Jameson Future City.pdf

fredric jameson

FUTURE CITY

he Project on the City assembles research from an

ongoing graduate seminar directed by Rem Koolhaas at the

Harvard School of Design; its first two volumes—the Great

Leap Forward , an exploration of the development of the

Pearl River Delta between Hong Kong and Macao, and the Guide to

Shopping —have just appeared in sumptuous editions, from Taschen. 1

These extraordinary volumes are utterly unlike anything else one can

find in the print media; neither picture books nor illustrated text, they

are in movement, like a cd rom, and their statistics are visually beauti-

ful, their images legible to a degree.

Although architecture is one of the few remaining arts in which the great

auteurs still exist—and although Koolhaas is certainly one of those—the

seminar which has produced its first results in these two volumes is

not dedicated to architecture but rather to the exploration of the city

today, in all its untheorized difference from the classical urban struc-

ture that existed at least up until World War II. Modern architecture

has been bound up with questions of urbanism since its eighteenth and

nineteenth century beginnings: Siegfried Giedion’s modernist summa,

Space, Time and Architecture , for example, begins with the Baroque

restructuration of Rome by Sixtus V and ends with the Rockefeller Centre

and Robert Moses’s parkways, even though it is essentially a celebration

of Le Corbusier. And obviously Le Corbusier was both an architect and,

with the Radiant Cities, Chandigarh and the plan for Algiers, an ‘urban

planner’. But although the Project testifies to Koolhaas’s commitment to

the question of the city, he is not an urbanist in any disciplinary sense;

nor can the word be used to describe these books, which also escape

other disciplinary categories (such as sociology or economics) but might

be said to be closest to cultural studies.

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The fact is that traditional, or perhaps we might better say modernist,

urbanism is at a dead end. Discussions about American traffic patterns

or zoning—even political debates about homelessness and gentrifica-

tion, or real-estate tax policy—pale into insignificance when we consider

the immense expansion of what used to be called cities in the Third

World: ‘in 2025,’ we are told in another Koolhaas collective volume, ‘the

number of city-dwellers could reach 5 billion individuals . . . of the 33

megalopolises predicted in 2015, 27 will be located in the least developed

countries, including 19 in Asia . . . Tokyo will be the only rich city to figure

in the list of the 10 largest cities’. 2 Nor is this a problem to be solved,

but rather a new reality to explore: which is, I take it, the mission of the

Project on the City , two further volumes of which are so far projected: one

on Lagos, Nigeria, and one on the classical Roman city as prototype.

Volume One of the Project , Great Leap Forward , interprets the prodigious

building boom in China today—almost nine thousand high rises built in

Shanghai since 1992—not so much in terms of some turn or return to

capitalism, but rather in terms of Deng Xiaoping’s strategy to use capi-

talism to build a radically different society: infrared rather than red :

the concealment of Communist, red ideals . . . to save Utopia at a moment

when it was being contested on all sides, when the world kept accumulating

proofs of its ravages and miseries . . . infrared

Those who believe that the market is a reality, anchored in nature and

in Being, will have difficulty grasping such a proposition, which from

their perspective will be dispelled either by an outright conversion to

capitalism or by economic collapse. But consider the architectural per-

spective: we witness thousands upon thousands of buildings constructed

or under construction which have no tenants, which could never be

paid for under capitalist conditions, whose very existence cannot be jus-

tified by any market standards. We here follow the outlines of housing

communities in the Pearl River Delta area which are being projected

for a future quite unlike those researched by Western speculators or

1 Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas and Sze Tsung Leong, eds,

Great Leap Forward , Harvard Design School Project on the City , 722 pp, Cologne

2002; and Guide to Shopping , Harvard Design School Project on the City , 800 pp,

Cologne 2002.

2 Mutations , Barcelona 2001.

is a campaign to preempt the demise of Utopia, a project to conceal 19th

century ideals within the realities of the 21st century.

jameson: Future City

banks and funding institutions in the capitalist world. Indeed, the four

communities explored here are something like four different Utopian

projections: Shenzhen, a kind of alternate or double of Hong Kong;

Dongguan, a pleasure city; Zhuhai, a golfing paradise; while the old

centre, Guanzhou (Canton), becomes a kind of strange palimpsest, in

which the new is superimposed on an already existing traditional eco-

nomic centre. It is an extraordinary travelogue into the future, and gives

a more concrete sense of China today and tomorrow than most guide-

books (and many real tours).

Proteus goes shopping

The Guide to Shopping is something altogether different, both in style

and intent. Consumption is, to be sure, a hot topic, but this is no con-

ventional study of it. Indeed, the question of what this book is—an

extraordinary picture book; a collection of essays on various urbanistic

and commercial topics; a probe of global space from Europe to Singapore,

from Disneyworld to Las Vegas; a study of the shopping mall itself,

from its first ideologues all the way to its most contemporary forms—

corresponds to the more general ambiguity of its object. Even if we stick

to the initial characterization of that object as ‘shopping’, what kind of

categorization is that? Is it a physical one, involving the objects to be

sold? Is it psychological, involving the desire to buy the objects in ques-

tion? Or architectural, having to do with the spatial originality of those

malls—which, famously, trace their ancestry back to Walter Benjamin’s

nineteenth-century arcades; if not, as some of the time charts in this book

suggest, back to the 7000 bc ‘city of Catalhöyük founded for the trade of

commodities’, or perhaps the ‘invention’ of the retail trade in Lydia in the

seventh century bc? Or are we talking here about the globalization of con-

sumption (consumerism)? Or the new trade routes and production and

distribution networks involved in such globalization? (Or the business-

men who organize those?) And what about the new technologies evolved

for commerce since Catalhöyük? The prodigious increase in size of the

merchandizing companies and conglomerates, some of them larger than

many foreign countries? What about shopping and the form of the con-

temporary city—if there is one: significantly Koolhaas’s collective project

changed its name from the ‘Project for what used to be the city’ to the

plainer and more optimistic Project on the City . To which may be added

the question: is a new kind of space emerging—control space, junk

space? And what does all this imply for the human psyche and human

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reality itself? (The first theoretician of advertising, Edward Bernays, was

Freud’s nephew.) What does it imply for the future and for Utopia?

I am probably forgetting some of the other modulations of this protean

topic; but it will be clear that it mobilizes, alongside the obvious

(and obviously anticipated) areas of architecture and urbanism, such

heterogeneous disciplines as psychoanalysis and geography, history and

business, economics and engineering, biography, ecology, feminism,

area studies, ideological analysis, classical studies, legal decisions, crisis

theory, et cetera. Perhaps this kind of immense disciplinary range is

no longer quite so astonishing in a postmodern era, in which the law

of being is de-differentiation, and in which we are most interested in

how things overlap and necessarily spill across the disciplinary bounda-

ries. Or, if you prefer, in the postmodern the distinction between the old

specialized disciplines is constitutively effaced and they now fold back

on each other, in the most interesting studies—from Deleuze/Guattari’s

Thousand Plateaux to Caro’s Power Broker ; from Empire to Rembrandt’s

Eyes ; from Benjamin’s Arcades to the Geschichte und Eigensinn of Negt

and Kluge; let alone SMXLX or even Space, Time, and Architecture .

Theory is here mostly eschewed (although Baudrillard is mentioned

once, I believe), but you must not let that tempt you into thinking that

this is a non-theoretical piece of cultural journalism, let alone a coffee-

table picture book. It is, as the enumeration above might also suggest,

a collective volume; although not in the sense that experts of the vari-

ous disciplines mentioned above are somehow judiciously assembled

and their contributions sampled in turn. This makes it embarrassing

for a reviewer to single out specific names, although Sze Tsung Leong

has the most, and also the most philosophically reflective, chapters, with

Chuihua Judy Chung a close follow-up for more concrete discussions.

As for Koolhaas, his role seems to have been mostly organizational (that

is to say, like certain versions of the deity, nowhere and everywhere all at

once) save for an astonishing appearance in his own name, which will

be discussed at the proper moment.

After the mall

I will try to put the theory back into all this; but it would first be better

to work through some of the detail of the layers or strata of the book,

whose alphabetical table of contents is quite misleading in this respect;

and thus a veritable tour de force in its own right. For a few previews

jameson: Future City

on the mall are the way in here: they will return, far more developed,

in a variety of contexts later on. But it is as though the shopping mall

is the spatial and architectural wedge into this immense topic. Few

forms have been so distinctively new and so distinctively American, and

late-capitalist, as this innovation, whose emergence can be dated: 1956;

whose relationship to the well-known decay-of-the-inner-city-rise-of-the-

suburb is palpable, if variable; whose genealogy now opens up a physical

and spatial prehistory of shopping in a way that was previously incon-

ceivable; and whose spread all over the world can serve as something of

an epidemiological map of Americanization, or postmodernization, or

globalization. So the mall focuses the inquiry and serves as the frame

for the prodigious enlargement of all this later on. Meanwhile, pages of

chronologies, colour-coded cross-referencing systems and innumerable

thematic indexes already train us in the rhizomatic form of that enlarge-

ment; while a first set of comparisons between retail areas all over the

world, and between national GDPs and retail revenues of the top corpo-

rations, help us begin to map the process in our minds and to form a

picture, not only of the relative hierarchies of globalization, but also of

a view of ‘shopping’ that will shortly become, dare I say, not merely a

political but also a metaphysical issue.

At once, however, we are pulled up short, and a fundamental difference

between this work and the proliferation of new and excellent cultural-

studies volumes on shopping, malls, consumption and the like, becomes

clear. Before we even get to the thing itself, we come upon the mall in

crisis, losing money and tenants, and on the verge of replacement . . . by

what? Benjamin took his snapshot of the nineteenth-century arcade at

the moment of its decay—and thereby developed a whole theory about

history: that you could best understand the present from the standpoint

of an immediate past whose fashions were already just a little out of date.

Crisis puts us on notice that we have here to do, not merely with the

archeology or prehistory of shopping, nor even its present but rather its

future. Whatever the future of the mall as such, however, ‘“there’s lots of

trash out there”. Many cavernous old malls are dinosaurs that can’t com-

pete with the convenience of drive-up value retailers in power centres or

strips’—to which one now needs no doubt to add eBay.

Something has evidently happened to the preconditions for the exist-

ence of malls in the first place. But what were those preconditions? As

in Aristotelian causality, they come in a variety of forms and shapes:

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