad, New York, Paris, Tokyo—they have all been sites of creative destruction.

The émigré economist Joseph Schumpeter is generally credited with coining the term creative destruction. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) he said that it was “the essential fact about capitalism,” that it was “what every capitalist concern has to live in.”5 But what is it exactly? The “evolutionary process” of capitalism, in Schumpeter’s account, is kept in motion by innovation, which brings about constant and necessary change.6 The capitalist shark has to keep swimming in order to stay alive. Things other than innovation can bring about change of course—“wars, revolutions and so on,” as Schumpeter put it in a parenthetical remark—but it is entrepreneurial inventiveness that the image of creative destruction is supposed to represent.7 Innovation introduces change, and this, as it were, effectively changes the rules of the game, in the middle of the action (hence the destructive aspect of the process). If it was not stifled by bureaucracy, Schumpeter thought, “the perennial gale of creative destruction” would keep capitalism, always and everywhere, from sliding into mere monopoly or oligopoly.8 The rules of monopolistic or oligopolisitc competition would be under constant threat. Schumpeter’s theory, contrary to current popular opinion, suggests that “the capitalist engine” runs not on oil, but novelty: “the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.”9

As a kind of abstract, theoretical shorthand for the process of capitalist development, the very idea of creative destruction is, like all ideas, perhaps rather innocuous. In practice, however, it has proven just the opposite. It has proven violently brutal and far from creative. The second half of the couplet has been more lasting than the first, for if there was anything creative about the destruction of the last century, it was only that new ways to be destructive emerged, again and again, at a dizzying pace. For proof, look no further than the nearest modern city, where you can find creative destruction written in its every detail—in suffering and stone, blood and brick, toil and tar.

In “Modernity as Break,” the introduction to his recently published Paris, Capital of Modernity, urbanist David Harvey challenges the notion that modernity represents a radical moment of creative destruction that effectively erases the old and inaugurates the new. No better example of this myth, argues Harvey, is the Haussmannization of Paris during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the process by which the modern Paris of today supposedly emerged, phoenix‐like, from the embers of its medieval past. Every city of course has its own mythologies, but this particular myth, that of a modernizing creative destruction, has led us to the false conclusion that, like the capitalist process Schumpeter thought it described, bourgeois modernity was an inescapable development: sometimes old buildings just need to be torn down to make way for new ones; you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, etc.

Harvey goes to great lengths in Paris, Capital of Modernity to challenge the common assumption that Haussmann’s Paris, which saw more than just a few eggsbroken, is the quintessential break with a long‐forgottenpast. He suggests, for example, that Haussmann actually appropriated a great many of his ideas for refashioning the streets and buildings of Paris from what at first glance might seem like some unlikely sources; namely the revolutionary thinkers of the 1830s—the Saint‐Simonians, the Fourierists, and their radical cohorts. Rather than portraying modernity as a radical break, in this case substantiated in Haussmann’s new boulevards, Harvey carefully teases out the revolutionary visions of these forty‐eighters that later found their way into Haussmann’s repertoire. In this account, what clashed in 1848, and again in 1870 with the Commune, then, was not so much an old regime, doomed to die, and a new one, destined to be born, but a capitalist conception of modernity and a radical, non‐capitalist one (p. 85). In the revolutionary fervent of the 1830s all kinds of utopian schemes and progressive visions were championed by all kinds of figures, who were only to be silenced by the rise of the Second Empire. But Haussmann, Harvey suggests, nonetheless learned from these figures, co‐opting their blueprints if not their manifestos. He appropriated aspects of their utopian urban visions, including elaborate plans for workers’ housing, but never the underlying socialist aspirations. His redesign of Paris was in this sense a capitalist, bourgeois re‐imagining of what was essentially socialist urban planning, only bigger (for what was truly new about Haussmann’s Paris—apart from the capitalist mechanics it introduced into urban development—was the change in urban scale that it represented [pp. 12–13]). But Haussmann’s plans not only ignored the revolutionary potential embedded in these urban visions, they actively denied them. Like 1968, which shares more than just a slight resemblance to the events of 1848, the real loss here was of a certain kind of utopian optimism, a belief that alternatives could not only be imagined, but affected. A moment of possibility for non‐capitalist visions of modernity was cut short. Just as with the post‐’68 years, when world superpowers pursued a policy of international détente so as to protect their own interests at home, Second Empire France kept revolution at bay by introducing moderate change while at the same time effectively squelching any discussion of alternatives.10 It was Haussmann’s way or the highway.

In a series of wide‐ranging historical‐geographical analyses, Harvey paints a vivid picture of urban life and transformation under Haussmann’s reign. If some of the details look familiar, it is because you might have seen them before. Paris, Capital of Modernity, like its subject, is not entirely new. Rather, it is a collection of Harvey’s writings on nineteenth‐century Paris spanning some twenty years. What is new is the coffee‐table etiquette of the layout—the book is handsomely illustrated with Daumier cartoons and Marville photos, which both serve as a kind of running commentary of their own throughout—and the overarching theoretical scaffolding, which can be found in the only sections unique to this collection, the introduction and the second chapter that Harvey devotes to precisely those pre‐1848 utopian images of the city that Haussmann simultaneously silenced and stole from.

What is it about Paris that calls for the publication of such elaborate volumes? We might find a clue in another ornate, recently‐published, and similarly‐titled book on the city: Patrice Higonnet’s Paris: Capital of the World.11 It is a majestic book, which tells the story not so much of the city itself but its mythical afterlives. Behind Higonnet’s sweeping survey of the various myths and legends that have accrued around the City of Light, is the inspiration of an enigmatic thinker who has in recent years captured the imagination of academics and all those who, for better or worse, sound like them. I am referring of course to Walter Benjamin, whose many writings, including, most recently, his massive, incomplete Parisian masterwork, The Arcades Project, have been translated into English with steady success over the past decade or so.12 Benjamin’s quixotic quest to hunt down the myths, or, as he called them, the phantasmagorias, ofmodernity via a concrete phenomenology of the city has inspired a whole new kind of urban analysis, one which pays as much attention to the fantasies of bourgeois capitalism as to the inner workings of its economics itself. And fantasies make for better coffee‐table books than dialectics, don’t they? Well, yes and no. The bulk of Harvey’s Paris book, when it first appeared in his Consciousness and the Urban Experience, dates back to 1985, and is thus decidedly pre‐Benjaminian in its approach, unlike Higonnet’s work.13 To some this may seem a defect, but Harvey makes a compelling case for complimenting Benjamin’s fragmented studies of Paris with a healthy dose of historical‐geographical awareness, which basically means a bit less Baudelaire and a lot more Marx.

If Harvey is less interested in the mythical afterlives of modern Paris, the stuff Higonnet meanders through to such great effect, it is only because he is more interested in the violent creation of the modern city itself, which is something that Benjamin discusses only in a rather roundabout way. For Harvey, the violence is inherent in capitalism. During a panel discussion held in celebration of the book’s publication back in March at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Harvey made it clear that he hoped his book might challenge the dominant Benjaminian image of Paris—the Paris of Baudelaire and the flâneur—by calling attention to the harsh realities of its modern re‐modeling. “Paris,” Harvey explained, “was a city which capital conquered through violent means.”14 Creative destruction is not just a synonym for harmless innovation, for wiping the slate clean and starting over. And it is certainly not a metaphor for cultural transformation. The modernization of Paris in the nineteenth century was a violent economic and political process, one which culminated, for Harvey, with the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871.

Another reason why Harvey argues against the idea of modernity as a radical break with the past is because he wants to keep alive an alternative conception of modernity, one he sees as being lost with the execution of the last Communards. With them, a non‐capitalist utopian tradition was effectively buried, buried beneath a monument to the forces of order in the shape of none other than the basilica of Sacre Coeur, the subject of Harvey’s stirring coda. Sacre Coeur, when plans for it were first being drawn up, was imagined to be a symbol of national repentance, and by the end of the nineteenth century Paris had a lot to be repentant about in the eyes of its more conservative religious leaders: revolutionary excesses, secularism, national military defeats, and imperial humiliation (p. 315). But, even amidst the coming of Sacre Coeur, Harvey finds traces of the utopian socialist past—that the blindingly‐white cathedral was supposed to wipe from memory—still lingering, proving perhaps that creative destruction can never truly erase the past. The construction of Sacre Coeur becomes, in Harvey’s hands, a metaphor for the changes—social, cultural, political, financial, and geographical—Paris underwent over the course of the nineteenth century. It makes for a powerful image, but it is also a little surprising, because, for all Harvey’s skepticism toward the current vogue of Benjamin’s peculiar kind of urban analysis, the Sacre Coeur conclusion only reveals how profoundly Benjaminian Paris, Capital of Modernity is in spirit. Harvey’s resurrection of the socialist souls who still haunt the cathedral atop Montmartre is, I would argue, a fitting example of Benjamin’s oft‐repeated suggestion that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.”15

If anything, the similarity of Harvey’s title to that of one of Benjamin’s most famous essays—“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” the condensed version of his Arcades Project—signals more intellectual overlap than perhaps he would care to admit. Benjamin, as it turns out, was also interested in the fate of the Communards and the rise of financial speculation.16 But because his dialectics are so unorthodox and because he combines them with an equally unorthodox theological perspective, Benjamin moves in a very different direction than Harvey. If Harvey leans toward strictly materialist concerns, the nuts and bolts of capitalist urban transformation, then Benjamin, despite himself, leans toward the expressionistic and the ideal. These idealist tendencies of Benjamin’s were, we now know, a constant source of concern for his friend Adorno, as their correspondence reveals.17 Adorno tried constantly to push Benjamin toward a more specifically historical and economic approach, one which would work in tandem with his cultural diagnostics.18 Whether or not Harvey’s materialism (which treats the city as thing created) ultimately compliments Benjamin’s idealism (which treats the city as creative thing), and vice versa, is for others to decide, but I think the rift between the two approaches testifies to the persisting divisions in Marxist scholarship on the city.

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin also claimed, in the spirit of nothing being “lost for history,” that “in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.”19 If there is a conformism inherent in the history of nineteenth‐century Paris, one to which Benjamin himself unwittingly contributed, it is to be found in the portrayal of Baron von Haussmann. The myths of modernity as a radical break, as opposed to a gradual process of capitalist development; of creative destruction as an inescapable and only mildly harmful part of modernization, instead of a violent and brutal reality—these are both linked to the person of Haussmann. In the same way that Robert Moses, who styled himself as a kind of reincarnated Haussmann, symbolizes the demolition of old New York and its replacement with the new, supposedly auto‐friendly metropolis it is today, Haussmann’s Paris is a kind of cliché, one that Harvey is eager to avoid, which is but another reason why this isn’t your usual history of Paris.20

Instead of talking yet again about Haussmann, Harvey wants to change the topic of conversation to the international circulation of capital. The Capital of his title carries both possible meanings in this regard. Haussmann’s Paris, Harvey argues, cannot be separated from the imperial, financial nexus of nineteenth‐century France. Harvey employs his signature “methodology of,” as he calls it, “historical‐geographical materialism” to keep both the city and its imperial stretch in view throughout the book (p. 19). This allows him to write the history of Paris via the larger interplay of capitalist spatial relations. Such an approach of course implies that local urban development cannot be separated from larger, global networks of financial circulation. And Harvey never forgets how the two are interrelated. Paris, Capital of Modernity is what we might call a local history of international finance capital. The New Imperialism, Harvey’s other recent publication, presents us with the opposite perspective. It is a global account of local inequality. What is common to both books—indeed, what joins the one to the other in my opinion—is the violence of creative destruction in capitalist spatial practices.

The New Imperialism, which Harvey originally presented as the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford in February 2003, is also, like the Paris book, an exercise in historical‐geographical materialism, but of an altogether different scale. Paris, Capital of Modernity describes the process of creative destruction on the scale of an individual urban area, but The New Imperialism situates this urban scale within the context of global capital flows. It traces the circulation of capital through America’s—the new empire of the title—postwar rise to economic dominance. Key in Harvey’s reconstruction of this development is the notion of the “spatial fix” (p. 87). Because “the crisis‐prone inner contradictions of capital accumulation” need never‐ending resolution, capitalism endlessly produces and reconfigures—i.e., destroys and rebuilds—space‐relations. The notion of a “spatial fix” as a palliative, a temporary release for the conundrums of capital accumulation, brings to mind the image of an addict in search of his next fix, which is no doubt an intentional insinuation on Harvey’s part. For just as the addict finds only temporary comfort in his next score, the hunting of which has consumed his entire being, capitalism can never find permanent resolution of its developmental contradictions. It will always need another hit. Or, as Harvey puts it: “capitalism perpetually seeks to create a geographical landscape to facilitate its activities at one point in time only to have to destroy it and build a wholly different landscape at a later point in time to accommodate its perpetual thirst for endless capital accumulation. Thus is the history of creative destruction written into the landscape of the actual historical geography of capital accumulation” (p. 101).21

Especially when it is put in this way, it is hard to interpret creative destruction as just an innocuous economic concept. And when urban capital accumulation goes hand in hand with a policy of brute military violence, which is precisely what we are witnessing right now, and which we would do well to protest, the harsh realities of creative destruction are simply impossible to ignore. Whether or not the creative destruction of spatial‐fixing alone can explain the current political situation is beside the point. There are too many other factors that cannot be overlooked, from oil to foreign policy to human rights; but whatever their combination, the end result, for the people who live in sites marked for creative destruction, sites caught firmly in the crosshairs, for them, the result is the same.22 Schumpeter’s greatest fiction was that creative destruction marked the only path to progress, the path of “modernization” as American social scientists, so influenced by him, understood it during the Cold War.23 Indeed, America’s rise to its current imperial status, predicated as it has been upon this crass kind of developmental theory, the predominant lens through which the United States unfortunately still views the rest of the world, has been a dangerous thing.

Whether or not Paris is the paradigmatic modern city, the capital of modernity and thus the best example for these modernizing processes, is naturally open to debate. A number of cities could be described in this way. A strong case, for example, can, and indeed has been made for describing the city of New York with this epithet, especially given the concentration of capital in Manhattan over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.24 Another city that comes to mind is turn‐of‐the‐century Vienna. In the introduction to Paris, Capital of Modernity Harvey confesses that he used the historian Carl Schorske’s magisterial Fin‐De‐Siècle Vienna as the model for his book.25 Because Schorske’s book is able, in Harvey’s opinion, “to convey some sense of the totality of what the city was about through a variety of perspectives on material life, on cultural activities, on patterns of thought within the city” (p. 17), it is indeed a good guide to the writing of urban transformation. At least one admirer of Harvey’s attempt to do for Paris what Schorkse did for Vienna, namely his Graduate Center colleague, and fellow urbanist, Neil Smith, thinks that he has accomplished such a daunting feat. The historian Thomas Bender, who worked with Schorske some years ago on comparative urban histories, had positive things to say about Paris, Capital of Modernity, too, when he spoke, after Smith, at the book discussion roundtable held at the CUNY Graduate Center in March.26 But Bender also highlighted some important differences between Harvey’s Paris and Schorske’s Vienna. For starters, and perhaps most importantly, as Bender pointed out, Schorske’s is a tale of decline; it catalogues the descent of the modern, liberal city into violence and political authoritarianism. What begins as the city of Mahler, Freud, Klimt, and Schnitzler, slowly slides into the Vienna of Karl Lueger’s racist politics, the Vienna, that is, of Hitler.27 This is a city under the siege of some very different forces, and it shows just how important the historian’s (or urbanist’s) perspective really is in determining the kind of narrative that they ultimately choose to tell. After all, the Vienna of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, who were both later forced to emigrate under Hitler’s regime, looks a lot better than the Nazi city it was to become.28

But if turn‐of‐the‐century Vienna looks like a tragedy because of what comes after it, then Haussmann’s Paris looks menacing because of the socialist utopias it buried beneath its boulevards. Harvey’s Paris, in contrast to Schorske’s Vienna, is about the rise of the modern, liberal city, not its decline. Yet Harvey sees the rise, importantly, as being equally violent. The modern city, then, if we are to believe these two accounts (representing the two poles of its existence), is made from violent beginnings only to come apart with equally violent endings. The city, if we abstract even further from this line of thought, has always and forever been under siege, either from forces without (war, terrorism) or from within (capitalist disinvestment, suburbanization, and political extremism).

In the United States, more attention has been paid as of late, perhaps as a wartime reflex, to external threats to urban life than to internal ones. The ruthless destruction of cities during the bombing campaigns of World War II has, for example, reemerged as a topic of interest. One simply could not help but notice how much time director Errol Morris devoted to Robert McNamara’s role in the fire‐bombings of Japan during the end of the war in his Academy Award‐winning documentary The Fog of War. In a particularly chilling sequence, McNamara and Morris imagine the destruction of Japanese cities at the hands of General Curtis LeMay’s fleet of B‐29 Superfortresses transposed onto American cities: imagine half New York gone, Cleveland, destroyed—the list goes on. In a frightening array of statistics (McNamara’s specialty since he was the head of Statistical Control for the United States Air Force at the time), the disaster is brought home to the viewer.29 It is almost as if the realities of total war finally sink in.

Precisely because its cities were spared the disastrous fate of places like London, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, the United States has been slow in coming to terms with the effects of urban destruction at the hands of external forces. Even the most realistic Cold War scenarios of urban attack could not convey the carnage. But the terrorist attacks have changed this. The recent interest in the fates of cities during total war is most of all a residue, I would argue, of the trauma of 11 September, 2001. This is not to say that the scales of destruction—the World War II air wars and the terrorist attacks, respectively—are comparable, but I do think that the underlying experience, the popular fears and anxieties of urban catastrophe, are. How else could we explain, to take another example, the vigorous debates that took place over the late German writer W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, with its signature essay on the psychic wounds of the air wars?30 If Sebald’s attempt to examine, via the literary record, the repressed memory of the aerial destruction of urban Germany was ultimately mistaken—by some at least—for an apology for the Nazi regime, it was only because the American memory of carrying out such campaigns has been similarly denied and is only belatedly coming into consciousness. Creative destruction demands historical amnesia all the way around in this regard, on the part of both the vanquished as well as the victors. Neither side can admit to the suffering entailed in the whole process. But although old destruction might eventually get buried beneath the construction of a new city, cracks always appear in the latter’s foundation, cracks exposing the tragedies of the past.

Harvey’s work, which highlights the internal threat that capitalism itself poses to urban life, may not appear, at first glance at least, to have anything in common with this line of thought, but the two themes—those of external and internal threats to the city—are in fact linked, and have been for some time; since long before the attacks on the World Trade Center at least. As Peter Galison has brilliantly shown, uncovering another repressed history of twentieth‐century warfare, Cold War cities in the United States actually developed as mirror‐images of the very European cities they helped to raze during the Second World War.31 The Strategic Bombing Survey, which, like McNamara’s Statistical Control, was set up to plot out more effective—that is, more destructive—bombing campaigns in Europe and Japan, eventually became a prime source of planning data for the suburbanization of the United States during the Cold War. (McNamara’s Statistical Control was, it is worth noting here, an offshoot of the Harvard Business School, perhaps proving that bombs and business go hand in hand after all.32) The lessons of total war taught planners that suburbanization was the best defense against possible precision strikes or, as the case may be, against nuclear blasts. After all, if we could do it to them, they might someday be able to do it to us. As the Strategic Bombing Survey’s maps and graphs were overlaid upon U.S. urban areas during the Cold War, the overt destruction of modern cities was transformed into a blueprint for decentralization, which, as scholars like Kenneth Jackson have shown, funneled federal money away from cities and toward suburban development.33 This ghostly mirroring, where an imagined threat ofdestruction spurs on a very different kind of urban evisceration, is another example of capitalism’s constant search for its next spatial fix. In America’s atomic suburbs, in other words, capitalism found a new release, at the expense of its urban denizens.34

That cities are under siege at home in more ways than one at the same time that they face military destruction and occupation abroad is perhaps not a stunning insight, though it can be put to very powerful rhetorical use. Michael Moore, for one, knows this. In Fahrenheit 9/11 he contrasts the squalor of his rust‐belt hometown of Flint, Michigan with the violence and chaos that still defines cities such as Baghdad, Najaf, Fallujah and Basra.35 Does this mean we should turn our back on the rest of the world and focus only on our own urban problems? Of course not, but a good place to start in helping the world’s cities might be to refrain from creating more cities like Flint, whether it be through military intervention (i.e., the endless destruction of the never‐ending ‘war on terror’) or scruple‐less free‐marketeering (i.e., the so‐called creativity of neo‐liberalism). We have had enough creative destruction already, enough to know that the costs of destruction far outweigh the benefits of its sham creativity. It is time for a change. If creative destruction is really the motor that drives our urban development, then we should think about getting off at the next stop and walking.36

Martin Woessner is a doctoral candidate in intellectual history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Is it all coming together? Further thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (3) Stuff happens?

Bob Catterall

‘The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. If we do not confront our hubris and the lies told to justify the killing and mask the destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary form of communication, we will not so much defeat dictators like Saddam Hussein as become them.’ (Chris Hedges1)

Tyranny, empire and occupation are no longer conditions that cities, an Athens or a Rome, impose on others. And yet the urban and spatial dimensions of those conditions are still crucial both to our understanding and to our ability to act, reverse and supersede those conditions. Two questions arise, then, that can be put to any work – whether classified as fact, fiction or faction ‐ that seeks to represent the origins and nature of the war on terror and terrorism, and specifically the war in and occupation of Iraq, how does it deal with the momentous ethical issues raised by the war and what sense does it give of the urban and spatial dimension of such a struggle. These matters are put forcefully by Chris Hedges, a journalist who has been a war correspondent for nearly two decades in Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. The ethical issues take the forms of the hubris and lies, the moral corrosiveness, the force and violence that contaminate our everyday lives and those of others. The spatial chain of responsibility he traces back in his historic example to Athens. Where does responsibility lie now?

These concerns are explored here in relation to a play written by a leading exponent of documentary drama, David Hare’s ‘Stuff Happens’ and produced with the considerable resources of Britain’s National Theatre2. The immediate context is provided by the two earlier endpieces in this series on ‘Is it all coming together?’ which dealt in turn with spaces and meanings and then with the question ‘what time is this space?‘3 I suggested that a major feature of our time, as defined by an imperial order, is ‘trapped circularity’ in which at levels ranging from the individual to the global we find ourselves trapped in cycles of apparent limited progress but actual rituals of repetition with no evident way out. ‘Radical time’, I went on to suggest, is when we begin to break out of these cycles. For our radical time now there are the suggested parallels of the Paris events of 1968 and of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King which was cut short by his assassination in 1968. We have given too much attention to the burgeoning intellectual ferment, important as it is, of the former largely to the exclusion of the emerging practical, ethical, significantly black and revolutionary ferment of the latter. We have also given too little attention to the role of storytellers or ‘mediators’, artists and sometimes journalists, in shaping radical time. This endpiece introduces in passing a journalist’s analysis but concentrates on one work of art, a play including the text and its performance, and looks at its strengths and weaknesses as a form of mediation.

‘Stuff Happens’ takes its title from the response of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of State, on April 11 2003 to a journalist’s question about images of looting and pillage in Baghdad:

‘Think what happens in our cities when we’ve had riots, and problems and looting. Stuff happens! But in terms of what’s going on in that country, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to see those images over and over again… And it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to do wonderful things, and that’s what’s going to happen here.’

The two occurrences of ‘happen(s)’ here seem to refer to opposed expressions of freedom, apparent escapes from trapped circularity, bad ones (that may themselves become circular?) and wonderful ones.

Hare is right to see something interesting in Rumsfeld’s much mocked eloquence but sadly seems unable to make anything of it. There is one initial attempt at profundity presented by one of the actors who are the anonymous narrators of this play: ‘The Inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance.’ Three similar epigrammatic sentences follow and then Hare, exhausted it seems by his attempt to unlock the deeper secrets of the happenings he is to present, sinks into the balanced but severely limited journalism – with only occasional glimpses of the possibility of a drama that would do justice to its themes ‐ of which the play largely consists.

It is a history play which ‘happens’, an author’s note tells us, to centre on very recent events. The events within it have been ‘authenticated’. The last major events of the play are the end of the military campaign in Iraq and Bush and Sharon’s abandonment of ‘the road map’ in April 2004. The first night of the production was in September 2004.As an exercise in instant political journalism it is excellent.

The play is essentially an attempt to give a fair assessment of how the invasion and occupation of Iraq came about through the interplay of nine central characters (in order of appearance): Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Hans Blix and George Bush. ‘Scenes of direct address’, Hare tells us, ‘quote people verbatim. When the doors close on the world’s leaders, then I have used my imagination.’

Hare has used his imagination well on the words and interactions of the world’s leaders – particularly in scenes in which Powell’ in effect, the play’s failed and self‐betrayed hero – challenges the neo‐cons and skilfully deploys his remaining moral capital with the world’s diplomats. The contradictions between his attenuated black heritage, as part of which he makes reference to Martin Luther King Day, and his soldierly loyalty to his commander in chief should be one of the central and symbolic centres of the action of ‘Stuff Happens.’ Powell gets near to making his way out of his world of trapped circularity and then allows himself to fall back into it. Hare gets near to enacting this as symbolic as well as actual but then fails to follow it through.

Hare’s attempts to plumb the symbolic depths of the play’s action fail and so too do his attempts to reach beyond the world of the leaders and diplomats. He inserts here and there short supplementary monologues: an anonymous British journalist, a New Labour Politician, a Palestinian Academic, and, to conclude the play ‐ not so much an epilogue but more, it seems, an afterthought ‐ an Iraqi Exile.

This last scene is a sad confirmation of Hare’s severely limited vision. It picks up and runs with the ‘failed state’ diagnosis of global disorder. The ‘Iraqi Exile’ tells us: ‘Basically it’s the story of a nation that failed in only one thing… It failed to take charge of itself.’ The possibility that the failure of Iraq has to be seen within a context of global power, of empire, tyranny and moral corrosion, seems to have escaped the author at this crucial point. It is a hollow ending.

That journalism is not necessarily limited to such a vision can be seen from the epigraph here by Chris Hedges whose outlook, as he reveals in the passage preceding that quoted above, is influenced by Thucydides:

‘We are tyrants to those weaker than ourselves. We have lost sight of of our democratic ideals. Thucydides wrote of Athens’ expanding empire and how this empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home.’

But is there a sense in the play of at least the spatialities and chains of responsibility of an expanding empire?

The action took place in the National Theatre production in a large auditorium on a large and empty stage, save for chairs, on which the actors scuttle around and occasionally congregate like beetles in a ballroom. How can one ‘imagine’ an empire without a sense of the spatial context that surround the residences, meeting points and decision centres of the powerful and its strange power over yet lack of relationship to the world that it controls?

The play and production do not altogether fail in this respect. In a series of scenes that bridge the two acts such a sense almost emerges. The penultimate scene of Act One ends as ‘The stage darkens. The White House glows in the night, creamy, surreal. An August evening in a Southern town.’ The act’s final scene begins: ‘The image holds, floating, dream‐like.’ Within that dreamlike image the neo‐cons gather, with other figures on the National Security Council, to share their new strategy for undermining the UN while appearing to support it. The scene ends: ‘A wind begins to blow. Two anoraked figures with walking sticks appear, blinking genially in the wind.’ One of the figures introduces himself as Hans Blix and recalls that he was walking with his wife in Patagonia, on the way to the Antarctic when Kofi Annan rang him to ask him to renew his old job of leading the Iraqi weapons inspection. Act Two begins with a Palestinian Academic who refers to Israel as ‘America’s three‐billion‐dollar‐a‐year colony’ and asserts:

‘UN resolutions which are offered as the gold standard to legitimise war on Iraq are ignored when they conflict with the territorial advancement of Israel…’

But the glowing, surreal White House and the struggle for mastery that reaches out to Israel and even for a brief moment Patagonia, though I have suggested their potential here, are rare and unrealised moments. Surreal in what sense? The visual poetry and the prose do not connect.

A second major shortcoming of the play as written is that though at times it touches on the nightmare nature of the global tragedy that is being re‐enacted it rarely achieves that degree of searing, emotional intensity.

In order to sustain such moments across the play, its director, Nicholas Hytner, has introduced a Shostakovich string quartet played in segments between scenes. He explains:

‘Shostakovich is a composer who has the same tragic, ironic view of history as the play; and whose experience as a writer of incidental music for the theatre seems to inform even his non‐theatrical works.’ 4

In one of the best reviews of the play and production, Ben Brantley comments in the New York Times:

‘woven throughout the evening are the ominous, anxious strains of a Shostakovich string quartet. It doesn’t really match the heightened brittleness of the performances. But more than anything else in “Stuff Happens,” this music expresses the profound, enduring unease that the events shown onstage have inspired.’5

This last sentence is used on the front of the CD that the Inklein Quartet has issued on the basis of their performance of the quartet as part of the play.6 There is, though an interestingly ambiguous quality to Brantley’s final sentence. It is the additional music and not the play that rises to the level of the events.

It should be noted that there is much more to the Shostakovich quartet than this. It is the eighth, once thought to be a protest against war and fascism brought about by a visit to the ruins of Dresden in 1960. Though there may be some truth in this view, Ian MacDonald has argued that it was primarily a protest ‘against the Communist Party into which Shostakovich was then in the process of being forcibly enrolled.’7

Particularly important is his view that the three‐note pounding in the fourth movement is not, as once was thought, gunfire or bombs falling but ‘represents a fist pounding on the door in the middle of the night.’ This, of course, is now increasingly a reality of the war on terror. It may require the full understanding of a work produced in response to the terror of actually existing socialism for us to begin to grasp the terror now of actually existing capitalist and imperialist democracy. Stuff happens.

  Bob Catterall

Notes

Anna Bowman was formerly the director of West Hampstead Housing Association. She has previously contributed an article entitled ‘Millenium Visions: rethinking social housing – perspectives from America and Europe’. In CITY, issue 8 (1997) pp 149–154

Habermas, Jürgen: Structural Transformation of Public Sphere, Cambridge MA, MIT Press 1989.

Soja, Eduardo, W., Writing the City Spatially, City, Volume 7, Number 3, November 2003

Danilevskii, Nikolai IAKovlevich, 1822–1885, Rossia i Evropa, New York, Johnson Reprint 1966

I am indebted to Eduardo Mendieta for his insightful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

New York Times April 14, 2003. See also Christian Parenti ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’, The Nation, Aug. 30 – Sept. 6, 2004.

See, for example, Jane Mayer, “Contract Sport: What did Dick Cheney do for Halliburton?” The New Yorker, February 16 & 23, 2004.

Walter F. Roche, Jr. and Ken Silverstein, “Advocates of War Now Profit from Iraq’s Reconstruction,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2004.

See the White House Press Release from February 10, 2004, “Iraq Becoming a Market Economy,” available online at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/print/20040210‐1.html; and the United States Department of Commerce Press Release from February 11, 2004, “Commerce Department to Lead U.S. Tour Promoting Business Opportunities in Iraq,” available online at www.trade.gov/media/PressReleases/0204/iraq_021104.html.

Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Third Edition (1942; New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1950), 83.

Ibid., 82.

Ibid.

Ibid., 84.

Ibid., 83.

On the diplomatic aftermath of 1968, see Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard UP, 2003).

Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard UP, 2002).

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin; prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Belknap, 1999). See also the volumes of selected writings that have been steadily translated since 1995, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings and also published by Harvard Belknap. Benjamin’s reception in the Anglophone world dates back at least to Richard Wolin’s authoritative Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (1982; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), but more recent attempts to link Benjamin with specifically urban themes include Susan Buck Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989); and Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).

David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985).

The panel discussion, which included remarks from Thomas Bender, Susan Fainstein, Kristin Ross, and Neil Smith in addition to Harvey, and was sponsored by the CUNY PhD program in Anthropology as well as the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, took place on 26 March, 2004. It is also worth mentioning here that Neil Smith, via the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, organized a conference a few months later (April 15‐17, 2004) devoted to the question of creative destruction, although in a slightly more specific context than I am discussing here. The conference, which was entitled “Creative Destruction: Area Knowledge and the New Geographies of Empire,” sought to reexamine the origins and legacies of Area Studies as an academic discipline in the United States. Area Studies, needless to say, was a powerful force behind a terrible path of creative destruction during the cold war. For more on this, see note 23 below.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, edited with and introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 254.

Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited and with an Introduction by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott (1978; New York: Schocken, 1986). See, respectively, pages160‐161 and 159.

Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928‐1940, edited by Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1999). See, for example, one of Adorno’s letters commenting on Benjamin’s Paris essay, where he laments the “mythologizing and archaizing tendency” of Benjamin’s most recent draft (110).

Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukacs, Aesthetics and Politics, Afterword by Frederic Jameson, Translation Editor: Ronald Taylor (1977; London and New York: Verso, 1980), 103.

In Illuminations, 255.

For Robert Moses’s relation to Haussmann, see Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974). Moses was an admirer of Haussmann and even wrote on him, but, tellingly and maybe inevitably, he also repeated Haussmann’s greatest mistakes. Thomas Bender pointed this out at the CUNY Graduate Center panel discussion. For more on Moses and the fate of New York, see also Marshall Berman, Everything That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982; New York: Penguin, 1988); and, more recently, Michael Greenberg’s discussion with Berman in TLS (June 25, 2004). It was Jane Jacobs of course who mobilized popular opposition to Moses’ plans to employ the techniques of creative destruction in her beloved Greenwich Village. See her The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).

For more on Harvey’s notion of a “spatial fix”, see his The Limits to Capital, New Edition (London and New York: Verso, 1999).

On the (geo)politics of oil, see Michael Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (2001: New York: Metropolitan/Owl Books, 2002); and, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Petroleum Dependency (The American Empire Project) (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). On human rights, see, for example, Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an age of Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003). And on militarism, see Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). Another key piece of the puzzle is provided in Neil Smith’s American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), which I reviewed in an earlier issue of CITY [8:1 (April 2004): 140‐145].

It is worth pointing out here that Harvey offers, as opposed to people like Neil Smith, a strongly oil‐centric analysis of the America Empire in his The New Imperialism. As with Klare, oil is, for him, a key link between American capitalism and imperialism. But Harvey thinks that it is not so much the need for oil that has driven current American global policy, but the need to control the flow of oil so as to exert pressure on its primary rival, the growing Chinese economy. On this topic, see also Bill McKibben, “Crossing the Red Line,” New York Review of Books June 10, 2004.

See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

See, for example, Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860‐1900 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).

Carl E. Schorske, Fin‐de‐Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1985).

See, for example, Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds., Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870‐1930 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994).

See Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas Thornton (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999).

See Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), and Malachi Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902‐1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000).

The website for the film, which includes a downloadable press packet with additional information, explores some of these details further: www.sonyclassics.com/fogofwar. For more on the evolution of American airpower and LeMay specifically, see Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987).

See W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003).

Peter Galison, “War against the Center,” Grey Room 4 (Summer, 2001): 7‐33. See also Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atlantic America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002); and Mike Davis, “Berlin’s Skeleton in Utah’s Closet,” in Dead Cities: And Other Tales (New York: The Free Press, 2002), 65‐83. For more along these lines, see Eduardo Mendieta, “Imperial geographies and topographies of nihilism: Theatres of war and dead cities,” in CITY 8:1 (April 2004): 5‐27, especially pages 10‐15.

See the press kit for The Fog of War available on the website mentioned in note 29 above.

See Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of The United States (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985).

This of course led to a different kind of creative destruction, namely the devaluation of urban capital so as to open new landscapes up for reinvestment, a phenomenon which found its perfect symbolization in the nightly fires that raged through the South Bronx—precisely the area Robert Moses had disemboweled with the construction of his Cross‐Bronx Expressway—during New York’s fiscal crisis. Mike Davis has explored the legacy of such inner‐city “brownfields” in his “Dead Cities: A Natural History,” which can also be found in Dead Cities. He argues that “urban dereliction has become,” in the United States, “the moral and natural‐historical equivalent of war” (386). As he puts a page later: “No civilization—especially not one so rich and powerful—has ever tolerated such extensive physical destruction of its urban fabric in peacetime” (387). A tangible example indeed of the kind of mirroring that Galison describes with regard to the legacy of the Strategic Bombing Survey.

In one memorable scene, a Flint resident, pointing to a row of run‐down homes, informs the audience that there is already an “Iraq” right here at home. And the president knows about the dire conditions in Flint because, as the fellow explained, he had already emailed him about it (!).

This thought came to me recently as I watched Thom Andersen’s compelling film essay on the cinematic afterlives, both real and imagined, of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). As Andersen, following Mike Davis [“The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles” and “Beyond Blade Runner,” both in Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998)] and others, suggests (among other things) in this brilliant meditation on Los Angeles’s role in the movies, Hollywood usually hides the reality of its creative destruction beneath a veneer of fantastic apocalyptic sacrifice. As Andersen points out, the Hollywood version of urban catastrophe, whether supposedly realistic or entirely outlandish, pales in comparison to the real plight of Angelenos left behind by the two most recognizable symbols of southern California success/excess, namely the automobile and Hollywood; which is probably why he ends his film with an ode to the Neorealism films of the sixties that sought to introduce a more human scale and timeframe into the language of Los Angeles cinema. Los Angeles is a city so scarred by creative destruction—the destruction of its transit system by the automobile industry is but one example of this—that it isn’t even considered modern, but somehow postmodern, that is, beyond the pale. Whether it is modern or postmodern, though, the fact remains that getting around by foot in Los Angeles is a difficult and dangerous undertaking. Creative destruction, in other words, makes even the basic act of walking in one’s own community seem impossible.

DOI: 10.1080/1360481042000313572

Chris Hedge, ‘On War’, a review of Evan Wright’s Generation Kill and Jon Lee Anderson’s The Fall Of Baghdad’ in The New York Review of Books, December 16, 2004, pp 8‐14. The review itself is dated November 17, 2004.

David Hare’s ‘Stuff Happens’ London and New York: Faber 2004. The National theatre programme is particularly useful.

City 7:3 and 8:2

My thanks to Lucinda Morrison, Press Officer at the National Theatre , for obtaining this statement from the director, Nicholas Hytner.

New York Times, September 13 2004

Zeptepi 002

Ian MacDonald, ‘The Legend of the Eighth Quartet’, http://.siue.edu/∼aho/musov/8qt/8qt.html

DOI: 10.1080/1360481042000333598