Contested Urbanism: Struggles about Representations

Abstract

Iconic architecture plays a crucial role in cities' interurban competition. This is also the case with Copenhagen which has used iconic architecture as part of its boosterism to gain investment, to increase tourism and to attract the creative class. This battle over the symbolic representation of city dynamism, architectural identity and market competitiveness is expressed in discourses and visual signs in space—be it cyberspace, on location, in newspapers or debates. The articulation of representations and meaning can produce conflicts which show the voids, ruptures, and rational generatives at play. This article will exemplify how actors' use of a specific spatial dispositif of visibility and legibility may be intertwined with particular discourses on community, architectural heritage and identity of place. Two cases are chosen, the first concerns resistance towards high-rise buildings and the second concerns a current debate about the development of a ‘metropol-zone’. Both cases concern Copenhagen. The signifying dispositifs (content, argument, rationality) in each case will be identified and the paper will emphasise how certain dispositifs of the visible and the arguable become strategically intertwined through symbolic, visual and virtual representations of the wrongs of current urban planning.

The author would like to thank the referees for their constructive comments and Andrew Crabtree, Roskilde University, for his detailed proof-reading.

Notes

Resemblance presumes a primary reference, similitude does not have one (Foucault, 1983).

A notable exception is Rabinow (1989) and, to be fair, the authors mentioned consider the social as such, but approached from the spatial—that is, the spatialisation of life through planning.

‘Komiteen mod forfejlet højhusbyggeri’ (The Committee against Misplaced High-rise Buildings, here CAHC).

I question the English translation here, because Deleuze uses the words ‘dispositif’, not ‘system’.

‘Machine’ as “a combination of resistant parts, each specialised in function, operating under human control to transmit motion and perform work” (Hillier, 2007, p. 61).

Using two different translations of Deleuze already shows the problems of the English translation of ‘dispositif’.

Foucault describes his own rules of method as being “the rule of immanence”, “the continues variations”, “the two sided conditionality” and “the tactical polyvalens of the discourse” (Foucault, 1978, pp. 110–115).

Denmark does not have problems with ghettos, but integration problems. The neo-liberal government allows xenophobic parties to shape a mono-culturalist and assimilationist immigrant politics. We have in the major cities minor religious parallel communities (‘own’ laws and ‘courts’) and some drug-crime gang fights, but the police say there are only about 200–250 real hard-core second-generation immigrants involved. The major drug-dealers are still Hells Angels.

A floating signifier is a signifier that is not yet well established. When for instance city councils propose new projects for public debate, their discourse will be vulnerable to counter-representations, because it is a floating and ‘empty’ signifier and new forms of visibilities, such as posters or protest actions, can take place to fill it.

See: www.cpk-vidensby.kk.dk (accessed 7 March 2008). If no other source given, quotations from Danish are translated by the author.

See: www.hoejhuse.kk.dk/visioner (accessed 27 February 2008).

So using the rhetoric of ‘creative capital’ city, it is an ‘image-obsessed’ urban politics on the international scene, while at the same time arguing for the need for ‘cheap housing’ and ‘housing for all’ in the creative and well-off areas. The municipality is not debating how it is possible to have a market-dependent strategy and making that include ‘cheap housing’ and a mixed population. Their symbol-politics presently include environmental planning (traffic reduction), signature architecture (high-rise buildings) and social housing (for example, 5000 apartments for 5000 Danish crowns per month. The flats will be about 70–85 square metres and then they are very cheap compared with rent levels in the current market. The most recently built apartments (Sydhavnen) cost about 9000 per month for 80 square metres).

A meeting place for North Atlantic—Greenland, Faroe Islands, Iceland—businesses and culture, comprising offices, the Greenland museum and gallery.

A quote from the former Minister of the Ministry of Urban and Housing Politics living in Holmen.

Named ‘Freja’, a state-municipal co-funded investment firm formed to steer the selling of land on the huge deindustrialised waterfront area. They have sold the rights to build on Krøyers Plads to NCC, a major Nordic investment and development company dealing with housing, transport and building.

Christianshavn is known as an area for the upper-middle class (academics, business, creatives, artists, etc.) and they have, as said, in fact complained a lot about Luftkastellet as well as the ‘free-town’ Christiania and its drug-dealing and related traffic.

www3.kk.dk; accessed 27 February 2008.

On the right-hand side of Figure 2, one can see an eight-lane major arterial road cutting through downtown (passing the City Hall and square) and, on the left-hand side, there is a six-lane road passing the central station and leading further to business waterfront hotels, a major shopping mall and the road to the airport, Sweden, and the Orestad.

Here, however, the police complain about the side-effects of concentrating night-life to limited areas—namely, drunken people, fights, aggressive behaviour and so on. In Copenhagen, the argument is not so much about control, but to avoid complaints from citizens by concentrating noisy use of the city in one particular area. That target is only mentioned in passing in interviews.

The network comprises the CAHC group, ‘The Friends of Tivoli’ established against Norman Foster's high-rise hotel as part of the Tivoli concept (located just across the City Hall square) and the ‘Brewer Group’ protesting against building on the last ‘green’ area at the waterfront, known as ‘The Brewer Site’ (Rem Koolhaas is the architect and the builder is Realdania, the largest public–private fund in Denmark funding especially projects on architecture and cultural heritage) (see www.metropol.dk).

The ‘Metropol zone’, resistance is basically an internet initiative (www.metropolzone.dk; accessed 1 March 2008).

The group suggest the newly built areas ‘Ørestaden’ and the Amager Beach Park located 8–10 km from the inner city.

www.fejlplacerede.dk; accessed 27 April 2007.

This is a dispositif ensemble that can be found in architectural intentions such as ‘functionalism’. Within the functionalist movement, they searched for, as the Swedish architect Gregor Paulsson said in 1930, an “architectural form that was a style of freedom, the social function an expression of equality” (Bech-Danielsen, 2004, p.10). Le Corbusier is of course a main inspiration for this Scandinavian functionalism. The suburbanisation of Scandinavia cannot be seen without the reference and intertwinement between the ideology of functionalism and welfare-politics.

This outcome of the forms of public participation is politically self-induced. In his writings on ‘The post-political city’, Erik Swyngedouw (2007, p. 59) argues that “the rise of a neo-liberal governmentality has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, and technocratic management”. The city of Copenhagen acts managerially and prioritises growth coalitions, rather than involving citizens actively in a longstanding dialogue on city development and local needs. There are a lot of public meetings, even several on the same subjects such as on high-rise buildings, but it is not a politically committed dialogue—only a way to ‘know counter-arguments’ and incorporate those that fit in political plans.