The City as a Real Construct

On the notion of the metropolis and other problems

Creator: Unreal | Credit: Gratis Graphics | Copyright: Free to use under Creative Commons License

Cities evolve endlessly, along with the ever-changing and multifaceted concepts accompanying their times. Today’s city has a very different order from the classical Greek and Roman, quite different from the medieval, then baroque and finally industrial cities. This order, of course, also marks particular historicized conceptions of what the collectively organized or constructed sensible is, how it is to be attended to, and whose access to its various parts, and to the city itself, is legitimate.

Owen Lattimore notes that the Great Wall of China was erected “as much to keep others (foreigners or barbarians) out as it was to keep taxpayers in.” The emphasis here is the content and its total provision for the needs of the interior.

The city’s content is entirely encompassed by its constructed institution(s), and the formation of the city-interior. What happens within the confines of the city-as-interiority persists largely within them, along with those who participate in that happening. This inward-oriented city, while quite distinctly asserting its presence in the environment, in the landscape, is partly exteriorized, partly conjoined with the outside, especially in two different activities that necessitate the relative permeability of its boundaries: trade and military campaigns.

But this is not an all-encompassing situation. That is not the case, for example, with the first historically known Greco-Roman entities. In the Greek polis and Roman cities of classical times, we observe something quite similar but situated on a very different plane. It can be formulated as an implicit interiority, as opposed to the explicit one described above. What we find here is a fundamental openness of the cities themselves, and with them of the entire institutional establishment (apart from the state, including cultural institutions such as the theatre and the agora) to the free citizen, together with its marginal closedness to everyone else: slaves, women, not seldom foreigners.

This is evidenced by the development of the Roman Republic from 753–31 BC. The jus civile (‘civil law’), applied exclusively to Roman citizens and was based predominantly on custom. Its primary purpose was to fend off the arbitrary, uninterpreted application of traditional law by magistrates. It is also significant that the jus gentium (‘law of the peoples’) was originally devised by the Romans for application to foreigners. Jus gentium is not the result of common law or other supreme law, but the product of magistrates and local governors who were responsible for dispensing justice in those cases in which foreigners were involved.

It appears that for the ancient Romans arbitrary action against foreigners was appropriate, but against their citizens, was not. But even this situation did not last long. Gradually, jus gentium melted into the vast body of laws applied by magistrates to both foreign and own citizens, insofar as it appeared as a “flexible” (read ad hoc) alternative to jus civile, thus destroying its raison d’être. This made it possible for the citizens of Rome to be held similarly liable to foreign ones.

Moreover, the history of our cities seems to have the coherence of the so-called ‘dialectical sublation’. If the overwhelming majority of the first city or state entities were characterized primarily by their explicit interiority, delineating a characteristic focus on content, today this rule has been melted into its opposite, even though (in certain territories more than others) implicit interiority is still present in one form or another.

Still, today we live in a globalized, hyper-dynamized exchange of goods, services, capital, labor, and so on. Those recognize no boundaries, neither spatial nor temporal. The institutional distribution of accessible or inaccessible interiority (mostly related to goods and services) is still present, grounded in the presence or absence of certain (most often acquisitive) characteristics in the individual subject.

Globalization — at least in its current form — can therefore be said to mark the historical end of explicit urban, and at a higher level state, interiority, but not of interiority as such.

“Nineteenth-century forms of production brought unexpected development to nations that, without the organizational capacities required to manage such production, implemented entirely insufficient regulatory measures. With surprising abundance, a great number of forces clamoured for and instigated the formation of metropolises, yet it was not possible to harness or organize these forces or to make their excesses useful to the general public or the collective population. Instead of thoughtfully and systematically addressing all public needs, one attempted merely to satisfy fleeting demands without consideration for general interests. Long-term responsibility was quite easily deferred. Everything was left to private initiative, whose essential point of view was to drive up land values and rental profits as high as possible. There was no general or directed aim, which would have been necessary to turn such a comprehensive social form as the metropolis into a functioning organism.”

Ludwig Hilberseimer — „Metropolisarchitecture and Selected Essays“

But everything Hilberseimer identifies here points to the fact that the cities of his days, and to a large extent ours today, especially metropolises, are very concrete embodiments of the very concrete configuration in which we find ourselves. Precisely find ourselves.

The ‘organization’ of the city is the organization of something stagnant, of something that awaits us. Its architecturally constructed appearance is, like the child’s cot and room, almost always already selected and adjusted by someone else. Moreover, that organization also implies the very referents within the constructedness, setting at the same time constraints that constitute a far wider set of multiple interiorities against which something or someone is inscribed and others are not.

We have, then, a somewhat homogeneous and leading central interiority (whether explicit or not) and other, somewhat fragmented and partially self-contained and self-governed segmented interiorities — the home, the neighborhood, various forms of a group, class and other types of communalisations. It is precisely these different circles with different scopes and myriad very interdependent and referential centers that form the mycorrhizomatic character of the city. It is precisely what the famous German urbanist marks with the term ‘forces’.

There is nothing new in this. The city has been a fluid, partly open and at the same time partly closed entity for as long as there has been a city at all. And the same holds true even of the city-as-interiority— at least within, again, trade and war. If with the city-as-interiority we had the attempt to ensnare the structure and telos of the nomadic machine in an over-coded and enduring topologization, which in turn pretends to satisfy the needs of humankind in general, and the wall aims to keep the flows of that same machine inside, things are quite different today.

In fact, the appropriation of the materials of city walls from the beginning of modernity to the present day, most often for the construction of central temples (such is the case in not a few cities in Central and Eastern Europe), marks an interesting moment. The city opens up at a principled level, even as it closes in around the topos of abstract unity. Such a moment could be said to mark the transition from explicit to implicitly framed interiority. Instead of the real boundary of the city wall, the temple appears as the virtual boundary of the communally permissible and the possibility of inclusion. Anyone can cross the real boundaries of the city, but not everyone can cross the real boundaries of its temple. Inclusive-exclusion.

“… [t]he present form of the metropolis owes its appearance primarily to the economic form of capitalist imperialism, which, for its part, developed in close collaboration with science and technologies of production. Its powers extend far beyond national economies and increasingly into the global economy. An excess of intensity and energy is achieved through extreme concentration and comprehensive organization. Since production for one’s own needs is no longer sufficient, aggressive overproduction is encouraged; the focus is on stimulating needs rather than satisfying them. Thus the metropolis appears first and foremost as a creation of all-powerful capital; as a feature of its anonymity; and as an urban form with its own economic, social, and collective psychic foundations that enable the simultaneous isolation and tightest amalgamation of its inhabitants.”

Only with the modern city of late capitalism, therefore, beginning with the early stages of the universalizing market of which Hilberseimer speaks, are the flows of the nomadic machine — predictably — finally ensnared in the reproduction of the system and capital itself. Here, the individual or group call(s) for deterritorialization, which turns out to be generated by capital itself, are overly exploited and coded.

But the constraints and inequalities that a person from oppressed groups and/or classes encounters in the place of his birth, in terms of accessibility and disposition to the sensible, not infrequently coincide, or at least resemble, those that he would also encounter in a completely different organized constructedness, a completely different intersection, thousands of miles away from the former. Dynamism here has as its rule the uneven distribution of the accessible and inaccessible sensible, in turn incessantly recalled by the very process of endlessly stimulating needs everywhere, where the leading imperative is precisely capital.

The city (or, even more so, the metropolis) as a manufactory for desires and affects, as a topos of perpetually possible consumption, and therefore of deprivation, is without precedent in our history to date. The original project of the first cities — claiming one form or another of antichaotic order — and even of the home, therefore, is displaced by the chaotic, disorganized project of the metropolis.

In it, the over-atomization of private initiative disrupts the possibility of a molecularized, collective being and shared disposition with the sensually given.