And even in those instances where speculative urbanization projects do result in the building of segregated urban enclaves for the privileged few, it is rarely possible to maintain continuous detachment from the surrounding society. By contrast, in many sub-Saharan African cities, for instance, the spatial lines of separation that isolate the affluent few from surrounding urban spaces follow a much wider and less coordinated meshwork of social divisions and political fissures and with deeper social, cultural and economic underpinnings Nielsen et al.
It simply needs to be understood differently. In many cities, physical spaces, built forms and sets of urban practices are reimagined and explored anew through the activation of desires and aspirations that are associated with urban milieu elsewhere.
Although heterogeneous and always contested, worlding practices conjure up new worlds across existing urban milieu through the juxtaposition of spaces, aesthetics and ideas from distinct localities. Hence I will venture to suggest that if there is anything inherently global about contemporary cities, it is this. With the circulation of ideas and ideals of what constitutes desirable urban worlds, disparate connections are forged between different cities, which carry concrete visions of new urban futures and thereby also a sense of experimental world-making that transcends the confines of specific local sites.
To be sure, this does not imply that urbanism anywhere can be considered a reflection of a self-replicating universal form, such as speculative global capitalism Roy, Rather than having a singular universal causality as its engine of genericity, we may argue that each city and every singular urban process produce their own abstractions, which are always more than the concrete spaces and specific aesthetic and social imageries from which they derive their directionality and force Nielsen and Simone, Global urbanism is, therefore, never equal to whatever the cities of the world may be taken to be.
Conventionally, legibility emerges from the fixation of things Taussig, But we also know that scales are not just neutral frames for somehow viewing the world objectively Wastell, While we may continue to insist that scales are set up prior to measuring the effects of actions, it is, in fact, by contextualizing, scaling, spacing that the idea of the scale itself is achieved Corsin Jimenez, ; Latour, To be sure, we would never know what actions to gauge for their effects without the distinctions we impose upon them through the use of scales, and so the instruments we operationalize when measuring things end up also producing their particular qualities Wagner, What happens, in other words, if we remove something from the constraints of legible scales and proportions - that is, if we move beyond the acts of immediate measuring and proportioning that seem to offer the most available form of readability of the city?
What kinds of perspectives might be accessible if the contrasts, differentiations and distinctions that mark the deep physicality of speculative urbanization projects in the Global South were momentarily removed, and we had to leave the cities to their own devices? Would that even be possible? Rather, the monu- mentality of the buildings triggered a transformative urge to lift out the materiality of the citadels of ancient cities certain visions of the world that arose from it but which it could not contain.
The monumentality of urbanism that I am focussing on here has, therefore, less to do with its particular physical proportions than its considerable capacities for producing ideas and ideals of desirable cities that might circulate across different urban milieu. Obviously, it is not only very large speculative urban development projects which seem to have wedged into their physical structures a transformative capacity for producing portable visions of the world.
But there is no doubt that the intensity by which desires and aspirations associated with such projects migrate across different urban terrains has a particularly pronounced effect on the pace of cities in many parts of the world and especially so in the Global South. Although impossible to capture by any legible scale, the proportions of these phenomena are, indeed, monumental. If anything, it is a slow-moving, somewhat dysfunctional but fairly stable vehicle, which lacks a workforce, financial resources and political attention Andersen et al.
Architect Anselmo Goveia has been with the DPU for more than 20 years and is now head of a small team that works exclusively on private construction projects near the coastal sections of the new ring road that was opened in While being constantly overloaded with work tasks, Goveia is excited about the prospects for the city and urban planning in particular, which new large-scale urban construction projects seem to carry.
In the spring of ,1 sat down with Goveia to talk about his views on the many planned but still unrealized urban development projects in and around the Maputo city centre. Well, this is much better than before! We are so few technicians working here, you know. So, we need condominiums i condomtnios like the ones they have in South Africa.
Do you know how they build Waterfall City? The government hands over a piece of land to the investor and then they take care of business. That is what we want here! Waterfall City, which Goveia explicitly refers to, is an impressive new property development located halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria. Similar to many other master-planned private cities that have been constructed in or near urban areas throughout the Global South during recent decades, Waterfall City involves a fundamental reconfiguration of the relationship between public administration and private investors where the latter increasingly come to perform the functions that are conventionally expected of municipal and state authorities.
For all practical purposes, the mandate to govern the new city has been outsourced to private actors, who are obviously interested first and foremost in financial gains rather than social cohesion and wide-ranging urban integration Murray; ; see also Acuto, ; Kanna, It is significant to note that, at the time of our conversation, the construction ofWaterfall City had not been completed yet, and so Goveia was reacting to the design of an urbanization project whose full realization was stencilled onto a future canvas, the texture of which was still relatively unknown.
Still, the lack of physical coordinates did not prevent Goveia and many other officials with him from using the projected urbanization projects as an imaginary conduit for recalibrating their understanding of what the city and urban planning might be.
Indeed, whereas officials at the Maputo Municipality and elsewhere had generally considered urban planning as the main administrative strategy for providing a minimum of spatial regularity in the city as a whole, it now seemed that urban planning was in the process of being morphed into a transactional object, which could be negotiated and outsourced to private actors who would manage enclaved slices of the city Easterling, But the introduction of global discourses on world-city projects has also produced imageries of alternative future scenarios, which already affect the socio-political dynamics of the city.
Seemingly inspired by the event, a city commissioner from the city of Jaipur took the podium to express his excitement:. Thanks to these Now I can imagine that Jaipur too can become a world city that can generate jobs and money From this view, our cities are full of untapped value and potential, making them a very exciting place to be. While the two contexts are seemingly too diverse to warrant comparison, it is, nevertheless, interesting to note how they both reflect a certain imaginative vibrancy prompted by projected large-scale urbanization projects.
By not being captured by its physical form, monumental urbanism can roam freely. Whereas most cities remain where they are, monumental urbanism migrates. Similar to the free zone, which operates almost like a sovereign space irrespective of its locality monumental urbanism conjures widespread desires for global city-making. But it does so in a slightly different way. In a sense, monumental urbanism only exists through its effects, as a series of speculative lines that are being drawn across existing city spaces with the force of future imageries.
No urban models are being exported here other than as a longing for something that might not have existed in the first place. And it is this imaginary vibrancy that invests certain registers of urban life in the Global South with an almost staccato-like rhythm and urgency Nielsen, ; see also Lefebvre, If monumental urbanism cannot be properly gauged by way of legible scales, its social, economic and political effects can, nevertheless, be determined with relative ease.
Take Maputo, for example, where a partially virtual building frenzy has fundamentally reconfigured the configuration of the urban landscape. Already in , there were more than 80 gated compounds in and around the city centre Costa, and only within the last five years, 15 new complexes have been built along the picturesque Costa do Sol road bordering the coastline Nielsen and Jenkins, And, still, very few if any of these ongoing building projects manifest the proportions of the urban development projects, whose monumental aesthetics they also reference.
To browse Academia. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Madrid, Trotta, El hombre unidimensional. It was inevitable, in these circumstances, that cinema would arouse interest in Mumford, who was very happy to take the most direct route in reaching that public with whom he could produce shared moments of transformative participation.
It is not known what were the intentions of the National Film Board of Canada when they made their decision to produce the series of documentaries, Mumford on The City, but from the various shots in the film showing Canadian cities it is possible to identify themes that were under discussion in that country at the time: the demolition, in Montreal, of historic buildings to be replaced by the new skyscrapers of financial institutions; housing expansion in the regional suburbs of the major cities, as seen in the sequences filmed in Ottawa which, according to a comment in a passage in The City and its Region, "in order to be able to preserve its own magnificent natural heritage, has decided to restrict its growth… [establishing a] protection belt of at least 65 square miles around the city …behind which its future growth … will take place.
The trend in regional growth will continue, but the equilibrium between city and countryside will be preserved for the benefit of everyone". In the early s Mumford was convinced that he had a solution to offer against that process which would lead the western city towards self-destruction 8 , through the corruption of established centres and the uncontrolled expansion of the suburbs.
In the last chapter of The City in History he had formulated a concept of city to be used "in reassessing the whole re-planning process of the city", proposing an idea of "invisible city", which we have achieved only now, in the Internet era, but which indicates the extent of the potential capacity of this writer although only described in broadest terms.
In order to understand the motive which prompted Mumford to take advantage of the occasion provided by the production of this television series, it is necessary to turn our attention away from the declared source of inspiration, the recently published book, and towards the series of articles published during the three subsequent years in "Architectural Records", and then republished together in book form, with The Urban Prospect.
In reality, at the centre of these articles lies a dispute, at times direct, with Jane Jacobs' essay in , entitled The Death and Life of Great American Cities 9 , which Mumford acknowledges as having broken the critical models of architecture and urban planning hitherto conditioned by the "disastrous" theories of the Twentieth Century and which Mumford follows also by reconsidering not only the rationalist proposals Le Corbusier, in Yesterday's City of Tomorrow but also those naturalistic proposals with which he more closely identified Wright, in The megalopolis as anti-city.
Nevertheless, according to Mumford, Jacobs did not have a convincing project to put forward and her arguments did not go beyond a plea to "increase variety" in the organisation of urban spaces, claiming to cure the cancer of the contemporary city with a "home made poultice". In one of the final comments in the last of the six documentaries, The City and the Future, he writes: "The city multiplies the capacity of man to think, to recall, to educate, to communicate in order to bring about the association which connects, which supersedes nations, cultures, beliefs and theories".
And it is necessary to reproduce this in the old urban centres that have been redeveloped and in new developments for expanding old centres.
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