The Urban Designer in Society: Populism and Mass Culture
“Populism: Political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want.” —Cambridge Dictionary
There are other definitions of populism, but this one grasps our attention, because it is one that, at least at the first glance, hardly anybody would disagree with. The term has become a buzzword not only because of Brexit, the Trump election, and the rise of right-wing parties in several European countries, but also because it symbolizes one of democracy’s obvious sore spots: the at times contentious relationship between decision takers and citizens; experts and the general public; elites and “commoners.” It is this relationship that, applied to the built environment, this article scrutinizes, drawing from material I gathered for a new book, Designing Change: Professional Mutations in Urban Design 1980-2020.
In it, I interview twelve practitioners from Western Europe, the United States, and China about the state of urban design over the last forty years, since the rise of postmodernism and the traditional neighborhood design movement (TND). One of the major themes to emerge across the interviews was the conflict between professional knowledge, on the one hand, and the everyday and the market, on the other.
Here, I present excerpts of my interviews to draw attention to three of the most frequent points of conflict: the role and significance of mass culture, the New Urbanism, and the ideas that small is beautiful and that we should privilege the bottom-up. In the book, each interview is siloed: presented in its own chapter, alongside a brief portfolio of the designer’s work. In this article, I bring several of the voices into dialog. The aim is not to polarize, but to generate a healthy discourse and highlight ambiguities.
Mass Culture
“In the field of urbanism, mass culture manifests itself in some sort of endless repetition of tested solutions that are easy to sell, that can be advertised, and that are understood by the financial sector, the building industry, and the authorities . . . it ridicules authenticity and suffocates the emergence of new illusions. . . . Mass culture claims a notion of freedom that is limited to the level of the consumer.” —Adriaan Geuze, West 8
Cynics consider democracy as the pursuit of mediocrity, or the tyranny of the majority. Adriaan Geuze, Winy Maas, and Wang Hui address these issues in the context of their work through the notion of mass culture, each of them with a different focus. Geuze criticizes the emergence of a system that is based on a simplistic economic logic and its endless repetition. At another point in the discussion, he identifies the nineteenth-century vocabulary of urban design as part of this package. While he does not question its general efficiency, particularly in terms of spatial qualities, he observes the incapacity to reflect contemporary identities as some kind of lost opportunity. The legacy of the squatter movement of the 1970s and 1980s appears to him as an opportunity to break this penetrant mold, referring to the Meatpacking district in Manhattan as a recent case-study where this happened, where “a smelly slaughterhouse could become a cool place to live, and express a new identity” (Figure 1).
Figure 1. New York’s Meatpacking District as a place in which industrial heritage stimulates the realization of contemporary identities. Photograph by Luca Vanzella 2008, courtesy Flickr under, Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 2.0.
“Is a good plan an invisible plan, or is a good plan the one that you notice and that makes you understand and wonder why it exists? . . . this European city model is very much liked. But we can make this more explicit, turn it into a spectacle, into something that is very visible . . . one month ago I pleaded for every project to not have just one selfie point, but several ones. You can laugh at this, but I think that it is an important moment these days.” —Winy Maas, MVRDV
Winy Maas seems to have another approach to the question of mass culture and authenticity. His concern is to communicate a strong message, and he does not recoil from fabricating a spectacle in order to make this message heard. Important is to him that the message itself is of value and interest. That’s where he sees, while sitting in a cafe in Miami Beach, surrounded by sleek new condo towers, a difference between the type of mass culture that represents nothing but real-estate investment and a project like his Market Hall in Rotterdam that, despite being upscale, is a unique and programmatically ambitious mixture of apartment building, food hall, office building and parking (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Selfie appeal in a conceptually sophisticated robe: MVRDV’s Market Hall in Rotterdam. Photograph by Eric Firley, 2017.
“There is an up and down curve of understanding postmodernism. After the 1990s, we had a period of denial, architecture turning back to architecture and some modernist issues, aesthetic or not. Postmodernism was just ignored. But right now, we realize again that intellectually it raised some interesting questions about the topic of inclusion, its attempt to connect architecture to common people, and not just the elites. That is what Charles Jencks called the double-coding, architecture being legible by the wider public, as well as having some kind of meaning for the world of experts.” —Wang Hui, Urbanus
Wang Hui brings the topic of the previous exchanges in context to architectural theory. His comments as such should be self-explanatory, but they are particularly interesting in relationship, and fake proximity, to Maas’s. Despite his practice’s avant-garde reputation, Maas acknowledges the importance also for him of some of the postmodern precepts, for example Robert Venturi’s point about the duck: the building as a messenger. These exchanges bare a certain bitterness, because they make us aware of the fact that the architectural establishment itself carries responsibility for not having properly addressed some of the philosophical findings that could have strengthened its position within an increasingly pluralistic society.
New Urbanism
“I experience this period as one of disorder. When the extremes, or people who are not very serious, are taking control, I think that it is because we never endeavored to explain why we are in disorder . . . for me New Urbanism is a marketing strategy. One sells to clients a fake city that looks like a village.” —Djamel Klouche, AUC
New Urbanism is an influential planning and urban design movement that emerged since the 1980s in the USA. One of the earliest and most published built examples is the Town of Seaside in the Florida Panhandle, masterplanned by the practice DPZ (Duany Plater Zyberk) and architecturally implemented by illustrious figures including Aldo Rossi, Deborah Berke, and Steven Holl (Figure 3). The movement took its roots from the realization that all over the country deficient zoning rules were generating a socially and ecologically problematic environment, car-dependent and deprived of any meaningful community aspects. A remediation was sought in the analysis and re-application of successful models of traditional urbanism that were, as much as possible, translated into so-called form-based zoning codes. These new codes did not only produce urban environments of higher quality, but also clarified the development rights of landowners through a set of graphically defined rules.
Figure 3. Seaside, a built utopia of beauty and order, at which the spirits divide in regards to its relevance as a planning paradigm. Photograph by Eric Firley, 2014.
“The separation of uses, a convention of modern codes, is symbolic of an attitude that limited planning to a simplistic facilitation of individual property development. The physical result was functional separation, buffering set-backs and a poor quality of the public realm. . . . the former regulations had been written by attorneys. Are they experts about the built environment? No. They know about the law, but why should they be writing design rules?” —Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, DPZ
In many cases, however, the practitioners adhering to New Urbanism were hired to create masterplanned suburban developments for a clientele that was allegedly characterized by an ambivalent and defensive relationship towards urban life.
“Cynics consider democracy as the pursuit of mediocrity, or the tyranny of the majority.”
“We worked with developer clients who have customers, not patrons. Patrons subsidize the explorations of artists. Customers have a choice and will walk away from something they don’t like. We were not living in an elite academic world. . . . CNU (Congress of New Urbanism) is essentially a popular movement. . . . What some people didn’t like was the fact that CNU was intentionally a propaganda movement.” —Plater-Zyberk
Over time this suburban tendency created a certain miscomprehension with the elements of the architectural establishment that adhered to an inner-city mentality with its differing set of preoccupations and principles. This is how Djamel Klouche’s comments can be understood. In criticizing the proposed order in this type of development he reveals a strong belief in the mutual relationship between physical form, its making, and the citizen’s political attitudes. He believes that the built environment has to address and reflect, rather than to ignore, a reality of disorder, in order to avoid the citizen’s increasing feeling of disorientation. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, in contrast, acknowledges the desires of the customers first, and does not question their appropriateness. Change is sought differently, on a larger scale, through the creation of a “propaganda movement” and the modification of zoning codes.
Bottom-up / Small is Beautiful
“The new generation does not see the world in terms of party politics anymore, neither do they use the media and public sphere in the same way as their parents. New tools have to be invented to satisfy an ever-growing appetite for co-determination in all sorts of societal aspects, including the built environment.” —Regula Luescher, Senate Director of Urban Development of Berlin
“The younger generation, or at least a large part of it, is completely focused on small elements. The hipsters believe in bottom-up, more radically than we do. And they are incredibly into green and climate change. Do I disagree? No, because I like the energy and the spirit, but I have some comments and questions . . . from the Small is Beautiful movement I definitely dissociate myself, because I do think that large-scale urbanism still makes sense, and that it is needed to develop a collective, whatever that collective might be.” —Maas
Understanding what the new generation expects from the built environment, and its own role within it, is obviously of central importance. Here, Luescher and Maas underline this generational issue, but also the fact that some of the newer, or rather reinvented trends, like small-is-beautiful or bottom-up urbanism, have an impact not only on the relationships between the citizens and their representatives, but also on the ones among citizens themselves. The fact that younger people are commendably asking for change on the background of ecological threats does not per se exclude an underlying tendency towards further individualization and communitarianism, with all consequences that this can have for future collective action.
“I was socialized in a Swiss participatory democracy in which citizens vote on many issues directly. . . . This experience enabled me to advise the city administration in financially highly precarious times in which topics such as participation and self-organization had become a necessity. In my office, rather than to design buildings or masterplans, we design, adapt, and try to perfect the processes that translate the needs and political will of the citizens and stakeholders into lived reality.” —Luescher
Luescher makes us aware of the fact that participation is not just a question of political will, but of experience and skill. The question in regards to quality therefore is not necessarily if the public sector still designs and builds on its own behalf, but if there is a system and culture in place that generates quality development, implemented by whoever it may be.
Figure 4. Website of Berlin’s “Haus der Statistik,” a highly complex renovation project that is fully based on process and participation, Jan. 22, 2021.
Under the polemic guise of populism these three assembled dialogues shed slightly differing lights on essentially the same question: how do people come together, and share and distribute responsibilities to conceive their physical environment? This very practical sounding negotiation gains in complexity if the act of building the city is understood as one of the most fundamental ways of human interaction, one that conditions us into members of a working civil society. Because, if this is the case, what is then an appropriate way to deal with issues like participation and ownership? In order to continue this discussion it might be useful to compare the process of building with the importance that the American philosopher John Dewey gave to education as a necessary component of democracy, both in terms of skillset as in terms of opportunity to actively participate in it.
