Meditations on Metropolis

Of all the modernists Ludwig Hilbersheimer is perhaps the most compelling, prescient and relevant to anyone with the slightest inkling of a project for the city. He has been of enormous influence on my thinking and below is an abortive attempt to unpick his concept of Metropolis.

A table comparing the idea of 'City' with the idea of 'Metropolis'

Text (unfinished) that begins to describe the difference between city and metropolis

We are fifteen years into the 3^rd Millennium. The statement appears overly portentous, but it is necessary to highlight the extraordinary shift humanity has undertaken in the past thirty five years.

 The 20^th Century was defined by a dichotomous, almost paradoxical, relationship between conflict and expansion; our capacity to stand on the Moon and commit genocide were realised within the same epoch. This era is now history. However the ideologies wrought, the discoveries made and the cultures formed, when coupled with our innate desire for persistence, had consequences that continue to shape our present. An exhaustive compilation and analysis would be futile and unhelpful. There are however a number of elements that underpin our existence, reduced for now to the paradigmatic conclusion that; that the way we think is out of step with our technological means. 

The most salient element germinated in the early 20^th Century and eventually defined it. The drastic revaluation of economics became the primary driver of human existence. Whilst this irrefutably brought great improvements to life during that period, in our contemporary predicament economics has begun to subversively counteract progress. The production of capital and its primacy in economics was exaggerated per absurdum by the neoliberal capitalism of the late 20^th Century. Everything is now put to work, everything is productive.  An innocuous ideal at face value, in fact our entire existence is underwritten by the continued survival of a system is built on several paradoxes. Firstly in theory, everything must simultaneously be both limitless and totally organised (to ensure maximum productivity). Try organising infinity and the ramifications become damningly apparent. When this absurd theory is applied to practice, the paradox mutates and poses the question: how can the production of capital be limitless in a world of very finite resources? The resultant conflicts and contradictions underpin all endeavours to perpetuate and propagate capitalism. One of the most malignant ‘solutions’ merely presents another paradox. In order to ensure that the aforementioned resources never run out, nothing in our world can be discounted as productive, nothing is absolute from exploitation. Economics (recently synonymous with capitalism) has thus subsumed every other aspect of human life, bending it to conform to principles of the market. Economics becomes the relative field into which humanity can be further subdivided and refined into increasingly atomised cells.  However, occurring in tandem and in contrast to this artificial multiplication of culture is the almost pathological need to make this process efficient, to reduce anything and everything to its most basic incarnation. The reductive logic results in a fundamental sameness that rejects any and all costs, perceived to be extraneous in regard to profit. How then does one reconcile the desire for a maximal variety presented by atomisation, with the totalitarian compulsion to strip that variety back to its most cost efficient form? The world enters a state of insanity, mimicking ingenuous progress by perpetually consuming and reconstructing itself. Each time the most superficial layer is altered purely for the sake of newness, giving the impression we have moved forward.  Are we doomed to our Promethean fate? Will we ever break this cycle of bad infinity?

Urban form has been reduced by market forces to fragmented islands of emeralds labyrinths and fortresses

We must question the resounding impact of our immediate history and examine its impact upon our lives, to discern a less bleak direction for this epoch. Our concern in this work is architectural inquiry.  It is bounded to understanding the manifestation of this problem within the construct of the city. Nowhere has the impact of capitalism been more explicit or more damaging than on our urban environment. Therefore we will explore the role of architecture and its complicity in this transformation. 

A pessimistic view of what remains to architects (Archifactory project, will elucidate in a future post)

   

To begin a clear distinction must be made. The urban environment can be viewed as a blanket term for human settlement. The aforementioned changes can be most quickly surmised in the question what is a city and what is a metropolis?

Cities and metropolises both occupy physical space. Both entities are composed of the same elements. They both have streets and a wide variety of building types. The physical size and population of a settlement only offer cursory understandings of either entity, more important are the desires of its populace. How a settlement is defined is based upon the forces governing its creation. We can therefore state that ‘city’ and ‘metropolis’ are descriptors. Identifiable by specific conditions present within a settlement, crucially they define its generative identity. This identity is what allows us to understand society and diagnose its problems. Differentiating between the city and the metropolis, how they evolved and the resultant conflicts that arise is unlikely to provide a comprehensive solution to the problems of society. The aim of this thesis is to establish a coherent understanding of the contemporary urban environment, in order to suggest a platform for reclaiming that environment. Maybe the metropolis is simply the natural evolution of the urban environment. Maybe it cannot be resisted and should not be destroyed, maybe the only answer its to embrace it. Plunge headlong into developing the concept of the metropolis based upon its principles. What does that mean for people?

The relationship between politics, economics and the city has been evolving since the 18^th Century when Giovanni Batista Nolli charted the ‘Eternal City’ of Rome as a system for infrastructural management, with isolated architectural islands. Nolli’s map made cartographic distinction between architecture, drawn in poche and the urban fabric, block footprints drawn with a linear hatch. The former’s inclusion of the interior plan establish architecture as immutable and fixed, the later free to be altered and reformed according to newly emerging principles of urban management. Emerging just a few decades before Adam Smith’s paradigmatic treatise The Wealth of Nations, the Nolli map becomes a prescient project for the city that foresees the shift towards economics and resultant concept of the modern metropolis. The city is a fundamentally political entity. Its growth form and life is both governed by a collective will and a manifestation of it. This collective will is usually represented by some form of government. As a manifestation of collective the city is an absolute idea, the flow of people and economics is governed by the political identity of a recognisable artefact.

Venturi compounds the metropolitan nature of Nolli's Rome

The word metropolis has existed in English since the medieval period. Initially used to define the capital or primary city of a state the word evolved to mean a large and busy city, manifested in the capitalist cities that were expanding from the late 18^th Century onward. This semantic mutation coupled with its etymology surmise the shifts in humanity explored in this thesis. Translated literally to ‘mother city’ there is an inference to the most enduring and intimate interpersonal relationship, that of mother and child. The metropolis therefore evokes a deep connection between it and its inhabitants. When viewed in this context we see the change in our mother from a political to an economic entity as a re-balancing of settlement patterns, emphasising the urban over the rural. Use of the word metropolis is not synonymous with the word city; indeed the difference in meaning and connotation exemplifies the problem at hand. The metropolis is a private entity, propelled by the singular desires of an assembled multitude. Unity cannot be achieved because civic ideology is too constrictive. The foundation of a metropolitan society relies instead upon the impartiality of free markets, that the trade of goods and services is determined by economic laws of supply and demand. The role of politics then changes, no longer the forge of life and purpose, it now just acts as a failsafe. The actions of the population are now a reaction to market changes and more or less political shepherding and private will becomes mutual self interest.

The key distinction between the metropolis and the city lies in relationship to two polar conditions exhibited by humanity. Both entities are composed of the same elements. They both have streets and a wide variety of building types. The city presupposes form, governed by an architectonic manifestation of the inhabitants’ political will. It is a discrete object, to be understood as absolute from its territory. In the metropolis however morphology is secondary to systems that ensure its productivity. 

Hilbersheimer's Hochhausstadt and a plan of Dunfermline inspired by Piranesi's Scenografia
Paradigms of Metropolis and City