Abstract
It would be difficult to find three books as dissimilar as those written by Shane Ewen, Rosemary Wakeman, and Benjamin Barber. While all three have been published recently and each is animated by vital intellectual and political issues, what is noteworthy is the degree to which cities—as categories of analysis and practice—continue to exert the power to attract scholars from various fields. Ewen’s book is a cutting-edge overview of the field of urban history, which, “at its heart, is concerned with the study of urban life in the past as well as the history of urbanization” (p. 1) rather than with empirical research on one or several cities. Conversely, Wakeman’s monograph examines a particular type of urban entity, called “new towns” which emerged after World War II in many places across the globe. She seeks to contribute both to the intellectual history of urban planning and to the history of urban utopianism, in its various material realizations. Finally, Barber’s work is yet another genre: he focuses on big cities along with their mayors, most of whom the author claims to have met in person. Although published by an academic press, it reads more like a political manifesto than a scholarly opus. Because of this, it appeals to a much broader audience than the first two books.
Yet, despite obvious divergences in goals and style, these works share much in common. First, they use a comparative approach and a cross-national perspective with respect to city-building, urbanization and urban governance. Second, they are attentive to the phenomenon of modernity and the ideologies and practices of modernization that were put into effect and made conspicuous in the way various cities were materially and symbolically altered and elaborated. Third, Wakeman and Barber perceive cities as a laboratory for the subsequent implementation of social and political utopias—“a marvellous glimpse at tomorrow,” in Wakeman’s words. Finally, although written by one British and two American authors, the three books convey a desire to incorporate nonwestern cities into their analyses and descriptions. This review will discuss these broader themes further, before providing a small conclusive overview.
Ewen organizes his book thematically, Wakeman does so chronologically and regionally, while Barber uses an actor-based approach. However, by comparing various cities and the actors who plan or govern them—and not through single case studies—their arguments are developed in the most effective and persuasive way. Comparisons are made both synchronically and diachronically, spatially and temporally, thus enabling readers to grasp the uniqueness of each example while simultaneously revealing what cities share in common and how they do so.
Moreover, in these three books comparative and transnational approaches go hand in hand: cities are presented as something irreversibly transnational. Acting as spaces of flows, of commodities and practices, cities are not only filled with “mobile” subjects (Ewen, p. 114) but frequently their material environment is also the product of ideas and techniques which circulate among architectural and planning professionals across the globe. Furthermore, contemporary cities, especially big and powerful ones, create various formal and informal cross-national networks to solve environmental and infrastructural issues through cooperation and the exchange of practices. According to Barber, cities are more successful in this endeavor than nation-states, for these latter are chronically unable overcome their egoistic interests and respond promptly to global challenges. “How many ways are there to stuff a million people into a radically delimited space?” he questions, arguing that mayors are better administrators than national leaders (p. 7).
Once cities are recognized as a transnational phenomenon, the cross-national approach may then come to be seen as a fruitful framework with which to analyze cities and the various processes that take place in them. Pierre-Yves Saunier suggested that transnational history “emphasizes what works between and through the units that humans have set up to organize their collective life, rather than what has been happening within these units taken as monads.” 1 Wakeman convincingly illustrates that the new town movement in the twentieth century cannot be understood fully without one taking into consideration the circulation of ideas among planners and practitioners who met at conferences, cruise ships, or United Nations (UN) offices. New towns can thus be considered a product of a common intellectual genealogy, stemming from a prewar garden city ideal, and realized by transnational technocratic elites who, in a postwar period, “travelled extensively, networked prodigiously, and shared an emergent body of knowledge tied to cybernetics and systems analysis” (p. 14).
Ewen dedicates a chapter of his book to an emerging approach which he defines as “transnational urban history.” While he recognizes that nation-states still play a dominant role in world politics, he notes, As the newest and least-developed subfield of urban history, [the transnational approach to urban history] is likely to exert significant influence over the next generation of scholarship. This is because it helps explain the manifestation and spread of innovative practices, technologies and a creative class of urban professionals (scientists, engineers, designers, planning consultants), as the growing literature on creative cities shows. (p. 115)
While Ewen uses transnationalism as a methodological tool that helps to explain cases which cannot be grasped at regional or national levels, Barber goes much further than this. He compares cities and nation-states directly—and not in favor of the latter—and instrumentalizes the transnational approach in such a way as to suggest that cities ought to be united via a World Parliament of Cities. “States will not govern globally. Cities can and will,” he asserts. He explains, A global league of cities is to be sure not the same thing as a global central government. But this is probably a virtue since it means that a League of Cities will be able to act globally through persuasion and example, and allow citizens to participate in their neighborhoods and local urban communities even as their mayors engage informally with one another across the globe. Moreover, networked cities already comprise webs of influence and interactivity that are creating new forms of global social capital and global civil society, and birthing something resembling a global “civil religion” whose reality is interdependence, whose liturgy is rights, whose doctrine is cooperation, and whose practice is democracy. (p. 22)
The intensity that emerges from this quotation (along with its very wording) leads us to another point, one announced at the beginning of this essay. In the twenty-first century, cities do not cease to generate utopias: the latter are embedded into the material and symbolic construction of the former. Wakeman approaches the new town utopias as a fait accompli and analyses how and by whom they were produced, while Barber wrote instructions for the building of a better future.
As expressions of political imagination dressed up in urban forms, utopias have had a very long pedigree. Plato used the example of ancient Sparta to depict his ideal state in the Republic. For Renaissance authors, such as More or Campanella, the imagining an ideal city was a way to criticize the societies in which they lived and to formulate alternative visions, based on more progressive ideas. By the Enlightenment, utopias did not lose their appeal, although the idea of marrying them to cities diminished somewhat. For Rousseau or Voltaire, an ideal place would be not a city but a rural oasis where conscious and rational citizens cultivated their garden in the daytime and wrote symphonies in the evening. Utopia was privatized, and ruralized. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought numerous attempts to realize utopias—from small-scale rural/industrial communities to large-scale state-guided initiatives. They were based on a number of common characteristics: a desire to improve the existing social conditions of its members, a normative approach to the organization of life, and an attitude to space as an instrument of social engineering.
By the 1920s, many utopian projects—most notably the Soviet experiment—had been deflected into something different, compared with what they initially promised. This propelled artists and writers, such as Pablo Picasso or Aldous Huxley, to name but a few, into an exploration and depiction of dystopias, represented as the reverse side of a utopia—or, simply, as a realized utopia. Influenced by literature and the arts, scholarship gradually became sensitive to the utopia/dystopia polarity, especially in architectural and planning projects. Starting in the late 1950s, a kind of historiography emerged which critically analyzed projects like Brasília or Chandigarh, along with modernist approaches to urban planning in general. By seeking to improve transport flow and achieve better functionality in public spaces, the latter destroyed the natural interaction between the inhabitants. 2 In addition, it created spaces of exclusion, as only the elites had access to planned neighborhoods and buildings, while the less privileged only had access to the outskirts of the properly designed territories.
Recently, a body of literature has emerged which strove to revisit and add nuance to the dominant critical discourse on modernist planning and utopias. A recent book on African modernism, edited by Manuel Herz, claimed that its historicization would help to “normalize” Africa, in order that the continent would no longer be associated exclusively with war and poverty but also with progress, as achieved or at least as aspired to in the 1960s onward. 3 In the same vein, a recent book on Belgrade by Brigitte le Normand argues that nonwestern countries were attracted to modernism for different reasons compared to their western counterparts. She demonstrates that in the case of Tito’s capital, modernist functionalism was abandoned not because utopian thinking faded but mainly because it gradually lost the support of municipal leaders and planners. 4
Wakeman adopts a similar direction. As she observes in the introduction, the “predominant postmodern viewpoint soundly rejects utopian thinking. Something isn’t just utopian anymore: it is suspiciously utopian” (p. 8). Almost four hundred pages of her book are an attempt to revisit such a perspective. The point, however, is not to rehabilitate utopia per se, or to ignore its mixed and problematic consequences in many places. Rather, it is “to explore the currents of utopian thought and how they worked for specific purposes” (p. 8). Her well-documented research does not engage in polemics about well-known showcase projects. Instead, the research investigates the elaboration of small and middle-sized towns in the Soviet Union, German Democratic Republic, Poland, Sweden, Finland, India, Pakistan, France, Australia, Great Britain, Iran, Algeria, and so on. Their elaboration, Wakeman argues, was based on the same universal premise: a desire for state authorities and planners to provide better living conditions for postwar generations.
Wakeman focuses on planning and planners, but provides little information on how the people perceived the new towns. For instance, Chapter Two examines Stalinstadt in East Germany and Nowa Huta in Poland, among other examples. According to Wakeman, these were “enchanted places.” “Ordinary people would have good jobs, access to education, modern housing, parks and playgrounds, health care, and a myriad of social and cultural entitlements” (p. 66). But, one may ask, who exactly had access to all these delights? In other words, what was the percentage of the workers and, say, party elites who lived in the beautiful blocks? As Jean-Louis Cohen suggests, the main sources of inspiration for the Stalinist Reconstruction of Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s were the Haussmannian reforms of Paris, Viennese urban development in the early twentieth century, and the City Beautiful movement. 5 All of these approaches emphasized the value of traditional architecture and sublime monumental buildings and were diffused throughout and, to a certain extent, imposed upon the entire Soviet Union and the Eastern Block. Given a terrible housing crisis in pre- and especially postwar Soviet cities, such an expensive and unpractical approach clearly privileged a vision of planning as an instrument of hegemony rather than as a way to solve social issues. What I see represented in the illustrations that Wakeman collects for her chapter (pp. 70, 76-77) is this very monumentality and grandeur once combined with “the new characteristics of a socialist industrial town” (p. 76).
Barber’s book is also about cities as utopias, but in a different way. The cities he describes are neither spaces for social engineering, nor are they a promise of happiness for middle classes. Barber sees cities as a catalyst—and the most suitable agent in global governance. His utopia is not limited by the city and is not reducible to it; rather he uses it as a trampoline for imagining a braver, less political and more practical, new world. According to Barber, mayors, who are accustomed to solving all kinds of technical issues, from trash collection to street safety, are more fit to govern this sphere than national politicians, disconnected as they are from the everyday realities of their citizens, to say nothing about how international organizations are often paralyzed by inefficient bureaucracy, vetoes, and cul-de-sac compromises. In Barber’s view, the world must be governed by a World Assembly of Cities, based on voluntary intercity cooperation without any binding legal obligations (pp. 336-359). Moreover, he claims that the prototypes of such associations already exist: for instance, the C-40 Climate Leadership Group (a network of global cities that have agreed to reduce their member’s carbon dioxide emissions by 248 million tons by 2020). The only missing step is to formalize such networks through the creation of a global parliament of mayors. The membership in this body would rotate, commitments would be consensual, and the population of the cities would also be taken into account to achieve equal representation. Direct local democracy, having originated in cities, and after its long romance with empires and nation-states, will thus return to its original form.
However, if cities are willing to unite, nation-states—at this very moment in the process of aggressively redesigning themselves on the world stage—are unlikely to willingly lose control over the cities they manage. And even if they do, why would we believe that mayors, once elected into a global body, would overcome their innate affiliations if state leaders failed to do so? Besides, if informal networks already exist and they are so successful, as Barber claims, what prevents mayors from further cooperation without the need for useless bureaucratic enticements?
The last feature shared by all three books is, as previously mentioned, a growing desire to incorporate the knowledge and study of nonwestern cities and the actors who design and govern them. Ewen offers a tribute to “urban” journals, such as this one, as well as to the activities of the European Association of Urban History (p. 27), which evolved from a small forum of urban historians focused on European cities in the early 1990s into a large transnational network with many attendants from Asia, South America (Brazil, in particular), Africa, and Australia. An increasing number of nonwestern doctoral students (in particular from China, India, and the former Soviet Union), accepted into European and North American schools, have also contributed to this trend by bringing their nonwestern case-studies onto Europe’s and North America’s theoretical soil.
For Ewen, nonwestern cities must be included if one is to grasp contemporary urban problems, such as rapid urbanization, social inequalities, identity and gender issues, and so on. As he observes, the two largest cities in the world in the early eighteenth century were Constantinople and Beijing; a century later the former were replaced by London. During most of the twentieth century, New York, Paris, Berlin, and Chicago dominated the stage, and now Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Mexico City, Mumbai, and São Paolo are at the top of the list. Moreover, according to the statistical data quoted by Ewen, Asian, African, and Latin American cities now grow at a rate of approximately 1.26 million inhabitants per week (p. 4). Ewen thus concludes that because of its “natural present-mindedness,” urban history is a useful tool for policy makers as it provides rich material for exploring contemporary urban problems based on past experience.
According to Wakeman, the dissemination of planning ideas connected nonwestern new towns to their western counterparts. For instance, she points out that socialist cities were not fundamentally different from the new town dreamscapes in the capitalist world. Both sides of the Cold War divide shared deeply in the regenerative, utopian aspirations of the reconstruction years. Rebuilding gave to enormous hopes for the perfectibility of the urban realm . . . Planners and architects in the East held a wide assortment of aesthetic influences, professional relationships, and urban theories in common with their Western counterparts. (p. 67)
Generally, a desire to rethink the East–West divide in urban planning and other spheres is a rising trend in the most recent research. 6
For Barber, the inclusion of Lagos, Delhi, or Seoul is key to demonstrating that the problems that pertain to cities are less “western,” “eastern,” or “southern” than are they environmental, infrastructural, or social. He indicates that mayors across the globe encounter and solve the same problems because cities in all continents, by their nature, are deemed to encounter the same challenges related to transportation, schools, access to jobs and public spaces, and so on. Based on this assumption, he advocates for a more fair and efficient inclusion of various cities in the process of global governance, which would reinvigorate the local participative democracy.
Overall, Ewen’s reading is refreshing because in a relatively short book he succeeded in presenting an up-to-date account of a rather heterogeneous field of urban history. After all, this field has been becoming more and more fragmented: in a situation where case-studies multiply, books that help one navigate through them become more and more necessary, and his is one of them. The suggestions for further reading which follow his six chapters are also a very useful tool.
Wakeman wrote a coherent and convincing book. Two further undeniable contributions should be added to what has been mentioned previously. One is that her book has historicized the shift from a utopian focus on the city as an ideal place to an ideal planning process, realized via a scientific approach based on cybernetics and systems analysis. (Chapters Four to Six are dedicated to the analysis of this shift in various places across the globe.) The other is an articulation of the role undertaken by public and private international organizations, such as the UN Habitat and the Ford Foundation, in shaping the postwar new towns. The financial and technical contribution of these bodies was substantial, and Practicing Utopia provides ideas for further research which would focus on the entangled relationships between regional, national, and international planners and donors. A recent example would be the elaboration of a Master Plan for the new capital of Kazakhstan, Astana, which was financed by the Japan International Cooperation Agency. What goals were pursued by each side? And how has international planning cooperation evolved since the late 1970s?
Barber’s book can be criticized from several points of view, but a desire for an apolitical form of governance, implemented by cities, may resonate with many of us. This, however, does not make Barber’s proposal less problematic. There is nothing bad about sharing experiences and best practices, just as there is nothing unrealistic in creating another transnational body. But this would be yet another utopia until nations remain the global deciders. So, would putting cities into play really help to solve the environmental and other issues or, instead, would it politicize and paralyze them?