“It’s just a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. Will I see you on the other side?” Reflektor, Arcade Fire, 2013
Anyone watching the long queues as shops were allowed to open across Britain on 12 April would be hard pressed to believe that online shopping killed the bricks-and-mortar stores. In fact, ‘online shopping’ has arguably become a fig leaf to hide what is actually wrong with retail, the economic order and the fate of our cities. It is a reductive explanation relying on quick answers and facile solutions. It is rather one symptom of the estrangement many people increasingly feel towards their own cities.
But why do people feel estranged? What is it about this sense of alienation that makes it impervious to strategies of “placemaking” and other well-meaning endeavours?
It can be argued that urban alienation is the apotheosis of a very long tradition of Western modernity that has shaped our economies, our cities and ultimately ourselves. According to Timothy Mitchell in Colonising Egypt, Western modernity is predicated on a system of representations where the human has become the centre of the universe facing the world which the human turned into a series of exhibits, or rather a representation of ideas and modes of production of capitalist accumulation. In this new universe, space has been transformed into objects on display for the human subject to experience visually. Cities have been radically reconfigured into a curated collection of images and objects manifest in retail arcades, view corridors, panoramas, boulevards, manicured gardens, facades and international exhibitions all designed according to the distanced point of view of the human observer.
What has been lost is the ability to experience the world with all the senses, without being detached from it, and without it being propped as choreographed images for us to view. Urban space no longer reveals itself in fragments or manifests itself gradually as a spatial-temporal function. The world-as-exhibition to borrow the term from Mitchell or the city-as-object more specifically is how London has been rendered into a flat representation of itself as if the real London does not exist any more. Mitchell quotes Martin Heidegger in that reality has become the accuracy of the representation because this representation regime keeps multiplying. Londoners have been relegated to self-contained enclaves in the suburbs where they experience their city by how it is represented on their phones and they consume commodities by how they are arranged on the screen whereas before commodities were organised on shelves in department stores and guarded behind glazed shop windows that ensured the distance between the observer and the goods.
Cities have been further abstracted by being obsessively designed: Any form of production has been banished to the periphery. Anything involving any sort of manufacturing has been scuttled away as if commodities were brought about through immaculate conception. Pedestrianisation writ large has abolished vehicles from the streets, creating a make-believe world where goods do not flow and where people do not commute. All the networks of production that actually underpin cities have been hidden to pave the way for photogenic urban spaces with picturesque facades and attractive people. It is ironic given that these cities have developed and flourished particularly by being critical nodes in the cycles of production. One thinks of the growth of Western global cities like London and like Paris thanks to the extensive rail network connecting these cities to their hinterland and the docks connecting the metropole to a global colonial network of flow of raw materials and goods. Back then, these networks were celebrated as hallmarks of modernity: Even today, people still marvel at the architecture of these magnificent railway stations like King’s Cross and docks like Shad Thames.
Abstraction has ultimately made cities feel unreal. They feel like yet another representation of a truth that seems ever more elusive. Cities feel like spaces for other people, people not like us. This reproduction of representation has made cities simulacra of themselves. No longer will dwelling in urban space experience it as it is so why would one visit the city centre to be faced with yet another representation that can be better achieved in high definition on a 4K screen in one’s semi-detached with the drawbridge pulled up?
This is compounded by well-meaning attempts at placemaking. Urban spaces have now to earn their keep, to work harder, to be “successful”. Having people cheek by jowl in every single urban nook and cranny has become the only metric of the space’s “success”. But why should urban space be successful and what does success even mean? Instragrammable cities? Iconic cities? Cities are living organisms laden with imperfections and randomness. Urban space can be ceremonial or intimate and everything in between. The quest for the real lies in the claims of tourist brochures promising you to experience the city as its locals would. People feel a sense of triumph when they come across a backwater space in the middle of the city because it gives them ownership of the urban narrative and it allows them to stake their claim in it.
In fact, the widely-derided hipster culture has constituted the biggest force of resistance to the abstraction of cities. Hipster culture is always a quest to find the “real”. Hipsters cherish working with the hands: craft, making and production rather than mainstream consumption. The hipsters have mounted a campaign of resistance to create agency for themselves in a world where everything has been meticulously arranged for them to consume. The hipsters are trying to challenge the official urban narrative’s hegemony. They move into abandoned neighbourhoods from which production had been outsourced, and they recreate local economies that eventually produce a sense of place (which gets absorbed by mainstream real estate promotion eventually). That being said, hipster culture is reductive and almost exclusive because it feels like the preserve of the middle class only (Hipsters are arguably the shock troops of the middle class), so it offers neither an equitable nor a comprehensive approach but it is a successful example of going against the “placemaking” orthodoxy.
We do take our cities for granted. We expect urban life to persist as we gradually withdraw from participating in it. What the current pandemic has displayed is the dystopian future that awaited us as we increasingly turned our backs to civic life, a future many of us find horrific. Perhaps the future of cities lies in going easy on placemaking and regeneration to allow the cities to just be themselves. The malaise of urban space and the high street cuts much deeper than easy explanations like online shopping and token solutions like “user experience”.
(This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organisation, committee or other group or individual.)