This is a heavily revised, much refined version of a post written last year for another site.
In late 2005, I travelled a little too much in a short period of time, to the point where things and places quite far apart from one another melted into mundane conformity. Airports, buses, train stations, subways, highways, hotels- they were identical brands and shapes, only explained in different languages. In particular, the architecture of international transportation I encountered exhibited a special distain for originality, the culprits likely being that select group of transnational star architects who relentlessly produce near-identical buildings the world over. Paris? Beijing? Doesn't matter, make that terminal huge, white and cavernous.
In my moments of fatigue and mental weakness, which can occur quite often when travelling, I surrender my critical faculties and bask in the superficial rhetoric of globalization. Knowing better but too tired to do anything about it, I relish in the surface evidence that the world is become smaller, more homogenous and, ultimately, more 'Western' (What does that mean, anyways- American? British? Italian? Dutch?). While for me these thoughts are for the most part limited to daydreams in the numb landscapes of airport expressways, for others this has become a much more engaged, and perhaps lucrative, affair. Contemporary urban studies is replete with theorists trumpeting the rise of a 'single, global urban discourse', or similarly the 'global' city rising through 'global urban change'.
From this general perspective, urban areas the
world over, despite an immense diversity in historical, cultural and
politico-economic circumstances, are increasingly growing, forming and functioning in a similar fashion driven by the inexorable tenets of universal market economics. Sure, cultural differences remain, but largely as a matter of consumer taste than a way of life. Culture becomes the flavour of potato chips that is popular in generic urban area A as opposed to generic urban area B. It is no longer an organizational foundation.
This viewpoint has apparently permeated much of the Anglo-American popular press as well. While one perspective writes in an awe tinged with jealousy of the rise of glittering 'global' skylines and 'modern' expressways in the mega-cities of the rapidly developing world, another laments the destruction of local culture as it makes way for this generic landscape of mega-malls, office parks and high-rise condominiums. Central to both of these perspective is the juxtaposition of 'culture' and 'modernity', the battle between the local, national and global. Modernity is represented as the rise of a generic industrial-consumerist landscape, the inevitable outcome of a globalized world. Culture is represented in the resistance to this transformation, in which old sensibilities struggle against the rising tide of cultural homogenization. Culture also, it seems, becomes the domain of the poor, the desperate, those pushed aside by the bulldozer. Those living in high-rise glass towers, with their cars and high-speed internet, belong to a 'global' elite, living a generic modern lifestyle increasingly detached from its stereotypical 'cultural' surroundings.
And so we get the usual tales of office districts adjacent to desperate slums, hypermarket consumerism contrasted with age-old agricultural subsistence. We get shock and consternation at urban living in which luxury sedans scatter rickshaws with horns blaring, and in which peasant vagrants grab at Gucci bags and cell phones with more features than one could ever need. We get stories of the clash between 'Westernization' and tradition played out through drastic disparities in income.
It is certainly not difficult to see where this assumption comes from, that urban areas worldwide are playing host to some battle between 'global' homogenization and localized difference. Increasingly, whether surveying a landscape in Asia or Europe, you will see the same hotel logos, the same glass towers, the same supermarket chains, the same car models, the same annoying McDonald's ad campaign about loving their hyperprocessed meals. On the dark side, many cities are experiencing similar problems: ill-planned expansion and runaway sprawl, grinding traffic congestion, drastic wealth gaps and serious environmental quality issues. The urban existence becomes a homogenized, global phenomenon not only in its advantages, but also in its shortcomings. Cities become a theory to examine, an abstract space to solve; with the rise of 'global' thinking, the conditions of actual physical places appear to matter less and less. One size fits all.
This belief in global urban homogenization stands up when judged against surface appearances and superficial evidence, yet I believe it ultimately crumbles when one digs deeper to look at the important cultural, social and political dynamics driving the bustle of any particular city. The persistence of the 'global modernity' perspective, in my opinion, is driven not so much by a careful consideration of actual places, but rather by our love for judging books by their cover. Complexity is complicated and time-consuming; generalization makes for an easier reality, neatly packaged and consumed.
This simplistic perspective also serves more political interests particularly well. Many of us in the "Western" world are so deeply lost in cultural arrogance that we assume our theories to be universal, that our way of imagining the world is not a perspective but a fundamental reality that everyone will get around to eventually if they would just stop being "backwards". And so the landscapes of 'global' cities become our easy justification that others are becoming more like 'us', that we were right all along. It is our evidence that wealth and prosperity cannot be separated from "Westernization". Globalization is a comfort blanket reminding us that our 'way of life' is a fundamental truth.
On the other side of the coin, the superficial landscapes of 'modernity' can become a potent tool of political survival. Glass skyscrapers and multi-level expressway interchanges become a tangible symbol of a society's success, no matter how poor the average citizen might remain. Visions of American cities are appropriated, warped and rapidly constructed as symbols of wealth and power, perhaps in the hopes that respective societies can convince themselves through real estate speculation that they are no longer 'inferior'. If America (as much the idea as the country called the United States) is the ultimate power, then perhaps by stealing its surface appearance some of that power can somehow be recreated. Image sells much more than reality.
But I fear, that in the end, this conceptualization of a single urban discourse, in which cities are evolving into an objective 'modern' form the world over, will do us all more harm than good. By reducing the infinite complexities, histories and cultures of the world's cities into simplistic abstract models (be they 'global' cities or 'third world' cities), we are running the danger of ignoring urban resident's needs rather than meeting them. Sure, it is certainly easier to think that cities are growing increasingly similar just because they might look similar; after all, we live in a world of 'best practices' and one-size-fits-all technocrat consulting, in which a traffic problem can be planned away on a computer regardless of whether it is in Lagos, Shanghai or Istanbul.
But what, really, is the guarantee that an approach that works in one place will work in another? What is the guarantee that Shanghai will ever be a New York, no matter how hard its government tries to plan free-wheeling capitalism? In the end, I don't think there is one. The fundamental cultural dynamics driving each urban area will send it off on its own unique course, no matter how superficially generic its skyline becomes. And until we finally move beyond our preoccupation with surface appearances and grand theories and accept the urban world as the confusing, chaotic, diverse and diverging reality it is in each real place, we will be mired in futility, trying to solve urban problems with the wrong set of conceptual tools.
Patrick Bennett likes to take old material, re-write it and make it new, all in the hopes that he might sound more intelligent.
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