Against Urbanism , livre ebook

Against Urbanism
Franco La Cecla. Translated by Mairin O Mahony
2020 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
The materials contained in this book are the fruit of studies undertaken, over the past years, by Franco La Cecla for the Research Laboratory on Cities (Laboratorio di ricerca sulle citt ) at the University of Bologna.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-235-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948159
Cover art by Gent Sturgeon
Cover layout by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
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Contents
CHAPTER 1 The Return of the Body to the City
CHAPTER 2 Images of Cities
Jogjakarta, Java, Indonesia
CHAPTER 3 Why Did Urban Planning Go So Wrong?
Fukuoka, Japan
CHAPTER 4 Why Urban Planning Doesn t Help Us Understand Cities
Istanbul, Turkey
CHAPTER 5 Against the Word of UN-Habitat: The World Will Be All Urban
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
CHAPTER 6 Why Urban Planning Is in a Deadly Delay: The Environment
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
CHAPTER 7 Lies and Lost Opportunities for Involvement
Shanghai, China
CHAPTER 8 Against the Slogans of Urban Planning Glamour
Milan, Italy
CHAPTER 9 Slums: How to Get the Poor to Pay the Costs of the City
Ragusa Ibla, Italy
CHAPTER 10 Urbanicide and Street Food
Minsk, Belarus
CHAPTER 11 Paris as Province in the XXII Century
A NOTE ON THE TEXT Raffaele Milani
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CHAPTER 1
The Return of the Body to the City
OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST YEARS I HAVE BECOME A witness to an unexpected transformation that I never imagined would happen. The first time it happened was in Cairo, the second was in Istanbul, and the third was in Hong Kong. In Cairo I had participated in a seminar organized by the NGO Liveinslums in the City of the Dead, 1 the district that is the monumental cemetery for the city, inhabited today by over half a million people who, thanks to an ingenious system of overbuilding, have created within, above and around the tombs, a close-knit and tranquil habitat (compared with the rest of the city). On that occasion the city appeared immense and completely blocked in a huge anxiety, so that it seemed impossible to have any kind of discourse with the people that would touch on the hope of the minutest change. It was the last year of Mubarak s government, but we did not know that.
Back home again in Italy, we were overcome by events. It appeared to us that a city from which all representative spaces had been removed suddenly became the protagonist in an immense revolt against the central power. Contrary to what the Cairene intellectuals who were interviewed had to tell us, here was no fragmented opposition which had finally gathered some courage, but rather an immense and orderly crowd, identifying itself with a space, Tahrir Square. During those days in the streets, a good friend and a great moviemaker, Stefano Savona, found himself in Cairo. And he understood that something unique was taking place, and with a minimum amount of equipment he installed himself in Tahrir Square with the occupiers. Wrapped in a shower curtain taken from his room in the nearby hotel, he slept with them and saw for himself the waiting, the outside attacks, the long resistance. And he filmed the protagonists, showing their faces and their bodies, creating in my opinion something totally unforeseen: photographing a revolution up close, where every participant was a protagonist.
It was a technique made possible by the equipment Stefano was using, blending in with the crowd and filming them body to body, but above all it was a discourse about what was happening. Here one was involved not just with a demonstration in the streets, but with the notion that to combat power it needed the people, young and old, entire families and students, Muslims and Copts, Islamic organizations and laypeople inspired by Che Guevara, poets and singers, people who blog and people who don t, to occupy a place physically. I visited the square and it seemed to me to be one of the dustiest and most anonymous of places in the city, important only because it is central and a couple of steps away from the seats of power. Today it has become Tahrir Square, a place that brings together the most disparate components and unites them in the idea that change cannot happen on Facebook or elsewhere on the internet, but only in the physical presence of millions of bodies in the streets. It is this occupation of the streets that created identity, constituted a new subject and proposed an idea of a citizenry with the right to be present together in a public space. There is a moment in Stefano Savona s film Tahrir: Revolution Square , the one that he made and distributed right after the events, in which a girl in a hijab contacts one of the protest leaders on Facebook. 2 He doesn t want to come to the demonstration because he thinks it is being led by the Muslim Brotherhood, but she reassures him that no, it is everyone and above all the many who want the downfall of Mubarak and a new constitution. It s an important moment, because we understand that something completely unexpected is happening that the devotees of the web have not cottoned to. What is novel is the taking back of the centrality of the connection between urban people and urban spaces, their right to exercise their own presence in the public spaces of the city, a gesture and a practice that puts back into play the physicality of the city and of its citizens.
A Norwegian anthropologist, Unni Wikan, who has worked for forty years straight in Cairo among the poor of the city, had foreseen something similar. She had understood that the international organizations, preoccupied with the transformation of Cairo into a sustainable city, were completely unaware of the daily experiences of the inhabitants. During the nineties, the United Nations organization that had asked for a consultation with the anthropologist concluded that conditions in the city were worsening. Wikan, however, concluded the opposite: that there were citizens networks of solidarity, which were working together day by day to provide a better future for their own children, making informal and illegal work arrangements by making deals with the owners of vacant lots to provide construction materials and building work in exchange for long-term leases, effectively providing a co-responsibility that enhanced the lives of everyone concerned. The problem for Wikan was that these processes were invisible to the international organizations, invisible precisely because they were dependent on the delicate tissue of the daily give-and-take in the physical presence of the people of the neighborhood. So when the millions in the streets went from being invisible to visible all of a sudden, the urgent and necessary work (here Wikan uses the binomial phrase coined by Pierre Bourdieu to describe the everyday condition of the poor) of the Cairenes to ameliorate the condition of life for the next generations slips under the radar and is not noticed. Wikan had intuited that anthropology as a discipline was blind with respect to the urban poor, and that the urban planner was incapable of understanding how people were using and occupying the spaces in their own city with an eye to improving their everyday life: It is not coincidental that the urban poor of the Third World remain peripheral to the anthropological scene: they don t have much to offer us that is exotic. They don t use fancy words, or recite poetry, or engage in elaborate rituals. In fact, as E.V. Walter notes, The poor have plenty, but it is plenty of what nobody wants. 3
Wikan s report was turned down and attacked as irrelevant. She was forced to publish it elsewhere so that it might gain visibility and have an effect. 4 What happened in Tahrir Square is the same type of phenomenon. Accustomed as we are to think that changes happen online or on a global scale, we do not take into account that they are made by human beings in urban spaces and that the mere presence of people in the streets taking back their own right to the city is an explosive political reality.
This can be seen in the events that followed the fall of Mubarak. The streets have determined a good part of the evolution or of the political regression of the Egyptian Spring. (But in our idea of the streets there is a negative political judgment: the streets would be the subconscious collective, incapable of emerging from barbarism.) They are the place where the opposition was constructed and destructed and reconstructed, where the destiny of the Muslim Brotherhood and of the secular Egypt which wasn t there were played out, where military repression was unleashed, along with the successful attempt at a new coup d tat. Yet Tahrir Square is very frightening to the new regime, who have in fact rendered it almost inaccessible. Because it is there that one can sense the radical difference between the opposition parties and the religious movements. How true it is that the same Muslim Brotherhood, who attempted to ride in on the revolt in Tahrir Square, was thrown from the saddle, precisely because it did not recognize that the city was expressing itself in the streets as a complex and composed structure, refusing to be identified as not belonging to that city and to that square and to those streets.
This new concept of citizenship threw me for a loop a second time in Istanbul. It s a city which I had begun visiting regularly and which also seemed to me to be stuck. I felt the discontent in the attitude of my artist and actor friends who had brought me to a demonstration of solidarity with the pianist Fazil Say, 5 threatened with exile because he had posted a tweet in which