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tags: Architecture Utopia Islands Perfection
related: The City Authentic
In cities around the world, a new urban condition is spreading rapidly, characterized by ever-increasing levels of ‘perfection’, efficiency, control and active eradication of any aberration or alternative. In the smooth city, urban space is sanitized and urban life is compressed into a seamless experience.
Thought
Surely, not NYC…
“Everything is complete, with almost no space to breathe.”
It often starts in city centers and steadily spreads outwards, but it also takes the form of an archipelago of interconnected (and sometimes even fenced off) islands of ‘perfection’
The idea that everyone needs a clean, safe, and efficient urban environment to live a decent human life, cannot be ignored either.
Deleuze and Guatarri Smooth space - in A Thousand Plateaus smooth space is described as a free, nomadic, heterogenous space without much of a fabric of control. It is referred to as smooth as it manifests itself as open, multidimensional and stretching beyond every obstacle. They also mention “striated space” which is regulated, sedentary, and homogenous and occurs when it is directly controlled by an authority.
Striated space is much more conceptually closer to a smooth city.
Companies tend to follow similar trends in terms of maintenance frequency; the use of specific techniques and the application of paint. This results in the remarkable phenomenon where current buildings in Reestraat despite having been built over a range of two hundred years and having many diverse architectural styles, start to increasingly look like one another.
King’s Cross Central: kind of environment feels hermetic, risk-averse, finalized as if it has at some point been delivered by a contractor with the clear indication to not change anything.
Another aspect of the smooth city is the kind of people who populate its streets and spaces, and the level of ‘perfection’ of their bodies. Anyone could walk anywhere, but in practice this isn’t often the case. The smooth city is dependent on relatively wealthy and depending on the city, relatively white and socially, culturally and aesthetically homogenous in general. They are generally the same, and wear clothes and accessories from the same narrow, global band.
There are also no voids. Literally all land has been designated, allocated and developed or plans are made to do so.
Sharon Zukin, “the city has morphed from a lumbering modern giant, to a sleek, smooth replica of its former self.”
Byung-Chul-Han understands the city as the signature of present time.” Smoothness is a key outcome of today’s society of positivity which always wants to please and never injures. It lacks inwardness and contains no hideouts. The isolated individuals have no choice but to mirror rather than oppose perfection, extend rather than annul sameness, contribute to the growing capital rather than providing alternatives.
It has been observed how, in a certain context, people’s appreciation of deliberately empty urban spaces as an open, democratic environment quite suddenly turned into a fear of the undefined and unknown, leading planners to start proposing spaces with more detailed designs and filled with objects and greenery. related: Terrain Vague
While smooth cities are keeping up appearances, they simultaneously tend to depend heavily on their non-smooth counterparts elsewhere, in a relationship that is more of than not unequal or extractive.
Smooth origins
Throughout history, epidemics have compelled those with the means to exit the city. This is apparent with the exodus of the rich towards well isolated fully catered homes in the countryside that happened around the world during the coronavirus pandemic, notably in New York.
Notable large-scale project towards imposing perfection is the Haussmannization of 19th century Paris. Napolean II instructed Georges-Eugene Haussmann to embark on a project with the aim to ventilate, unify and beautify the city. Concealed a more fundamental agenda to gain control and impose order on what seemed like a disjoint, overcrowded group of neighborhoods. Haussmann ordered the creation of long, straight and wide boulevards right through the city’s close knit medieval fabric, which had to be partially demo’d.
This allowed easier pandemic response, and ability to quell uprisings, but also it created unprecedented opportunities for prime real estate to develop fitted in the typical Haussmann style of architecture. It transformed a varied landscape of close-knit neighborhoods into a unified, homogenized, perfected city based around efficiency and mass consumption.
Emergence of neoliberal urbanism, rooted in neoliberal globalization is a major cause of the emergence of Smooth cities. Attempts to incorporate local, historical or authentic elements have resulted in some superficial diversity, which has been unable to counter the homogeneity from dominance by a decreasing number of powerful brands.
NOTE
McGuggenization - a sequence of cities having convinced a famous museum brand, such as Guggenheim, to open a branch in their city, trying to stand out on a global map, in which others ironically are attempting to do the same.
Also SC emerge from popularity of the city as a place to live in and to spend time. This is a recent phenomenon. Post WWII people started to leave cities in Europe and US en masse, moving to newly built suburbs and new towns.
Perfection Another development to SC is the general widespread proliferation of smoothness across many societal domains in the last few decades. The impulse to make things seemingly perfect, frictionless and according to dominant norms has encroached on many aspects of life, from how people communicate or obtain food, to romantic relationships or how people represent themselves online.
Dataism - a term used to describe the urge to collect data, which results in demands for increasingly updated, accurate and detailed data.
Dataism pushes designers to make everything, from appliances to interfaces and applications as frictionless as possible.
Byung-Chul Han: All acts by people are becoming increasingly transparent, especially as dataism smooths acts into a data-driven process without any autonomy or dramatic orchestration of the subject.
Illegally downloaded mp3s have been completely forgotten in the smooth city, where spotify automatically plays the next bit of chilled sonic wallpaper on a brand-new set of noise cancelling headphones.
Sorkin Variations on a Theme Park - Identified various subthemes of the smooth city, such as the mallification or militarization of urban space. Three similarities between contemporary theme parks and the new kind of city emerging
- steady evaporation of all relations to specific localities and their replacement with generic, placeless, urbanism. Urban space became ageographic and departicularized
- a rise in securitization and mass surveillance and their role in segregating communities.
- proliferations of simulations, from a historicized architecture to all kinds of re-enactments with happy-face familiarity and distancing itself from fundamental realities.
Stavrides - “Thresholds may appear as boundaries which separate an inside from an outside, as for example, in the case of a door threshold, but this act of separation is always and simultaneously an act of connection” rel: Islands
Smooth Future East River Valley by Mark Foster Gage Architects, went so far as to propose draining the river between Brooklyn and Manhattan in its entirety.