the wealthy cast the poor into slums. the grandchildren of the wealthy find the slums authentic and gentrify them.— lord crunkington III (@postcrunk) June 1, 2013
"the wealthy cast the poor into slums"
If you don't want to read a brief, synthesized, and slightly subjective history (as all histories are) of cities, then you are welcome to skip the next few paragraphs, but they are fundamental to the point I make in the post. I'll skip the arcane, mind-numbing drivel about the 5 or so archaeological remains that proves humans had cities some crazy number of years ago, and I'll skip to colonial times in history, because it's the period at which a real urban mess appears. Lastly, I'll note the largely Western-centric historical viewpoint I use - partly because it's what I have to work with, and partly because it's the information that's relevant in this case.
Before and around the time Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Europe was stuck in a feudal, xenophobic dark age, largely summarized by limited trade, religious control and petty battles between rich, ideologically endorsed overlords each controlling their own sections of peasant-harvested farmland. As trade slowly crept through Europe and people realized that black pepper could make their bland meals at least a bit less monotonous, the inevitable occurred, and rich white people did what they've done best for a long time - colonized the areas producing it. Conveniently accompanying this colonialism was a strengthening and recentralization of governmental power in Europe as well as religious righteousness 'justifying' any war crime on the face of the planet.
This is all commonly known history, presented in an excessively sarcastic, angsty tone. What came out of it is important. Country by country, European port cities slowly regrew to allow the centralization of trade, creating intense competition between the reforming European powers to colonize as much land as possible (yes, I did skip some time here). In each territory, key cities were propped up as trading posts and/or governmental and military outposts. Many of these cities have evolved into some of the craziest, largest cities around - think Lagos, Nigeria, for example. All of these convenient resources pretty quickly led to a massive, sweeping industrial revolution. The next domino that fell was a massive rural exodus as industries centralized in cities.
When Columbus made his glorious journey across the wrong ocean just before the halfway point of the 1000s, Paris and London were small, gated cities. The closer in to the city you were, the richer you were. Because of their isolation from the actual production centers of the majority of food, cities were only suitable for those who could find a way to somehow get their dairy products unspoiled by the time they arrived at their destination. The compactness ensured transportation methods other than walking were unnecessary, and commuting really wasn't a thing people did. Instead, businesses were home-based and small-scale.
The Industrial Revolution changed all of this. Factories were set up wherever possible, and old and new cities alike grew exponentially. The rich mostly kept their dwellings, but the factory workers were predictably neglected, and lived in unimaginably dense, unsanitary and inadequate housing, with multiple families sharing single rooms. The reaction was predictable - the government officials visited them few times, shocked in the same way a person is when presented with a video on climate change: frightened and so appalled that the response ultimately is that of continued ignorance and defeatist, lazy inaction, furthering the issue at hand. This vicious cycle, largely symbolized by pathetically halfhearted attempts to, in any way, give a flying crap about these utterly depressing worker's 'homes' continued into the 20th century, with limited, if any, success.
This situation also prompted the first real instances of large-scale 'urban design'. Paris's famous reconstruction of the city, done by the well-known Baron Haussmann (o yay! back to the boring 5th grade history you didn't want to read!), is a primary example. Using a top-down approach, the city was redesigned exactly as the rich people running industry and government wanted it - ideal for military control and protest squashing, seemingly better for commuting (as it started to become a necessity), and, invariably, just as indifferent to the underlying inadequacy of working families' housing, health and general well-being.
Primarily characterizing this renovation was the symbolically grandiose, uniform, and beautiful nature of the design. It effectively hid the city's underlying sociopolitical problems, and thus was wildly popular among Western governments and city planners looking for some way to deal with the urban squalor they were too afraid to touch. Instead of actually solving issues of housing and thus of fundamental urban design, you could destroy everything, build lavishly large avenues and pretty, unified buildings, and completely ignore the thousands of people you carelessly displaced!
The issues of urban squalor, combined with the rapid increase of the importance of the city as a phenomenon in and of itself, developed whole academic and governmental fields of planning and sociological studies based around cities. In the early 20th century, large-scale urban planning became mainstream, and various clods of rich white men, far removed from the real issues of society at the time, started playing citywide Sims, except with actual cities. Names such as Robert Moses and Le Corbusier come to mind. Responding to the rapid changes occurring in the urban centers of this time, a group of 'scholars' based out of the University of Chicago synthesized the very little social research on cities done up to that point in time, conducted some research of their own, and started drawing vast, generalizing conclusions about cities, with these theories covering anything from structural to sociological issues.
More frightening than his effect on Paris was Haussmann's effect on the rest of human urban history. The top-down (as in government- and city planner-controlled) approach ended up being wildly popular, as well as everything that came along with it - notably the aesthetic, grandiose, and functionality-disregarding nature of these designs. Although various theories popped up throughout the first half of the century on how to play this game of real-life, citywide Sims (and all of them are thoroughly studied and discussed in the courses I have taken), these theories are all ultimately the same damn thing.
Of course, they all look pretty different from one another. And that's the point - the vast aesthetic differences are what kept the models alive for awhile, and in many ways to this day. The master plans alone for all of these designs look like they come from different planets. If you compared the proposed City Beautiful redesign of Chicago to the generic master plan for a Le Corbusier-style 'Radiant City', you'd say I was absolutely out of my gourd for even going so far as suggesting that they fundamentally rely on the same principles.
The issue with these designs is that they ignore the same fundamental issues Haussmann ignored in his renovation is Paris. These planners all did the same thing - they drew their dream city, then conveniently ignored just about every real urban problem imaginable while making up senseless hogwash about how they would "improve" the function, form and social fabric of real cities. Le Corbusier's 'Radiant City' is an excellent example - his dream city has 95% green space, and everybody lives in a high rise and gets around on a massive system of highways. Here's a visualization of this dating from the era:
The reason that these designs got a chance - primarily in Western cities - is that everybody looked at it the same way you did. You looked at it and made a value judgment of it based on its appearance. Of course, 90 years later, you're looking at this and saying, 'who would want this?' Now, go downtown, and tell me your buildings, highways, and green spaces don't look at least a bit like this.
It's like going to an Apple store and meandering through the ultra-huge, ultra-new iPad section. If you conveniently hide the price tag, damn, that looks great. If you conveniently ignore the fact that it really doesn't offer a significant functionality advantage over any worldly computing device, damn, that looks great. If you conveniently take poor people out of the equation - yeah, from the bauxite miners to the parts assemblers, all of them - damn, that looks great. If you conveniently ignore that your 7-year old will kick his toy directly into the screen within the first week you get it, damn, that looks great. I could make sentences like these for decades. You get the point. Even better, the Apple store dude was really nice and convincing. And attractive. You might even go back to the Apple Store again to see if he'll help you with that brand-new iPod touch.
Your city officials went to the Apple Store. They ignored the homeless people under the highway they drove over to get there. They didn't mind the people in the store desperately trying to return their iPad - convenient how Apple Stores don't have return lines. They listened to the dude who nicely and gloriously illustrated the various ways that this iPad would totally improve their life. And then each and every single one of them bought that iPad, and each and every single one of their 7-year olds destroyed the iPad on the second day they had it, because they were too busy playing DoodleJump to teach their child how to use the toy properly.
One of the most insulting examples of this occurred in 1954 with the Pruitt-Igoe housing project. I'd imagine it's a classic horror story in any introductory college course about cities. As the officials of Saint Louis struggled to deal with the postwar inner-city decline and massive urban exodus that all of postwar America experienced, they were convinced that it was a good idea to adopt a Le Corbusier-style arrangement to conveniently move the city's poor into one massive complex. With little to no public inquiry or consultation, they created a space not unlike the one in the illustration above, dedicated entirely to housing the city's poor, minority, and socially unwanted populations.
They didn't ask the Apple dude the questions that mattered! How on Planet Earth would using a model of urban design that fundamentally ignores the very existence of minority and underserved populations, to house minority and underserved populations, work? What, if anything, would it do to stop the urban decline Saint Louis was experiencing? Who would maintain it? Who had the money to maintain such a massive complex? Would the housing exacerbate the issues common to the populations living inside it? Of course, the questions regarding issues such as basic functionality were ignored. An award-winning establishment when it was christened, it would ultimately be completely obliterated less than twenty years later.
Not far from the time this epic failure was demolished, Jane Jacobs published her legendary book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". It's the book every urban studies professor furiously masturbates to in front of the course's unassuming students for a week. There's a reason for it - Jane Jacobs was a badass. A resident of New York's Greenwich Village in the 60s, she had plenty of first-hand experience with such urban planning. In New York's case, entire neighborhoods were destroyed to make way for the highways that subways breeze past nowadays.
Jane Jacobs wasn't a city planner, a college professor, or a scholar. What made her work significant was that she actually experienced living in the city, and more specifically, in a diverse and authentic space. She showed that the fallacy in the master plans was that the master planners really didn't know that much about the parts of cities that weren't custom-made for them. Most strikingly of all, she didn't come up with a master plan for the city. She fought the master-planning movements that were imposed on her with anti-planning fundamentals. But she didn't have the title of 'city planner' to work with. She also wouldn't have wanted it.
Jane Jacobs was too late. By the time her book came out in the late 60s, the city officials had had their way. The inner cities were the wastelands that had been used, and were still being used, to implement these rotten planning theories, and while the middle class and rich could avoid the mess in a growing tangle of suburbia, only having to pass by this mess to and from work - another topic in and of itself - the poor were stuck in the slums, industrial wastelands and deteriorating infrastructures of inner-city planning failures.
"the grandchildren of the wealthy find the slums authentic and gentrify them."
I don't need to explain this part. It's self-obvious, because it's one of the defining urban issues of today and goes hand-in-hand with current political hot topics, such as cultural appropriation and ongoing racial divides today, throughout America especially.
I'll use my life and work experience to exemplify it. I moved into Seattle's Central District in 2000, before I can remember anything that happened in my life. At this point, my mother, originally from Mercer Island, a rich suburban enclave across the water, was warned of the various "dangers" of the neighborhood, herself never having lived a significant part of her life in a neighborhood akin to Seattle's Central District. Upper-middle class, white people were not a minority nor were they uncommon here - this is Seattle, after all - but the Central District has culture and identity far removed from that of its now mostly white, upper-middle class constituents.
Fast-forward fifteen years later, and up comes an expensive weed shop, catering to the white people who were disproportionately not arrested for what was a criminal activity black people went to jail for two years earlier, not five yards across from a historical church, desperately holding on to its longtime members being pushed away by rapidly increasing rents moving them out to Kent. As an intern at Wellspring Family Services, just south of the Central District, last summer, I worked next to two of these wonderful people that had been moved to the exurban reaches of Seattle because of the gentrification they could not fight with their 7-day, 2-job work weeks. I listened as they reminisced of the friends and neighbors they knew so closely in Judkins Park not so long ago.
conclusion. we still suck at this.
After the week-long part where we learn about how cool Jane Jacobs was, we slowly get back into the same stuff in the geography course. We conveniently transition to the mostly contemporary era, which is where the Western-centric viewpoint erodes a bit. Two main themes mostly represent the rest of the course: new cities popping up throughout the world, and the renovations and redesigns of current cities. The terminology for these is as blandly grandiose as you'd expect: these new cities are called "new master-planned cities", and the renovations currently going on worldwide to many metropolises muster expectedly cool-sounding, meaningless terms like "smart cities".
By this point, you should know that I have a fundamental problem with these "new master-planned cities", just from the moniker they're given. But everything about them is wrong. In fact, they are literally no different from what happened not even a century ago. It's the same process, the only tangible difference being that they are actually building entirely new cities that adhere almost perfectly to these plans.
These brand-new cities and subdivisions are already sparkling failures. Built under the same lack of perspective and convenient assumptions made by Le Corbusier in his time, they ignore almost every real urban problem imaginable. They're designed for rich people, by rich people. They are classic examples of why sweeping economic liberalism doesn't work. They take the century-old city-building principles, and expand on them. Instead of creating slums for the poor, they take it a step further - to cast out the same people that build, clean and maintain their dwellings, they build walls around their communities. (These are popping up everywhere. Guarantee there are a few where you live, old or new.) This both symbolic and real exclusion, combined with the lack of any coherent government in many countries, creates even more chaotic, unhygienic, and vast slums, which are in turn even more ignored by city officials.
These city officials went to the Apple store again, decided that the problem wasn't that they didn't need the iPad, but that the iPad wasn't big enough. Now, they're buying the biggest, newest iMac possible, with all of the accessories that come along with it. These brand-new iMacs, if they aren't already broken, like Gurgaon in India, are going to get their screens shattered very soon.