perspective
Matthew Gandy
Less speculation,
more imagination
In the early hours of 26 August 2005 a fire swept
through a dilapidated apartment in central Paris
crowded with African immigrants. Among the 17
dead there were 14 children. In April 2005 another
similar fire had killed 24 people, again mostly poor
immigrants. The buildings in which these people
lived were unfit for human habitation: cracked walls,
lead paint, dangerous wiring, infested with vermin.
By 2004 some 100,000 people were searching for
social housing in Paris, a marked increase on ten
years earlier, but only 12,000 homes were allocated
leading to excessive overcrowding1.
Lagos, Nigeria (2003) – Professor Matthew Gandy
(UCL Geography)
In Paris and elsewhere we find the persistence of 19th-century forms
of poverty and human exploitation. In the cities of the global South
the scale of suffering and human degradation is far worse, yet the
technical means to improve urban living conditions are not obscure
– better housing, improved healthcare, modern plumbing and so on.
Despite the efforts of early social scientists to demonstrate the
connections between labour markets and poverty or the role of public
health advocates in forcing improvements in the way cities are
managed we have nonetheless retained nefarious elements of the
19th-century mindset such as the neo-liberal revival of laissez-faire
public policy combined with renewed moral admonitions towards
people living in poverty.
It is striking how the middle-class mix of fear and disdain for the
urban poor remains so powerful today through the proliferation of
gated communities and the clearing away of informal settlements. In
India, for example, the war on the poor has become one of the
dominant elements of environmental demands to “clean up” cities and
remove “encroachers and polluters” 2. Whether in London or Mumbai,
a vast army of cheap labour is needed to allow the urban economy to
function yet the rich increasingly prefer not to mix with these people.
Many architects and planners acquiesce in these processes, seemingly
willing to transform cities into playgrounds for the wealthy where
professional ethics is subsumed by the cult of celebrity, real-estate
speculation and a new homogeneity in urban life 3.
The 19th-century city has left us with a dualistic legacy of “urban”
and “rural” where the supposed benefits of small-town life are
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
routinely juxtaposed with the dangers of urban living. The city itself
is characterized as a greedy behemoth gobbling up people and
resources. These antiquated ideas persist today through various forms
of anti-modern architectural and environmental thought. Yet as the
French sociologist Henri Lefebvre argues, it makes little sense to
artificially separate cities from our understanding of society as a
whole: the transformation of the urban and the rural is part of the
same set of processes and the city considered in isolation can never
be properly understood 4.
It is striking how 20th-century utopian ideals in architecture, modern
living and urban design are now in such disrepute: the exhilaration of
speed has been replaced by gridlock and frustration, the high-rise
apartments that were to cut through the gloom and congestion of the
industrial city have become sink estates, and the idea of an inclusive
public realm is now assailed from all sides, whether through the
privatization of public services or the incessant exhortations to
consume.
References
1. David Fickling, ‘Paris apartment fire kills 17’,
‘The Guardian’, 26 August 2005
2. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Are Indian cities becoming bourgeois
at last?’, in Indira Chandrasekhar and Peter C. Seel (eds)
‘body.city: siting contemporary culture in India’
(Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Delhi:
Tulika Books, 2003) p178
3. Jonathan Raban, ‘My own private metropolis’,
‘Financial Times’, 9/10 August 2008
4. Henri Lefebvre, ‘La Révolution urbaine’
(Paris: Gallimard, 1970)
What kind of ideas do we need for the 21st-century city? Certainly
we need to begin by disentangling past thinking: retain the
engineering brilliance of the 19th century, for example, but not
its moral hypocrisy; nurture the 20th-century public realm but not
the autocratic or dysfunctional dimensions to state power.
What kind of distinct ideas are now emerging? An alternative to
conservative environmentalism, for instance, is provided by an
emphasis on the “living city” where the ecological dynamics of urban
space become part of public policy: the aesthetic and biotic diversity
of the city is celebrated and encouraged in order to enliven the urban
experience; urban landscapes are themselves used for the production
of food, the cleansing of water or the improvement of flood defences;
and the artificial distinctions between the “natural” and the “artificial”
are extensively broken down.
“It is striking how the middle-class mix of fear and
disdain for the urban poor remains so powerful today
through the proliferation of gated communities and
the clearing away of informal settlements”
In the political sphere, the idea of secular cosmopolitanism presents
a real alternative to the incessant drift towards greater division and
segregation that is fuelled by poverty and racism but exacerbated by
new forms of religious intolerance. London, for example, despite
recent racist and homophobic attacks, presents a remarkably
successful model of a world city with its long history of incorporating
new communities. It is the “island” function of the city as a safe
haven that links the contemporary metropolis with the medieval
city as a place of sanctuary.
A global commitment to improving human health is also a crucial
component of a new urban politics. There are few areas of public
policy that can so easily be transformed yet have been so
systematically neglected. The scale of the threats demands an
emphasis on the politics of human body in all its cultural, social and
epidemiological complexity. Whether we are engaging with the HIV
threat faced by impoverished women in West Africa or the spread of
dengue fever on construction sites in south Asia there is an urgent
need to pool knowledge and expertise from every discipline in order
to exert maximum leverage on governments, international agencies
and others charged with the responsibility for human health.
Finally, we need to recover the urban imagination in order to enrich
21st-century public culture. From galleries to lidos, carnivals to
theatres, the historic role of cities as generators of ideas must be
recognized and nurtured.
Profile / Professor Matthew Gandy
Matthew completed his PhD at the London School
of Economics in 1992. From 1992 to 1997 he was
a lecturer in the School of European Studies at the
University of Sussex. In 1995 he was a visiting
scholar in the Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning & Preservation at Columbia University,
New York, and since 1997 he has taught at UCL.
His book ‘Concrete and clay: reworking nature in
New York City’ examined five interrelated aspects
to New York’s urban environment: the building of
a modern water supply system; the creation and
meaning of public space; the construction of
landscaped roads; the grassroots environmental
politics of the ghetto; and the contemporary politics of
pollution. It won the 2003 Spiro Kostof award for the
book within the previous two years “that has made the
greatest contribution to our understanding of urbanism
and its relationship with architecture”.
With Professor Alimuddin Zumla, Director of the UCL
Centre for Infectious Diseases & International Health,
he edited ‘The return of the White Plague: global
poverty and the ‘new’ tuberculosis’.
His ESRC-funded project ‘Cyborg urbanization:
Theorizing water and urban infrastructure’ involved
research in Berlin, Lagos, Los Angeles and Mumbai,
and his AHRC-funded project ‘Liquid city’ led to the
production of a film which has just been shown at the
London Documentary Film Festival. In addition to his
research on the metabolic dimensions to urban space
he also writes on the representation of nature and
landscape in the visual arts, including recent essays
on Michelangelo Antonioni and Todd Haynes.
Contact
Professor Matthew Gandy
Professor of Geography
UCL Geography
Director
UCL Urban Laboratory
+44 (0)20 7679 5517
m.gandy@ucl.ac.uk
Less speculation, more imagination!
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities