The End of Tradition?

The End of Tradition, or the Tradition of Endings? i

The End of Tradition?

‘Since the beginning of history, human beings have been fascinated with endings – the end of their lives, the end of seasons and the end of the world . . .’, so says Nezar AlSayyad in his preface to The End of Tradition? But, he and his contributors argue, endings are also coupled with beginnings, and destruction is sometimes a precondition for construction or reconstruction, particularly where the built environment is concerned. Indeed, the end of tradition does not entail the death of tradition itself, only our conception of it – and the emergence of a need to re-evaluate its utility as a repository of authentic (and hence valuable) ideas to be handed down or preserved. Following an introductory chapter in which Nezar AlSayyad presents the current debates about ‘endings’, about ‘tradition’, and about the relationship between tradition and modernity, the book is divided into three parts. Part I, ‘Traditions of the Modern’, explores the ways in which the terms ‘tradition’ and ‘modern’ have become inextricably linked, while Part II, ‘Invented Landscapes’, chronicles how traditions are identified, manufactured, and deployed. The final Part, ‘Programmes of Tradition’, reveals how tradition is deployed, resisted and reworked through hegemonic struggles that seek to create both built environments and citizen subjects. Drawing on case studies from round the world, Nezar AlSayyad and his contributors provide a unique window on how globalization has unsettled the conventional connection between place and culture and so given rise to the question ‘The End of Tradition?’.

ii The End of Tradition?

The End of Tradition, or the Tradition of Endings? iii

The End of Tradition?

edited by

Nezar AlSayyad

iv The End of Tradition?

First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Talyor and Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 Selection and editorial, Nezar AlSayyad; individual chapters, the authors This book was commissioned and edited by Alexandrine Press, Marcham, Oxfordshire All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The end of tradition? / edited by Nezar AlSayyad.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–415–29040–6 — ISBN 0–415–29041–4 (pbk.) 1. Tradition (Philosopy) 2. Globalization—Social aspects. 3. Globalization— Political aspects. I. Alsayyad, Nezar. B105.T7 E53 2003 148—dc22 2003018044 ISBN 0-203-42133-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67479-0 (Adobe eReader Format)

The End of Tradition, or the Tradition of Endings? v

Contents Preface

vii

Illustration credits and sources

ix

Contributors

xi

1 The End of Tradition, or the Tradition of Endings? Nezar AlSayyad

1

I. Traditions of the Modern 2 Tradition is (not) Modern: Deterritorializing Globalization Jane M. Jacobs 3 The Tradition of the End: Global Capitalism and the Contemporary Spaces of Apocalypse Katharyne Mitchell 4 Nostalgias of the Modern Ananya Roy

29

45

63

II. Invented Landscapes 5 Nature and Tradition at the Border: Landscaping the End of the Nation State Matthew Sparke 6 The Tensed Embrace of Tourism and Traditional Environments: Exclusionary Practices in Cancún, Cuba, and Southern Florida Robert Mugerauer

87

116

7 Architecture and the Production of Postcard Images: Invocations of Tradition vs. Critical Transnationalism in Curitiba 144 Clara Irazábal

III. Programmes of Tradition 8 Tradition as a Means to the End of Tradition: Farmers’ Houses in Italy’s Fascist-Era New Towns Mia Fuller

171

vi The Tradition? The EndEnd of of Tradition?

9 Cultural Identity and Architectural Image in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town Fabio Todeschini and Derek Japha

187

10 The Latency of Tradition: On the Vicissitudes of Walls in Contemporary China Duanfang Lu

210

11 Seizing Locality in Jerusalem Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

231

Selected Bibliography

256

Index

258

vi

The End of Tradition, or the Tradition of Endings? vii

Preface Since the beginning of history, human beings have been fascinated with endings – the end of their lives, the end of seasons, and the end of the world. In a sense, the idea of endings is as old as human history. This book, however, is not about endings. Instead, its starting point is a healthy scepticism with the utility of the notion of endings. In fact, for those of us who study the built environment, endings are also coupled with beginnings, and destruction (creative or otherwise) is sometimes a precondition or prerequisite to construction or reconstruction. My opportunity to take on the theme of endings came up when I was writing the Call for Papers for the IASTE 2000 conference, which was held in Trani, Italy, in a beautiful medieval fort on the Adriatic Sea. The previous IASTE conference, held in Cairo two years earlier, had dealt with the theme, ‘Consuming Traditions and Manufacturing of Heritage’, and later published as a book bearing the same title. It became clear during that conference, and in the process of putting a book together from it, that attention must be paid to cycles of life and death as they relate to tradition in the built environment. Additionally, my own interest in endings led me to structure the IASTE 2000 conference around three broad themes: ‘Deterritorialization and Traditions’, ‘Globalization and Place’, and ‘Tradition as a Call to Arms’. In general, the conference was concerned with a specific historical moment, one in which an all-consuming capitalism seemed to be levelling differences and particularities, but in which a resurgence of localisms, populisms, and fundamentalisms was simultaneously occurring. It was this paradoxical simultaneity which necessitated our question: ‘The End of Tradition?’ The papers at the conference showed how globalization unsettled the conventional connection between place and culture. While some saw these dislocations as new traditions in and of themselves, others argued that the spatial basis of tradition is still firmly grounded. Similarly, many of the conference papers demonstrated how the fervent revival of some place-based traditions marked the urban landscapes of much of the world at the end of the millennium. From the ravages of the Balkans, Afghanistan and Palestine, and, more recently, Iraq, to the nitty-gritty neighbourhood battles of post-industrial First World cities, the politics of difference were playing havoc with cities, nations, and regions. Subsequently, the events of September 11, 2001 made this point very clear, and necessitated turning these intellectual debates into a book. While no one can provide reasonable justification for the events of 9/11, we must all labour to understand their nature and repercussions. In doing so, we should refuse to read the attack on the World Trade Center as a meaningful protest against long-established traditions of urbanism, against globalization, or against America’s role in it. The individuals who perpetrated this atrocity harbour a fundamental ignorance of America and of the global landscape within which they exist. Their intolerance and fanatical belief in a singular invented truth remains

viii End The of End of Tradition? The Tradition?

the only rationale for their action. The new global realities demand that we be intolerant of intolerance itself. The failure of a few countries and peoples around the world to understand this message has allowed a climate in which a handful of maniacal individuals managed to hold the entire world hostage to their will, even after their death. Although the events of 9/11 occurred almost a year after the conference, some of the contributing authors revised their chapters to deal with their significance or repercussions. The book is mainly based on keynote papers at the conference, but they are complemented by additional chapters from the theme sessions. I have divided the book into three parts, dealing with traditions of the modern, invented landscapes, and programmes of tradition. Although I commented on all the chapters, I have specifically refrained from asking the contributing authors to abide by certain definitions or to come to an agreement regarding the ‘end of tradition’ as an intellectual notion. Indeed, any such agreement, if it emerges, is possibly a product of discussions we all had during and after the conference. This project took three years to complete, but I am very grateful to all the contributors for their commitment to it and to insisting on making it happen. Many individuals deserve serious thanks for helping put this book together. First, my partner Ananya Roy helped me articulate the initial idea for the conference, and later the book. Second, I would like to thank the people who helped me put the original conference together: Attilio Petruccioli, the local conference coordinator; Montira Horayangura, the conference coordinator; and Mark Gillem, the IASTE coordinator. Third, I would like to thank my research assistants who helped with different tasks on the project. Duanfang Lu was assigned the task of identifying library material, and never failed to discover new books and articles that educated me enormously. William Duncanson worked with me on my chapter, and it owes as much of its current form to him as it does to me. I am grateful for his intellectual input. Mrinalini Rajagopalan and Madhuri Desai helped with a variety of tasks during the time I put the book proposal together. Renu Desai was my principal research assistant on the editing task and was a very able liaison with my contributors. She did a superb job handling the book in its last stages and I am very thankful for her efforts. I am also grateful for the editorial advice we received from David Moffat. Fourth, I would like to thank Ann Rudkin at Alexandrine Press and Caroline Mallinder at Routledge. Ann handled the book in its final stages, answered many of the difficult issues faced by some of the contributors, and was very patient in dealing with all of us. I am very grateful for her work. Like many of my previous books, I hope that this book will excite and incite my students and my friends in the field to study further the traditions of place in this everchanging world. Nezar AlSayyad September 2003

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The End of Tradition, or the Tradition of Endings? ix

Illustration credits and sources The editor, contributors and publisher would like to thank all those who have granted permission to reproduce illustrations. We have made every effort to contact and acknowledge copyright holders, but if any errors have been made we would be happy to correct them at a later printing. Chapter 1 1.1, 1.2, 1.3

© Bill Duncanson

Chapter 2 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4

© Kim Dovey

Chapter 3 3.1 Source: Spencer Museum of Art: Museum purchase: Letha Churchill Walker Memorial Art Fund 3.2 © Duncan Long 3.3 © Peter Proksch 3.4 © Benetton. Source http://www.benetton.com/imgfuturefamily.jpg 3.5 Source http://www.irnpdx.edu/~strukn/Watts/images/riot3thumb.jpg 3.6 © Ron Olsen (source: http://www.workingreporter.com/riot2.jpg) 3.6 © Office of Logistics and Technology, Foundation for the Law of Time. Source http://www.tortuga.com/updates) Chapter 4 4.1 © Dafna Kory 4.2 © Casaro Renato 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 © Anaya Roy 4.7 © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/FLC 4.8, 4.9 Source: Battle of Algiers publicity material 4.10 Source: Charulata publicity material 4.11 Source: Anaya Roy Chapter 5 5.1 © Matthew Sparke 5.2, 5.3, 5.7 Source: Cascadia: A Tale of Two Cities, Mortone P. Beebe ©1996, Harry N. Abrams Publishers 5.4 © David D. McCloskey, Cascadia Institute 5.5 © Port of Seattle 5.6 Source: University of Washington, Special Collections Division, Seattle, WA. Negative # UW17081 Chapter 6 6.1–6.13 © Robert Mugerauer Chapter 7 7.1–7.8 © Clara Irazábal Chapter 8 8.1, 8.2 © Mai Fuller 8.3 Source: Dagoberto Ortensi, Edilizia rurale. Urbanistica di centri comunali e di borgate rurali, 2d edition, Rome, Casa Mediterranea, 1941, p. 515 8.4–8.9 © Mai Fuller ix

x The The EndEnd of Tradition? of Tradition?

Chapter 9 9.1 Source: National Library of South Africa, Cape Town 9.2 Source: Copy in the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town. © Atlas Van Stolk, Rotterdam: inventory number top.1052 9.3 Source: Cape Archives: M1/339 9.4 Source: Cape Archives: M/453 9.5, 9.6 Source: City Planner’s Department, Cape Town 9.7 Source: National Library of South Africa, Cape Town 9.8 Source: Cape Archives: E3860 9.9 Source: Cape Archives: E9181 9.10 © Fabio Todeschini and Derek Japha 9.11 Source: Cape Archives: M1/65 9.12 Source: Cape Archives, Elliott collection 9.13, 9.14, 9.15 © Fabio Todeschini and Derek Japha 9.16 Source: Cape Archives: E8145 9.17 Source: Cape Archives: E7807 9.18 Source: Cape Archives: E1933 9.19 Source: Cape Archives: Elliott collection 9.20 Source: Cape Archives: Elliott collection 9.21 Source: City Engineer’s Department, Cape Town: A740/9 9.22 Source: City Engineer’s Department, Cape Town:A740/54 9.23 Source: Die Burger, re-published in Suid-Afrikaanse Oorsig, October 1970; © Die Burger 9.24 © Fabio Todeschini and Derek Japha Chapter 10 10.1 Source: Edward Farmer, Early Ming Government: The Evolution of Dual Capital, Harvard East Asian Monographs, No. 66, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1976 10.2 © Song Huancheng 10.3 Source: Liang Sicheng, Liang Sicheng wenji, Vol. 4, Beijing, Construction Industry Press, 1986 10.4, 10.5 © Duanfang Lu Chapter 11 11.1 Source: reprinted from Israel, The Ministry of Housing, Israel Builds, Tel Aviv, The Ministry of Housing, 1964 11.2 Source: David Kroyanker, Jerusalem – Conflicts over the City’s Physical and Visual Form, Jerusalem, Zmora-Bitan, 1988, p. 319 11.3 Source: Dubi Tal and Moni Haramati, Kav Ha-Ofek, (Jerusalem Skyline), Israel, Ministry of Defense, 1993, p. 9 11.4 © Ram Karmi 11.5 Source: Ministry of Labor, Housing Department, Tel Aviv, Israel 11.6 Source: Avraham Vachman and members of the Hachsharah 11.7 © Dan Etan 11.8 Source: Tvai, 1, Spring, 1966, p. 19 11.9 Source: Ram Karmi, ‘On the Architecture of Shadows’, kav, 3, 1965, p. 55 11.10 left: Source: Moshe Safdie, Safdie in Jerusalem, slidcas no. 3, London, Pidgeon Audio Visual, May 1979; top right: Alona Nitzan-Shiftan; bottom right: source: photograph by Amikam Shoov in Irit Zaharoni, Israel, Roots & Routes: A Nation Living in Its Landscape, Tel Aviv, MOD Pub. House, 1990, pp. 20–21 11.11 Source: Moshe Safdie, Jerusalem: The Future of the Past, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989, unpaginated. The photograph ‘Habitat Jerusalem’ is credited to Arnott Rogers Batten Ltd) 11.12 Source: G. Blas and I. Tatenbaum, Social Realism in the 1950, Political Art in the 1990s, Haifa, The New Haifa Museum, 1998, p. 97 x

The End of Tradition, or the Tradition of Endings? xi

Contributors Nezar AlSayyad is Professor of Architecture and Planning and Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also the Director of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments. Mia Fuller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Clara Irazabal is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Planning in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Jane M. Jacobs is Director of Graduate School in Geography at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Derek Japha is Professor of Architecture at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Duanfang Lu is a Lecturer in Environment-Behaviour Studies in the School of Architecture, Design Science, and Planning in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sydney, Australia. Katharyne Mitchell is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Washington at Seattle. Robert Mugerauer is Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Washington at Seattle. Alona Nitzan-Shiftan is currently a Samuel H. Kress Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Ananya Roy is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. Matthew Sparke is Associate Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Washington at Seattle. Fabio Todeschini is Professor of Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. xi

xii The End of Tradition?

To Memories of Trani

The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings?

Chapter 1

The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings? Nezar AlSayyad

The July 2002 issue of Time magazine featured the prescient title ‘The Bible and the Apocalypse’ emblazoned on a cross engulfed in flames. This blasphemous image underscored the degree to which American popular culture has become obsessed with the ‘end of the world’. For some, 9/11 was an indication that the end was near. On that day, the prophecies of the Bible’s book of Revelations suddenly seemed to be manifest in our own backyard. Eerily coincident with the millennium, when the duel between the Lord Almighty and the beast Satan will take place, some believed it signalled the End. And according to Time, 59 per cent of Americans now believe that the events depicted in Revelations will come true.1 This view, of course, is a singularly Christian imaginary of the Apocalypse. Yet it is held by a substantial proportion of people in a country which, despite a Constitution dividing church and state, remains fundamentally Christian. References to ‘God’ on our money, in the classroom, and (make no mistake) in every speech by President George W. Bush are not to a generalized, ambiguous God, but to the same God that ‘our’ forefathers came to the ‘New World’ to worship. Consequently, this talk of Apocalypse, at least in the United States, is not empty. Increasingly, Americans see it as involving the need for a ‘Holy War’ against the ‘Holy War’.2 Indeed, the Time article focused on the popularity of a series of books on the (Christian) Apocalypse called Left Behind which have now sold more than 32 million copies – a surprisingly large number in a world of increased product differentiation.3 This certainly suggests that many Americans, if not actually awaiting the End, are at least curious about it. Clearly, the popular and often evangelical anxiety about endings has gained new import since the events of 9/11. But surprisingly, this is true not only for American Christians, but also for non-Christians and in other parts of the world. The irony, of course, is that what one group or nation may consider hell another may consider the road to heaven. But the consistent thread through all these discourses – on endings, on apocalypse, on heaven and hell – is that they are all ‘modern’ for having been dialectically constructed as a binary. Triumph is predicated upon the reciprocal defeat of an ‘other’. These debates, omnipresent not only in America but in other parts of the world, 1

The End of Tradition?

are instructive of the duplicity of discourses on endings – indeed, discourse in general. One needs merely to turn on the television to be reminded of how ‘endings’ and their perception have become instruments of propaganda in complex negotiations between competing subject positions. Thus, news coverage of the same incident in the Middle East by different networks like CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and Al-Jazeera, and their commentary on the looming apocalypse, underscores the relative positions of different cultural groups with different vested interests, politics, tactics, and beliefs. It may be reasonable to infer then that the study of endings is more about an end to certain noble truths than to any real end in the historical sense. This study of ‘ends’ is, paradoxically, not without precedent. There has, in fact, been a proliferation of proclaimed ends in both the popular media and academia coincidental with the ‘end of the millennium’. These ‘endings’, although secular, exhibit no less anxiety. They are, nonetheless, the stories of the end of things. Consequently, it makes sense to see what can be learned from these ‘other’ end(s) before we consider the end of ‘tradition’. Most importantly, this exercise will shed light on why one writes about an ‘end’ in the first place. Specifically, there are four recent ends that are often explicitly in dialogue with one another. Not surprisingly, each of these proposed ‘ends’ cites similar precedents and outcomes. However, there is little agreement as to whether the results are to be lamented or celebrated.

On endings While humans have been fascinated with cataclysmic tales of endings since time immemorial, more calculated accounts have been rare. The first scholarly discussion about endings in recent history was Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology.4 Written in the late 1950s in the United States (and published in 1960) this book chronicled how the great catastrophes of the twentieth century (World War I, World War II, Russian totalitarianism, etc.) fomented a general suspicion and subsequent abandonment of nineteenthcentury utopian ideologies. ‘In the last decade, we have witnessed an exhaustion of the nineteenth-century ideologies, particularly Marxism, as intellectual systems that could claim truth for their views on the world.’5 Bell defined ideology as a means of translating ideas into action, and claimed that ‘few serious minds believe any longer that one can set down “blueprints” and through “social engineering” bring about a new utopia of social harmony’.6 By contrast, he argued that the acceptance of the ‘welfare state’ by both the ‘right’ and ‘left’ was demonstrative of intellectual and political convergence. Citing such trends, Bell outlined the potential malaise for contemporary intellectuals. The young intellectual is unhappy because the ‘middle way’ is for the middle-aged, not for him; it is without passion and is deadening. Ideology, which by its very nature is an all-or-none affair, and temperamentally the thing he wants, is intellectually devitalized, and few issues can be formulated any more, intellectually, in ideological terms.7

But Bell was actually excited about the prospect of an end to ideology, since he viewed ideology as a means to limit and ‘preconceive’ reality. As dogma, ideology gets in the way 2

The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings?

of new ideas. And in the end, he suggested, it was not prudent to sacrifice today for the future. Critics have suggested that history proved Bell’s prophecy false when in the 1960s many movements arose, fuelled by recombinant ideologies regarding human society. Ostensibly, the radicalism of the 1960s in the United States made Bell’s critique of the malaise surrounding issues of social justice moot. His theories, however, particularly regarding the difficulties facing intellectuals, were to be rekindled by others later. Bell’s was an end not so much of events or progress, but an anticipated end of what he considered the ‘dogma’ of nineteenth-century social planning. Significantly, he saw this end as a victory of sorts. No longer hampered by the musings of Marx, society would be free to develop new solutions for its problems. Implicit in Bell’s account, however, was the triumph of the Western democratic model over the (evil) dogmas of the nineteenth century. This victory existed in time, and was thus ‘historical’. Indeed, it was Bell’s trajectory of theoretical achievement by democracy (or failure of communism and totalitarianism) that suggested that those ‘other’ ideological models were dead. Not surprisingly, the historical transformations provided as evidence by Bell for the end of ideology also provided the starting point for other writers. The next major proposition about endings was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which identified a similar but, at first, less invidious end.8 According to Fukuyama, Hegel had envisioned an ‘end of history’ upon the consolidation of ‘free societies’.9 And pointing to the same twentieth-century events as Bell, he argued that because there was no conceivable alternative to liberal democracy, centuries of ideological evolution had come to an end.10 Thus, according to Fukuyama, the international consensus for liberal democracy was the ‘endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution’.11 However, in what amounted to a truly teleological account of philosophical and political development, Fukuyama allowed no room for alternative visions of the future. Indeed, all systems not currently conforming to the model of liberal democracy were merely waiting to become indoctrinated in the ‘struggle for recognition’, thus resulting in an end to history. But this end was clearly contingent upon a highly circumscribed definition of history, and as such, it became the cause of much of the confusion surrounding the book. For Fukuyama, history was simply the evolution of (Western) political ideology, and its end merely represented the inability to develop it further. To be sure, ‘events’ would continue, but none would significantly alter the political-economic makeup of the modern world. Like Bell, Fukuyama described what appeared, at first, to be a victorious tale of human development and progress. But it, too, held the seeds of a perverse and flawed future. Fukuyama, again citing Hegel and echoing Bell, warned that, upon achieving the peace and prosperity of the end of history, ‘men would face the constant danger of degenerating from citizens to mere bourgeois, and feeling contempt for themselves in the process’.12 Fukuyama’s end, again like Bell’s, was a tale of how an ostensibly celebratory series of events – the twentieth-century collapse of fascist, totalitarian, and other despotic regimes – could have a less-than-positive outcome. Nevertheless, notions of the ‘end of ideology’ and the ‘end of history’ both constituted radical, yet sanguine breaks with what had 3

The End of Tradition?

heretofore been considered the root of history and mankind – progress. In both accounts, progress, considered a single, coherent, evolutionary process, emerged as a simple tale of cause and effect. According to Fukuyama, if there was no further challenge, man would simply fester and die. Looking back, it is interesting today to note the ambivalence both authors exhibited toward such a dispassionate future. In the wake of 9/11, Fukuyama’s reticence appears as myopic as Bell’s some forty years ago. Today, it has become abundantly clear that there remain serious challenges to liberal democracy. But fundamentalist Islam is not the only one, and all threats are not necessarily violent. For example, China, despite becoming increasingly market oriented, has maintained a uniquely Chinese authoritarian government, indicating how democracy may not be the only choice. Here, of course, one is reminded of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis and the idea that differences between Western liberal democracy, political Islam, and Chinese market socialism will define the next world conflict.13 It is here that we may also see the impact of history and ideology on space. But the spatial implications of a proposed end to history are quite nebulous. Since history here really means the end of challenges to the ideology associated with liberal democracy, the spatial implications may simply follow Bell’s points, particularly because these ends are concerned with intellectual developments and are predicated on paradigm shifts in both government and economics. In this regard, Bell outlined the end of ideologies competing with capitalism, and Fukuyama described the end of associated governments. But neither dealt with the unit of analysis that defined geopolitical discourse in the last century, the nation-state. It was here that Kenichi Ohmae seemingly picked up the discourse on endings.14 Curiously, Ohmae proposed an end to the very institution Fukuyama claimed had reached ubiquity. In The End of the Nation State, Ohmae described the end of the nation-state as playing a substantive role in the global economy. He stated that ‘because most of the money now moving across borders is private, governments do not have to be involved at either end’.15 Unconsciously echoing postcolonial critiques, Ohmae asserted that nationstates no longer adequately represent groups of people based on social interest. Nationstates move too slowly and often exhibit conflicting motives with regard to free and open markets. Moreover, they may actually discourage economic activity in instances of political instability or governmental intervention in local markets.16 Ohmae proposed the region-state as an economically viable alternative. Using such terms as ‘unbounded’, and ‘deterritorialized’, he described this neoliberal economic paradise as follows: [Region-states] may lie entirely within or across the borders of a nation-state. This does not matter. It is the irrelevant result of historical accident. What defines them is not the location of their political borders but the fact that they are the right size and scale to be true, natural business units in today’s global economy. Theirs are the borders – and the connections – that matter in a borderless world.17

While it is difficult to argue against the ‘nostalgic fiction’ of the nation-state in terms of its effectiveness at representing the desires of its subjects, or its cohesion regarding ethnic and cultural representation, both the spatial implications and the veracity of such a model have become problematic in a post-9/11 world. One might look to the current 4

The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings?

U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq for evidence of both a resurgence of nationalist and imperialist agendas in regulating the world economy and local nation-building. Here, both History and Ideology seem to be still alive and well. In terms of architecture and urban form the end of the nation-state (arguably, a somewhat discredited concept) holds the most relevant spatial implications. The nationbuilding apparatus has always been responsible for much of what might be described as official built tradition. Thus, a radical reconceptualization of what constitutes a ‘state’ would have serious implications for the redefinition of established regions, often typified in architectural terms. In this regard, the above eulogies have recently been bolstered by yet another, even more trenchant ‘end’. Exhibiting an acute anxiety akin to that of evangelicals awaiting the Apocalypse, Russell Jacoby’s The End of Utopia has taken the discourse on endings even farther.18 According to Jacoby, Bell was right – just premature.19 Jacoby argues that Bell’s account of the malaise of the intellectual in the face of the various triumphs of the West simply failed to prophesize the radical leanings of the 1960s. But, according to Jacoby, the present moment (1999) is the true ‘end of utopia’, and he pronounces a suitably contemporary account of doom and gloom. In what should now sound painfully familiar, Jacoby states: We are increasingly asked to choose between the status quo and something worse. Other alternatives do not seem to exist. We have entered the era of acquiescence, in which we build our lives, families, and careers with little expectation the future will diverge from the present.20

Armed with a new arsenal of geopolitical interpretations, Jacoby claims that the notion of a future that can transcend the present is dead. He engages in a calculated assault on the ‘left’ and its representative intellectual leanings. In a familiar binary of cause and effect, Jacoby declares that the death of the right caused a loss of vigilance on the part of the left.21 And in this regard, he attacks notions of ‘multiculturalism’ as a strategy of retreat by the left: since it lost the war of equity, it must be satisfied with celebrating diversity.22 He attributes this ‘loss’ to an ‘intellectual refusal to define what makes up culture’.23 In particular, Jacoby finds the fascination of Cultural Studies with the ‘everyday’ and the quotidian of ‘mass culture’ to be particularly ironic and paradoxical, especially when the field was founded by Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart to protect ‘working-class culture’ from ‘mass culture’.24 In reality, Jacoby’s ‘end of utopia’ is an attempt to identify and critique the very ‘malaise’ that Bell predicted. As such, it is no more and no less than a call for rethinking universals. And, despite his rancour, Jacoby does offer some valuable insights. Possibly the most instructive for our inquiry here into the ‘end of tradition’ is his statement: ‘It is the rootless, not the rooted who fetishize their roots’.25 In this respect, a question has much to tell about its questioner, for those engaged in a search, revival, or simply engagement of/with traditions are usually those most preoccupied with defining and redefining their position in a changing world. All four of the above ‘ends’, with their apocalyptic claims, belie a certain anxiety not 5

The End of Tradition?

only over ideology, history, the nation-state, and utopia, but also over the role of the intellectual. Most chronicle the now-fashionable disfavour for universals and nostalgically propose a tentative return to the certainty of the nineteenth century. But it remains to be seen what asking about ‘the end of tradition’ says about us. Are we the traditionless, grasping for traditional roots? Today, the events of 9/11 also necessitate a different reading of the above scholarship on endings. These events have shown that serious challenges exist to liberal democracy, both as an institution and an ideology. In particular, Ohmae’s views look woefully naïve in a post-9/11 world. State intervention, unilateral posturing, ‘nation-building’, and many other components of the supposedly dead model of the nation-state have increasingly come to the fore. And the disjunctures between U.S. imperatives and those of the international community highlight the degree to which consensus is often unachievable, especially when common sense gives way to the personal agendas of powerful national leaders. But of course, such self-interested policies were never really abandoned, despite Ohmae’s (and other’s), best attempts to tell us otherwise. Thus, the end of the nationstate, the only true threat to an ‘end of tradition in the built environment’, is no less a fallacy than that of the end of utopia, ideology, and history. Spawned as a challenge to Western hegemony, the events of 9/11 have clearly shown that the homogenizing forces of globalization are far from being a fait accompli. Indeed, serious challenges, most of which are a product of globalization itself, remain.

On tradition The above debates on endings teach us that, among other things, ‘endings’ are always contingent upon carefully circumscribed definitions. The study of ‘tradition’ has been championed by many scholars, and the lively debates that have occurred in Traditional Dwelling and Settlements Review (TDSR) and at conferences of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE) point to an open-ended definition of tradition. These studies parallel questions of what constitutes ‘tradition’, ‘culture’, and ‘ethnicity’, in fields from Architecture to Anthropology to Cultural Studies. The multiplicity of definitions of these and other mutually dependent terms makes their study all the more problematic. Surely, there are some who might argue that ‘tradition’ exists, and that it is in danger of being exterminated by contemporary forces in the name of ‘globalization’. But these arguments are generally weak, or else are invoked to preserve particularly national or regional agendas. As evidenced by the chapters of this book, tradition may more profitably be considered a foil for exploring the contested subjectivities involved in producing and/or occupying space. Thus, the tangible products of tradition are those processes by which identities are defined and refined. That said, the writing of an introduction about ‘The End of Tradition’ is no less complicated. In Keywords, Raymond Williams suggested that tradition is a particularly problematic concept because of its multifarious popular uses.26 Furthermore, he identified a correlation between the degree to which tradition is imbued with notions of ‘ceremony, 6

The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings?

duty, and respect’, and a relative lack of these qualities with the modern.27 Indeed, the uneasy relationship between the mutually dependent categories of tradition and modern makes the postulation of an end to one a de facto victory for the other – or, more earnestly, challenges the very existence of both as objective categories. The 1989 publication of Dwellings, Settlements, and Tradition marked both a great deal of excitement in the field and a reconceptualization of the approach to this subject.28 I argued at that time: . . . we are not concerned here with presenting an exhaustive view, nor with unifying terminology or agreeing on paradigms. In fact, we are seeking acceptance of the multiplicity of definitions and meanings contained in the idea of traditional dwellings and settlements. In the process of putting this book together we have tried to avoid proposing grand theories. And yet, recognizing that the worst type of research is one that is ill-defined, we did adopt some basic theoretical positions. One of these was that tradition must not be interpreted simply as the static legacy of the past but rather as a model for the dynamic reinterpretation of the present.29

In keeping with this model of dynamic reinterpretation, the book contained three chapters that proposed three different concepts of ‘tradition’. Prefacing his remarks with a comment on the ambiguity of the word tradition, Yi-Fu Tuan identified the primary component of tradition as constraint. Tuan suggested that nonliterate and folk societies are characterized by a limited number of choices, which are imposed by religious custom, available resources, local climate, etc.30 A space of constraint is a space bounded by a neatly defined culture and ecology. These constraints once resulted in a material world that, in relation to ‘our’ seemingly unlimited choices, may now appear attractive in its simplicity. Thus, ‘tradition’, as constraint, existed as the antithesis of modernity – so much so, Tuan wrote, that nostalgia for it could be explained by our postmodern anxieties for a ‘simpler’ time. But this innovative concept, while explaining tradition qualitatively, could not articulate the process by which tradition comes to be. Paul Oliver’s contribution focused on how the concept of ‘handing down’ provided the key to understanding traditional architecture and built environments. While most accounts of traditional places use the phrase ‘handed down’, Oliver suggested that we concentrate on the actual process of transmission from one generation to the next. And he proposed that we look closely at the actual methods of transmission, both oral and other, in our study of these environments. Moreover, he argued that these practices of transmission constitute what tradition is, since the material products themselves were not tradition. ‘In one sense it can be argued that there is no such thing as a traditional building, no larger field of traditional architecture. There are only buildings which embody traditions.’31 Here, tradition, as handing down, became less concrete, in comparison to Tuan’s ideas of tradition as constraint, which could be seen diagnostically as a product of culture and ecology. But these seemingly mutually exclusive conceptions of tradition still both focused on tradition as a noun. Thus Oliver, who denied the materiality of tradition, still outlined an identifiable thing that happens: transmission. Amos Rapoport’s chapter focused on our interpretation of the commonly received concept of tradition. He suggested that tradition is widely used and described but seldom 7

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defined, and is consequently pregnant with implication. Rapoport compiled these implied definitions into a ‘list of attributes’ by which one could test the degree of ‘traditionality’ in a given environment. He acknowledged that many of these attributes are mutually exclusive and/or may not fit within a given environment, but he proposed that such discrepancies are useful in and of themselves for identifying what is traditional and what is not. Individually, the chapters described above helped articulate the difficulty in defining tradition. Together, however, they outlined a new trajectory for the study of traditional environments. The other chapters in Dwellings, Settlements, and Tradition could then be considered examples of using these new approaches in studying traditional environments. One key theme that emerged from the above positions was a burgeoning selfconsciousness about the role of the researcher in the study of traditional environments – now seen by most as a dialogic process between researcher and subject. Consequently, there has been a proliferation of studies that question the role of tradition in the production of space and place. This shift in both the implied methods and subjects has resulted in much new and exciting scholarship.32

On built environments One of the main issues in studying traditional built environments has been how to resolve the issue of change in various societies, and the fact that many scholars in the field have assumed a linear history and accepted the myth of progress. There have thus been two, often antagonistic moral, positions describing such change. In a seminal article in the first year of Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Henry Glassie outlined the case for what could be considered the paternalistic view of traditional dwellings and settlements. His essay began with the assumption from which all interrogation into traditional dwellings and settlements must begin: that all architecture is the embodiment of cultural norms that pre-exist individual buildings. So defined, traditional dwellings and settlements were ‘material culture’ – the physical evidence of society. From this point, ostensibly equating in importance all built forms, Glassie continued to press a case seemingly against the merits of ‘modern’ architecture and for the vernacular. ‘True vernacular tradition is based upon participation, engagement, and egalitarian political ethic . . . [b]ut much of the connection to these forces has been lost in modern society, and thus has led to ignorance, weakening of culture, and a decline in personal empowerment’.33 Thus, Glassie established a binary – yet one he was quick to qualify. For him, ‘the Western technology called “modern” was much less a violation of the vernacular than it is an exaggeration of one impulse within the vernacular: the wish to free will from environmental conditions, the intention to set the human being righteously in the role of exploiter’.34 So, while there was a clear distinction between the modern and the vernacular, both were examples of how ‘social order cannot be disjoined from economic aspiration and ideas of the sacred, then houses cannot be understood outside their economic, political, and religious contexts, outside of their reality as cultural creations’.35 In the following year, Amos Rapoport bolstered the argument that the built 8

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environment – that is, the ‘cultural landscape’ – is always symbolic.36 As the material result of human interaction with the natural landscape, cultural landscapes provide rich raw data to study human behaviour. Rapoport claimed that ‘cultural landscapes’ ‘add-up’ because of shared traits in a given society – that is, ‘schemata’. Like Glassie, he suggested that the way vernacular or traditional settlements change, however, is different from contemporary or modern ones. In general, the persistence of clear (or strong) orders depends on conservatism, that is, the existence of tradition-oriented people unwilling (or unable) to alter that which has worked and is time-honored. As tradition weakens or disappears, so do the degree of sharing schemata and the strength of rules. The result is a reduction of clearly distinct cultural landscapes, especially at larger scales, with consequent ‘blurring’ and hence, a declining place specificity of traditional vernaculars (as opposed to the time specificity of high-style and popular design).37

Both Glassie’s and Rapoport’s contributions to the concept of tradition, particularly as it applies to built environments, emphasized the degree to which the built environment is the material realization of cultural norms. Both contributions were also predicated on certain assumptions that other contributors to TDSR began to question. In the very same issue of TDSR, Janet Abu-Lughod’s ‘Disappearing Dichotomies’ proposed a radical shift away from the paternalistic conceptualization of an endangered vernacular environment. Critiquing one of the fundamental tenets of traditional dwellings and settlements studies, Abu-Lughod suggested that (today) there is a decreasing congruence between spatial location and social formation. She suggested that the old spatial distinctions of East and West no longer make sense. And, echoing Edward Said, Abu-Lughod warned of the use and abuse of the concept of ‘tradition’ to reinforce or maintain ‘traditional’ forms of domination.38 Adapted from John Turner, she suggested thinking in terms of the present participle ‘traditioning’, so that we ‘pay more attention to the process of making houses and settlements, rather than the form or result or outcome’.39 Here, the assumptions that easily identify tradition as being from a particular place and belonging to a particular ‘ethnographic present’ were seriously questioned. Where Abu-Lughod challenged the assumptions of linking tradition to place (and even time), Dell Upton, a year later, challenged the very concept of tradition. He suggested that ‘the young field of vernacular landscape studies suffers from limitations imposed by its fundamental categories, which in turn grew out of the field’s roots in Western intellectual and aesthetic concepts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’.40 Upton suggested that ‘proceeding in a positivistic manner from a belief that the landscape has some authentic connection to a discrete population is risky and can have only limited success’.41 ‘We should turn our attention away from a search for the authentic, the characteristic, the enduring, and the pure, and immerse ourselves in the active, evanescent, and the impure, seeking settings that are ambiguous, multiple, often contested, and examining points of contact and transformation – in the market, at the edge, in the new and the decaying.’42 These views were bolstered by another contribution from Janet Abu-Lughod. In a second, later paper in the journal, she took issue with the assumptions regarding the isolation of traditional environments, and consequently their absolute representativeness. 9

The End of Tradition?

I begin with the premise that throughout history architectural forms have migrated – either along with migrations of people (the world has always been nomadic, although the current range is spectacularly wide), or with the reports of travelers who carried goods and ideas from one place to another . . . Such diffusion served a valuable function. Because humans are both imitative and adventurous, the creative impulses of builders have been strengthened and transfused by such gifts. Indeed, great architecture has always traveled, interbred, and synergized. In the process of its transmission, changes have been integrated with existent forms, thus ‘becoming’ the transformed ‘tradition’.43

Abu-Lughod then asked if there is anything different about this process today. In response, she offered the historical anomaly of colonialism as an event which significantly altered the natural course of selection and diffusion of architectural norms and forms. She went on to comment on the ‘sheer cacophony of postmodernity’, rejecting the argument that it might pose a ‘threat to coherence and authenticity’, because that would deny the possibility ‘that truly great and innovative art forms can be generated by incorporating the traditions of others’.44 Later, I would expand on the above notions of deterritorialization of identity and place by addressing the phenomena of globalization.45 I proposed four historic phases, each corresponding to a particular kind of norm regarding the production of space. During the ‘Insular Period’, characterized by the indigenous vernacular, architectural production was largely determined by local forces. This changed during the ‘Colonial Period’, which could be characterized by a ‘hybridity’ of core and peripheral styles.46 Both sites were irreparably altered in an unequally representative synergy, but indigenous forms were particularly changed. The third period was that of ‘Independence and Nation-Building’, characterized by the modern and pseudo/modern.47 Here the influences of modernism coupled with the imperatives of nation-building to produce a proliferation of ‘invented traditions’, often with the expressed intent of exporting the illusion of social cohesion to a global audience. In the last phase, that of ‘Globalization’, I predicted that while settlements are likely to become homogenized, their inhabitants are likely to demonstrate rising levels of awareness of the ethnic, religious, and racial associations of the subcommunities within which they exist. I concluded that identity and tradition, in the era of globalization, are likely to become less rooted in place and more informationally based. Recently, Dell Upton articulated a trenchant indictment of the modern/tradition binary. In ‘Authentic Anxieties’ he stated: ‘the adjectives traditional and modern are themselves artifacts of modernity: tradition did not exist until it was imagined as the defining complement of modernity’.48 Focusing on the dichotomous pair of ‘authentic and inauthentic’, he then claimed that the concept of tradition has served as a mirror for the anxiety that ‘arises from the fear that modern life is by its nature inauthentic – even counterfeit or spurious’.49 [Scholars of tradition] too often leave unchallenged the notions of tradition as a definable, hence commodifiable, entity, and of authenticity as a testable and desirable quality of tradition. Implicitly or explicitly, they assume the defense of tradition and authenticity against modernity and artificiality . . . Thus the attempt to deconstruct the discourse of modernity becomes simply an example of that discourse, betraying a continued allegiance to modernity that flourishes in the so-called postmodern age.50 10

The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings?

Clearly, for Upton, any instance when ‘tradition’ is invoked requires as much scrutiny as the supposed tradition itself. In my chapter in the edited volume Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage I next looked at the ‘new dynamics of relocalization’.51 Through the lens of tourism, I problematized many of the assumptions regarding tradition and heritage and showed how built environments are often packaged and sold in a global economy of image consumption. Significantly, I argued that value judgments associated with the ‘authenticity’ of traditional environments should be jettisoned because they are predicated on a false dichotomy of traditional versus modern. The book helped dispel the assumption that tradition is always the ‘authentic’ product of a group of people, and proposed that tradition can also be catalogued, packaged, imagined, and sold. But I also argued that despite their increasing consumption by tourists, traditional places remain places where real people live, and where real conflicts may arise. But in these places ‘tradition’, as a frame of reference, is becoming fundamentally dis-located; indeed, we can no longer consider the physical or the authentic to be a safe point of reference when looking at urbanism. In another chapter in an edited book that year (2001) I then explored what I called ‘Third Place’. Building upon the postcolonial connotation generated by Homi Bhabha, I attempted to ‘spatialize’ this reworking of the received binaries of identity politics. Within such a schema, I considered Third Place to encompass the reinterpretation of the politics of spatial production in a globalized world. Specifically, I pointed out that space and place are not entirely local phenomena and need to be reconsidered in the context of contemporary ‘flows’ of people, goods, and information. ‘Globalization has made the very issues of identity and representation in urbanism cumbersome.’52 Because I argued that culture has become increasingly placeless, I wrote that urbanism will continue to be an arena where one can observe the specificity of local cultures and their attempts to mediate global domination.53 Thus, the local remains the stage for the drama of identity to be played out; however, assumptions regarding the actors themselves have become increasingly problematic. The same, of course, can be said for tradition. Linking tradition and identity to place has become equally problematic, especially as the various ‘scapes’ of Arjun Appadurai multiply.54 The assumption that hybrid environments simply accommodate or encourage pluralistic tendencies or multicultural practices should be turned on its head. Hybrid people do not always create hybrid places, and hybrid places do not always accommodate hybrid people. All that can be hoped for at the beginning of the twenty-first century then are environments that harbour the potential for growth and change, and for peoples who may find the possibility of adapting and adopting otherness as a legitimate form of self-identification.55 Is this, then, the ‘end of tradition’? All this emphasis on the re-evaluation of tradition, its role in the production of environments, its relative efficacy of transmission, its demise in the face of globalization, etc., certainly does suggest its possible ‘end’. Indeed, if tradition is merely the dialectical fabrication of modernity, then its objective reality is seriously in peril. Does not the end of tradition as an object of inquiry suggest the end of tradition as an objective reality? 11

The End of Tradition?

Fortunately, as stated above, the end of tradition does not entail the death of tradition itself, only an end to our conception of it – and the emergence of a need to re-evaluate its utility as a repository of authentic (and hence valuable) ideas to be handed down or preserved. Indeed, many of the commonly received assumptions regarding tradition have recently been revised or jettisoned completely. For example, the notion that tradition must be associated with place and is specific to a certain group of people has been significantly modified by scholarship on globalization in fields from Anthropology to Geography. The implication of isolation and rootedness fostered by earlier work on tradition has also been significantly challenged. As many authors, including the contributors to this volume, have shown, modernity’s complicity in locating and defining tradition makes its invocation altogether suspect. These suspicions, however, warrant more scholarship to uncover the relationship between tradition and modernity.

Traditions of the modern In Part I of this book, the contributors explore the ways in which the terms ‘tradition’ and ‘modern’ have come to be inextricably linked. All three chapters seek to think in and through this dualism, revealing its geopolitical implications while presenting intellectual alternatives. In this sense, these chapters logically build upon the themes explored in TDSR and seek to problematize the very assumptions associated with the study of tradition. It is worth noting that instead of proclaiming an end to a seriously challenged concept, each author establishes tradition as an entirely new exploratory device – albeit in differing ways. In her chapter ‘Tradition is (not) Modern: Deterritorializing Globalization’, Jane M. Jacobs makes several important points as to the role of tradition in an era of globalization. She starts by arguing that tradition has indeed been brought into being by modernity’s own imaginary. But she notes that rather than doing away with tradition, under globalization, tradition has been reshaped and enlivened in a range of unexpected ways. Globalization has thus delivered new conditions for the re-emergence of tradition, installed new mechanisms for its transference, and brought into being new political imperatives for its performance. Under these conditions, Jacobs believes that it is useful to think about tradition and modernity as a vibrating couplet, where the terms are both co-dependent and mutually exclusive. She presents this as a formula: ‘tradition is (not) modern’. To illustrate this theme, Jacobs presents a case study of the emergence of an ‘Aboriginal architecture’ in Australia. During the 1990s in order to meet tourists’ desire to experience this aspect of Australia, a number of architectural elements were inserted into the design of hotels and interpretation and cultural centres to express what might be described as Aboriginal identity. This new architecture was not simply imposed upon indigenous communities; nor did it simply appropriate, willy-nilly, aspects of their culture. Instead, architects were actively commissioned by local Aboriginal communities to design buildings in consultation with appropriate traditional custodians. The projects were also approved by the broader community, and continued to retain Aboriginal input in their 12

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management and functioning. In other words, despite how one might judge the formal features of such architecture – whether as authentic or appropriative, innovative or kitsch – the structure of authorization conformed to the structure of tradition. For Jacobs, this provides a powerful example of the circulation of tradition through modern structures. In particular, the new architectural collaborations offered novel ways to perform traditional authority. Furthermore, it was under the global deterritorializations of tourism that the traditional structure of authorization could be extended to new ways of dwelling, to new kinds of built form, and to emergent architectural styles. In ‘The Tradition of the End: Global Capitalism and the Contemporary Spaces of Apocalypse’, Katharyne Mitchell offers an account of the shifting conceptions of the apocalypse in the era of capitalist globalization, and particularly how they relate to conceptions of the city. While in the Book of Revelation, the city of hyperproductivity and conspicuous consumption was considered sinful, Mitchell argues that such negative associations have been reversed in contemporary neoliberal thinking, so that ‘profitmaking in the limitless spaces of the new global community becomes something holy, becomes the New Jerusalem’. She highlights the paradox that such a neoliberal utopia may simultaneously still be considered a harbinger of the Apocalypse. Here the neoliberal position would celebrate the end of tradition as an end to barriers and the beginning of the complete freedom of movement of capital. For neoliberal thinkers like Fukuyama, the current apocalypse is also the present utopia. But for those who see the spaces of economic globalization under the condition of late capitalism as affecting human society negatively, this apocalypse is a form of further alienation. Here arises the question: how can we imagine the spaces of utopia in an interdependent world, without either duplicating the logic of late capitalism, or resorting to tyrannical and ill-conceived closures of various kinds, as seems simultaneously to happen in different parts of the world? Mitchell recognizes that the city of ‘Babylon’ is no longer only Rome, but also Cairo and London, Sao Paolo, and Los Angeles. For her, these are the sites of our future utopias. She calls upon us, citing the contemporary work of David Harvey, to reclaim these spaces as a way of contesting the apocalyptic visions and spaceless utopias, which ‘front for the imagined communities of global capitalism’. In the chapter ‘Nostalgias of the Modern’, Ananya Roy then completes the first section of the book by presenting the end of tradition as the end of traditional ways of thinking about tradition. Arguing that tradition cannot be understood as having authentic or intrinsic value, she states that the practices of valuation associated with consumption give value to tradition. In other words, the consumption of tradition is the production of tradition. But consumed in what ways? Roy makes note of two different systems of valuation and meaning. The first, which she calls ‘dwelling’, is concerned with authenticity, and often seeks to recover authentic traditions through narratives of nostalgia. As in neotraditional design movements, this nostalgia is often formalized in the form of heritage. For Roy, a second and quite different system of valuation and meaning is ‘performing’. She sees performing as making explicit the consumption of tradition, of 13

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involving inauthentic practices such as borrowing and mimicking, and therefore unsettling the fixed relationship between tradition and place. Roy presents two sets of examples to discuss her ideas of dwelling and performing. In each, she is as concerned with tradition as she is with the modern, for she argues that the two concepts are tightly linked. Taking on the theme of the world-as-exhibition, Roy then examines various nineteenth-century discourses of the Crystal Palace. Contrasting the anxious and critical interpretation of the ‘crystal edifice’ by Dostoevsky with the upstart arrogance of Walt Whitman, she shows how this moment of modernity was constituted through the dualities of development and underdevelopment, of progress and backwardness. She then moves her focus to twentieth-century world exhibitions, in this case comparing the clumsy cardboard Eiffel Tower of the Calcutta book fair, located at the margins of globalization, with the global grandeur of Las Vegas’s Paris Casino. However, she unsettles these dualities by arguing that, in such forms of mimicry, it is impossible to judge representation against any original reality. The original Eiffel Tower was itself a gateway to a world exhibition, to the city as theme park. The study of such displacements, of the performance of the Eiffel Tower in different world locations, allows Roy to point to the multiplicity of the modern. She argues that this is much more than simply the modern taking on different meanings in different places. Indeed, it is that difference which lies at the very heart of the modern. Tradition, she notes, is often the distillation of this difference. By turning to French colonialism in North Africa, she shows how colonial modernity preserved and managed this difference as tradition. But she also discusses how such dualities – of tradition and modern, of native Casbah and modern city, were undermined by independence struggles. Drawing upon the example of the battle of Algiers (in both historical and cinematic genres) she points out the ways in which the veil, a symbol of tradition, was strategically deployed to negotiate the cordon sanitaire, and wage battle against the French. Algerian women, by shedding the veil, took on the guise of French women; Algerian men, by donning the veil, took on a gendered disguise. And yet Roy warns that such forms of performance cannot always be understood as subversion. They are often ‘compulsory’ performances, and often replicate structures of power through the performance. She makes note of how, while Algerian women had so creatively performed tradition in the context of colonialism, with independence, they were subject to purist interpretations of tradition that severely circumscribed their freedoms. They were expected to dwell in the prescribed spaces of home and nation. In her closing section, Roy points out that by paying attention to performance it becomes possible to think about the inauthenticity of tradition and the multiplicity of the modern. For her, then, the ‘post’ – as in postmodern or post-tradition – is not a new historical phase but rather a surplus or an excess that has always existed within the original terms: modern, tradition, urban, colonial. She closes on the note that this surplus is one that is often experienced through geographical displacements, through movements in and across space, in the web of flows through which colonialism and postcolonialism are constituted. Geography then is inherently political: it can be the stasis and fixity of dwelling, or it can be disruptive, and even subversive. 14

The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings?

The contributions of Jacobs, Mitchell, and Roy successfully problematize any preconceived notions of tradition, squarely placing it within the rubric of modernity, and offering insight into its persistent utility in the study of the built environment. While the material reality of tradition as an authentic expression of an isolated and culturally homogeneous group may be in doubt, it is still useful in identifying instances of difference and resistance, manifestations and aspirations of utopia, and the tropes of competing subject positions, respectively. Thus, ‘traditions of the modern’ are situational and relational, and while predicated on the ‘end’ of previous preconceived notions of tradition, they constitute expressions of tradition nonetheless.

Invented landscapes These new traditions, however, contain some attributes that are at odds with the earlier definition of tradition. One of the most glaring is an increasing self-consciousness of invention. Beginning with Hobsbawm and Ranger in 1983, the ‘invention of tradition’ has been well articulated as a critical theme. The contributors to Part II now further chronicle how traditions are identified, manufactured, packaged, and deployed. Here ‘tradition’ becomes the rhetoric for both inclusion and exclusion, and is explicitly dissected as the product of particular vested interests’ aspirations to capital accumulation. In each of the examined ‘invented’ landscapes, tradition is the trope of cohesion. If tradition is a process of invention, then clearly one of the most appropriate places to study it is in the making of landscapes and landscape myths. In his chapter ‘Nature and Tradition at the Border: Landscaping the End of the Nation-State’, Matthew Sparke examines the notion of Cascadia, an idealized transnational space on the Pacific Coast of North America. Sparke invokes the concept of ‘enframing’ as formulated by Timothy Mitchell in an account of how nineteenth- and early-twentieth century colonialism in Egypt, by employing modern planning and building design, managed to embody and diffuse a set of powerful distinctions between the lived world and an ordered, underlying abstract space. Thus, in Egypt, the ‘traditional’ could be remade as ‘modern’ by dismissing all that was considered chaotic and unruly in contemporary life. The Cascadian case is far simpler, Sparke points out, because there are fewer macroscale issues. Indeed, the work of enframing can be accomplished simply with images like those reprinted in a coffee-table book. But at its core this is still nothing more than ‘a semiotic attempt to make such an order seem a natural destiny by enframing at a visual level what is not being enframed by actual political, economic, and sociological developments on the ground’. Nevertheless, the sense of an underlying Cascadian crossborder space is evoked in a putatively postcolonial gesture of emergent, incomplete, and aspirational inventiveness. Sparke then explores the production of Cascadia as a postnational form of locality using the prism of Appadurai’s five disjunctive ‘scapes’. While agreeing with Appadurai that there are fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics to which we need to attend, Sparke also maintains that certain reterritorializing forces tie the 15

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various cross-border visions together. In terms of ideoscapes, Sparke finds that while there remain certain contradictions between the ecological and economic visions of Cascadia, the two are nonetheless closely related. Thus, where bioregionalists like McCloskey see in the transboundary space a harmonious ecosystem that needs to be liberated from the disciplinary apparatus of two industrial nation-states, the promoters of the economic vision likewise see a harmonious region divided by an unnatural border to the free market. However, in terms of financescapes, Sparke argues that such deregulated global financial flows are far more destabilizing than even Appadurai allows. Promoters of Cascadia claim that ‘gold’ may be found in a future landscape of high-tech investment and growth. But Sparke warns that the same future could be ‘a bubble destined to burst’. Sparke goes on to examine Appadurai’s notions of mediascape and technoscape. Appadurai has written that contemporary electronic communications and media technologies have the power to create new solidarities through deterritorialized webs of communication that subvert exclusive nationalisms and their associated power structures. But Sparke suggests that the campaign to promote Cascadia calls these idealistic claims into question. In Cascadia, such mediascaping and technoscaping merely embody the desire of local promoters of neoliberal reterritorialization to develop revenues ‘out of the fantastic objects of postnationalism’. Finally, Sparke addresses Appadurai’s notion of ethnoscapes. For Appadurai these are comprised of the moving peoples who in turn constitute the liberatory promise of the postnational public sphere. But for Sparke, the emancipatory possibilities of the Cascadia ethnoscape ‘stem less from a postnationalism than from a multinationalism’. As evidence, he points to the postnational-cum-multinational call to First Nations to work together across a border drawn by colonialists. For him, this call is ‘a reterritorialization which moves beyond the nation-states of today, not by creating a transnational ethnoscape of postcolonial movement, but by reclaiming an ethnoscape of precolonialism, an ethnoscape of native space that existed before the first round of modern territorialization even took place’. Sparke’s study of the excessive and inauthentic enframing of Cascadia shows how dependent the present ‘borderless-world’ discourse is on geography, and how dependent postmodern gestures of regional invention are on modernist strategies for bounding space with maps and exhibitionary views of people and place. However, Sparke concludes that there are always opportunities for other traditions to be fashioned in postnational space – ones that can replace the territories of the nation-state with a more just and environmentally responsible geography of the future. While Sparke maintains that the neoliberal ideoscape of Cascadia effectively overdetermines the other promotional landscapings of the region, he also believes that this promotional effort has not completely co-opted and erased other more radically disjunctive regional forces. This view is also held by Robert Mugerauer. In his chapter, ‘The Tensed Embrace of Tourism and Traditional Environments: Exclusionary Practices in Cancún, Cuba, and Southern Florida’, he observes how global mass-tourism is often blamed for bringing about the end of traditions by consuming and destroying natural environments, unsettling 16

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local ways of life, and threatening traditional values. As an alternative, Mugerauer points to the many groups that now advocate ‘ecotourism’. The goals of these groups often include minimizing environmental damage through low-impact practices, sustaining local ways of life by promoting the use of ‘simple accommodations built of traditional materials by local people’, and advancing the economies and cultures of areas they visit through the ‘use of as many local materials, products, and people as possible’. However, in his chapter, Mugerauer provides a more complicated picture of the impacts of mass-tourism and ecotourism through three case studies: of south Florida, of Cancún, and of Cuba. He maintains that south Florida offers little of interest to ecotourism since its existing natural and cultural environments, mainly based on citrus growing, are neither exotic enough to lure ecotourists nor aesthetically/physically attractive enough to entice activity tourists. Instead, the Disney Company has created a huge tourist enclave, with a classically separated service sector that is not only physically distinct from the tourist zone and the surrounding agricultural realm, but also socially segregated from them. In Cancún, Mugerauer then shows how the focus of tourism activity has recently changed. Originally, tourists were principally attracted to the area by its beaches. But a shift to such new tourist activities as water skiing and windsurfing has now led to the construction of new facilities along the inner lagoons. Simultaneously, a fear of spending too much time in the sun has stimulated shopping and restaurant patronage. As a result, formerly bypassed lagoons and service areas have today become important commercial and tourist destinations. The region has also shifted its promotional focus to capitalize on the popularity of outdoor activity and ecotourism. Some new ventures, such as swimming through the underground river-cenote trail south of Cancún, might qualify as ecotourism. But many others, such as swimming with and petting dolphins, fall within the bounds of traditionally packaged nature experiences. With its exceptionally high-quality and well-preserved natural environment, Mugerauer suggests that Cuba has the greatest potential as a setting for ecotourism. At the moment, Cuba is experiencing a mixture of economic and social impacts as a result of increased hard currency flows from international tourism. On the one hand, these flows have benefited the overall regional economy and improved conditions for many local people. On the other, the introduction of a second, U.S.-dollar economy, and the attempts to limit it to those sectors of the population serving the tourist trade, have been problematic in a country that still advocates social equity. While the criticisms of mass-tourism are valid, Mugerauer then argues that ecotourism is not without problems. For example, ecotourism may deprive local people of access to environments when they are ‘set aside for international tourists (including conservation groups) and removed from the traditional patterns of hunting, fishing, farming, religious, and other uses . . .’. Yet he is not totally pessimistic about the future of tourism. He claims that both forms of tourism may potentially protect or support traditional environments and local cultural practices. But tourism needs to be evaluated not only in terms of a broad critique of the dominant mode of capitalist social constitution, ‘but in terms of the open possibilities and the need for active resistance . . .’ to the stratification and 17

The End of Tradition?

displacement that are always going to result from a capitalist value system. Overall, Mugerauer believes it is no longer possible simply to retreat into isolation, since the only hope for the self-development of nations and communities is the reinstrumentalization of tourism for their own benefit. If Mugerauer’s cases of Cuba, Cancún, and south Florida expose the dangers of embracing tourism while also attempting to resist it, Clara Irazábal’s case-study examination of Curitiba, Brazil, reveals the risks and possibilities of tourism development from another perspective. In ‘Architecture and the Production of Postcard Images: Invocations of Tradition Versus Critical Transnationalism in Curitiba’, Irazábal explores the theming of vernacular settings, a contemporary worldwide trend involving the invention and consumption of tradition in the built environment. In the last two decades, she reports, as part of a calculated strategy of self-promotion, the government of Curitiba has dotted the city with foreign-style landmarks, mostly based on selective samples of European architectural traditions. The landmarks have sought to exploit the heritage of the city’s different ethnic communities to construct a cosmopolitan, international image. But for Irazábal, such new constructions as the Polish, Italian, and German parks have merely created the Brazilian version of Epcot Center, the section of Disneyworld where a pedestrian loop connects the pavilions of eight nations. Yet Curitiba’s claims are even more inflated than Epcot’s, she argues. At Epcot, one is explicitly invited to enter a ‘Magic Kingdom’. But, in Curitiba the urban spaces and monuments created are supposedly the genuine expressions of ethnic groups with claims on the city’s past and present. As a result, Curitiba’s public building campaign may actually alter contemporary power struggles in the city. In fact, despite being officially presented (and superficially accepted by some residents and visitors) as a celebration of diversity and rich heritage, Irazábal reveals how these stage-set landmarks actually work as mechanisms of exclusion. The decisions as to who gets represented and who does not are deliberately made by a governing elite, targeting both resident groups with cultural and economic power in the city and potentially desirable visitors, tourists, and eventual investors. Only lately have some other ethnic groups, such as the city’s Chinese population, managed to approach the government to bargain for a space and monument to represent them. Rather than signalling the end of tradition, Irazábal claims that the creation of these ethnic memorials re-enacts a singular process of ‘inventing’ tradition, which defines a future through the editing and reconstruction of the past. As an alternative approach, she proposes ‘critical transnationalism’ as a way for cities like Curitiba to re-create themselves in the present era of globalization. To do so, she reworks the notion of critical regionalism, widely established in the realms of architecture and urbanism, to reflect current theoretical discourse on spatial and cultural globalization. Irazábal employs the term ‘glocalization’, as opposed to globalization, to recollect the hybrid, fluxional, and as-yet-not-fullyunderstood relationship between the local and the global environments. Her choice of the term ‘critical transnationalism’ also emphasizes the importance of a critical attitude for the conscious articulation of the global and local in the creation of architecture and urbanism. If critical-regional architecture, as advocated by Tzonis and Lefaivre, is an architecture that 18

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redefines itself through the defamiliarization of regional elements, Irazábal proposes a critical-transnational architecture which redefines itself through the defamiliarization of glocal elements and a creative proposal of their reconnection. Through an investigation of such other city building projects as its Unilivre and City Memorial, she then argues that critical-transnational design practices have the potential to become instrumental in allowing glocalities to overcome the homogenizing forces of globalization. In all these instances, the spectacle of history is aestheticized and naturalized in the complex and dynamic interplay between the postmodern and the traditional. The authors in Part II not only examine the multiple dimensions and trajectories of the interplay, but also reveal the subtle process in which diverse groups attempt variously to employ the interstice it has created for active resistance and assert the possibilities of alternative traditions and environments. Thus, the invented landscape is inherently incomplete, for it is predicated on the successful deployment of an invented tradition. As the contributors to Part II demonstrate, this process is inevitably a failure, for such deployments are inherently messy and bear the vestiges of the competing traditions they seek to exclude. Thus, the increasing self-consciousness of tradition is also increasingly visible. This fact is further clarified by the chapters of Part III.

Programmes of tradition In many ways, tradition is a regime, programmed and policed. The chapters in Part III show how tradition is deployed, resisted, and reworked through hegemonic struggles that seek to create both built environments and citizen-subjects. Building on themes of a complicit modernity and invention, this section stresses the role of the state in identifying, manufacturing, and mediating tradition. Here the institutionalized ‘end’ of tradition may beget curious remanifestations of tradition. As shall be shown, traditions may persist and grow, albeit in unanticipated and unexpected ways. Furthermore, the contributions in this section simultaneously challenge and enrich debates regarding the correlation between built form and identity. In her chapter ‘Tradition as a Means to the End of Tradition: Fascist-Era “New Towns” in Italy’, Mia Fuller examines farmhouses built by the Italian Fascist regime during its last decade as an unusual instance of the simultaneous naming and dismantling of tradition. On the one hand, the designs for these farmsteads were rhetorically saturated with allusions to ‘traditions’ of rural life; and in this sense, they were unlike Fascist designs for housing in the industrial towns. But on the other hand, the government carefully reconfigured ‘tradition’ so that settlers’ houses appeared regionally ‘neutral’, and yet generically ‘traditional’ enough to make the settlers’ adaptation to local life as unproblematic as possible. If the lack of added regional character and the loss of familiar traits were dissatisfying to settlers, this neutral, generic new housing aligned well with the Fascist government’s desire: that Italians behave more like, or look more like, nationminded citizens than like people whose regional and local identities came first, and whose nationality seemed more like an afterthought. Ultimately, this reinvention of tradition 19

The End of Tradition?

helped cloak the Fascist regime’s intensely modern reach for control of Italians’ political and economic lives. In this juxtaposition of the semblance of architectural traditionality with modern, totalizing agendas, Fuller argues, the appearance of traditionality directly supported the undermining of traditional life and political institutions. Her chapter offers an instance of invoking old traditions in invented new ways to put an end to living traditions that do not meet the political aspirations of a state. It is provides a good example of what happens when a state becomes the guardian of tradition or possesses the authority to define it. In the chapter ‘Cultural Identity and Architectural Image in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town’, Fabio Todeschini and Derek Japha tell a fascinating story of the conservation of Bo-Kaap, a residential enclave on the fringe of the Cape Town city centre. While Bo-Kaap had long been home to the poor of various backgrounds, the notion of a united ‘Malay’ community was constructed there during the first half of the twentieth century. Using this newly invented identity, cultural conservationists such as Du Plessis could blame the supposed social ills of the area not on poverty in general but on the presence of natives and other undesirables. Thus, the conservation of Bo-Kaap involved not just the preservation of ‘Malay’ architecture but also reconstitution of a ‘diluted Malay community’ into an ethnically pure neighbourhood. On the one hand, Todeschini and Japha show how this restoration effort subtly changed the landscape of Bo-Kaap by privileging the flat-roofed house, with its supposedly Eastern character, to capture an idealized image of ‘Malay’ exoticism. On the other, they illustrate how the conservation project also involved the removal of ‘disqualified persons’ from the neighbourhood, and a search for suitable ‘Malays’ to move to the ‘Malay Quarter’. Since the capacity to execute the restoration programme was tied to funding and affordability, the latter meant not just persons who were ‘Malay’, but those who fell within the income guidelines accepted by the National Housing Commission for statesubsidized housing. This involved a stipulation in 1957 under the Group Areas Act (which in 1950 had created the legislative framework for the connection of space and ethnicity) mandating that by 1962 no person other than a designated ‘Malay’ could own property in the neighbourhood. These interventions eventually resulted in a physical and social fabric that matched the rewritten social history, but was far more homogeneous than the actual character of the neighbourhood had ever been. Today, according to Todeschini and Japha, with the Group Areas Act repealed and houses in Bo-Kaap for sale on the open market, good views, proximity to town, and quaint charm have made the area attractive to wealthy buyers, many of whom are not Malay. But such gentrification has brought new pressures and twists to this story of conservation. For example, many Bo-Kaap residents now claim, as did Du Plessis half a century ago, that the influx of newcomers is destroying the social fabric of the area. Where Todeschini and Japha highlight the role of the state and certain ‘enlightened individuals’ in the creation and preservation of a ‘Malay’ architectural idiom in South Africa, Duanfang Lu next identifies the persistence of the wall as a building typology in contemporary China through successive political changes and despite state condemnation. In ‘The Latency of Tradition’, Lu describes the transformation from ‘City Wall’ to ‘Unit 20

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Wall’ as a progression of symbolic importance from one regime of power to the next, which challenges notions of cultural homogenization purported to be associated with the ‘triumph of capitalist democracy’. Lu’s chapter starts with a discussion of the ideas of tradition and history put forth by Freud in his book Moses and Monotheism. She points out that by conceiving of the past as being constantly contained in the present, Freud’s formulation provides a way of circumventing the progressive view of history embodied in modernist thinking. For Lu, tradition is not ‘simply a “not-yet” waiting to be turned into a “now”; instead, it shares with modernity the same “now”, the same responsibilities for making the lived ground, and the same potential to shape the future’. To illustrate her point, Lu provides a case study of the making and unmaking of the wall-building tradition in China. Historically, China was a society of walls, with the physical structure of Beijing typifying this model. According to Lu, upon consolidation of socialist control in 1949, many people eagerly identified themselves with modernity. But since their lives were constrained by a host of barriers, ‘tradition became the offensive odour that one . . . could not wait to escape’. Such thinking was quickly turned toward the city wall. While it used to be the most important symbol of the city, its utility was now called into question. As the new government struggled to create a material reality commensurate with their ethical aims, city walls came to be seen as representing the old society, and were officially condemned. Such old walls also provided a much-needed source of raw materials to transform the city into a new socialist image. Yet, while one era of city wallbuilding in Chinese culture was ending, a new one was beginning. Lu states that by the mid-1960s, work units, the self-contained and largely self-sufficient entities peculiar to Chinese socialism, were building walls to address security concerns and define their territories. Thus the wall was resurrected as a functional and symbolic element in a newly socialist Chinese landscape. Beginning in 1978, China began the gradual change from a planned economy to a market economy. And in her final section, Lu points out how the present campaign to rebuild city walls is a particularly ironic emblem of the present reform era. As Beijing’s resources were redirected toward tourism and the service industries, a regretful city government acknowledged that the demolition of the old city walls was short-sighted, and a mile-long segment of the city wall was re-erected. In contrast, the walled work unit compound is now considered to be a barrier to the new economy and social life. Yet due to increased crime and social instability, the importance of walls has not decreased; instead, the need for walls has been strengthened, and the work unit’s wall-building tradition is now being emulated by new private office complexes and residential enclaves. Lu argues that this history of walls, ‘rather than representing a series of events unfolding progressively through time, is actually a case of dynamic repetition’. She points out that some traditions may be repressed temporarily during periods of political and social change. Yet, like the traumatic experience in Freud’s account, ‘after a latency period, these traditions may resurrect themselves under new conditions, and once again actively participate in shaping, for better or worse, distinctive presents’. Therefore, while 21

The End of Tradition?

scholars like Fukuyama consider that a period of quiet has currently descended on history after the passing of a storm of revolutions, Lu suggests that ‘the debris that has been smashed by the previous storm is more than just a residue: it holds the potential to bring about another storm’. In the final chapter in Part III, ‘Seizing Locality in Jerusalem’, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan examines the construction projects of Israelizing Jerusalem after the 1967 War. If the symbols of the conqueror were the cubical, ordered housing blocks of pre-1967 West Jerusalem, and the symbols of the conquered were the historic stone buildings of the Old City, then the post-1967 architecture seemed to absorb the symbols of the conquered rather than those of the conqueror. To explore this bewildering phenomenon, NitzanShiftan traces its roots in the cultural and professional formation of architects. During the 1960s and 1970s, the architects who were entrusted with the national mandate of Israelizing Jerusalem found themselves inextricably bound up in developing crises about modernism. At the same time that architects worldwide were questioning the premises of the Modern Movement in architecture, Israelis were becoming more vocal in challenging the modernization project of Labor Zionism, which had campaigned for decades for ‘progress and development’. This twofold crisis resulted in critiques of both architectural and Zionist modernisms among Israeli-born architects, who turned for an alternative to the Palestinian vernacular, which had fascinated them for a decade. However, the wellmeaning desire to adopt architectural forms of another nation eventually also helped inscribe the contested city with an Israeli character. In fact, as Nitzan-Shiftan points out, the very localities that Israeli artists and architects came to identify as points of connectedness to place were exactly those places that most embodied the pain and alienation of their former Palestinian inhabitants. Eventually, Nitzan-Shiftan argues, ‘the efforts of Israeli architects to crack the Palestinian code for local habitation on unequal political grounds diverted their focus on the structuralist Man of post-World War II architectural culture away from its humanistic path, depriving other men of the symbolic ownership of their built heritage’. Nitzan-Shiftan’s chapter provides a convincing example of what happened when the political ideology of Zionism attempted to define a future with no past, only to find out that on the ground this was impossible. As the chapters in Part III clearly demonstrate, the ‘end’ of a tradition far from marks its demise. Indeed, through careful scholarship one can identify acute patterns of cultural persistence despite a regime of power’s best efforts to do otherwise. Thus, the efficacy of state manipulation of the built environment is cast in a particularly questionable light. It is only in the case of extremely authoritarian regimes (such as Fascist Italy) that such a project can be considered successful. Clearly, the ‘end of (one) tradition’ often marks the beginning of another.

On the end of tradition So far, two opposite concepts of tradition appear salient in the general debates. The first privileges national culture and continuity; the second stresses the absence of choice. Yet in 22

The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings?

a sense, both positions may be challenged by Benedict Anderson’s idea of ‘imagined communities’, and by Hobsbawm’s and Ranger’s notion regarding all tradition being invented. More recently, the emergence of the idea of a global cultural supermarket has cast further doubt on the legitimacy of tradition as a stable frame of reference. According to Gordon Mathews, the earlier idea of culture as ‘the way of life of a people’ should be combined with a more contemporary concept of culture as ‘the information and identities available from the global cultural supermarket’. This is to say, roughly speaking, that in a global era it is necessary to adopt a view of culture that is equally shaped by both the state and the market.56 Tradition, like culture, has now, at least for some, become a matter of choice, because both information and alternative identities are now available in this global supermarket. Today, tradition should also be viewed as the arena of mediation between the hegemony of national or local culture and the exercise of choice by some members or groups of that society. According to a Hong Kong newspaper article, for instance, when a reporter asked members of a motorcycle gang in China why they were obsessed by Harley Davidsons and the American dream of freedom, he was told, ‘Cultures . . . are like the dishes on a table. You just pick up what you like’.57 People all over the globe increasingly identify with more than one tradition, as they do with more than one identity. Tradition, therefore, has become a global hyphen. If people today identify themselves as AmericanAfricans, Arab-Muslim, or Chinese-Indonesians, then tradition must be accepted as equally hyphenated. With the rising power of civil, local, and military groups, tradition is no longer fundamentally mediated mainly or only by the state. Similarly, the cultural landscape of so-called ‘traditional’ societies in a media-crazed world is becoming as much manipulated by the cultural and material global supermarket as by state or society. But this does not apply to all situations. For example, ethnic or minority groups, oppressed or otherwise, may defy this pattern. Indeed, the traditions that shape their cultural landscapes are often moulded by two additional factors: practical resistance against the dominant majority culture, and their allegiance to a community identity that may be more important than their national or state identity. So it would seem that what has ended, in the end, is not tradition itself, but the idea of tradition as a harbinger of authenticity, and as a container of specific cultural meaning. What has ended is not tradition, but tradition as a place-based, temporally situated concept; as a static authoritative legacy; and as a heritage owned by certain groups of people. We must recognize that what lasts in tradition today is the ‘transient, the fleeting, the contingent’, because that is the new way to find ‘the eternal and the immutable’.58 We should take the position that ‘fashion is not innocent of history . . . [and in fact] it continually scavenges the past for props, masks, and costumes’.59 Ultimately, not only does the distinction between the fake and real become meaningless, but also the simulation may become the real in and of itself. Tradition is not dead either. What is dying is tradition revered as authenticity. Tradition is no longer found only in ‘real’ places; it lives on in the most fake of all places, where it is reborn everyday in the social practice of those who inhabit what used to be the space of fakery. Thus, the recent collapse of the Old Man of the Mountain, a natural rock 23

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formation at Franconia Notch State Park in New Hampshire has led to an intense and lively debate on the importance of this symbol and how and whether to resurrect it. For a century the Old Man was the State’s symbol. It was reproduced on license plates, the State letterhead, and even on a quarter dollar coin issued by the U.S. government. But following the collapse of the Old Man, the State government announced that May 10, 2003, would be Family Remembrance Day, and it invited families to ‘visit Franconia Notch and reflect on what the Old Man of the Mountain has meant to people young and old’.60 Ever since, people have expressed support for the reconstruction of the Old Man. But whatever the final form of its resurrection, this will not be the original or authentic Old Man. Does that really matter? As the Boston Globe reported: ‘the lore of the Old Man has only been enhanced by the history-making geological event that brought him down’.61 Thus, the tradition that the Old Man of the Mountain stood for in New Hampshire will not only continue after its collapse, but will also be modified with practices that its collapse has put into motion. Another interesting story that may be appropriate to mention has to do with New York, the quintessential American city, and its Times Square. In the 1990s Rudolph Giuliani took over the mayorship of New York City, vowing to clean Times Square of prostitution, drugs, and informal street hawkers. This campaign included taking over several establishments, selling property, rezoning, and offering various financial incentives to encourage major corporations to take over this public space.62 By the end of the 1990s Times Square had

1.1 (left) The New York/New York hotel casino in Las Vegas 1.2 (right) Where informal street vendors used to sell their products after September 11th in front of New York/New York now has a plaque bearing New York City’s mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s words regarding September 11th 24

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1.3. Cards with pictures and phone numbers of prostitutes being distributed on the Las Vegas strip

been totally remade, with the Disney Company occupying a major part of it. Times Square is now safe for tourists and citizens alike, but the price is that it now seems more like Disneyland or Las Vegas than a piece of New York. And, of course, the street hawkers, prostitutes, and pimps have just set up shop in other parts of New York. Meanwhile, on the Las Vegas strip, a place no one even called a city a few years ago, a new hotel casino named New York/New York was built in the mid-1990s (Figure 1.1). The casino, with a skyline that emulates New York’s with a scaled Brooklyn Bridge in front, has become popular among tourists who may never have been to the ‘real’ New York, but find New York/New York a worthwhile experience nonetheless. Yet even as New York/New York continues inside as a private casino, its public space on the strip is being taken over. After September 11, street vendors began to sell all forms of New York souvenirs – from fire-fighter T-shirts to police-officer memorabilia – on the sidewalk out front (Figure 1.2). Hispanic men and women distribute cards with pictures of prostitutes who can arrive at your door in thirty minutes. The cards promise prompt service, credit-card convenience, and faithfulness to the advertised image. The cards go on to identify rates ranging from $50 for half an hour for a ‘brunette’ to $80 for an ‘Asian beauty’ (Figure 1.3). And in front of the hotel, mounted riot police control teenage crowds on weekends – sons and daughters of the casino employees – mainly minorities and predominately Hispanic. None of this behaviour would have been so openly tolerated in the New York of Rudolph Giuliani. Yet, in Las Vegas, the ultimate fake city, these former New York traditions are alive and well. Has Las Vegas become the real [New York] city? The paradox is that Vegas, designed as a utopia, and streamlined for unfettered 25

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consumption, now exhibits all the ‘messiness’ of a real city. This story should remind us that the end of tradition does not come when a highly circumscribed utopia ceases to exist; rather, it comes when we realize that tradition is what we make and sustain everyday and everywhere through the occasionally contemptuous act of living.

Notes 1. N. Gibbs, ‘Apocalypse Now’, Time, July 1, 2002. 2. The irony that each ‘Holy War’ is viewed as divine justice with the aim of eradicating evil is most certainly lost on their respective adherents. 3. As of 6:30 am on October 18, 2002, the U.S. population was 288,378,598. Viewed on http: //www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html. 4. D. Bell, The End of Ideology, New York, The Free Press, 1960. Daniel Bell, Henry Ford Professor Emeritus of the Social Sciences at Harvard, scholar in residence at American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, co-founder of The Public Interest magazine, was one of the last of what we used to call ‘public intellectuals’. The brazen sweep of subject and theory covered by him and his contemporaries will surely pass with his generation when they die. Along with Irving Kostol (with whom he co-founded The Public Interest), Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer, he was one of the famous critics known as ‘New York Intellectuals’. 5. Bell, The End of Ideology, p. 16. 6. Ibid., p. 373. 7. Ibid., p. 375. 8. F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, The Free Press, 1992. Currently a Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a member of the President’s council on bio-ethics, Francis Fukuyama has been a political scientist working both privately and for the United States Government since the 1970s. 9. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, p. 64. 10. Ibid., p. 51. 11. Ibid., p. xi. 12. Ibid., p. 329. 13. S. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996. 14. Kenichi Ohmae, known as ‘Mr. Strategy’, has a Ph.D. from MIT in Nuclear Engineering. He is an American Management consultant. Once a partner in McKinsey and Co., he now has his own firm, Ohmae and Associates. He lives in Tokyo where he received his undergraduate degree. He is a business consultant, social reformer, author and journalist, adviser to governments and business entrepreneur. He has written over one hundred books. 15. K. Ohmae, The End of the Nation-State, New York, The Free Press, 1995, p. 3. 16. Ibid., p. 71. Ohmae cites the example of the uprising in Tianneman Square in 1989 as ‘scaring’ investors away from China. 17. Ibid., p. 12. 18. Russell Jacoby is a Professor at UCLA whose interest is in twentieth-century European and American intellectual history. 19. R. Jacoby, The End of Utopia, New York, Basic Books, 1999, p. 5. 20. Ibid., p. xi. 21. Ibid., p. 8. 22. Ibid., p. 32–33. 23. Ibid., p. 39. 24. Ibid., p. 77. 25. Ibid., p. 48. 26. R. Williams, Keywords, New York, Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 318. 27. Ibid., p. 319. 28. Indeed, a deliberate interest in ‘vernacular’ architecture can be traced back to Bernard Rudofsky, 26

The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings?

Architecture without Architects, New York, Doubleday, 1964; Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1969; and Paul Oliver, Shelter and Society, New York, F. A. Praeger, 1969. Together, these works began to outline an interest in non-monumental buildings. 29. N. AlSayyad and J. Bourdier (eds.), Dwellings, Settlements, and Tradition, Lanham, University Press of America, 1989, p. 3. 30. Ibid., p. 28. 31. Ibid., p. 74. 32. A somewhat recent article in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review (TDSR) provided a summation of these issues surrounding the problematic of tradition. In ‘Writing Spaces’, Greig Crysler chronicled the shifts in attitude and definition of the concept of ‘tradition’ in the context of TDSR’s history, reminding us that all ‘journals are institutions in themselves’. Crysler suggested that there have been two primary attitudes to tradition in the space of the journal. The first, ‘narratives of the ethnographic pastoral’, were dominant until 1995. The second, ‘critical reflexivity’, gained prominence since 1995, and can be characterized as scepticism or ambivalence to the former. Thus Crysler highlighted the degree to which all discussion of tradition is inherently ‘modern’. See G. Crysler, ‘Writing Spaces: Cultural Translation and Critical Reflexivity’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 11, no. 2, Spring 2000. 33. H. Glassie, ‘Vernacular Traditions and Society’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 1, no. 2, Spring 1990, p. 9. 34. Ibid., p. 11. 35. Ibid., p. 18. 36. Rapoport chronicled the genealogy of the concept of ‘cultural landscape’ from Carl Sauer and German Cultural Geography at the turn of the twentieth century. A. Rapoport, ‘On Cultural Landscapes’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 3, no. 2, Spring 1992, p. 34. 37. Ibid., p. 36. 38. J. Abu-Lughod, ‘Disappearing Dichotomies’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 3, no. 2, Spring 1992. 39. Ibid., p. 10. For a discussion on the adjectival use of ‘cultural’, see A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 40. D. Upton, ‘The Tradition of Change’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 5, no. 1, Fall 1993, p. 9. 41. Ibid., p. 14. 42. Ibid., p. 14. 43. J. Abu-Lughod, ‘One’s Future From One’s Past,’ Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 7, no. 1, Fall 1995, p. 8. 44. Ibid., p. 10. 45. N. AlSayyad, ‘From Vernacularism to Globalism: The Temporal Reality of Traditional Settlements’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 7, no. 1, Fall 1995, p. 14. 46. Ibid., p. 15. 47. Ibid., p. 16. 48. D. Upton, ‘Authentic Anxieties’, in N. AlSayyad (ed.), Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage, New York, Routledge, 2001, p. 299. 49. Ibid., p. 299. 50. Ibid., p. 300. 51. N. AlSayyad, ‘Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism’, in N. AlSayyad (ed.), Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage, New York, Routledge, 2001, p. 16. 52. N. AlSayyad, ‘Hybrid Culture/Hybrid Urbanism: Pandora’s Box of the “Third Place”’, in N. AlSayyad (ed.), Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment, Westport, Praeger Publishers, 2001, p. 13. 53. Ibid., p. 13. 54. For an in-depth discussion of the ‘scapes’ through which culture flows, see A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Alternately, see Matthew Sparke’s chapter in this volume for a ‘spatialized’ critique of Appadurai. 27

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55. AlSayyad, ‘Hybrid Culture/Hybrid Urbanism’, p. 16. 56. G. Mathews, Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket, London and New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 1. 57. Ibid., p. 4. 58. D. Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, Public Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 1999, pp. 1–18, The quotation is from page 7. 59. Ibid. 60. Website of the State government of New Hampshire. Viewed on May 25, 2003, at http: //www.state.nh.us/oldman. 61. M. Rosenwald, ‘Lasting Image’, The Boston Globe, May 5, 2003. Viewed on May 25, 2003, at http://travel.boston.com/places/newengland/stories/050503_nh_old_man_image.htm. 62. Alexander Reichl, Reconstructing Times Square: Politics and Culture in Urban Development, Lawrence, KA, University Press of Kansas, 1999; and Todd W. Bressi, ‘Reveille for Times Square: It’s a New Day for Manhattan’s Traditional Entertainment District’, Planning, vol. 62, no. 9, September 1996, pp. 4–8.

28

Tradition is (not) modern: deterritorializing globalization

Chapter 2

Tradition is (not) modern: deterritorializing globalization Jane M. Jacobs

For many of us the idea of globalization has become such a naturalized fact of current times that what this process entails and the consequences to which it gives rise are constant accessories to our self-understandings of being in the world. But, of course, it is usually such ‘naturalized’ things that need the most careful and constant scrutiny. We, by and large, take as given that globalization is linked to the current workings of Late Capitalism which is, itself, a marauding extension of earlier processes of capitalism as enacted through exploration, trade, empire building, and modernization. Diagnosing the logic and consequences of this global condition has become an academic preoccupation, albeit one that has tended to be confined to the purview of certain styles of critical thinking. There is general agreement that globalization is marked by a peculiar set of transformations, many of which are explicitly spatial. We might begin with the new intensity of time-space compression. We might point to the new pace in the transnational flow of goods, information, people, and technologies. We might verify such transformations by focusing upon specific localities that have been changed or even produced by globalization. Such is the scale and scope of these transformations that Fredric Jameson famously called for a new cognitive mapping of the present.1 What might constitute this new cartography of the present? Arjun Appadurai argues that it is essential that we ‘name and analyse . . . mobile civil forms’.2 This requires a shift away from what he describes as ‘trait geographies’; those studies which assume that certain enduring properties (such as values, languages, material practices, and traditions) are tied to specific, bounded socio-spatial units (such as the locality, the region, and the nation).3 Appadurai proposes instead that we focus on ‘process geographies’, which chart ‘various kinds of action, interaction, and motion’, be they manifest through trade, travel, migration, pilgrimage, invasion, proselytization, exploration, or colonization.4 Alternatively, Saskia Sassen has argued that our understanding of global processes is urgently in need of ‘thickening’.5 Her advice for this thickening is not simply to attend to the sociology of flows, for globalization, she argues, is not that diffuse. Every flow begins somewhere and is destined for somewhere. Flows are, in their own ways, embedded in specific localities. Sassen herself has conducted in depth research on a certain type of locality, the global 29

The End of Tradition?

city. But we can imagine that there are many other, albeit perhaps less spectacular, global localities. Methodological prescriptions such as these attempt to bring into view ‘the global everyday’.6 In doing so they disaggregate the process of globalization, not by wishing it away as some current social theorists might, but by attending both to its specificities and its reach, its genealogies and its present states.

Deterritorializing globalization The spatial outcome of globalization is often described as being that of deterritorialization. A nest of interrelated transformations is implied by this term and it may be useful to outline them at this point. Most directly, the term implies the replacement of the bounded by the unbounded, or the superseding of territory by geographies that exceed the bounded unit. Some commentators conceptualize this as the triumph of space over place. Others, like Anthony Giddens, have diagnosed this as a process of disembedding in which social relations are ‘lifted out’ from the local.7 Under such conditions one’s sense of dwelling-in-the-world no longer derives simply from the particulars of one’s locality.8 Furthermore, places under these conditions become ‘phantasmagorical’, for what appears to be local is neither constituted through localized forces nor even likely to be unique to our peculiar place in the world. We see parallel analyses manifest in the debates about whether or not the nation-state continues to matter, or in, say, Marc Augé’s account of the emergence of so-called ‘non-places’ under conditions of supermodernity.9 These are but a few threads in a broader analytical cloth that I would like to suggest carries with it assumptions most relevant to the thematic question of this book, ‘the end of tradition?’ It is almost always assumed that the socio-spatial relations of globalization mark a radical break from those that existed previously. Not least, so the story goes, globalization marks an extension and intensification of a set of processes established in modernity. These have resulted in a distinctive reconfiguration of the associations between place and tradition understood to characterize a premodern world. In that world, it is assumed that there was a ‘natural’ relationship between everyday lived culture and geographical territory or place – a pre-given or natural order of things embedded in, and confirmed by, one’s locality. Within a ‘traditional’ framework of dwelling, one’s fate is understood to be tied to that which is given within a closed system of belief and faith, often conceived of as the god-given rules of sacred authority. This structure of authority is stably confirmed by the locale in which one is embedded. Modernity, it is argued, delivers us away from this embedded mode of dwelling, and injects us into a more disembedded and rationalized, and individuated being in the world. For example, Giddens suggests that modernity is marked by a radical turn from tradition, and a demise in ‘the local’ as a meaningful life-world constituted through face-to-face interactions.10 No longer subjects of fate, we are active agents of rational choice. Authority no longer lies outside of us, but within us. Modernity is not without tradition and, in fact, requires an idea of it in order to know itself. In this regard, tradition is either disdained (something to be left behind in the rage 30

Tradition is (not) modern: deterritorializing globalization

for the new) or lamented (as something now lost). Tradition is something that is brought into being by modernity’s own imaginary.11 So formed, it is important to interrogate the specific logics of the relations that exist between the terms ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. In the first instance we need to move away from seeing ‘tradition’ as fixity and stasis. The root origin of the word tradition is of course the Latin verb tradere, meaning ‘to transmit’ or ‘to give something over to another’.12 This verb root alerts us to the fact that tradition is not a ‘thing-like vessel’. Rather, it is something that is handled and which is embedded in action in specific contexts. As Timothy Luke suggests, ‘traditions are . . . continuously sent and chaotically received throughout all generations’.13 This interpretation of tradition suggests that the fixing of stable traditions ‘back then’ or ‘out there’ is but part of the modern (re)making of this idea. I am pointing here to the embedded teleology and geography of the modern making of tradition. Behind it lies a story in which modernity first arises in Europe and then spreads, by way of European imperial expansion. Other cultures, and their traditions, it is assumed, give way to the force of this expansion and all that it delivers. If tradition survives, it does so anachronistically – perhaps because modernity has inexplicably passed it by or, alternatively, because modernity has assumed a paternal stance towards it and sought to protect and preserve it.14 Other cultures and traditions encountered in and through such deterritorialization themselves come to be viewed through the lens of modernity. Most notably, other cultures (and their traditions) come to be known worldwide through certain scientific frames – like that of anthropology. Recent histories of anthropology have brought clearly into view how this discipline functioned as the framework of knowledge for conceptualizing tradition in modern times. It has been through modern geographical processes of movement (such as exploration, colonization, and globalization), working hand-in-hand with comparative knowledge fields like anthropology, that our modern idea of ‘tradition’ has come into being. As Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us: ‘the picture of a changeless or static past is . . . itself a construction of early-modern European historical or sociological thinking. It has seldom been a non-western society’s way of describing itself until recent times’.15 In short, so-called traditional societies only came to see themselves as such once subjected by Europeans and their modes of thought. Talal Asad has argued that through anthropological thinking non-European societies were classified in ways ‘consistent with Europe’s story of triumph as ‘progress’’.16 They came to be seen as remnants of a past time, which appeared in the present only because of the spatial fact that they were distant from, and therefore beyond the influence of, Europe’s modernizing force.17 Through ‘discovery’, these ‘traditional’ societies were incorporated into the now spatially extensive reach of European modernization. And through disciplinary fields like anthropology, such societies were incorporated into a so-called salvage paradigm, whereby as much as possible of their ‘traditions’ were recorded before the final and fatal blow of modern social change.18 In this sense, it is true to say that the tradition/modern binary, in and of itself, is a product of global expansion and the kind of ‘world picture’ it inaugurated. As Tomlinson notes, this ‘tradition-modern dualism becomes the single, universal story of human development’.19 Indeed, Timothy Luke has gone so far as to 31

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suggest that, ‘seeing the past (tradition) in ruins and the present (modernity) as its ruination is now ‘traditional’ for us’.20 One clear expression of this view of world history was in ‘modernization theory’, but there is a sense that its ‘ideological drift’ is residual in much current globalization theory.21 This is the case even though there has been a radical restructuring of the place of tradition in the present under Late Capitalism. I have already mentioned the way flows of information, goods, people, and power are understood to disembed social relations. I have also sketched how some commentators view this as a process through which one’s sense of the structure of authority for being in the world is radically changed and place-based authority lost. So along with deterritorialization, we might assume a concomitant process of detraditionalization.22 A symptom of such a process might well be registered in the view that globalization results in cultural homogenization, a ‘global culture’. Such cultural flattening is understood to be a consequence of local specificity, often conceived of in terms of ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’, being compromised or over-ridden by global processes. Of course, this assumption coincides with our awareness of new intensities of differentiation into which an idea of tradition immediately gets drawn.23 So at the same time that there is a discernable emergence of a ‘global culture’ under Late Capitalism, there is a re-emergence of tradition, albeit in forms that are often assumed to be inauthentic. As Tomlinson notes, a homogenization of culture – the doing away with tradition – is the most obvious, but least plausible, outcome of globalization. Rather than doing away with tradition, globalization has delivered new conditions for its emergence; installed new mechanisms for its transference; and brought into being new political imperatives for its performance. Under globalization, tradition has been reshaped and enlivened in a range of unexpected ways. We see this in the ever-expanding markets for ‘traditional artworks’ (most of which are, of course, produced in the here and now); in the traditional performances and environments choreographed and staged for tourist consumption; and in the nostalgias, religious fundamentalisms, and essentialized identity categories that emerge as defensive stances in relation to the modern, the Western, and the global. If we remain wedded to the idea of tradition as something archaic or residual, then these emergent forms come always to be construed as somehow not authentic enough. They are, as Hobsbawm and Ranger diagnosed, ‘invented traditions’.24 The idea of ‘invented tradition’ provided a framework for understanding the work that modern traditions do under conditions of deterritorialization. ‘Invented traditions’, it would seem, do not come from the authority of the local, but from the demands of deterritorializing forces. As J. B. Thompson has suggested, under global conditions ‘[t]raditions do not disappear but they lose their moorings in the shared locales of everyday life’.25 Most benignly, such traditions may be understood simply as mediated, globally scoped elaborations of existing traditions. More actively, such traditions may be attempts at re-embedding and reterritorializing bounded spatial units (such as the nation or the region) whose pre-given sense of self has been compromised by the deterritorializing effects of globalization. More cynically, they may be seen as disembedded marketing ploys that claim tradition as a way of expressing market-driven 32

Tradition is (not) modern: deterritorializing globalization

differentiation. Of course, the residual problem, that the idea of invented traditions has left us with, is the sense that there was somewhere, sometime, ‘real’ traditions and that these present ‘invented’ traditions are but ideological malformations. As Chakrabarty notes, this structure of thinking about now-modern traditions is but an extension of that earlier relational (modern) system of thought that brought the idea of tradition into being in the first place.26

Tradition is (not) modern Can we think about this relationship between modernity and tradition differently? Is it possible to think past this binary altogether? Or should we simply think more productively in and through the binary? A useful starting point might be to think about tradition and modernity as being a vibrating couplet within which the terms are both co-dependent and mutually exclusive. We might deliver this formula in the following terms: ‘tradition is (not) modern’.27 And we might then attach this formula to some very specific spatial questions about processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization under globalization. There are a number of thinkers who have started this process and their insights are very suggestive of alternative ways of thinking about both modernity and tradition. In the first instance, we might note the ways in which traditions move, not just intergenerationally but now, also through space. They move with people as they make their transnational journeys from old homes to new homes (be it voluntarily or not). They circulate (often globally) as mediated and romanticized reports on people and place, to eager and curious audiences elsewhere. These kinds of movements, J. B. Thompson rightly notes, are the precondition for traditions to be re-embedded in new contexts and ‘within new territorial units that exceed the limits of shared locales’.28 We might think here, by way of example, of the processes of historic built environment conservation and management. Set within the framework of this chapter, we might variously read such activity as making tradition, salvaging tradition, or activating tradition anew (inventing tradition). My own research into built environment conservation in Britain, Australia, and Asia has, in part, focused upon the very powerful role of the idea of townscape in aesthetic evaluations of what is of value, and what matters in historic built environments. Part of that project has entailed constructing a genealogy of the idea of townscape, from its early shaping in the writings of Hubert de Cronin Hastings (under the curious pseudonym of Ivor de Wolfe) in the pages of Architectural Review in the 1940s, to the elaborations offered by Nikolaus Pevsner, through the popularization of the concept by way of the skilful renditions of Gordon Cullen.29 The push toward townscape was undoubtedly a nationalistic expression, coming as it did during World War II and its immediate aftermath. It sought, in de Cronin Hastings’s own words, to identify, protect, and enhance a ‘landscape tradition to which England owes it most personal aesthetic character’.30 We might interpret this as a kind of turn to the local, a reterritorialization under conditions (here of war) that threatened deterritorialization. Yet we know that the townscape principle, and the aesthetic assemblies framed by it, have 33

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not simply served British planning. Townscape has become a planning common sense that has traversed national boundaries with surprising ease. These principles not only define what can and cannot be built around, say, for example, the dome of St Paul’s in London, but also what should be done about war-damaged Dubrovnik, about the refurbishment of Singaporean high-rise, about redevelopment and restoration in decaying Hanoi, and about the (re)making of ‘Chinatowns’ both in the West and the East. While townscape’s aesthetic principles are highly sensitized to the specificities of the local (that is, they are territorialized), its logic as a planning principle has been disseminated across the globe in an utterly deterritorialized manner. Something supposedly of, from, and for the local, has happily expanded its sphere of influence through the deterritorialized structure of modern planning. We can stretch our thinking about townscape even further by delving more deeply into the genealogy of townscape itself. For Hastings, the point of townscape was to improve a scene or environment ‘by the manner suggested by itself’, a notion of development based on the genius loci of place, the intrinsic, indigenous qualities of the local. In particular, his aesthetic preference was for the enhancement of areas that had what he referred to as ‘infinite variety’, ‘irregularity’, and ‘disdain [for] formality’. This visual disorder he dubbed ‘sharawaggi’, and glossed this as being a term derived from an ‘East Asian’ expression for ‘irregular gardening’. Here we glimpse something peculiarly hybrid about this supposedly indigenous ‘English’ principle of place. At its very heart stands an aesthetic concept that was by no means purely English, but had derived out of a global flow which came to bear on what was thought to be ‘genius loci’, or put in the terms of this chapter, the tradition of place. Through this example, we can see the need to think differently about tradition, and to draw into view the ‘geographies of process’ (flow) that produce it. In doing so, we will see how these processes produce traditionalisms that express themselves as oppositional to modernity (not modern), but are also in and of modernity. We should not imagine that the mobility of tradition always occurs smoothly. Such movement produces disturbances, and most usually in terms of tradition’s sources of authority. So, for example, under conditions of migration, questions are raised about who has the authority to judge what is or is not ‘proper’ in terms of relocated traditions. Furthermore, a migrant group that re-embeds elsewhere through the reconfiguration and performance of tradition may be met with hostility by others who feel that their own traditions and their own authority over locality are being threatened. Similar disturbances around authorization and tradition are felt by those who experience what we might think of as deterritorialization-without-movement – the dispossessed subject of colonization.31 For both the migrant and the colonized, the performance of tradition almost always entails (re)constructing lines of authorization. Often enough, such reconstructions rely upon utterly modern structures – be it the records of anthropology, global networks of communication, recent technologies of representation, or modern regimes of governance. For this reason, modern tradition is always surrounded by debates about who is the proper authority as well as suspicions as to authenticity.32 Another kind of relational process is worth considering when seeking to complicate 34

Tradition is (not) modern: deterritorializing globalization

our sense of the tradition/modernity binary. This is the way in which, under the logic of consumption, traditions routinely pass out of the very group they were assumed to belong to. We might think of the seemingly insatiable appetite that the global subculture of the ‘New Age’ seems to have for indigenous ways of being in the world. These New Age romantics scan the web and scour globally-supplied New Age stores for the traditions they imagine they no longer have. What come to be assembled from such global shopping sprees are innovative, thoroughly mediated, utterly commodified, and usually unauthorized, versions of indigenous living. It is, of course, very easy to be cynical about such New Age activities, but, in their own globalized way, they are attempts to dwell meaningfully in the world by assembling an infrastructure of tradition derived from anywhere, anytime, anyplace.

Modern architectures of tradition: ‘Aboriginal architecture’ in Australia In the last part of this chapter, I want to touch upon some formations which elucidate the formula ‘tradition is (not) modern’, by drawing on my research into indigenous cultural property matters in Australia.33 One component of that work was to examine (along with colleagues Kim Dovey and Mathilde Lochert) the emergence of a specific touristic architecture that has come to be referred to as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘indigenous’ architecture. Tourism is, of course, one of the more evident flows that help give our globalized existence one of its specific characteristics. Australia has vast numbers of international tourists, and the majority of them state a desire to experience something of Aboriginal Australia. In this world of touristic consumption, what comes to stand as ‘Aboriginal Australia’ is far more narrow than the diverse ways of life and cultural performatives that are the reality of contemporary indigenous Australian life. The Aboriginal Australia that is sought out by tourists is framed for the most part by a primitivist Aboriginalism. Only those Aboriginal people and places that register Aboriginality in terms of certain hallmarks of ‘tradition’ are sought out by the modern tourist wishing to touch radical otherness. What these hallmarks come to be is mediated as much by anthropological reconstructions, as it is by more populist and romanticized stereotypes of the noble savage. This preference for an experience of traditional Aboriginal society draws specific parts of Australia into the purview of the tourist. Two premier sites on the tourist map of Australia are Kakadu National Park in northern Australia (where there are World Heritagelisted rock-art complexes), and the central Australian Uluru and Kata-juta National Park (where the mythical and symbolic importance of the monolith Uluru – Ayers Rock – is well recognized). Both these areas are legally owned by their indigenous custodians, having been returned to them in the 1980s under special legal provisions to restore lands to ‘traditional owners’. That these communities were successful in claiming lands under that early Land Rights legislation meant that they were able to prove in the eyes of the law that they had had continuing ‘traditional’ association with the land. This recent history of recognition of indigenous rights over these lands, and their repatriation under land 35

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rights provisions, is itself a symptom of the way in which these ‘traditional’ Aboriginal places are constituted out of a strange mix of modern (Anglo-Australian) law and preexisting (indigenous) tradition. A further expression of this hybrid status is the fact that neither Kakadu nor Uluru were exclusively returned to indigenous custodians. Such was the ‘world’ significance of these places (culturally and naturally), they were ‘returned’ to their indigenous custodians with the proviso that they were leased back to the state so that they could be national parks, accessible to all. During the 1990s, a number of architectural elements – in the form of hotels, visitor, interpretation, and cultural centres – were inserted into these already complexly constituted places. At a functional level, this architecture serves the needs of tourists by providing either accommodation or visitor interpretation facilities. Yet, many of these buildings are also expected to express what might be described as Aboriginal identity or Aboriginal notions of dwelling and being in the country. Some of them, like the Warradjun Cultural Centre, built in Kakadu National Park in 1995, and the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Aboriginal Cultural Centre opened in the Central Australian park of the same name, are dedicated specifically to housing interpretation centres representing local Aboriginal views of the land and ways of life (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). Other buildings, like the Aboriginal-owned South Alligator

2.1 Warrandjun Cultural Centre, Kakadu National Park, northern Australia. The centre offers interpretations of the Aboriginal interests in and associations with the park

2.2 Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre, UluruKata Tjuta National Park, Central Australia: The centre provides an Aboriginal interpretation of the park 36

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Hotel houses an indigenous enterprise that seeks to take economic advantage of tourism (Figure 2.3). Still others, like the Bowali Visitor Centre, also in Kakadu, are intended to act both as administrative headquarters for park managers as well as general (not specifically cultural or indigenous) interpretation centres (Figure 2.4). This emergent ‘Aboriginal architecture’ is haunted by one peculiar ‘fact’: that indigenous Australians are popularly seen to not have their own permanent architectural traditions in pre-contact times.34 This so-called ‘fact’ is itself a symptom of essentialist assumptions about pre-contact Aboriginal society. Most groups had some style of impermanent weather shelter, and in some communities, versions of these continue to be used. There are also very precise rules about the spatial organization of customary camps and complex symbolic knowledge fields that structure the landscape more generally. So, the so-called ‘fact’ that indigenous Australians were without architecture emerged hand-in-hand with racist colonial logics as proof that Aborigines were ‘uncivilized’, ‘primitive’, and did not properly (read productively) occupy the land. Colonists were unable to translate the different spatial logics by which indigenous Australians dwelt, into something that could claim equivalence to European spatial logics of occupation (such as architecture or property). This created an erasure that legitimated colonial dispossession,

2.3 The South Alligator Motel, Kakadu. This Aboriginal-owned enterprise takes economic advantage of the thousands of tourists who annually visit this World Heritage area 2.4 Bowali Visitor Centre, Kakadu National Park. The centre is designed to house park administrators and to display a general interpretation of the natural and cultural features of the area. Depicted here is an interior wall in the restaurant where indigenous and nonindigenous people involved in the building of the centre left their marks in a style reminiscent of traditional art practices (although not ones especially common to this area) 37

The End of Tradition?

for it allowed the early colonists to construct the imaginative geography of terra nullius (no one’s land). With this history in tow, the ‘Aboriginal architecture’ emerging in these new touristic contexts is predisposed to being read as inauthentic. Yet at the same time, this architecture is often over-determined by ‘Aboriginal tradition’, for it is drawn immediately into the task of expressing Aboriginality in a tourist context. How then might we think of these buildings in a way that moves us beyond terms like ‘inauthentic’ and ‘appropriative’? It is at this point that we might usefully invoke an alternate notion of hybridity to that which has come to us by way of postcolonial theory.35 This is Bruno Latour’s notion of the hybrid event.36 His work on science and technology in society has usefully drawn attention to the ways in which some of the social templates of the modern (notably rational science) are actively made through acts of ‘purification’ which rid them of signs of the non- (or pre-) modern orders of knowledge. Latour charts another world, one filled with hybrids in which the modern and the premodern, the human and the non-human, proliferate. Latour draws our attention to the networks of artefact, idea, nonhuman, person that make up life. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern gives us a very relevant application of this notion to the frame of thinking about culture, and, specifically, what we might think of as modern/nonmodern culture mixes. Latour’s notions of hybrids and networks are, she says ‘visible effects of mediation’, they are ‘translations’ between ‘different orders of knowledge’.37 She goes on to observe that a key analytical responsibility lies in not simply revealing that a thing is hybrid (made of, say, two versions of the same thing), but that there has been a ‘hybrid constitution of an artefact’.38 Bringing this into view, she argues, is democratizing, in that it assumes that ‘the configuration of meanings’ that are an artefact, are the product of many actors (some human, some non-human, some animate, some not).39 If we use this model to think about the emergent artefact called ‘Aboriginal architecture’ then it might be possible to see how these buildings are quite different from the dynamics implied by processual terms like ‘appropriation’ and categorical labels like ‘inauthentic’. If these buildings were indeed ‘hybrids’ then what might need to come into view is not so much their architectural form (although this too is important) but the creatures and people and places that are attached to and constitute the making of these buildings. It is this wider network of constitution that could account for a far more meaningful – but not any less political – hybridity in relation to these buildings. We might begin this alternative reading of ‘Aboriginal architecture’ by focusing on aspects of these buildings that self-consciously carry an ‘Aboriginal meaning’. For example, the architects of the Bowali Visitor Centre (the renowned Glenn Murcutt in conjunction with Troppo Architects), assembled layouts, finishes, ornamentations, and formal features that very loosely interpret aspects of the varied spiritual, artefactual, ritualistic, or spatial aspects of the customary owners whose lands are now incorporated into Kakadu National Park (Figure 2.4). Such a building expresses tradition by assembling into a coherent architectural whole a set of features that were either previously outside indigenous architectures or expressed in quite different indigenous spatial terms. Illustrative in this context is the entranceway of the Bowali Visitor Centre (Figure 2.5). It offers a meandering 38

Tradition is (not) modern: deterritorializing globalization

2.5 Bowali Visitor Centre. Architects Glenn Murcutt and Troppo Architects designed an entranceway that interprets local protocols for how visitors should approach country to which they do not belong

and indirect entrance route into the building. The rationale for this architectural feature is that it expressed – in built form – a translation of local indigenous protocols about how strangers should approach lands, sites, and encampments in which they are visitors and about which they have little knowledge and uncertain authority. In short, this entrance is a hybrid form in that it comes from an indigenous spatial logic (albeit not formally architectural) and a non-indigenous (architectural) translation of it. At least some of these buildings, like the Warradjun Cultural Centre and the South Alligator Hotel in Kakadu, and the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre in Central Australia, are zoomorphic. These buildings have their formal features derived from a mimetic interpretation of the form of an animal or dreaming figure of special importance to locals (Figures 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3). In the case of the Warradjun Cultural Centre and the South Alligator Hotel, the totemic figure that is expressed in the zoomorphic architectural forms of these buildings is the turtle and the alligator, respectively. A similar, and certainly more interpretative, zoomorphic building was designed by architect Greg Burgess for the UluruKata Tjuta Cultural Centre. The building is in the form of two snakes (Liru and Kuniya) that are associated with the main dreaming for the area (Figure 2.2). This kind of zoomorphic architecture is over-determined by a specific interpretation of Aboriginal tradition. It is also an architecture that bares little relationship to any preexisting spatial logics of actual building structures used by the indigenous people of the area. In short, traditional shelters never were and are still not in the shape of alligators, turtles, or snakes. Yet the indigenous landscapes within which these buildings are placed are animated in very real terms for the indigenous custodians by alligators, turtles, and snakes. These are but a few of the more important creatures to whom indigenous custodians are related – in their view, literally and symbolically – and with whom they work to co-produce proper occupation of the lands for which they are responsible under customary law. What to an architectural critic may be animal kitsch may be, to a local 39

The End of Tradition?

custodian, an apt expression of proper human-nonhuman relations. How this will be known will depend on more than any formal signs of architectural hybridity. We can start to see the complex ambivalence of the widened concept of architectural hybridity by returning to one of the zoomorphic forms described above. Burgess’s UluruKata Tjuta Cultural Centre in Central Australia is an award-winning building by an architect who has considerable fame (at least in local Australian terms). A celebrity building enters into a specific set of representational and discursive formations that both account for its status and contribute to it. In short, Greg Burgess’s story of the production of this building is one component in the complex semiotic of this hybrid architecture, and the fame it has garnered. Burgess’s own account of how the design came about refers to a complex set of consultations and artistic collaborations with the Anangu (Aboriginal) custodians of the area. The building is based, he suggests, on an architectural interpretation of an Aboriginal elder’s sand drawing of the snake story. Overlaying this is a site plan that replicated a specific inter-locking hand gesture – made during consultation by one of the Anangu custodians – which expressed the mood of reconciliation on cohabitation envisaged for this iconic part of Australia.40 So, this building has a detailed and widely circulated story of joint authorization that is attached to it and elaborates its status and meaning. Similar collaborations may have been associated with the South Alligator Hotel or the Warradjun Cultural Centre in Kakadu, but as buildings lacking celebrity status, such stories remain locked in the opaque networks of the community and the government bureaucracies that produced them. They can do little or no work to augment the, often negative, adjudication that these examples of ‘Aboriginal architecture’ receive. In contrast, the celebrity building, with its story of productive and artistic collaboration, captures a certain hope in a nation self-consciously seeking to move beyond its colonial past. It is a story of production that suggests mutual authorization over the form and, as such, works to embed the building in the imaginative landscape of a postcolonizing Australia.

Amplifying indigenous authority There are many things that can be said about the architectural, aesthetic, and political features of this emergent Aboriginal architecture.41 My purpose in activating the formula ‘tradition is (not) modern’ is to move beyond, on the one hand, romantic notions of architectural hybridity, and, on the other, cynical readings of appropriation. Rather, I am proposing a more radical notion of hybridity in which stylistic cross-fertilizations, if present, are but one aspect of a wider set of intersecting semiotic systems in which things, people, ideas, technologies, and nonhuman natures come together in inventive events. To use the language of inventiveness is not to imply an inauthentic tradition, nor is it to suggest a romantic optimism. One certain thing about the hybrid event is that it cannot be pinned down. As Strathern reminds us, the characteristics of the hybrid ‘do not reside in any one part but in the way parts work together’.42 In short, such inventiveness does not necessarily mean reconciled coexistence. To capture the uneven fortunes of this kind of inventiveness, we need only think of the ambiguous politics of how these 40

Tradition is (not) modern: deterritorializing globalization

buildings were produced, and the often ambivalent registers into which they are received. These aspects of the event of ‘Aboriginal architecture’ detail the uncertain structures of authority and authorization that gave rise to these buildings and flow on from them. In an earlier part of this chapter, I referred to the assumption that tradition operated with a specific level of authority attached to and verified by a monogamous, place-based geography. One of the ways that globalization deterritorializes, so it is argued, is by undoing that local (tradition-bound) structure of authority and imposing other (modern and external) authorities over the fate of one’s place in the world. We might imagine that this emergent Aboriginal architecture is evidence of such a process of deterritorialization, arising in the first instance from colonization, and, subsequently, from the intensified forms of dispossession that occur when thousands of tourists daily traverse one’s country. Yet, it is also true that this architecture is not simply imposed upon these indigenous communities, nor does it simply appropriate, willy-nilly, aspects of their culture. These are buildings that were actively commissioned by the local Aboriginal communities. They are buildings that were designed with varying levels of consultation with the appropriate traditional custodians of the area. They are buildings that were approved by the broader community through elaborate consultation procedures. They are buildings that retain significant (albeit varying) levels of Aboriginal input into their ownership, management, and functioning. Despite how the formal features of such architecture might be adjudicated – whether they are seen as ‘authentic’ or ‘appropriative’, ‘innovative’ or ‘kitsch’ – the processes of authorization that flow through these buildings are a significant part of their hybrid nature. Each building, in differing ways, reflects traditional obligations around place and kinship for indigenous authorization. Each was produced out of complex processes in which traditional meaning was enjoined with modern architecture by a range of technologies of communication and representation (themselves both traditional and modern). It is this hybrid inventiveness that gives these building events the potential to be something entirely productive in political and architectural terms. Whether this is the case, however, is by no means guaranteed by architectural hybridity alone. Any radical potential remains poised in the shifting and uneven networks of power and authorization that come together to produce the hybrid event called ‘Aboriginal architecture’. The architecture produced out of such processes is never merely something traditional in the service of the modern, nor is it only ever an expression of touristic nostalgia, nor even is it simply an indigenous essentialism. This architectural event is an expression of the productively unstable formula ‘tradition is (not) modern’, a formula that is energized in peculiar ways by the deterritorializations of globalization. In these sites and through these architectures, global heritage regimes and global tourist consumption are in inventive relations with traditional structures of authorization and spatiality. Through these hybrid architectural events, new regimes of authorization are produced; new ways of dwelling in country are enacted; new forms of land management are devised; new structures of pedagogy are delivered; and new kinds of knowledge translations are made. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

41

The End of Tradition?

Notes I would like to thank Nezar AlSayyad and the conference participants of ‘The End of Tradition?’ (Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, Trani, Italy, October 12–15, 2000) for their input to this chapter. 1. F. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, vol. 146, 1984, pp. 53–92. 2. A. Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 1, 2000, p. 6. 3. Ibid., p. 5–6. 4. Ibid., p. 6. 5. S. Sassen, ‘Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 1, 2000, p. 217, footnote 2. 6. Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, p. 18. 7. A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990. 8. J. Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, London, Polity Press, 1999, p. 107. 9. Augé, Marc, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (translated by John Howe), London, Verso, 1995 10. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. 11. Jean-Paul Bourdier notes that ‘[t]radition identified as the past is a modernist idea’. He goes on to note the problems this produces for the study of traditional dwellings, resulting in nostalgia, romanticism, and antiquarianism. See J. Bourdier, ‘Reading Tradition’, in J. Bourdier and N. AlSayyad (eds.), Dwellings, Settlements, and Tradition: Cross-cultural Perspectives, Lanham, University of America Press, 1989, p. 38. 12. D. Gross, The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1992, as cited in T. Luke, ‘Identity, Meaning, and Globalization: Detraditionalization in Postmodern Space-Time Compression’, in P. Heelas, S. Lash, and P. Morris (eds.), Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, Oxford, Centre for the Study of Cultural Values at Lancaster University with Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996. See also E. Shils, Tradition, London, Faber and Faber, 1981; Bourdier, ‘Reading Tradition’; and Y. Tuan, ‘Traditional: What does it Mean?’ in Bourdier and AlSayyad (eds.), Dwellings, Settlements, and Tradition, pp. 27–34. 13. Luke, ‘Identity, Meaning, and Globalization’, p. 116. 14. Malinowski said, ‘Destroy tradition, and you will deprive the collective organism of its protective shell, and give it over to the slow but inevitable process of dying out’. See B. Malinowski, ‘Ethnology and the Study of Society’, Economica, vol. 2, 1922, pp. 214 as quoted in G. Stocking Jr., ‘Maclay, Kubary, Malinowski: Archetypes from the Dreamtime of Anthropology’, in G. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, p. 51. 15. D. Chakrabarty, ‘Afterword: Revisiting the Tradition/Modern Binary’, in S. Vlastos (ed.), Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998, p. 286. 16. T. Asad, ‘Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony’, in Stocking (ed.), Colonial Situations, p. 314. 17. Malinowski expressed this notion through a very specific time-space model. For him, what ‘time had hidden from us, space keeps preserved for a while.’ See Malinowski, ‘Ethnology and the Study of Society’, Economica, vol. 2, 1922, pp. 216 as quoted in Stocking (ed.), Colonial Situations, p. 51. 18. Asad, ‘Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony’, p. 315. 19. Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, p. 64. 20. T. Luke, ‘Identity, Meaning, and Globalization: Detraditionalization in Postmodern Space-Time Compression’, p. 114. Talal Asad suggests that this notion of tradition is derived from the conservative Edmund Burke. For Burke ‘“the past” is a palpable point of authority to which one is 42

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21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

either linked by mimetic action or from which one is forever severed.’ See Asad, ‘Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony’, p. 316. Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, p. 64. P. Heelas, ‘Introduction: Detraditionalization and its Rivals’, in Heelas, Lash, and Morris (eds.), Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, pp. 1–20. Doreen Massey describes what she calls the new ‘power-geometry’ of deterritorialization. She argues that ‘different social groups have distinct relationships to . . . differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movements, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it’. See D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p. 149. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984. J. B. Thompson, ‘Tradition and Self in a Mediated World’, in Heelas, Lash, and Morris (eds.), Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, p. 94. Chakrabarty, ‘Afterword: Revisiting the Tradition/Modern Binary’, p. 286. Kwame Anthony Appiah gives an exemplary account of the entanglements of modernity, rationality, myth, neotraditionalism, and traditionalism in contemporary global art markets. He offers us a template for how to understand the modern through its supposed antithesis – the traditional – by exposing some of the ‘natural errors’ in the West’s thinking about both. See A. Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 107. See K. Gelder and J. M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1998. Thompson, ‘Tradition and Self in a Mediated World’, p. 99. H. de Cronin Hastings, ‘Exterior Finishing or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscape’, The Architectural Review, January 3–8, 1944; and G. Cullen, Townscape, London, Architectural Press, 1961. de Cronin Hastings, ‘Exterior Finishing or Sharawaggi’, p. 5. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari describe imperialism as the ‘first great movement of deterritorialization’. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London, Althone, 1983, p. 261. Similarly, the authority of earlier imperialists to remove artefacts and other items of cultural value in the name of science, and place them in metropolitan collections, is now being challenged. There is now a worldwide repatriation of such objects. And while this is a process of re-embedding, the fate of these now floating objects is accompanied by transnational struggles over to whom the objects rightfully belong, who might best care for them, and who has proper authority over them. See, for example, R. Handler, ‘On having a Culture: Nationalism and the Preservation of Quebec’s Patrimoine’, in G. W. Stocking Jr. (ed.), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. This research was in part undertaken with colleagues Kim Dovey and Mathilde Lochert from the University of Melbourne. The research was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council. There is considerable scholarship on indigenous architecture in Australia. See M. Heppell, A Black Reality: Aboriginal Camps and Housing in Remote Australia, Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1979; B. Hodge, ‘Aboriginal Iconographies of Home’, Communal/Plural, vol. 5, 1997, pp. 47–68; P. Memmott, Humpy, House, and Tin Shed: Aboriginal Settlement History on the Darling River, Ian Buchan Fell Centre, University of Sydney, 1991; and P. Memmott, ‘The Way it Was: Customary Camps and Houses in the Southern Gulf of Carpentaria’, in P. Read (ed.), Settlement: A History of Australian Indigenous Housing, Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2000. See, as examples, J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1988; R. J. C. Young, Colonial Desire, London and New York, Routledge, 1995; and in the spatial sciences, E. W. Soja, Thirdspace, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1996. See especially B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. 43

The End of Tradition?

37. M. Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things, London and New Brunswick, NJ, The Athlone Press, 1999, p. 120. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Gregory Burgess can be seen giving this account at the following web site: www.abc.net.au/arts/ architecture/arch/ar_bur.htm 41. See K. Dovey, J. Jacobs, and M. Lochert, ‘Aboriginality and Architecture’, in Lesley Lokko (ed.), White Papers/Black Marks: Architecture, Race, and Culture, London, The Athlone Press, 2000, pp. 25–37. 42. Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect, p. 120.

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The tradition of the end: global capitalism and the contemporary spaces of apocalypse

Chapter 3

The tradition of the end: global capitalism and the contemporary spaces of apocalypse Katharyne Mitchell

. . . there, there overhead, there, there, hung over those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes, there in the starless dark the poise, the hover, there with vast wings across the cancelled skies, there in the sudden blackness the black pall of nothing, nothing, nothing – nothing at all. Archibald MacLeish1 Eschatology is the study of endings or last things, from the Greek eschatos ‘last’ or ‘furthest’. Individual eschatology is concerned with the fate of the individual after death. Is there an afterlife? What is the future of the soul? Cosmic eschatology is more concerned with the fate of the planet and of human society as a whole. What will happen to humanity in the event of worldly cataclysm? What is the destiny of the universe?2 Although forecasting the end of humanity, space, and time is an old and widespread practice, the discourse of endings has proliferated greatly in Western philosophy and popular culture in recent years. Examples from scholarly books in the last two decades alone include the titles The End of Space, The End of Time, The End of History, The End of the Nation, The End of Tradition, and The End of the World. Postmodernist philosophy, in particular, can be characterized by an increasingly apocalyptic tone, one in which all parties vie for the strongest language of foretelling the end, and of predicting the extreme limit, the ‘imminence of the last’. In an essay from the 1980s, Derrida wrote about this penchant for eschatological thinking, where each claimant for a particular discourse of the end attempts to speak more forcefully and lucidly than the last:

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The End of Tradition?

. . . this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there, the end of history, the end of class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals . . . the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now, I tell you, in the cataclysm, the fire, the blood, the fundamental earthquake, the napalm descending from the sky by helicopters, like prostitutes, and also the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogocentrism, and I don’t know what else.3

Derrida links the desire of the new preachers to circumvent the power of the Kantian logos through perverting philosophy into poetry. The ‘poetry’ of the end resists the overweening power of philosophical ‘reason’, which has occupied the centre stage of Western thought since Enlightenment times. It is a language of persuasion, which ‘naturally wants to attract, to get to come, to arrive at this, to seduce in order to lead . . .’.4 Derrida’s essay is concerned with philosophical texts and the current ontological and epistemological struggles over reason and language which are played out through the metaphor of the apocalypse. But in this chapter I am more interested in the current philosophical and popular imaginings of the end as they are co-opted and instrumentalized by the institutions and actors of capitalism, and as they play out in space. The notion of apocalypse is part of the eschatology of the communal end, and historically it has contained the seeds of a positive future. What are the shifting conceptions of the apocalypse in the era of capitalist globalization, and how do modern understandings and experiences of space contribute to these conceptions? I will begin with a quick perusal of some of the motifs and spaces of apocalyptic thinking in the past.

Apocalyptic visions and spaces Historically the idea of apocalypse, or global destruction, was a meaningful one within many religious traditions across the globe. The narrative of the end of the world can be found in most of the extensive historical civilizations, including the GrecoRoman, Babylonian, Indian, and Mexican empires, and was prevalent also in JudeoChristian narratives and in Sumerian, Buddhist, and Islamic myths of destruction and transformation. Apocalypse was a liberatory vision in most of these societies, as it was interpreted as containing future redemption alongside the destruction of the present. The component of transformation was a key one as it gave meaning to the event itself – with world annihilation came regeneration and expiation; with destruction came creation; with an ending came the chance for a new beginning. The Book of Revelation from the Bible forms the basis for most Western traditions of apocalypse. In Revelations, John offers a vision of the future cataclysmic destruction of the city of Babylon and those who have profited from its blasphemies and excesses (Figure 3.1). The text focuses on the evil events and practices occurring within Babylon, and foretells the day when an angel will come and announce the fall of the wicked city. The city is henceforth destroyed, and the pagans are judged, found guilty, and punished.5 The 46

The tradition of the end: global capitalism and the contemporary spaces of apocalypse

3.1 The Fall of Babylon, by John Martin, 1835

book ends with a depiction of the heavenly, perfect Jerusalem as the glorious city to be inhabited by the Christian believers – those deemed to be faithful and pious at the time of last judgement. The depiction of the actual spaces of the new city, however, remains largely abstract. The city is never clearly delineated, but rather exists in the imagination as part of the perfect and limitless future (Figure 3.2). Two points are useful for my discussion here: the first is the idea of descriptive time and normative time which run through the text; and the second is the deeply spatial nature of the vision, which locates the apocalypse (and the ensuing salvation for the chosen few) squarely within the cities of Babylon (Rome) and the New Jerusalem. The conceptualization of descriptive time versus normative time is based on the idea that there is a distinction between the world that is (the descriptive order) and the world that ought to be (the normative vision). In the former, the existing world is spatial, temporal, and eminently categorizable. In the latter, it is eternal, infinite, and uncategorizable.6 Babylon, as a metaphor for a real city (Rome) is describable, and hence immediately rendered imperfect in and through its being in the world. The New Jerusalem, on the other hand, is not of this world; it is a normative vision of what ought to be, a perfect system existing as an ideal type – and hence, above and beyond the messy imperfections rendered concrete and inescapable by the ravages of space and time. Hendrix writes: Whether Judeo-Christian or secular, apocalyptical thought and literature reside at the nexus of the ontological and the ethical, and are necessarily concerned with the perfectability or imperfectability of humanity in time . . . What I am attempting to define as ‘apocalyptic’, then, is a tradition within literature in which there is a peculiarly pronounced revelatory shift – by which I mean that point of radical differencing in any narrative at which ‘what is’ gives way so that ‘what ought to be’ may reveal itself. If, in analyzing any narrative, we label as descriptive time that time in which ‘what is’ occurs, and as normative time that time in which ‘what ought to be’ occurs, then the apocalyptic moment is the crossroads at which descriptive time yields narrational right of way to normative time.7

In the Book of Revelation, as in most apocalyptic narratives, the movement from descriptive to normative time is a profoundly conflictory and catastrophic moment. The traditional world of Babylon must be destroyed in order that the perfect world may be 47

The End of Tradition?

3.2 Imagining the New Jerusalem, by Duncan Long

born (again). This is also the ultimate ‘return’ narrative as it involves the strong desire for the return or restoration of the perfect world of Genesis, the moment in time prior to the Fall, the time in which ‘God dwelled among men’. This quest for a return to the time of Genesis is a desire for perfection, for the transcendent moment when God and man were one and there were no fissures between them, no knowledge of good and evil, no alienation caused by the comprehension of the ‘real’ world – the world of awareness and of description. It is also a desire to escape the alienations of the world as it actually exists, and to punish the ‘bad guys’ who have created such an alienating world for the apocalyptic visionary. Apocalypse is thus an ecstatic catastrophe for the narrator/promoter, in that it promises both salvation, a perfect oneness with God and a perfect normative world/city in which to spend his days, and damnation for the unbelievers. The vision of the apocalypse is a profoundly spatial one on a number of scales. If the idea of the apocalypse is concerned with the ravages of alienation and distance (from God) and of thus restoring the lost perfections of the oneness with God found in Genesis, ‘then the pursuit of apocalypse is itself a quest for direct apprehension of the transcendent – a quest for the end of metaphor, escape from the net of words, freedom from entrapment in the hermeneutical circle’.8 This ‘escape’ – from the distance 48

The tradition of the end: global capitalism and the contemporary spaces of apocalypse

of metaphor, from the alienations of language, from the fissure between subject and object – is fundamentally an escape from all of the paradoxes of time and space. ‘It is a metaphor for the direct apprehension of a paradoxical reality, for the disappearing of that epistemic gap that makes knowledge, description, definition, language, and metaphor all possible and necessary.’9 Apocalyptic thinking represents the quest for a world without metaphor, and hence a world without time or space as it actually exists. It is thus a vision inherently connected with the end of tradition, and ultimately the end of the world. Babylon, the city drawn from the Old Testament to represent blasphemy and sin, is modelled on the city of Rome, as it existed at the time of St. John the apostle, circa 95 AD. In Revelations, the city of Babylon is postulated as the ultimate place of evil – it is not just the place in which prostitutes linger, it is the prostitute and the seductress: The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and glittered with gold and jewels and pearls, and she was holding a gold wine cup filled with the disgusting filth of her fornication; on her forehead was written a name, a cryptic name: ‘Babylon the Great, the mother of all the prostitutes and all the filthy practices on the earth’.10 (Figure 3.3)

For John, part of the great seduction of Babylon exists in its capacity to make money, to be a successful commercial capital for traders and merchants. For him it is the ultimate market capital of the world, the first truly ‘global’ city, and when the ‘people of the world mourn for Babylon’, they are depicted in Revelation as mourning the loss of their riches and of the possibility for great profit-making which the city enabled. ‘Mourn, mourn for this great city whose lavish living has made a fortune for every owner of a seagoing ship; ruined within a single hour . . . never again will craftsmen of every skill be found or the

3.3 Die Grosse Babylon (Babylon as Prostitute); designed by Peter Proksch and woven by Heide Proksch 49

The End of Tradition?

sound of the mill be heard. Your traders were the princes of the earth, and all the nations were under your spell.’11 Here the city is depicted as the locus of evil-doing, primarily because of its seductive qualities as a ‘merchant’ city, a site of tremendous productivity and conspicuous consumption. In this apocalyptic vision, it is the closure of space within the city which hints of biblical evil, the possible ‘sedimentation’ of sin through time. The city form itself represents the loss of perfection, as perfection can only exist in the perfect space of the ideal type, of the limitless (spaceless) place of oneness with God. This early equation of closure with negative qualities, and openness with positive ones is a reversal of the typical understandings of tradition, in which community values are believed to survive through the generations because of their very qualities of rootedness in place. In John’s apocalyptic vision, however, tradition has been spoiled by the unbelievers – the sinners, fornicators, and merchants – and must be swept away so that the New Jerusalem (and a new set of ‘perfect’ traditions) can be established for the chosen few. In this negative depiction of Babylon (Rome), and positive vision of the New Jerusalem, the element of persuasion is very clear. If the listener will follow the apocalyptic visionary wholeheartedly and without reservation, then the chance of perfection will be his. The angel says, ‘Come up here: I will show you what is to come in the future . . . Then I saw the Lamb break one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four animals shout in a voice like thunder, “Come”. When he broke the second seal, I heard the second animal shout, “Come”’.12 It is this tone of warning and persuasion that signals the apocalyptic narrative, and it is a narrative that behoves its listeners to listen and follow. Derrida writes, ‘Whoever takes on the apocalyptic tone comes to signify to, if not tell, you something. What? The truth, of course . . . The end is beginning, signifies the apocalyptic tone. But to what ends does the tone signify this? The apocalyptic tone naturally wants to attract, to get to come . . .’.13 It is this tone of warning and revelation, tied in with the vision of limitless space, of the end of cities as repositories of tradition, and the beginning of new traditions formed in the ideal-type spaces of the imagined (global) community, that I wish to examine in the contemporary moment. However, unlike the Book of Revelation, the negative association of closed city spaces with sinful money-making activities is reversed, so that profit-making in the limitless spaces of the new global community becomes something holy, becomes the New Jerusalem.

The spaces of apocalypse now According to apocalypse historian Daniel Wojcik, since the nineteenth century a belief in the inevitable end of the world is no longer necessarily tied to the promise of transformation and redemption. Instead, the belief in a fundamentally meaningless apocalypse has been growing exponentially over the course of the last century.14 Any vacuum such as this invites narrative rewriting. What is the possibility for redemption in the current moment? In Western literature and film, global catastrophe is often depicted 50

The tradition of the end: global capitalism and the contemporary spaces of apocalypse

as imminent and unavoidable. From the early Planet of the Apes and Mad Max movies of the 1970s, to the visions of global decay, annihilation, and societal collapse in Waterworld, Terminator, and The Handmaid’s Tale, images of the destruction of the environment and of human society itself are commonplace. Often the post-civilization societies following nuclear or other catastrophes are set in the ruined cities of the past, for example, Blade Runner (Los Angeles) and Escape from New York (New York).15 These urban wastelands, however, do not hold any promise of a utopian future community on the horizon. On the contrary, the terrible consequence of the ‘hyper’ modernity that has brought them to this pass continues with unabated horror – barbarians rule, and the few humane survivors are not ‘chosen’ for redemption because of their faith in God, but rather have survived randomly, or because of their skills as warriors. Thus, after massive destruction and near annihilation, comes only more chaos and pain, and not the salvation and redemption promised in earlier apocalyptic visions. In these contemporary visions of death and destruction, the nonsecular component of associated peace and justice, of redemption and expiation following the pain and suffering of cataclysm, is largely absent. For religious apocalyptic thinkers, the belief that the cosmos was ordered and that events were inevitable – guided by a stronger or larger force – was central to the regenerative quality of the belief. Faith and fatalism were woven together. For contemporary secular thinkers, however, there seem to be few redemptive qualities in the end of the world narrative. And it is thus a vision characterized largely by pessimism and despair. One scholar has called the use of the old visions without the attendant spiritual beliefs in salvation ‘metaphors for modern anxiety’.16 What forms the basis of this modern anxiety? Why the fascination with endings but not beginnings?17 Why and how does apocalyptic thinking and discourse continue to take shape in the modern era? Economic instability and spatial dislocation are two of the primary symptoms of negative change often associated with modernity. With the growth of industrial capitalism in the West and its rapid global spread, the experience of a more secure and stable sense of being in the world declined for many.18 In more recent decades, global capitalism has grown into the unrivalled socioeconomic system of the world, while at the same time, the negative experiences of modernity vis-à-vis its sociospatial referents of instability, anxiety, and dislocation appear to have accelerated. I believe it is these accelerating forces of ‘global’ capitalism and modernity that are leading to the proliferating discourses of apocalypse. But what kind of apocalypse? Apocalypse which leads to redemption and the New Jerusalem? Or the apocalypse of the Road Warrior, leading to endless damnation, chaos, and pain? It seems there is a current effort underway to harness and rework the discourse of apocalypse into a discourse of endings, but with an attendant future salvation; this represents a very strategic manipulation of the earlier, religious visions of the apocalypse. What is this vision? It is one which replaces the sense of God as representing the perfect entity (with whom we have a desire to become one) with a pseudo-religious sense of globalization as the perfect ideal-type system. Further, as with the acceptance of God, 51

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it is a system which demands complete faith. Despite the often catastrophic ending of tradition, belief in the perfect system must continue, for it is only with the destruction of old cities and spaces, that way can be made for the New Jerusalem.

Global capitalism as the apocalypse Globalization is a term that has become so ubiquitous and bloated with often contrary and conflicting meanings that it now has come to mean hardly anything at all. Scholars critical of the processes associated with economic globalization refer to the expansion of a laissez-faire brand of capitalism worldwide. It is an expansion networked through command centres often referred to as ‘global cities’, and it is accompanied by the subsequent liberalization of markets and labouring bodies; and the general attrition of governance – especially the sociopolitical power wielded by the erstwhile welfare state. Interestingly, these same processes of economic globalization, when discussed by globalization proponents, also refer to the expansion of a laissez-faire brand of capitalism worldwide – with the subsequent freeing up of markets and bodies, and the general attrition of governance, especially the sociopolitical power wielded by the welfare state. What is most astonishing about these two visions is not the similar depiction of global processes, but the realization that for the former this vision represents apocalypse, while for the latter, utopia. For one group, it is about endings without redemption; and for the other, it is about endings and attendant salvation. Most of us are now familiar with scholarly discussions of globalization written from a critical, spatial perspective.19 In the last three decades, a number of forces have come together to create a highly integrated and interdependent international system. Research in globalization studies focuses primarily on changes in the systems of world governance, including the proliferation of regional and cross-border trade agreements and pacts, the end of the cold war and the beginning of a ‘new world order’, and the ongoing impacts of neocolonialism and neoliberalism. There is an emphasis on shifts in the nature of capitalism as a global socioeconomic system – especially the changing geographies of production, the changing flows of capital and labour, the rise of new kinds of networks and commodity flows, and the increasing polarization of wealth on both macro (geographic) and micro (household) scales. A key feature of contemporary capitalism that is often discussed is the increased global nature and flexibility in regimes of accumulation – these include the deterritorialization of finance, the geographical fragmentation of production, and the growth of various kinds of systems of subcontracting.20 This flexibility is also manifested in the increasing, and often enforced, movements of labourers in extended social fields across borders; and in the consciousness, sociocultural expressions, and identity formation of both these transnational migrants and those who remain locally based. The overall perception of contemporary economic globalization as purveyed by critical scholars is one of individual anomie and despair as jobs are lost through runaway shops; of collective powerlessness in the face of failing unions as corporations and nations play 52

The tradition of the end: global capitalism and the contemporary spaces of apocalypse

off against each other in the entrainment of labour; of the increasing misery of less developed states through the enforcement of neoliberal policies by market pressures; of global environmental catastrophe owing to insufficient attention to questions of ecological sustainability; and of the rise of regimes of anti-democratic transnational governance in the form of regional and global trade agreements such as the WTO. In the most apocalyptic vision of all, it is a new world order structured primarily by spaces of flows. There is capital without capitalists, production without labour, just flows travelling at the speed of bits through networks of information, with nothing short of planetary catastrophe in the making.21 In the intensity and scope of the vision it is apocalyptic in the extreme, but it is an eschatological image that is ultimately unredemptive. Compare this with the vision of economic globalization from the perspective of thinkers on the right side of the political spectrum. These discourses of globalization are described well by Fernando Coronil, who writes: As an expression of this millennial fantasy, corporate discourses of globalization evoke with particular force the advent of a new epoch free from the limitations of the past. Their image of globalization offers the promise of a unified humanity no longer divided by East and West, North and South, Europe and its Others, the rich and the poor. As if they were underwritten by the desire to erase the scars of a conflictual past or to bring it to a harmonious end, these discourses set in motion the belief that the separate histories, geographies, and cultures that have divided humanity are now being brought together by the warm embrace of globalization, understood as a progressive process of planetary integration.22

It is this global-village image of harmonious integration that is harnessed and put to work for corporations from AT&T to Benetton, from Global Crossing to IBM (Figure 3.4).23 Different histories and bodies are fused together into a perfect oneness, and then difference itself is banished from future discussion. This is the ultimate fantasy of disembodied, ahistorical spacelessness, where there are no material or discursive frictions to hinder the space of flows. This is the fantasy of liberalism – a world without historical and spatial closure, without fissures and alienation. This is the transcendent moment for capitalism as well, for in a world without ‘the scars of a conflictual past’ or ‘the separate

3.4 ‘Future Family’: Planetary Integration by Benetton 53

The End of Tradition?

histories, geographies, and cultures that have divided humanity’, there also exist no barriers to the free circulation of capital and labouring bodies across space. For the corporate world, and for neoliberal thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, human society is poised for a great evolutionary leap – the leap into total obeisance to the laws of capitalist motion. For Fukuyama, the ‘end of history’ means the end of the twentieth-century experiments of different doctrines of government; it means the victory of capitalism and liberalism over socialism, communism, fascism, and dictatorship. For him, the current apocalypse is also the current utopia – the moment where the limits of so-called social engineering are made manifest, and a liberal, market-based order grounded in human nature emerges triumphant.24 The end of history means the final moment of evolution in the Hegelian-Marxist sense of a progressive evolution of political and economic institutions. Economic globalization, finally made possible through the perseverance of laissez-faire capitalism’s dynamic and inexorable motion, will mean the ending of the old traditions, and the beginning of a new world era.

Spaces of identity: towards the global self What are the spatial ramifications of this capitalist apocalypse? I will select a few transformations which can be said to categorize the shifting experience of being-in-theworld in late modernity. In terms of the sense of self, one of the changes that economic globalization has wrought is in the connection between identity and place. For many individuals worldwide, the sedentary relationship to a homeland, especially, a ‘national’ homeland since the eighteenth century, has been greatly disrupted by the processes characteristic of globalization. The word ‘homeland’, or ‘heimat’ in the German, connotes roots and territory – land itself. The deep connections that were felt between peoples and their land in many societies can be found in archival evidence dating back to early agrarian times. The contemporary philosopher, Sloterdijk, analyzed the many linguistic concepts around the world that connote this connection between a people and a particular territory. He wrote: The reason for this common capability can be found in analogous experiences of cultural development. It was thus with concepts like ‘folk’ and ‘motherland’ that people who began to cultivate the earth after the Neolithic revolution characterized the positive side of their sedentarism. Through the different expressions which they gave to the space with which they had become familiar, sedentary people articulated their symbiosis with an earth that, while feeding them, was also the depository of their dead. Through these words, which expressed deep allegiance to their own spatial residence, these peoples manifested what could be called agrarian patriotism.25

This patriotism – the patriotism of people to land, of citizen to nation, of self to space – is rendered increasingly unstable by the growing interdependencies between spaces in a global era. The current phase of neoliberal globalization involves the reordering and redefinition of geohistorical units, and it is a reordering that is profoundly spatial. The absolute and unquestioned relationship to a particular territory – in the last two centuries, a national territory – is ripped apart by the relentless dislocations and new articulations 54

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characteristic of capitalist development. There is an insistent tension between the state and global forces that has lead to the inexorable breaching and tearing of territorial narratives as well as physical boundaries, a constant rhythmic refrain of deterritorialization and reterritorialization played out unevenly across space.26 One of the concepts that has been caught up in the headlights of territorial transformation is that of community. Scholars of modernity from Tönnies through Weber have made the distinction between a sense of community as a more rooted, familiar, and personal set of relations than those characterized by the word ‘society’. Society is identified with the relationships of modernity, where personal connections are lost in the anomie of an abstracted and individualist world of monetary calculability and bureaucratic instrumentality. Michael Watts makes the connection between community and ‘its sister concepts of tradition and custom’ and stands them in sharp contrast to the ‘instrumental, individuated and formal properties of state or society in the modern sense’.27 He reflects at length on the question of why the concept of community ‘figures so centrally in contemporary violence’. Clearly, the highly charged contemporary politics of community centres on the shifting relationships between self and space. The dislocations occasioned by economic globalization have accelerated the modernist angst of loss of community – community here operating as a metonym for the shared personal spaces of social relationships anchored in a particular place. This has been heightened by the loss of the nation as the default repository of these narratives of shared identities, memories, and histories. Whether these narratives were ever actualized or not is insignificant beside the imagined community of national belonging.28 The loss of these imaginings is widely experienced as unacceptable and viciously struggled over, as it leaves in its wake nothing but a secular image of economic globalization, or, in other words, apocalypse without redemption. So here we are at the crossroads of discourses of apocalypse. Apocalyptic thought in contemporary scholarship results from the multiple transformations in society in the current period of flexible capitalism or late modernity; they are changes that go to the core of being and are intimately overlapped in the relationship of self and space. Historically, the concept of apocalypse contained a ‘redemptive’ quality to it in a nonsecular age. There was a pronounced religious fervour to the clearing out of old debris; the prospect of conflagration led to the prospect for a future rising, Phoenix-like from the ashes. Apocalypse was the precursor or preamble to utopia. Those apocalyptic promoters like Fukuyama, who see neoliberal globalization as progressive, depict utopia as the end of barriers – the complete freedom of movement. Movement through space is the ultimate democratic moment. It is bodies in movement, capital in motion. The End of History is the moment of an ultimate realization of and for society – utopia as the spaces of movement. Thus the religion of the market is the vision of apocalypse as the redemptive moment of capital’s perfect movement through space – and the creation that it leaves in its destructive wake. A regional example of a neoliberal utopia is the vision of Cascadia. Cascadia is an imagined, unified territory which stretches, according to the more expansive accounts, 55

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from Alaska through British Columbia, into parts of Idaho and down into Washington and Oregon. It is perceived as a postnational space by its promoters. Matthew Sparke describes it in the following terms: Rather than being territorially fixed, static and statelike, Cascadia appears to its promoters first and foremost as a moving ‘state of mind’. However, as a vision, an idea, a discourse, a dream image, a space-myth and a state of mind, to list only a few of the terms applied to Cascadia, this CBR [Cross-Border Regionalism] project is actively sustained by Canadian and US think tanks, visionaries and policy-makers.29

Cascadia manifests the logic of borderless flows, of networks and spaceless connections rather than of cities and embodied relationships. Cascadia is an ideal type, a perfect system that is always imagined and never attained. It is a node in a profoundly spaceless global economy, and its citizens are the managerial elite, disembodied (at least in the imagining) and inherently mobile in their ability to manage and evade the regulatory systems of cities and states. The Cascadian subject citizen is the veritable ‘global self’, a faceless, placeless being whose homeland is utopia itself.30 This ‘utopian’ vision rests on several assumptions, the first of which is that the normative citizen who is able to remain disembodied and contextless, is always a wealthy, white male. As with all neoliberal visions, the only body which can be truly bodyless, is this ‘standard’ body. This understanding is tacit, but never acknowledged, as it would disrupt the corporate narrative of warm and fuzzy planetary integration. The second assumption is that the actual spaces in which Cascadia is inscribed are environmentally more ‘natural’ and thus more sustainable than the arbitrary divisions caused by state borders. This narrative is key to the promotion of Cascadia as a pure space, one that is inherently more natural and perfect than the slow, ugly, and unsustainable regulatory spaces of the two nation-states. The dystopic vision of neoliberals, by contrast, is represented by the spaces of blockage and impurity. These blocked spaces are the postmodern cities of messiness and hybridity, of antagonistic bodies of difference, vying with and against each other, creating havoc and confusion, and united only in opposition to the ravages caused to their communities by the destructive side of capitalism’s uneven development. The classic city of dystopia is Los Angeles, where ghettos are perceived as constant sources of potential friction, with their normally contained inhabitants unexpectedly erupting out and beyond the barriers of poverty to protest and riot at their bloody marginalization (Figure 3.5). These types of postmodern cities represent the antithesis of Cascadia, for the ‘differences’ of bodies, their racialization and marginalization, is palpable, and is a constant source of tension. Los Angeles is the metaphor for a cultural pluralism that can never be harmonized and forgotten. The blockades of tires burning in the streets; the looted shop windows; the inassimilable migrants unable to cross legal or cultural borders freely and easily; the non-labouring, immobile, incarcerated, and welfare-dependent bodies – these are all the emblems of closure and dystopia found in the neoliberal vision of Los Angeles (Figure 3.5 and 3.6). It is in these stubborn, existing sites of sticky and immovable difference and tradition that neoliberals see apocalypse without redemption, 56

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and in which the discourse of ‘environmental apocalypticism’ is trumpeted most loudly. This particular narrative (too many people, too many irresolvable problems, too much sedimented sin) serves to depoliticize and disable those who are most likely to contest the economic and social inequities of the environments in which they are mired. As Cindi Katz notes, ‘nature made apocalyptic gives rise to a politics of hopelessness from which the means of social and environmental transformation are unlikely to emerge’.31 The apocalyptic tone here is again one that warns and persuades, although to different ends. And once again, it is concerned with a profoundly spatial struggle – the future of the city and of nature itself.

Apocalypse and utopia: spaces without limits? In All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman emphasizes the profoundly spatial nature of capitalism’s force of creative destruction.32 In his discussion of Goethe’s legend of Faust, Berman writes of a man who makes a pact with the devil. In one of his three incarnations, that of the developer, the man connects his personal drives with the economic, political, and social forces that drive the world. He learns to build and destroy,

3.5 Ghetto Blockages: ‘Turn Left or Get Shot’

3.6 California National Guard Barricades in Los Angeles 57

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taming nature for contemporary needs, making progress, making the world modern. His ultimate project, what we would now see as the capitalist urban mega-project of all time, is to transform a particular coastal site into a ‘productive’ space through massive reclamation projects involving the construction of harbours, canals, dams, irrigation systems, fields, and waterpower. The transformation of the coastal site represents the rebuilding of the world through capitalist motion, and in the name of modernity. The creation of this dynamic space (and almost all the changes are changes that facilitate movement through space) allows business to expand exponentially. International trade can be opened up through the transportation of commodities through the canals and harbours. People can come to labour in the new fields and factories. Unlike the Gothic, slow, stagnant, closed, barren, and traditional spaces which he destroys, spaces are opened up for freedom. All natural and human barriers fall. Faust is thus the ‘new’ man, wrecker and creator, the ultimate figure of the master developer. Of course this spatial transformation has a cost. The people in this new modern space must become ‘modern’ people. But not all are willing to adapt and to create the new ‘community’ that is necessary to survive in modern times. Faust finally decides that the old, traditional people who are standing in the way of the project must be sacrificed for the greater good. He has the elderly couple, Baucis and Philemon destroyed, so that the project can be completed as planned. It is only through the clearing out of the old and the traditional, that the new and modern can take hold. For Faust, capitalism’s creative destruction is both apocalypse and utopia in one. Faust’s religion is modernity. And this modernity is represented by the limitless spaces of capitalist progress. In this epic narrative, we thus see once again the connection of apocalypse and space, and its moment of transition from the age of faith to the modern era. As Gottlieb notes: . . . if the central drama of the age of faith was the conflict between salvation and damnation by deity, in our secular modern age this drama has been transposed to a conflict between humanity’s salvation or damnation by society in the historical arena.33

First capitalism and now global capitalism have taken the place of the deity, and events such as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001, indicate the

3.7 World Trade Center as Babylon, from the Foundation for the Law of Time 58

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widespread furore that this displacement has caused. Indeed, this terrorist attack has been projected by some Christian fundamentalists as a blow against the religion of global capitalism and its unfettered movement across the spaces of the globe. In this apocalyptic imagining, the destruction of the World Trade Center represents the modernday equivalent of the Fall of Babylon (Figure 3.7). The attack, however, was, needless to say, an ultimately unredemptive act – one without a vision of a viable alternative. It was a political act but an act without politics, without a conceptualization of the spaces of hope, without a vision of utopia. What are these contemporary visions?

Alternative utopias Those who see the spaces of economic globalization under Late Capitalism as negative (as ultimately apocalyptic) for human society and the planet are caught in a bind vis-à-vis a consideration of the spaces of utopia. Here’s the bind: how to imagine the spaces of utopia (a constructive imagining) in an interdependent world, without either duplicating the capitalist logic of movement, speed, and openness being equated with freedom, or resorting to tyrannical and ill-conceived closures of various kinds (especially closures that lead directly to the neo-traditionalist identity politics that most progressive critics see as suffocating of difference). In the worst-case scenarios, these closures lead to the kinds of terrorist acts or ethnic cleansings discussed above.34 The reality and the prospect of violence from the ‘territorial fallacy’ – the false connection between the land and its proprietor, is perceived as a crucial problem of the contemporary moment by both neoliberal and radical scholars. But, whereas Marxist geographers tend to depict violence without surcease (apocalypse without redemption), neoliberal philosophers like Sloterdijk offer apocalypse with the possibility of an attendant utopia. Utopia, for Sloterdijk, will come with the total submission to the reality of a new, multi-spatial self, or as he puts it, the ‘global self’. This self, as in all of the neoliberal images, exists in free and mobile space and is represented by ‘movement away from a point of departure toward an open global space’.35 If the utopia of free-marketeers is the absolute freedom of movement, then what is the utopia of Marxists, or others critical of laissez-faire capitalism and its various violences? If critical discourses of globalization as apocalypse do not contain any seeds of hope, they will either lead followers (including students) to pessimism and despair, or over to the ‘other’ side – the side that promises salvation, the side which sees neoliberal globalization as a warm and fuzzy moment of planetary integration. The problem for critical scholars on the left is the problem of imagining progressive spaces in a non-identarian mould; of imagining the spaces of community without communal exclusions and normative assumptions; of imagining a global civil society, but without the biases of Western liberalism. David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope is a partial response to these questions of alternative imaginings. The book is both a reaffirmation of Harvey’s earlier work and an apologia for the lack of alternatives it seemed to offer. The need to imagine the spaces of hope rather 59

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than just critique the spaces of alienation is palpable. There is now a growing scholarly interest in the formation of these spaces on a global scale, as a form of cosmopolitan civil society or transnational public sphere – a space that is neither neoliberal globalization nor fundamentalist, neonationalist separation. What might this alternative space look like? Spaces of Hope consists primarily of a reworking of Harvey’s earlier theses on spatializing Marx but set within contemporary globalization debates. He does not directly address the topic of spatializing utopia until near the end of the book, and he begins his discussion with a critique of degenerative utopias – particularly those of urban redevelopment projects and other profit-oriented, capitalist projects hiding behind the rhetoric of progress. For example, Harvey introduces Disneyland as an example of a ‘degenerative utopia’, and uses it as a way of critiquing any kind of spatial form that represents itself as a form of materialized utopianism. In his examination of alternative spaces, spaces of hope and possibility, he quickly rejects the limitations necessitated by any idea of utopia that is fixed in space. Inevitably, he argues, these spaces are closed, often authoritarian, ultimately undialectical as soon as they are rendered concrete. Thus begins a quest for an alternative. He writes: ‘The task is to pull together a spatiotemporal utopianism – a dialectical utopianism – that is rooted in our present possibilities at the same time as it points towards different trajectories for human uneven geographical developments’.36 This is a search for an alternative space of possibility that is materially grounded, yet never actually materialized. Harvey takes back the rhetoric of movement and freedom for his alternative utopian vision from the neoliberal right. For him, the alternative to a sense of despair stemming from the apocalypse of economic globalization is in the proactive imagining of a better society – one springing from a greater awareness of the inherent internal contradictions of Late Capitalism. His sociospatial and dialectical utopia allows, in fact necessitates, closures of various kinds, but they are closures that are negotiated and made vulnerable to constant critique. He writes: How, then, can a stronger utopianism be constructed that integrates social process and spatial form? Is it possible to formulate a more dialectical form of utopianism, construct, even, a utopian dialectics? For this to happen requires a dialectics that can operate in relation to both space and time (something impossible within the Hegelian tradition). It also has to face up to the materialist problems of authority and closure. Closure (the making of something) of any sort contains its own authority because to materialize any one design, no matter how playfully construed, is to foreclose, in some cases temporarily but in other instances relatively permanently, on the possibility of materializing others. We cannot evade such choices.37

The revalorization of closure is an interesting theoretical move. But alongside this suggestion vis-à-vis the imagining of a ‘normative’ spatial form, I would like to rethink the descriptive order of being itself. The cities of ‘Babylon’ are with us now: they are still Rome, but also Cairo and London and Sao Paolo and Los Angeles. These are the sites of our future utopias: the ontological world that is. The first step in reclaiming these spaces is to contest the apocalyptic visions and narratives of Cascadian-style, spaceless utopias, which front for the imagined communities of global capitalism. At the same time, we must contest the image of dystopia, the actually existing, described, and describable 60

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urban places (or city fragments) around the globe which do not correspond to the freeflowing narratives of openness and perfection. These are the cities to fight for, to improve, and to claim as our utopias, ones in which none are excluded and all may enter. They are the messy, hybrid, historical, and geographical cities of the postmodern era, and they are the cities that we must revalorize and work to make our New Jerusalem of the future.

Notes 1. A. MacLeish, ‘The End of the World’, Collected Poems, 1952. 2. D. Wojcik, The End of the World as We Know It, New York, New York University Press, 1997. 3. J. Derrida, ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Adopted in Recent Philosophy’, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 6, no. 2, 1984, pp. 20–21. 4. Ibid., p. 24. 5. The New Jerusalem Bible, New York, Doubleday and Company Inc., 1968. 6. H. Hendrix, The Ecstacy of Catastrophe: A Study of Apocalyptic Narrative from Langland to Milton, Peter Lang, New York, 1990, p. 2. 7. Ibid., p. 3 8. Ibid., p. 6. 9. Ibid., p. 7. 10. The New Jerusalem Bible, p. 333. 11. Ibid., p. 335. 12. Ibid., pp. 324–325. 13. Derrida, ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Adopted in Recent Philosophy’, p. 24. 14. Wojcik, The End of the World as We Know It. 15. J. Combs, ‘Pox-Eclipse Now – The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Popular Movies’, in C. Sharrett (ed.), Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film, Washington D.C., Maisonneuve Press, 1993, pp. 17–35. 16. W. Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982. 17. One could argue that the fascination with the end of the second millennium accelerated modern angst and soul-searching concerning endings of various kinds. Certainly, the furore brought about by this calendric moment was widespread and initiated countless ‘revelations’ concerning an impending apocalypse. Nevertheless, I think the overall volume of prognostications concerning the end speaks to deeper and more long-term changes than could be caused by millennium fantasies alone. 18. There are numerous widely divergent types of literatures on this theme. Some scholars of the shifting spaces of modernity include Allan Pred, Timothy Mitchell, T. J. Clark, Derek Gregory, and Carl Shorske. 19. See, for example, P. Dicken, Global Shift: The Internationalization of Economic Activity, New York, Guilford Press, 1992; K. Cox, Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, New York, Guilford Press, 1997; J. Agnew and M. Corbridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory, and International Political Economy, New York, Routledge, 1995; K. Olds, P. Dicken, P. Kelly, L. Kong, and H. Yeung, Globalization and the Asia Pacific: Contested Territories, London, Routledge, 1999; A. Herod, G. O Tuathail, and S. Roberts, Unruly World? Globalization, Governance, and Geography, London, Routledge, 1998; and A. Amin and N. Thrift, Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994. 20. D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell Publications, 1989. 21. See M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford, Blackwell Publications, 1996. 22. F. Coronil, ‘Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 2, 2000, pp. 351–374. 23. See, for example, my discussion of the strategic use of the liberal discourse of multiculturalism for global corporate ends in ‘Multiculturalism, or the United Colors of Capital?’ Antipode, vol. 25, no. 4, 1993. 61

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24. F. Fukuyama, in ‘Post-Human History?’ New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 3, Summer 2000, p. 4. See also F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, The Free Press, 1992. 25. P. Sloterdijk, ‘From Agrarian Patriotism to the Global Self’, New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 1, Winter 2000, p. 15. 26. A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996; M. Sparke, Hyphen-Nation-States, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming; and J. M. Jacobs, ‘Tradition is (not) Modern: Deterritorializing Globalization’, this volume. 27. M. Watts, ‘Geographies of Violence and the Narcissism of Minor Difference’, Struggles Over Geography: Violence, Freedom, and Development at the Millennium, Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg, 2000, pp. 9–10. 28. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1983. 29. M. Sparke, ‘Not a State, But More than a State of Mind: Cascading Cascadias and the Geoeconomics of Cross-Border Regionalism’, in M. Perkmann and N. Sum (eds.), Globalization, Regionalization, and Cross-Border Regions, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 212. 30. For an illustration of Cascadia, see M. Sparke, ‘Nature and Tradition at the Border: Landscaping the End of the Nation-State’, this volume. 31. C. Katz, ‘Under the Falling Sky: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and the Production of Nature’, in A. Callari, S. Cullenberg, and C. Biewener (eds.), Marxism in the Postmodern Age, New York, Guilford, 1995, p. 277. 32. M. Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1982. 33. E. Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction East and West, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s, 2001, p. 3. 34. Watts, ‘Geographies of Violence and the Narcissism of Minor Difference.’ 35. Sloterdijk, ‘From Agrarian Patriotism to the Global Self’, p. 16. 36. D. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000, p. 196. 37. Ibid.

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Chapter 4

Nostalgias of the modern Ananya Roy

The menu lists ‘steak au poivre’ ($18) and ‘tenement mac and cheese’ ($12).1 The restaurant is called ‘Tenement’ (Figure 4.1).2 It is located in the Lower East Side of New York. The name, Lower East Side, refers to a distinctive neighbourhood history of nineteenth-century tenements that housed immigrants, to the labour struggles and rent struggles that once animated the area, and more generally to a working-class milieu.3 The Lower East Side is the past; its symbolic elements, such as the tenements, are today its tradition. The Lower East Side is now the East Village, a renaming that indicates the intense gentrification that has taken place here at various times but in most sustained fashion in the 1980s and 1990s. As brilliantly argued by Smith, this gentrification has actively capitalized on the theme of urban decay, turning dilapidation and poverty into a corporate fantasy.4 The devalued terrain of the inner city has been reclaimed through techniques of ‘cultural boosterism’5 that transform the experiences of the inner city into iconography. As these icons such as the ‘tenement’ are consumed, so the inner city itself disappears. The opening of a high-priced restaurant called ‘Tenement’ inaugurates the end of the working-class tenements, or more specifically of the working-class residents of the tenements. The tenement itself is now a façade, housing rich consumers interested in an exotic cityscape. It is above all an aesthetic icon, dissociated from both the property systems and inhabitants that once gave meaning to its form. Elsewhere, I have called this separation of form and social practice the ideology of space.6 Gentrification is a stark manifestation of the ideology of space, where what is revitalized is real-estate profit and not the lives or livelihoods of neighbourhood residents.7 But the ideology of space involves much more than simply evictions or demolitions; it is often the recreation of space through the deployment of tradition, through the appropriation of the very icons whose material realities are being negated through such redevelopment. In the case of the Lower East Side, Mele thus argues that the aesthetic landscapes of gentrification gesture toward and even mimic the look and feel of the very social elements they threaten to displace.8 It can be argued then that the consumption of tradition is the end of tradition, that the consumption of the icon of the ‘tenement’ marks the end of tenements as a housing tradition.9 I do not mean this proposition as a lament, a mourning for the commodification of allegedly authentic traditions. Rather, my intention is to point out the inauthenticity 63

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4.1 The Tenement restaurant, Lower East Side, New York, 2003

of tradition and, further, to note that tradition becomes authentic only in the act of consumption. Put simply, the valuation implicit in consumption gives value to tradition. There is no inherent or intrinsic value to tradition outside these processes of valuation. It can also be argued then that the consumption of tradition is tradition. As in the case of the Lower East Side, history becomes tradition only through the practices of consumption. It is thus that memory is distilled into icons of value. Tradition then is one of those commodities where the distinction between production and consumption is meaningless. The consumption of tradition is the production of tradition. This proposition can in turn be articulated in at least two different ways, in two different systems of meaning. The first, which I will call ‘dwelling’,10 is concerned with authenticity. The second, which I will call ‘performing’,11 is blatantly inauthentic. Both involve frameworks of valuation but dwelling, concerned as it is with authenticity, masks the act of valuation in a narrative of nostalgia. In contrast, performing makes explicit the consumption of tradition thereby revealing the geopolitical order of valuation, and at times even unsettling this order. Both, I will argue, are ultimately concerned with the modern. Gentrification embodies modernization, the teleology of progress, of renewal and remaking. As evident in the case of the Lower East Side, gentrification operates through an appropriation of tradition, through a ‘looking backward’. Such are the nostalgias of the modern. I use the term ‘looking backward’ quite deliberately to make reference to the 64

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novel, Looking Backward, published by the American writer, Edward Bellamy, in 1888.12 This utopia envisioned a modern world, the year 2000, complete with welfare capitalism and a benevolent state. But it also preserved the saccharine sweet Victorian family as a model. Other than the ubiquitous credit card to which women have unfettered access, this radically modern utopia is also staunchly traditional, unable to overcome a ‘longing for early America’.13 Similar themes of nostalgia run through present-day utopias such as New Urbanism. Here too the icons of family and community loom large as the ‘new’ seeks to recreate the ‘old’. Frantz and Collins describe New Urbanist towns like Celebration as a ‘back to the future’.14 This, like Bellamy’s utopia, is a future modelled after a mythicized and cleansed past. Most significant, it is this ‘looking backward’ that masks practices of consumption and naturalizes capitalist valuation. Nostalgia then has important political implications. I have argued in previous work that quite a bit of urban redevelopment, such as slum upgrading, operates through an imperialist nostalgia, a term used by Rosaldo to indicate the ‘mourning for what one has destroyed’.15 Such mourning generates innocence. It obscures agency and culpability. When formalized as heritage, nostalgia goes a step further: it produces legitimacy through aestheticization. As Mele argues in the case of gentrification, ‘reinvention legitimizes the entire process of urban restructuring and masks the class conflict that is inherent in the restructuring of working-class neighborhoods’.16 Nostalgia as heritage serves a double function – on the one hand, it generates aesthetic icons of value, icons that add value, icons that revalorize and revitalize; on the other hand, through this aestheticization, it renders invisible the brutal mechanics of capitalist valuation. In this way, nostalgia also magically resolves the problematic of change and transformation. In Bellamy’s Looking Backward, there is no revolution, there is no politics, there is only utopia as the ‘determinate sociohistorical negation of what exists’.17 In New Urbanism, change is mandated through the environmental determinist techniques of the master-architect. Politics, as the conflict over valuation, is irrelevant in such aesthetic democracies because everything of value is aesthetic and has already been preserved as heritage. And yet this lack, this absence, is of course the ultimate political project: a claim to the postmodern future by way of the authentically traditional past. There are other ways of remembering the past, for example, as memory that forces us to mourn, to take account of a difficult and bitter history.18 While I am cautious about the idea of mourning and its implication that innocence can be achieved through catharsis, I am interested in memory as a counterpoint to nostalgia. Nostalgia is a narrative of loss and eventually a celebration as what was once lost is recovered. It is not surprising then that Disney’s New Urbanist town is called Celebration. And it is in this sense that it is postmodern, a ‘look back to the future’. Memory overflows; it cannot be contained in this teleology. Memory wanders; it cannot be fixed in this relationship between place and tradition. Memory betrays; it cannot fully remember and therefore cannot ever be authentic. Later in this chapter I will pay attention to such discontinuities, displacements, and duplicities. For the moment, let me state what I see to be the geography of memory and nostalgia: If memory evokes territorial loss and struggle, then nostalgia establishes 65

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territorial claims, and when formalized as heritage, such claims attain legitimacy. Nostalgia makes possible a dwelling in modernity,19 an occupation and inhabitation of space. In contrast to dwelling, I have posed the notion of performing. The performance of tradition was a key idea in the work of Neil Leach and Ackbar Abbas who, in their keynote talks at a recent conference, focused on the performative dimensions of tradition.20 The conference, a site of academic production, was also a site of consumption – of consuming tradition. On our first evening, as many of us from Berkeley sat down to a jetlagged dinner having just flown in to Hong Kong on a recently bankrupt United Airlines, we noticed that we were surrounded by American paraphernalia. What we had thought was a French bistro, La Brasserie, was in fact L.A. Brasserie, complete with American flags and waitresses in Statue of Liberty ties. In keeping with the L.A. theme, the walls were lined with famous images such as the Last Supper, except that now Hollywood stars had replaced traditional icons (Figure 4.2). It is perhaps significant that Marilyn Monroe, that symbol of gendered performativity, was centre-stage as Jesus, and in another as the hand of God. Here is a performance of tradition, one that is in Abbas’s framework, a ‘slip of the tongue’.21 This is a mimicry, one that produces what Bhabha sees as ‘slippage’, ‘excess’, ‘difference’.22 But this is a performance of inauthenticity that can only be understood in the space between places. It is spatial slippage, a Hong Kong performance of L.A. traditions. It is about displacement and dislocation rather than dwelling. It is about experiencing spatial separation and distance through performance rather than inhabiting space through nostalgia. That this performance can be interpreted as either mimicry or satire, or in Bhabha’s terms, as both, is interesting because it reveals the paradoxes that are inherent in performativity and more generally in the structure of modernity. In this chapter I examine such issues by broaching the question of tradition through the trope of the modern. I investigate the modern as a simultaneous transcendence and valuation of tradition. As tradition is superseded by modernist progress, so a pure and distilled tradition is put on display, such that it can be consumed within the circuits of

4.2 A mural by Casaro Renato entitled Invitation, on the wall of the L.A. Brasserie restaurant, Royal Kowloon Hotel, Hong Kong 66

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modernization, such that the other continents can arrive as contributions. In a second move, I make evident how such frameworks of authenticity come to be disturbed through the performing of tradition. Most important, such performances unsettle the relationship between tradition and place. Instead, there are spatial slippages where the practices of desire, aspiration, fakery, borrowing, and ambivalence signify one place but in the context of the other. These displacements are not accidental; rather they belong to the very real cartography of postcolonialism and its web of flows, fantasies, and figments. In this chapter then the end of tradition is not a temporal ending. Rather, it is the end of an epistemological order where tradition is derived through techniques of nostalgia and formalized in a spatial order as heritage. The end of tradition signals a slipping past the cordons of the modern, a breaching of the boundaries of dwelling, a movement in and through geography. It is also the end of the universal modern, that which seeks to transcend geography. If tradition no longer has a fixed relation to place, then the modern need not supersede the particularities of place. The end of tradition is the geographical multiplicity of the modern.

The other continents arrive as contributions The idea of the modern is also the idea of progress. This notion of progress operates in time and space. If some places are seen as backward, then moving ahead also implies being ahead of such places, of being essentially different from such places. Such geographical articulations of development and underdevelopment constitute a key dimension of the modern. They imply that progress can only exist in relation to what is seen as backwardness; that the modern must put not only itself but also tradition on display: the other continents must arrive as contributions. Let me discuss such ideas in the context of a quintessentially modern icon: the Crystal Palace. Erected first in London, in 1851, to house a world exhibition, the Crystal Palace was hailed as a feat of modern engineering. Assembled from thousands of small prefabricated parts, the structure was a feat of iron lattice work and uniform sheets of glass.23 But while the Crystal Palace was initially located in London, a geopolitical mapping of this emblem of modernization requires a more global sweep. I have chosen two other nineteenth-century locations, St. Petersburg and New York, within which to situate my discussion of the Crystal Palace. Eventually, I expand the argument by taking on another icon of the colonial world exhibitions, the Eiffel Tower, this time in the contemporary locations of Calcutta and Las Vegas. Such displacements, I hope, will unsettle some of the certainties of progress and difference that are embodied in the universal modern. In late-nineteenth-century Russia, the Crystal Palace was an accomplishment worthy of emulation. Russian intellectuals, inspired by the momentous 1861 emancipation of the serfs, began to envision a modern Russia, free of its feudal trappings and rapidly catching up with the West and its democratic traditions. The Crystal Palace signified such dreams.24 It was the affirmation of a universal modern to which Russia could aspire. And this aspiration was a prescient vision, located midway between the words of Marx and 67

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the actions of Stalin. In 1867, Marx had declared that the country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed, the image of its own future.25 Almost a century later, Stalin had insisted that the Soviet Union, while fifty or hundred years behind the advanced countries, must make good this distance in ten years. The teleology and geography of modernization had been thus laid out. But there was a late-nineteenth-century Russian voice that was markedly different. In the writings of Dostoevsky, the modernist utopia of Russia took on dystopic undertones. In Notes from the Underground, he called into question the promises of modernism, instead foregrounding a stomach-turning nausea that prefigures Sartre and the angst of the twentieth century. Looking towards the West, Dostoevsky saw the norms of modernization and progress, enshrined in monuments like the Crystal Palace, but saw little to celebrate. In the garb of the Underground Man, he wrote: You believe in a crystal edifice that can never be destroyed, an edifice at which one would not be able to stick one’s tongue out, or to thumb one’s nose, even on the sly. And I am afraid of this edifice just because it is of crystal and can never be destroyed, and because one could not stick out one’s tongue at it on the sly.26

Who is this ‘you’ of which Dostoevsky writes? Perhaps the timeless subject of the universalist modern? And how is Dostoevsky’s snub of the Crystal Palace to be interpreted? As the perverse envy of a backward Russian? In his path-breaking book, All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman designates Dostoevsky’s gesture as a ‘modernism of underdevelopment’. It is a modernism, Berman argues, that is characterized by desirous mimicry, bearing the apparent forms of the modern while lacking its processes and possibilities. And it is a modernism marked by an almost pathological envy, an ‘abject longing for the enemy’s love’.27 Berman’s interpretation is of some importance, because it casts the question of being modern in the universalist idiom of Western reforms, and brands the rejection of this as indelibly regressive. Herein lies a lineage that weaves its way through quite a bit of the social and political theory of the twentieth century. I find it quite interesting to revisit Dostoevsky in the current era of globalization. It is worth remembering that the Crystal Palace was entitled the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’. Prince Albert introduced it to the British public as a setting where ‘the products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal’.28 It was one of many world exhibitions where a newly carved-up globe was displayed through the techniques of colonial power. Dostoevsky rightfully recognized it as an attempt to generate ‘worldwide commerce’. A Prussian diplomat had described the Crystal Palace as a ‘midsummer’s night dream in the noonday sun’.29 Dostoevsky, writing in a poignantly titled piece called ‘Winter Notes on Summer Impressions’ rejected the symbolic order of world exhibitions, this ‘Biblical scene’, this ‘ultimate truth’: You sense that it would require a great deal of eternal spiritual fortitude and denial in order not to submit, not to yield to the impression, not to bow down to the fact, not to worship, not to accept the world that exists as one’s own ideal.30

Today, as the battles over globalization play out on city streets, in the protests against the spectacle of institutions such as WTO, Dostoevsky’s Winter Notes sound eerily familiar. 68

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But the dualistic structure of this modernist narrative lies not so much in the feud between Russia and the West, in what Berman sees as Dostoevsky’s attempt to snub what he cannot have. The significant counterpart is the American response to the Crystal Palace, which I present through the words of the poet, Walt Whitman. This is the geopolitical imaginary that marks the other end of the map and seals its boundaries. Whitman has long been hailed as a ‘captain’ of American literature. Leaves of Grass has long held a special place of prominence, although more recently it has had the dubious distinction of appearing on the national agenda as the only recorded gift that Bill Clinton had given to Monica Lewinsky! But, I digress. Whitman, while writing the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass is said to have attended the 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York on a daily basis. It is reported that he marvelled in the sights day and night, until even the guards knew him well.31 There are two striking ways in which Whitman’s writings on the Crystal Palace contrast sharply with those of Dostoevsky. First, Whitman revels in the Archimedean bird’seye view provided by the exhibition, in what Cutler calls ‘spectacular modernity’.32 If Dostoevsky’s Underground Man felt his presence negated by the splendor of the edifice, then Whitman embraces the sweeping moment when ‘to him the other continents arrived as contributions’.33 This was the very spirit of the world exhibitions, to exhibit the world, and even bolder, as Mitchell notes, to image the world as exhibition. It was an order that epitomized ‘the strange character of the West, a place where one was continually pressed into service as a spectator by a world ordered so as to represent’.34 This was the order that Dostoevsky rejected, and this was the order that Whitman affirmed. Second, Whitman not only gazed at the view, but also managed to position himself beyond and above it, as its master. Dostoevsky saw himself on the margins of this eternal and universal order, a Biblical scene that demanded of him a bowing down. Whitman, in contrast, stated boldly, as if to the exhibition itself: Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me I crowd your noisiest talk by looking toward you.35

These are stunning words, which mark the arrogant privileges of an upstart American nation. This piece, aptly titled Song of Myself, delineates a commanding gaze, one that prefigures the cartographies of the twentieth century. Here lies the mastery of the twentieth century, which in its second half is indubitably an American century. Whitman’s America exists; Dostoevsky’s Russia mimics. One embodies gentlemanly progress, the other engages in the rudeness of a snub. One desires (and conquers), the other desires but only in warped and perverse ways, even hating with ambivalence. This theme of Third World envy and mimicry can be explored by looking at contemporary articulations of the world-as-exhibition. For this I turn to Calcutta, a Third World metropolis historically named as the black hole of urbanization. Languishing at the margins of global change, Calcutta nevertheless participates in spectacular modernity, for example, through its book fairs.36 The annual book fair is a well-established tradition in Calcutta, an urban ritual played 69

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4.3 Bangladesh pavilion, 1997 Calcutta Book Fair

out under a hazy late winter sun. The dense lines of bamboo and cloth stalls, barely holding up to the swirls of dust stirred up by the shuffling of avid visitors, have always symbolized more than simply the city’s famed cultural passions. In many ways, the fairs are also meant to signal Bengal’s participation in a world arena of literary production with stalls ‘representing’ particular nations and their cultural traditions. Thus, at the 1997 Book Fair, an ill-proportioned copy of Louis Kahn’s National Assembly building served to represent Bangladesh (Figure 4.3), and a stocky arch led to the French pavilion where indigent local artists displayed their paintings for ridiculously low prices (Figure 4.4). The 1997 Calcutta Book Fair had a French theme, with a truncated cutout of the Eiffel Tower that served as the venue’s gate, and complete with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida as guest of honor. Derrida was as symbolic as the cardboard Eiffel Tower, his presence upstaged by a communist regime simply eager to attract European investment to the city. However, there was an unfortunate twist to this Bengali world exhibition. A gas cylinder, which was being used to cook food in one of the stalls, overturned and set off a fire. The sole fire truck on duty had no access to water supplies, and the others did not arrive until the combustible mixture of bamboo, cloth, and books had created a mushroom cloud of

4.4 French pavilion, 1997 Calcutta Book Fair 70

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4.5 Eiffel Tower gate with fire in the background, 1997 Calcutta Book Fair

fire and smoke (Figure 4.5). The book fair burnt to the ground. The European publishers who had arrived in the city ever so tentatively retreated ever so rapidly. The fire can be seen as just another instance of Calcutta’s crumbling infrastructure, a deathblow to a city long designated as ‘dying’; just another example of a Third World metropolis unable to secure for itself the certainties of modernization. The Calcutta book fair can also be seen as a world exhibition of sorts. If the fin-desiècle expositions symbolized the colonial power to represent, then, at the turn of this century, the clumsiness of Calcutta’s book fair stalls is perhaps indicative of its tenuous presence on the margins of a global cartography. How is this to be interpreted? As a modernism of underdevelopment, the pathetic gesture of a liberalizing communist government seeking to image itself within global capitalism? Or, as a deliberate and snide rejection of the Crystal Palace motif, like Dostoevsky wishing to stick his tongue out, on the sly, at the edifices of the West? There is another form of mimicry with which this contrasts: this one from Las Vegas and its invocation of Parisian themes. Walking through Las Vegas’s Paris (Figure 4.6), along with the 33 million annual tourists who make the pilgrimage to this asphalted stretch of Nevada desert, I have thought back to that day in Calcutta: to a lone and paralyzed fire truck on a winter afternoon. How is the Las Vegas Eiffel Tower to be interpreted? As First World postmodernism, a success in a city where fakery is at a premium? The idea of ‘authentic fakery’37 might sound oxymoronic, but this seeming paradox reveals a particular geopolitical privilege. Foucault distinguishes between resemblance and similitude.38 In this vein, Calcutta’s Eiffel Tower can be seen to bear resemblance to a ‘model’, ‘an original element that orders and hierarchizes the increasingly less faithful copies that can be struck from it’. Located at the edge of the world-system, it is a dimunition of authenticity. In contrast, the Las Vegas Eiffel Tower can be seen as a simulacrum, one that repeats, but through ‘an indefinite and reversible relation of the similar to the similar’. Here, both the original and the copy are authentic, both equally part of a geopolitical order that links the Parisian world exhibition of 1889 to the global display of Las Vegas 2000. The contrast between Calcutta and Las Vegas is provocative because it indicates varied 71

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4.6 Eiffel Tower, Paris Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas

genres of performance. That contrast, which I have cast as that between resemblance and similitude, is not a contrast between better or worse representations, between more authentic and less authentic forms of representation. Rather it is the contrast between different forms of representation. The continents arrive as contributions in both sites of modernity but they do so in drastically different ways. This difference indicates geopolitical difference, in this case between a city at the margins of globalization and that at the heart of global circuits of tourism and consumption. This difference also indicates a multiplicity to the idea of spectacular modernity and indeed to modernity itself. As I will argue later in this chapter, the notion of multiple modernities involves far more than diversity, or the multiple articulations of the modern in multiple places. Such notions of diversity are still in keeping with the idea of dwelling, of dwelling in modernity by tweaking the modernist ideal to fit the unique necessities of place. Instead, the concept of multiple modernities can indicate the paradoxes and ambiguities that are inherent in modernity. This is most evident in the concept of performing. The displaced world exhibitions of Calcutta and Las Vegas are performances. But they cannot be judged against any original reality. While commentators like Paul Goldberger contrast the ‘authentic’ Eiffel Tower with the corrupt mimicry of Las Vegas,39 it is important to note that the so-called original was itself a performance, a gateway to the world exhibition as theme park, in Roland Barthes’s terms, a tower meant to be seen and to see from.40 As Mitchell notes, ‘in the world-as-exhibition, “reality” means that which can be represented’.41 It is in this sense that Chaplin and Holding espouse the idea of the posturban. Drawing upon Virilio’s notion of the ‘overexposed city’ they seek to understand the city as comprised of various disguises and façades, as performances if you will.42 This is the multiplicity, even duplicity, of the modern. 72

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Slipping past the cordon sanitaire Colonialism, argues Mitchell, divided the world into two: one part was the exhibition and the other was the museum. As the wonders of the modern were exhibited so was tradition preserved and put on display. ‘The colonial order depended upon at once creating and excluding its own opposite.’43 It is thus that difference, embodied as the native or indigenous or traditional, came to be implicated in the very constitution of the universal modern. And yet difference was maintained as separate – at once transcended and appropriated by the modern. If the layout of the world exhibitions indicated this logic of separation, then at the scale of the colonial city, the cordon sanitaire was the technique of separation. This technique was of course also a technique of power: the power to name, value, preserve, and separate tradition. By discussing the case of colonial Algiers, I show how this cordon sanitaire was imagined but also breached. What did it mean to slip past tradition, into modernity? I pursue such questions by briefly turning to a second context, colonial Bengal. A great deal has been written about French colonialism in Algeria, that oldest of colonies, that most protracted of bloody independence struggles. It is not my intention to rework these debates.44 I revisit them to simply outline some key themes. First, it is obvious that colonialism involved an unprecedented level of modernization and modernism. Not only were cities and regions brutally remade in ways that would have made Haussmann proud, but so also was put into place an entire professional apparatus of modernism. Thus, on the one hand, the future was ‘invented’,45 and on the other hand, this invention was made possible through the rationalization of geopolitical knowledge, an ordering of the world if you will. This was the hierarchical structure best epitomized by the world exhibitions like the Crystal Palace and most clearly expressed in the discursive logic of Orientalism.46 Crucial to this modernism was the supervised preservation of carefully selected native traditions, manifested on the ground through the sociospatial management of difference. A striking example of this comes from Corbusier’s famous Plan Obus for Algiers. For someone who had dedicated one of his earliest designs to a single god, Authority, and who lamented the republicanism of post-Haussmann France, it is not surprising that Corbusier saw colonialism as a welcome opportunity to spread modernism. His graphic representation of colonialism portrayed it as an axis of ideas, taking hold in Algiers, and then extending further south to French black Africa.47 Of course, this is the very axis along which a different colonial exchange – of resource extraction and revenues and labour power – was taking place. This was the primitive accumulation, the bloody modernization, which would make the edifices of modernism possible. Corbusier was particularly interested in Algiers. He had first visited the city in the early 1930s during the festivities marking one hundred years of French occupation, and had thought that the city was perhaps ‘the most beautiful in the world’.48 His Plan Obus envisioned preserving intact the city’s Casbah, with a highway hovering above it, connecting the planned expansions of European residences with European businesses. Quarantined behind this 73

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vertical cordon sanitaire, the Casbah and its traditions would endure, as would the careful balance between European and Muslim cultures that Corbusier had articulated in various sketches. Tafuri describes the Plan Obus as the ‘most elevated theoretical hypothesis of modern urbanism . . . the repository of a new scale of values . . . a means of collective integration’.49 The plan never came to fruition. Even the French military authorities who were in charge of Algiers were convinced that it could only be implemented through a new bombardment of the city. But it is perhaps this incompletion that imparts unsullied perfection to Corbusier’s vision, making it a distilled spatial image of colonialism. The Casbah of Algiers was preserved in other ways by the French, most notably through policies of associationism, or what Rabinow has called techno-cosmopolitanism.50 But what is interesting for our purposes is that it is precisely this spatial order that aided the emergence of particular forms of political protest. Lamprakos, for example, documents the ways in which the geography of the Casbah made possible the guerilla warfare waged by the National Liberation Front.51 The native Casbah, in fact, often proved impenetrable to European troops and tanks, refusing entry to its very creator. There is another way of mapping these impositions of the modern and the challenges posed by tradition. The boundaries between Casbah and White Town were not simply regulated through zoning and building regulations, but equally through the contestation of social norms, and specifically through the regulation of gendered hierarchies and meanings. This too was a cordon sanitaire of sorts, marking as separate the traditions of the other. Corbusier, for example, presented the city as a feminized entity, as being caressed by the godly hand of the architect and more specifically represented the Casbah in the image of a veiled woman (Figure 4.7).52 He was particularly fascinated with the seductive veil, which he saw as concealing the ‘penetrable mystery’ of ‘ravishing coquettes’.53 His representations make evident the mutual constitution of gendered and geopolitical difference: how the ‘Woman’ Question is in fact the ‘Other’ question. In Algeria, the veil became the ‘visible marker’ of cultural difference,54 a misogynist tradition that had to be eradicated through modernization. Indeed, the colonial mission of civilization could only be complete when the Oriental woman had been liberated from what was perceived to be the patriarchal tyrannies of her own culture. This, as Spivak notes, is the itinerary of recognition through the assimilation of the Other: a mis-recognition of the other as unfree and therefore of the self as free.55 In Algeria, the itinerary took the form of elaborate rituals of unveiling: colonial liberalism inscribed on to the female body.56 But if these were the gendered and sexualized terms of the colonial modern, then the Algerian nationalist movement turned them on its head. The veil, marked as tradition by the French, became a sign of moral resistance to colonialism. In his Studies in a Dying Colonialism, Fanon writes of how Algerian women, particularly in the cities, re-adopted the veil, as a direct engagement with French interventions.57 As the nationalist movement gained strength and vigour, the French responded by closing off the Casbah and monitoring all movement in and out of it. Algerian nationalists contested such forms of spatial surveillance through performative strategies of gender that hinged on the creative 74

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4.7 Le Corbusier, Poesie sur Alger, sketch showing the Casbah as a veiled head

deployment of the veil. This is powerfully depicted in the film, Battle of Algiers (1965), Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s paean to the FLN 1954–1958 uprising in the Casbah.58 Algerian women would transform themselves into European women, thus carrying bombs and revolvers into the heart of the European districts. Fanon writes of such moments: The unveiled Algerian woman moves like a fish in the Western waters. The soldiers, the French patrols, smile to her as she passes, compliments on her looks are heard here and there, but no one suspects that her suitcases contain the automatic pistol which will presently mow down four or five members of one of the patrols.59

And when this strategy was uncovered by the French, the veil was once again assumed, this time by nationalist men who donned the chador, thus claiming the feminized protections of what was perceived to be a misogynist tradition. Surely French soldiers would never have the courage to look underneath the disguise of the veil (Figure 4.8). And so we have a traditional symbol, ‘manipulated’, and ‘transformed into a technique of camouflage’.60 Also revealed are the ambiguities of both colonialism and its postcolonial articulations. The Battle of Algiers shows how the seeming duality of the colonial city is a binary that is not easily policed and implemented. Instead, it is the inauthenticity of tradition, in this case embodied in the strategic deployment of the veil, which allows a remapping of city and home, nation and world. Here, the veil loses its fixed meaning as a traditional symbol, and instead becomes a claim to a modern nation-state. This is also a distinctively regional articulation of that modernity, a remaking of self and society that Watts has termed ‘Islamic modernities’.61 In other words, as the authenticity of tradition is undermined, so is the universalism of the modern eroded. Perhaps this is clearest in the gendered nuances of this narrative. It is the performance 75

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4.8 Film still from Battle of Algiers

of gender that creates a surplus of meaning, one that defies the simple mapping of modern and traditional. When the Algerian woman takes off her veil is she modern? Is she mimicking the modern? Or is this the purest moment of her traditional incarnation? It is this equivocation that is exciting. A similar displacement attends the film, Battle of Algiers, and its style of pseudo-documentation.62 Pontecorvo deliberately uses documentary techniques, creating an air of objectivity. In fact, it is this claim of objectivity that Louis Malle deployed when showing the film in Paris, after it had been banned in France for a while. And yet, Pontecorvo also states quite clearly at the start of the film that not a single documentary reel was used. The tension between the documentary techniques and the staging of content creates an ambiguity, a ‘mimetic overflowing’, that is highly provocative.63 It becomes difficult to tell apart the historical from the cinematic. In the Battle of Algiers, such tensions are gendered. If nationalist projects are also body projects, regulating the gendered body, then this moment of Pontecorvo directing the performance of the veiled Algerian woman reveals the imitative and repetitive rituals through which gender is inscribed onto the body (Figure 4.9). This body is also the body politic.64 Against Fanon, Bhabha argues that colonial culture is not simply ‘present and mummified’; it is ‘potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal’. This potential unfolds through mimcry, through the cover of camouflage: ‘For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it deauthorizes them. Similarly, mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its “otherness”, that which it disavows’.65 The struggle for the Algerian Casbah mimed the fetish of the veil and yet is it a counter-appeal? I have argued that the performative gender strategies of the battle of Algiers – of both history and cinema – reveal the rituals of colonialism and postcolonialism. But is this revelation necessarily an undoing? Do the rituals revealed come undone? In this case, the mimicry of the fetish seems to maintain the fetish, even imparting to it an authenticity that becomes the essence of nationalism. Performance then is not necessarily subversion, especially when, as in Butler’s terms, it is ‘compulsory’ performance.66 76

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4.9 Film still from Battle of Algiers

For example, despite the intricacies of Fanon’s argument,67 he maintains the female body as the ultimate site of nationalist struggle. Corbusier’s vision of the Casbah is consummated through his imagining of a city as plastic and beautiful as the supplehipped and full-breasted Algerian woman.68 Fanon’s nationalist imaginary is fuelled by a fetishized and feminized Algerian authenticity. For him, the Algerian struggle was made possible through a remaking of the female body which in turn remade urban space. But, in the last instance, the revolutionary act of unveiling was to him the sexualized act of walking into an European city ‘stark naked’.69 Indeed, here, the contradictions of the Algerian veil, and discourses thereof, can be read as a forebearer of contemporary anguishes. It is thus that Assia Djebar has written of an independent Algeria where the bombs that nationalist women had carried under their clothes, that they had taken out as if they were taking out their own breasts, exploded against them, right against them.70 In the nationalist imaginary, women became the ‘embodiments of cultural authenticity’, condemned as Lazreg points out, to an ‘irremediable caricatural existence’, and eventually to the violence of an increasing fundamentalist ‘religiosity’.71 Dubey notes that ‘the metaphorical figure of woman’ had been conjured up ‘to resolve the inescapable contradiction’ of the nationalist project: the contradiction of laying claim to ‘European categories of progress and modernity, while reviving precolonial traditions to safeguard the nation’s cultural difference from the West’.72 But in postcolonial times, this figure congealed and froze, taking on the rigour of nationalism. The performative gender strategies that had sought to unravel colonialism, to lay claim to modernity, were folded into the imaginary of the nation. As the veil once again came to be seen as an authentic symbol of timeless tradition, so the subversive rituals of performance became the pedagogical rituals of nationalism. Let me emphasize this point with another example, this one from colonial Bengal. In the early part of the nineteenth century, Bengal, the heart of the British empire, witnessed what has come to be called the Bengali Renaissance – a social reform movement founded 77

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on the alliance between a liberal colonial administration and a Westernized Bengali elite eager to cast its aspirations in the image of the Enlightenment. Such aspirations can of course be seen as a way of dwelling in colonialism, of a colonized elite making a home in the world by appropriating the modern customs of the colonizers. It is this dwelling that is made evident in the Satyajit Ray film Charulata (1964), which in turn is an adaptation of a novel by Rabindranath Tagore. In what is perhaps the quintessential image of the film, the central character, Charulata, is broodingly contemplative with a pair of binoculars in her hand (Figure 4.10). The subtitle of the film is The Lonely Wife and Charu is indeed lonely and bored. While her husband seeks to have her trained in Western ways, even hiring an English teacher for that purpose, Charu spends much of her time within the traditional confines of home. It is from here that she gazes at the world outside, with curiosity and longing. The binoculars signify the modern practices of consumption that have been displaced onto the colonial subject and that make possible this desire. In this they are a symbol of colonial modernity as it is performed by the colonial subject; they are the instrument of what Bhabha calls ‘the displacing gaze’ of colonial imitation.73 But, as in the Algiers case, performativity is not necessarily subversion. The figure of Charu, binoculars in hand, embodies a tension generated by performance, mimicry, and displacement on the one hand, and by gendered confinement and dwelling on the other. The Bengali Renaissance and its objects of consumption soon came to be superseded by a different form of nationalism. Known as swadeshi, this late-nineteenth-century moment involved the economic boycott of all British goods and an alternative social order. The linchpin of this new order was to be the Bengali woman – not Charulata, but a mother figure, free of colonial corruptions, untouched by material consumption, the spiritual and moral opposite of the Englishwoman.74 In other words, the imagining of a modern and free nation was predicated on the resurrection of gendered icons of tradition. Such forms of nationalism had crucial consequences for the ordering of space and society, most obviously through a mandate for the seclusion of women within the home. If this was a ‘Bengali modern’,75 then this domestication of the modern was made possible through the domestication of the gendered subject. So also emerged the

4.10 Film still from Charulata 78

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4.11 Bharatmata, watercolour by Abanindranath Tagore, 1925

nationalist imaginary of the motherland. The slogan of the Bengali nationalist movement was bande mataram: hail the mother, the motherland. The nation was imagined as mother-goddess, as bharatmata (Figure 4.11). Interestingly enough, this icon invokes long regional traditions of mother cults, of vengeful and powerful goddesses; but within the bourgeois imagination of nation, such cults were purified into the frail image of a mother requiring the protection of her sons.76 The domestic order of home and nation is at times unsettled. In the Ray film, Ghare Baire (1984), roughly translated as The Home and the World, and also based on a Tagore novel, the central character, Bimala, literally and metaphorically steps out of the inner sanctum of domestic and feminine space into public and male spaces, thereby violating the separation of home and world. This transgression comes to threaten her entire marriage and the nationalist project itself, ultimately being repaired through the punishment of widowhood. But such moments of transgression reveal the necessary incompleteness of the project of dwelling and the constant possibility of displacement. There are times when this displacement is subversive as in the various veiled disguises of the battle of Algiers. Here displaced identities – of gender and race – allow a displacement of the spatial order of colonialism. And there are times when this displacement is a borrowing, as in the case of Charu’s binoculars where colonial consumption is performed and thereby replicated. Both are instances of mimicry, an unsettling of notions of authenticity and tradition. But one is radical and the other barely so. Even the radicalness of the battle of Algiers is short-lived, for the postcolonial modern is quickly consolidated through the purification of tradition. The architecture of nationalism as it turns out is very much the space of dwelling, a sealing of borders that make difficult the acts of displacement. 79

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Multiple modernities This is a time of endings, or at least of the talk of endings. From the end of the modern to the end of tradition, there is an eager discourse of closure and finality. This discourse with its definitive proclamation of endings has not, however, led to an assertion of new beginnings. In the place of a much anticipated millennial utopianism has come a more tentative but pervasive chatter about the ‘post’ – postmodern, posttraditional, posturban. There is an ambivalence inherent in the idea of the ‘post’ – the sense of an afterwards but little sense of what is to come. There is the certainty of succession, of teleological progress beyond, but to what? In many cases then, the ‘post’ has come to be a looking backward as in postmodern design movements such as New Urbanism. The brave, new future is cast in the mould of nostalgia; the modern is transcended through tradition. In contrast to such conservative interpretations, there is also the attempt to cast the ‘post’ as the end of concepts, or at least concepts as we know them.77 The posturban then does not mark the end of the city; rather it marks the end of established signification, of the epistemological order through which iconography is linked to meaning. It is not that the city can no longer be experienced or known, but rather that the authenticity of this experience or knowledge, and therefore of the city, is now in doubt. To pose the issue of inauthenticity is not to undermine the legitimacy of such forms of signification; rather it is to assert that posturbanism involves a different social construction of reality, a different calculus of representation. The practices of valuation and performance are thus particularly important; they are mechanisms through which reality – or perhaps more appropriately post-reality – is constructed and negotiated. This radically different framework of signification is perhaps most apparent in the case of postcolonialism, where the ‘post’ is much less about moving beyond colonialism and much more a system of critical analysis that emerges through an engagement with colonial experiences and epistemologies. And yet, the terminology of the ‘post’ has taken on a temporal dimension in today’s debates. Not only is the ‘post’ seen as an element of contemporaneity, even if this is a ‘looking backward’, but there is also a loose consensus that this contemporary phase started sometime around the 1970s. The ‘post’ then is simply the latest phrase in a wellestablished vocabulary of progress. It is this timeline that I seek to question. Against the sense of moving ahead, I want to pose the idea that the ‘post’ is a surplus, an excess, that exists within the originary terms: modern, tradition, urban, colonial. The ‘post’ indicates a constantly contested hegemony, a subversion of the singular ideal. It is, in the narration of T.S. Eliot, the ‘shadow’ that falls between, in between.78 I have argued that this casting of the shadow takes place through acts of displacement, in the slippages of geography. This dissonance and disturbance is created as the Crystal Palace, that icon of modernity, is understood and experienced in diverse locations. This disruption is created as the Eiffel Tower, the world-as-exhibition, is performed in diverse sites. Such forms of displacement are rarely revolutionary and scarcely rebellious. As evident in the cases of Algiers and Bengal, they can be easily co-opted in the making of new forms of hegemony. And yet 80

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there is a transgression, a rupture, a remaking, an unsettling, and one that works in and through geography, one that is a displacement. These ideas can also be found in concepts such as ‘multiple modernities’ or ‘alternative modernities’. Ong, for example, investigates alternative projects of Asian modernity that are always in dialogue and in tension with the West.79 The emphasis is not on a singular ideal of modernity but rather on ‘borrowing, blending, and cross-fertilization’ as modernity is ‘critically and creatively reappropriated’ in ‘non-Western contexts’.80 The emphasis here is on the ambiguous nature of multiple modernities, as in Eisenstadt’s discussion of how religious fundamentalist movements maintain modernity as a major frame of reference while selectively denying some of the premises of modernization.81 Similarly, Gole points out that ‘Islamist movements are revolutionary; yet past-oriented . . . radical in the criticism of traditional interpretations of Islam’ and yet deeply reliant on an imagined Islamic past.82 This too is a looking backward of sorts. AlSayyad and I have been calling this ‘medieval modernity’.83 We are beginning to explore how the experience of modernity is mediated by medieval actors: those imposing medieval truths and medieval identities and possibly recreating the medieval city. In the context of neoliberalism, with the increasing privatization of the state, these medieval actors are taking on the roles of governance. From the favelas of Rio ruled by drug bosses to the squatter settlements of Cairo regulated by Islamist groups, the city is being reterritorialized as medieval fiefdoms, or what Holston and Appadurai call a ‘honeycomb of jurisdictions’.84 And yet, such medieval practices are consolidated through circuits of modern consumption, as in the provision of urban services and housing. Medieval urbanism can thus be seen as a claim to modernity and modernization; perhaps the only route through which such claims can be made in an era of global austerity and inequality. These paradoxical articulations give a new content to the idea of multiple modernities: as modernity’s multiplicity, or even its duplicity. In other words, multiplicity is much more than simply the diverse localizations of the modern; rather it is the inherently paradoxical, even duplicitious, nature of modernity. I stress this point because recent debates seem to imply that that the concept of multiple modernities refers to different forms of modernity in different places. Yes, but there is also the issue of how modernity is forged through difference, how difference lies at the very heart of modernity. Tradition is the distillation of this difference. It can be fixed in the form of nostalgia or heritage. On rare occasions, it is deployed as subversion and resistance. At these moments, the inauthenticity of tradition is revealed as is made evident the multiplicity, even duplicity, of the modern. I have argued that the fixing and unsettling of tradition, the displacements of the modern, are spatial processes. It is in this sense that geography is surplus to the dualities of tradition and modern. It is in this sense that geography is posttradition and postmodern. With this in mind, I want to conclude by drawing upon a novel, The Enigma of Arrival, by Nobel-prize winning author, V.S. Naipaul.85 Naipaul is a controversial figure, labelled by Edward Said as ‘a witness for the western prosecution’ of the Third World.86 But such controversies indicate his significance as an interpreter of the postcolonial condition. In a recent essay, Homi Bhabha argues that Naipaul, through his writing, produces 81

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vernacular cosmopolitanisms.87 What are vernacular cosmopolitanisms? In a piece called ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils’, David Harvey reminds us of the ‘deeply disruptive effects’ of geography. Inserting this ‘disruptive spatiality’ into the discourse on cosmopolitanism he unsettles both universalism and localism, undermining the sense of a universal ethos that overcomes local evils.88 Rather, Harvey calls for a critical imagination that emerges from the dialectic between geographical knowledge and cosmopolitanism. It is this ‘disruptive spatiality’ that is present in Naipaul’s writings. The Enigma of Arrival is partly a memoir. It tells of Naipaul’s move from Trinidad to England as an aspiring writer. In this setting he finds intimations of the abstract England he has so carefully memorized as a studious colonial native at the margins of empire. The people he meets are Wordsworthian, London is drawn from the pages of Dickens, and Naipaul often longs for Shakespeare. The referents are all literary not only because of Naipaul’s literary aspirations but because this is a set, a stage-set for the fictions of empire, a regime of truth constituted of what Naipaul calls ‘literature and antiquity and landscape’.89 But eventually Naipaul comes to feel the raw nerves of the colonial, interpreting this antique landscape through the geographical lens of the colonial Caribbean. ‘The English country garden calls forth the landscape of plantation colonization’ worked by the indentured Indian families from which Naipaul derives, revealing as Bhabha notes, the ‘unsettling rituals of laying down roots’.90 Instead of a Wordsworthian landscape, Naipaul now sees farm labourers, landlords, landed gentry, and twentieth-century gentrifiers. This act of displacement is the engima of arrival; it is vernacular cosmopolitanism. Memory rather than nostalgia is at work here. Arriving in England is interpreted via the memories of the colonial Caribbean and this remembering unravels English heritage; it unsettles the relationship between tradition and place. As Naipaul journeys back to the Caribbean, he now sees it as well through a different lens – this time as the spectacle, the postcard seen from the British cruise ships. Once again, the epistemological order of iconography and meaning is altered through displacement. The Enigma of Arrival is a provocative text for in it Naipaul forces us to think about arriving rather than dwelling. But in a postcolonial world, arriving is always related to elsewhere, or at the very least to memories or anticipations of elsewhere: In those very early days, the first days of arrival . . . I lost a faculty that had been precious to me for years. I lost the gift of fantasy, the dream of the future, the far-off place where I was going. At home I had lived most intensely in the cinema . . . In those dark halls I had dreamt of a life elsewhere. Now in the place that for all those years had been the ‘elsewhere’ no further dream was possible.91

Geography is the end of tradition. Geography is also the multiplicity, or even duplicity, of the modern.

Notes This chapter builds on my keynote address delivered at the IASTE 2000 conference, ‘End of Tradition?’ in Trani, Italy, October 12–15, 2000. The talk was published as ‘Traditions of the Modern: A Corrupt View’ in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 12, no. 2, 2001, pp. 7–19. Some of the 82

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ideas discussed in this chapter, be it notions of performing, of inauthenticity, and the examples of the Crystal Palace and French colonialism in Algiers, were first developed in that talk and article. But they have been substantially expanded and reworked for this chapter. In addition, I have also used my reflections as a discussant at the IASTE 2002 Hong Kong conference, ‘Unbounding Tradition: The Tensions of Borders and Regions,’ addressing some of the issues raised in this forum. 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

For those of us who are foodies, it is fascinating to note the recent revival of ‘mac and cheese’ as a comfort food but now consumed in high-end restaurants. A special thanks to Dafna Kory for sharing with me this photograph and her account of this restaurant. For a discussion of the history of the Lower East Side, see J. Abu-Lughod, et al., From Urban Village to East Village, Cambridge, Blackwell, 1994; N. Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, New York, Routledge, 1996; and C. Mele, Selling the Lower East Side, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000. N. Smith, ‘New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild West’.in M. Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, New York, Hill and Wang, 1992. See also Mele, Selling the Lower East Side. Smith, ‘New City, New Frontier.’ A. Roy, ‘Transnational Trespassings: The Geopolitics of Urban Informality’, in A. Roy and N. AlSayyad (eds.), Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America, Lexington Press, 2003. For an analysis of gentrification, see N. Smith, ‘Gentrification, the Frontier, and the Restructuring of Urban Space’, in N. Smith and P. Williams (eds.), Gentrification and the City, Boston, Allen and Unwin, 1986. Mele, Selling the Lower East Side. For a sophisticated discussion of cosmopolitanisms, see B. Robbins and P. Cheah (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998. For more on the consumption of tradition, see N. AlSayyad, ‘Global Norms, Urban Forms’, in N. AlSayyad (ed.), Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage, London, Routledge, 2000. There are many ways of talking about ‘dwelling’. I am explicitly drawing upon the concept of ‘dwelling’, specifically of ‘dwelling in modernity’, put forth by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty also pays attention to the various ‘nostalgic narrations’ that are associated with dwelling in modernity. See for example, D. Chakrabarty, ‘Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity’, Public Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 1999, pp. 109–145. I am borrowing the idea of ‘performing’ from Judith Butler’s work on the performativity of the gendered body. I am specifically interested in the notion that identity is a performance, an imitation for which there is no original but that this performance is usually compulsory, bringing on punishment when not enacted. See for example, J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990; and Bodies that Matter: The Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York, Routledge, 1993. In the 2002 IASTE conference, the keynote addresses by Neil Leach and Ackbar Abbas addressed the theme of ‘performing’ as well: N. Leach, ‘Belonging: Judith Butler and the Discourse of Performativity’, keynote address, IASTE conference, Hong Kong, December 12–15, 2002; and A. Abbas, ‘Traditional Environments and Any-Space-Whatever’, keynote address, IASTE conference, Hong Kong, December 12–15, 2002. Leach, in particular, draws upon Butler’s notion of performativity to articulate the concept of belonging: ‘It may well be that the concept of ‘belonging’ – an ever provisional, rhizomatic model of attachment to place – offers us a viable paradigm to replace the now somewhat outmoded model of “dwelling” that once so dominated architectural discourse’. E. Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, New York, New American Library, original 1888. F. Manuel and F. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Cambridge, Belknap Press, 1979, p. 762. D. Frantz and C. Collins, Celebration, USA: Living in Disney’s Brave Town, New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1999, p. 37. R. Rosaldo, ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’, Representations, vol. 26, 1989, pp. 107. 83

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16. C. Mele, ‘Globalization, Culture, and Neighborhood Change: Reinventing the Lower East Side of New York’, Urban Affairs Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 1996, p. 6. 17. Marcuse in M. Sorkin, ‘See You in Disneyland’, in M. Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, New York, Hill and Wang, 1992, p. 232. 18. D. Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995, p. 238. 19. Chakrabarty, ‘Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity’. 20. Leach, ‘Belonging: Judith Butler and the Discourse of Performativity’; and Abbas, ‘Traditional Environments and Any-Space-Whatever’. 21. Abbas, ‘Traditional Environments and Any-Space-Whatever’. 22. H. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture, New York, Routledge, 1994. 23. S. Kostof, A History of Architecture, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 598. 24. For a discussion of Chernyshevsky and other Crystal Palace themes, see M. Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York, Penguin Books, 1982. 25. K. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (edited by F. Engels), New York, International Publishers, 1967, original 1867. 26. F. Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground and the Grand Inquisitor (edited by R. Matlow), New York, Dutton, 1960, original 1864. 27. Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, p. 223. 28. W. Friebe, Buildings of the World Exhibitions, Leipzig, Edition Leipzig, 1985, p. 13. 29. Ibid., p. 13 30. F. Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (translated by L. Renfield), New York, Criterion Books, 1955, original 1863. 31. E. Cutler, ‘Passage to Modernity: Leaves of Grass and the 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York’, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 16, no. 2, 1998, pp. 65–89. 32. Ibid., p. 76. 33. This line appears in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. For details see ibid., p. 75. 34. T. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 13. For a discussion of this point, see D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, Cambridge, Blackwell, 1994, p. 37. 35. These lines appear in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. In later editions, the lines read: ‘Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me/ I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you’. For a discussion of this change, see Cutler, ‘Passage to Modernity’, p. 80. 36. The discussion of Calcutta is drawn from my recent book, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 37. AlSayyad, ‘Global Norms, Urban Forms’, p. 11. 38. M. Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (transl. J. Harkness), Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983, original 1973, p. 44. 39. P. Goldberger, ‘Commentary’, Lecture delivered at Center of Environmental Design Spring 2001 Lecture Series, University of California at Berkeley. 40. R. Barthes, ‘The Eiffel Tower’, in N. Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, New York, Routledge, 1997, p. 174. 41. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, p. 29. 42. S. Chaplin and E. Holding, ‘Addressing the Post-Urban: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New York’, in N. Leach (ed.), The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis, New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 187. 43. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, p. 164, 294. 44. See G. Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991; M. Lamprakos, ‘Le Corbusier and Algiers: The Plan Obus as Colonial Urbanism’, in N. AlSayyad (ed.), Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, Aldershot, Avebury, 1992; and P. Rabinow, ‘Colonialism, Modernity: The French in Morocco’, in AlSayyad (ed.), Forms of Dominance. 84

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45. ‘To organize a new country is essentially to invent – to invent the future’ declared Alfred de Tarde, Lyautey’s lieutenant; quoted in Wright, The Politics of Design. 46. E. Said, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon, 1977. 47. N. AlSayyad, ‘From Vernacularism to Globalism: The Temporal Reality of Traditional Settlements’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 1995, pp. 13–24. 48. Lamprakos, ‘Le Corbusier and Algiers’. 49. M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1976, p. 133. 50. Rabinow, ‘Colonialism, Modernity’. 51. Lamprakos, ‘Le Corbusier and Algiers’. 52. Z. Celik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 23–24. For a general discussion of Corbu’s gendered representations, see L. Carranza, ‘Le Corbusier and the Problems of Representation’, Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 48, no. 2, 1994, pp. 70–81. 53. Le Corbusier, Journey to the East (edited by I. Zaknic), Cambridge, MIT Press, 1966, p. 129. 54. S. Pile, ‘Opposition, Political Identities, and Spaces of Resistance’, in S. Pile and M. Keith (eds.), Geographies of Resistance, New York, Routledge, 1997, p. 18. 55. G. C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in L. Grossberg and C. Nelson (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1988. 56. M. Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question, New York, Routledge, 1994. 57. F. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (translated by H. Chevalier), New York, Grove Press, 1965, p. 36. 58. Battle of Algiers, 1965; Director: Gillo Pontecorvo. 59. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, pp. 57–58. 60. Ibid., p. 61. 61. M. Watts, ‘Islamic Modernities? Citizenship, Civil Society and Islamism in a Nigerian City’, Public Culture, vol. 8, no. 2, 1996, pp. 251–290. 62. M. Kozloff, ‘Shooting at Wars: Three Views’, Film Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2, 1967, pp. 27–29. 63. Harkness, This is Not a Pipe, p. 8. 64. A. Ong, ‘State Versus Islam: Malay Families, Women’s Bodies, and the Body Politic in Malaysia,’ American Ethnologist, vol. 17, no. 2, 1990, pp. 258–276. 65. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, p. 90. 66. Butler, Bodies that Matter. 67. M. Dubey, ‘The “True Lie” of the Nation: Fanon and Feminism’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 1998, pp. 1–29. Dubey, p. 20, argues that while Fanon activates a rhetoric of nationalist authenticity, this rhetoric shifts its grounds too often to yield a stable knowledge of either term, ‘woman’ or ‘nation.’ 68. Celik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations, p. 22. 69. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, p. 59. See also R. Khanna, ‘The Battle of Algiers and the Nouba of the Women of Mont Chenoua: From Third to Fourth Cinema’, Third Text, vol. 43, 1998, pp. 13–32. 70. A. Djebar, Women of Algiers in their Apartment (translated by M. De Jager), Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1992, p. 150; and Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence. 71. Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence. 72. Dubey, ‘The True Lie of the Nation’, p. 2. 73. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, p. 88. 74. P. Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990. 75. D. Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’, in D. Arnold and D. Hardiman (eds.), Subaltern Studies VIII, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994. 76. J. Bagchi, ‘Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, October 20–27, 1990, pp. WS65–WS71. 85

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77. This echoes the argument posed by Nezar AlSayyad in the opening chapter of this book. 78. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, in Selected Poems, London, Faber & Faber, 1954; poem in 1925. 79. A. Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, Duke University Press, 1999, p. 23. Also see D. Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, Public Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 1999, p. 13. 80. N. Gole, ‘Snapshots of Islamic Modernities’, Daedalus, vol. 129, no. 1, 2000, p. 91. 81. S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, vol. 129, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–29. 82. Gole, ‘Snapshots of Islamic Modernities’, p. 93. 83. I use the term ‘medieval citizenship’ to talk about the emerging landscape of neoliberalism. Medieval citizenship refers to the consolidation of a civil society that is fundamentalist in content and yet that is a primary axis of resources and identities for many social groups. See A. Roy, ‘Marketized? Feminized? Medieval? Emerging Modes of Urban Governance’, in J. Tulchin, et al. (eds.), Democratic Governance and Urban Sustainability, Washington, D.C., Woodrow Wilson Center, 2002. AlSayyad and I are now developing this idea further through the concept of ‘medieval modernity’. 84. J. Holston and A. Appadurai (eds.), Cities and Citizenship, Durham, Duke University Press, 1999. 85. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, New York, Vintage Books, 1987. 86. E. Said, ‘Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World’, Salmagundi, vol. 70/71, 1986, p. 53 87. H. Bhabha, ‘Naipaul’s Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms,’ The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 26, 2001, p. B13. 88. D. Harvey, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 2, 2000, pp. 529–564. 89. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, p. 21. 90. Bhabha, ‘Naipaul’s Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms’. 91. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, p. 134.

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Chapter 5

Nature and tradition at the border: landscaping the end of the nation-state Matthew Sparke

It was the best of years; it was the worst of years. Not 1789, but 1996; not the Paris and London of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, but the Vancouver and Seattle of local business planners; and not the end of the monarchy and the modern birth of a real republic, but rather the end of the nation-state and the seemingly postmodern birth of an invented cross-border region called Cascadia. The concept of Cascadia as a binational region linking the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon (Figure 5.1) had been in the works for almost a decade by 1996, having been given a significant boost by the implementation of both the Canadian/U.S. Free Trade Agreement in 1989 and the subsequent North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. By the mid-1990s many of the high hopes of Cascadia’s promoters had started to seem more feasible. The plans to ‘bulldoze the checkpoints’ at the border on the 49th Parallel, and expedite business and tourist travel; the plans to make a bid for a binational Olympic games; the plans to develop high-tech infrastructure for business and build a fast bullet train between Vancouver and Seattle; the plans to cooperate in promoting a socalled ‘Two Nation Vacation’; and many other such schemes to develop the international profile of the region had begun to appear as more than just the pipe dreams of a few entrepreneurial urban-planning gurus. This growing sense of imminent cross-border reterritorialization was captured in 1996 in suitably postmodern fashion by the publication of a large coffee-table book of photographs by Morton Beebe, designed and marketed for a popular mass audience under the title Cascadia: A Tale of Two Cities (Figure 5.2).1 This book, like the cross-border regional aspirations it sought to capture in almost 200 pages of glossy, colour photographs, evoked Cascadia as a region that was at once borderlessly brand new and at the same time based on an ancient natural environment: both a hightech hub of international business and a sublime space of enduring ecological integrity, a place where you could sail from majestic wilderness to urban opportunity with natural grace and speed. Cascadia was thereby said to have traditions, but they were presented 87

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5.1 A map showing Cascadia as it has been conceptualized by the promoters

as naturally postnational traditions – and, as such, the basis for anticipated economic success in the new borderless world economy. A coffee-table book may seem a strange place from which to begin a discussion of landscape and the end of tradition, but it presents us, I argue here, with a useful and graphic condensation point for a number of broader tendencies transforming the meaning of tradition, place, and space in recent years. Beginning with the imagery in the book, this chapter examines some of the visions of landscape and environment through which the promoters of Cascadia sought in the mid-1990s to bestow retroactively on their cross-border regional vision an ‘always already there’ quality. In the very moment of seeking to go beyond the nation-state and national traditions, they sought, I will suggest, to naturalize notional Cascadian traditions by locating them in the landscape. Representations of the natural environment itself were part of this process of naturalization. The Cascade mountains, their waterfalls, the temperate rain forests, and the cross-border peregrinations of the Pacific salmon were all thereby put to work in the semiotic production of a ‘natural Cascadia’. But there was also a super-natural kind of conjuring of the cross-border region. At the same time that images of nature were put to work to ground the cross-border coherence of Cascadia, historical traditions of colonial and even precolonial borderless trade were also invoked in an attempt to present the region’s destiny as a gateway of fast and free-market capitalism on the Pacific Rim. This invention of Cascadian tradition might well be seen as just a postnational example of the more deliberate kinds of manufactured national traditions noted by scholars such as Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm.2 But the super-naturalization of Cascadia also illustrates quite well another kind of inauthenticity of the type discussed earlier in this 88

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5.2 The front cover of Cascadia: A Tale of Two Cities

volume by Ananya Roy.3 In this respect, what is most fascinating about the production of the Cascadian landscape and its associated traditions is its semiotic excess, its repetition with a difference of a whole panoply of tropes associated with the modern naturalization of the nation-state. According to Benedict Anderson’s famous thesis, one of the signal traits of the imagining of national community is the national ‘meanwhile’. This is the sense of a deep contemporaneous common interest shared by people across whole swathes of territory, a shared sense of moving through history and experiencing particular events together.4 What we see with the promotion of postnational regions such as Cascadia is at first sight a similar framing of shared destiny in shared space. A typical gesture of the promoters, and one that is photographically followed with care by Beebe’s book, pictures Cascadia as a place of parallels and similitude across the international border (Figure 5.3). Like the national census, map, and museum discussed by Anderson in the second edition of his book, Cascadia’s postnational promoters seek to map intraregional contrasts and complementarities in such a way as to evoke an abstract basal space that is fundamentally shared by all Cascadians. Whether it is mountains, urban cosmopolitanism, or bio-tech businesses, the parallels are presented as underpinning a real horizontal commonality. Pages 82 and 83 of Cascadia: A Tale of Two Cities illustrate this gesture very well. The two upper images contrast glimpses of Seattle’s and Vancouver’s skylines. Anonymous, would-be Cascadian individuals populate the foregrounds, all the while set off against the gentle splendour of similar natural-cum-urban backdrops. The formal semiotic similarities between the photographs thus serve simultaneously to frame the underlying sense of commonality. Beneath these images are two photographs of buildings. One pictures a 89

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downtown Seattle Victorian Romanesque building, the other the new Vancouver Public Library with its signature reference to the Roman Coliseum (albeit one denied by the architect himself). Here it is the play on the Roman references and their architectural grandeur that does the work of picturing commonality. Historical anachronism is not a concern at all in this respect, although it might be argued that the architecture’s own historical license allows the two distinct building styles to be further abstracted from their contexts of development. The traditional in the modern (the pioneer building with its stony columns) and the traditional in the paradigmatically postmodern (the library that spirals out of its Coliseum model), are both yoked together to suggest the simple built environment resonances north and south across the 49th Parallel. This collapse of history in the search of cross-border commonality gives a clue in turn as to what is revealingly excessive about the wider invention of Cascadian similitude: namely, its aestheticized and dehistoricized repetition of geographical enframing. I use the word ‘enframing’ here with deliberate reference to Timothy Mitchell’s account of how modern spatial planning and building design embodied and diffused a set of powerful distinctions between the lived world and a sense of an ordered, underlying abstract space in which social relations came to make sense.5 Mitchell’s study itself was most interested in how colonialism in Egypt operationalized such dualistic distinctions as it proceeded to remake the ‘traditional’ as the ‘modern,’ all the while enframing out of the colonial scene all that was seen as chaotic and unruly. As Roy points out in her discussion of French colonialism in Algiers and the Casbah, such processes were and remain themselves replete with all kinds of self-defeating excesses and inauthenticities. The traditionally chaotic came back as the unrulably modern, the expunged as the destabilizing insider, the modern veil-less woman as the veiled liberation fighter, and so on. However, here the inauthenticity that interests me most involves the way in which the excessive replaying of the enframing gesture in the portrayal of Cascadian commonality

5.3 Pages 82 and 83 of Cascadia: A Tale of Two Cities 90

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reveals something of the contextual contingency of enframing more generally. In the Cascadian case there are far fewer of the macro-logical power systems that – like the Royal Navy’s ships offshore Egypt’s coast – made possible the micro-disciplinary power systems that allowed enframing to make sense in colonial contexts of city street plans, hospitals, and barracks. Moreover, the actual territorial realignments anticipated by the Cascadian planners have not happened yet, and so the enframing work we see in images like those in the coffee-table book is not so much a symptom of a new order as a semiotic attempt to make such an order seem a natural destiny by enframing at a visual level what is not being enframed by actual political, economic, and sociological developments on the ground. In other words, the picturing of Cascadia would seem to represent a revealingly shallow and aestheticized, albeit glossy, kind of enframing. As such, it evokes an underlying Cascadian cross-border space not in a moment of entrenched colonial hegemony, but in a putatively postcolonial gesture of emergent, incomplete, and aspirational inventiveness.6 It should perhaps not be surprising that the imagining of a postnational region such as Cascadia has had a simulacral quality. Taking shape in the mid-1990s at the very height of the ‘dot-com’ boom and the broader U.S. stock market bubble, it reflects the more widespread ways in which the cart of boosterish discourse got ahead of the horse of political-economic change.7 Moreover, arguments about the eclipse of the nation-state that were being broadly touted at the time – most notably, in Kenichi Ohmae’s 1995 book The End of the Nation-State – also repeatedly returned to references to regions and the supposed reality of geographical reterritorialization in order to secure claims about the inexorable imperatives toward postnationality.8 The subtitle of Ohmae’s book was The Rise of Regional Economies, and his basic argument was that region-states, as opposed to nation-states, ‘are the right size and scale to be true natural business units in today’s global economy’.9 ‘For global managers,’ Ohmae enthused, ‘the bright, attractive and manageable spots on today’s development maps are not countries but bounded regions like Shanghai/Pudong, which are appealing in themselves as a market, as a base from which to provide both manufactured goods and service, and as a functioning link to the borderless economy.’10 Responding, it would seem, to arguments such as this, Cascadia’s promoters seemed to think they had it all. Not only a wealthy North American market; not only the home of significant manufacturing, high-tech, and financial firms; and not only a gateway hub with numerous port and air links to Asia and beyond; they also saw Cascadia as an effective region-state because it embodied the very borderlessness of the global economy itself. Here, for example, are the mid-1990s arguments of Paul Schell (who later became mayor of Seattle) and John Hamer (a fellow of a conservative Seattle think-tank called the Discovery Institute): The lines imposed over 100 years ago have simply been transcended by contemporary cultural and economic realities . . . Cascadia is organizing itself around what will be the new realities of the next century – open borders, free trade, regional cooperation, and the instant transfer of information, money and technology. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century realities of the nation-state, with guarded borders and nationalistic traditions are giving way.11 91

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Such appeals to a new geographical order helped to make the boosters’ hopes seem somehow more palpable, and thus possible. In what follows I explore how many of these geographical gestures worked repeatedly to enframe and thereby naturalize the space of Cascadian tradition. In this respect, a useful academic argument through which to make sense of what I call the consequent ‘land-scaping’ of Cascadia is the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s famous work on the cultural logics of globalization, Modernity at Large. Published in 1996, Appadurai’s book presented a thesis which, while far more critical of economic globalization than Ohmae’s entrepreneurial assessment, nevertheless used geographical terminology to paint a picture of new global opportunities that accompanied the impending end of the nation-state. Instead of business opportunities, though, Appadurai described what he saw as new cultural possibilities of transnational mixing and interconnection that would challenge the ethnic absolutism so often associated with the nation-state. And instead of the rise of new and dynamic regional economies, Appadurai sought to ground his argument about emergent cultural hybrids in a much more abstract language concerning what he referred to as ‘perspectival land-scapes’. I have come to be convinced that the nation-state as a complex modern political form, is on its last legs . . . The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics that we have only begun to theorize. I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes. The suffix –scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. These terms with the common suffix –scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors.12

Appadurai’s approach to these ‘scapes’ is problematic because of its relentless focus on their deterritorializing impacts. He evinces little interest in any simultaneous reterritorializing tendencies; and, as I argue elsewhere at much greater length, it is almost as if the repeated geographical reference to ‘scapes’ functions in the end as an e-scape for Appadurai from having to address the messy spatial reconfigurations of place and territory that have been set in motion by globalization.13 That said, his acute sensitivity to the different modalities of cultural and political disjuncture associated with transnationalism makes his five ‘scapes’ a useful organizing heuristic with which to analyze the land-scaping of Cascadia. In order, then, to demonstrate both the pertinence and limits of Appadurai’s argument when applied to the naturalization of Cascadian tradition, the five main sections of this chapter examine the imagined geographies of Cascadian reterritorialization through the disjunctive rubrics of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. Reversing the order of Appadurai’s own original argument, my discussion moves from the ideoscaping of the cross-border region to the complex theme of Cascadia’s contemporary ethnoscaping.

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Ideoscaping Cascadia Ideoscapes are . . . concatenations of images . . . [that] are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it. These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy.14

For Appadurai, ideoscapes fundamentally concern the global movement and mediation of key political and ideological principles. The questions he is most keen to address surround how principles such as democracy and freedom are radically renegotiated and reworked as they become articulated in new contexts or are rearticulated in old contexts shaped by new flows of images, capital, and information. Context becomes centrally important in this regard, of course; it is thus that Appadurai notes ‘[t]he very relationship of reading to hearing and seeing may vary in important ways that determine the morphology of these different ideoscapes as they shape themselves in different national and transnational contexts’.15 Such sensitivity to context notwithstanding, Appadurai nevertheless does not engage here with the actual production of new spatial contexts through the interactions of different ideoscapes – nor, less still, with the ways contexts thus formed become determinative of further interactions. It is exactly this recursive and agonistic production of context that is brought into focus by the ideoscaping of Cascadia as a postnational reterritorialization of regional space. Conceived as a way of capitalizing on postnationalism, Cascadia reflects more than anything the transnational potency of neoliberal ideology and the power of this ideology to transform the meanings of concepts like freedom and democracy. Developed in the context of North American free trade, imagined as a borderless gateway on the Pacific Rim, and repeatedly represented as a free West of high-tech business development unfettered by East Coast government, Cascadia is held up by its promoters as an embodiment of the very best the free market has to offer: open borders, free trade, regional cooperation, and the instant transfer of information, money, and technology. Its promoters thus speculate that, by virtue of being created as a borderless market in the very image of free trade, the region is destined for a privileged future of wealth and growth precisely because of its capacity to internalize the liberalized logic of the global marketplace. In this way too, the region’s border-transcending position on the Pacific Rim is interpreted as a site for a grand neoliberal experiment in transforming the meaning of the very elemental keywords listed by Appadurai. Thus, freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and even democracy all have their particular Cascadian resonances. However, ideoscaped as a region, Cascadia also illustrates the complicated ways in which this kind of production of locality in globality is also profoundly predicated on a sense of place and a related reterritorialization of space. Indeed, it is worth noting in this respect that it is the reterritorializing move itself that most effectively enables the promoters to dissemble their core neoliberal politics. The glossy appeals to Cascadia enable them instead to sidestep direct political speech, all the while naturalizing neoliberal policy goals in the postnational landscape. 93

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This particular process of Cascadian naturalization has its roots in another quite distinct ideoscape: an earlier ecotopian vision of the cross-border region defined by the ecology of the Cascade mountains and their cascading waters, rainforests, and salmon. It is these ecological roots that were rerouted into the routes to ports, gateways, and the promise of prosperity by the more recent promoters. Hence, throughout the 1990s most of the grand announcements of Cascadia’s coming development were made in a language which, while evoking economic expansion, simultaneously appealed to the environment and the cross-border nature of the region. Examining this process more closely reveals how an ideoscape of natural history has been put to work in advancing a natural future for the region; a natural future which, in turn, is imagined as a form of neoliberal utopia where freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and democracy can all be rearticulated in terms of the free market. The ecotopian idea of Cascadia was and remains a vision of an integrated bioregional polity. Within this polity the bioregionalists envisaged a population of inhabitants who might one day live in harmony with the integrated cross-border ecosystem. Initially, as it was evoked as the site of environmentalist resistance in Ernest Callenbach’s book Ecotopia, this vision only linked northern California with Oregon and Washington, and was not transnational.16 However, later, with the publication of Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America, a less literary and less politicized ecotopia became border-crossing in scope, stretching from Monterrey through western Canada to Alaska.17 Subsequently, during the 1980s, this sweeping transnational region was painstakingly redrawn by Seattle-based bioregionalist David McCloskey who produced maps of a more ecologically grounded transnational region based on the watersheds of the Cascade mountains and their rivers (see Figure 5.4).

5.4 Cascadia mapped as a bioregion 94

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These relatively autonomous environmentalist imaginings continue to spur both interest and activism. Bioregional visions of the region continue to be produced: there is ongoing discussion of plans to create a North Cascades cross-border international park; there are active transboundary environmentalist campaigns by groups such as the Georgia Strait Alliance and People for Puget Sound; and there are a number of environmentalist websites, such as Cascadia Planet, devoted to the bioregional vision and its ecocentric politics.18 However, as William Henkel noted in an early critique of the more business-oriented Cascadian constructions, the eco-logics of the bioregional visions have been appropriated into the eco-nomics of the Cascadia promulgated by the economic visionaries. ‘It is strange,’ remarked Henkel with irony, ‘when fiscal conservatives start employing the language and labels once used by a dispersed group of radical bioregionalists, but if crossing the border is the goal, an evocative symbol like Cascadia may well be the ideal Trojan Horse.’19 Such observations of the changing valence of Cascadia are worth noting not only because of the need to document the enframing of the region’s nature, but also because of what the enframing represents in terms of the disjunctive politics of the new postnational ideoscape. Building upon and yet simultaneously paving over the earlier ecotopian ideoscape of the region, the promoters of the economic vision of Cascadia created a fundamental disjunction at the very inception of their cross-border regional development concept. Call it an appropriation, a Trojan horse, a rebranding, or just a discursive innovation, the move from the ecologics of bioregionalism to the economics of strategic regionalism established a certain sort of basal flux that has come to characterize all of the subsequent land-scapings of Cascadia as a cross-border region. This flux is a rather more co-optive and less ambivalent compromise with naturalism than the engagement with touristic capitalism described by Robert Mugerauer in his treatment of Cancun, Cuba, and Florida in the chapter that follows this. This means that while the economic ideoscapings of Cascadia can often express a spiritual and utopian attachment to the landscape, they generally come together with a wholesale commitment to remaking the region in the image of the borderless free market. Once the contradictions between the ecological and economic visions of Cascadia are brought into view, it is easier to examine the ways in which the ideoscaping of the latter relates to the former. Most obviously, the economic promoters have seen great advantage in the border-crossing scope of the ecologically defined region. Using the same regional template, they nevertheless radically rearticulate its meaning. Bioregionalists like McCloskey see in the trans-boundary space a harmonious ecosystem that needs to be liberated from the disciplinary apparatus of two industrial nation-states and the ‘unnatural’ boundary line (and associated pesticide use along the line dividing them).20 The promoters of the economic vision likewise see a harmonious region unnaturally divided by the border and a history of two sovereign governments, but for them the natural system crying out for liberation is the free market. This, for example, is the argument of two Canadian economists who, as they imagine the hidden harmony of Cascadian common interests, slip easily between the registers of economic and ecological nature. 95

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It was an accident of history that shaped the division of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Oregon Territory – a land stretching from Oregon to British Columbia – at the forty-ninth parallel. The purchase from Russia of Alaska and its detachment from the United States by territory of the Crown, were also historical accidents. These events have had no bearing on the economic realities of the region which is now known as Cascadia. The national and state borders that cross the land between the Arctic Ocean and Oregon are simply political artifacts, hiding a harmony of interest and opportunities that makes Cascadia as meaningful an economic entity as California. Indeed, this region has much that is the envy of California including untapped water, bountiful power and room to breathe. As borders come down with free trade, the prospects for Cascadia are as endless as its magnificent shorelines on two great oceans, and its folding mountains stretching from the Pacific to the Plains.21

Much of these economists’ actual argument is taken up with charting economies of scope and scale in the region, a tendency that is equally perspectival and to which I turn in the next section on financescapes. Here, instead, my focus is on how this appeal to the hidden harmony of Cascadian nature takes more than just a naturalization of postnational space from the ecotopians. In addition, the promoters’ ideoscaping also just as often emphasizes decentralization and freedom from faraway federal governments, emphases that also run through the bioregional literature and its calls for ecocentric governance. Predictably, however, the economic call for decentralized governance rearticulates the notion of freedom and local sovereignty in strictly neoliberal terms as freedom from government regulations, bureaucracy, and federal interference in local business. Bruce Agnew, for example, the director of the Cascadia Project at the Discovery Institute, has put it like this: ‘We are finding borders and national government policies increasingly irrelevant and even crippling’.22 In the same way, Alan Artibise, the founder of the Vancouver-based Cascadia Institute, has argued that one of the visions that ‘Cascadians share’ is a ‘certain bemused antipathy toward the two national capitals’.23 As a corollary, then, to the suggestion that Cascadia’s eclipse of the 49th Parallel enables it to internalize and thereby capitalize on the benefits of free trade, this argument asserts that because British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon have all shared a supposedly similar experience of historical alienation from faraway federal capitals, they are all also inclined toward a distrust of big government. Broader arguments about the positioning of Cascadia equally reveal connected commonalities and contrasts between the economic and ecological ideoscapes of the region. In both visions Cascadia is viewed as a special sort of globally central meeting point. But for bioregionalists such as McCloskey this is a middle ground defined primarily by mental maps of the local ecology and its ancient history: Cascadia is also a center as well as an edge. This is a meeting place, for instance, between land and sea, north and south, east and west, between ancient and modern cultures, Canadian and American societies.24

For McCloskey, this meeting-point quality of Cascadia explained the elemental ecological energies he felt in the land: ‘In this flying arc of landscapes,’ he wrote, ‘you can feel tremendous forces working, a tension or torque of powers in the sky above and the earth below, a curve of binding energy revealed in the shape of Cascadia herself’.25 96

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The promoters, it appears, also feel an elemental energy in the land, but for them it is produced predictably enough from what James Gardner refers to as ‘The Competitive Advantage’ of Cascadia’s middle-ground position. According to Gardner: [W]e are beginning to visualize the globe without the impediments of nationalistic blinders – and with the Northwest nicely centered between Europe and East Asia. From this perspective our verdant Cascadia does not only cling precariously to a distant shore of North America but instead occupies the epicenter of the interlinked global economy, midway between Brussels and Tokyo – the incontestable geographic heart of the mighty Asian-American-European economic triad.26

Here, clearly, the binding energy pumping through the heart that is ‘verdant Cascadia’ is global capital. But it remains remarkable, all the same, that this imagined geography of the middle ground can be used so flexibly to articulate a neoliberal rationale for the region and its competitive advantage in the global economy. Such, it seems, is the potency of an ideoscape that is fundamentally predicated on a reterritorialized conception of locality in globality. It is this naturalization of reterritorialization that enables the promoters to make their various arguments for cross-border cooperation. And it is these arguments that in turn serve as the preface to the project of promoting Cascadia in global circuits of investment and consumption. In the next section, I turn to these more particular promotional projects through which the boosters of Cascadia have sought to explain the financial rationale for cross-border integration.

Financescaping Cascadia Thus it is useful to speak as well of financescapes, as the disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid, and difficult landscape to follow than ever before, as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed, with vast, absolute implications for small differences in percentage points and time units.27

For Appadurai, financescapes are all about the destabilization wrought by the flows of global capital. For him, it is the disjunctive quality of these flows vis-à-vis the movements of people and existing national governance structures that is of most note. As a result of such disjuncture not only is national sovereignty challenged fiscally, but Appadurai argues it is also challenged politically and culturally as migrants and cultural commodities with their own autonomous financial backing create new ruptures in the meanings of citizenship and cultural belonging. I agree that these disjunctures and disruptions are profound. Indeed, it is arguable that the implications of deregulated global financial flows threaten still far more instability than Appadurai allows. The long-term stability of today’s complex markets in currencies, bonds, equities, and derivatives seems highly questionable, and while they effectively contain and project present-day over-accumulation crises into a speculative future, that same future appears more and more like a bubble destined to burst. But this crisis theory argument aside, another question that Appadurai leaves begging, even as he notes the impact of financescapes on the meaning of time, is their impact on space and place. Following my argument about the ideoscapes of reterritorialization, I will argue in this section that the case of Cascadia also reveals how 97

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the land-scaping of a postnational future is profoundly interarticulated with financescapes of reterritorialization. The financescaping of Cascadia by its promoters is in essence all about the entrepreneurial promotion of Cascadia as a site for investment, consumption, and financial control. Cascadia is in this respect both similar and distinct from the urban regions discussed by the geographer David Harvey in his famous 1989 examination of post-Fordist urban boosterism.28 The postnationalism of the region, for example, might well seem to handicap Cascadia’s chances of winning government support – one of the forms of urban entrepreneurialism charted by Harvey. Nevertheless, it is precisely the region’s postnational border-crossing novelty that the promoters advertise in their bids to win federal support from Ottawa and Washington, D.C. This disjuncture or contradiction – of applying for federal monies while simultaneously ideoscaping Cascadia as a site of freedom from governmental regulation – is paralleled by yet another disjuncture: namely, that of claiming to be at the heart of new global interdependencies even when reciprocal economic ties between Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia are few in number. This profoundly disjunctive quality of Cascadia as financescape lies in its notable discontinuities from the actual economic geographies of production and circulation in the region. Instead of being predicated on the activities of actual business supply chains and networks, Cascadia’s financescape thus more closely represents an attempt to anticipate and promote traditions of cross-border economic networking where currently very little local economic integration exists. This is not to say that there are no actual economic imperatives behind the visioning of the region. Rather, in a local re-enactment of global financial speculation, investments in the Cascadian idea and promotional venture deal in a certain sort of fictitious capital, a fictitious financescape of reterritorialization. From the naturalized outlines taken from the bioregionalists, the promoters proceed to discern profit potential in the landscape by way of imagining a future of high-tech investment and growth. Here, for example, is a typical evocation of this natural history turned natural future from Doris Jones Yang, the Seattle-based Northwest bureau chief for Business Week magazine. Across the Pacific Northwest, from Burnaby to Boise, from Corvallis to Calgary, high-tech companies have sprouted up like mushrooms in a rain forest, emerging from the lush soils of the region and attracting an inflow of technical talent from across the continent. Cascadia is not yet the heart of the technology world. But as the glow in Silicon Valley fades, its right where the high-tech sun is rising. And it has what many regions wish they could replicate: a natural environment where entrepreneurs thrive and techies long to live.29

The goal of writings like these, it would seem, is to evoke a set of entrepreneurial traditions as rooted in the soil. The basic aim is to present Cascadia as the perfect place from which high-tech business can be conducted: perfect not just because of the position of the region, but also because it provides a postindustrial ludic landscape, filled with the environmental amenities that will enable the new masters of the high-tech universe to thrive. Seattle’s Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon.com, and Targeted Genetics all loom large on this landscape, but so too do Portland’s Tektronix and Vancouver’s MacDonald Dettwiler. 98

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The founder of the latter company, John MacDonald, is reported by Jones as saying: ‘I’m very enthusiastic personally about the prospects for advanced technology industries in the whole of Cascadia’.30 So too it seems are actual investors; and so Cascadia, the name, has now also come to brand a regional stock fund, the Cascadia Equity Fund, managed by the Aquila investment firm.31 The manager of the fund told a reporter that he did not just see the region as a picturesque landscape or as an accumulation of regional companies, but rather as a ‘geographically linked’ combination of the two. ‘Some folks may just see trees, rugged mountain ranges, and a few famous companies like Boeing and Microsoft. But when Lacy Herrmann looks at the Pacific Northwest, he sees “Cascadia”, a mythical but geographically linked region stretching from Nevada to Alaska.’ The acknowledgment of myth-making is frank here, but based on this financespace of appearances, the fund manager nevertheless believes he can deliver real returns to investors. The same double gesture – mixing geographic myth-making with a vista of financial gain – seems to characterize the wider promotional attempts to position Cascadia in the global competition for investment capital. ‘The regional thrust,’ claims Artibise, in a typical appeal to the region’s intangible potency, ‘has attracted the attention of analysts outside the region and has given Cascadia growing advantages in targeting investment from major financial centers.’32 In addition to investors and promoters speculating on Cascadia’s positioning as a financescape of high-tech, high-returns development, financial firms themselves have become caught up in the process of promoting the region on the global stage. ‘For financial services giant the Frank Russell Company the Pacific Corridor is more than just a nice place to live’, begins another gushing article about the region as a place of wealthgeneration and financial opportunity. To George Russell, the Pacific Corridor is the best place in the world to be for a company involved in international finance . . . Operating in Pacific time means that the working hours at the Russell headquarters include the close of financial dealings in Europe, all of the New York and Toronto trading days, and the opening of the next day’s market in Tokyo.33

The article goes on to make the case yet again that the region is effectively at the centre of the global economy, and in particular at the centre of global finance. But more than this, it proceeds to connect the centrality and the Russell firm’s significance as the funds manager for some of the world’s biggest corporations (including GM, IBM, Boeing, AT&T, Xerox, Rolls Royce, Sainsbury’s, Molson, Ford, and Daiche Life) with the CEO’s love of mountain climbing and the local environment of Mt. Rainier and the Cascades. That same environment is also said to nourish a mode of living by the financial giant’s staff that puts a special emphasis on quality of life and good health. This is just one example, but again and again through the promotional columns and speeches about Cascadia there is the same repeated appeal linking the local landscape with traditions of a more sensitive, recreationally enriched and thus supposedly more sustainable business life. It is this traditional postnational way of life that is simultaneously offered up as the special lure that comes together with the region’s centrality to give Cascadia its especially competitive position as some sort of peak of privilege at the summit of the international 99

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division of labour. However, to fulfil this potential the promoters argue that Cascadia has to capitalize on other touted local traditions, those for media savvy and technological sophistication.

Mediascaping and technoscaping Cascadia By technoscape I mean the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology and the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries . . . Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information . . . and to the images created by this media.34

In Appadurai’s attempt to rewrite Benedict Anderson’s arguments about the nation as imagined community, the concepts of transnational technoscapes and mediascapes are crucial. While Anderson saw the print media as a technology that enabled the creation of a common national feeling among citizens who would never meet one another, Appadurai sees contemporary electronic communications and media technologies as creating the same sorts of solidarity through deterritorialized international webs (including the World Wide Web). The resulting postnational spaces, he argues, not only blur the meanings of home and away and transform people’s feelings of belonging, they also blur the distinction between the real and the imagined in ways that are radically transformative of how people act. The lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes they see are blurred, so that the farther away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct imagined worlds that are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects.35

Distance and space are still suggested to have an effect here, but it is an effect that unleashes the fantasies of the deterritorializing imagination – and with it, for Appadurai, the desired possibility of moving beyond exclusive nationalisms and their associated power structures. It is these kinds of hopes for postnational justice and freedom that Cascadia calls into question. In particular, the case of Cascadia reminds us that postnational spaces can also be put to work in the service of vested elite interests. In fact, the mediascaping and technoscaping of Cascadia illustrate the degree to which the local promoters of neoliberal reterritorialization hope themselves to develop real revenues out of the fantastic objects of postnationalism. Many images of the region, or in reference to it, have recently appeared, partly as a result of the growing film industry in Vancouver. Movies and TV series ranging from First Blood, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, and the X-Files to Frasier and Sleepless in Seattle all play off the nature and invented tradition of the regional landscape. However, perhaps the best example of a mediascape in Appadurai’s sense of the term, and one that has also been explicitly reterritorialized around the theme of Cascadia, has been the concept of the Two Nation Vacation. The basic idea behind the Two Nation Vacation is that of cooperating regionally to compete globally. ‘By showcasing the region and bundling its three major airports, planners hope to attract more flights from overseas’, noted a Chicago 100

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Tribune reporter in 1994. Launched primarily at the instigation of the Port of Seattle with support from the Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Project, the Two Nation Vacation has been supported by British Columbia tourism agencies and marketed to long-distance visitors from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia. The key purpose of the marketing concept is to twin the chimerical notion of a borderless Cascadia with the pocketbook notion that Cascadian tourists get two nations and all of their collective recreational diversity for the price of just one long-distance plane ride. The link between this ‘fantastic’ mediascape and the more general financescape of entrepreneurial promotion remains a favourite concept of Cascadia’s boosters, but it reached a notable peak at a conference in 1996 in Seattle. At the June 1996 conference, the Two Nation Vacation concept was revitalized with the unveiling of glossy marketing posters and a magazine entitled Cascadia: Your Two Nation Vacation Guide. The assembled images in the poster served at once to evoke an ancient and enduring history and a seemingly sublime naturalness in Cascadia’s contours as a region rooted deep in the soil (see Figure 5.5). Here the whole panoply of iconic commodification has been put together with a map that lends a sense of objectivity and, in this version, a copper-plated sense of tradition to the reterritorialization of Cascadia. Native totems, waterfalls, forests, bears, eagles, salmon, trees, and orcas are all packaged into the advertisement. In this aestheticizing way, they are all also reduced to serving as objects of the long-distance touristic gaze. They thereby enframe a postnational mediascape that really does construct a fantastic imagined world to be viewed from afar, a world that links the entrepreneurial vision of the promoters with would-be vacationers’ visions generated on the other side of the world.

5.5 The 1996 advertisement for the Two Nation Vacation 101

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While the poster only offered a sense of the separate elements that go into the touristic fantasy, the special promotional pamphlets later produced to be sent to tour agents gave a sense of the kinds of scripts that the promoters hoped would be generated. Cascadia, gateway to the Pacific Northwest and the Two-Nation Vacation, consists of the American states of Washington and Oregon and the Canadian province of British Columbia. It’s an advantageous location of international tourism and trade; London and Europe’s other great cities are as little as nine hours away by air, and a similar ease of access by land or sea puts the rest of North America and all of the Pacific Rim virtually at Cascadia’s doorstep. There’s something magnetic here for a certain kind of soul . . . one who appreciates natural beauty, limitless recreational opportunities, and the vibrant blend of international influences that have produced Cascadia’s diverse culture and thriving economy. Many people have decided to call this region home, which is a decision you’ll understand once you see Cascadia for yourself. The merging of continent and ocean that defines Cascadia gives the region a diverse geographical climatic face. Waves that have traveled all the way from Asia crash on Pacific beaches, while inland – just beyond Cascadia’s thousand-mile-long spine of snow-capped mountains – sun-kissed deserts and rolling farmlands are split by canyons carved during the greatest prehistoric floods in all of North America. The weather in Cascadia is as varied as the land and the people. It is entirely possible to sunbathe and snow-ski here in the course of one short visit, and today’s gentle rain shower is almost guaranteed to lead to tomorrow’s bluebird sky. Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. That’s where Cascadia is. But once you’ve experienced this magical place, its going to be somewhere else as well. It’ll be in your heart and on your mind . . . forever.36

Here there is a grand plan to script and disseminate the Cascadian ‘state of mind’. Monied tourists, it would seem, with their own aestheticizing approach to nature, love of ‘diversity’, and yearning for soul are envisioned in this material as perfect future Cascadian citizens. It is in every sense a postnational vision, and, as such, it is disjunctive from traditional and national appropriations of local landscape icons. But reterritorialized for the purpose of increasing the region’s capacity to attract consumption capital, the Two Nation Vacation sales campaign also attests to the far-from-emancipatory possibilities of postnational spaces. Indeed, the concept is obviously part and parcel of the overall entrepreneurial repackaging of the region, conjunctive with the narrowed circle of belonging imagined in the suburban, gated-community vision of Cascadia. Tourists, in fact, would seem to be the perfect neoliberal citizens of this landscape. Investing the region with their personal fantasies of recreation, they bring money, appreciation for objectified nature, and desires that respond quite directly to price signals. Moreover, because they are only temporary visitors, they bring all this without the bothersome bureaucracy of democratic institutions, governments, courts, and welfare systems. Like the mediascapes discussed by Appadurai, the Two Nation Vacation campaign also rests on a technoscape of transnationalism. In the Cascadian case this concerns more than just the global dissemination of the imagery and ideas of tourism; it also relates to the political-economy of regional reterritorialization. Indeed, for some promoters such as John Miller, technology ranks alongside trade as the most important integrating factor in the region – far surpassing the significance of Cascadia’s environmental commonalities. Yes, there is a common climate along the Cascadia strip that fosters regionalism . . . Yes, there is common geography . . . Yes, we have a common appreciation of environment. Yes, we have 102

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an economy historically rooted in natural resources which has been moving increasingly to high technology. But none of these factors is as important as Pacific trade and transportation technology.37

Other promoters have shared Miller’s keen interest in the technological advancement of Cascadia’s competitive positioning. And they have lobbied for more investment in infrastructure to speed movement through the region. Two such practical attempts to ‘bulldoze the border’ are significant insofar as they have clearly been conceived as facilitating the wider projects of promoting Cascadia for high-tech investment and tourism: the vision of a high-speed, bullet train between Vancouver and Eugene; and the transformation of customs and immigration processing at the border itself. The concept of a Cascadian bullet train had its origins in a failed effort to bring the Olympic Games to the region. The idea was to promote the games as a unique binational event that would somehow embody the border-crossing international diversity of Olympic sport itself. Just like Olympic bids the world over, the idea was also to attract more government spending on regional infrastructure than otherwise might have been spent. Thus, as both the ultimate goal of the bid and a part of selling the concept of a binational games, the promoters put forward the idea of a government-funded bullet train that would whisk spectators and reporters from events in Vancouver to others in Eugene, up and down main-street Cascadia. Part of this Olympic vision was imagined and evoked at the time by Oregon journalist John Henrikson: It’s July 2008, and the big event has arrived. You hop a Cherriots bus, paying the fare with a special credit card, to the Amtrak Intermodal Station in downtown Salem. The northbound tilt train is warming up at the station. You insert the ‘Discovery’ card in the ticket dispenser, punch a few buttons and out comes your boarding pass. Your long anticipated trip to the games is underway. The train whisks you along at 80 mph through Portland, Tacoma, Seattle. Crossing the Canadian border without delays, you speed past the Peace Arch and end up in downtown Vancouver, where you use your card to take the sky-train to Exhibition Park. The opening ceremonies for the Summer Olympic Games are about to begin. Tomorrow, you’ll take the tilt down to the Kingdome to watch the first day of decathalon competition. Then its back down to Eugene to see the field hockey at Autzen Stadium. Welcome to Cascadia, a vision of tomorrow’s Northwest that may be closer than you think.38

It should be noted that Henrikson’s vision of a technologically integrated postnational region is of a piece with the wider ideoscaping of a high-tech, knowledge-based, sustainable Cascadia. For many promoters, high-speed rail was also a particularly attractive technological fix to the problem of maintaining Cascadia’s green image. Thus, back in 1994, Artibise noted that ‘there is significant interest in the Region in the future of high-speed rail as an essential element of the regional transportation system and an efficient, environmentally sensitive alternative to highway and air travel’.39 However, today, while the regional train service has been improved slightly with the upgrading of Amtrak service to faster, Spanish-made, Talgo rolling stock, Henrikson’s vision of a bullet train seems as dated as the Seattle Kingdome, which was imploded in 1999 to make way for a new stadium. Nevertheless, neither this turn of events, nor the clear contradiction of seeking national government funding for the avowedly postnational project of Cascadian 103

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corridor development, has stopped the promoters from continuing to push for federal transportation funding. Other technological initiatives that relate less to the transportation of goods and more to the movement of people have been advanced by Cascadia’s promoters in the hopes of reducing delays at the border. Most notably, in the early part of the 1990s they were successful in implementing expedited border-crossing lanes for frequent travellers at the so-called Peace Arch. For traffic into the United States the ‘dedicated commuter lane’ was called the PACE lane, and for traffic into Canada it was called CANPASS. By the Fall of 1992, the first year of the programme, American officials had approved 19,000 PACE decals, and Canadian officials 27,500. These decals enabled drivers to line up in a dedicated fast lane at the border and move through with little questioning by the customs and immigration agents. The rapid passage of the cars with the PACE and CANPASS authorizations was ensured on the basis of computer-database-mediated preclearance processes that effectively meant that travellers who registered with the programmes and paid the required fees only had to answer the usual questions at the single moment of application. After initial enthusiasm for the project, numbers of applicants fell, but by the end of 1999, 27 per cent of southbound vehicles were using the PACE lane. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Congress removed the sunset clause that would have ended the project, and it was permanently authorized on the U.S. side by federal legislation. All this would indeed seem to betoken the ‘bulldozing of the checkpoints’ that Schell and Hamer forecasted when they lauded the programme in their 1995 essay on Cascadia.40 However, in the wake of 9/11 the PACE and CANPASS lanes were closed down, and it was only after intense lobbying from business interests, local communities, and the Canadian government that a new solution was found, aimed at providing both high-speed crossings for precleared travellers and high security for everybody else. That system, implemented in 2002, is called NEXUS. Like the PACE and CANPASS systems, NEXUS allows for fast-track border crossing. But, as a bureaucratic bridge between the Canadian and U.S. governments, it also incorporates photo-ID and biometric ‘proximity cards’. Thus, NEXUS members crossing into the United States carry a card in their cars which relays enrolment data – including finger prints, photo ID, name, date of birth, and so on – to an antenna, and from there to a border guard’s computer screen. However, this technological fix for the problem of ensuring high security without creating a drag on cross-border business would seem to represent just one more way station on the road toward still more sophisticated technoscaping of Cascadian belonging. One example of how such border regulation may continue to develop involves plans for a single biometric passport turned credit-card system. Such systems were already being tested in 1996 in response to a new U.S. law mandating exit as well as entry checks (never fully implemented because of protests by, among others, Cascadia’s promoters). Ronald Hays, an Assistant Chief Inspector of the INS, published a paper at the time arguing that biometric systems would accelerate dedicated commuter lanes such as PACE by using machines that would determine if a card holder was actually the person who had been precleared by reference to digitized hand-prints or voice-prints encoded on 104

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the card.41 Adding a further neoliberal gleam to this promise of technological efficiency, Hays’ description of INS planning also highlighted how the preclearance lane cards and the automated checking machines would actually be owned and maintained by private companies. Insofar as such cards might portend the future passports of postnational identity in places such as Cascadia, the outline of the technoscaping of this identity would seem to accord neatly with the financescaping and ideoscaping of cross-border space as a site of invented neoliberal traditions. We have included in our design the necessary technological platforms to ensure that the card will have a useful life of approximately five years. Most importantly for commercial users today, it will sport the ubiquitous magnetic strip which the government will not use, making it completely available to the commercial sector. We have also included a microchip in the design as we will require some of the available storage space for automated inspections. We will make the remainder of the chip’s storage available to our commercial partners. We think this is especially significant because of the recent announcement by Visa, MasterCard and Europay of their joint specification for chip-based credit cards. To further the appeal of this idea to the commercial sector, we will also allow cards prepared by our partners to display the logo of the partner. This would create in the mind of the card holder an instant link between our high technology application and the sponsoring corporation. Just think of the possibilities for a frequent traveler pulling out a card bearing the IBM or United Airlines logo, for example. Now potentiate that image by seeing the card as a charge card, an airline ticket, a medium by which you access telecommunications systems, an electronic bank, and/or any other card-based application you can conceive.42

This technoscape would seem to be radically deterritorializing – and yet, of course, profoundly exclusive. Only certain sorts of moneyed people would be able to access the cosmopolitan space of flows that this credit-card kind of passport would make available. Others would be left behind in the slow lanes of super securitization, interrogation, and potential exclusion. There is fast postnationalism for the Cascadian cosmopolitans and their kin, then, but all kinds of coding and gatekeeping – enforced traditionalization, perhaps – for the rest. These concerns in turn introduce the questions that the invented postmodern traditions of Cascadia pose vis-à-vis Appadurai’s vision of ethnoscapes.

Ethnoscaping Cascadia By ethnoscape, I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree.43

For Appadurai, the anthropologist, ethnoscapes are the central feature of modernity at large. They are comprised of the moving peoples who in turn constitute the core of the postnational public spheres he sees as full of liberatory promise. This is not hard to understand, perhaps, when the foci are refugees and immigrants, who by moving to new locales might escape experiences of ethnic absolutism or find new routes to agency. But, notably, Appadurai also includes tourists in his list of moving peoples. And, as I have 105

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already shown, the hegemonic tourist landscaping of Cascadia is hardly liberatory. In what follows I suggest that other ethnoscapings of the region also reveal the limits of reterritorialized postnational belonging. Indeed, in stark contrast to Appadurai’s idealized vision of postnational inclusiveness, the ethnoscaping of Cascadia illustrates all manner of regionalized racism and ethnic instrumentalism. However, I also suggest at the end of this section, that if there has been a more liberatory reterritorialization of the Cascadian ethnoscape, it has been by native peoples – peoples who, far from being immigrants, refugees, or tourists, have instead been moving through the region for millennia. Their contemporary reterritorialization of regional space as a postcolonial borderless space does reveal emancipatory agency. However, somewhat against the grain of Appadurai’s claims, its emancipatory possibilities stem less from a postnationalism than from a multinationalism, an insistence that as First Nations, these moving peoples also have discrete, territorially-defined claims to sovereignty that, in some cases, transcend today’s international border, and that in all cases pre-date Cartesian colonization of regional space by cadastral and national borders. One of the most remarkably racist visions of the Cascadian landscape dates back to a much older, early-twentieth-century attempt to promote the region’s special destiny on the basis of its environment. Entitled In the Zone of Filtered Sunshine: Why the Pacific Northwest is Destined to Dominate the Commercial World, the vision took shape as a 1920s Seattle Chamber of Commerce promotional booklet.44 Although the author, Erwin Weber, did not use the name Cascadia, the booklet operationalized a very similar concept of regional space which, defined by supposedly natural features, is clearly shown in the image on the cover of the booklet as crossing the border and including much of western British Columbia all the way up to Alaska (see Figure 5.6). Much like today’s promoters,

5.6 The front-cover of Weber's In the Zone of Filtered Sunshine 106

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Weber was particularly exercised by the region’s location vis-à-vis Pacific Rim trade. ‘Seattle and Puget Sound,’ he claimed, ‘are the logical economical locations for the manufacture of all goods for which the raw materials are derived from the Orient, Oceania and Alaska, and for the manufacture of all goods to be marketed to those places.’45 However, much more crucial to his argument about the region’s special commercial destiny was another kind of geographical claim about its natural future that rested on an environmentally determinist and racist vision of the region’s climate. ‘Intense and prolonged sunshine,’ Weber explained, ‘is detrimental to the highest human progress . . . The most energetic human types and highest and most enduring civilizations have evolved in the cloudiest region of the world, Nordic Europe.’46 Extending this racialized model of environmental determinism to North America, Weber asserted that the Pacific Northwest with its limited sunshine was another of the earth’s ‘few favored regions’ – a region ‘which possesses all the basic requirements necessary and desirable for the development of the most virile types of humanity, and the highest attainments of civilization’.47 Citing early-twentiethcentury environmental determinists such as Ellsworth Huntington, Weber then presented page after page of climatological data, all with a view to clinching his point that the region, thanks to its clouds and rainfall, has a special destiny, indeed a natural tradition, as a white site, a ‘natural’ base from which the white races can pursue their ‘natural’ talents for conquering the commercial world. Today, Weber’s white supremacism lives on, but it would never be found in a Seattle Department of Commerce-sponsored booklet. Instead, it is marginal, far-right groups in the region, both in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, that continue to reproduce versions of this environmentally determinist racist regionalism.48 The so-called ‘Northwest Kinsmen’, for example, have a web page, which (still active at the time of writing) introduces visitors with the following message: Welcome to the Northwest Patriot Gathering Place. This web site includes materials of political, religious or racial nature, and is designed to bring you information about various Christian Patriot groups and ideas. We advocate the ‘Northwest Territorial Imperative’, which encourages the migration of White Christian Patriots to the Northwest five states in an effort to establish a regional power base.49

A link from the page goes to an explanation of the ‘Northwest Territorial Imperative’ from ‘Pastor’ Robert Miles that returns to the region’s ‘natural’ mountainous geography to make the case for regionalism. Unlike the imagery that figures in the financescaping of Cascadia as a privileged peak at the epicenter of the international economy, here by contrast the mountains underpin a phobically isolationist outlook. America is not a free country. It is a land of sheep. They are content to graze, to romp in the grass and procreate. They avoid looking at the slaughter house on the hill. They are moved by the shepherd and his dogs. The sheep move in the direction that the shepherd wants them to move. The shepherd sends his dogs to nip and bark at them. They are fed and sheared. The only thing they forget is that they also are fair game for the wolves. For the sheep are moved by either the bark and nip of the shepherds’ dogs, or the fangs of the wolf pack. America is a land of sheep . . . We who are the mountain rams understand. It is why we chose the high ground. It is why we moved to the rocky peaks of the mountains. It is why we told our own to go to the northwest.50 107

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In many ways this might seem an all-American ethnoscaping of the region. Indeed, perhaps for Robert Miles the ‘wolves’ represent transnational corporations with their foreign ‘fangs’. It is hard to tell, but there is a strong anti-globalism mixed in with the anti-Semitism and racism of far-right rhetoric in the Pacific Northwest.51 Certainly, there is a virulent nationalism in the rhetoric. However, in terms of the ‘white site’ ethnoscape’s binationalism it should be noted that British Columbia also has its white-supremacist fringe groups such as the ‘Ku Klux Klan of the Pacific Realm’ who make similar appeals to the ‘nature’ of their racist regionalism.52 Moreover, in 1996, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police seized a stash of weapons and survival gear that had been hidden by a U.S. militia group in British Columbia. The stash was found in a remote mountain area near Smithers, and indicated cross-border organizing by U.S. militia groups into Canada.53 Such crossborder activities by the far right are probably rare, but one development that has brought them together to collaborate openly and actively on either side of the border around a common cause has been the possible development of a North Cascades International Park. Ironically, the planning around this park represents an example of Cascadian environmentalism that goes deeper than the ‘sustainable development’ sound bites of the promoters. There really have been attempts to turn British Columbia’s Manning Park and Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness into a common park for the purposes of better managing and protecting the area’s unique transborder ecology. But these same attempts have raised the ire of local far-right groups, including so-called ‘Wise Use’ antienvironmentalist groups, leading them to make common cause across the border against the planning. According to David Neiwert, such groups saw the initiative as just the start of ‘a massive conspiracy to turn the North Cascades National Park into a United Nations enclave stocked with concentration camps, high-tech surveillance equipment and New World Order Ground Troups’.54 This paranoid vision only brought Canadian and American far-right groups together for a short time before other local issues came to the fore. But even as a brief concern, their anxious, imagined geography of the New World Order in local cross-border space mobilized the racist nationalists to network transnationally. As an example of reterritorialization, then, this example also reveals how reactive locality can be constructed in globality ‘in a world where spatial localization, quotidian interaction, and social scale are not always isomorphic’.55 Far from reactive, Cascadia’s neoliberal boosters would no doubt be horrified by Weber’s scientized racism and its farcical, if no less dangerous, return in the traditional white-supremacist fascination with a Northwest Territorial Imperative. Although the promotional vision of the region as some sort of environmentally insulated gated community might seem to resonate with a certain country-club white privilege, the promoters’ keen interest in boosting Cascadia as a centre of Pacific Rim trade explicitly leads to all kinds of declarations of the region’s cultural diversity. Indeed, whereas Weber found license for his white supremacism in claims about the climate, the promoters of the Two Nation Vacation – to pick an example I have already cited – draw direct parallels between meteorology and their appeals to diversity. ‘The weather in Cascadia,’ the advertisement reads, ‘is as varied as the land and the people.’ More generally, these 108

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appeals to diversity are marked by the particular importance the promoters attach to the presence of local Asian Americans and Asian Canadians. Schell and Hamer, for example, put it like this: We also share an openness to Asian, as well as European, influences, perhaps as a result of lying equidistant between the two continents and having had a long history of exchange dating back to the early silk trade from China. Indeed, immigration – particularly of Asians, who have flooded into Vancouver, and to a lesser extent, Seattle and Portland in recent years – has become a major influence in Cascadia.56

In other scripts of Cascadian promotion, Asian Americans and Asian Canadians are also repeatedly instrumentalized and stereotyped as ‘go-betweens’ and ‘middlemen’ who underpin the region’s hopes of becoming a linchpin of trans-Pacific trade. No matter that Japanese immigrants in both British Columbia and Washington were imprisoned in internment camps in World War II, and no matter the long history of anti-Chinese racism in the region. These real modern traditions north and south of the border can now be forgotten, and Asian Cascadians can be touted as part of the postmodern traditional diversity that gives the region its special niche in a Pacific Rim future. As Gordon Price, a Vancouver City Council member and Cascadia sympathizer, told Robert Kaplan: Vancouver is attracting the young of the world’s most dynamic middlemen minorities . . . Look at these Asian kids – many of them are sent here to study by their families. For them, Vancouver must be like Paris in the twenties – an earlier, modern capitalist culture, compared with the overnight glitz of the rest of the Pacific Rim.57

The instrumentalist ethnoscaping of Cascadia by its promoters is not limited to the stereotyping of local Asian populations as go-betweens for Pacific Rim trade and development. Native people are also made part of the cosmopolitan diversity. Yet whereas the Asian influence is put to work in narratives about Cascadia and trade, the native presence is instrumentalized to explain Cascadians’ touted eco-sensibilities. According to Schell and Hamer: ‘We have a love of the outdoors and a relatively high level of concern for the environment. The Native American regard for nature in Cascadia is a clearer influence than in the East’.58 All questions about the real concern for the environment aside, such clichéd stereotyping of native peoples as guardians of the earth also expresses a stunning disregard for the low regard in which, historically, they have been held in the region. Less valuable than the environment, but often treated as equal to it in colonial management practices and discourse, the native peoples of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon were famously left out of the initial nineteenth-century disputes between Britain and the United States over how the space that is now being reterritorialized should be territorialized in the first place.59 Today in the context of reterritorialization there is no such lack of attention. In contrast to the events that led up to the creation of the border in the nineteenth century, the promoters of a borderless Cascadia do clearly allude to and mention the native presence. The 1996 Cascadia coffee-table book is no exception. On a double-page spread (pages 146 and 147) readers are treated to a rich palette of diversity that counterposes a photograph of Japanese tourists beneath a Chinese dragon mural (itself highlighting 109

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5.7 Pages 146 and 147 of Cascadia: A Tale of Two Cities

the history of Chinese railroad labour) with two shots illustrating the Cascadian native presence (Figure 5.7). The decontextualizing postmodern mélange of it all does not seem to matter; indeed, it is in some respects the point of the mix of images. The juxtaposition of the Blake Island native longhouse where President Clinton brought APEC leaders with the native street mural featuring tepees in a desert is offered with no comment on how many of ‘Seattle’s large homeless population’ are themselves native peoples (indeed, their homelessness is a sign of all kinds of colonial continuities into the supposedly postcolonial Cascadian present). Instead, the native traditions (themselves both indigenous and, as with the tepee mural, imported from the Plains native traditions) are here and on other pages offered as part and totemic parcel of Cascadian regional diversity. If the roots and routes of native peoples in and through the region are therefore foregrounded, they are also in much of the promotional work commodified and consumed. Thus, in the Two Nation Vacation traveller script sandwiched between a section on ‘Art and Cultural Centers’ and another on ‘Dining in Cascadia,’ comes this lively consumer-friendly celebration of Cascadia’s ‘Native People’: You may recognize some of their names: the Haida, Kwakiitl, Nez Perce, Chinook – all famous tribes of the Cascadia region. But more than eighty tribes, each with its unique language, stories, art and epic history live here today – many on the very land that their people have occupied for more than 10,000 years.

To be sure, the long history of native occupation (though not, it might be noted, government) is highlighted here. But it is a history that is instrumentalized for the purposes of creating yet another natural history of Cascadia itself. At the 1996 Two Nation Vacation planning conference in Seattle, Bruce Chapman from the Discovery Institute explained to a panel on native tourism that the reason he 110

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had wanted to include the panel when he was helping to plan the conference was that, in his mind, native peoples of the region were ‘the original Cascadians’.60 In response, a Makah representative on the panel took issue with Chapman’s declaration. ‘Ab-original Cascadians might be a better term,’ she said, making a profoundly disruptive postcolonial point with the rhyming of the words. Moreover, she continued, ‘we would prefer that instead of talking about a Two Nation Vacation you would at least talk about a Three Nation Vacation’. This insistence on native sovereignty as First Nations proceeded to animate much of the rest of the panel session. The native leaders who were there all represented particular native-tourism interests, and were clearly aware that they were involved in a certain sort of capitalization of culture. But at the same time they argued that if anyone was going to be selling native culture and artefacts, it should be native peoples themselves. Moreover, they argued, this had to be done with care and on the basis of careful collaboration. As evidence of such work, a tourist guidebook entitled Native Peoples of the Northwest: A Traveler’s Guide to Land, Art, and Culture was exhibited to the audience.61 In many different ways the guidebook presented at the conference represented a distinct departure from the general Two Nation Vacation campaign. Each section deals in great detail with different First Nations sites and their particular histories, often describing individuals with whom visitors can speak or from whom they can purchase services. The overall sense a potential traveller receives, therefore, is far from a generic list of places to buy native artefacts, but a much more lively and heterogeneous set of notices and invitations to visit. Certainly, the guidebook takes the same regional template used for Cascadia by the promoters. But as a map of First Nations sites that comes with the guidebook shows, this Cascadian landscape is transformed, turned over on its side, and reoriented with the up-river east at the top of the map. While for some native leaders even this kind of publication represents a dangerous dalliance with commercialization, the representatives at the panel in 1996 argued that putting native land on a map like this actually furthered the increasing recognition of First Nations sovereignty and history. In terms of the ethnoscaping of reterritorialization, such a map is also significant as a sign of agency, a negotiation of a more meaningful representation of native localities within the structures of globality. By downplaying the border and reorienting the viewer’s geographic imagination, the map and the book suggest a reworking of a postnational Cascadian concept, that is meaningfully postcolonial in that it recalls the precolonial native networks of the region.62 The map, of course, is just one example. More recently in 1999, a more deliberately political announcement of the same point was made in Vancouver at a special meeting of Canadian and U.S. native groups where illustrations of economic involvement in the global economy were combined with declarations about the importance of native peoples coming together across the border as a single people. ‘In a ceremony rich with religious pageantry, pride and hope’, noted a local reporter, major native groups from the United States and Canada yesterday pledged to work in tandem to expand political rights and cultural values on both sides of the border. The ‘sacred document’, as it was described by the groups’ leaders, declares that while boundaries were drawn between the 111

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two countries by ‘others’ hands’, these arbitrary lines have not severed, and never will, the ties of kinship among our peoples.63

This declaration, with its postnational-cum-multinational calls to First Nations to work together across a border drawn by colonialists, seems to reflect a radically distinct form of recovering and remaking of regional traditions. It is a reterritorialization which moves beyond the nation-states of today, not by creating a transnational ethnoscape of postcolonial movement, but by reclaiming an ethnoscape of precolonialism, an ethnoscape of native space that existed before the first round of modern territorialization even took place.

Conclusions For the promoters who have spent much of the 1990s landscaping Cascadia as a crossborder region there appears to be a solution to the disjunctures of deterritorialization. Ultimately, it is a solution that seeks to reconcile globalism and regionalism by capitalizing on a powerfully conjunctive series of ideoscapes, financescapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, and ethnoscapes of the region, all of them designed with a view to entrenching supposedly Cascadian traditions of making money and spending money while living in some sort of high-tech harmony with the natural landscape. After a short stay interviewing promoters and other commentators in the region, Robert Kaplan came away thinking that in this regard Cascadia was in fact the shape of things to come. Not only does Cascadia, with its high-income professionals and growing Asian population, foreshadow a greater loyalty to the region and its landscape than to a state or nation, it also suggests a place of resident expatriates, of ‘rooted cosmopolitans’, living in one place but intellectually and professionally inhabiting a larger world – the one across the Pacific and maybe beyond, as the old mass-production economy and the unified culture it spawned devolves into a customized production system while to no nation. Cascadia, in other words, is concrete expression to what is already beginning to happen in many other parts of the continent.64

For the same reasons that Kaplan evokes, Appadurai’s conceptualization of the disjunctive scapes of deterritorialization is not redundant in this context. It certainly helps us find useful ways of categorizing the different modalities of producing and promoting Cascadia’s so-called ‘competitive advantage’. However, as I have tried to show, Appadurai’s single-minded focus on deterritorialization leaves us without a critical vocabulary for addressing the ways in which the production of locality in globality also works through different forms of reterritorialization. The production of new crossborder spaces is just one example of this, of course, but it provides us with a particularly useful antidote to the more hyperbolic announcements of a coming borderless world. Indeed, studying the invention of cross-border regional traditions enables us to see how dependent borderless-world discourse tends to be on a return to geography. The excessive and inauthentic enframings of Cascadia’s geography in turn show how dependent the postmodern gestures of regional invention are on modern patterns of enframing space with maps and exhibitionary views of people and place. Among others, traditional native 112

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spaces that were supposedly expunged through modern colonial enframing come back in this context: partly as newly instrumentalized and commodified objects, but also, as the Makah critic at the conference pointed out, as disruptive supplements in which native peoples can find opportunities for postcolonial ab-original resistance, even as they are framed as postnational originals. These points mean that it is important for me to qualify my generally sceptical conclusions about the limits of a deterritorialization meta-narrative with a note about the importance of Appadurai’s emphasis on disjuncture. While I have shown the ways in which the neoliberal ideoscape of Cascadia effectively over-determines the other promotional landscapings of the region, I would not like to leave the impression that this promotional effort has completely co-opted and erased other more radically disjunctive regional forces. Clearly, the cross-border First Nations networking is one example of this, but there are others also. While the economic boosters of Cascadia take their regional template from earlier ecological imaginings, the ecoregional and bioregional traditions still persist. Many groups including People for Puget Sound, the Georgia Strait Alliance, and the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance also continue thus to imagine other alliances and futures for the region. They too represent a challenge to national sovereignty on either side of the 49th Parallel. But they do so in a disjunctive way that cannot be easily remanaged through the rhetoric of Cascadian sustainable development. There are then opportunities for other traditions to be fashioned in postnational space, other traditions that can land-scape the end of the nation-state with a more just and environmentally responsible geography of the future.

Notes 1.

M. Beebe, Cascadia: A Tale of Two Cities, Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., New York, Harry Abrams, 1996. 2. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1983. 3. A. Roy, ‘Nostalgias of the Modern’, this volume. 4. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, revised edition, 1991. 5. See T. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988; and T. Mitchell, ‘The World as Exhibition’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 31, 1989, pp. 217– 236. 6. I have discussed the complex and too often blurred borderland between postcolonialism and cross-border regionalism elsewhere at length. See M. Sparke, ‘Between Postcolonialism and Cross-Border Regionalism’, Space and Polity, vol. 6, no. 2, 2002, pp. 203–213. In this chapter I return to the postcolonial questions begged by the Cascadian concept in the final section on Cascadia’s postnational ethnoscape. 7. For a clear-cut critique of the boosterism around the U.S. stock market bubble in the mid-1990s and its detachment from the long-term recessionary realities of global overcapacity, see R. Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The U.S. and the World Economy, New York, Verso, 2002. 8. K. Ohmae, The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies, New York, Free Press, 1995. 9. Ibid., p. 5. 10. Ibid., p. 105. 113

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11. P. Schell and J. Hamer, ‘Cascadia: The New Binationalism of Western Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest’, in R. Earle and J. Wirth (eds.), Identities in North America: The Search for Community, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 141. 12. A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 13 and 33. 13. See M. Sparke, Hyphen-Nation-States: Critical Geographies of Displacement and Disjuncture, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004, chapter 2. 14. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 36. 15. Ibid., p. 37. 16. E. Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, Berkeley, Banyan Tree Books, 1975. 17. J. Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1981. 18. See also P. K. Schoonmaker, B. von Hagen, and E. C. Wolf (eds.), The Rain Forests of Home: Profile of a North American Bioregion, Washington, D.C., Island Press, 1997. 19. W. Henkel, ‘Cascadia: A State of (Various) Mind(s)’, Chicago Review, vol. 39, 1993, pp. 112–113. 20. D. McCloskey, ‘On Ecoregional Boundaries’, Trumpeter, vol. 6, no. 4, 1989, pp. 127–131. 21. M. Goldberg and M. D. Levi, ‘The Evolving Experience Along the Pacific Northwest Corridor Called Cascadia’, The New Pacific, Winter 1993, p. 28. 22. Quoted in V. Schodolski, ‘Northwest’s Economy Defies National Borders: History, Trade, Climate Define Vibrant Region’, The Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1994, p. 1. 23. A. Artibise, ‘Cascadian Adventures: Shared Visions, Strategic Alliances, and Ingrained Barriers in a Transborder Region’, Paper presented at the symposium On Brotherly Terms: Canadian American Relations West of the Rockies, University of Washington, Seattle, 1996, p. 13. 24. D. McCloskey, ‘Cascadia’, in D. Aberley (ed.), Futures By Design: The Practice of Ecological Planning, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, New Society Publishers, 1994, p. 102. 25. Ibid., p. 102. 26. J. Gardner, ‘The Competitive Advantage of Cascadia’, The New Pacific, Winter 1992/1993, p. 13. 27. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 34–35. 28. D. Harvey, ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, Geografiska Annale, vol. 71B, 1989, pp. 3–17. See also D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989. 29. D. J. Yang, ‘Magic Mountains: Attracted by Pristine Mountain Beauty, the Pacific Northwest’s High-tech Wizards are Aiming at Conquering World Markets’, The New Pacific, Autumn 1992, p. 19. 30. Ibid., p. 19. 31. G. Halverson, ‘Regional Road Maps Guide Some Mutual Funds’, The Christian Science Monitor, October 8, 1996, p. A9. 32. Artibise, ‘Cascadian Adventures’, p. 12. 33. G. Fysh, ‘A Head for Heights’, The New Pacific, Autumn 1992, p. 21. 34. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 35. 35. Ibid., p. 35. 36. The Cascadia Traveler, Tourism promotion pamphlet, undated. 37. J. Miller, ‘Transportation Key to Cascadia Regionalism and Pacific Trade’, Pacific Economic Review, Fall 1996, p. 36. 38. J. Henrikson, ‘Blurring Borders for the Future’, The Salem Statesman Journal, October 3, 1994, pp. A1 and A2. 39. A. Artibise, Opportunities of Achieving Sustainability in Cascadia, Vancouver, International Center for Sustainable Cities, 1994, p. 11. 40. Schell and Hamer, ‘Cascadia’, p. 148. 41. R. J. Hays, ‘INSPASS: INS Passenger Accelerated Service System’, Paper authored on January 4, 1996 that was published on a now-inactive webpage of the U.S. Department of Justice. For reasons that are no doubt connected to the argument for public-private partnerships put forward by Hays, his paper is now available – on the Web at the time of revising this paper (August 114

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

12, 2002) – on the site of the ‘Biometric Consortium’, http://www.biometrics.org/REPORTS/ INSPASS.html Ibid. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 33. E. L. Weber, In the Zone of Filtered Sunshine: Why the Pacific Northwest is Destined to Dominate the Commercial World, Seattle, Seattle Chamber of Commerce, 1924. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 2. D. Neiwert, In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest, Pullman, Washington State University Press, 1999. http://www.concentric.net/~Nwk/, website viewed in June 2001. http://www.concentric.net/~nwk/dedication.htm, website viewed in June 2001. J. A. Aho, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1990. See C. Jackson, ‘Klan’s B.C. Boss Fired by Top Security Firm’, The Province, Sunday, August 10, 1997, pp. A1 and A3; and also W. Kinsella, Web of Hate: Inside Canada’s Far Right Network, Toronto, Harper Collins, 1994. Martin Schuldhaus, ‘Arms and Survival Gear Seized from U.S. Militia in B.C.’, Seattle Post Intelligencer, October 26, 1996, p. A2. Neiwert, In God’s Country, p. 265. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 179. Schell and Hamer, ‘Cascadia’, p. 144. R. Kaplan, ‘Travels Into America’s Future,’ The Atlantic Monthly, August 1998, p. 54. Schell and Hamer, ‘Cascadia’, p. 144. See D. Clayton, Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island, Vancouver, UBC Press, 2000. These remarks and those that follow were recorded by the author who was there as an observer at the conference in June 1996. J. Halliday and G. Chehak, Native Peoples of the Northwest: A Traveler’s Guide to Land, Art, and Culture, Seattle, Sasquatch Books, 1996. For more on these kinds of postcolonial mapping potential, see M. Sparke, ‘A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 88, no. 3, 1998, pp. 464–495. J. Connelly, ‘Tribes put Kinship Above Boundaries’, Seattle Post Intelligencer, July 24, 1999, p. A1. R. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America’s Future, New York: Vintage Books, 1999, pp. 327–328.

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Chapter 6

The tensed embrace of tourism and traditional environments: exclusionary practices in Cancún, Cuba, and Southern Florida Robert Mugerauer

It would appear that tourism is one of the major means through which globalized capitalism brings about the end of traditions, especially insofar as they have been bound up with differences among locales and place-responsive practices. As often is argued, modernity’s tendency to homogenize local environments and ways of life is exaggerated and hastened in the recent unfolding of globalization.1 And, within globalization, as we will see, it is tourism that now leads the way in physical, economic, and social change. Hence, in tourism, where the empirical and theoretical issues are writ large, it is easier to discern and understand the critical features and complexities of our subject matter. Because global tourism is often seen as destructive of local place and tradition, those who would honour and protect the latter, but who still want to visit and experience the remaining distinctive locales of the world, seek alternative modes of tourism. Currently, the chief among these is ecotourism, which aims to touch places and traditions lightly and to leave most of the economic benefits of and control over tourism in the hands of the local population. Hence, by examining and comparing the impacts of mass tourism and ecotourism we can gain considerable insight into whether or how global flows of people, money, and cultural norms end, preserve, or transform traditional environments and practices. Insofar as poststructural theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari are correct, cultural practices and discourses unfold by articulating binary distinctions and enforcing hierarchical preferences among them (for example, the modern as opposite and superior to the traditional, or the global as opposite and ascendant over the local).2 Examining how tourism affects traditional relations and hierarchies may provide insight into how historical bio-cultural environments are constituted and maintained or modified. 116

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Insofar as these same theorists are correct in their complementary assertion that binary exclusions are unavoidable and ungrounded or arbitrary, examining the impact of mass tourism and ecotourism on local traditions may help us understand the ways in which traditions are replaced, recovered, or perhaps even invented anew. Here it is crucial to re-examine our assumptions about the meaning of autonomy in traditional practices and the rights peoples have to such self-determination when they collide with external groups’ ideas such as ‘tradition should continue [always] [as it has been]’; or ‘advocating tradition is advocating the local as opposed to the global’. The empirical research in Cancún, Cuba, and Southern Florida that provides the basis for this chapter both supports and modifies the reigning ideas about the differences between, and cultural implications of, mass tourism and ecotourism. First of all, the case studies presented show that the major criticisms of mass tourism are justified. But beyond this, the methodology used in this study combines critical hermeneutics and the comparative case method.3 With the latter, though some elements are compared across the cases, this is not done in a rigorously systematic manner. More importantly, the elements considered are allowed to emerge from the empirical descriptions as is appropriate to the phenomenological and hermeneutic methods, rather than being pushed to the fore by the ‘hot-house’ method of hypthothetico-deductive and falsification procedures. A problem with, and objection to, this approach is that it is not generalizable, since there is no reason to suppose that the three case studies are representative of more or most of the tourism sites around the world. In fact, this limitation is neither accidental nor undesirable. On the contrary, the procedures used aim to avoid the methodological universalization and homogenization that are part of the abstracting and reductive modern world view – whether found in science, epistemology, and analytic techniques, or in the processes of manufacturing, transportation, banking, and entertainment-leisure activities. Making explicit the major similarities and differences among the three case studies will raise enough questions to enable us to deal with the issue of the end of tradition mentioned above, especially because what is accomplished will be empirically sound. Moreover, differences need to be allowed to stand – that is, allowed to withstand our urge to make sure all data are representative of something other than the phenomena at hand. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger has shown, deeper understanding lies in the shift from representational thinking to a mode of reflection that lets things be.4 The three cases, in their intersections, certainly raise more additional questions than can be considered or answered here. For example, might it be that Florida, Mexico, and Cuba participate in the constitution of the Caribbean as a distinctive place despite or even through its tourism, say a decentred place as distinct from the centred Mediterranean?5 Or, is the interpretive apparatus we apply to the physical and cultural environments adequate to understanding their development? Might poststructuralist strategies concerning the ‘minor’ and ‘becoming’ offer interpretations just as important as – or even crucially integral to – the places’ actual historical constitutions?6 It is this generation 117

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of fresh questions that may be the most fruitful aspect of our inquiry about the end of tradition by way of tourism. To begin, we have the big question: ‘Is tourism good or bad for the people involved?’.7 To try to answer this, it is useful to take up the most important issues that centre on the kinds of harm that happen between tourists and local residents in the three major scenes or milieus of tourism: the tourist enclave, the service centre, and the regional – often initially agricultural – setting. In the end, the dangers seem to reduce to the appropriation (and consumption or destruction) of the natural and cultural environments that produced and supported what attracted the tourists in the first place, and thus, to the threats to local and regional ways of life. To modify the argument of Harrison in order to contend that the tourism phenomena is much the same within as between countries, I would argue that the basic process involves harms that occur ‘when visitors from rich [areas] visit poor ones’, with the subsequent ‘highlighting of disparities of wealth and raising expectations’ (Figure 6.1).8 Critics argue that in the worst cases, tourism amounts to the enacting of, or opening for, imperialism9 that may result in xenophobia: ‘the hatred of the rich, the arrogance and the neocolonialist appearance of the tourists’.10 Even more moderate positions admit that much of tourism involves not merely accidental differences between individual tourists and local residents, but structurally subordinate positions.11 Hence, for analysts from a wide range of ideological positions, there is consensus that ‘the regional tourist industry remains vulnerable to multiple critiques. These include limited links with local economies, as well as high import propensities and costs; typically expatriate [or local elite] management and ownership structures; frequent environmental degradation; and extreme fluctuations in visitor volume as well as expenditure’.12 There

6.1 Disparities of resources: children in Trinidad, Cuba interact with tourists who have more 118

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is substantial agreement in the research literature analyzing tourism’s socio-cultural and environmental changes that these and related harms (such as low-paying jobs and socio-political dependency) are widespread. There is less agreement as to whether these ‘costs’ are offset by the ‘benefits’ (such as wages and ultimate profits for some).13 In fact, it may well be that a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis is inadequate to finally decide the issue, since many of the potential negative effects are moral, political, or spiritual, and thus not reducible to an economic measure. For example, Negi finds that the problems of tourism based on sea/sun/sex centre on the creation of dissatisfaction and resentment, entrenchment of mutual prejudices, conflicting moral values, crime and anti-social activities, gambling, prostitution, and immoral traffic.14 There is little doubt that the interaction of differing groups (through tourism just as through commerce, religious pilgrimage, or countless other human modes of contact) opens each group to the behaviour and value systems of the ‘others’. Negatively, the encounter may not be open to mutual engagement, and on occasions one group may assert or acquire superiority over the other. Thus, with tourism, we have the ‘demonstration effect’, which ‘implies the devaluation of the indigenous culture, the movement of that culture toward a more homogeneous western model’.15 And this may cause undesirable changes in the local ways of life (such as crime or disobedience to traditional authorities), as the subordinate group attempts to achieve what is held out as desirable but not attainable under currently existing social-economic structures.16 While the differences between those who have what is ‘newly desirable’ and those who do not is emphasized in many tourist exchanges, the counter or complement is that stratifications and exclusions are often more rigidly introduced or enforced, leading to the phenomena of ghettoization. Hence, ‘much criticism is made of exclusive tourist “bubbles” or “ghettoes”, such as Antigua’s Mill Reef . . . on the grounds that they appropriate the choicest sites, exclude non-elite locals (except as menial employees) and fail to contribute to the well-being of adjacent settlements’.17 As we know, in a complex inverse intention, the host powers may act paternalistically to separate locals from tourists as a ‘means of protecting the traditional way of life from “contamination” by tourists’, as happens in the Maldives and, as we will see, in Cuba.18 It is easy enough to see why the dangers remind many of colonialism and the objectification-commodification that accompanied it as it spread around the planet. In this regard, it can be noted that the cases presented in this chapter may also evoke the issue raised by tourism in the Caribbean during the dependency period of the 1970s, which, given the dominant character of the tourists (from North America and Europe) who are served by the darker-skinned locals, became known as Black Servility Theory.19

The three milieus: tourist zones, service centres, and rural regions Because this chapter deals with the issues of interaction and exclusion by considering the three classic milieus generated by tourism, it is important to clarify the range of 119

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6.2 Orientation to the highway system: roads as key location factors for Disney and Florida tourism

spaces generated by contemporary tourism. They may be most clearly seen in sites where economic factors are relatively invariable. South Florida provides such a setting because the dominant motives and causal apparatus are those of private-sector power and profit. Note that this is not purely the case because substantial public supports ultimately helped enable the private-sector projects to succeed (for example, through publicly financed infrastructure and tax breaks). While the Florida Keys offer an intriguing site to compare with nearby Cancún and Cuba, the cases of Disneyworld in Orlando and South Miami Beach are more important to clarify the three classic milieus of tourism. When the Disney Corporation sought an East Coast site for a second complex (to accompany Disneyland in Southern California), the deciding locational factor was the highway system (Figure 6.2). That is, the decision was based on existing infrastructure and the likely ease of generating a large area that could be fully, or substantially, controlled as part of the development.20 The already-existing natural and cultural environments of the area – dominantly agricultural with citrus crops – were of no positive interest then, nor are they now. They are neither exotic enough to lure ecotourists, nor are they aesthetically or physically attractive to activity tourists. Thus, Disney has created a huge tourist enclave and a classically separated service sector – one that is not only physically distinct from the tourist zone and the surrounding agricultural realm, but that is socially and behaviourally separate, with now-notorious regulations stipulating differences in accepted behaviour by employees when ‘on duty’ and ‘off duty’. The distance between the regional context and the service centre, on the one hand, and the tourist zone and those who profit significantly from it, on the other, is seen in the severe problems tourism workers and non-tourism locals have with the cost of living (especially increased costs of housing) and 120

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in the legendary criticism of the ways the Disney empire has run roughshod over local governance and decision-making autonomy. Similarly, in Miami Beach, the renovation of the tourist zone – associated visually with the strip of now-pastel Art Deco buildings along the beach – is a result of the business community ‘sorting out’ an area for tourist activities and profit, and delimiting it from the service city away from the beach (whose businesses may cater to locals, but are not part of the upscale tourist trade), and further detaching it from the greater Miami area and the surrounding agricultural and rural region. The intended clarity of the distinction can be seen in the care taken to emphasize the spatial and image separations, a technique that tries to deal with the panic that resulted from the violence against international tourists.21 The management of land uses and behaviour patterns results from the way main-line (for example, Chamber of Commerce) interests in South Florida operate to control the net that captures tourist income (though only out of self-interest and not for a broadly public good) by minimizing the ‘loss’ of profit to the marginalized local (working or unemployed) populations and areas surrounding the narrowly delimited tourist ‘catch basin’ along the beach (Figure 6.3).

Attempts to deal with exclusion and benefits at local, regional, and national levels Since the American capitalist system has no inherent drive to mitigate the exclusions and other harms that often result from tourism, to find planning practices that aggressively attempt to control such problems, we need to turn to examples in countries with more centralized governments or with more public intentions. In taking up the cases of Cancún and Cuba, we find complicated, perhaps even contradictory, attitudes in regard to our

6.3 The beach as destination: South Florida directionality is towards the beach and away from the hinterland 121

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three milieus. While tourism development in these areas certainly intends to benefit the local population in neighbouring service centres and the surrounding region, it is also acknowledged that some dimension of the local is to be sacrificed for the greater regional and even national good. Thus, the attempt by the Mexican and Cuban governments to manage tourism and international capital involves a complex series of changes and the attempt to distribute fairly the benefits (and harms) at all scales. A major point is that the ‘hosts’ need be neither silent nor passive. In the cases of both Mexico and Cuba, the ‘hosts’ in fact are many: national public leaders and the population by extension, local government authorities, local residents, immigrating workers, and, increasingly, international capital partners. To simplify at the beginning of the analysis, we can remember that the initial motives and power for the development of tourism in Cancún and Cuba came from the central government. Moreover, the explicitly stated goals of both the Cuban and Mexican governments are similar in their concern to alleviate the dangers noted above, and to deal with all three spatial milieus. The Mexican government’s goals, articulated by politicians and institutions (such as National Council for Tourism, founded in 1961, and the subsequent National Tourism Development Plan, developed in 1962), include the general desire to (1) increase currency flow into Mexico as a whole; (2) generate new jobs outside urban centres; and (3) counter patterns of regional inequality (and regional political instability, since the sites chosen, in addition to meeting the basic criteria of regional economic potential and need, were in the ‘politically troubled areas’ of the Yucatan (‘close to politically troubled Latin America’) and, on the other coast, in Mexican-California-Ixtapa, a region of leftist influence). These goals are to be achieved through: (1) growth of international tourism; (2) improvement of the quality of infrastructure; and (3) development of new resorts, which require government funding, and partnerships with the international banking community through the Bank of Mexico.22 A. Enriquez Savignac, President of INFRATUR, emphasized the importance of working to ‘spur regional development and increase foreign exchange’, to seek ‘new sources of employment, in rural culture with low income and few alternatives’, as well as to increase ‘foreign exchange income’.23 Cuba’s leadership has stated similar goals, even making explicit what D. R. Hall calls the dedication ‘to achieve socialist values’, which involves the desire to ‘assist equal distribution of goods, services, opportunities’, to ‘enhance visitors’ cultural and ideological awareness by the host country convincing them of the superiority of socialism’, and to ‘avoid introducing “anti-socialist” “revisionist” or “capitalist” influences to “turn the heads” of the indigenous population working in the tourist industry and coming into contact with foreign tourists’.24

The stories of development Cancún In the last three decades, both Mexico and Cuba have turned to tourism, which was 122

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already well established as part of their cultures and connections with the rest of the world as a result of economic and political considerations. In the case of Mexico, the context was a commitment to revolutionary modernization and, particularly, the dedication to industrial development of steel and petroleum. But because these latter projects were complex, long-term developments, there was also the recognition that tourism was an essential ingredient to make more immediate changes from the traditional ways of life at both regional and national scales. Public officials, in explaining the turn to tourism, acknowledged that despite all public institutional efforts ‘to improve the unemployment problem in the areas of agriculture, cattle raising, industry, construction, and services, the problem is far from being solved’. In contrast, tourism requires ‘a great number of persons with little education’, and could encourage the regional development of agriculture, cattle raising, handicrafts, and service.25 In participating in developing Cancún, the Inter-American Development Bank ‘emphasize[d] the importance of helping the residents of the project area’.26 A brief review of the development of Cancún reminds us that the contemporary tradition of tourism in Mexico had gone through several stages, to the point where the government both wanted to participate in the growing international tourism economy and wanted to avoid problems with its own citizens, as had occurred in the past. There had been a steady tourism traffic into Mexico by 1929 (19,000 visitors a year), which swelled to 164,000 after World War II; but the major growth occurred in the 1960s, with slightly more than 1,000,000 visitors in 1963 and more than 2,000,000 by 1969. The major modernization of tourism occurred in Acapulco, with its high-rise buildings and internationally styled amenities. Postwar prosperity generated a middle class in Mexico that was also attracted to Acapulco, and turned away from previously appealing places such as Veracruz.27 The government had embraced a policy of working with Community Development Teams to provide services to local residents (in addition to tourist facilities), but admittedly, in Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta, development outstripped ‘the local capacity to provide schools, health facilities, housing, and other services . . .’.28 Thus, Mexico wanted to provide all that both tourists and its own citizens required, as it continued to support existing tourist resorts and create new ones at Cancún, Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, San José del Cabol Loreta, and Santa Cruz Huatalco.29 The turn from Acapulco to the new resorts such as Cancún came about because of the aging of the postwar resorts and the need to develop other regions. As the decisionmakers flew along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico looking at thirty-five possible sites for development, they had complex criteria in mind: natural environments that would appeal to the then-current tourist preferences and markets of the eastern North America and Europe, and the needs of the regions themselves. The area of Cancún Island not only had wonderful beaches and coral reefs, but was economically depressed because of a collapse in the demand for crops such as chicle (sisal) and hemp,30 and because the State of Quintan Roo ‘had no urban center or prospect for economic development’.31 The attractions of Cancún and nearby sites such as Chichen Itza, Tulum, Isla Mujeres, Cozumel, 123

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6.4 The Cancún site had it all: sand, sun, sea, and ruins

and Xel-ha were undeniable: a long stretch of beach with brilliant sand (95–97 per cent calcium carbonate, the rest silicates and carbon), 243 days of sun a year, cooling breezes to mitigate the heat, and wonderful water and coral reefs, with tropical fish of the Gulf of Mexico-Caribbean Sea, as well as Nichupté Lagoon (Figure 6.4).32 Once selected, the site had many advantages, not the least of which was that its prior lack of development provided a ‘blank slate’ for the desired comprehensive planning. The initial plan was for a clearly divided three-zone development: (1) the focal tourist zone on Cancún Island, to be joined to the mainland by two bridges; (2) Cancún City, the separated service area; and (3) the rural hinterland, which could be thought of as either unconnected in actual or working plans or as potentially connected since it could provide goods, supplies, and labour. Some critics contend that Cancún’s separation of leisure space and service-work space, with minimum interface ‘between workers and public’, is an instance of modernization, following the ideology of Corbu and the Taylorists.33 In any case, conceived in the 1960s as a ‘new town differing from the usual image of Mexico and Acapulco’ and opened to tourists with the first hotels in 1976, Cancún has remained the scene of changing formats. In large part, this is due to economic shifts and to congruent changes in tourist taste and preferences. At first, the resort had accommodations only for the high end of the trade, catering to travellers mainly from Canada, the United States, and Mexico. But with the devaluations of the peso, the Mexican audience declined by 1982; and with the same shift, North Americans and Europeans who had formerly been excluded by economic barriers became a prime audience, especially through tour operators, resulting in genuine mass tourism to the area. By 1984 the building complexes had caught up with the change, shifting from earlier 124

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low-density, low-rise complexes on the sheltered side of the island, appropriate to the more exclusive trade, to a higher-density, higher-rise format along the exposed Caribbean side that would accommodate lower unit prices and greater numbers of visitors. A shift in tourist activities also led to new facilities along the inner lagoons; thus, visitors with an enthusiasm for outdoor activities generated water skiing, windsurfing, and boat trips, while others with new ideas about spending less time in the sun stimulated shopping and restaurant patronage. One result was that the lagoons and service areas themselves became commercial and tourist attractions (although the beaches also remained a major draw) (Figure 6.5).

6.5. Cancún’s wonderful beaches: first for a few, then for mass tourism

As the area built out, the government had a substantial investment, not only in infrastructure to attract private-sector investors, but in its own income-generating properties. Thus, by 1983 FONATUR, the government’s development arm ‘owned 6 hotels, 2 restaurants, 2 malls, the golf course, and the convention center’.34 Currently, the touristic development continues to move southward down the coast along Highway 1, toward Chetumal and even Belize, with the newest and most luxurious complexes such as Puerto Aventuras sharing space with many inexpensive developments. Today, in terms of the desire to draw more tourists, increase currency flow into Mexico, and stimulate the regional economy, especially through employment, the Cancún region is certainly a success. Depending on which numbers you use, by 1990 either Canada and the Unites States provided 65–75 per cent of the visiting tourists, and Germany and France 15–20 per cent,35 or Canada and the United States provided 91.65 per cent 125

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and Europe 4.04 percent.36 It is estimated that in 1989 tourism provided Mexico with US$395,000,000 in hard currency earnings, and the Cancún area with 60,000 direct and 20,000 indirect jobs.37 Before turning to the analysis and evaluation of Cancún in light of tourism’s prospects and dangers, let us turn to a similarly short narrative of Cuba’s contemporary development of tourism.

Cuba Although Cuba has been a tourist attraction since the Americas were discovered five hundred years ago, tourism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has revolved around the island’s image as a source of pleasure, especially for North Americans.38 Against this background, it is not surprising that for the early revolutionary society, ‘tourism was perceived as too closely associated with capitalist evils of prostitution, drugs, gambling, and organized crime’. Simultaneously, with the U.S. Trade embargo beginning in 1962, U.S. citizens were prohibited from travelling to Cuba and spending currency there.39 Nonetheless, the Cuban government since has created three major institutions to develop international tourism: INTUR (Instituto Nacional del Turismo), begun in 1976; Cubanacan, started in 1987 to develop foreign capital arrangements for joint investment ventures; and Gaviota, with a similar mission and tied to the military.40 The impetus for the shift in Cuban strategy is almost entirely economic, necessitated by the withdrawal of financial support from the former Soviet Union. With the end of

6.6 Cuba’s tourist destinations: internationally supported development in Havana and on the coasts 126

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artificially elevated sugar prices and general Soviet and Eastern Block support, Cuba was in desperate economic circumstances. Although, oddly, the CIA’s Cuba Handbook of Trade Statistics does not include tourism, the rest of the picture is clear from 1995 and 1998 CIA reports: revenues from sugar, molasses, and honey are down; from fruit, down and then steady; from fish, tobacco, and medical products, up and down, but lately steady; from tobacco, up and down, but recently up; from nickel, down then up; from coffee and cocoa, recently down; from all other sources, down. And because of scant resources, Cuba has reduced its imports: fuels, food, machinery, semi-finished goods (metal, leather, rubber goods), chemical products, consumer goods, transportation equipment, raw materials, and all other categories are down.41 Seeking sources of convertible currency, Cuba passed legislation allowing joint ventures in 1982. Then, in 1987, the country expanded the regulations to allow even greater degrees of ownership by international corporations, stimulating the upgrading of much existing accommodation, and creating the conditions for joint ventures for new properties with Canadian, Spanish, and West German firms.42 Most of the international partnerships have occurred along the coast, especially at Cayo Largo and Varadero (where 20 km of white sand is found some 250 km from Havana), though some involve restoration projects in Old Havana (Figures 6.6 and 6.7). For example, the Spanish hotel chain Grupo Sol-Melia (which also operates in Cancún) is active along with Cubanacan in three hotels at Varadero, including Sol Palmeras and Las Palmas Hotel.43 Tuxpa Hotel is a foreign capital venture with German LTI International Hotels, and two more projects are on the way, Milia Varadero and Milia Las Americas.44 In Havana, the Cohiba Hotel was developed

6.7 Hotel Santa Isabel: Old Havana restoration, 1996–98 127

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6.8 Cuban colonial tourism: Spanish and French heritages in Trinidad

with a Spanish company, Royal Tours of Spain, and several projects have involved the Jamaican firm, Super Clubs.45 The Canadians not only helped renovate Havana Airport, but Canadian firms are active at Varadero Beach and the other end of the island as well. Developments have also been underway for new resorts on the northeast coast (Santiago de Cuba, Sierra Maestra), and the northern coast (Santa Lucia area and Holguín area).46 In addition, local traditions such as small family-run restaurants – paladares – are being revived. As with Cancún, the attractions to tourists are obvious and many. Resources for water and coastal tourism are outstanding since Cuba has 289 beaches, as well as a tradition of sport fishing associated with the very marketable name of Ernest Hemingway. In addition, it has historic sites and a rich Spanish colonial heritage in Old Havana and elsewhere (Figure 6.8);47 health tourism facilities famous throughout Latin America; and significant resources for activity tourism (for example, in the interior there are places to camp, hike, ride horses, climb, go caving or birding, and take mountain resort holidays – an activity especially popular among Cubans). Still, the come-on remains old: visitors are lured with the reputation captured by the title of Rosalie Schwartz’s book: Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Figure 6.9). Even under Cuban governmental authority, the pitch is low – but effective enough to evoke the paternalistic protection of the moral character of local residents from the influences of tourists and their preferred activities. As noted 128

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6.9 High and low attractions: architecture and the sensuous in Havana

by travel writer Pico Iyer, the basic message on Cubatur brochures is ‘Ven a vivir una tentacion!’: ‘Come to live out a temptation!’.48 International tourism had an initial sputter when the United Kingdom started, then stopped, direct flights to Havana. Visitors from West Germany and Italy have increased due to direct flights. But Canada has remained the major source of visitors since 1988, with the next largest number from Spain.49 Economic success is evident in the fact that, as a source of hard currency receipts, in 1987 tourism was fourth behind sugar, fish, and oil re-exports of bartered Soviet Union petroleum.50 But by 1998 tourism was bringing in more convertible currency than sugar.51 In 1990 the Cuban government reported that 250,000 jobs in the country were connected to tourism.52

Analysis and evaluation: continuing ripples of change Cancún While some of the outcomes of tourism development are fairly obvious, others are so intricate and intertwined that it is difficult to discern patterns of benefit and harm. As noted above, Cancún’s human and physical configurations have changed, rather than remained static. It appears that the changing patterns of settlement and habitation have benefited the overall region – but not necessarily the indigenous local population to the extent hoped. Of course, an important feature of the original development was that it was located on the sparsely settled Yucatan Peninsula. The Maya living there were no longer at 129

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a height of cultural achievement, and instead eked out a meagre life through slash-andburn agriculture in the forest. Indeed, when the tourism project began on Cancún, there ‘were 170 impoverished squatters living on the island’.53 During the original construction phase, there was a great need for unskilled labour, and the local Maya did much of this work. But, as the resorts opened, a pattern became discernable, as the Maya became acquainted with tourism work elsewhere in the region, learned some Spanish and a bit of English to become employable, and then sought jobs in Cancún at the lower end of the service industry as maids, kitchen helpers, or landscape maintenance personnel. But, even with good planning through which the government intended to avoid the problems of Acapulco (‘environmental pollution and shortage of services and infrastructure for the service/residential population’), the provision of Cancún City infrastructure for the resort’s service staff was not easy.54 Indeed, it has been argued that the greatest environmental problem caused by the development was not the filling in of the island’s mangrove swamps to create building sites, nor the removal of topsoil to the island for golf-course construction (resulting in basins in the nearby rain forest that bred even more mosquitoes than before), but the ‘immigrant labour problem and squatter settlements’.55 Once the basic infrastructure was in and the initial hotels were up and running, demand increased for more skilled service personnel. This meant that more and more alreadyurbanized employees were transferred into the area or drawn there by employment hopes and prospects. The more ‘sophisticated’ work force from around Mexico – or at the top, expatriate professionals – acquired the most desirable and higher-paying jobs, generating a kind of internal elite. Eventually, as the Cancún area developed fully, a substantial regional-scale economic benefit also emerged – from supplying materials for construction; goods and services for maintenance; and a secondary or multiplier sector serving the resort personnel. Hence, Hiernaux-Nicolas argues, ‘Recently [Cancún] has been shifting from a resort enclave to an open urban centre, integrated more than ever into the Mayan region around it, although it has not produced a substantial improvement in regional conditions’.56 The failure to solve regional employment problems despite generating a substantial amount of cash flow is troublesome, but not peculiar to Cancún, and thus it is instructive in regard to tourism’s developmental structure and outcomes. The Mexican government’s goal of using the ‘increase[d] economic yield from tourism’ to generate a ‘higher quality of life for the rural peasantry’ has not been accomplished. Although the Maya locals can train to be tourism staff or attend schools for agricultural workers, fishing trades, and technology, with the decreasing need for unskilled workers, many native Maya have left Cancún City.57 As noted, the higher-paying jobs have gone to more skilled and alreadyurbanized workers who continue to immigrate from all over Mexico, or to foreigners (often expatriates). The increase in the cost of living (especially housing), due to overall development and increasing wages, further displaces those at the lowest end of the pay scale. For example, though Cancún City was designed for 75,000 and largely had ‘caught up with the demand for facilities and services’ by 1977, housing problems appeared as 130

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early as 1978, when the cheapest house cost 800,000 pesos with 15 per cent interest on a five-year loan term. No matter that the ordinary wage earners made many times more than they had been able to make before, this housing was ‘not for workers who make 1,600 peso per month’.58 This situation has been exacerbated by a situation in which, as part of the increase of mass tourism from the United States and Canada, many less-welloff tourists seek out lower-priced accommodation and restaurants in Cancún City, driving up the prices.59 As a result, the local service centre has increasingly become physically and economically appropriated by international tourists, forcing locals to live in squatter settlements on the edge of Cancún City such as Puerto Juárez.60 Thus, the development of Cancún has brought overall economic gain for Mexico and the regional economy, but it has also resulted in a series of complex displacements over time. Not only are tourists and residents still segregated, but there are increasing stratifications and displacements within the local and service populations, shifts which continue to be played out.61

Cuba Cuba has also experienced the mixed economic and social results of increased international tourism. Not only, as noted above, has the flow of hard currencies into Cuba benefited the nation as a whole, in this case ‘to achieve socialist values’, but wages for working in the tourist zone have provided a richer material way of life for many, and the overall regional economies and local industries have benefited through the usual provision of materials and supplies and the handling of increased imports for the resorts.62 Among the negative effects, however, the introduction of a second, dollar economy and the attempts to limit it to those sectors of the population serving the tourist trade have been economically and socially problematic, resulting in a large unofficial economy which not only suffers from the problems of the black market, but which unfairly disadvantages many Cubans.63 In addition, the management systems implemented by international corporations intent on satisfying tourist preferences for certain types and levels of services and goods have reintroduced a decidedly non-socialist hierarchy into the work force, with the best positions going to a foreign elite. Quality of service, long described as unacceptably low, has also been a lingering problem for Cuban tourism.64 Though enjoying an immense competitive advantage because of low prices (the lowest prices among major Caribbean countries), those responsible for Cuban tourism reintroduced foreign management and training because notoriously poor service apparently was responsible for the ‘lowest return rate of tourists visiting the Caribbean (only +/– 2 per cent)’.65 Finally, there has been the controversial impact of the government’s project to protect Cubans from the social/moral harms of tourists and tourism by prohibiting Cubans not working at the enclave resorts (especially Varadero and Cayo Largo) and urban facilities (especially in Old Havana) from having access to many beaches, hotels, restaurants, clubs, and tourist taxis (Figure 6.10).66 Since the lingering hurts and concerns from the old sexual 131

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6.10 Enclave hotel off-limits to locals: ‘All Inclusive’ Resort, Peninsula de Ancón, Cuba

exploitations, as well as the new isolations and exclusions, are becoming more familiar to international audiences through mass-media coverage and treatment in films such as Bitter Sugar and I Am Cuba, and because this well-intended approach to social and moral benevolence seems simultaneously so proper and so doomed (as currently implemented in the context of increasing global capitalism and intercultural transactions), I leave it to the Cubans themselves – and my audience – to debate the appropriate next step.

Common trends From the above descriptions of tourism in Cancún and Cuba, as well as with the even more completely private-sector projects in South Florida, I believe it is fair to conclude that these three cases support the major criticisms of mass tourism. Chief among these are the ripples of displacement in tourism employment that especially squeeze out those at the lowest end of the scale, and that inevitably seem to create new hierarchies among the labour force, with new elites formed variously by ethnic groups, more urbanized employees, expatriates, and local political groups or financiers and entrepreneurs.67 The problem seems not to end: ‘Although tourism creates some new jobs, the regional unemployment problem is not resolved, because an even larger number of jobless people immigrate constantly from distant places to the tourist centre thus increasing the unemployed population’, and new local elites constantly emerge and benefit more than their fellows.68 132

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Clearly, there are economic benefits to many locals, especially in comparison with previous rural and agricultural traditions. But much of the profit is transferred to the foreign sources of increased imports, since the tourists’ typical preference for ‘familiar varieties and standards of goods and services is very high’,69 and remains with the internationally controlled enclaves, which may actively ‘discourage patronage of local businesses outside the resort to maximize purchases inside’.70 Or, to return to the three milieus treated at the beginning of the chapter, these processes mean that tourism’s development removes even further the tourist areas from previous ways of life and land use: the only way the rural regions can benefit is to become transformed into part of the food and supply industry supporting the tourist centre (Figure 6.11). Since even the lowest wage earners can earn more than they did in agriculture previously, and since the lure of the new, more materialist ways of life, combined with increased cost of living, generates new desires for money, more and more people are drawn into the tourist area’s wage and employment system. As researchers at other Mexican resorts have found, the impacts on workers’ lives are heavily differentiated by gender. Because of traditional allocations of work within the house and the need to care for children, many women wind up with a double day, working both at paid (tourism) and unpaid (household) work, while men actually ‘may reduce their contribution to household income’. Typically, women helping each other also tend to develop two tiers of female employment, as some local women ‘look after’ children and help with the housework of those employed in resorts.71 In such power shifts, we see that relationships and practices remain problematic no matter among which groups they occur, so that, to the problems of international

6.11 Traditional landscape remains in oblivion: rural ways of life and land use, Cuba 133

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or foreign capitalist control of nations and local populations, we need to add issues of control by groups from within the same nation, region, or local area – especially when the controls are exerted, for example, by development-oriented elites so as to implement a value system alien to that of many involved.72 The changes range across the full spectrum of the social groups involved and are as complex as any full-scale social transformation. For example, in regard to women in Mexico who work in tourism, as a result of the ‘demonstration effect’ from foreign women tourists as well as from the increased wage earnings, women who are single heads of household frequently report a positive gain in personal independence and freedom in regard to former family constraints. Correlated with these changes, of course, are shifts in family and social structure, and a decrease in the authority of the traditional system and of the elders.73

Ecotourism as an alternative? It might seem that the problems documented and analyzed here are peculiar to today’s mass tourism. Many responsible groups such as The Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism or even the World Tourism Organization’s Sustainable Tourism branch are calling for more sensitive and responsible modes of international visitor and economic exchange that would move us beyond the usual paradigms of acculturation and development.74 It can be argued that ‘Residential responsive tourism is the watchword for tomorrow: community demands for active participation in the setting of the tourism agenda and its priorities for tourism development and management cannot be ignored’. Likewise, while the needs of consumers of tourism services are important, nonetheless ‘there is a strong and growing recognition that a greater balance needs to be struck in weighing the desires of visitors against the well-being of the hosts’.75 Many have recently contended that one way such responsible activity might occur – that could both nurture and develop local ways of life – is through ecotourism, understood as an aspect of the larger movement of sustainability. Even the U.S. Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment, in its Science and Technology Issues in Coastal Ecotourism – Background Paper (which touts the importance of tourism as the world’s biggest industry because its export earnings ‘surpass even arms and oil in contributing to global economic development’) promotes ‘ecotourism’ as ‘responsible travel that conserves the environment and sustains the well-being of local people’, and critically notes that ecotourism is also ‘a notion that lends itself to commercial exploitation’.76 One of ecotourism’s major goals, in addition to minimizing environmental damage through low-impact practices, is to sustain local ways of life by promoting use of ‘simple accommodations built of traditional materials by local people’, and to do good both economically and culturally for the region by ‘use of as many local materials, products, and people as possible’ – though, of course, this does not solve the existential problem of how to discern and achieve the proper balance of volume and impact (carrying capacity analysis) with income.77 The assumption, of course, is that local people, though perhaps unskilled in many of 134

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the tasks required of tourist-facility workers, nonetheless have a substantial heritage of local knowledge of their environment. Insofar as this is so, and as ecotourists seek to see things ‘as they appear to insiders’, the locals can act as guides and provide non-corporate accommodation.78 Among our cases, clearly South Florida offers little of interest to ecotourism as currently practiced: the citrus industry is simply not exotic enough. Likewise, the Keys are so well developed that, though there is a lot of outdoor activity, most of the area is considered too degraded and too familiar to lure ecotourists, who are ever on the trail of the exotic and unspoiled (attempting to ‘see it while it lasts’). Cancún has been adding more attractions to lure tourists interested in outdoor activity and ecotourism. Some of these ventures, such as swimming through the underground river-cenote trail south of Cancún, would likely count as ecotourism; but many others, such as swimming with and petting dolphins fall within the bounds of traditionally packaged nature experiences. Now that the remaining hinterland is being developed as far south as the marine and nature preserves near Belize, it remains a question whether serious ecotourism can develop, or whether, as some critics charge, it would merely be an ‘add on’ in the Cancún area.79 Cuba clearly has the greatest potential of our three case areas. On the one hand, this is due to an exceptionally high quality and well-preserved natural environment (Figure 6.12). Indeed, the island ‘has one of the highest regional levels of endemism, with 50 per cent of all flora and 32 per cent of vertebrate fauna believed to be native only to that island’. Cuba’s protected areas are also exceptional: the National Network of Protected Areas includes 200 conservation units that amount to 12 per cent of the island’s total

6.12 Ecotourism potential in Cuba: south coast mangrove – rich bird and fish habitat 135

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land area.80 At the same time, as mentioned earlier, in the spirit of emergent local entrepreneurship that was shared with the former East European Block, there has been a revival of the paladares (family-run eateries, limited by the government to no more than twelve seats). It is thus easy to imagine the generation of rural tourism accommodation benefiting the local population. Even so, in terms of our three basic milieus and ways of life, the rural areas with their sugar and coffee plantations will likely remain as isolated as ever from tourist interest and interaction – though packaged tours to the tobacco areas might develop into a special niche business if we believe Cigar Aficionado. However, ecotourism does not come without problems. Even with tourists interested in low-impact visits closer to local ways of inhabitation and experience, international tourists still have a preference for familiar standards and consumption patterns. To cite just one example, the ‘average tourist in Barbados consumes eight times the water of the average resident’.81 Even with ecotourism there is the danger that locals will be deprived of access to their own environment, as it is set aside for international tourists (including conservation groups) and removed from the traditional patterns of hunting, fishing, farming, religious, and other uses, in a process of resource appropriation (and degradation or protection) that often disrupts local cultural practices and knowledge and also raises the costs of living and land.82 As to what such changes would mean, consider the recent increase in interest in Cubans’ African and Indian heritages, in local arts and crafts and folklore, especially Santeria.83 What does this mean on an island where the entire indigenous population was wiped out in the process of colonization five hundred years ago, and today’s Cubans themselves are all immigrants? (The case of the local Maya in the Cancún area of the Yucatan Peninsula is similarly complicated by colonial heritage, though clearly not in so extreme a manner.) In Cuba, what would it mean for Santeria to become increasingly a tourist attraction, as so many shadows of earlier spiritual rituals and so many spectacles are completely fabricated to entertain tourists?84 In deciding what we should do, the danger is that ‘by making [the natural and cultural environments] part of the tourism package, [they are] turned into an explicit and paid performance and no longer can be believed in the way [they were] before. Thus, commoditization of [nature and] culture in effect robs people of the very meanings by which they organize their lives’.85 Not only do our case studies indicate how natural and cultural environments are problematic as a result of interregional and international travel (which generates networks of displacements from traditional, ordinary life worlds, and also exclusions within the new cultural practices); but they also indicate how tourism (including ecotourism) remains embedded in the global matrix of modernization and its attendant commoditization and objectification of cultural phenomena. Here it is especially important to see how ecotourism’s position – that visitors should have a lower and more diffused impact on local environments, rather than a high impact on a concentrated enclave – is not sufficiently self-critical. The natural environments which the international environmental community focuses upon are uncritically constituted by ‘aesthetic’ and ‘exoticizing’ filters, which preclude attention to the culturally maintained 136

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6.13 Interesting only as a romantic landscape? Sugar plantations, Valle de Los Ingenios, Cuba

environment that is produced by, and at the core of, local life-world traditions. The fragile coral reefs, colourful marine life, barrier islands, water exchange systems, and tropical forests that form the fantastic image of ‘paradise’ for Europeans and Americans are attended to by tourists and researchers alike. But there is little or no ecotouristic concern for ordinary agricultural land in any of these areas, nor for everyday rural life (Figure 6.13). Further, since there is no obvious way to connect either mass tourism or ecotourism to developing a sustainable way of life for the marginalized rural populations of Cuba, Cancún, or South Florida, their traditional ways of life remain oddly unrelated to the impact of tourism – as the result of the historical, but arbitrary, perceptual categories and value preferences of the dominant groups of tourists, financiers, and environmental protectionists. In addition, ecotourism, no less than mass tourism, is a means through which capitalism opens everything, demanding even where mass tourism would not, that all local secrets be yielded up: all the wonderful local foods, places, rituals, even the people themselves in their domestic habitats. Not only is this amazingly intrusive and naïve (the tourists believe they are everyone’s friends and that all local people will welcome their company into intimate settings and lives), but it threatens alternative social and economic systems. For example, in Cuba, ecotourism that would bring interested visitors into rural habitats and distribute international currencies directly to individuals would undermine the central government’s legitimate control (a goal, which though desirable to those 137

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U.S. citizens or advocates of capitalist entrepreneurship who have a strong dislike for the centralized, Communist government of Cuba, nonetheless is an illegitimate intervention in the social-economic system chosen at substantial cost by Cubans themselves). In short, eco-criticism also objectifies and aestheticizes the tropical other and acts with unjustified colonial assumptions.

Conclusion Governments, international corporations, and local businesses appropriate features of the environments studied in our three cases by using stereotyped concepts and images of the ‘tropical’ and ‘exotic pleasures’, with little concern for existing environmental or cultural traditions. In fact, they control the distance of tourists from the environments and lives of marginalized rural and urban residents: such as from the actual city of Cancún; the regional residences just off Highway 1 on the Yucatan Peninsula; the sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantations in Cuba; and both the agricultural landscape outside Miami and the impoverished areas of that city. The public-sector partners in these developments ‘sacrifice’ the sites, severing them from the continuous fabric of everyday life. The tourists visiting these ‘destinations’ have little interest in connections with the fine-grained natural and social patterns, and they do, indeed, colonize them through their aggressive expectations for specific types of accommodation, services, and ‘entertainment’. Marginalized locals are excluded in various ways from the tourist zones, revenue, and emerging power structures of new elites. All these separations unfold in ways that the reigning and chosen public power structure, the private-sector interests, and the tourists themselves desire – and in a manner that promotes the value systems of these groups (note that describing the autonomously chosen value systems and practices is not to argue that they satisfy the standards, for example, of ‘distributive justice’). Here we find an odd symbiosis, but one that apparently works on behalf of larger indigenous social goals with some concern for local ways of life within the context of nationally chosen modes of governance and regional or national concerns for development. We find, then, a tension: operative dominant structures autonomously chosen by the public and private sectors and tourists (that, in principle, are to be respected) act in opposition to the interests of subordinated local groups, who also deserve to be supported on their way to liberation, but who are serially marginalized as new social-economic exclusions result in the emergence of new local elites. The conclusion appears to be that the positive approaches and effects of tourism desired by the international, national, regional, and local levels generate harmful new hierarchies and stratifications in a manner that echoes the binary process of differential structuration of economic or bio-technio-power – described as unavoidable and calling for de- and re-territorialization by Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari.86 Since it is clear that whether or not tradition comes to an end (or can continue, transformed) in these three sites is not simply a matter of the external forces of global capitalism, but also of the changing visions and practices of the very members of the local traditions and hosts, 138

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further questions arise. For example, although the indigenous traditions have all ended in Florida, the Cancún region, and Cuba, it can be argued that these places have distinctive identities and ways of life that visitors take to be ‘traditional,’ or that at least are attractive and notable enough to attract large numbers of tourists. How do non-indigenous local groups who occupy such environments create new traditions? Clearly, as is already the case with the current inhabitants of Cuba who have resisted becoming Westernized capitalists, the diverse employees who have come to live together in the Cancún region because they service its resorts might well come to create such new communities and traditions. In what ways are the conditions for the possibility of new traditions related to the character of the local place, or of the inhabitants, becoming articulated as a new people, as a distinct minority, perhaps as defined in terms of differences from majorities and in light of the latter’s discernable characteristics?87 These sorts of questions understand tradition as an open dynamic, where the issue involves not so much finding where a given tradition might end, as it involves noting the continual process of splitting off, recovery, and mutual cross pollination into often-fruitful hybrids. Here the scattering and consolidation of traditions might be understood as a constant becoming and inventive process, full of peril as well as promise. Tourism, then, needs to be evaluated not only in terms of a critique of the dominant mode of postmodern, democratic capitalist social constitution, but in terms of the open possibilities and the need for active resistance, where alternative life worlds attempt to counter precisely the harmful stratifications and displacements generated within the capitalist value system at the same time as they nurture their own senses of life and place. The alternative effort could not occur in isolation (which is self-defeating in today’s globalization), but through the subtle and dangerous modes of participation that use tourism as an instrument of self-development, and that recognize that many of the same dangers arriving with international social and economic exchange lie within perhaps all cultures’ complexes of national, regional, and local identities and differences.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

R. Mugerauer, Interpretations on Behalf of Place, Part II, Albany, SUNY Press, 1994. Ibid. R. Mugerauer, Interpreting Environments: Tradition, Deconstruction, Hermeneutics, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1995; and D. G. Pearce, ‘Comparative Studies in Tourism Research’, in D. G. Pearce and R. W. Butler (eds.), Tourism Research: Critiques and Challenges, New York, Routledge, 1993, pp. 20–35. M. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, New York, Harper and Row, 1974. See, for example, R. Mugerauer and M. Kaup, ‘Reconfiguring the Caribbean: From Fixed Identity to Fluid Hybridity’, Paper presented at the Eighth IASTE Conference, International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, Hong Kong, December 2002. R. Mugerauer, ‘Qualitative GIS: To Mediate, Not Dominate’, in D. Hodge and D. Janelle (eds.), Measuring and Representing Accessibility in the Information Age, Frankfurt am Main, Springer Verlag, 2000. D. Nash, Anthropology of Tourism, London, Pergamon, 1996, p. 20, following the position 139

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8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

140

developed by J. Jafari, ‘Research and Scholarship: The Basis of Tourism Education’, Journal of Tourism Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1990, pp. 33–41. D. Harrison (ed.), Tourism and the Less Developed Countries, London, Belhaven Press, 1992, p. 2. M. Crick, ‘Representations of International Tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights, Savings, and Servility’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 18, 1989, pp. 307–344; D. Nash, ‘Tourism as a Form of Imperialism’, in V. Smith (ed.), Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989, pp. 37–54; F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967; and J. Kincaid, A Small Place, London, Virago Press, 1988. J. Negi, Tourism Development and Resource Conservation, New Delhi, Metropolitan, 1990. P. Bachmann, Tourism in Kenya: A Basic Need for Whom? Berne, Peter Lang, 1988; F. Rajotte, ‘Safari and Beach-resort Tourism: The Costs to Kenya’, in S. Britton and W. C. Clarke (eds.), Ambiguous Alternative: Tourism in Small Developing Countries, Suva, University of South Pacific, 1987, pp. 78–90; and R. M. Summary, ‘Tourism’s Contribution to the Economy of Kenya’, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 14, no. 4, 1987, pp. 531–540. D. J. Gayle and J. N. Goodrich (eds.), Tourism Marketing and Management in the Caribbean, New York, Routledge, 1993, p. 11. Nash, Anthropology of Tourism; and A. Lee, ‘Who Owns Boardwalk: The Structure of Control in the Tourist Industry of Yucatan’, in M. D. Zamora, V. H. Sutlive, and N. Altshuler (eds.), Tourism and Economic Change, Studies in Third World Societies, no. 6, Williamsburg, VA, Department of Anthropology, College of William and Mary, 1978, pp. 19–36. Negi, Tourism Development and Resource Conservation. E. Cohen, ‘Toward a Sociology of International Tourism’, Social Research, no. 39, 1977, pp. 164–182. D. B. Weaver, ‘The Evolution of a “Plantation” Tourism Landscape on the Caribbean Island of Antigua’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, vol. 79, 1988, pp. 319–331. D. B. Weaver, Ecotourism in the Less Developed World, New York, Center for Agriculture and Biosciences International, 1998; D. R. Judd, ‘Constructing the Tourist Bubble’, in D. R. Judd and S. S. Fainstein (eds.), The Tourist City, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 35–53; Weaver, ‘The Evolution of a “Plantation” Tourism Landscape on the Caribbean Island of Antigua’; P. Blednick, Another Day in Paradise? The Real Club Med Story, Toronto, Macmillan of Canada, 1988; S. Britton, ‘The Spatial Organization of Tourism in a Neo-Colonial Economy: A Fiji Case Study’, Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 21, 1980, pp. 144–165; and T. G. Freitag, ‘Enclave Tourism Development: For Whom the Benefits Roll?’, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 21, 1994, pp. 538–554. M. Domroes, ‘Tourism Resources and their Development in Maldive Islands’, Geojournal, vol. 10, 1985, pp. 119–126. H. Erisman, ‘Tourism and Cultural Dependency in the West Indies’, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 10, 1983, pp. 337–361; and L. A. Perez, ‘Aspects of Underdevelopment: Tourism in the West Indies’, Science and Society, vol. 37, no. 4, 1973, pp. 473–480. On dependency and development-‘under’ development in connection with Caribbean tourism, see N. Harrigan, ‘The Legacy of Caribbean History and Tourism’,’ Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 2, 1974, pp. 13–25; B. Finney and K. Watson (eds.), A New Kind of Sugar: Tourism in the Pacific, Honolulu, East-West Center, 1975; Weaver, ‘The Evolution of a “Plantation” Tourism Landscape on the Caribbean Island of Antigua’; I. Shivji, Tourism and Socialist Development, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Publishing House, 1973; W. Tabb, ‘The Economics of Tourism: Who Benefits?’, in Economic Issues of Tourism, Consultation IV, Stoney Point, New York State, NACRT, 1988, pp. 7–12; J. Lea, Tourism and Development in the Third World, New York, Routledge, 1988; A. Pleumarom, ‘The Political Economy of Tourism’, Ecologist, vol. 24, 1992, pp. 142–148; S. Plog ‘Understanding Psychographics in Tourism Research’, in J. Ritchie and C. Goeldner (eds.), Travel, Tourism, and Hospitality Research: A Handbook for Managers and Researchers, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1987, pp. 203–213; Nash, Anthropology of Tourism; Erisman, ‘Tourism and Cultural Dependency in the West Indies’; and Freitag, ‘Enclave Tourism Development’.

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20. R. Foglesong, ‘Walt Disney World and Orlando: Deregulation as a Strategy for Tourism’, in Judd and Fainstein (eds.), The Tourist City, pp. 89–106, especially pp. 90–92, 100, 104; L. Lebowitz, ‘Critics Pan Disney Plan: Affordable Housing at Issue’, Orlando Sentinel, November 16, 1991; and L. Lebowitz, ‘Public-private Partnership brings Two Toll Roads to Osceola County’, Orlando Sentinel, July 24, 1992. 21. T. Yuan, et al., ‘The Sunshine Seekers: German Travelers to Florida, The Caribbean, and Mexico’, in Tourism: The Economy’s Silver Lining, Travel and Tourism Association Annual Conference Proceedings, Wheat Ridge, CO, Travel and Tourism Association, 1994, pp. 105–115. 22. D. Hiernaux-Nicolas, ‘Cancún Bliss’, in Judd and Fainstein (eds.), The Tourist City, pp. 124–139, quotation from pp. 128–129. 23. A. Savignac, President INFRATUR, ‘The Computer Planning and Coordination of Cancún, Island, Mexico: A New Resort Complex’, in The Values of Travel Research: Planning, Techniques, Applications, Wheaton, CO, The Travel Research Association, Conference Proceedings, 1972, pp. 107–116; quotation from pp. 107–108. 24. D. R. Hall, ‘International Tourism Policies in State Socialist Countries’, in C. M. Hall (ed.), Tourism and Politics: Policy, Power, and Place, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1994, pp. 79–107, citation on p. 79. 25. Savignac, ‘The Computer Planning and Coordination of Cancún, Island, Mexico’, p. 115. 26. F. P. Bosselman, In the Wake of the Tourist: Managing Special Places in Eight Countries, Washington, D.C., Conservation Foundation, 1978, p. 39. 27. Hiernaux-Nicolas, ‘Cancún Bliss’. 28. S. Chant, ‘Tourism in Latin America: Perspectives from Mexico and Costa Rica’, in Harrison (ed.), Tourism and the Less Developed Countries, pp. 85–101, quotation from p. 94. 29. Ibid. 30. Bosselman, In the Wake of the Tourist, p. 43. 31. Hiernaux-Nicolas, ‘Cancún Bliss’. 32. P. P. Wong (ed.), Tourism vs. Environment: The Case for Coastal Areas, Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993, pp. 55–65. 33. Hiernaux-Nicolas, ‘Cancún Bliss’, p. 129. 34. Ibid., pp. 132–135. 35. Wong, Tourism vs. Environment, pp. 55–65. 36. FONATUR (Fondo Nacional del Turismo), Reporte de Financiamiento, Mexico City, 1976; and from World Tourist Organization, Compendium of Tourism Statistics, Madrid, 1990, vol. 2, Table 1. 37. Chant, ‘Tourism in Latin America’. 38. R. Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997. 39. M. Espino, ‘Tourism in Socialist Cuba’, in Gayle and Goodrich (eds.), Tourism Marketing and Management in the Caribbean, pp. 101–110, quotation from p. 101. 40. Ibid. 41. CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, Cuba: Handbook of Trade Statistics, Washington, D.C., CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, 1995 & 1998. 42. D. R. Hall, ‘Tourism Development in Cuba’, in Harrison (ed.), Tourism and the Less Developed Countries, pp. 102–120, quotation is from p. 105. 43. A. Ryan (ed.), The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, New York, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997, p. 320; and Espino, ‘Tourism in Socialist Cuba’. 44. Cabrera, Granma Weekly Review, Havana, January 13, 1991. 45. Espino, ‘Tourism in Socialist Cuba’. 46. Ibid. 47. J. Barclay, ‘Castro’s Revolution of Restoration’, The Independent, December 12, 1990. 48. P. Iyer, ‘Holguin, Santiago, Havana, the Beach – 1987–1992,’ in Ryan (ed.), The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, p. 380. 49. Hall, ‘Tourism Development in Cuba’. 50. Espino, ‘Tourism in Socialist Cuba’, pp. 106–107. 51. National Geographic, vol. 195, no. 6, June 1999, pp. 2–45, citation is from p. 14. 141

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52. Granma Weekly Review, Havana, July 22, 1990, p. 9. 53. Bosselman, In the Wake of the Tourist, p. 41. For an account of recent Maya agricultural life in the Yucatan Peninsula, see E. R. Kintz, Life Under the Tropical Canopy: Tradition and Change among the Yucatec Maya, Chicago, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990. 54. Bosselman, In the Wake of the Tourist. 55. Ibid.; and Wong, Tourism vs. Environment, pp. 55–65. 56. Hiernaux-Nicolas, ‘Cancún Bliss’, pp. 124, 138. 57. Bosselman, In the Wake of the Tourist, p. 46. 58. Ibid., p. 49. 59. Hiernaux-Nicolas, ‘Cancún Bliss’, p. 135. 60. This presentation has not focused on environmental degradation. In addition to pollution and elimination of wetlands and wildlife, as well as the damage to coral reefs, this includes the failure, or appropriation for hotel sites, of wildlife sanctuaries designed in 1972 or planned thereafter. In addition, there is the complex issue of changes in local hunting and fishing patterns as resources become depleted due to the need to supply visitors and accommodate the subsistence hunting and fishing practices of locals. See Bosselman, In the Wake of the Tourist; Wong, Tourism vs. Environment; and S. Wells and A. Price, Valuable but Vulnerable, Gland, Switzerland, World Wide Fund for Nature, 1992. 61. Hiernaux-Nicolas, ‘Cancún Bliss’, pp. 136–137. 62. Hall, ‘Tourism Development in Cuba’, p. 116. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., p. 115; and Cigar Aficionado, June 1999, p. 119. 65. Espino, ‘Tourism in Socialist Cuba’, p. 106. 66. Iyer, ‘Holguin, Santiago, Havana, the Beach –1987–1992’, in Ryan (ed.), The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, pp. 373–389; G. Gibson, ‘Santiago and Beyond, 1987’, in Ryan (ed.), The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, pp. 304–318; and C. Gebler, ‘At the Beach, Santa Maria and Varadero, 1987’, in Ryan (ed.), The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, pp. 319–344. Also see Hall, ‘Tourism Development in Cuba’, pp. 116–118; Granma Weekly Review, July 22, 1990; Espino, ‘Tourism in Socialist Cuba’, p. 107; Cigar Aficannado, June 1999, p. 119; and Schwartz, Pleasure Island, p. 210. 67. Erisman, ‘Tourism and Cultural Dependency in the West Indies’, pp. 337–361; and Chant, ‘Tourism in Latin America’, pp. 23–24. 68. Harrison (ed.), Tourism and the Less Developed Countries, p. 15; cf. Backmann, Tourism in Kenya: A Basic Need for Whom? p. 281. Hence, the value of models of tourist space that include tourist behavior and the attitudes of the decision-makers and the population of the receiving region as well as the character of the resorts and transportation. See J. M. Miossec, ‘Éléments pour une théorie de l’espace touristique’, Le Cahiers du Tourisme, C-36, CHET, Aix-en-Provence, 1976, pp. 148–149, cited by L. S. Mitchell, ‘Research on the Geography of Tourism’, in Ritchie and Goeldner (eds.), Travel, Tourism, and Hospitality Research, pp. 191–202. 69. Plog, ‘Understanding Psychographics in Tourism Research’, pp. 202–213. 70. Freitag, ‘Enclave Tourism Development’, pp. 538–554. 71. Chant, ‘Tourism in Latin America’, pp. 85–101; and N. Evans, ‘The Dynamics of Tourism Development in Puerto Vallarta’, in E. de Kadt (ed.), Tourism – Passport to Development? Perspectives on the Social and Cultural Effects of Tourism in Developing Countries, New York, Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 302–320. 72. D. Pearce, ‘Alternative Tourism: Concepts, Classifications, and Questions’, in V. Smith and W. R. Eadingtom (eds.), Tourism Alternatives: Potentials and Problems in the Development of Tourism, Chichester, Wiley & Sons, 1992, pp. 15–30. 73. Chant, ‘Tourism in Latin America’, pp. 97–98; COCODERA (Comision Co-ordinaora del Desarrollo de la Desembocadura del Rio Ameca), Programa de Ordenacion de la Zona Conurbada de la Desembocadura del Rio Ameca, Puerto Vallarta, 1980. 74. K. Srisang, ‘The Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 16, 1989, pp. 119–121; and World Tourism Organization, Sustainable Tourism Development: Guide for Local Planners, Madrid, World Tourism Organization, 1993. 142

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75. D. E. Hawkins, ‘Global Assessment of Tourist Policy: A Process Model’, in D. Pearce and R. Butler, Tourism Research: Critiques and Challenges, New York, Routledge, 1993, p. 190. 76. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Science and Technology Issues in Coastal Ecotourism – Background Paper OTA-BP-F-86, Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1992, pp. 1, 4. 77. Ibid., p. 10. 78. Ibid., p. 6. 79. Weaver, Ecotourism in the Less Developed World, pp. 132–133. 80. Ibid., p. 183; and E. Santana, ‘Nature Conservation and Sustainable Development in Cuba’, Conservation Biology, vol. 5, pp. 13–16, March 1991. 81. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Science and Technology Issues in Coastal Ecotourism, p. 6. 82. Ibid., p. 8. 83. Schwartz, Pleasure Island, pp. 208, 210. 84. Ibid. 85. D. Greenwood, ‘Culture by the Pound: An Anthropological Perspective on Tourism as Cultural Commoditization’, in Smith (ed.), Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, p. 179. 86. M. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, New York, Pantheon, 1978; and G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 87. On ‘minor’ and ‘becoming a people’ see G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986; G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The TimeImage, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 215–224.

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Chapter 7

Architecture and the production of postcard images: invocations of tradition versus critical transnationalism in Curitiba Clara Irazábal Here is urban renewal with a sinister twist, an architecture of deception which, in its happy-face familiarity, constantly distances itself from the most fundamental realities. The architecture of this city is almost purely semiotic, playing the game of grafted signification, theme-park building. Whether it represents generic historicity or generic modernity, such design is based in the same calculus as advertising, the idea of pure imageability, oblivious to the real needs and traditions of those who inhabit it. Welcome to Cyburbia. Michael Sorkin1

Cultural landscapes must be understood as the products of specific political economic formations.2 The production of ‘postcard’ images constitutes a practice of representation by which meanings are constituted and communicated. Such shared meanings help to some degree to constitute the reality they aim to represent. In particular, material, cultural landscapes stimulate active, although not necessarily conscious, readings.3 Often, people uncritically accept cultural ideas and social relations embedded in the built environment because they are taken as non-ideological material facts, when indeed they are representations that have become alienated or naturalized to the point that their social origins may be lost. In this chapter I engage in a theoretical and empirical discussion about the theming of vernacular settings. This practice has become a worldwide trend at the turn of the century, facilitating the invention and consumption of tradition in the built environment. Specifically, I show how this phenomenon is present in Curitiba, Brazil, where government officials have invoked First World architectural traditions in a Third World setting for the sake of urban image-making and tourism development. As an alternative, I propose ‘critical transnationalism’ as a better way for Curitiba, or any city, to develop a mode of architecture and urbanism that both serves its local needs and links it to the global 144

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economy. To illustrate these views, I analyze a number of architectural examples in Curitiba, including the city’s programme of ethnic memorials and its Unilivre (Open University of the Environment) and City Memorial projects. In the last two decades, the government of Curitiba has dotted the city with foreignstyled landmarks mostly based on selective samples of European architectural traditions. The city has used these ethnic monuments to help construct an image of itself as cosmopolitan and international, free of the legacies of black slavery and oppression of indigenous Indians that taint Brazilian history. However, rather than contributing to a process of ‘ending’ tradition, these ethnic memorials have only re-enacted a singular process of ‘inventing’ tradition, in an attempt to define a future by selectively editing and reconstructing the past. At its best, the invocation of foreign traditions in the Curitiban monuments has resulted in representations of ‘a long-lost and often romanticized’ past, one which has been freed from ‘oppressive social relations’.4 At worst, it has created images without real referents – a simulacrum or pastiche. Supposedly, these monuments are expressions of ethnic groups that have claims both to the history of the city and to its current spaces. Yet, even as these stage-set landmarks are officially presented and superficially accepted by some residents and visitors as a celebration of diversity and rich heritage, they also work as mechanisms of exclusion. In contrast to these structures, other recent public buildings in Curitiba seem to respond to a different intent – what I identify as critical transnationalism. These buildings celebrate local elements and traditions, avoiding the extremely sentimental characteristics of the ethnic memorials. With a critical commitment to place, they also reterritorialize a spectrum of global cultures. The idiosyncratic and symbolic elements of traditional cultures are hybridized in these buildings with aspects of universal culture to generate a locally based, global architecture. I conclude by arguing that this exploration of critical transnationalism offers great potential in addressing the real architectural and urban challenges in Curitiba, and that it can construct a more competitive, tuneful image of the city for the twenty-first century.

‘The end of tradition?’5 As mentioned above, over the last two decades, and particularly during the 1980s, the government of Curitiba has dotted the city with foreign-styled landmarks in an attempt to fashion a new image for the city. Such projects have attempted to emphasize the idea that Curitiba’s heritage is connected with established European or transnational cultures. Examples of such ethnic landmarks include the Ukrainian, Japanese, and Arab memorials and plazas; the Polish and Italian portals and parks; and the German and Portuguese memorials and parks. Such monuments seek to depict a rich, tolerant, cosmopolitan city, freed from memory of black and indigenous submission and from the racial and social tensions that still exist among different groups in Brazil. However, the selective editing of history that these projects represent highlights and romanticizes parts of the past, while erasing others.6 145

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Indeed, such a strategy of self-presentation is only one aspect of a larger policy of economic development being pursued by city officials. The functional restructuring of the metropolitan area, the modernization of the central city, and the constant recycling of planning and development models have all sought to reinforce the city’s competitive position with respect to other Brazilian metropolises of similar scale, such as Florianópolis and Porto Alegre, and to a lesser extent in relation to the relatively small capital cities of neighbouring countries such as Montevideo, Uruguay, and La Asuncion, Paraguay. All these cities today find themselves in competition within the regional economic structure of Mercosur (South America’s supranational trade organization). In this globally induced competition among localities, Curitiba has sought a better way to ‘package’ itself to lure tourists and investors. But with no major natural or cultural assets of national or international transcendence to draw on, the city has turned to its varied ethnicity as an instrument of image-making. Curitiba’s strategy of ethnic iconization is also testimony to recent demographic shifts in Brazil. During the latter decades of the twentieth century several older European immigrant groups gained power in the country (recall, for instance, the heritage of the dictator presidents Medici, 1969–1974 and Geisel, 1974–1978). In Curitiba, Jaime Lerner rose to power during the same period. A descendant of Polish Jews, he served three times as mayor and twice as governor of the state of Paraná. Other recent local political figures have had similar foreign heritages: for example, Cassio Taniguchi, twice mayor of Curitiba, is a second-generation Japanese; and the late Hanibal Khoury, a well-known politician of Paraná was a third-generation Lebanese. Representation of these immigrant groups in the Brazilian government is revolutionary. Before, national officials had largely adhered to, and portrayed, ‘invented’ Portuguese elements in Brazilian history (forgetting even the actual experiences of Portuguese immigrants). As such, it may very well be that Curitiba’s ethnic monuments give a truer picture than the older mythologies of the Brazilian central government. As is the case in many other nation-states, the central government of Brazil has always tried to define Brazilian identity (Brasilianidade) through an exclusionary process. Thus, in the sixteenth century, the official Brasilianidade excluded indigenous people; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it excluded the Africans; and in the nineteenth century it excluded the caboclos.7 And in the years since it has excluded other immigrant groups, even some Europeans.8 Until the 1700s Curitiba’s population was still mostly native and/or Portuguese. However, during the nineteenth century, the southern region of Brazil received great numbers of European migrants, mainly from Germany, Poland, Italy, and the Ukraine, in that chronological order. These people were mostly rural and semi-rural, and they created many new settlements around the then-small urban centre of Curitiba. Today, many of these communities have been conurbated – i.e., absorbed within a fast-growing metropolitan area. Yet, at the same time that some of these settlements have lost most of their original spatial and/or ethnic character the government of Curitiba has been determined to revive their architectural heritages, along with whatever ornamental details 146

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may make the new references appealing to the general public. The overall goal of this effort by the government and the planning elite has been to construct a notion of place identity – of being Curitibano-as-Western-European, and of Curitiba as a cosmopolitan city. But this process has been distorted by the propagation of formal stereotypes, as reconstructions have relied on essentialized ethnic imagery and included little, if any, participation from the portrayed ethnic groups. Even the choice of words for these monuments has implications. Thus, use of the word ‘memorial’ – rather than ‘monument,’ or some other term – has located the existence of these ethnic groups in the past, erasing the present politics of identity and representing them as ‘naturally’ Curitibano. Of course, Curitiba is not the only city involved in such a theming of vernacular settings. Recently, many cities have (re)created urban traditional forms that fall ‘out of context in their nostalgic references to (an imagined) social and economic order of the past’.9 Indeed, the dominant class in Curitiba is merely participating in a larger contemporary trend of ‘inventing tradition’, with the goal of transforming the past into a commodity for mass consumption and profit-making.10 Across the world, such efforts have been born of rapid spatio-temporal transformation, which poses a threat to identity with place, and to the sense of historical continuity. By contrast, the creation of themed vernacular settings provides the illusion of stability and temporal anchoring. Almost three decades ago, Berger warned of this phenomenon, stating that ‘fear of the present leads to mystification of the past’.11 A number of problems derive from the invocation of traditions in this way. For example, such representations may invoke a past from which traces of exploitative social relations have been expunged. This allows specific historic circumstances to be ignored, producing ‘history-as-arcadian-symbol, not history-as-reality’.12 Beyond the manipulation of the past and its symbols, ethnic monuments such as those of Curitiba may also signal the transformation of cities from places of production to places of consumption. For Boyer, nostalgia and imagination could be seen as ‘increasingly manipulated by stage sets and city tableaux set up to stimulate our acts of consumption, by the spectacle of history made false’.13 And from another standpoint, such romanticized invocations of tradition may also create images without real referents, a ‘simulacrum or pastiche’.14 In this sense, the superficial invocation of past forms may impede the quest for innovative, adequate solutions to contemporary urban problems. Thus, the repeated practice of invocation can place a serious ‘brake on the imagination’.15 As Jane M. Jacobs points out in her chapter in this book, ‘traditions routinely pass out of the very group they were assumed to belong to’.16 Elsewhere, she has discussed this as representing ‘a new trend toward embeddedness which both reacts to and benefits from the deterritorializations of globalization’.17 In this sense, in Curitiba the creation of ethnic monuments embodies two unstated main intentions: the co-option of immigrant groups in the political process by encouraging the reproduction of ‘not-destabilizing’ local traditions; and the promotion of consumption of symbolic signs linked to foreign traditions to highlight their exoticism for the tourist market. For their part, the immigrants still live in spaces of in-betweenness18 – or, more specifically, in a complicated situation 147

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between rhizomatic and hierarchical power relations. This situates them in a complicated web of identity politics, within which unresolved issues of economic and social integration run the risk of being diluted. Thus, although these immigrants are theoretically free to act as they choose, they are pre-empted by the government to react in prescribed ways – i.e., both feeling accepted as multicultural Brazilians, and enacting the commodification of traditions from which the tourism industry profits. In her chapter, Jacobs points to several problems posed by this underlying concept of ‘invented traditions’. On the one hand, she concedes the value of the Hobsbawmian and Rangerian notion; yet on the other, she warns that ‘the residual problem that the idea of invented traditions has left us with, is the sense that there was somewhere, sometime, “real” traditions, and that these present “invented” traditions are but ideological malformations’. Jacobs further argues that we should go beyond the binary of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ – or at the least use it more productively. Thus, she writes, we should ‘think about tradition and modernity as being a vibrating couplet within which the terms are both co-dependent and mutually exclusive. We might deliver this formula in the following terms: “tradition is (not) modern”’.19 Conversely, she also reminds us of the usefulness of Luke’s suggestion, which is to see modernity-as-tradition – i.e., attending to the genealogies of globalization and recognizing many superposed global modernities. These views resonate with Ananya Roy’s; Roy has suggested that we go beyond the modern, to see ‘the ‘post’ not as the end of intellectual traditions, but rather as a surplus present within the modern itself’.20 She has argued that ‘this excess, the corruptions of the modern, offers renewed privileges of representation . . . In some ways, this may mean thinking about the end not so much as a temporal marker, but instead . . . as multiple modernities, as the emptying out of master narratives’.21 The concept of the invention of tradition mostly derives from Hobsbawm’s work on governmentally introduced traditions in Great Britain and in several of its former colonies. This raises an important question: Is every tradition just a product of a semiotic topdown imposition, and hence an alienating process? Is it always a product of a master, hegemonic narrative? I do not think so. In this regard, Curitiba’s memorials provide a full spectrum of representations. Thus, on the one hand, the Polish Park is closely linked to a ‘real story’ – that of the difficult integration of Polish immigrants into Brazil. Yet, on the other hand, the Portuguese Park is made out of completely artificial elements, among which are displays of classical poems (themselves reproductions of the cultural production of a small intellectual elite), which only divert attention from the actual experiences of Portuguese immigrants to Brazil. In this sense, this park tells a constructed story that merely venerates the colonizer. Another useful comparison is provided by the different elements of the Ukrainian Park – the former Tingüi Park. In this park the representation of the indigenous Indian chief Tingüi appears semiotically transformed as a bronze/stone monument, a code normally reserved for use by colonizer elites. Meanwhile, the park also contains representations that are more meaningfully linked to the history of Ukrainians in the state of Paraná (Figure 7.1). In particular, since the Catholic faith still plays an important role in the 148

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7.1 A scaled-down replica of a Ukrainian church in a town in Paraná is the landmark of the Ukrainian Park in Curitiba

identity of Ukrainian Brazilians, the Ukrainian church in the park is a real monument – even if spatially displaced and decontextualized. Moreover, many Ukrainian Brazilians still wear Ukrainian clothing when they visit the park, and several of their ethnic festivities take place there. This park, therefore, tries to accomplish two seemingly incongruous objectives: to reproduce a noble version of the history of indigenous people in Brazil; and to integrate itself into ‘vernacular’ stories (Ukrainian-Brazilians’ histories). Colquhoun has recognized that since the remains of regional architecture are mostly bits and pieces torn from their initial contexts, ‘any attempt to retrieve the original contents in all their original wholeness would result only in a sort of kitsch’.22 Such a result is present in some of Curitiba’s ethnic monuments – in particular, the Polish, Ukrainian, and Italian ones.23 This kitsch architecture exploits memory excitation and stage familiarization, heroizing folkloristic motifs and evoking a nostalgia for a lost ‘era of home, motherly tenderness, and magic lantern freewheeling daydream’.24 Tzonis and Lefaivre have described this as ‘the professional architecture of the genius commercialii of tourism and entertainment’.25 Aimed to offer recreational options to regional tourists as well as local inhabitants, such architecture is also targeted to potential national and international tourists and investors. Through the mass diffusion of ‘postcard images’ of this architecture through the media, . . . [it] offers – for a good price – to alleviate the pain of atopy and anomy of contemporary life’s overfamiliarized settings, simulacra of places, façades, masks of environments offering the illusion of participation in their internal activities . . . Commercial regionalist works give the feeling of ‘a world being there’, a make-believe regional entity of easy access which not only does not require a ‘translator’ . . . to be understood but also requires no effort to be totally possessed. Like other 149

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kitsch works or mass media products, these settings feed emotions and starve rationality. They are an architectural pornography of sorts.26

From a formal point of view, the critique of such projects may parallel the critique of postmodern architecture in general. Postmodern architects – such as Venturi, Graves, Moore, and others – have been accused of producing interpretations of past architectural styles that result in individualistic, detached, isolationist, and formalistic works.27 For example, Jencks has argued that postmodern architecture is mostly scenographic, devoted to entertainment and commodification.28 In fact, in their designs for most of these ethnic monuments, architects in Curitiba are ‘feeding the media-society with gratuitous, quietistic images rather than proffering . . . a creative rappel à l’ordre’.29 Furthermore, as already mentioned, represented ethnic groups participate little in the creation of these memorials. With the exception of some minor projects (portals), whose designs were open to public competition, the projects have generally been designed by the Institute for Research and Urban Planning of Curitiba (IPPUC), or by design professionals appointed by the city or state government. These professionals have merely selected the stylistic languages they thought best represented the cultures in question. Indeed, the exclusion of other designers from the production of public architecture and urban space (to the point that some have even fled the city in search of professional opportunities elsewhere) is a telling aspect of the city’s hegemonic modus operandi.30 Yet government officials have also been clever to create a partnership for the control and use of these spaces, assigning their maintenance to organized groups within the ethnic communities they are meant to represent. Thus, citizen participation is restricted to use and management.31 It is important to note how the ‘invention of tradition’ that starts with the physical objecthood of these ethnic memorials may be expanded and dynamically played out by rituals that use them as stage sets. For example, the inauguration of each memorial has been marked by a grand ceremony, at which important personalities (such as presidents or other political figures from the countries represented – or even the Pope, in the case of the Polish Park) have been present. The result has been to institutionalize these urban interventions and give them a powerful initial fixation in the city’s imaginary. These ceremonies have also given the represented ethnic groups a strong sense of ownership, to which they have responded by transforming these spaces and monuments into stage sets against which to display their traditions – both to themselves and the rest of the city. Consequently, stores that sell traditional foods, beverages, and arts and crafts (along with folk exhibitions, festivals, and celebrations) have become common in and around the parks. Indeed, these spaces have created a renaissance of ethnic traditions – but traditions reinvented as hybrid expressions of a mixture of cultures in a new spatio-temporal context. Overall, these spaces and the events that take place in them have allowed Curitiba’s ethnic groups to gather together whatever fragments they still have of their original identities, and use them to construct pleasing new identities for their own and others’ consumption. But, of course, whatever subjective message the ethnic memorials may contain has already been defined by the government and planning elite, rather than by the communities themselves. 150

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The government in Curitiba has reinforced the importance of these ethnic monuments in the public landscape in several strategic ways, betting on them as marketing ‘catches’ that will distinguish the city and give it an edge in national and global markets. First, a tourist transit line has been constructed to link most of these places, making them accessible to everyone in smooth sequence. Second, chain stores named ‘Carry Curitiba’ (Leve Curitiba) have been built at several points along the route to sell souvenirs that depict these memorials and other architectural icons of the city. Third, a sense of public expectation and approval has been fostered for each new urban intervention through spectacular media campaigns at the local, national, and international levels. The tourist line in Curitiba, originally named ‘Round Trip Around the World’ (A Volta ao Mundo), offers a fantasy voyage that links all these representations of faraway geographies and cultures in one two-hour trip of only 40 kilometres.32 On a single bus ticket, a traveller may get off at any three out of twenty-two stops. The stops include the Polish, Ukrainian, German, Italian, and Arab portals and memorials, as well as the City Memorial and the Unilivre among other non-ethnic public buildings and spaces.33 The majority of Curitiba’s monuments may thus be appreciated by ‘the view through the framing window of the passing car’, which ‘animates the townscape, cinematizing the city’, and which emphasizes the ‘consumption of the city as spectacle, by means of mechanical movement through it’.34 In the bus, a recording is played that highlights the characteristics of each place in three languages – Portuguese, Spanish, and English.35 The ‘Carry Curitiba’ retail stores are located at four of the most popular stops along this tourist loop. The products for sale convey legitimacy and an aura of authenticity to these memorials and other architectural icons. At the stores, the icons are depicted on such things as postcards, clothing, books, tapes, videos, and even CD-ROMs. Most therefore allow further promotion of the city through their use by the buyer.36 In addition, the creation of public buildings and spaces in Curitiba is systematically accompanied by an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at fostering a sense of pride among the population. However, this campaign manipulates the practices of appreciation/ appropriation of the city by its inhabitants in a way that privileges architectural icons and urban interventions that cater to the needs and expectations of the middle and highincome classes. Toward this end, broadcast and print media also help construct and diffuse an exclusively positive image of Curitiba. Such marketing builds citizen pride into an acritical, irresponsible force that supports the status quo power structure. Such a packaging of ethnic monuments and other public works is clearly based on a hegemonic, homogenized reading of the city. Its insistence on a discourse promoting ‘the city of and for the people’ hides social contradictions existent in its contested terrain and complex social fabric.37 Through its European and Asian memorials, the city has also attempted to exorcise the stigma of being in the so-called Third World. Curitiba has catalogued itself as a ‘First-World city’ (in the midst of a Third-World continent!). Sharing the image of their city as a place that has already solved its major problems, many Curitibanos have limited themselves to being recipients of given urban services or commodities, as opposed to critical assessors 151

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of the city’s problems and challenges and active agents of its transformation. Indeed, citizens are presented by the media as happy contributors to Curitiba’s well-being and proud users of its urban spaces, when, in fact, they are often coerced to show approval for urban interventions technocratically planned and implemented from the top down. This model of urban planning and management, although extremely effective in terms of the expeditious transformation of the physical structure of the city, has taken a toll on the social consciousness of the citizenry. Thus, Curitibanos seem to engage in a consuming rush towards utopia, with an exacerbated city-consumerism, anxiously expecting the next architectural or urban design intervention before properly assimilating the previous one. Meanwhile, the marketing strategy for each new spatial product is meticulously designed to distinguish its novelties from the last one, and so maintain momentum and public excitement for a sustained programme of urban intervention. In such a situation, tradition must be always ‘invented,’ due to the ever-changing nature of context. Thus, what makes each setting distinct is not so much the invention of a particular tradition, but the manipulation of the entire process to attain certain local-specific ends. For instance, many of the city’s monuments serve as strategic tools of denotation and control. Some aim simply to preserve and control flood-prone areas. But others are intended to prevent squatter invasions. A park with a monument from which it derives its name and character, equipped with a minimum of recreational and/or sport facilities, is almost immediately appropriated by a community. These communities, in turn, police the parks and advise authorities of attempts to squat there. The celebration of immigrant pioneers may also legitimate the contemporary appropriation and conversion of the city’s undervalued urban land. Revealingly, new ethnic parks have rarely been located within the ethnic neighbourhoods they represent. Instead, they have been located strategically to transform land uses and values elsewhere. In some cases, these parks have only been made possible by an exchange of land for a greater construction index for surrounding areas. Developers and landowners have thus used the parks as assets to magnify the value of real estate deals, limiting the chances of middle- and low-income people residing nearby. Such a speculative process pushes these groups to the fringes of the metropolitan area, where land values are lower because of their poorer soils and/or level of urban services. Thus, in Curitiba most memorial parks have helped create or consolidate wealthy neighbourhoods or allow the gentrification of other important areas. Significantly, the ethnic memorials and other public buildings and spaces linked by the tourist line are also all located within the municipality of Curitiba – i.e., the central portion of the metropolitan area.38 Around the globe, a common problem in places undergoing rapid urban transformation is that ‘a city of increasing spatial differentiation results in an ever-widening gap between neglected land and revalued places, between the poor that the market ignores and the well-to-do that it privileges’.39 Thus, some disfranchised residents of Curitiba’s metropolitan area have never visited its parks and monuments, and many others only make the trip when friends or relatives visit from elsewhere. Meanwhile, the monuments increase the quality of life in the central city by increasing the number 152

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of its public amenities and its index of green space per inhabitant while also cordoning the central city off from its poorer metropolitan outskirts. This creates a widening gap in environmental quality between centre and periphery.

The theming of vernacular settings ‘Invented traditions,’ Jane M. Jacobs argues in her chapter in this book, . . . do not come from the authority of the local, but from the demands of deterritorializing forces. . . . Most benignly, such traditions may be understood simply as mediated, globally scoped elaborations of existing traditions . . . More cynically, they may be seen as disembedded marketing ploys that claim tradition as a way of expressing market-driven differentiation.40

Around the world examples abound of how the invention of tradition as an expression of market-driven cultural differentiation may produce a ‘hyper-real’ environment which transcends and replaces its original sources of inspiration.41 The prototypes of these fake environments are theme parks (others are shopping malls and some master-planned communities). Paramount among them, of course, is the hyper-famous Disneyworld. Referring to it, Sorkin has written that ‘in the Disney utopia, we all become involuntary flaneurs and flaneuses, global drifters, holding high our lamps as we look everywhere for an honest image’. He has further asserted that ‘the search will get tougher and tougher for the fanned-out millions as the recombinant landscape crops up around the globe’.42 The creation of ethnic monuments in Curitiba presents such ‘Disneyfication’ at an urban scale, making Curitiba all-too-evident proof of the existence of that global recombinant landscape. If the ‘Cyburbia’ to which Sorkin refers (and which I note in an epigraph to this chapter) were other than a spatial metaphor, the Curitiba of the ethnic memorials might be it. In our present era cities compete with each other (and with theme parks!) to attract visitors. In Curitiba this has meant trying to obtain regional advantage by adopting a ‘theme-park’ attitude to the development of the city. However, Curitiba’s emphasis on its European heritage has now reached a point of saturation. And this has resulted in the same conditions of hyper-reality that characterize theme parks. Thus, the Polish, Italian, and German parks (among other urban spaces with distant referents) supply a Brazilian version of Epcot Center, that section of Disneyworld containing pavilions for eight nations. But, ironically, the claim in Curitiba is greater. In Epcot, visitors are asked to enter a ‘Magic Kingdom’, where they suspend belief for the sake of entertainment. There are no real residents to take account of; instead, Epcot pavilions assemble clichéd versions of what constitutes the selected ‘others’. In Curitiba, on the other hand, the urban spaces and monuments are supposedly genuine expressions of the city’s ethnic groups. For many visitors to Epcot the simulacra presented provide a ‘real’ mental image of countries they will never visit. The pavilions package convenient, hygienic stereotypes, detached from such troublesome realities as congestion, crime, pollution, poverty, etc. Similarly, the ethnic memorials in Curitiba have been comfortably detached from the somewhat distant and often physically deteriorated or inconspicuous ethnic settlements 153

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they represent, and conveniently presented on a centralized urban loop. The monuments then become the ‘real’ images of those communities for visitors, and sometimes even for the ethnic groups they supposedly represent. This is the meaning of the theme park, the place that embodies it all, the ageographia, the surveillance and control, the simulations without end. The theme park presents its happy regulated vision of pleasure – all those artfully hoodwinking forms – as a substitute for the democratic public realm, and it does so appealingly by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting, of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work.43

In the present global era, such theming may transform a city into ‘a place of escape, a wonderland that evades reality’ – in other words, a place mainly devoted to consumption.44 In Curitiba, however, this process has been complicated by the fact that the city’s outer areas are simultaneously attracting industries that are being displaced from more advanced capitalist economies. And this is happening at the same time that Curitiba’s central areas are being purged of local industries in order to increase its specialization as a regional service hub. The economy of representation at the international pavilions in Epcot is based on a ‘careful calculus of degrees of difference . . . Thus, its images really never innovate, they intensify and reduce, winnowing complexity in the bane of both quick access and easy digestibility’.45 Design strategies aimed to facilitate access and digestibility are used wherever a theming of vernacular settings is attempted. But within the constraints of a Third-World budget this often presents serious challenges, and so buildings display a range of aesthetic and construction qualities, with both rich and poor architectural results. Aesthetics aside, the memorials remain socially constructed instruments that shape, and are shaped by, the discourses and practices that promote the (re)production of (in)equality. As such, they work as mechanisms of exclusion as well as celebrations of the rich heritage of the city. To date, decisions as to who gets represented and who does not have been deliberately made by the government and the elite. The goals are twofold: to promote the interests of resident groups with cultural and economic power; and to attract desirable visitors (tourists and potential investors). Only lately have some other ethnic groups in the city, such as its Chinese, approached the government to bargain for a space and monument of their own. By coming to the table with an offer of partnership for the construction and maintenance of a site, they have improved their chances of success. Aiming to represent world diversity, Epcot Center presents at least one country pavilion per continent, but all of them are subsidized by their respective nations. In Curitiba, a similar economic partnership exists between the government and local ethnic groups. But this does not extend to all groups with a significant presence in the city. Indeed, the multicultural image of the city almost exclusively celebrates First-World European communities. Meanwhile, there are distinguishable communities from other countries (and ethnic Brazilian groups) with similar, or stronger, claims to spatial expression.46 And recently some of these groups, particularly Brazilians of African descent, have expressed their discontent with this exclusion.47 154

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One example of an excluded group are the region’s indigenous peoples. Most obviously, the Guarani’s Tingüi indigenous tribes were the first inhabitants of the land, yet they have no memorial. The only statue of their tribal leader, Tindiquera, is very modest; as I have already mentioned, it is now located in a park rededicated to the city’s Ukrainians.48 Another excluded group are the tropeiros, cattlemen from southern Brazil who once guided their herds between the states of Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo, traversing Curitiba. They were very influential in the consolidation of Curitiba as a town – and in the definition of its main crossing paths, its social fabric, and its economic basis. Deservedly, a park has now been dedicated to the tropeiros, and another to today’s blue-collar workers. But these are located on the perimeter of the city, far from the central loop on which the European memorials are situated. One might also point to the way that non-Christian religious groups have been excluded. Christian chapels and/or religious motifs, icons, and messages are a significant part of the Italian, Ukrainian, Polish, and German memorials.49 Indeed, this religiosity is important to many migrants from these ethnic groups, since it has helped retain their social and cultural cohesion. But other religious faiths in Curitiba have not been similarly represented.50 And where they have been, they have often been misrepresented. Thus, different groups of Arabs have migrated to Curitiba during this century – such as Syrians and Lebanese. Yet, despite their many religious and cultural differences, there is only a singular, reductionist Arab Memorial. It is interesting to note how the European ethnic memorials embody different design approaches. In some cases, existing structures were dismantled and rebuilt in new settings. At the Polish park, for example, seven peasant wooden houses and structures, gathered from different parts of the metropolitan area, were rearranged as a village-like setting and put to use as museums to display different aspects of the Polish migration to Brazil, and Polish culture in general (Figure 7.2). However, even though this memorial celebrates an ethnic group that began arriving in Curitiba in 1871, its moment of genesis was the visit of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, in the 1990s. During this visit, John Paul addressed the Polish community from one of the cabins, and today this visit is memorialized by

7.2 Polish cabins were gathered from different locations in the metropolitan area of Curitiba, and reassembled in the Polish Park 155

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furnishing the cabin as a chapel with religious icons and pictures of him. Together, these buildings are an excellent example of the ‘museumfication’ of the building traditions of immigrants in Curitiba, and their reification through associations with contemporaneous events and personalities. Strikingly, a Curitiban professor recently said that other examples of Polish architecture in the city may now be safely dismantled, because such architecture has been well-documented in a report,51 and ultimately well-preserved in the park.52 The case of the Ukrainian Memorial is slightly different. It involved producing a downscaled copy of an orthodox chapel originally built by Ukrainian immigrants in Mallet, a town in the state of Paraná. It was created in 1995 to celebrate the centennial of the Ukrainian immigration to Curitiba. The copy of the chapel, built in wood and bronze, is today used as a museum to display an assortment of ethnic crafts, and to document the three major migratory waves of Ukrainians to Brazil: at the end of the nineteenth century, and following World Wars I and II. The memorial also includes a typical Ukrainian house that serves as a souvenir store and stage for folkloric events. And surrounding plantings of wheat and sunflowers are further meant to recall the Ukrainian landscape and pay homage to the Ukrainian poet Iwan Frankó. As mentioned before, the memorial occupies an area of Tingüi Park, originally intended to honour the indigenous tribes that first populated the Curitiban plateau. In the Italian Memorial, historic structures such as a Roman aqueduct were simplified and downscaled and combined with replications of local structures such as the façade of the local Church of Santa Felicidade and a reproduction of the icon of its Virgin. The formula was clear: to use Alberto Rossi’s simple, geometric style in a postmodern pastiche, à la Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans.53 Italians have been one of the most cohesive and active communities in Curitiba since they began arriving in 1872. But Curitibans of Italian descent are today unable to enjoy this park because its ownership is being disputed by the city and the Catholic church. The church, which owns the land, currently allows access to the park only for celebrations of certain Italian festivals, and so the memorial remains largely closed and untended. Thus, although the memorial may remind people of Rome, that would most likely be Rome in one of its periods of ruin. Not surprisingly, while the dispute remained unresolved in December 2002, the park had been dropped from city brochures, and its stop had disappeared from the tourist bus route. The German Memorial is a synthesis of all the approaches above. However, it begins to indicate how it is possible to go beyond stereotypical invocations of tradition in search of a critical-regional architecture. Within a wooded area of 38,000 square metres, the German Park and Memorial celebrate this first group of immigrants to Curitiba, who arrived after 1833. It includes the Bach Oratorium, a reproduction of a 1933 wooden chapel with Neo-gothic ornaments, which is used for concerts; a watch tower dedicated to several famous German philosophers; a reproduction of the façade of a Curitiban house from the beginning of the century, which presides over a plaza dedicated to German poetry; and a house for story-telling, or ‘enchanted house’, which serves also as a children’s library (Figure 7.3). In the woods between these structures are panels that narrate and illustrate the Grimm Brothers’ famous story of Hansel and Gretel. Thus, the 156

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7.3 The Bach Oratorium and the watch tower dedicated to German philosophers at the German Park

German Memorial combines folk motifs and children’s legends with more sophisticated representations of cultural heritage. Typically, the city failed to preserve the original chapel and house that inspired the Oratorium and façade of the plaza. Instead, it chose ‘historyas-arcadian-symbol’, conveniently packaging the newly re-erected referents in a singular, alluring site. Nevertheless, it is particularly in the tower dedicated to German philosophy that a simple, yet evocative combination of natural elements – woods, creek, vistas of the city – and manmade structures begins to achieve critical-regional meaning. One of the few non-European communities that has been granted a memorial are the Japanese, who started to arrive in Curitiba after 1915. After its construction in 1962, an original Japanese plaza suffered spatial and social degradation. But recently it underwent a process of revitalization, and the current memorial dates to 1993. An architect of Japanese origin was hired to design a portal, a traditional garden, and a tea house that, despite its modesty, is said to have been inspired by the Kinkakuji, the gold pavilion in Kyoto. The tea house adequately serves the Japanese tea ritual, and is surrounded by a traditional landscape, including some plants donated by the Japanese emperor Hirohito.54 Furthering its legitimacy, the cultural exhibition holds documents on Himeji, Curitiba’s sister city in Japan. This relationship was further cemented by having that city’s governor attend the memorial’s opening. Although Curitiba’s Japanese population is dispersed throughout the metropolitan area, this house and garden have been used as a stage for cultural gatherings. The Japanese plaza is nonetheless a modest-sized space along one of Curitiba’s main transit corridors. And because land along these corridors can be profitably and intensively developed, the plaza is gradually being surrounded by oppressively tall and bulky mixed-use structures. Indeed, such densification is encouraged by the existence of the plaza as a local amenity, even when such development clearly threatens it as a ‘traditional’ setting (Figure 7.4). Considered as a whole, this above group of ‘as-if’ ethnic settings mingles reality and simulation, history and fantasy, providing a ‘simplified, sanitized experience that stands in for the more undisciplined complexities of the city’.55 As at Epcot, ethnic depictions 157

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7.4 The Tea House and Japanese Garden at the Japan Plaza have been surrounded by massive high-rise buildings

in Curitiba are renditions reduced to their ‘minimum negotiable signifiers’.56 In many cases, the authentic referent no longer exists (e.g., the Polish cabins), or is inconvenient to visit (e.g., the Ukrainian chapel). And in some cases, the reproduction actually eased the eradication of the original, as was with the Polish cabins. In other cases it created an architectural fad whereby ethnic motifs have been exploited as symbols of status, as with the replication of Germanish façades near the German Memorial. Before moving into a discussion of an alternative critical-transnational architecture, it is important to mention how the ethnic memorials in Curitiba exploit notions of hybridity. In this regard, it is necessary to mention the work of Katharyne Mitchell exploring the topics of diaspora and hybridity in the contemporary world.57 Specifically, Mitchell has documented how Hong Kong-Chinese capitalists in Vancouver manipulate their self-image as both transnational, transcultural cosmopolitan subjects and ‘ethnic Chinese’ to position themselves on the margins of the nation, but at the lucrative centre of the Pacific Rim.58 In a similar way, by portraying Curitiba as harmoniously multicultural, officials have sought to position the city advantageously in the networks of the global economy. Thus, Curitiba also positions itself on the margins of the nation. And in this sense, the ethnic memorials are intended to convey the notion that Curitibanos are both Brazilians and Europeans. As further evidence of such a parallelism, Curitiba has long sought to promote itself in a lucrative light as ‘the capital of Mercosur’. Many cultural theorists have celebrated diasporic identities and hybridity as a means of resistance to hegemonic narratives of nation and race. However, Massey has suggested that some forms of hybridity may, in fact, be disempowering.59 And Mitchell has proposed that diasporic identities and hybridity may actually collaborate in the hegemonic narratives of capitalism. Thus, the flexible citizenship of Hong Kong Chinese in Vancouver enables them to make the most of two worlds – Asia and North America – and serve as bridges between them. In Curitiba, since hybridity has been constructed as a government showcase, it contains few elements of resistance. On the contrary, the appropriation of these memorials by ethnic groups they supposedly represent to a certain extent realizes 158

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the government’s goal of constructing a multicultural society and a hybrid, flexible Curitiban citizenship. In the era of globalization, it is relatively common for governments to develop a flexible notion of citizenship as a strategy to accumulate capital and power. In such a context, ‘flexible citizenship’ reflects the cultural logic of capitalist accumulation, which is to force governments to respond flexibly and opportunistically to political and economic glocal conditions.60 To participate in this world, governments emphasize practices favouring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to global markets and cultural regimes. These logics and practices are produced within particular structures of meaning about nationality, citizenship, class and ethnic identity, and social power.61 Thus, government attempts to regulate the identities of ethnic groups in Curitiba may be seen as representing the new cultural logics of transnationality. The tensions between ‘the politics of imposed identity and the politics of self-positioning’ speak to the logics and ambivalence that construct the cosmopolitan Curitiban subjectivity.62 The building of ethnic monuments in Curitiba conforms to an elite practice of transnationalism, enacting processes of ethnic essentialism and cultural othering whose ubiquity and effectiveness have intensified as transnational conditions have spread. Such monuments, conceived within closed political circuits, construct a regime of truth about a distinctive Curitiban identity. According to Foucault, such apparently neutral discourses may use rationalizations and categories as systems of regulation and control. In these transnational imaginaries effected by the symbolism of the monuments, the Curitiban cosmopolitan identity also becomes ‘naturalized’ so that it may be deployed as a ‘naturalizing power’. Such a strategy helps the government shape the way people think about ‘Curitibanness’.63

Prospects for critical transnationalism in Curitiba As I stated before, rather than ‘ending’ tradition, the creation of ethnic memorials in Curitiba re-enacts a singular process of ‘inventing’ tradition, defining a future through the editing and reconstruction of the past. But is it possible to envision a more productive way for cities to recreate themselves? Critical regionalism has been widely cited in writings on architecture and urbanism as one way to escape the duality of ‘ending/inventing’ tradition. I would like to rework it here according to current theoretical discourse on spatial and cultural globalization – or more specifically, the dynamics of ‘glocalization’. The idea of glocalization, as opposed to globalization, attempts to recollect the hybrid, fluid, and as-yet-not-fully-understood relationship between local and global environments. However, I prefer the phrase ‘critical transnationalism’, rather than ‘glocalization’, since it emphasizes the importance of a critical attitude towards the articulation of the global and local in shaping buildings and cities. The term ‘critical regionalism’ was originally coined by Tzonis and Lefaivre in 1981.64 Critical regionalism ‘upholds the individual and local architectonic features against more universal and abstract ones’, they wrote. They also warned against romantic or commercial regionalism, asserting that ‘no new [critical-regional] architecture can emerge without a 159

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new kind of relation between designer and user, without new kinds of programs’.65 The term critical regionalism has since been adopted by several other authors, most notably the architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton, who elaborated on it extensively in writings during the 1980s.66 According to Frampton, one or many local characteristics may inspire critical-regionalist designs: light, materials, climate, topography, construction mode, etc. But it is most important that designs maintain a critical level of self-consciousness in order to mediate the influences of universal and local cultures. He also stated that the resulting integration of idiosyncratic and symbolic elements from traditional cultures and the rational and normative aspects of universal culture would generate ‘regionally based world cultures’.67 Thus, critical-regionalist designs would achieve ‘through synthetic contradiction, a manifest critique of universal civilization’.68 ‘Trans’ is a prefix that means above, beyond, across, and/or transcending. Transnationality, in the context of cultural studies, therefore, denotes the conditions of cultural interrelateness and mobility across space. Transnational practices, thus, involve cultural exchanges among individuals and/or societies. These may encompass the economy; politics; the definition and redefinition of individual, group, and national identities; or the territorialization and reterritorialization of spatial practices. As Ong has written: . . . besides suggesting new relations between nation-states and capital, transnationality also alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behavior and imagination that are incited, enabled, and regulated by the changing logics of states and capitalism.69

Transnationalism, then, refers to ‘the cultural specificities of global processes, tracing the multiplicity of the uses and conceptions of “culture”’.70 For Smith, a conceptual distinction exists between globalization and transnationalism based on differences in scope and implication. Specifically, discourses on globalization and transnationalism differ in the assumptions they make about the role of the state in the production and negotiation of power, knowledge, and subjectivity (which in turn shape meanings, identities, and social relations). While the globalization discourse draws attention to social processes that are largely decentred from specific national territories, the transnational discourse depicts social relations as anchored in, but also transcending, nation-states. Thus, discourses on globalization often dismiss the significance of national borders, boundaries, and identities. In contrast, transnational discourses emphasize the continuing, yet reworked significance of borders, state policies, and national identities, while recognizing that these are often transgressed by media networks and social practices. Globalization discourses also often treat the conceptual categories of globalization and the nation-state as mutually exclusive and antagonistic. Theorists of transnationalism, meanwhile, treat the nation-state and transnational practices as interlocked, enmeshed, mutually constitutive social formations.71 Ong also prefers the term transnationality to globalization. She has criticized the globalization discourse as based on an analytical model that defines the global as political and economic, but the local as cultural. She has claimed that transnationality, on the 160

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contrary, captures the horizontal and relational nature of contemporary economic, social, and cultural processes that stream across spaces, and expresses their embeddedness in differently configured and reconfigured regimes of power.72 Applied to architecture and urbanism, transnationality is a metaphor that goes beyond geographical and spatial connotations to encompass the multicultural dimensionality of the political practices of place-making. Smith, for instance, has used the term ‘transnational urbanism’ as . . . a marker of the criss-crossing transnational circuits of communication and cross-cutting local, translocal, and transnational social practices that ‘come together’ in particular places at particular times and enter into the contested politics of place-making, the social construction of power differentials, and the making of individual, group, national, and transnational identities, and their corresponding fields of difference.73

This dynamic, which is identified by Smith at the scale of urbanism, is proportionately reproduced at the scale of architecture. Hence, we can talk about transnational architecture. In Curitiba, far from presenting the characteristics of critical transnationalism, the simplistic efforts to revive vernacular styles may easily create a kind of populist demagogy. In such designs, architecture may be reduced to minimal signs aimed at providing as direct and economical an experience and message as possible. In this way, a preconceived level of gratification is provided, and the need for critical interpretation is avoided. To be candid, in romantic and/or commercial architectural regionalism – such as that of the Curitiban memorials – buildings are supplied as objects of hedonistic consumption. Tzonis and Lefaivre condemned such romantic and commercial regionalism for its ‘chauvinistic, atavistic sentimental hallucinationist attitudes’. Instead, they wrote, critical regionalism must turn buildings ‘into objects with which to think’.74 Critical-regionalist architecture thus defines itself through the defamiliarization of regional elements – i.e., making them strange by creative change and innovation. It follows, then, that critical-transnationalist architecture should define itself through the defamiliarization of glocal elements and a creative proposal for their reconnection. Temple, among other contemporary authors, has written that critical regionalism remains valid as a way not only to requalify spatially the built environment and its relationship with nature, but also to advance theoretical and philosophical discourses about space. In her view, a critical-regionalist approach opts ‘for a complex, heterogeneous dialectic among any and all forces relevant to the mise-en-scène of architectural design and construction’. Thus: [C]ritical regionalism precludes neither a deconstructivist/poststructuralist theoretical sophistication nor the discriminating use of principles like that of undecidability; in fact, Frampton’s attention to interpenetrating, complex, highly articulated spaces serves to dimensionalize vintage Derridean logic and to interrogate that logic as it rebounds against other historical and theoretical contingencies.75

In other words, critical-transnationalist architecture expands the interpenetration of theoretical and historical contingencies accomplished through critical regionalism to 161

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encompass transregional geographies and cultures. In Curitiba, as elsewhere in the world, it is possible to create an arrière-garde architecture, one that resists the ‘ever-present tendency to regress into nostalgic historicism or the glibly decorative, . . . to cultivate a resistant, identity-giving culture’.76 Indeed, examples of such a self-conscious synthesis of global and local cultures already exist in Curitiba – for example, the Open University of the Environment (Unilivre) and the City Memorial.77 Such buildings are attempts at critical regionalism, and are potential indications of a direction toward critical transnationalism. Both buildings present a dialogical relationship between nature and the manmade glocal context. They celebrate local materials, crafts, climate, light, and vegetation, while avoiding the extremely sentimental characteristics of Curitiba’s ethnic buildings. Conceptually and symbolically, they also reach out to global audiences. With a critical commitment to place, they ‘deconstruct’ and ‘reconstruct’ the overall spectrum of glocal cultures they are a part of. Designed to promote environmental education, research, and the diffusion of sustainable practices, the Open University of the Environment (Unilivre) opened in 1992 after a ceremony presided over by the late oceanographer Jacques Cousteau (Figure 7.5). In a park of 59,000 square metres, the eroded setting of an abandoned quarry was used as a dramatic site for the building and its landscaping. But the intervention did not try to heal the damage done to the environment when the site was used as a mine – because that is beyond possibility. Rather, it made a commendable attempt at reconciliation. The intervention, thus, does not hide the history of the place, but embraces it, offering the hope of transformation over time. In terms of its architecture, the Unilivre explores what could become a local neo-vernacular style for public buildings; and, indeed, since its

7.5 The architecture of Unilivre achieves critical transnationalism, yet it depoliticizes environmental issues 162

Architecture and the production of postcard images

7.6 The structure of the Unilivre is made out of recycled electric posts. The building provides functional versatility in its interior and exterior spaces

construction, the Unilivre has inspired similar structures in parks and buildings throughout the city and the state. The Unilivre proposes new spatial possibilities through the use of native materials and construction techniques. Among other features it employs recycled wooden electric posts, rather than metal ones (Figure 7.6). And its design was inspired by symbolism of the four natural elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. The building, which is one of the major ‘postcard’ images of Curitiba, both celebrates nature – in its playful incorporation of light, air, views, and landscaping – and offers functional versatility. In contrast to the ethnic monuments, the primary value of such a building is its tectonic rather than scenographic quality. Its structure does more than just resist gravity; it simply but meaningfully raises its construction to an art form, giving ‘expression to its function’.78 The programme is also innovative. The university is said to be the first of its kind in the world, promoting ecological courses and events tailored to men and women of all ages, education levels, and professions. The availability of varied interior and exterior spaces accommodates the diversity of programmes and users. Interestingly enough, since its opening, the Unilivre has inspired the creation of a number of sister universities in Brazil and other countries. Another strategy that the Unilivre employs to resist the domination of universal rules is its emphasis on a full range of experiential qualities. The aroma of wood and vegetation, the sense of humidity, the cadence of the body as it traverses the ramp, the kinetic friction of the slope, the perception of the building and its surroundings from a variety of angles and heights, the sense of plenitude at conquering the highest terrace, all allow a full sensual/emotional experience of architecture and place. As Frampton has 163

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7.7 The City Memorial is yet another attempt to portray critical transnationalism in Curitiba, despite the prevalent display of official exhibitions

written, ‘the liberative importance of the tactile resides in the fact that it can only be decoded in terms of experience itself’.79 This is something that a simulacrum of absent realities cannot accomplish. The Unilivre demonstrates that wherever tactile and tectonic architectural qualities are orchestrated, the poetics of construction increases the density of the architectural objecthood and transcends its technical appearance, while the poetics of space enhances the phenomenological experience of the place. The siting of the City Memorial in the middle of Curitiba’s historical quarter is another successful design intervention. Created in 1996, as a celebration of the city’s founding three hundred years before, this building was clearly intended to promote the city through its location, form, and function – i.e., it is another important ‘postcard’ image of the city. Yet, a critical-regional approach provides the City Memorial with genuine architectural appeal (Figure 7.7). Despite its four-storey height, its metal structure, and transparent façade, this modern building manages to preserve the scale of the streets onto which it faces. And, as a complement to the exterior spaces of the street and plaza, it offers an interior plaza – a useful space in Curitiba, where winter weather can be cool and rainy. However, natural light and views are fully incorporated into the design of this interior space, allowing those who visit to remain aware of external conditions. Besides this covered, inner plaza, the building also contains concert and exhibition halls for art shows and displays related to the city’s history, demographics, culture, and future plans. Branching out from a central column, the spaces of the City Memorial are also inspired by Curitiba’s symbol – the Araucaria pine tree.80 In this regard, the primacy given to a main interior spiral stair also gives the visitors an immediate appreciation of linkages among its interior spaces and their relationship to the urban context. Overall, a dynamic spatial poetics flourishes here, brought about by a playful interaction of building structure, urban context, cultural events, and, ultimately, the changing natural elements (Figure 7.8). The City Memorial and the Unilivre have had an innovative and positive effect on the built environment of Curitiba, and they have contributed to public education and cultural incentive in the city. But their impact as real estate investments should also be understood. 164

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Furthermore, as Moura has pointed out, ‘the Unilivre promotes the “pasteurization” of the discussion about the environment, because it . . . perpetuate[s] a bucolic-landscape vision . . . rather than one that necessarily discusses the relationship between environment and social demands’.81 At a certain level, therefore, these buildings are not so different from the other urban ‘scenographic’ elements in Curitiba. Both were political projects designed by planners also responsible for the ethnic monuments. And at the Unilivre, at least, the ecological message has been largely depoliticized (e.g., although it advocates clean water, it expresses little about the reasons for water pollution). In relation to the City Memorial, it is also important to question which elements of Curitiba’s history are being memorialized. Its exhibitions largely provide the official view of city’s history and advocate the officially defined future and the means to accomplish it. Toward this end, maximum use has been made of a rhetoric of environmentalism, evident in such mottoes as ‘Green Curitiba’ or ‘Curitiba, the ecological capital of Brazil’. But this environmental stance has been largely separated from underlying social and political problems. It is also curious that recent university research in Curitiba seems to indicate that average people fail to understand the linkages between Curitiba, Paraná, and the City Memorial.82 This suggests that the stylistic connotations of the memorial may appear more elitist than those of the ethnic monuments. In semiotic terms, only highly qualified and well-educated intellectuals can ‘decode’ it. On the other hand, the City Memorial’s architecture may certainly be read as more ‘open’ and democratic. Does this mean that the City Memorial accomplishes the ultimate goal of postmodern architecture – i.e., the poststructuralist recognition of multiple social subjects (with legitimate, differing, and often conflicting voices)? In this regard, one could claim that the memorial has pushed the limits of utility by historicizing, and ultimately fictionalizing, architecture. But in a more general sense, one could also ask if this is not a democratic stance, since it leaves open the question of interpretation. The Unilivre and the City Memorial are but two examples of an alternative approach to public architecture in Curitiba. Despite the above criticisms, these buildings are a

7.8 The interior plaza at the City Memorial provides a versatile, lively space for cultural activities 165

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more honest and effective way to promote the city than the thematic ethnic memorials. Most importantly, they create a unique urban image for both local and international appreciation. In general, the exploration of critical transnationalism evident in these buildings has greater potential to solve the architectural and urban challenges of Curitiba than the mere invention of tradition evident in the ethnic memorials. Across the world, such critical transnationalism may be used to resist the theming of vernacular settings, which creates only ahistorical, alienated commodities. In Curitiba and elsewhere, a critical response to the deterritorializing effects of globalization may be used to contest the growing hegemony of invented traditions and urban simulacra. It may also be instrumental in the quest for a more context-sensitive, culturally and historically dialogical approach to architecture and urban form. I started this chapter by stating that people often accept cultural ideas and social relations embedded in the built environment without questioning where they came from or what they aim to produce. This is because they take built forms to be non-ideological material facts, when in fact they are reified representations of power struggles and hegemonies. Alternatively, people may resist and subvert dominant readings of their built environments; or they may create other landscapes altogether, ones that embody different representations of space better fit to the needs and traditions of the people who inhabit them.83 This is the approach taken by the Unilivre and the City Memorial in Curitiba. However, the universalizing possibilities of critical transnationalism need to be further explored and exploded. Whereas Sorkin’s ever-more-ubiquitous ‘Cyburbia’ presents a theme-park architecture and urbanism of deception, oblivious of the real needs and traditions of those who inhabit it, critical-transnationalist design may allow glocalities to overcome their deployment. In which case, one could hopefully paraphrase Sorkin: Welcome to Transurbia.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

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M. Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992, pp. xiv–xv. D. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, London, Croom Helm, 1984. A. King (ed.), Re-presenting the City, London, Macmillan, 1996. D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989, p. 303. ‘The End of Tradition?’ was originally the name of the Seventh IASTE (International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments) Conference in Trani, Italy, October 12–15, 2000. This conference was officially described as being ‘concerned with a specific historical moment, one where a seemingly all-consuming late capitalism levels differences and particularities, but where there is at the same time a resurgence of localisms, populisms, and fundamentalisms’. N. Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1996. Caboclo refers to Brazilian half-breeds (white and Indian), known as ‘copper-coloured’. It also refers to agricultural labourers. E-mail correspondence on May 22, 2000, with Professor Wolf-Dietrich Sahr of the Department of Geography, Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), Curitiba, Brazil. J. Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1989, p. 317.

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10. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1983. 11. J. Berger, Ways of Seeing, London, BBC and Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972, p. 11. 12. D. Davis, ‘Late Postmodern: The End of Style’, Art in America, June 1987, p. 21. 13. C. Boyer, ‘Cities for Sale: Merchandising History at South Street Seaport’, in Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park, p. 204. 14. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 303. 15. J. Lucan, France Architecture 1965–1988, Paris, Electa Moniteur, 1989, p. 145. 16. J. M. Jacobs, ‘Tradition is (not) Modern: Deterritorializing Globalization’, this volume. 17. J. M. Jacobs, ‘The Global Domestic: Deterritorializing Globalization’, paper presented at the IASTE 2000 conference ‘The End of Tradition?’ in Trani, Italy, October 12–15, 2000. 18. In different ways and at different levels, people are today being forced to engage in multiple scales of hybridity. Critical anthropology and postcolonial cultural studies have generally engaged the theme of migrants living in spaces of in-betweenness. In particular, one might cite Arjun Appadurai’s work on transnational anthropology, and cultural criticism by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. 19. Jacobs, ‘Tradition is (not) Modern’, her emphasis. 20. A. Roy, ‘Traditions of the Modern: A Corrupt View’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 12, no. 2, spring 2001, p. 7. 21. Ibid., p. 16. 22. A. Colquhoun, ‘The Concept of Regionalism’, in G. B. Nalbantoglu and C. T. Wong, Postcolonial Space(s), New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, p. 19. 23. I mean kitsch in a way that surpasses its more common derogatory meaning as pretentious bad taste or false aesthetic consciousness. For an elaborate discussion of kitsch, refer to C. Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience, New York, Pantheon Books, 1998. 24. A. Tzonis and L. Lefaivre, ‘Critical Regionalism’, in S. Amourgis (ed.), Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting: Proceedings, Pomona, CA, College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991, pp. 12. 25. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 26. Ibid., p. 13, their emphasis. 27. W. Lesnikowski, Rationalism and Romanticism in Architecture, New York, NY, McGraw Hill, 1982. 28. C. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, New York, Rizzoli, 1977. 29. K. Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in H. Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend, WA, Bay Press, 1983, p. 19. Wolf-Dietrich Sahr has preferred to name this architecture of the ethnic monuments in Curitiba ‘semiotic baroque’ (e-mail correspondence on May 22, 2000). 30. For more on the strategies of Curitiba’s city government, see C. Irazábal, ‘Behind the Scenes in Wonderland: An Assessment of the Planning Model in Curitiba’’ AULA, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1999, pp. 92–103. 31. In effect, the symbolic and programmatic function of these buildings and spaces is only completed when its use (i.e., the production and consumption of ethnic rituals and celebrations) are handed over to specific ethnic groups. Who makes the decisions about these events; who leads them; who performs what, when, how, and for whom: these issues are of profound political, cultural, and social importance, but they are outside the scope of this chapter. 32. The evocative name was changed in 1998 to ‘Tourist Line’, when two different tourist lines merged creating an itinerary that combined the foreign-referred landmarks with other ‘local’ amenities. 33. In the last section of the chapter, I use the City Memorial and the Unilivre as examples of criticalregional architecture in Curitiba. 34. M. Sorkin, ‘See you in Disneyland’, in Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park, pp. 217–218. 35. This tourist line is modelled after similar programmes in Barcelona, Spain, and other major tourist cities in Europe. 36. Additional ‘Carry Curitiba’ stores are located in social service centres throughout the metropolitan area, called Citizenship Streets (Ruas da Cidadanía), and at the major regional airport. It is only 167

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37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

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fair to mention that profits from these stores are said to support social programmes, and some of the arts and crafts sold there are produced by people that benefit from those programmes. F. Sánchez, Cidade Espetáculo: Política, Planejamento e City Marketing, Curitiba, Editora Palavra, 1997; M. Santos, O Espaço do Cidadão, São Paulo, Nobel, 1987 and 1998; M. Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York, Penguin Books, 1988; and R. Barthes, Mitologias, Rio de Janeiro, Bertrand Brasil, 1989. The metropolitan area of Curitiba has more than twenty municipalities. Boyer, ‘Cities for Sale’, p. 204. Jacobs, ‘Tradition is (not) Modern’. Baudrillard defines simulacra as ‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality, a hyperreal’. See J. Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic, pp. 126–134. Ellin has also elaborated on the concept: ‘Simulation, as distinct from resemblance, has no original or referent, for the model replaces the real . . . With hyperreality, the simulations come to constitute reality’. Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, p. 108. These simulated environments become ‘realer-than-real, a real retouched and refurbished’. See S. Best and D. Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, New York, Guilford Press, 1991, p. 119. Sorkin, ‘See you in Disneyland’, pp. 231–232. M. Sorkin, ‘Introduction: Variations on a Theme Park’, in Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park, p. xv. C. Boyer, ‘Erected Against the City’, Center, no. 6, 1990, p. 36. Sorkin, ‘See you in Disneyland’, p. 226. The Portuguese Memorial provides a curious exception to this celebration of the heritage of European ethnic groups in Curitiba. The memorial was separated from the rest and located far from the centre of the city. In addition, architectural or formal motifs are secondary in this memorial to a celebration of the Portuguese language. By depicting fragments of poems of renowned Portuguese and Brazilian authors, the Portuguese Memorial lacks in ‘spectacularity’ (architecture-made-spectacle), but it excels in meaning. However, uncertainty about the appeal the memorial might have for visitors, and mixed feelings about the colonial period and its heritage on the part of the city authorities, may have caused the Portuguese Memorial to fall out of the typical, directed traveller’s path. In Brazil, Brazilians of African descent are not called and do not call themselves African Brazilians. Other words, such as mulata/o, preta/o, or negra/o, are used instead. Indigenous heritage is preserved in Curitiba largely through the names of things and places – starting with the name of Curitiba itself. Curitiba literally means ‘land of many pinhões’. This is the fruit of the local pine tree, the Pinheiro or Araucaria. Indigenous heritage is also exalted in the names of several new parks – Tingüi, Tanguá, Barigüi, etc. In an era of secularity, though, these religious places and icons are not used for the celebration of the rituals for which they were originally conceived. Voided of their religious function, they stand as mere pieces of exhibition or commodities for tourism consumption. Most of these ‘religious’ memorials were built under the mandate of Mayor Rafael Greca de Macedo, who is Catholic. The emphasis in Christian iconography in the public realm during Greca’s mandate contrasted with the relative lack of religious iconography during the three mayoral terms of Jaime Lerner (who is Jewish), or the two terms of Casio Taniguchi (who is Buddhist). In part, the religious bias was addressed by creating the Jerusalem Fountain in 1995, celebrating the 3,000 years of this city. At the top of a 14.5 metre tower, the fountain’s focal points are three bronze angels symbolizing the three main monotheist religions – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – that converge in Jerusalem. Another minor gesture was also made in the Japanese Memorial, with the placing of a statue of Buddha in its garden. E. Temski, ‘Prefacio’, in J. Velentini, A Arquitetura do Imigrante Polonês na Região de Curitiba, Curitiba, PR, Estante Paranista, 1982. This experience corresponds to the established ‘salvage paradigm’ in anthropology, whereby as much as possible of ‘authentic traditions’ are recorded before their ‘unavoidable’ erasure by modern social change.

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53. Although the Italian Memorial in Curitiba is a humbler project, Klotz’s comments about the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans (built in 1976–1979) are applicable to it. He said that the piazza presented an architecture ‘between the Old World and the New, between wit and seriousness, between perfection and fragmentation, between historical exactness and humorous alienation. The Piazza risks making the poetical statement “Here is Italy!” only to add immediately, with a sad smile, “Italy is not here”’. See H. Klotz, ‘Postmodern Architecture’, in C. Jencks (ed.), The Post-modern Reader, London, Academy Editions, 1992, p. 244. 54. A Japanese master who lives in São Paulo is regularly invited to conduct a traditional tea ceremony in this memorial. Interestingly, São Paulo holds the largest Japanese community outside Japan. 55. Sorkin, ‘See you in Disneyland’, p. 208. 56. Ibid., p. 216. 57. This chapter does not explore the concepts of diaspora and hybridity in depth. However, it is important to mention them and briefly link them to the discussion here. The phenomena they analyze are very relevant to the current demographic trends of the globalized world and the postmodern theoretical (de)constructions of subjectivity and identity. For a more elaborate discussion, see H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London, Routledge, 1994; N. AlSayyad (ed.), Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment, Westport, CT, Praeger, 2001; J. Jacobs, ‘Eastern Trading: Diasporas, Dwelling, and Place’, in Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, New York, Routledge, 1996, pp. 70–102; and K. Mitchell, ‘Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, no. 15, 1997, pp. 533–553. 58. Mitchell, ‘Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity’. For an extensive discussion of flexible, transnational Chinese citizenship, see A. Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1999. 59. D. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994. 60. A hybrid word, such as the nature of the phenomena it refers to, ‘glocalization’ entered the Oxford Dictionary of New Words in 1991. For more on the discussion of the term, see E. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 2000. 61. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, p. 6. 62. Ibid., pp. 6, 23. 63. S. Yanagisako and C. Delaney (eds.), Naturalizing Powers: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, New York, Routledge, 1995, p. 1. 64. A. Tzonis and L. Lefaivre, ‘The Grid and the Pathway, An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis, with Prolegomena to a History of the Culture of Modern Greek Architecture’, Architecture in Greece, no. 15, 1981, pp. 164–178. 65. Ibid., p. 178. 66. For sample references, please refer to Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’; K. Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, London, Thames and Hudson, 1985; and K. Frampton, ‘Prospects for Critical Regionalism’, Perspecta, vol. 20, 1983. 67. Frampton, Modern Architecture. 68. Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’, p. 21. 69. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, p. 4; her emphasis. 70. Ibid., p. 4. 71. M. Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization, Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 72. Ong, Flexible Citizenship. 73. Smith, Transnational Urbanism, p. 5. 74. Tzonis and Lefaivre, ‘Critical Regionalism’, pp. 3–4. 75. C. Temple, Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the American Midwest, Gainesville, FL, University Press of Florida, 1996, p. 17. 76. Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’, p. 20. 77. Unilivre Project: architect Domingos Henrique Bongestabs, professor at Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR) and PUC, Curitiba, Paraná. Partner: architect Mario José Kuster. When I interviewed Bongestabs in September 1998, he did not think of his architecture as being influenced by 169

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78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

170

particular architects or styles, although he acknowledged his admiration of Alvar Alto and Frank Lloyd Wright. He also highlighted his upbringing in the interior of the Paraná state, learning to appreciate the vernacular wooden architecture of southern Brazil. One can perceive the influence of these factors on Bongestabs’s architecture. His style has been appropriated by the Department of Parks and Plazas in the Municipal Secretary of Landscape to address the design of parks and plazas equipment and some public buildings in Curitiba and in other parts of the state. City Memorial Project: architect Fernando Popp, member of the state government’s team of architects, Curitiba, Paraná. When I interviewed Popp in September 1998, he recognized his architecture as being influenced by some famous architects. Specifically, he mentioned James Stirling (England), Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragan (Mexico), and Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi (Brazil). The juxtaposition of the varied styles and geographical origins of his referents makes for a complex and at times contradictory architecture. Note that Popp is, for instance, the architect of the controversial Italian Memorial. Popp’s language has been proliferating in public works throughout the metropolitan area, yet in many cases devoid of its richness. S. Anderson, ‘Modern Architecture and Industry: Peter Behrens, the AEG, and Industrial Design’, Oppositions, no. 21, Summer 1980, p. 83. Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’, p. 28; his emphasis. Interestingly enough, the creative metaphor for the Unilivre, acknowledged by its architect Bongestabs, is also a tree, although in a more general way. With no water bodies, mountains, or other prominent natural features, trees were pervasive defining elements in the original Curitiban landscape. It comes as no surprise that they would become a regional architectural metaphor. E-mail correspondence on April 28, 2000, with Rosa Moura, geographer of IPARDES. The study was performed in the Department of Geography at UFPR, guided by Professor WolfDietrich Sahr, in 2000. T. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Tradition as a means to the end of tradition: Farmers’ houses in Italy’s fascist-era new towns

Chapter 8

Tradition as a means to the end of tradition: Farmers’ houses in Italy’s fascist-era new towns Mia Fuller

. . . and thus was inaugurated a City without a past. Vincenzo Rossetti1

Beginning in 1928 with Mussolinia in western Sardinia, the Fascist government created at least twelve new towns in Italy, along with roughly sixty smaller villages or service centres (borghi); several areas of newly developed farmland; and a few mining and industrial centres.2 Although they have attracted less scholarly attention than other architectural and urban developments in interwar Italy, there is a considerable literature on these settlement programmes.3 By and large, though, this literature has addressed only two aspects of the settlements: architecture and planning in the town centres, and Italy’s internal migrations during the Fascist era (1922–1943).4 In contrast, the present chapter focuses on one of the programmes’ humblest elements: the houses that were provided for farmers, far from the town centres. The designs for these farmsteads (unlike those for housing in the industrial and mining towns) were rhetorically saturated with allusions to traditions of rural life, as were the social roles – citizen, farmer, daughter, son, wife, husband, mother, father, etc – advocated by the settlement programmes, and implemented under the watchful tutelage of administrators and other government personnel. The Italian Fascist new towns offer an unusually transparent instance of the simultaneous naming and dismantling of tradition that has characterized onslaughts of modernity. In general, scholars, politicians, and administrators in Fascist Italy identified, manipulated, and reinvented traditions within various state programmes intended to rationalize and centralize Italian institutions – i.e., to modernize and detraditionalize how Italians lived.5 Overall, such programmes (including the new towns) aimed to increase the population’s economic productivity and political loyalty to the state, and this entailed reducing Italians’ ties to the old aristocratic order and to their regional identifications 171

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while increasing their belief in (or at least their surrender to) the ‘nation’ and its Prime Minister and dictator, Mussolini. Paradoxically, the administration’s repetitive invocations of tradition directly served new (i.e., non-traditional) political, social, spatial, and economic programmes to redirect historically entrenched (i.e., traditional) socio-economic and political relations in the lives of rural Italians. For instance, settlers in the new towns had to demonstrate allegiance as they had done ‘traditionally’, but rather than remaining visibly loyal to the old landowning classes, they had to direct these sentiments to the state and the organizations in charge of their settlements.6 Thus, at the same time that the government proactively altered Italian economic and political structures, it retained some of the outer, so-called ‘traditional’, indices of civic and social life that had been associated with these structures in the past – in effect, making the profound changes under way more opaque. This is especially evident in the new towns, where the de-traditionalizations imposed by the regime were routinely disguised as ‘returns’ to ‘tradition’. To some slight extent, scholars have already deciphered architectural designs in the new town centres with respect to the designs’ explicit quotations of ‘traditional’ elements in the service of modernist agendas. But even more than the town centres’ civic buildings, it was the newly-settled farmers’ houses which embodied Fascist designs for the physical environments of Italians who had uprooted themselves from their various regions of origin.7 The houses seemed ‘traditional’, and yet, did not allude unambiguously to a particular ‘tradition’ – i.e., to a single Italian region. Just as settlers had to overcome differences in dialect and social-cultural patterns in order to live among their neighbours, the apparently ‘traditional’ qualities conveyed by the new house designs were, in fact, part of a generic neo-vernacular architecture that ultimately attenuated the specificities of various Italian (regional) ‘traditions’ (Figures 8.1 and 8.2). In addition, the self-conscious ‘traditional’ appearance of the houses belied the ways in which they provided tangible vehicles for the state’s break with past patterns of Italian agrarian life, and facilitated new tactics of invasiveness into the daily lives of individuals. The Fascist apparatus penetrated the Italian private sphere in many ways. In urban settings, Italians were almost constantly exposed to propaganda – not only in the press,

8.1 1930s settlement programme farmhouse, Apulia region 172

Tradition as a means to the end of tradition: Farmers’ houses in Italy’s fascist-era new towns

8.2 1930s settlement programme farmhouse, Pontine area

but also in portraits and quotations of Mussolini on town walls, and in the amplified sound of Mussolini’s speeches in the streets. In their houses and apartments, though, they could count on some measure of privacy, especially if they were judicious in their choices of friends and discreet in front of their children. Meanwhile, for many rural dwellers, Italy’s political upheavals were remote, and it took some time for Fascism’s implications to become clear. The resettlement organizations (and by extension, the government), however, shaped the domestic sphere in the new towns even before settlers took possession of their houses. Settlers encountered the state and its politics at home, even before reaching the street, the piazza, the school, or the town hall. In the farmers’ houses in particular, the number and placement of designated sleeping areas implemented the administrators’ goal of controlling ‘promiscuity’, i.e., excessive contact, between the sexes and between humans and livestock. In other words, farmers in the new settlements were both more intimately and more inescapably exposed to the regime’s goals than most other Italians. Rather than focusing on the new towns’ architectural modernism, this chapter views them as particularly legible sites of the Italian Fascist government’s quest for modernity, with respect to themes of hygiene, political control, and uniformity.8 The ‘traditions’ which planners relied on for the designs of the new towns were as contrived as the new Italian ‘modern’ that was staged there – which is why both terms bear quotation marks throughout most of this chapter. Not that these ‘traditions’ had no basis in the Italian past; but their status as ‘traditions’ was abrupt: their ‘traditionality’ was only pronounced in conjunction (and contrast) with the modernity that the Italian government was imagining and proclaiming at the same time. As we shall see below, the reconfiguration of ‘traditional’ life in appearance was an integral part of the government’s efforts to put an end to pre-Fascist (‘traditional’) civic life.

Agricultural new towns The first phase of Fascist-era settlement programmes targeted agricultural development in 173

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marshy (and malarial) areas that were only sparsely populated. Draining the marshes and excavating new canals entailed extensive labour, as did the construction of new buildings; hired labourers did all the work, but they had to leave after completion and make way for the settlers.9 However, once the League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy’s international trade in response to Italy’s war on Ethiopia in 1935–1936, the government began to sponsor industrial and mining towns: economic self-sufficiency – autarky (l’autarchia) – required internal production of coal and textiles.10 The towns built in this second phase differed somewhat from those of the first: workers’ housing was built in towns and within reach of factories and mines. Various aspects of the new towns programme loudly echoed patterns of Roman antiquity, linking the towns to warfare on the one hand, and to a putative founder on the other. The programme’s initial mandate was to grant land to World War I veterans, just as Roman emperors and generals had granted land to returning veterans. In this respect, the agricultural programmes reiterated a distant historic pattern. Military imagery pervaded the settlements, although in fact, many non-veterans obtained land – settlers were described as waging a ‘battle for grain’ (battaglia del grano), and town insignia combined firearms with spades and other agricultural tools. In addition, each town’s foundation de novo mimicked the ancient pattern whereby a new colony’s founding was attributed to a particular individual (human or divine) – Mussolini announced the new settlement’s groundbreaking, and appeared on-site for this event or for the inauguration. In keeping with this figurative paternity over the new settlement, and with the need to tie these towns to the state rather than to particular regions, the first town was named Mussolinia after Mussolini. The next two names also gave heavy-handed indications as to the settlements’ symbolic governance: the second town was Littoria (after the Roman lictor, who accompanied Roman generals), and the third, Sabaudia (after the Savoia, modern Italy’s royal family).11 The tens of thousands of settlers endured multiple constraints – not all of them ‘traditional’. When they arrived, their houses were ready and completely furnished. They agreed to repay the building expenses over the next thirty years, at the end of which they would gain title. Meanwhile, their numbered houses, along with all their contents, belonged to the organization in charge. The rationalizing measures that shaped their daily lives included the organization’s intensive number-crunching regarding their agricultural yield in comparison to what it determined the family could keep for itself, and its control over what and how farmers sowed and when they harvested. Surveillance, meanwhile, took the form of overt patrols and covert secret informers, seeking farmers who had abandoned their posts to work for wages nearby or sold crops for cash, neither of which was permitted; and state employees searching for complaints and anti-Fascist sentiments in settlers’ letters ‘back home’. The state, in other words, was in the settlers’ patches of land, their barns, and their mailboxes. Italian small landownership itself was not especially ‘traditional’ (i.e., historically prominent). Rural Italians had more often experienced some degree of indentured servitude to, or at least dependence on, larger landowners (usually as day labourers – 174

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braccianti – or sharecroppers – mezzadri). Here too, the state’s re-adaptation of ‘traditions’ was selective in its conformity to the dominant historical patterns that it claimed to emulate. Italian political life, both before and since the unification of the Italian state in 1861, had typically been highly localized, with layered loyalties and debts to individuals who wielded great power in the immediate area. One could argue that making settlers so dependent on the settlement programmes repeated this pattern, since settlers laboured as sharecroppers for thirty years until they were able to claim title to their land. But, as the state itself boasted, the programmes aimed to change the historic pattern radically, by creating a new class of small landowners. Furthermore, the state’s agenda differed from ‘traditional’ patterns of land ownership by reaching for unprecedented levels of uniformity, centralization, transparency, and micro-management. In these respects, the ‘return’ to agricultural ‘tradition’ was anything but ‘traditional’ – even though it invoked some ‘traditions’, such as stricter gender roles, greater family size, and rural living. Before addressing the specifics of farmstead designs, let us turn to the essential, systematic pattern that held for all of the towns and borghi – agricultural and industrial alike. No two were identical, but they all contained the same institutional and architectural elements, albeit in slightly different styles and configurations, combining a formulaic representation of the agents of social order with an apparent ‘return’ to ‘tradition’. Every town contained a central piazza, a market, a Fascist-Party office, a town hall, a church, a school, a medical clinic, a supply store, offices of the Balilla youth organization, the voluntary militia (Milizia Volontaria di Sicurezza Nazionale), the maternal and child welfare organization (Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia), and an ‘after-work’ centre (Dopolavoro). Borghi held the bare essentials: the Fascist-Party office, a church, a school, a medical clinic, and the police station (Figure 8.3). Both the Fascist-Party office and the town hall typically featured towers, an explicit allusion to the towers of medieval northern Italian towns (Figure 8.4). These towers

8.3 Borgo Domenico Borzellino (Sicily). The centre-left tower extends from, and belongs to, the Fascist Party office; the church and its campanile are on the upper right. Clockwise from the Fascist Party office, buildings on the piazza housed craftsmen’s shops, the post office, the police station, the medical dispensary, the restaurant, and the school 175

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8.4 Fertilia (Sardinia)

illustrate especially well how the Fascist state, through its architects in this instance, deftly appeared to ‘return’ to ‘tradition’ while it undermined ‘traditional’ – i.e., historical, social, and political – relations. Some medieval Italian towers had stood for the relatively representative institution of the commune (comune); others had belonged to wealthy families and provided a means of competition among them.12 Both represented civic power; the difference was in whether a substantial number of citizens sanctioned this power or whether it was derived from independent wealth and the mercenary military force it could buy. The new towns’ municipal towers were associated rhetorically with the first of these two types of public power, the comune, lending them an aura of medieval autonomy and Republican values; but the Fascist-era comune was indeed a conduit of the centralized Fascist state in another guise. The towers’ interpellation of Mussolini, and therefore the state, was unequivocal. Each one had a small balcony one storey off the ground; this balcony’s sole purpose was to serve as a platform from which to harangue a mob beneath it (and it was designated by an apt neologism, arengario) (Figure 8.5). If Mussolini visited the town, he would address the crowd gathered in the piazza below from this balcony, just as he used the balcony of

8.5 Sabaudia (Pontine area) 176

Tradition as a means to the end of tradition: Farmers’ houses in Italy’s fascist-era new towns

8.6 Manhole cover, Ragusa (Sicily). The fasces is made up of a bundle of rods combined with an axe (to the right in this image). The ‘A VIII’ that appears on the left means ‘Anno 8’, i.e., ‘Year 8’, referring to the eighth year of the Fascist regime

Palazzo Venezia in Rome for his most important speeches. More often, though, figures of lesser authority addressed crowds from the balcony. But given the increasing centralization and verticalization of state power under Mussolini, anyone who made a speech from the balcony stood in for the dictator; the balcony became a metonym for Mussolini in his role as speaker, and each central piazza was a satellite of Rome’s Piazza Venezia.13 These elements were constant and predictable, but planners assembled them differently in each town plan. The key political institutions invariably occupied the largest piazza. The church might be on the central piazza, suggesting that it shared the focus of inhabitants’ lives equally with the town administration and the Fascist Party; or it might be aligned on a parallel piazza. Another measure of the importance that the design gave to the church relative to the government lay in the height of the church bell-tower as compared to the heights of the civic-building towers. Typically, where the church was off the central piazza, its bell-tower was taller, but if it shared the central public area with the Fascist Party, its tower never dominated the government’s. Beneath this manifest variety, though, the towns displayed uniformity above all. This is best illustrated by the ubiquity of the fascio littorio – the fasces, the symbol of Italian Fascism that had been appropriated from the Roman republic – in endlessly varied forms and sizes, from the drastically simplified to the ornate (Figures 8.6 and 8.7). Another striking manipulation of variety in the service of uniformity arose when monuments – signs of collective memory by definition – depicted commonalities that had been entirely absent a priori. For instance, a monument was erected to those who died in the war (who were named one by one) based on settlers’ different towns of origin, lumping together ‘martyrs’ who were buried elsewhere and had never known each other; who did not, in fact, represent any particular group or past; and who, most likely, had not spoken the same dialect. In this instance of ‘the invention of tradition’, monumental commemoration was used to perform the opposite of representing a shared memory – rather, it simultaneously invented and depicted a fictive shared history, or ‘instant history’.14 Beyond the commonalities of architecture and spatial distribution that made all the 177

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8.7 Pomezia (Pontine area): the arengario, with a fasces on either side of the door beneath it

new towns alike, the agricultural new towns had the distinction of being linked to each other under the ideological rubric of la bonifica, which means ‘land reclamation’ and ‘the drainage of marshes’ on the one hand, and ‘moral uplift’ and overall ‘improvement’ on the other. La bonifica was a master trope under Fascism, referring both to making fallow land arable and to the reclamation of Italian manpower (which had been emigrating apace) and national ‘spiritual’ potential.15 Ironically (given the repeated assertion that the agricultural settlements constituted a ‘return’ to ‘tradition’), many settlers were new to farming; nonetheless, the programme’s overwhelming rhetoric presented them as returnees, reclaimers, and – in a Catholic subtext – as being ‘redeemed’ in the very process of ‘redeeming’ the land. Relative to patterns of Italian agrarian life, settling farmers outside the towns was another departure from ‘tradition’. Italian farmers had just as often lived in villages (often walled) and travelled by day to their plots of land. But one of the most notable paradoxes of the new towns programme is that it was designed to stem urban growth in Italy. Italian cities were sprawling, and Mussolini’s government had identified Italy’s social ills with urban ‘decadence’ even more strongly than the urban hygienists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had.16 The new towns were supposed to help stem migrations to large cities and counter the cities’ physical and moral depravities. This may help explain why farmers were to live outside the town perimeters (even though industrial workers and miners in the autarkic new towns lived within). Also, administrators mentioned on occasion that placing farmers’ houses on their plots would enhance productivity – being close to the land would allow for more time working on it. Leftist Italian scholars17 have interpreted the farmers’ dispersal as a concerted effort to impede their contacts with other Italians, isolate them from each other, and thereby prevent the formation and maintenance of bonds of class solidarity – echoing Gramsci’s view that The Fascist method of defending order, property and the state tends, even more than the traditional system of compromises . . . to shatter social cohesion and the political superstructures that go with it.18 178

Tradition as a means to the end of tradition: Farmers’ houses in Italy’s fascist-era new towns

Another, American interpretation of the same problem – what sort of social configuration was facilitated in the new towns? – has been more optimistic, deeming them ‘new communities’.19 But the archival evidence does not support either hypothesis: that the programme designers or administrators intended to isolate people from one another – although this may have been an effect of some surveillance measures – or conversely, to create ‘communities’. Indeed, the archived documents do not provide a clear explanation for the farmers’ location outside the towns; they do not even confirm what scholars have assumed, namely, that the administrators and planners had an interest in the new forms of the settlers’ societal life. Other theoretical interpretations, along Foucauldian lines of panoptical planning or governmentality, or the colonization of consciousness, are likely to yield yet other provocative views of how Italian administrators understood and intended the new towns’ plans. But analyzing the agricultural settlements from the vantage point of the farmsteads, on the other hand, shifts the question from ‘why were farmers far from town?’ to ‘what kind of site was the farmer’s house?’. For the farmers, the distant town cannot have been the primary point of geographic reference, or the main setting for social or professional encounters. The farmsteads themselves were the context for the settlers’ experience, and surrounding plots and houses provided the next frame of reference – extending, beyond that, to further farms, and eventually, to the borgo and the closest town. Thus, the farmstead was the border at which the settler met the state’s programmes and intrusions, rather than the piazza or the cinema. The place of everyday contact between the farmer’s purview and the state-controlled public sphere was the house itself, where architects negotiated the careful juxtaposition of ‘tradition’ with ‘modern’ requirements, and followed the government’s wish to effect both physical and moral reforms.

Farmstead designs Outside every front door in the Pontine Marshes, sat a well; and every well’s pump was shaped like a fasces. Farmers could not help but see the Fascist government’s most important symbol when they stepped outside, and they had to handle the fasces every time they drew water (Figure 8.8). This fasces for every house blatantly signified the government’s symbolic presence in every farmstead. But the government’s architects also built in the programmes’ coercions less overtly, and yet more concretely, in the interiors of the houses. The few dwellings in the Pontine Marshes prior to the settlement programmes had been made of mud and thatch. Under Fascism, these dwellings came to epitomize the unmodern, unhygienic Italy the government wanted to modernize. Physical and moral hygiene, the key motif to the house plans, dictated a cautious distribution of rooms and rigorous separation of humans from livestock. In discussing these interior designs, architects did not mention ‘tradition’ – indeed, they overlooked the habits settlers would bring from their regions of origin. Instead, their arduous dissections and reformulations of ‘traditional’ architectural elements took place with respect to the exteriors of the new houses. 179

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8.8 Fasces-shaped well-pump, Pontine area

Architects expressed their concern with hygiene in their interior designs in terms of ‘promiscuity’ – excessive, inappropriate contact – making the parents’ bedroom less accessible to children, who were to sleep elsewhere; distinguishing children’s bedrooms according to sex;20 and creating clearly bounded stalls for livestock, as separate from the kitchen as possible. Dagoberto Ortensi, who both designed and documented such houses, listed the elements essential to this purposeful farmhouse as follows: . . . a large and comfortable kitchen, which will also serve as a dining room and living room for the whole family, situated so that from it one can watch over everything that happens in the house and in the courtyard; a minimum of three bedrooms, one for the parents, one for the sons and one for the daughters. This relatively large number is indispensable in order to abolish a dangerous promiscuity . . .21

These internal ‘building blocks’ did not refer to ‘tradition’; if anything, this rational, planned concept of the farmhouses’ interior was part of what made these designs innovative. Instead, ‘tradition’ was mentioned in the context of exterior materials and colours – in other words, in the realm of appearance. The idea of ‘the vernacular’ – the architectural ‘traditional’ – entered Italian architectural debates in the early 1930s, when it was developed by some of Italy’s modernist (or Rationalist) architects. After the rise of Italian Rationalism in the second half of the 1920s, architects had sought intellectual genealogies and justifications for the functionalist, International-Style designs they favoured. At first, their alliance with the modern movement sweeping international architecture had not been especially problematic. But by the early 1930s, with the growing alignment of the architectural 180

Tradition as a means to the end of tradition: Farmers’ houses in Italy’s fascist-era new towns

profession with the Fascist regime, theoretical architects were faced with the challenge of justifying their work in terms that were not international, but strictly national – purely ‘Italian’. For some architects, re-adapting Italy’s classical and Renaissance past was acceptable; but modernists resisted the idea of returning to architecture’s historical past for fear of seeming anti-modern and retrogressive. These architects turned instead to the vernacular as the source of a genuine, national, spontaneous Italian modern in architecture.22 This led to both an equation of the modern with the vernacular and a more counter-intuitive one, of the modern with the rural. Thus, while making the farmhouses’ interiors ‘modern’ meant applying up-to-date ideas of hygiene and social relations, making them visibly ‘modern’ from outside was synonymous with devising deliberately rural and ‘traditional’ exteriors for them. For example, Ortensi described a planned borgo in the Campania region as follows: All the buildings have very simple architectonic lines, and they respect Campanian architectural traditions. The church and the campanile will be crowned with enameled tiles from [the local town of] Vietri . . .23

Of a design for a church in Apulia, he wrote: It harks back to the magnificent, characteristic historic-artistic traditions of Apulia . . . [by using] typical regional materials, such as local stone . . . and the beautiful, warm stone of [nearby] Trani, with its special ornamental effect.24

Architects described exteriors in terms of their most superficial visual cues – ornamentation – rather than as reflections of structure or internal distribution. Most significantly, they emphasized the idea of making their new farmsteads, borghi, and towns reflect regional patterns of decoration and general external appearance, and even called for the creation of distinctive farmhouse models for different regions. In practice, though, the settlement organizations rarely carried this goal through to realization, at least in part due to their limited funds. Prominent buildings in the towns’ centres often ‘wore’ regional materials in a clear nod to ‘tradition’, but the farmsteads did not. Instead, they blended ‘typical’ elements, in a generic and impoverished neo-vernacular vocabulary. Ornamentation was not the only area affected by the organizations’ limited finances, and even some of the design’s stringent hygiene principles were at stake, as when in the Pontine Marshes . . . [t]he outdoor latrine . . . was located on the edge of the manure heap, with its discharge directed into it, but without benefit of running water; as this system, thanks to the free fall of excreta, did away with this necessity.25

In some cases, though, the organizations used architectural elements that were specific to one region in another region altogether, for no apparent financial reason.26 The question of external staircases – typical of central and southern Italy, but in the end, used elsewhere as well – exemplifies this discrepancy between architects’ wish to give their buildings a recognizable local appearance on the one hand, and what was built on the other. In 1936, the prominent rationalist architect Giuseppe Pagano wrote: 181

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. . . a knowledge of the laws of functionality and artistic respect for our imposing and littleknown heritage of wholesome and honest rural architecture . . . will give us pride in knowing the true autochthonous tradition of Italian architecture . . .27 [which in turn will] contribute to a greater knowledge on our part in facing the practical problem of new rural constructions . . . One of the important issues . . . is the perfect solution to the rural house . . . a generic solution to the modern rural house does not exist and it cannot exist, because every region . . . has its specific needs, which cannot be met with one standard house model for all of Italy . . .28 One instance in which rural building traditions offer an inexhaustible supply of aesthetic lessons is the external staircase. This element is specific to central and southern Italy, as it is allowed by the climate . . .29

Yet this distinctive regional feature ended up in another region altogether: on the Istrian peninsula (Figure 8.9). From the settlers’ point of view, their neo-vernacular rural housing looked familiar enough; but they were keenly aware of having lost details that had made their old environments home, and they did not refrain from bringing their discomfort to the attention of administrators and outsiders. A visitor to the Pontine Marshes described settlers’ reactions to their bountiful new houses: In a house of settlers from the Veneto, a woman who was accustomed to cooking between two bricks, complained about not having these . . . Settlers from Ferrara, who normally made large oven-fulls of bread, found the oven in the new house too small . . . Peasants are conservative and attached to their habits. In the house they put each thing in the place it had occupied in the previous house. Some even asked for an additional door because they were used to a door in that exact spot.30

The reinvention of ‘traditions’ in these houses, coupled with the imposition of unfamiliar measures of control on the settlers, illustrates how the appearance of traditionality in the new towns programmes directly undermined – in effect, helped to ‘end’ – traditional life and political institutions. This neutral new housing provided all the farmers with the same domestic apparatus, but it also interfered with their ability to do some of the things that revealed their region of origin – in other words, to continue living ‘traditionally’. Ultimately, these generic housing forms were just what the regime needed to best express the exact landscape, and humanscape, it was striving to design: an Italy

8.9 Podlabin (formerly Pozzo Littorio), Croatia 182

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that looked like a nation, and Italians who looked like nation-minded citizens rather than people whose regional, local identities came first.

Conclusion The observation that ‘the traditional’ has been symptomatic of ‘the modern,’ but that it has also been phantasmically evanescent in contrast to it is hardly new. The designs for farmers’ houses in Fascist Italy’s new town areas show pointedly that in some cases, the ‘ends’ of ‘tradition’ have been more complex than an exercise in nostalgia that both opposes and nourishes ‘the modern’. Italian administrators and planners gave ‘the modern’ in these settlements a ‘traditional’ appearance, thus putting a selective ‘end’ to ‘tradition’, all the while proclaiming its revival at the same time. More specifically, they ‘ended’ ‘tradition’ by parsing it into good and bad ‘traditions’: they replaced what was undesirable about ‘the traditional’ with what was desirable about ‘the modern’ – for instance, in terms of hygiene. And they incorporated what was desirable about ‘the traditional’ into what was desirable about ‘the modern’ – for instance, generic ‘vernacular’ exteriors. At a conference in 2000, Jane M. Jacobs described today’s ‘global domestic’.31 I propose that Fascist-era new town plans are one instance of crucial, early interventions in ‘the domestic’ – but a ‘national domestic’, the logical corollary to the ‘global domestic’. These patterned settlements prefigure today’s interdependent deterritorialization and globalization, on a national scale. As we have seen, the Fascist government went about reinforcing citizens’ imagination of a supra-regional (i.e., national) community by levelling and redistributing differences between regions, thus subsuming key aspects of ‘the traditional’ into ‘the national’. While we are keenly aware of such processes of deterritorialization at the turn of the twenty-first century, roughly seventy years have passed since the Fascist government devised its instruments for deliberate de- and reterritorialization, in part by reconfiguring ‘tradition’ for the sake of ‘the modern’ – leaving us to draw the jarring conclusion that ‘tradition’ has already been at an ‘end’ for quite some time.

Notes I am indebted to several institutions and colleagues for their support of this research. Fellowships at the American Academy in Rome and the Wolfsonian Foundation-Florida International University led me to begin designing the project. Since then, a grant from the Ecole Française de Rome and a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities have funded the project (any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities). The University of California at Berkeley has provided additional support in the form of grants from the Academic Senate’s Committee on Research and the Hellman Family Faculty Fund, and a Humanities Research Fellowship. In and around Latina (the former Littoria), I am very thankful to Pietro Antonelli, Andrea Bellini, Alda Dalzini, Mario De Pasquale, Antonio Pennacchi, and Alessandra Vinciguerra. Feedback from audiences to whom I have presented this material – at the Columbia University Department of Anthropology, the Columbia Seminar in Modern Italian History, the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments meetings (2000), 183

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and the conference on Italian Modernisms at Cornell University (2002) – has been valuable and highly appreciated. Individually, I wish to thank Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Catherine Brice, James D. Faubion, D. Medina Lasansky, Susan Slyomovics, and Laura Wittman. Above all, I am grateful for Brien Garnand’s insistence that he and I visit all of the new towns and look closely at each surviving fasces. 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

184

V. Rossetti, Dalle paludi a Littoria: Diario di un medico 1926–1936, Milan, Bompiani, 1937, p. 291, speaking of the inauguration of Littoria. Since the late 1970s, scholars have repeatedly named twelve new towns, at times even indicating that the government’s intention was to create as many (and no more). They are, in order of foundation: Mussolinia (1928, agricultural, now named Arboréa, western Sardinia); Littoria (1932, agricultural, now named Latina, in the Pontine Marshes area south of Rome); Sabaudia (1933, agricultural, Pontine Marshes); Pontinia (1934, agricultural, Pontine Marshes); Guidonia (1935, Air Force training base, north-east of Rome); Fertilia (1936, agricultural, in north-western Sardinia); Aprilia (1936, agricultural, Pontine Marshes); Arsia, (1936, mining, now named Rasa, on Croatia’s Istrian peninsula); Carbonia (1937, mining, south-western Sardinia); Torviscosa (1937, textile industry, between Trieste and Venice); Pomezia (1938, agricultural, Pontine Marshes); and Pozzo Littorio (1940, mining, now named Podlabin, on Croatia’s Istrian peninsula). But while scholars have repeated this a posteriori classification of ‘the’ twelve new towns with increasingly canonical consistency, it is misleading. By the regime’s end, the sponsored towns – often called ‘Mussolini’s towns’ (le città di Mussolini) – already numbered more than twelve in some accounts. For instance, one travel account included Tirrenia, a seaside town planned for both tourism and agriculture; see S. Ruinas, Viaggio per le città di Mussolini, Vicenza, Bompiani, 1938. For a similar objection, see A. Pennacchi, ‘Città nuove: questioni di metodo’, in R. Besana, C. Fabrizio Carli, L. Devoti, and L. Prisco (eds.), Metafisica costruita: Le Città di fondazione degli anni Trenta dall’Italia all’Oltremare, Milan, Touring Club Italiano, 2002, pp. 162–163. Pennacchi and Carli provide the most complete list available of the towns and hamlets, a total of seventyfour settlements, including three that are now part of Croatia. See A. Pennacchi and C. Fabrizio Carli, ‘Città nuove: proposta d’inventario’, in Besana, Carli, Devoti, and Prisco (eds.), Metafisica costruita, pp. 164–166. Most of this literature focuses on particular towns, with only a few works addressing the programs as a whole. These few all concern architecture and planning: R. Martinelli and L. Nuti, ‘Le città nuove del ventennio da Mussolinia a Carbonia’, in R. Martinelli and L. Nuti (eds.), Le città di fondazione (Atti del II convegno internazionale di storia urbanistica), Lucca, CISCU, and Venice, Marsilio, 1978, pp. 271–293; L. Nuti and R. Martinelli, Le città di strapaese: La politica di ‘fondazione’ nel ventennio, Milan, Franco Angeli, 1981; D. Ghirardo and K. Forster, ‘I modelli delle città di fondazione in epoca fascista’, in C. de Seta (ed.), Storia d’Italia, Annali 8. Insediamenti e territorio, Turin, Einaudi, 1985, pp. 628–674; D. Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989; and Besana, Carli, Devoti, and Prisco (eds.), Metafisica costruita. This chapter draws particularly on the works of Martinelli, Nuti, Ghirardo, and Ghirardo and Forster. Most publications on the towns come from the former settlement areas themselves, where local writers and scholars produce numerous works concerning the new towns’ past and present, from local perspectives. This is especially true of the Pontine area south of Rome, which holds five of the twelve towns, and was the largest of the reclamation and settlement areas. See the periodical La piazza di Latina; and the publications of Edizioni Novecento, particularly M. Vittori and A. Pennacchi (eds.), I borghi dell’Agro Pontino, Latina, Novecento, 2001. For the most interesting exception, i.e., for writing on the New Towns that is neither primarily about architecture nor about migration, see the works of A. Pennacchi. For example, Palude, second edition, Rome, Donzelli, 2000; and his essays in Limes, beginning with ‘Sabaudia’, Limes, no. 1, 1998, pp. 309–318. See W. E. Simeone, ‘Fascists and Folklorists in Italy’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 91, 1978, pp. 543–557; V. De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 201–216 especially; and S. Cavazza, Piccole patrie: Feste popolari tra regione e nazione durante il fascismo, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1997. Some

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6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

festivals from earlier eras were revived and/or reinvented under Fascism, such as the well-known Palio di Siena. In another example of the simultaneous destruction and invention, cataloguing, and preservation of traditional aspects of Italian life, numerous new ‘ethnographic’ (or folklore) museums were created in Italy during this period, while ‘picturesque’ old neighbourhoods in Italian cities were targeted for demolition. Different organizations were charged with developing the settlements, according to the kind of economy they had to create. The National Veterans’ Association (Opera Nazionale Combattenti, or ONC) oversaw most of the agricultural developments. Most settlers came from the Italian north-east, the Veneto and Ferrarese areas in particular. On these themes, see P. Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, MIT Press, 1989; and D. G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994. The strictly agricultural towns, with dependent borghi, were Mussolinia, Littoria, Sabaudia, Pontinia, Fertilia, Aprilia, and Pomezia. Additional agricultural borghi were built in Sicily and Apulia. The autarkic towns were Arsia, Carbonia, Torviscosa, Pozzo Littorio, along with a few smaller developments. Perhaps the most memorable Italian invention of the period was Lanital, a woollike substance derived from cow’s milk. The name ‘Littoria’ evokes the Fascist era as unequivocally as ‘Mussolinia’ does. After World War II, both towns were renamed, as Latina and Arboréa. On reiterations of medieval and other historical urban forms in the Fascist new towns, see Ghirardo and Forster, ‘I modelli delle città di fondazione in epoca fascista’; Ghirardo, Building New Communities; and D. Ghirardo, ‘City and Theater: The Rhetoric of Fascist Architecture’, Stanford Italian Review, special issue, J. Schnapp and B. Spackman (eds.), Fascism and Culture, vol. 8, no. 1–2, 1990, pp. 165–194. On the Fascist-era reinvention of medieval urban cores in Tuscany, see D. Medina Lasansky, ‘Tableau and Memory: The Fascist Revival of the Medieval/Renaissance Festival in Italy’, The European Legacy, vol. 4, no. 1, 1999, pp. 26–53; and D. Medina Lasansky, The Perfect Past: Reshaping the Late Medieval/Early Renaissance City in Fascist Italy, University Park, Penn State Press, 2004. This pattern held equally for the farming settlements built in the Italian colonies under Fascism, no matter how small: see F. Cresti, ‘Edilizia ed urbanistica nella colonizzazione agraria della Libia (1922–1940)’, Storia Urbana, vol. 11, no. 40, 1987, pp. 189–231; Ghirardo, Building New Communities; P. G. Massaretti, ‘La colonizzazione agraria in Africa orientale italiana’, in G. Gresleri, P. G. Massaretti, and S. Zagnoni (eds.), Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940, Venice, Cataloghi Marsilio, 1993, pp. 243–255; G. Gresleri, ‘La ‘Libia Felix’ e i contadini di Balbo’, in Gresleri, Giorgio Massaretti, and Zagnoni (eds.), Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940, pp. 303–311; H. M. Larebo, The Building of an Empire: Italian Land Policy and Practice in Ethiopia 1935–1941, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994; K. von Henneberg, ‘The Construction of Fascist Libya: Modern Colonial Architecture and Urban Planning in Italian North Africa (1922–1943)’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1996; and M. Fuller, Colonial Constructions: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism in the Mediterranean and East Africa, London, Routledge, 2004. Both the expression and the description of the monument come from H. A. Millon, ‘Some New Towns in Italy in the 1930s’, in H. A. Millon and L. Nochlin (eds.), Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 1978, p. 332. On invented traditions, see E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983. On bonifica, see R. Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, pp. 4–6. See G. Zucconi, La città contesa: Dagli ingegneri sanitari agli urbanisti (1885–1942), Milan, Jaca Book, 1989; and Horn, Social Bodies. Especially Nuti and Martinelli, Le città di strapaese. In D. Forgacs (ed.), The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935, New York, New York University Press, 2000, p. 148. My thanks to Antonio Pennacchi for our discussions of this point in 2000 and 2001. 185

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19. See Ghirardo, Building New Communities. 20. Cf. J. Donzelot, The Policing of Families, translated by R. Hurley, New York, Pantheon Books, 1979. 21. D. Ortensi, Edilizia rurale: Urbanistica di centri comunali e di borgate rurali, second edition, Rome, Casa Mediterranea, 1941, pp. 511–516. 22. Excellent examples are P. Marconi, ‘Architetture minime mediterranee e architettura moderna’, Architettura ed Arti Decorative, vol. 9, no. 1, 1929, pp. 27–44; G. Michelucci, ‘Fonti della moderna architettura italiana’, Domus, vol. 5, no. 56, 1932, pp. 460–461; and G. Pagano and G. Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana, Milan, Hoepli Quaderni della Triennale, 1936. 23. Ibid., p. 464. 24. Ibid., p. 490. 25. V. Di Lembo, ‘Tipologia della casa rurale’, in Vittori and Pennacchi (eds.), I borghi dell’Agro Pontino, p. 164. 26. An alternative hypothesis is that the organizations deliberately kept farmhouses non-regional in appearance in order to minimize the settlers’ sense of regional affiliation. I have not yet found material substantiating this, however. 27. Pagano and Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana, p. 6. 28. Ibid., p. 22. 29. Ibid., p. 71. 30. C. Alvaro, Terra nuova: Prima cronaca dell’Agro Pontino, Rome, Novissima, 1934, p. 41. 31. J. M. Jacobs, ‘The Global Domestic: Deterritorializing Globalization’, paper presented at the IASTE 2000 conference ‘The End of Tradition?’ in Trani, Italy, October 12–15, 2000.

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Cultural identity and architectural image in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town

Chapter 9

Cultural identity and architectural image in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town Fabio Todeschini and Derek Japha

Foucault once suggested that the study of social phenomena in pathological societies sometimes reveals clearly what is elsewhere less obvious. If this is so, perhaps it is because of the raw instrumentality that seems to prevail in such contexts. This chapter examines an instance of such raw instrumentality. It draws from, and is intended to contribute to, a rich scholarly literature showing just how situational and fluid South African identities have been, and how various and even bizarre were the ways in which they were constructed, thereafter to be imposed, rejected, or assumed by the operation of coercion, choice, or unselfconscious acculturation.1 This chapter deals with the conservation of Bo-Kaap, a residential enclave on the fringe of the Cape Town city centre, which was established in the second half of the eighteenth century and developed over the next 150 years. It survived the urban iconoclasms of apartheid only because of a discourse that presented it as the traditional environment of an ethnic identity that should be recognized and protected from a municipality intent on modernist urban renewal. This was a discourse created by two aligned groups: those whose primary concern was to secure recognition of this ethnic identity, and those whose primary concern was to save the physical environment of Bo-Kaap. The latter group derived from the former a cultural argument against modernist renewal; and in exchange they provided a technical case that could be deployed in the offices of state bureaucrats. Subsequently, the intervention of the department charged with the implementation of state racial-segregation policies overcame the resistance of the municipality, and forced the initiation of a programme for the restoration and, in significant measure, reconstruction of Bo-Kaap. This chapter will make the case that this programme substantially remade BoKaap in the idealized physical image propagated by the culturalist preservationists. The story that the chapter tells interweaves two themes: the conflict between the architectural and urbanistic values of modernism and tradition, of the kind so often evoked by urban renewal anywhere in the world; and the playing out of a peculiarly South 187

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African Orientalist constitution of an exotic other, in an environment ruled by essentialist conceptions of ethnicity, culture, and tradition.

Background The cultural roots of Cape environments such as Bo-Kaap were complex. Between 1652 and 1806 the Cape was controlled by the Dutch, and its colonial population was drawn from much of the Hanseatic League as well as from Holland, other Low Countries, and France.2 There was also a diverse population of slaves – of whom we will say more later. With the English occupation of the early-nineteenth century, an already-diverse gene pool was further enriched by the arrival of British immigrants. And then, as the nineteenth century progressed, dispossessed Khoisan also increasingly made their way into the colonial towns. The physical environment these people created and shared reflected cultural influences from the two colonizing powers and the homelands of the various immigrant populations (Figure 9.1). Significantly absent in this environment, given what follows, was cultural influence from the places of origin of slaves.3 Cape Town’s builders, however, were limited by many local climatic, economic, and technological factors and could not simply reproduce imported images of settlement. This and its complex cultural roots made architecture at the Cape distinctive, nowhere more so than in Bo-Kaap, the town’s first area of huurhuisjes – small dwellings built by speculators for rental to those of modest means. Prior to Bo-Kaap’s appearance on the town landscape, wealth and urban location were only loosely related, in that the dwellings of a wide spectrum of colonial society shared the same streets. The new spatial pattern manifested in Bo-Kaap was a response to an accelerating immigration rate: the population quadrupled between 1756 and 1806. These immigrants, mainly European mercenaries and artisans, created new housing demands, to which BoKaap was one of several responses in the town. The shortage of modest housing for rental was exacerbated by emancipation in 1834, after which many ex-slaves left the premises of their former masters to seek their own accommodation.4 The booming rental market, initially financed in part with slave compensation money, was then sustained in the later nineteenth century by further immigration during the diamond and gold rushes and the two Anglo-Boer wars.

9.1 View looking across Bo-Kaap to the center of Cape Town; photo by William Millard, 1859 188

Cultural identity and architectural image in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town

9.2 Detail of 1762 drawing by Johannes Rach, titled ‘Gezight van Cabo de Goede Hoop . . . na het lewen getekend [drawn from life]’. Note the first block of small houses in Bo-Kaap visible in the left background

The growth pattern of Bo-Kaap and its character can be seen in accompanying historical maps and photos (Figures 9.2 to 9.8). However, by the 1930s Bo-Kaap had become run-down, decrepit, and overcrowded. Threatened with demolition, it only managed to avoid the fate of its sister inner-city area, District Six, because of a discourse that presented it as the traditional environment of an ethnic identity called ‘Cape Malay’ (see Figure 9.9).5 This was an identity sufficiently exotic to be thought able to show a country obsessed with difference what it was to have the great desideratum of apartheid, an own culture, an ethnos, the subject of South Africa’s curious brand of anthropology, volkekunde.6

The construction of Malay identity The term ‘Malay’, as used in South Africa, had roots in slavery but no actual ethnic significance.7 By the early-nineteenth century, 63,000 slaves had been imported to the Cape, in approximately equal numbers from India, Africa, Madagascar, and Southeast Asia, with less than 1 per cent from what is now Malaysia. In addition to people from the Indonesian Archipelago, Indian Ocean Basin, and other sources, slaves included Abyssinians, Arabs, Burmese, Bouginese, Chinese, Iranians, Japanese, Indians from Bengal and the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts, and Sri Lankans.8 This diversity required some shared means of communication, which was at first satisfied by the trading languages of the Indian Ocean basin, Melayu and MalayoPortuguese, the use of which at the Cape was probably what gave the term ‘Malay’ its local currency. After about 1770 these languages were steadily replaced by the creolized Dutch which was to become Afrikaans; among the earliest recorded written instances of which were Islamic religious texts penned in Arabic script.9 This is an indicator of another ingredient in Cape slave identity, Islam. Islam was brought to the Cape in the seventeenth century by indentured labourers from Amboyna in the Molucca Islands and by Indonesian political prisoners, but became common only around the beginning of the nineteenth century, at which time it was spread mainly by 189

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9.3 Plan of Cape Town, drawn by Van der Graaf, Barbier, and Thibault in 1786, highlighting the block of houses depicted by Rach, and showing proposals for the expansion of Bo-Kaap that were on the table at the time

Indian Muslim slaves from Bengal, the Malabar Coast, and the Indian interior.10 Throughout the nineteenth century the term ‘Malay’ was used to refer to Muslims of whatever origin, including, according to contemporary commentators, ‘Arabs, Mozambicans, Khoi, Christian perverts and blooming Englishwomen’, the latter sometimes described as having ‘gone Malay’.11 During the first half of the twentieth century, ‘Malay’ became a self-descriptive term used by many Afrikaans-speaking Muslims with free-black or slave roots, who hoped that what was accepted by whites as an elite black identity would bring advantages in a racist context.12 This position, propounded by cultural bodies such as the Cape Malay Association, came to be known as ‘Malayism’.13 Together with Malayists, a key role in the construction of the ‘Malay’ identity was played by I. D. Du Plessis, poet, author, and academic at the University of Cape Town, friend and acquaintance of several Nationalist ministers and prime ministers and a future high official in the Nationalist administration.14 Du Plessis’ interests in ‘Malay’ culture went back to before 1930, when his work on Dutch folksong had led him to ‘Malay’ choirs, ironically then the purest repository of traditional Dutch song in South Africa. He completed a doctoral dissertation on these songs, which made him a widely acknowledged expert on ‘Malay’ life in general.15 Although Du Plessis knew of the diverse origins of Cape slaves, his academic and literary texts nevertheless set out to make the case that ‘Cape Malays’ were a distinct ethnic group with a shared heritage, physiognomy, and group character, who, while not racially pure, had derived their most distinctive features from Southeast Asia.16 The ancestors of the Cape Malays, according to Du Plessis, were drawn not from the Orang Laut, the uncivilized men of the soil, or the Orang Benua, the semi-civilized men of the sea, but from the Orang Melayu, the Malay Men, the Javanese, Sudanese, and Balinese who constituted the civilized Malays with a culture, literature, and religion.17 These men, so we are told, were small in stature with olive skins, flattish faces, small noses, hands, and feet, and thin legs. They were introspective, polite, kind to women, 190

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children, and animals, inclined to speak slowly, to be passive and indolent, but with a tendency, when aroused, to lose all self-control and run amok. Cape Malays, however, were bigger, with aquiline features resulting from Arab infiltration, but retained much of the temperament of the East, for example, Oriental reserve and fatalism, though less of the inclination to run amok. Malays, for Du Plessis, were a social asset, ‘n stortvloed van kleur’ (a flooding shower of colour), in the city, who, as the trusted servants of the old settlers, brought quaintness and exoticism without political risk.18 They had kept the group values of honesty, industry, and respect for authority; and like every people, their identity had always been rooted in a traditional terrain: the semi-Eastern environment they had made in the Malay Quarter, Bo-Kaap, with its distinctive flat-roofed houses, the centre of Malay life, just as London is the centre of English life. These literary musings are significant because Du Plessis was about to become a high official in a state in which ethnic identities were demarcated and separated by law, therefore well placed to impose his thought far beyond the boundaries of the poem and the text. The impetus for him to do so was that by the early 1940s the ‘Malay Quarter’, traditional home of the ‘Cape Malays’, was facing obliteration following the promulgation of the Slums Act by the South African state and a new zoning scheme by the Cape Town City Council.

9.4 Plan of Cape Town by George Thompson, 1827, with the block pattern on Bo-Kaap more or less established, and with houses by then populating far more blocks

Blocking renewal Throughout the early 1930s there had been constant agitation in the Cape Town press about slums. The focus of much of this was on three inner-city working-class areas: the Jerry Street precinct, District Six, and Bo-Kaap.19 The passage of the Slums Act in 1934, partly as a result of representations to the national government by the Cape Town City Council, conferred wide powers on local authorities to intervene in such areas.20 The city immediately began to declare slums and arrange for their demolition so that the land could be sold for commercial use or redeveloped with social housing. The city 191

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wanted to replace eighteenth- and nineteenth-century terrace housing in slum areas such as Bo-Kaap with so-called ‘workmen’s flats’, three- or four-storey walk-up apartment blocks, laid out using principles derived from the garden suburb theory that was then in the process of becoming the dominant paradigm for new development throughout the city. The adoption in 1941 of a new zoning scheme was an equally real threat. To the extent that the scheme can be said to have had a theoretical basis, this was a watereddown version of modernist urbanism. It targeted many older working-class areas in Cape Town, manipulating permissible uses, floor-area ratios, and site footprints – and therefore potential land values – to promote multi-storey buildings set back from the streets, freestanding in open space (the inverse of the built form of Bo-Kaap and similar places in the city). The zoning scheme designated much of Bo-Kaap for commercial development, and the remainder for apartments. Thus, by the early 1940s Bo-Kaap was a designated slum; about 150 houses had been expropriated, comprising most of the eighteenthand nineteenth-century housing stock; the city’s zoning scheme had targeted it for redevelopment; and a massive renewal scheme was on the table.21 This was the background to the formation of the so-called ‘Group for the Preservation of the Malay Quarter’, led by Dr. E. Jansen, with Du Plessis as a key member, and a number of prominent citizens recruited to the cause.22 In 1943, with the destruction of Bo-Kaap seemingly imminent, two architect members of the group produced the first conservation proposal for the area.23 The group then solicited the involvement of the national statutory heritage body, the Historical Monuments Commission (HMC), which immediately allied itself with the group, and communicated to the city its interest in the

9.5 Detail of Snow plan of Cape Town, 1862, showing the texture of row houses and courtyards in Bo-Kaap. This was the first comprehensive measured survey of Cape Town 192

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area of Bo-Kaap covered by the group’s conservation plan. The HMC stated its view that this area should contain a large number of representative examples of what it called ‘Old Malay architecture’, and asked the city to collaborate with the group in developing and realizing proposals for conservation.24 In 1946 a block of seventeen houses was jointly identified by the group and the city as a project for restoration. This project was completed in 1950 with national housing funds, which had to be supplemented from rates because the costs ran well over budget and over national cost norms for public housing. This cost overrun hardened the city’s already strong anti-conservation stance, and even before the project was completed, it became apparent that the group/HMC alliance and the city had entirely different agendas for the area as a whole. To the former, the seventeen-house scheme was merely a pilot project, the first step in the restoration of Bo-Kaap as a whole. To the city, for reasons that were both economic and ideological, this single block would ideally constitute the sum total of all restoration work, and the rest of Bo-Kaap would be demolished and replaced with new housing, or the land would be sold. This difference led to a decade of tension, in which the balance of power was such that neither party could prevail. Although in theory the HMC had the power to block the city by declaring Bo-Kaap a historical monument, problems with the affordability of restored housing and the availability of capital funding for the restoration itself made this less than straightforward. Moreover, the HMC knew well that implementing a restoration project in Bo-Kaap without the city’s cooperation would be virtually impossible; and while it had the legal power to protect buildings, it could not enforce cooperation. While the city at times threatened to flatten Bo-Kaap and sell the land, it was also in a bind. It could not demolish properties without HMC consent until they had deteriorated to the point where they could be formally condemned as unsafe, and in terms of the Slums Act expropriated land could not be sold until the buildings on it had been demolished. It could also not entirely ignore the threat of HMC-invoked broader state action. Bursts of

9.6. Plan of Cape Town, 1903, author unknown, showing the expansion of the two working-class areas on either side of the town, District Six and Bo-Kaap 193

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9.7 Panoramic view of Bo-Kaap, author unknown, c.1900

activity and interchange were therefore followed by periods of stalemate, during which the physical condition of the area continued to decline. This balance of power was altered by the increasing willingness of the central state to intervene. The environment for such intervention had been radically altered by the Nationalist victory in the general election of 1948, which had placed the politics of ethnic identity on the national agenda even more firmly than before. Moreover, in 1951 Du Plessis had accepted the position of Commissioner of Coloured Affairs in the newly formed Department of Coloured Affairs, which placed him in the perfect position to pursue his agenda for the ‘Malays’ from within government. After the promulgation of the Group Areas Act in 1950, with which the new government created the legislative framework for the connection of space and ethnicity by fiat, and almost certainly at Du Plessis’ instigation, the state made it clear that it intended to proclaim Bo-Kaap a ‘Malay Group Area’.25 This was done in 1957, with the stipulation that by 1962 no one other than a designated Malay could own property there. This proclamation forced the city to rethink that part of its plan which involved the sale of land for commercial use; but it did not stop the demolition of condemned properties. Nor did it prevent the city from pursuing its redevelopment agenda, because, in terms of the proclamation, new housing could be constructed, as long as it was offered only to ‘Malays’. Until the early 1960s the city’s view remained, as the city engineer put it to a convention of conservationists in 1959, that overzealous antiquarian enthusiasm should not be allowed to obstruct change; that the bulk of the houses in the Old Malay Quarter were in an advanced state of decay and were unsuitable as modern homes; and that large sums of public money should not be spent on restoring ‘anachronistic incongruities’.26 Urban renewal therefore remained the city’s desired alternative; but, given the HMC’s interest in Bo-Kaap, it was apparent that the area could not be transformed as radically as had been proposed in the 1930s. So, in the late 1950s the city produced a new, and supposedly more sensitive, design proposal, with townhouses rather than apartments.27 While the new proposal may have been more sensitive, it was nevertheless redevelopment, and was thus unacceptable to Du Plessis and his traditionalist allies in the HMC, who decided to raise the stakes for the city 194

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9.8 Bo-Kaap street scene, c.1900

by seeking to increase central-state pressure to block redevelopment for good. The impetus for this tactic was a reorganization of state ministerial portfolios to make the bureaucratic apparatus controlling spatial segregation more efficient. Du Plessis’ department, Coloured Affairs, which had previously fallen under the Ministry of the Interior, became a separate ministerial portfolio in 1960, with Du Plessis’ position upgraded to full secretary; and a new department, bizarrely named Community Development, was created in 1961 to coordinate the implementation of the Group Areas Act.28 Both Coloured Affairs and this new department fell under a single minister, P. W. Botha, so this rearrangement of state power gave Du Plessis’ new boss legal control of the key aspects of state policy directly affecting municipal actions in Bo-Kaap. This meant that the somewhat fragile legal powers vested in the heritage agency could be bolstered by those of a state department with real teeth, if necessary. Du Plessis made it clear to the HMC that, in light of the perceived recalcitrance of the city, he was prepared to take whatever steps were necessary to bring about effective central-government intervention,29 and soon after Botha’s appointment, Du Plessis arranged the first of several meetings between members of the HMC and Botha, who professed his support. The HMC’s first move in this new context of cooperation was to notify the city that it intended to recommend the declaration of the entire area covered by the Group Areas proclamation as a national monument.30 Given previous difficulties with restoration costs, the HMC also approached the state agency responsible for allocating national housing funds to public housing projects, the National Housing Commission (NHC), to explore ways by which the restoration project could be funded. This notice was initially sufficient to prompt the city to abandon the renewal scheme and, in the early 1960s, to collaborate with the HMC’s architectural advisors on a compromise proposal, in which only the façades of Bo-Kaap houses would be retained, with new houses constructed behind them.31 The logic was that this would overcome NHC objections to using national housing funds for pure restoration. 195

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In 1965, however, mainly for economic reasons, the city backed out of the arrangement, and a full plenary meeting of council approved a proposal to sell the land the city had expropriated to individual Malays, which would have meant the end of a coordinated restoration scheme. Botha, whose responsibilities as Minister of Community Development had by then expanded to include the national housing programme, the implementation of the Slums Act, and ‘urban renewal’,32 secured the promise of a loan from the National Housing Commission and helped to obtain cabinet approval for a special top-up grant to cover the difference between the expected restoration cost and statutory cost norms for new housing. He then threatened the city that unless it executed a restoration project, the state would expropriate and restore the Bo-Kaap properties itself and transfer them back to the city, with or without its consent, and recover the costs.33 In the face of this, the city capitulated and agreed to restore/reconstruct Bo-Kaap under the supervision of HMC advisors and a specially formed committee set up by the HMC’s parent department, Cultural Affairs, of which Du Plessis was a member.

Conserving the Malay Quarter The conservation programme that was implemented as a result of Botha’s intervention had two aspects: replacing the existing community with one designated ‘Malay’; and reconstructing the environment to represent this ‘Malay’ community with a supposedly typical ‘Malay’ architectural setting. Du Plessis had made the occasional claim that Bo-Kaap had always housed ‘Malays’, but no one – not even Du Plessis himself – seems to have taken this seriously. The

9.9 Muezzin in Bo-Kaap, artist unknown 196

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conventional wisdom, repeated by author after author, was that Bo-Kaap had initially been inhabited by European immigrant soldiers and artisans and some free blacks, but that after emancipation, the original inhabitants had moved out, to be replaced by ‘Malay’ ex-slaves, who had come to dominate the population by about 1850. This assertion was made repeatedly with no evidence adduced other than the proliferation of mosques in the area, of which there were once nine. Achmat Davids, himself a Muslim, an inhabitant of Bo-Kaap and the first historian to examine actual evidence, such as nineteenth-century street directories and local oral tradition, tells a different story. According to Davids, up until the late 1920s Bo-Kaap was racially mixed: a place where, as he put it, ‘the poor of all races had shared a common neighborhood’.34 Davids also concluded that the number of mosques in the area had as much to do with the fractiousness of local Muslim congregations and their propensity to split as with a burgeoning Muslim population.35 If anything, Bo-Kaap was home to the poor of various backgrounds for even longer than Davids suggested. A survey carried out by the Medical Officer of Health on the block of seventeen houses selected for the original restoration project revealed that 40 per cent were ‘Malays’ (i.e., Muslim), 31 per cent were Africans, 27 per cent were Cape Coloureds (that is, Christians), and the balance were Indians.36 This kind of neighbourhood was a prime target for apartheid removals, as regularly made clear by Du Plessis after he became Commissioner for Coloured Affairs.37 Ever since Du Plessis first started to write about the Malay Quarter, he had blamed the supposed social ills of the area not on poverty in general but on the presence of outsiders, particularly Africans, suggesting that while there may have been various social problems, this was not the fault of ‘Malays’. Malays, as Du Plessis would have it, remembered the days when life in the Quarter was serene and good, when oleanders and fig trees lined the streets and the autumn haze drifted up from the city and mingled with the scents and sounds of evening. But these memories, he suggested, had been crushed between the upper and nether millstones of conflicting cultures. Where once there had been peace, now there were raucous voices and drunken brawls: not Malay voices or Malay brawls, but disturbances due to the influx of natives and other undesirables.38 The theme that conservation therefore required not just preservation of Malay architecture but also reconstitution of the now diluted Malay community in an ethnically pure neighbourhood was taken up by the HMC. When, in a memorandum presented to the Minister of the Interior in 1961, one of its members made the case for proclaiming the Malay Quarter a national monument, he sold the need for physical rehabilitation on the grounds that restoration was intimately tied up with the development of the Malay Group Area as a whole. He pointed out to the minister that the city had been trying to accommodate ‘Malays’ outside of the quarter rather than inside it, and that this was a direct negation of the object of ‘preserving the pride and contentment of a particular racial group, as envisaged under the Group Areas Act’. He reminded the minister that the government had already intervened in other cities in the interests of realizing its Group Areas policy.39 The HMC also wrote to the local Group Areas Development Board stating 197

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that strenuous efforts were being made to ensure the preservation of the Malay Quarter, and that it was necessary to clear out large numbers of Bantu, ‘whose invasion of the area had a direct bearing on the preservation of its spirit and traditions’.40 The correlation between physical conservation and the presence in the area of only those whose culture it was purported to represent was stressed in an even more ominous way in 1964 when the Department of Community Development told the city that it wished to see the conservation programme proceed; that it now had the legal machinery to control the city’s actions affecting the physical fabric in Bo-Kaap; and that it was about to take steps to remove ‘disqualified persons’ from the area. The city was requested to provide lists of the racial designations of Bo-Kaap inhabitants, and to inform the department of its plans to resettle those other than ‘Malays’ elsewhere. This letter was copied to the HMC.41 The irony of this, not entirely lost on the HMC, was that in terms of apartheid race classifications, a Muslim was a Malay only if living in a Malay Group Area. Muslims outside such areas were classified as Cape Coloureds. Part of the conservation problem was therefore to find suitable Malays who could take the place of those removed. Since the capacity to execute a restoration programme was tied to funding and affordability, people had to be found who were not only Malay and willing to move to the Malay Quarter, but who fell within the income guidelines accepted by the NHC for state subsidized housing. Du Plessis’ department conducted a search for such persons, and provided the HMC with a list.42 The physical conservation and reconstruction of Bo-Kaap was to take twenty-five years from the date of the Botha ultimatum. In 1965 the core of Bo-Kaap was declared a national monument. Fifty-two houses were restored or reconstructed in the early 1970s under HMC supervision (most houses were repaired – in some cases extensively – but a few were entirely reconstructed, and in some cases only the façades were kept). Finally, in the mid-1980s a few more houses were restored and about one hundred sites were identified for entirely new houses, the existing buildings having collapsed or deteriorated beyond repair. Sixty-seven houses were built by the city, and the remainder of the sites were sold to individuals designated as Malays, with restrictions imposed on the permissible form of buildings on them. New houses on many of these sites have been completed by their owners or are under construction, and some sites are still vacant. Thus, of the 175odd buildings in the historic core of Bo-Kaap that were affected by the three conservation projects, about sixty-five were restorations/renovations and the rest entirely new buildings. These projects, as mapped on Figure 9.10, gave Bo-Kaap its current form and subtly changed the physical fabric to match the rewritten social history. To understand the nature of the change, we need to return to the urban and architectural history of the area. In the context of Cape Town’s historical development, there was nothing culturally or environmentally unusual about Bo-Kaap. The street pattern was the same as that of other contemporary urban extensions, as shown in a plan of 1854 (Figure 9.11), where the New Market area and the first blocks of District Six are also shown. Over the years Bo-Kaap buildings were generally typical of their periods. Initially, some were thatched, such as the oldest surviving Bo-Kaap building, Spolander House 198

Cultural identity and architectural image in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town

9.10 The rectangle in the map shows blocks which were part of Bo-Kaap housing but were redeveloped for business and commercial uses by virtue of the zoning scheme

(Figure 9.12). However, after several devastating fires in the eighteenth century, some the result of slave arson, the Dutch administration promulgated a regulation prohibiting the use of thatch in town. Since there was no other locally available roofing material from which pitched roofs could be constructed, flat roofs became practically inevitable throughout the city, including in Bo-Kaap.43 Because of this problem with roofing materials, even English builders were initially forced to use the flat-roof form in the first decades of English occupation, although this did not correspond to the English image of what a house should be. Flat roofs remained typical of Cape Town urban building until slate was imported in quantity from the late 1820s onwards, and continued to be employed in modest buildings until the advent of corrugated iron in the 1850s made cheap pitched roofs feasible. Corrugated iron, of course, also made a waterproof flat roof feasible for the first time, so flat-roofed houses continued to be built alongside those with pitched roofs. The earliest flat-roofed houses in Bo-Kaap, like those in other low-income areas, were usually single rather than double storied, with two- or three-bay plans. Many had Cape-

9.11 Plan of Cape Town 1854, unknown author 199

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9.12 Spolander House, Bo-Kaap

Dutch details of the kind found in buildings of similar dates throughout the town. Some had rectilinear parapets of the type described as ‘neoclassical’; others had the curvilinear parapets sometimes categorized locally as ‘rococo’ (Figures 9.13 and 9.14). They had special front doors and often the large sash windows typical of the Dutch period, with small square panes, fixed top sashes, and the windows set flush with the outer wall face. Later flat-roofed houses had the typical hybrid forms of the early English period, with elegant Georgian and Regency double sliding sash windows set back in the reveals, double eight- or six-panelled doors with fanlights, and plaster details not found in Cape Dutch building, such as rusticated plaster and quoins on corners and around windows. After the mid-nineteenth century, new Bo-Kaap buildings took the international colonial forms of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, typically with verandas (Figures 9.15). The location of these house types in Bo-Kaap was the logical consequence of its historical development pattern. The core of Bo-Kaap, built prior to 1850, had mainly flatroofed houses. Outside this area, buildings were more diverse, and even within it, early houses were occasionally replaced and were also sometimes embellished with details that

9.13 Eighteenth-century ‘Cape Dutch’ house, BoKaap 200

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9.14 Mid-nineteenth century house, Bo-Kaap

subsequently became fashionable. The range of building types in the area around the oldest core can be seen in Figure 9.16, a panorama of the Strand Street end of Bo-Kaap, also showing flat-roofed houses with added verandas. No house type, including the flatroofed house, presented in the Du Plessis discourse as the ‘Malay’ traditional house, was linked to any particular cultural group in the town, as Figures 9.17 to 9.20 show. This history notwithstanding, the restoration/reconstruction subtly changed the landscape of Bo-Kaap by privileging the flat-roofed house, with its supposedly Eastern character, to capture an idealized image of Malay exoticism. The power of this image recurs in every conservation proposal, of which two examples are shown in Figures 9.21 and 9.22, depicting designs from the 1950s and 1970s. While there is no evidence that buildings in good condition were demolished merely because they did not correspond to this idealized type, Bo-Kaap became an environment where radical intervention was dictated by circumstances as much as by desire, as the unmaintained council-owned buildings in Bo-Kaap deteriorated progressively over a period of many years. In this environment, conservationists were presented with constant decisions about what to defend and what to give up; many buildings considered salvageable were very

9.15 Row houses with verandas in Leeuwen Street, Bo-Kaap 201

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9.16 Photograph of the northern, Strand Street end of Bo-Kaap

dilapidated when work on them began and required extensive reconstruction; and between such buildings there were many gaps or building shells that had crumbled beyond repair, which had to be rebuilt from scratch. These actions – or even the lack of action – inevitably had significant consequences for the Bo-Kaap fabric. Moreover, the choices governing these actions were influenced not just by ideological considerations pertaining to Bo-Kaap’s special history, but also by conservation practice in general, which favoured radical reconstruction rather than a light touch. Nor was much value placed on the ability to distinguish between new and old work, even under close inspection. Conservation architects generally identified an ideal state or historical period, and did whatever they thought appropriate to return the building or area to that state. The additions of later periods were commonly removed. The most distinctive national case of this was the restoration of the eighteenth-century town of Tulbagh, which was completely transformed after an earthquake by the removal of nineteenthcentury additions, in particular verandas. Both the Dutch and, in the first few decades of occupation, the English built flat wall architecture at the Cape, drawing on European architectural models. Given climatic differences between the homelands and the colony, verandas were very common nineteenth-century additions, as was the case in Tulbagh. These verandas, however, completely changed the character of houses to which they were added, and many were removed in the Tulbagh restorations because they detracted from

9.17 Drawing of the Cape Town waterfront area, unknown artist, 1820 202

Cultural identity and architectural image in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town

9.18 Detail of Sherwill panorama of Cape Town, 1849

the stylistically typical.44 Similar actions occurred in Bo-Kaap, though not on the same scale.45 The impact of this action can be seen in a photograph of houses in the Loader Street area – once part of Bo-Kaap – depicting on one side a restored double storey flatfronted house and on the other a pitched-roofed house with a veranda, described as awaiting a similar restoration (Figure 9.23).46 It was also common practice to reconstruct missing architectural features. Sometimes this was done on the basis of historical evidence; sometimes the added features were entirely invented, applying general stylistic conventions. The restoration architect representing the HMC in negotiations with the city over Bo-Kaap was a well-known

9.19 Photo of Coffee Lane, a street in another working-class area in Cape Town, c.1900 203

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9.20 Houses in Simonstown, c.1900

exponent of creative restoration of this kind. In Bo-Kaap this approach to architectural restoration was extended to the urban sphere. Thus, new infill buildings between restored buildings were usually built as direct copies of other Bo-Kaap flat-roofed buildings, and where entire Bo-Kaap blocks had deteriorated to the point where they could no longer be salvaged, they were sometimes replaced with flat-roofed buildings, irrespective of their original forms (Figure 9.24). While the experiential consequences of these actions were not the same in every part of Bo-Kaap, and while the work of the 1980s was done with the aim that new work should be recognizable as such, in sum the interventions resulted in an architectural and urbanistic image of far greater homogeneity than was the case before the work was executed.

9.21 Design proposal for new houses in Bo-Kaap, 1959 204

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9.22 Sign proposal 1972

Conclusion If the goal espoused by the cultural conservationists of apartheid to construct a ‘Malay’ community in an idealized Malay setting was therefore realized, the present historical moment has brought new pressures and twists to a story not lacking in irony. Now that the Group Areas Act has been repealed and houses in Bo-Kaap can be bought and sold freely on the open market, good views, proximity to town, and quaint charm have made the area a prime target for gentrification, attractive to wealthy buyers, many of whom are not Muslim. This has brought new perspectives on the identity ‘Malay’, which is once again an identity both claimed and rejected in the tense interchanges arising from the fact that many Bo-Kaap residents now claim, as did Du Plessis, that the influx of newcomers will destroy the social fabric of the area. In response to popular anger about issues such as the prices of city-built housing, in 1995 the city planner of Cape Town commissioned a facilitation process ‘to ascertain the issues and concerns of the Bo-Kaap community’.47 This process involved forty-nine organizations and more than a hundred residents, who overwhelmingly expressed concern for the protection of what they all saw

9.23 1970s photograph of Loader Street houses 205

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9.24 New houses in BoKaap from City Council designs, 1980s

as their religious, cultural, and architectural heritage. Within this consensus, however, were significant rifts regarding how this heritage should be defined and described. For example, an organization called the Forum for Malay Culture in South Africa – formed ‘to promote Malay culture and create a living monument for the pioneers of Islam in South Africa, who had come from Malaysia’ – proposed that Bo-Kaap should be renamed ‘the Malay Quarter’. This was resisted by many Bo-Kaap residents and other Cape Muslims, for whom the suggestion was both inaccurate and an entirely unacceptable reversion to the terminology of apartheid. Feelings at a public meeting where this was discussed ran sufficiently high for it to become necessary for the provincial African National Congress leader and the Chairman of the City of Cape Town Executive Committee, both Muslims, to intervene to restore order and to negotiate a compromise.48 While it was agreed that cultural celebration of ‘Malay heritage’ would continue, and while there would be commitment to the long-term development of Bo-Kaap ‘as the cradle of our culture and as an integral part of cultural tourism’, Bo-Kaap would not be renamed. Thus, for now, it keeps its name.

Notes 1.

206

The first South African study to explore these issues, and one of the classic works on acculturation anywhere, was Mayer’s Eastern Cape study demonstrating that similar people in rural Transkei communities responded to the indignities of segregation and migrant life with two distinct identities, ‘Red’ and ‘School’, each with highly elaborated codes, practices, and different constructions of the meaning of tradition. See P. Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen, Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1971, original 1961. Other examples are a study showing how different ethnic identities were assumed by men and women in a single community; see D. Webster, ‘Abafazi Bathonga Bafihlakala: Ethnicity and Gender in a KwaZulu Border Community’, in A. Spiegel and P. McAllitster, Tradition and Transition in Southern Africa, Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1991, pp. 243–271; and a study showing how ethnic identities were brought into existence by circumstances as ephemeral as an esoteric academic dispute between missionaries as to how a group of languages should be codified; see P. Harries, ‘The Roots of Ethnicity: Discourse and the

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2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

Politics of Language Construction in South-East Africa’, African Affairs, vol. 87, no. 346, 1988, pp. 25–52. These later studies draw on obvious sources such as E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983; and E. Said, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon, 1991, original 1977. Except for two brief periods of a few years each. The contribution of slaves to Cape building culture is an interesting and much debated question of particular relevance to environments such as Bo-Kaap. While the case is strong that language and food customs, for instance, were creolized, no feature of architectural form at the Cape has been adduced by any historian of architecture as evidence of influence on local space making and building practices from any slave culture. Of course, many slaves, free-blacks and, after emancipation, ex-slaves were expert craftsmen in a range of building trades, and constructed many of the buildings in colonial Cape Town. But it seems that they built in an image that was imposed on them. The dissenting voice is the historian Robert Shell, but his case for slave influence on Cape architecture is based only on the necessity for architectural form to respond to slave arson and to security demands, not on demonstrated cultural transfers from slave places of origin. See R. Shell, Children of Bondage, Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1994, Chapter 6. Effectively, slaves were emancipated in 1838 since they were forced into four years of indentured labour even after being freed. District Six was bulldozed in one of the most notorious apartheid removal exercises. Volkekunde, loosely translated as ‘the study of peoples’, was a disreputable South African form of cultural anthropology propounding the concept of ethnos, the unit formed by a relationship between a people and their culture. According to proponents of volkekunde, ethnos is made cohesive by a genetic and psychic unity, creating by adulthood a volkskondisioneerde persoonlikheid (ethnically conditioned personality) that is difficult to change. See J. Sharp, ‘Can We Study Ethnicity?’, Social Dynamics, vol. 6, no. 1, 1980. For the origins of the term see F. Bradlow, ‘The Origins of the Early Cape Muslims’, in F. Bradlow and M. Cairns, The Early Cape Muslims, Cape Town, A. A. Balkema, 1978, pp. 83–84. The term’s first official appearance was in the census of 1875. See R. Ridd, ‘Creating Ethnicity in the British Colonial Cape: Coloured and Malay Contrasted’, Africa Seminar paper, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, March 31, 1993, p. 9. See Shell, Children of Bondage, pp. 40-59; and Bradlow, ‘The Origins of the Early Cape Muslims’, p. 92. Shell (with the better raw data) and Bradlow come up with slightly different slave origin statistics, but the general picture is similar. See A. Davids, ‘The Words the Slaves Made’, Collection of papers presented at the ‘Cape Slavery and After’ Conference, August 10–11, 1989, Department of History, University of Cape Town, p. 1. A. Davids, Mosques of Bokaap, Athlone, Cape Town, South Africa, Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 1980, pp. 35–36, 41. See J. Mayson, ‘Malays of Cape Town, South Africa’, in Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society, Manchester, Cave and Severs Printers, 1855, p. 11; and L. Duff-Gordon, Letters from the Cape, London, Oxford University Press, 1927, p. 37. D. F. Malan, future Nationalist prime minister, had said already in the 1920s that ‘the Malay community . . . constructed the country’s history together with the white man . . . [who] did not come here to bring civilisation to the Malays. They were always civilised, and they constructed a language together with the white man, which is therefore also their language’. See UG 20/1954, p. 32, quoted in S. Jeppe, ‘Historical Process and the Constitution of Subjects’, B. Hons Thesis in African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1986–87. For a history of Malayism, see A. Davids, ‘From Complacency to Activism: The Changing Political Mood of the Cape Muslims from 1940 to 1985’, Unpublished paper, Cape Town, 1985, p. 5. ff. For a good summary of identity pressures, see a letter by the curator of the Bo-Kaap Museum, Nazeem Lowe, to the Cape Argus, September 18, 1999. Our account of Du Plessis’ role in the construction of Malay identity has benefited from the first study of the subject: Jeppe, ‘Historical Process and the Constitution of Subjects’. Du 207

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15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

208

Plessis had been at school with Hendrik Verwoerd, Nationalist Minister of Native Affairs, Prime Minister, and chief theorist of the apartheid concept. He had been an employee of Dönges – minister in the Nationalist government from 1948–67 – when he had been a sports journalist and Dönges the editor of the influential Cape Nationalist newspaper Die Burger. He was a friend of D. F. Malan, the first Nationalist prime minister, and had been at university with Paul Sauer, Nationalist Minister of Transport. See I. D. Du Plessis, Aantekeninge Uit Tynstraat, Kaapstad, Tafelberg-Uitgewers, 1975. Du Plessis’ dissertation was published as Die Bydrae van die Kaapse Maleir tot die Afrikaanse Volkslied, Kaapstad, Nasionale Pers, 1935. Du Plessis’ key texts in addition to the one listed above are Lied van Ali, en Ander Gedigte, Kaapstad, Nasionale Pers, 1931; Uit die Slaamse Buurt: Kaapse Sprokies, Fabols en Legendes, Kaapstad, Nasionale Pers, 1939; Die Vlammende Fez: Verse deur I.D. Du Plessis, Kaapstad, Unie-Volkspers, 1943; The Cape Malays, Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1944, republished 1946, 1947, 1972; Tales from the Malay Quarter, Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1945; and The Malay Quarter and Its People, Cape Town, A. A. Balkema, 1953. Except where otherwise indicated, this and the following paragraphs are reconstructed quotes and paraphrases from Du Plessis, The Cape Malays, Chapter 1; Du Plessis, The Malay Quarter and Its People, Chapter 1; and ‘The Malay Quarter: The Case for Preservation’, a pamphlet issued by the Group for the Preservation of the Malay Quarter (of which more later) (available at SAHRA Archive, Cape Town). The phrase ‘n stortvloed van kleur’ is from the poem ‘Karnaval,’ in Du Plessis, Die Vlammende Fez, p. 49. It refers to the clothing worn during the so-called ‘Coon Carnivals’ held every new year. See T. Truluck and G. Cook, ‘Preservation of Bo-Kaap, Cape Town: Changes in Attitudes and Actions’, Contree, vol. 29, 1991, pp. 19–21. This paper was based on newspaper reports and records in the City Council Archive. Since the authors did not examine documents in the SAHRA (then National Monuments Council) Archive, the account they give of the preservation programme is partial and inaccurate. They could expropriate properties condemned by the Medical Officer of Health, paying compensation only for the assessed value of the land, excluding buildings. Former owners or tenants could be evicted and the buildings demolished, provided some offer of alternative accommodation was made. This was for 1,520 apartments, with 500 proposed for the site occupied by the existing housing, and the balance on the vacant Scotschekloof site, which the city had also acquired. This scheme was approved by the CCC’s key planning committees in 1936. Drawings have not survived, except for those for a section of the Scotschekloof scheme, which are in the possession of the Cape Town City Council. E. Jansen was then Governor General and became Minister of Native Affairs in the Nationalist government. The other members included two Chief Justices, H. van Zyl and E. Watermeyer; a former Governor General, G. van Zyl; and South African Ambassador to the court of St. James, C. Te Water. One of the architects included Magda Sauer, daughter of Paul Sauer. See the plan in 3CT 4/2/1/1/720 20/6/46 at the Cape Archives, Cape Town. The records of these early exchanges between the HMC and the City are in file 3/CT 4/2/1/1/ 720 at the Cape Archives, Cape Town. Du Plessis’ annual reports as Commissioner of Coloured Affairs make it clear that he regarded dealing with Group Areas Act issues as one of the major tasks of his Division and that his department cooperated closely with the Land Tenure Advisory Board – the Group Areas implementation agency, later replaced by so-called Group Areas Boards. See, for example, the Report of the Commissioner of Coloured Affairs for the year 51/52, UG 45/52, Pretoria, Government Printer, p. 9, where Du Plessis states that the Division of Coloured Affairs was in close touch with the Board’s local committee in Cape Town. S. Morris, ‘The Restoration and Preservation of Historic Buildings’, in R. Immelman and G. Quinn (eds.), The Preservation and Restoration of Historic Buildings in South Africa, Cape

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27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Town, A. A. Balkema, 1968, pp. 57–58. The paper was originally delivered to a symposium in 1959. Against this trend, the City’s officials produced a conservation scheme in the mid1950s, but it came to nothing. The drawings for this are in the possession of the Cape Town City Council. Although the brief to the responsible professional staff was to achieve the maximum possible density with walk-up apartments, the architects convinced the City Engineer – mainly for cultural reasons – that townhouses were a better option. The minutes of a series of meetings of the design team are in the Cape Archives. See 3CT 4/2/1/3/3600 and 3CT 4/4/1/3/3861 B57 at the Cape Archives, Cape Town. The drawings of the proposed scheme are in the possession of the Cape Town City Council. This is stated in the opening paragraph of the Department’s first report. See RP No. 40/63, Cape Archives, Cape Town. Letter from William Fehr to the Secretary of the HMC reporting the contents of a telephone call to Du Plessis, May 5, 1961 (available at SAHRA Archive, Cape Town). If passed, such a declaration would have frozen development in Bo-Kaap entirely. The drawings for this scheme are in the possession of the Cape Town City Council. ‘Urban renewal’ was apartheid speak for the removal of black people from inner city areas. This arrangement of responsibilities was an entirely logical move, given that the implementation of the Group Areas Act depended on the national housing programme. See the report in the Cape Times, May 1, 1965. A. Davids, ‘Community Participation in Conservation and Urban Regeneration: The Case of Bo-Kaap’, in D. Japha and V. Japha (eds.), Proceedings of the National Urban Conservation Symposium, Cape Town, Oakville Press, 1990, p. 87. See also, L. Townsend-Freedman and S. Townsend, Bokaap Faces and Façades: A Record of the passing scene in Cape Town’s Malay Quarter with a brief account of its Architecture and the Muslim Inhabitants, Cape Town, H. B. Timmins, 1977. A. Davids, The Mosques of the Bo-Kaap, passim. MOH Survey, 3/CT 4/2/1/1/720 20/6/46, Cape Archives, Cape Town. For example see his report for the year 52/53, Report of the Commissioner of Coloured Affairs, UG 13/54, Pretoria, Government Printer, p. 6, where he identified one of the main tasks for the Division of Coloured Affairs as bringing about ‘the separation of Coloureds and Natives, thereby overcoming the evils resulting from the intermixing of the two races’. I. D. Du Plessis and C. Lückoff, The Malay Quarter and Its People, Cape Town and Amsterdam, A. A. Balkema, 1953, Chapter 1. ‘Memorandum on the Proposed Proclamation of the Malay Quarter as a National Monument’, hand annotated as being written by William Fehr for presentation to the Minister of the Interior at an interview on April 10, 1961 (available at SAHRA Archive, Cape Town). Letter, June 16, 1961, SAHRA Archive, Cape Town. Letter, August 13, 1964, SAHRA Archive, Cape Town. SAHRA Archive, Cape Town. These were usually constructed of crushed brick and sea-shell lime laid on timber boarding and waterproofed with whale oil mixed with molasses. G. Fagan and G. Fagan, Church Street in the Land of Waveren, Cape Town, PrintPak, 1975. See illustrations throughout the book. See report, Cape Argus, February 20, 1950. In this case, since Loader Street had been declared a white group area, the desired stylistic model was ‘Cape Georgian, not “Malay”’. City of Cape Town, Report 49/1995, ‘Results of the Bo-Kaap Facilitation Process: Next Steps’, City Planner’s Department, City of Cape Town, 1995. See report by Linda Daniels, Atlantic Sun, September 30, 1999.

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Chapter 10

The latency of tradition: on the vicissitudes of walls in contemporary China Duanfang Lu

[The hero of the romantic epic Jerusalem Liberated], Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. Sigmund Freud1

In 1989 the world witnessed some of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century: in May portions of the Iron Curtain were demolished in Hungary along its border with Austria; in November the Berlin Wall was breached; and in December the Romanian Communist leader Nicolai Ceausescu was tried and executed. The dizziness and disorientation brought by the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe yielded various visions of future political and social trends, among which what might be termed the ‘triumph-of-capitalist-democracy’ scenario echoed frequently through Western discourse. Notable among this genre of commentary was Francis Fukuyama’s argument concerning ‘the end of history’. Fukuyama claimed that with the disintegration of socialist regimes there remained no legitimate alternative to market capitalism and liberal democracy. With the expansion of the latter as a final, universal form of political-economic structure for all human societies, ‘history’, understood as a contest over ideologies, was over.2 The actual developments of the past decade, however, have refuted such a homogenizing and hegemonic assumption. And, in particular, the disintegration of socialist regimes and their opening to market capitalism have not automatically led to the formation of democratic social spaces. Instead, longstanding and problematic tendencies within these societies have often been exacerbated: military dictatorship, ethnic conflict, and the re-emergence of alternative modes of social domination, to name just a few. And what has happened in the postsocialist societies of Eastern Europe has by no means been unique. In other parts of the world, where analysts of globalization once assumed that 210

The latency of tradition: on the vicissitudes of walls in contemporary China

the homogenization of culture would greatly reduce the possibilities for local alternatives, there has been an upsurge of localisms, populisms, and religious movements. As pasts which were long relegated as ‘backward’ have been resurrected in different parts of the world, it seems that conflicts over modernity articulated as part of the opposition to socialist and capitalist models during the Cold War have been replaced with a surge of diverse, competing cultural claims. It is within this context of radical change brought by ‘unvanquished remnants of the past’ (to use Marx’s phrase) that the question of tradition has become more pressing than ever. Has the passing of the era of Cold War revolutions ironically brought the return of multiple traditions with legitimate claims on the future? Has European modernity, once extolled as the ‘end of history,’ been thus rendered merely one more ‘provincial’ version of modernity? And does the resurgence of traditions hold the potential of viable alternative rationalities? Or does it just temporarily postpone an inevitable historical trend in which (as Fukuyama and others have argued) sooner or later all nations will join the march of progress, following the models of ‘advanced societies’? Questions of this magnitude do not lend themselves to easy answers. In this chapter, however, I shall venture a preliminary reading of some possible new trajectories of tradition through a case study of the making and unmaking of the wall-building tradition in contemporary China. By doing this, my aim is to boost appreciation of the vitality and transformability of tradition in our time. ‘Tradition’ in its barest sense, to quote Edward Shils, means ‘simply a traditum; it is anything which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present’.3 However, this study of the persistence of the wall as a building typology in China reveals that tradition in a fast-changing society is not so much ‘handed down’ as constantly constructed and deconstructed in its daily reproduction. It is in this ongoing process that the same tradition may be rehistoricized, appropriated, and transplanted. With such a capacity to renew itself, tradition may be held back temporarily during periods of political and social change, but rarely does it die off completely. Instead, it tends to reappear in new guises and generate new contradictions in other contexts. In this chapter I describe the above tendency as involving ‘the latency of tradition’, where my use of the term ‘latency’ is specifically inspired by the writings of Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism.4 Thus, before proceeding with the case example of Chinese wall-building, I shall offer a brief introduction to some of Freud’s ideas and their implications for current discussions of tradition in the built environment.

Tradition and history, past and present In Moses and Monotheism, Freud offers an explanation of the history of the Jews from the perspective of a psychoanalyst. At the beginning of the book, he claims that Moses was not a captive Hebrew, but an Egyptian. And although Moses led the Hebrews from Egypt to Canaan to preserve their withering monotheism, he was later murdered by the Hebrews in a rebellion. According to Freud, both this traumatic event and the Mosaic religion were repressed following the moment of the murder. But they returned later to 211

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constitute the essence of Jewish history, as the religion of Moses was assimilated into a new Jewish monotheism, and the founder of the latter was also named Moses. The dualities, writes Freud, ‘are necessary consequences of the first: one section of the people passed through what may properly be termed a traumatic experience which the other was spared’.5 In this way, the repressed was never truly forgotten; it returned by taking the form of reappearance. Freud notes that there is a latency period between the repression of trauma and the return of the repressed. And in a section entitled ‘Latency Period and Tradition’, he gives an example of a train accident to illustrate the dynamics of trauma: It may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms, which can be ascribed only to his shock or whatever else happened at the time of the accident. He has developed a ‘traumatic neurosis’.6

In spite of the fundamental difference in the two cases – the problem of the traumatic neurosis and the history of Jewish monotheism – Freud finds a correspondence between them: that is, the latency of the shocking event curiously resonates with the belatedness of the Jew’s traumatic experience. Thus, the murder and the repression of Moses and his religion could not be understood at the moment they occurred, but could only be truly assimilated when they returned after the ‘latency period’. Freud contrasts the role of tradition during the latency period to that of written history. According to Freud, written history itself is an engine of repression, through which unpleasant traumatic experiences are denied and original events are distorted. In contrast, tradition is less subject to distorting influences, hence ‘[w]hat has been deleted or altered in the written version might quite well have been preserved uninjured in the tradition’.7 It is here, Freud claims, that the history of the Jewish religion finds its explanation: the facts which the so-called official written history purposely tried to suppress were in reality never lost. The knowledge of them survived in traditions which were kept alive among the people.8

In other words, traditions store and pass on the repressed even without people being conscious of it. Thus, as time goes by, some traditions may grow more and more powerful, and ultimately allow the return of the repressed as a force strong enough to decisively influence the thought and activity of a people. ‘[T]he religion of Moses’, Freud thereby proclaims, ‘exercised influence on the Jewish people only when it had become a tradition.’9 Despite its psychoanalytical derivation, I believe that Freud’s formulation of history and tradition is inspiring as an alternative way of seeing tradition. In modernist thinking, events are considered to be moving forward irreversibly, and historical time is divided into lineally developed periods. From the nineteenth century on, with the spread of colonialism, such a Western pattern of temporality reordered the spatial relationships of people and things into evolutionary series. Hence, historicism came to non-European peoples, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, as ‘somebody’s way of saying “not yet” to somebody else . . . not 212

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yet civilized enough to rule themselves’.10 Thus, societies and artefacts that were ‘less progressed’ were termed traditional, in contrast to those considered modern. Freud’s view, however, proposes that the past is constantly contained in the present as repeated flashbacks and, among other things, this provides a way to circumvent the progressive bias in modernist thinking. Here, the past always rests upon the present, competes with the present, and at times thrusts forward to shape the future. This alternative way of seeing the past and the present invites us to rethink the relationship between tradition and modernity, not as being connected in a unilinear evolutionary link, but as living equally in the present. In the new formulation, tradition is no longer simply a ‘not-yet’ waiting to be turned into a ‘now’; instead, it shares with modernity the same ‘now’, the same responsibilities for making the lived ground, and the same potential to shape the future. Certainly, what should be immediately pointed out is that while, epistemologically, the two may coexist within a common temporality, they occupy unequal positions in the current world power geometry. Thus, it is modernity that continues to dominate, and which provides an arena for tradition to contest. Yet we should also bear in mind that the shift from industrial modernization to globalization has brought new contradictions and ambivalences onto the scene. If the boundaries between tradition and modernity used to be clear, the new global condition has rendered the borders vague, porous, and subject to crossings from both sides. It is with this ambiguity that both modernity and tradition have become increasingly multiplied and mutually constituted. As their diverse modalities emerge on the ground in different parts of the world, we are now facing a contested terrain where more voices than ever are demanding a hearing. With this new understanding of tradition in mind, I now turn to the story of wallbuilding in China. In the following section, I shall offer a brief history of traditional wallconstruction practice there. In subsequent sections I shall then give an account of how city wall-building practice was overturned in the 1950s; how a new tradition of work-unit wall-building emerged in the 1960s; and how the reform era has brought new twists to the story today. The final section provides a discussion of the implications of this study for the current understanding of tradition and modernity. Except for the following section on the role of city walls in Chinese history, the writing of this chapter has mainly been based on field research I conducted in China in 2000 and 2001. The parts on the fall of the city wall and the rise of the unit wall, in particular, are heavily based on the archival materials available at Beijing Municipal Archives.

Walls in traditional China Walled enclosures were some of the most basic features of the traditional Chinese landscape.11 Walls not only physically bounded various kinds of spaces – cities, villages, gardens, temples, houses – they also symbolized the manner of classification in an ordered Chinese environment. The variety and significance of walls can be shown by the fact that the Chinese devoted a number of words to describing their different forms and 213

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meanings. To take just a few examples, high walls around courtyards were called qiang, which connoted what was used to shield oneself; house walls and part walls were called bi, which connoted what warded off and resisted the wind and cold; and low walls were called yuan, which connoted what one leaned on and thus took as protection.12 In particular, the importance of the city wall transcended that of other types of walls. Symbolizing authority, order, and security, the city wall was so central to the Chinese idea of a city that the traditional words for city and wall were identical – the character ch’eng standing for both.13 The city wall and the local centre of imperial administration were also institutionally and conceptually inseparable; thus, an unwalled urban centre was almost as inconceivable as a house without a roof. Like city walls in many other societies, those in China were built essentially to protect the city against invasions and peasant rebellion. In fact, before the introduction of modern artillery, Chinese city walls, which were ordinarily surrounded by a moat, were almost indestructible. Their solidity made any attempt to breach them extremely difficult, and their height, ranging from 5 to 15 metres, made scaling them equally hazardous.14 Similar to the walled cities of the Middle East, the walls around many riverine Chinese cities had the additional function of defence against floods, which were a continual menace in many lowland areas.15 Besides these practical functions, the Chinese elite also attached rich symbolic meaning to city walls from Zhou times (256 B.C. to c. eleventh century). For the earliest city, the construction of city walls signified the establishment and maintenance of an order that could be kept in accord with the ideal order of the cosmos. Such symbolism also often conformed with political circumstances, as individual states struggled for power against each other. However, under the socio-political conditions of imperial China, the symbolic emphasis shifted. Most importantly, the city was no longer treated as the centre of the cosmos; rather, it was the loyalty of the region to the emperor in his imperial capital, to the centrality of the imperial government, and to the social order it established that mattered most.16 The Mongols interrupted this tradition, however, and few walled cities were constructed during the Yuan dynasty (1280–1368), whose Mongol founders, pastoral in origin, were unsympathetic to the wall-building tradition.17 In order to display their power, at one time the Mongols even forbade the building of city walls throughout China. Thus, during the thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries, walls that pre-dated the Mongol conquest deteriorated. And by the time the Mongols were finally overthrown, these walls needed repair. In fact, the first half of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) witnessed the advent of ‘the great age of Chinese wall building’. This had ‘the primarily psychological function of reaffirming the presence of the Chinese state’, and re-established proper social order after a century of Mongol rule.18 Perhaps because of this new significance, while early city walls had simply consisted of pounded earth ramparts, Ming engineers now faced them with bricks, ceramic blocks, or stones. Intensive wall construction continued into the Ching dynasty (1644–1911), the last dynasty of imperial China, and a new function for city walls arose under the specific social circumstances of this period. The Manchus, in the wake of their conquest of China in the 214

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seventeenth century, were concerned to preserve the ethnic identity and military prowess of their troops stationed at key places. To this end, they appropriated for exclusive Manchu residence entire sections within the walls of many cities, and sometimes built a partial internal wall to create a separate enclosed Manchu quarter. In a few instances they even built a completely separate enclosure within a short distance of an existing Chinese city. Eventually, about thirty-four such twin cities were created by the Manchus in north and north-west China to achieve ethnic segregation.19 Another type of wall within the traditional Chinese city was the ward wall. Since Zhou times, city planning principles determined that cities should be divided into wards both for symbolic reasons and to control patterns of residence. This led to a pattern of distinct residential precincts, market quarters, and enceintes exclusively occupied by local government offices, each being enclosed by walls and separated by streets.20 This system reached its maturity by the Sui (581–618) and the early Tang dynasties (618–907), and it had a tremendous impact on daily life in the city. For example, Chang’an, the Sui-Tang capital, was divided into large enclosed wards by extraordinarily wide streets. Houses of commoners were confined to the interior of these wards, and guard posts were located at the junctions of major avenues.21 Additionally, the main streets were devoid of commercial activities, such activities being restricted to the city’s fortress-like East and West Markets during certain hours of the day.22 It was during the late Tang and the early Southern Song periods that this strictly controlled ward system began to collapse. And as the autocratic grip of the Sui emperors was replaced by a bureaucracy of scholar-officials, the enclosed marketplaces and the walled residential wards were gradually replaced with a more open street system.23 This period coincided with a growth of commercial suburbs outside the city gates, caused by an intensification of the market economy, itself a result of urbanization and a slackening of commercial controls and urban regulations.24 Because all traffic to and from a sector of the city’s hinterland needed to be channelled through the city gates, the areas immediately outside the gates became favoured sites for markets and businesses. By the nineteenth century, suburban development outside at least one gate was common in many walled cities in China, and in some cases, such built-up areas outside the walls even exceeded those within the walls.25 Concern for the security of these suburbs sometimes led to the construction of a second, outer wall to encompass all or part of this suburban area. But in many cases no effort was made to enclose the commercial suburbs. In fact, some researchers of Chinese history maintain that cities in late imperial China were largely open institutions, and they claim that the basic political, social, and cultural cleavages, unlike those of the premodern European city, were between classes and occupations rather than between the city and countryside.26 As F. W. Mote states in his study of Nanjing during the early Ming: Neither the city wall nor the actual limits of the suburban concentration marked the city off from the countryside in architectural terms. Nor did style of dress, patterns of eating and drinking, means of transportation, or any other obvious aspect of daily life display characteristic dichotomies between urban and rural.27 215

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Such a continuum was physically manifest in the fact that urban areas were not spatially separated by walls from rural areas during the late imperial period.

The fall of the city wall Historically, the meanings and functions of the city wall went through various shifts under the tide of social and political transformation. Yet, spiritually, to traditional Chinese thinking, the city wall represented what was constant in the vicissitudes of life. In many poems and articles, writers portrayed city walls as part of the timeless universe, in contrast to the incessant change of things. One example is a story told by Tao Qian (c. 372–427 A.D.) in his Sou shen houji. In the story, Ding Lingwei turns into an immortal crane after having studied the dao of immortality for a millennium. When he flies back to his home place, he laments the transience of human life, singing ‘city walls are as ever, but [people] are not the same’.28 This sense of eternality attached to the city wall, however, melted into air with the advent of a new socialist era. When the Chinese Civil War finally ended in 1949, the new socialist rulers were left with the task of rebuilding war-ravaged Chinese cities. Although there was no shared sense of what exactly constituted a socialist urban environment, many agreed that in order to create a world approximating the modern life imagined for the new society, certain heritage would have to be abandoned. In fact, for a people who eagerly identified with modernity, but who were hopelessly trapped by a host of problems, tradition became the offensive odour that one suddenly could not wait to escape. Such was the case of the Chinese city wall. While walls were once the most important symbol of a city, upon consolidation of socialist control in 1949, their utility was immediately called into question. And due to its importance, the city wall of Beijing serves as a focus for this discussion. In 1949 Beijing was a city of walls within walls. It had both outer walls (the traditional walls of the Chinese city), and inner walls (the walls of the Tartar city). Within the inner walls were the walls of the Imperial City, and within these were the rust-red walls of the Forbidden City (Figure 10.1). The main city, accommodated within the inner walls, was initially constructed in the Yuan dynasty, and then revised in the Ming era.29 These walls measured 6,650 metres east–west, and 5,350 metres north–south, and had nine gates.30 The outer walls were a later addition of the mid-sixteenth century, built to accommodate the prosperous southern commercial suburb. While the plan for these outer walls was that they were to have circumscribed the whole city, due to a shortage of funds, only the southern outer area was ultimately enclosed. The new walls were thus shaped like a cap adjoining the main city. During the Qing dynasty, the conquering Manchus drove most of the native population from the main city and into this southern suburb surrounded by outer walls. For this reason, the inner city came to be known as the Manchu or Tartar city, and the outer city, the Chinese city.31 The inner city walls and their attached gate towers were of massive scale, but of flawless proportion (Figure 10.2). As Osvald Sirén once described them in The Walls and Gates of Peking: 216

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10.1 The locations of Beijing city walls and their changes in different dynasties

Of all the great buildings of Peking there is none which can compare with the walls of the Tartar city in monumental grandeur. At first sight they may not be as attractive to the eye as the palaces, temples, and shop-fronts of those highly coloured and picturesquely composed wooden structures which still line the old streets or hide behind the walls, but after a longer acquaintance with this vast city, they become the most impressive monuments – enormous in their extension and dominating everything by their quiet forceful rhythm. . . . On the outer side of the walls this rhythm is accentuated by the powerful bastions which follow one another at regular intervals though somewhat varying in size. On the inner side the movement is slower and more irregular on account of the extreme unevenness of the joints between the sections and of the bends and bulges resulting from the pressure of water and tree-roots. This slow rhythm is suddenly quickened and changed into a powerful crescendo at the gates, where double towers rise triumphantly above the long horizontal lines of the battlements, the 35 larger of these towers resembling palaces on high terraces. The corner towers, massive and fortresslike, form a magnificent finale of the whole composition.32

The destruction of city walls, however, had already started at the time when Sirén was conducting his research. With the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Beijing was no longer an imperial capital, but the ground for the competing ambitions of rival warlords. With no authority to protect its precious legacy, carved shop-fronts and old-fashioned courtyards were destroyed every year to make room for modern, multi-storey brick buildings. A few parts of the pink wall around the Imperial City were even torn down in order to construct electric streetcar lines. Observing these shifts, Sirén asked at the end of his book: ‘How long will they still remain, these wonderful walls and gates, these silent records of Peking’s most beautiful and glorious past?’.33 If changes began during the time of the Chinese Republic, their pace increased dramatically after the socialist revolution. In 1949 Beijing was made the national capital of 217

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10.2 The gate tower on Beijing’s city wall

a new People’s Republic, and the city government proclaimed that the guiding principle for urban construction was ‘to serve the masses, to serve production, and to serve the Central Government’.34 In the years that followed, Beijing entered an era of rapid development, as its population and the number of its institutions and factories increased rapidly and the demand for all types of buildings multiplied. During the Republic period (1911–1949), walls were torn down in cities like Guangzhou. But in 1949 Beijing was still very much confined by its walls, which were now considered by many to be a physical and symbolic barrier to modernization. For planners eager to shape the city into a modern, socialist capital, the issue of how to deal with the walls became a central concern, and there was a great divergence of views as to whether to demolish or preserve them. One group argued that the city walls should be torn down for both political and economic reasons. Ideologically, they argued, city walls were both a relic of ancient emperors, a symbol of the ‘feudal’ tradition, and a sign of division between urban residents and peasants. Thus, the document ‘The Preliminary General Planning Proposal for Beijing Urban Construction (Draft)’ stated: The city of Beijing was built during the feudal times; its construction was thus limited by the low productive force. Because it was built under the social condition characterized by antithesis between classes, its construction principle was to meet the needs of feudalist rulers. The most important buildings in the city were the palaces and temples; layers of city walls were built centering on the palaces, which reflected the feudal emperors’ overweening idea of protecting feudalist domination and preventing peasant uprising.35

Practically, this group also maintained that the city wall was an ancient defence work that had now finished its ‘historical task’. In the new age of socialist development, the persistence of the city wall blocked traffic, wasted land, and limited urban development. Hence, it was not only useless but also harmful to keep the walls. By contrast, if they were torn down, a large amount of brick could be obtained for new construction projects; the land they occupied could be made into wide streets; and the city could establish an integrated modern transport system. The other group, however, insisted that it would be a big mistake to demolish the city’s 218

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great heritage; they argued that the walls should be preserved and put into modern use. Various ways of taking advantage of the city walls were raised: some proposed building a high-speed streetcar system on the walls; others suggested remodelling the gate towers into museums; still others thought to connect the city walls and their adjacent areas into greenbelts. The last idea was supported vigorously by architectural historian Sicheng Liang, who wrote extensively on the preservation of Beijing’s cultural legacy during the early 1950s. In his 1950 article entitled ‘Discussion on the Issue of the Conservation-orDemolishment of Beijing City Walls’, Liang suggested that the city walls and moat should be redeveloped into a ‘three-dimensional’ park (Figure 10.3).36 Flowers and grass could be planted on the top of the walls, and with a width of more than 10 metres such a terrace would provide a perfect place for people to stroll and enjoy distant views of the city. Dozens of gate towers could be refurbished into reading rooms or teahouses. And by diverting water from the Yongding River, the city’s moat would allow people to go boating and fishing in the summer and skating in the winter.37 Yet Liang’s proposals for the city walls, together with his other ideas on historical conservation, were dismissed as nostalgia in the mighty torrent of socialist development surging forward at the time. During an era in which historical materialism achieved neartotal supremacy, most decision-makers judged plans in accordance with their imagined role in ‘the progress of social history’. Thus, Nangui Hua, one of the key petitioners on many urban construction issues, considered the removal of the city walls inevitable due to ‘[t]he evolution rule of society’. He maintained that ‘the yearning for the past cannot prevent the society from making progress’.38 Moreover, in the early phase of planning for the reconstruction of Beijing, the influence of the Soviet model was explicit. Soviet experts were invited to review the plans, and the weight of their opinions often defeated local attempts at historical conservation. When the general plan of Beijing was drafted in 1953 Liang argued that the administrative centre should be put outside the old city, to the west of its wall, to preserve the Imperial City intact. But the Russian experts insisted that time and cost

10.3 Liang Sicheng’s proposal to redevelop Beijing’s city walls into a public park 219

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considerations dictated the demolition of old structures in and around the southern part of the Imperial City to create space for the construction of a headquarters for the national administration. Apparently, the latter’s opinion became dominant, for later, when the government approved the new general plan (‘Draft Plan on Reconstructing and Expanding Beijing Municipality’), one of its six planning principles spoke directly against the idea of conservation: ‘The major danger is an extreme respect for old architecture, such that it constricts our perspective of development’.39 While debate about the city wall still reverberated in the general public, the piecemeal demolition of the wall had already begun, conducted by individual work units (danwei, the state-run employers or organizations to which every citizen was assigned). One reason was that there was a nearly constant shortage of construction materials in China beginning in the early 1950s. And as planners continuously increased the scope of building projects, the gap between the production and consumption of building materials only widened.40 With construction projects often interrupted due to inadequate supplies of new materials, the city walls became an alternative source of bricks and earth. Thus, in December 1956 the Beijing Planning Bureau reported how the city walls were being excavated by individual work units in a chaotic way. Some wanted to demolish the inner walls, and some wanted to tear down the outer walls; those who only needed earth inside the facing left crushed bricks all around, and those who only needed bricks peeled the brick facing off the walls and left the inner earth standing alone.41 The bricks and earth taken by work units were used for all kinds of projects. The Planning Bureau even received requests from some suburban agricultural production units, who wanted to use the bricks to build pig houses.42 By 1959 the outer walls had been almost completely demolished except for the part south of Tiantang, and the inner walls had been partly dismantled. But as the brick facing of most parts of the walls was removed, the soil inside began to wash away in the rain, threatening collapse at anytime. Under these circumstances, the municipality decided that the remaining city walls should be removed completely.43 And eventually, the city of Beijing burst through its walled enclosure and burgeoned outwards in every direction. Except for a few segments, in place of the city walls today one finds wide, wellpaved boulevards. Only the names of the old city gates remain, now nothing more than picturesque reminders of a legendary past.

The rise of the unit wall Ironically, while its city walls were being torn down, other walls were being constructed around individual work units throughout Beijing. During the early period after the revolution in 1949, almost all factories, schools, and government departments were organized into state-run administrative systems, and each factory or institute became a work unit. The work unit thus became the major socio-spatial form organizing newly built areas of Chinese cities. Over the years, the work unit has gradually developed into a self-contained and largely self-sufficient entity peculiar to Chinese socialism. One of 220

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its most striking spatial characteristics is that it often integrates housing, workplace, and social services within a walled compound. Thus, the wall has remained one of the most impressive and most essential physical features of life in Chinese cities. Up to today, approaching any work unit from the outside, its walls are the first structures one sets eyes on. And one seldom finds a workplace of any size in China which does not have a brick or concrete barrier around its territory. Initially, such new wall-building projects were held in check. During the 1950s and the early 1960s most work units were without walls; and for those that needed some kind of physical confinement, more often than not only barbed wire entanglements or wattle walls were erected. It was not until the mid-1960s that many work units started to think about building permanent walls, and even then such walls were not encouraged by state planners. To ensure that major construction projects within the national plan would not be interrupted by inadequate supplies of materials, planning departments kept strict control over consumption of building materials by minor projects. And since they considered wall-building a waste of resources which were already in short supply, the Beijing Planning Bureau was generally reluctant to approve the wall-construction projects of local work units, except for certain crucial institutions such as military-related research units. One method for discouraging such projects was to make the application procedure complicated and time consuming; successful applicants not only had to demonstrate that they had a reliable source of the building materials for construction, but they were also required to specify why the walls were absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, in order to obtain endorsement, each work unit attempted to show its special prowess. Some stressed that they would use only construction materials of substandard quality or made of waste materials. According to a 1964 document, for example, in order to build walls with a length of 850 metres, the College of Nationality claimed that it had devised a method for making cinder bricks out of coal.44 And because brick was one of the construction materials that was in constant short supply, quite a few applications proposed building metal-rail fences rather than brick walls. In early May of the same year, for instance, the municipal government of Beijing issued a circular which required that no further brick walls should be constructed. In response to this constraint, some work units requested to build fences instead.45 Despite the strict control from the planning department and the municipal government, work units were nonetheless eager to build walls. During the short period of time between May 22 and July 23 of 1964 alone, fifty-one local work units submitted wall-construction applications to the Planning Bureau of Beijing.46 The main reason for this wall-building enthusiasm was concern for security. The report submitted by the Chinese Scientific Council, for example, described the difficulties in maintaining safety in its residential district without walls: Because there are no walls, it is impossible to manage. Accesses are available in all directions, people are free to come and go, and vendors are hawking everywhere. This has not only been disturbing, but has also made safety a big issue. According to an incomplete estimation, there were 11 cases of burglary in 1963, among which there were 7 cases of bicycle stealing and 4 other cases.47 221

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Most newly established work units at the time were located in suburban areas, and there was nearly always tension between the units and the peasants. Unit leaders considered the tradition of building security walls between their territories and the rural hinterlands the only solution to the contradiction. According to the application submitted by Miyun Water Electronic Power Factory in 1964, for example, peasants not only herded pigs and sheep in the factory’s office and residential areas, but they also developed family vegetable plots within the unit.48 Another application submitted by the Fifth Branch of the Automobile Repairing Factory detailed the conflicts between the unit and nearby peasants.49 Located on the old site of the Shiye Timber Factory, the factory was sandwiched between two residential districts, and bordered the Sun Palace People’s Commune on another side. Factory leaders complained that because of the ineffective management of the previous tenant, residents in the vicinity had developed a habit of coming to the factory to pick up leftover materials. When the factory tried to stop the practice, the local people became angry and spread complaints everywhere. In addition, while the previous tenant had allowed more than 300 households in the vicinity to share electricity, the factory had decided to cut off the supply. The sudden power failure caused great ‘misunderstanding’ from locals, and on two occasions hundreds of people gathered in the factory and protested. The crises were only solved with the assistance of the Public Security Bureau and the Electricity Provision Bureau. But the relationship between the factory and local residents was ended. And later, when unit leaders decided to build a new power distribution house on the roadside, they considered walls to be the only way to protect factory property.50 Second to the security function, unit walls played an important role in defining boundaries. In particular, this had to do with an urban property-right system adopted in China that is not ordinarily found in market economies. Soon after the founding of the People’s Republic, most urban land owned by the former Kuomintang government, foreigners, and some large private landowners was confiscated by the state.51 Socialist reform of private industries and businesses, launched in 1956, further changed the ownership of private real estate by instituting ‘joint state-private ownership’ and state management of leases. By 1958, therefore, the bulk of urban land had been converted to state ownership, and land profit and land rent had disappeared from the Chinese economy.52 However, while it was clear that urban land in China belonged to the state, what remained vague was the relationship between the state and the urban land user. The question of whether requisitioned land actually became the property of an urban land user (in which case the state provided only a permit for land requisition), or remained the property of the state (in which case the urban land user had obtained only the land use right), was never clarified in government documents or theoretical writings. In reality, the principle was ‘those who used the land would manage the land’, but there was no clear legal protection for users’ rights. As a result, although there was no time limit set for the use of land by work units, the state might take the land back anytime. During the 1950s, for example, because the General Institute of Iron and Steel Research needed room 222

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to expand, the state required its neighbouring work unit, the Institute of Agricultural Scientific Research, to yield up its experimental farmland. As it had taken several years to develop that farmland, the transaction caused a great loss for the latter.53 Without explicit legal protections, therefore, the very existence of walls became an important way to safeguard land use rights. And to avoid waste, once such walls were built, the Planning Bureau often hesitated to order their demolition, and was thus often forced to admit the ‘established fact’ of property rights. While it was always desirable to acquire as much land as possible, work units generally had little say in the urban land disposition process. Without a market mechanism, initial land disposition was largely a matter of administrative allocation under the general investment plan. In other words, when an investment plan was approved, the application for land use was simultaneously approved, with the state determining land allocation according to a ratio between the construction project and its land use acreage. In this disposition process, the government played a determining role, while the direct users of land had little influence. Thus, once a work unit was set up, even if the unit had the incentive to expand its production capacity (therefore generating a new demand for land) it could not acquire land freely. In most cases, only those whose new production investment plans were approved would be allowed to acquire additional land.54 Under these circumstances, construction of walls beyond a given planning redline often became a preferable way to occupy more land. Good evidence of this strategy appears in a document reporting a survey of wall construction by Beijing middle and elementary schools.55 In 1964 the Planning Bureau approved a total of 105 wall-construction projects for security purposes at middle and elementary schools. Among seventy-three projects that had been completed, thirty-three had resulted in walls that exceeded the originally specified boundaries. The walls constructed by the Attached Middle School of Beijing University, for example, exceeded the scope of land distribution to the east, south and west, and its north wall, if built according to the unit’s construction plan, would have circled the 6 acres of agricultural fields that belonged to the neighbouring Dazhongsi Production Team. As work-unit wall-construction practice was gradually established as a norm, the wall again became an essential physical part of Chinese life. Indeed, when a new work unit was established, a perimeter wall was often the first structure it built. Today, every work unit is a walled enclosure – or, if large enough, a cluster of several walled enclosures. The wall creates a clear-cut differentiation between the unit and its surroundings, a visible expression of workplace identity, and a boundary protecting its property and social facilities from outsiders’ use (Figure 10.4).56 As a result, whereas the Chinese city as a whole is no longer walled, its geography consists of many closed cells circled by walls. There is more than a little irony in this transition. No doubt, the city wall was once a charged symbol of state-authorized urban-rural contradictions. But, in fact, during the late imperial period what was urban was not spatially separated by the city wall from what was rural; rather, the Chinese city at the time, different from the premodern European city, was an ‘open institution’. The irony is that such a tradition disappeared at the same 223

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10.4 The wall and gate of a Beijing work unit

time that socialism was setting out to eliminate the social ill of urban-rural inequality. In the end, it turned out that in many cases the unit wall, together with other social policies, imposed a tight, new division between the work unit and the rural hinterlands. Hence, in addition to ending the era of the city wall, the transition to socialism also ended the era of the urban-rural continuum.

Walls in an era of reform In 1978 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership launched a series of reform programmes to shift the country from a planned to a market economy. Foreign investment and joint ventures were introduced, alternative forms of profit-making enterprise and industrial growth were established, and previously suppressed economic and cultural activities were rehabilitated. Among many, the rebuilding of city walls has become one of the most profound ironies of the present reform era. While Beijing was developed as the modern industrial centre during the Maoist period, after the initiation of the Open Door policy the economy of the city was redirected towards the development of tourism and service industries. Local value systems and self-perceptions were greatly affected by the resumption of tourism, the return of the Chinese diaspora, and the development of international trade and cultural exchange. With the growing awareness of its position in the global hierarchy, the Beijing municipality realized that the development of an urban identity was central to its ability to compete for global flows of tourists and capital. Traditional architectural elements were now appreciated for their value as exotic visitor attractions and an important source of symbolic capital. Thus, while the Beijing city wall had once been considered a symbol of the old society and a hurdle to urban modernization during the 1950s, today a regretful city government has acknowledged that its demolition was shortsighted. A mile-long segment of the city wall, on Beijing’s old south-east corner, has even now been reerected, and officials have said that more bits of the wall may be restored in the future.57 224

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In addition, with rapid commercialization, the central government now considers some aspects of the socialist landscape to be barriers to the new economy and social life; the enclosed work-unit compound is one of them. In previous decades the Chinese state’s overriding commitment to quick industrialization had forced it to adopt development strategies heavily biased against consumption. To remedy this deficiency and provide for basic living needs of their members, individual work units gradually developed various social facilities within their walled territories for the exclusive use of their members.58 The Chinese city thus came to depend on individual work units rather than specialized urban functional units to provide many social services. But as emerging market forces opened up new opportunities for private-sector employment, the cellular pattern of the urban system developed during socialist times became less feasible. In particular, the situation was aggravated by the arrival of large numbers of rural migrants. Free rural-to-urban migration was forbidden under Mao’s rule in order to maintain a neat socialist urban order devoid of such urban ills as unemployment and hunger.59 But in the reform era, with new funds fuelling urban development and generating new occupations, the central government recognized the contribution that cheap and docile peasant labour could make toward invigorating old industries and filling labour needs. As a result, the decades-old prohibition on rural-to-urban migration was gradually relaxed. Within a few years of the initiation of economic reforms, millions of peasants had thus left the rural hinterlands to seek employment and business opportunities in China’s cities. But the unprecedented arrival of massive numbers of peasants brought many problems to the cities, one of which was a drain on already-scarce public resources. As the shortage of social services was increasingly felt in the city, the state encouraged work units to let outsiders make use of their community facilities. The municipal government of Beijing, for example, in July 2001 issued a circular entitled ‘Several Rules on Taking Advantage of the Interior Facilities of the Work Unit to Develop Community Services’, which encouraged once-exclusive work units to open their social facilities for public use. Such facilities included cultural and educational facilities (for example, conference halls and libraries); recreational facilities (for example, sports fields, swimming pools, and weight rooms); and other living facilities (for example, public dining halls, bathhouses, and clinics).60 Contrary to public expectations, however, most work units did not want to open up their protected territories. To be sure, in the reform era the once-closed unit spaces were increasingly becoming places of uncontrollable diversity. Housing reforms and new commuter patterns were replacing the close linkages between residence and workplace typical of the Maoist era. And the retreat of politics and the development of private consumption patterns were opening up new opportunities for people to manipulate the unit space for the purpose of pleasure. The new legitimacy of commodification (shangpinhua) also enabled work units to rent out their land and office space for profit, and some unit walls were even breached by stores, restaurants, and recreation centres. Yet while great changes were taking place in response to market competition, few work units were willing to dismantle their walls totally. In fact, most of them still retained 225

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walls as an important instrument to regulate human and material traffic. Some of the rationale for this controlling function was based on an increase in crime and social instability brought by the reforms. For instance, in a Beijing work unit where I conducted fieldwork in 2000, all of its three districts were still encircled with walls, and its gate attendants were busier than ever due to the increasing mobility of people. An article appearing in the unit newsletter reported that the residential district had in recent years become a ‘big chaotic compound’ (dazayuanr), with cars running all around and strangers wandering everywhere. This was cited as cause for the Residents Committee to implement a series of new regulations to battle disorder and increase residents’ sense of security.61 My survey of fifteen work units in Beijing also revealed the continued importance of unit walls: fourteen out of fifteen interviewees (most of them unit officials) stressed that unit walls were necessary, while only one of them considered them useless and harmful. The work unit’s security-driven wall-building practice has also now been emulated by newly developed private office complexes and residential districts. Rapid real estate development has greatly transformed the Chinese urban landscape in the past two decades: luxury hotels, high-rise office buildings, and large-scale shopping centres are now creating new vitality everywhere in Chinese cities. Yet while the privatization of land has fundamentally changed patterns of housing, transportation, and other aspects of spatial organization, new private developments nonetheless bear some stamp of the past. A significant continuity has been the fortification of social boundaries through walls. For example, one luxury condominium project developed by a Hong Kong industrialist in Beijing is entirely surrounded by walls and iron-stake fences, and its gates are guarded by private police (Figure 10.5). Indeed, the black-and-white sign exhibited at its main entrance gate (which reads ‘Guests should register, show the identification card, and get off the car when entering and exiting’) is an imitation of signs typically found at work-unit entrances. If not recognized as residents of the condominium, persons passing through the gate are stopped and subjected to identification procedures, which also reminded me of the experience of entering a work unit.

10.5 The guarded gate of a luxury condominium complex in Beijing 226

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Besides security walls, some other distinctive characteristics of the work unit have been reproduced in many residential tracts built by private builders. Like the work unit, these tracts have often been laid out with a street system designed primarily to facilitate internal circulation. Except in some cases of detached single-family housing, the architectural style of most of these tracts is modern and utilitarian. And similar to the work unit, they often provide kindergartens, small parks, stores, and recreational facilities for their residents. But with walls and controlled gates, outsiders are prevented from taking advantage of these facilities. Indeed, their security systems are even more strict and sophisticated than their socialist counterparts. In promotional literature, many residential tracts built on the urban fringe, for instance, boast twenty-four hour policing and high-tech alarm systems. When I asked a real estate developer why his projects should be so intensively fortified, he responded by telling me stories of their construction. Many of the projects located in suburban areas were situated on agricultural land acquired from local peasants, he said, and the great economic benefits gained by developers often fostered a sense of relative deprivation among peasants. As a result, conflicts had erupted between peasants and builders, which not only frequently forced the latter to change their development strategies, but also, at times, led to violent encounters. Had these tracts not fortressed themselves behind walls, the developer concluded, it would ‘not be safe’ to live in them. As geographer Piper Gaubatz has rightly pointed out, a new urban environment is developing around functionally specialized nodes of commerce, finance, and trade in reform China.62 But this has not caused the cellular landscape of the Maoist city to disappear. Instead, as the tradition of building security walls, together with other features characteristic of the socialist city, continue to shape new construction in the private sector, what has arisen is a hybrid urban landscape combining both the marks of past establishments and the imprints of present development trends.

Concluding remarks In the story cited by Freud at the beginning of this chapter, Clorinda, killed and buried by Tancred, was able to turn up again in front of her beloved, though in the form of a sorrowful voice crying out from a tree. In a somewhat similar manner, the vignettes I have outlined above suggest that, while the ‘wall’ as a traditional Chinese building typology has been officially condemned at certain times, it has had a tendency to return over and over again under new social conditions. Yet, like Clorinda, the wall-building tradition has not returned as a pure repetition over time; instead, it has re-emerged under new guises in response to different contexts. While tradition often appears timeless in the contexts of isolation and stability, the story of Chinese wall building thus reveals that tradition is a product of the ongoing process of production and reconstruction in a fast-changing society. If in the ‘traditional’ definition of tradition as ‘the transmitted thing’, tradition is the past handed down to the present, this study shows that the past, rather than simply being passed on, is ceaselessly restructured in the course of making the present. With the past constantly present in 227

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this way, the history of Chinese wall building, rather than representing a series of events unfolding progressively through time, is actually a case of dynamic repetition. In his book The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama presents a world history in which the power of science, the free market, and democracy slowly obliges one nation after another to reshape themselves. With the passing of Communism, all nations with distinctive pasts will now necessarily reach for a common ‘democracy’. As a result, Fukuyama believes, all the major problems have now been solved; we are facing a world where struggle over all of the large issues has been largely settled. Arriving at a time of disorientation in the face of new historical conditions, Fukuyama’s ideas have been well received in popular, post-Cold War political discourse in the West. Yet, in the light of the relationship between past and present framed above, I contend that such a view ignores the role of tradition in the making of history, and thus is far from an accurate account of reality.63 The traditional features characteristic of each nation do not disappear easily. Some may be held back temporarily during times of political and social change, but the significance of the repression may not be understood at the moment – as this case of wall-building traditions in China would seem to indicate. Yet like the traumatic experience in Freud’s account, after a latency period, these traditions may resurrect themselves under new conditions, and once again actively participate in shaping, for better or worse, distinctive presents. Therefore, if in Fukuyama’s vision, a quietus has currently descended on history’s long storm, I suggest instead that the debris that has been smashed by the previous storm is more than just a residue: it holds the potential to bring about another storm.

Notes This article is a revised version of the chapter ‘From the City Wall to the Unit Wall’ in my dissertation ‘The Spatial Unconscious: On the Building of the Chinese Work Unit, 1949–2000’, University of California at Berkeley, 2003. I conducted my field research in China in 2000 and 2001. The research was supported by Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship, University of California Berkeley Humanities Research Grant, and University of California Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship for Dissertation Research. Some parts of the chapter were published in Asia Pacific: Perspectives, vol. 3, no. 1, 2003. 1.

S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 18, London, Hogarth Press, 1955. p. 22. 2. F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992. 3. E. Shils, Tradition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 12. 4. S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, translated by Katherine Jones, New York, Vintage Books, 1967 (1939). 5. Ibid., pp. 64–65. 6. Ibid., p. 85. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 86. 9. Ibid., p. 64. 10. D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 8. 11. A. Boyd, Chinese Architecture and Town Planning: 1500 B.C.–A.D. 1911, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 49. 228

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12. Yinong Xu, The Chinese City in Space and Time: The Development of Urban Form in Suzhou, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2000, p. 197. 13. P. Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City, Chicago, Aldine Publishing Company, 1971, p. 221. 14. Sen-Dou Chang, ‘The Morphology of Walled Capitals’, in G. W. Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1977, pp. 75–100. 15. Ibid., p. 79. 16. Xu, The Chinese City in Space and Time, p. 240–241. 17. Chang, ‘The Morphology of Walled Capitals’. 18. F. W. Mote, ‘The Transformation of Nanking, 1350–1400,’ in Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China, pp. 101–154. The citation is from p. 137. 19. Chang, ‘The Morphology of Walled Capitals’, p. 92. 20. Xu, The Chinese City in Space and Time, p. 163. 21. Chye Kiang Heng, Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats: The Development of Medieval Chinese Cityscapes, Singapore, Singapore University Press, 1999, Chapter 1. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., Chapters 4 and 5. 24. Ibid. 25. Chang, ‘The Morphology of Walled Capitals’, p. 99. 26. G. William Skinner, ‘Introduction: Urban and Rural in Chinese Society’, in Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China, pp. 253–274. 27. Mote, ‘The Transformation of Nanking, 1350–1400’, p. 116. 28. Tao Qian, Sou shen houji, Beijing, Zhonghua shuju, 1981. Cited from Xu, The Chinese City in Space and Time, p. 126. 29. E. Farmer, Early Ming Government: The Evolution of Dual Capitals, Harvard East Asian monographs, no. 66, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1976. 30. Victor F. S. Sit, Beijing: The Nature and Planning of a Chinese Capital City, Chichester, John Wiley & Sons, 1995, Chapter 3. 31. Ibid. 32. Osvald Sirén, The Walls and Gates of Peking, London, John Lane, 1924, pp. 34–35. 33. Ibid., p. 219. 34. Sit, Beijing: The Nature and Planning of a Chinese Capital City, p. 91. 35. ‘Beijing chengshi jianshe zongti guihua chubu fang’an (chao’an)’ [The Preliminary General Planning Proposal for Beijing Urban Construction (Draft)], Beijing Municipal Archives, Category No. 131, Content No. 1, Vol. 56. 36. Liang Sicheng, ‘Guanyu Beijing chengqiang cunfei wenti de taolun’ [Discussion on the Issue of the Conservation-or-Demolishment of Beijing City Walls], in Liang Sicheng wenji [Collected Works of Liang Sicheng], vol. 4, Beijing, Construction Industry Press, 1986, pp. 46–50. The quotation is from p. 46. 37. Ibid. 38. Nangui Hua, ‘Bu ying zai chengqiang shang jianzhu dianche dao’ [We should not Build Streetcar Trail on the City Walls], Chengshi jianshe [Urban Construction], November 1956. 39. Sit, Beijing: The Nature and Planning of a Chinese Capital City, p. 94. 40. Kang Chao, The Construction Industry in Communist China, Chicago, Aldine Publishing Company, 1968. 41. ‘Guanyu chengqiang chaichu wenti de qingshi’ [Petition on the Issue of Demolishing City Walls], Beijing Municipal Archives, Category no. 131, no. 1, vol. 271. 42. ‘Guihuaju guanyu weixian bufeng chengqiang chaichu de yijian’ [The Planning Bureau’s Opinion on the Demolishment of Some Dangerous City Walls], Beijing Municipal Archives, Category no. 131, no. 1, vol. 271. 43. Ibid. 44. ‘Guanyu jianshe danwei xiujian weiqiang wenti gei chengjianwei de qingshi baogao’ [Report to the Committee of Urban Construction on the Issue of Wall Construction by Work Units], Beijing Municipal Archives, Category 131, no. 1, vol. 491. 229

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

230

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Zhongguan Yang, et al., Urban Land Use and Management in China, Beijing, Economic Science Press, 1992. Ibid. Interview with a member of the General Institute of Iron and Steel Research in Beijing, 2000. Yang, Urban Land Use and Management in China, Chapter 2. ‘Guanyu jianshe danwei xiujian weiqiang wenti gei chengjianwei de qingshi baogao’ [Report to the Committee of Urban Construction on the Issue of Wall Construction by Work Units], Beijing Municipal Archives, Category 131, no. 1, vol. 491. E. M. Bjorklund, ‘The Danwei: Social-Spatial Characteristics of Work Units in China’s Urban Society’, Economic Geography, vol. 62, no. 1, 1986. The quotation is from p. 21. ‘Asia: The Antique that Mao Destroyed’, The Economist, October 26, 2002. Duanfang Lu, ‘The Spatial Unconscious: On the Building of the Chinese Work Unit, 1949–2000’, unpublished dissertation, Berkeley, University of California at Berkeley, 2003, Chapter 3. Tiejun Cheng and Mark Selden, ‘The Origins and Social Consequences of China’s Hukou System’, The China Quarterly, September 1994. ‘Qi yue yi ri qi Beijing danwei neibu shesi xiang shequ kaifang’ [The Interior Facilities of Beijing Work Unit Should be Open to the Community by July 1], Beijing wanbao [Beijing Evening], June 13, 2001, B1. Ren Xiao, ‘The First Step of Comprehensive Management: Guarding the Gates of Residential Districts’, in GISIR Newspaper (gangyan yuanbao), June 25, 1996, p. 4. P. Gaubatz, ‘Urban Transformation in Post-Mao China’, in D. S. Davis et al. (eds.), Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, Washington, D.C., Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995, pp. 29–60. Although it represents a popular post-Cold War political idea in the West, Fukuyama’s thesis has been criticized by many from different perspectives. Robert Kaplan, for instance, in an article titled ‘The Coming Anarchy’, presents a powerful counter-argument. He argues that due to the uneven distribution of resources, while part of the globe is inhabited by Fukuyama’s ‘Last Man’, pampered by prosperity, the other, larger, part of the world population will continue to be stuck in history, condemned to a life of poverty. Under such conditions of environmental stress, a broad range of riots and conflicts will be virtually inevitable. See R. Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, pp. 44–76.

Seizing locality in Jerusalem

Chapter 11

Seizing locality in Jerusalem Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

As you approach Jerusalem from the valley, the road ascends to a crest overlooking the western hills of the city. Down the slopes, a deserted Arab village hugs the hill, small and larger cubes made of the stone of the mountain: domes, arches, vaults, the mosque’s tower, shaded passages, all in harmony with the landscape and the sun. At the summit of the hill is a series of long fourstory apartment structures built in the late fifties. They do violence to the mountain. They are foreign, as if imported from some rainy, cool European suburb. Moshe Safdie1

The 1967 War, during which Israel seized East Jerusalem from Jordan, caught the Israeli planning administration unprepared. Immediately after the war, Israeli planners were asked to cover the recently occupied land with built ‘facts on the ground’ in order to foster the desired unity of the city under Israeli rule. Jerusalem’s unity became a primary national goal because it symbolized for Israelis the return of the Jews to their mythical biblical origins. But neither Israel’s modernist planners nor the politicians who guided them knew how to express such powerful symbolism architecturally. The Minister of Housing simply advised his planners to give the unified city2 an ‘Oriental character’.3 The prefabricated concrete arches that were soon after superimposed on the completed design for the first neighbourhood in East Jerusalem illustrated the confusion.4 This

11.1 Upper Lifta Neighborhood (Romema); general view. (Architect D. A. Brutzkus and the Jerusalem District Planning Team)

11.2 Lifta, a deserted Palestinian village; general view 231

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11.3 The reconstructed Jewish Quarter; aerial view

situation changed dramatically, however, when a younger generation of architects entered the planning scene. During the 1970s these architects created a coherent architectural image that depended heavily on the readily accessible Palestinian vernacular (Figures 11.3 and 11.4). The result bewildered Elinoar Barzaki, the former head of the Jerusalem Region in the Ministry of Housing: A culture looks for the symbols of its heroic periods and assimilates them in its local architecture, as Italy, for example, relates to the Roman Empire. In Jerusalem, however, the post-1967 architecture of power absorbed the symbols of the conquered rather than those of the conqueror.5

If the symbols of the conqueror were the cubical and ordered housing blocks of pre-1967 West Jerusalem as well as the modernist institutional buildings that crowned its government precinct, while the symbols of the conquered were the Oriental stone architecture that composed the picturesque skyline of the Old City and its environment, then Barzaki’s is a forceful observation. Post-1967 Israeli architecture clearly drifted away from its predominantly modernist practices, emulating instead the architecture of its Arab Other. Why should architects Israelize a contested city with architectural forms of another nation? Moreover, once such espousal of the Palestinian vernacular took place, what were the mechanisms that enabled Israelis to separate it from the culture that produced it in order to make it constitutive of ‘an Israeli architecture’? Paradoxically, the initial efforts to devise such Israeli architecture were already taking shape when the first history of Israel’s architecture was written in 1963. In this study, the architectural modernism that had been practiced as a Zionist style since the early 1930s was established as an identifiable Israeli architectural tradition.6 Such resolution was based on the thoroughly and uniformly modernist landscape that Israelis created during the first 232

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11.4 Ram Karmi, Gilo, cluster 6, 1970s; axonometric view (top), general view (bottom)

two decades of statehood. The questions listed above indicate severe cracks in this novel yet entrenched modernist architectural tradition, which was soon to be replaced with a quest for a newer tradition authenticated by deeper roots, the tradition ‘of the place’. This new tradition underpinned the conceptual architectural framework most prevalent in post-1967 Jerusalem. The focus of this chapter is the evolution and force of this localist tradition as well as its potential demise during the current phase of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. I seek the roots of this architectural tradition in the cultural and professional formation of the generation of architects, which was entrusted with the national mandate of Israelizing Jerusalem. During the 1960s and 1970s, these architects found themselves inextricably bound up in modernism’s developing crises. At the same time that architects worldwide were questioning the premises of the Modern Movement in architecture, Israelis were becoming more vocal in challenging the modernization project of Labor Zionism, which had campaigned for decades for ‘progress and development’. This twofold crisis strongly affected Israeli-born architects, the so-called sabra, the first ‘natives’ of the Israeli State. Their emerging critique of both architectural and Zionist modernisms led them to the Palestinian vernacular, particularly to ‘the Arab village’ which had fascinated them for almost a decade by the time post-1967 construction was under way. In order to analyze the journey of these Israeli-born architects into the place to which they wanted to belong as well as to the position of power from which they could shape its physical form, I study this architectural generation ethnographically. Such a perspective unravels ties between seemingly dispersed issues: the practice of post-World War II architectural trends, the pressing issue of national belonging in a settler society, the 233

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appropriation of Palestinian vernacular architecture, and, ultimately, the ethics of Israeli place-making in art and architecture. In these sets of encounters between architectural and national cultures, we find that architects were neither autonomous, creative professionals working only within the discipline of architecture nor simply instruments of official power. I argue instead for the transparency of architectural production, in which architects worked out themes from within the framework of their discipline, and yet their actions were thoroughly politicized at the very point where they were most ‘neutral’ and ‘professional’.

A sabra generation searching for ‘architecture of place’ In the late 1950s, sabra architects launched a campaign to localize Israeli architecture. They saw in the territory of the decade-old Israeli State a homeland that was fundamentally different from what had been envisioned by the preceding generation, the founders of Labor Zionism. Since the early 1930s, Zionist architects in Mandate Palestine had embraced a modern architecture, which promised a new beginning, a departure from both bourgeois and ‘Oriental’ life, which they believed had contaminated Jewish life in the Diaspora.7 Sabra architects claimed that the resulting ‘international architecture’ – by then identified with the Israeli State – disregarded the Zionist promise of ‘a national home’ (Figure 11.5). Architects voicing this criticism, known also as the ‘Generation of the State’,8 were committed primarily to professional, rather than political, action.9 Their cultural formation was strikingly uniform – they were native born, urban, and socialist.10 This

11.5 Israel, Agaf ha-shikun, Israel Builds, Tel Aviv, The Ministry of Labor, Housing Department, 1959, cover image 234

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formation created an ideological screen through which members of the group assimilated professional knowledge. The subsequent dissemination of this architectural knowledge, filtered through an intricate cultural and political web, established them as leading professionals capable of mobilizing specialized knowledge into the national arena – a process that yielded substantial cultural power. Most members of this group were born or grew up in Tel Aviv, and attended one of three high schools there during the 1940s.11 These schools were ideological hubs, cultivating ‘men of European culture in the East’ while investing them with the value system of the so-called ‘working settlement’ – the elite of Labor Zionism.12 Later, a programme of combined military and agricultural training prepared them to take part in the Judaization of Mandate Palestine, and the War of Independence.13 The group sent to Rosh Hanikrah kibbutz, for example, consisted of six architects, who had great impact on Israeli practice, academia, and institutional planning (Figure 11.6) – one of them, Avraham Vachman, became an influential professor at the Technion (until recently, Israel’s only architectural school); another, Ram Karmi, a prominent architect and educator, became the first Head Architect of the Ministry of Housing; and four of them built extensively in post-1967 Jerusalem.14 According to Moti Sahar, a powerful institutional architect and a former combat pilot, it was a generation that saw itself as ‘bound with issues of the nation’.15 Its architectural members learned from their elders the power of collective effort. By the 1960s, they had formed an identity of their own. A leading group even set up a circle of sabra architects that met once a month to brainstorm their projects (Figure 11.7).16 Although the circle never produced a single written manifesto, it had a very clear agenda that soon covered

11.6 Rosh Ha-nikrah hachsharah, images collected for the group’s reunion 235

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11.7 Meetings of the Tel Aviv Circle of architects; counter-clockwise from right: Avraham Yaski, Amnon Alexandroni, Ram Karmi, Yitzhak Yashar, Moshe Zarhi

the pages of Israel’s single architectural periodical of the time as well as the reports judging numerous architectural competitions (the administration of which gradually came under their control).17 The principal focus of their work was housing, particularly in the new towns that mushroomed at the territorial periphery of the state after independence. Such was the model housing estate in Beer Sheva, where architects experimented both with a kilometre-long Corbusian megablock and with carpet housing – a low-rise and continuous built fabric with shaded passageways and private patios. In Giv’at Hamoreh, white regionalist buildings recreated conventional streets by accommodating the slope of the hill into their section. In Dimona, Nazereth, Arad, and in the unbuilt Bsor City, this group of architects experimented with the new trends they advocated – trends that are discussed further below.18 By 1967, members of the circle were gaining the professional power that was required to lead the building of the so-called ‘united Jerusalem’. During the 1970s, their influence extended from the private sector to the heart of bureaucracy. In 1974, Ram Karmi, arguably the most influential architect of his generation, became Head Architect for the Ministry of Housing, which centralized the building market in Israel. In 1977, Amnon Niv, a younger Tel Aviv architect with related architectural convictions, was appointed as Jerusalem City Engineer. Both appointments provoked a shift in planning and design philosophy as well as professional personnel. Ram Karmi, for example, halted all ongoing planning projects, brought three dozen or so architects and planners to the Ministry, and embarked on a new nation-wide planning programme. During the time of the interviews conducted for this research, two members of this very team headed two of three accredited architectural schools in Israel – a powerful testimony to the ongoing influence of their agenda in Israeli architectural culture.19 The 1957 conference in Ohalo, near the Sea of Galilee, was a formative moment.20 Avraham Yaski, who was a rising young architect at the time, and has been for decades the powerful head of arguably the largest architectural firm in Israel, remembers his trembling 236

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knees and cracking voice when he challenged his revered elders, the founding generation of Zionist architectural modernism.21 These elders had brought the ‘new architecture’ of European inter-war modernism to Mandate Palestine.22 After independence, they had incorporated the modern architecture they had previously practiced into a mass-produced housing industry that helped them accommodate numerous waves of new immigrants.23 In the minds of the sabra architects, however, these ‘housing solutions’ ignored the cultural diversity of the immigrants. Furthermore, they claimed that the architecture of Zionist modernism had failed to create the mandatory sense of belonging between men, community, and place. The sabra criticized architects like Alexander Klein, an inter-war architect who had fled from Europe, who taught at the local Technion, and was renowned for his famous scientific schemes for ‘existence minimum’.24 They appreciated the mass housing Klein and his colleagues advised for new immigrants, but insisted that in the process, Zionist modernist architects treated the inhabitants of the so-called ‘shikunim’ as objects. Klein’s housing projects, they contended, were certainly efficient but left no room for ‘culture’, which is, according to sabra architects, ‘what makes human beings into a people and society’.25 Enthusiasm for vernacular architecture typified the new generational strategy that sabra architects shared with their colleagues overseas. Instead of the modernist will to reform society, they sought ‘the spatial expression of human conduct’.26 An unmediated form of this expression could be found, they believed, in indigenous architecture – where life, rather than architects, dictated the form of building.27 As a result, architects shifted their focus to Man, with structuralist anthropology providing the theoretical ground. In a repeatedly quoted statement, the influential Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck said: Man is always and everywhere essentially the same. He has the same mental equipment though he uses it differently according to the particular life pattern of which he happens to be a part. Modern architects have been harping continually on what is different in our time to such an extent that even they have lost touch with what is not different, with what is always essentially the same.28

If man is essentially the same everywhere, his environment must be expressed by similar architectural principles. Post-war architectural discourse presented a wealth of mostly ‘primitive’ examples of this correlation between man and the built places that clothed his life. This architecture was felt to be uncontaminated by Western historical conventions, or by spurious Western progress. Moreover, unlike regional architecture at (the European) home, it risked no nationalistic interpretation, no painful memory of prewar sentiments. The prototypical inhabitant of these environments was a generic Man, whose specific history, culture, and politics were ignored in favour of a universal truth regarding the instincts of human habitation. In the United States, architectural critics such as Bernard Rudofsky drew upon the Bible and Darwin – the mythical and scientific origins of Western culture – to divest the Modern Movement of its scientific command. Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects of 1964 emerged as a major sourcebook for architects worldwide. It held vernacular architecture as ‘nearly immutable, indeed, unimprovable, since it serves its purpose to perfection’.29 237

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Similarly enthusiastic were Heideggerian phenomenologists who found in vernacular architecture ontological definitions of ‘place’, of being ‘at home’ in the world. The group Atbat-Afrique in Morocco, whose work combined Arab vernacular with modern architecture, wrote in their statement of principle that ‘[i]t is impossible for each man to construct his house to himself. It is for the architect to make it possible for the man to make his house a home’.30 This was precisely the type of ‘social ethics’ that brought the architectural thinking of the European Team 10 and the concurrent New Brutalism trend to bear so effectively on the architectural discourse of sabra architects.31 It suggested new venues for using architecture to socialize new immigrants into a national community, and at the same time to connect this imagined community to its place, i.e., the Land of Israel. New immigrants, the sabra generation posited, could not and should not comply with a modernist immigrants’ idea that is imposed on them in the form of a utopia built in white. The sabra generation wanted instead to ‘transform the Diaspora Jew into a man growing out of the land’, a man whose identity develops as a result of his organic ties to the territory rather than his adherence to an idea foreign to him.32 Only architecture ‘of the place’ could therefore identify Israelis with the territory to which they wanted to belong, as well as to possess. Makom (Hebrew for place) refers to ‘the encounter between man and the place where he is’.33 The notion of makom is fundamental to sabra art and architectural discourse because, as Gurevitz and Aran have argued, Israeli Jews did not succeed in resolving the ambiguities of their place: the tension between the text and the territory. The ‘Land of Israel’, according to this argument, has always been an abstract homeland, an idea, an aspiration the Zionist movement inherited from the Jewish religion. At the same time, however, it was also an actual place, laden with history, authenticity, and sacredness. If the founding generation was devoted to ‘the idea’, the sabra generation embraced the territory itself. The schism between the two constantly disturbed the process of inhabiting the land. Because, according to Gurevitz and Aran, the idea preceded the place, the efforts of sabra architects to substantiate the ‘idea’ in the land were not as spontaneous as they imagined. On the contrary, they were conscious, determined, and ideologically charged – fundamentally different from the effortless ‘nativeness’ that is gained by birthright and direct ancestry.34 Such ‘nativeness’ was readily found for sabra architects in Arab culture, whose vernacular architecture, inseparable from the place in which it was created, evinced the rootedness they sought. When Yoram Segal published in the inaugural issue of the journal Tvai a cover story on ‘The Traditional House in the Arab Villages of the Galilee’, he stressed this unmediated connectedness.35 He saw in the ties of the fellah to his house, which he builds and maintains with his own hands, ‘a relationship of belonging, of identification, and of strong emotional attachment’ (Figure 11.8).36 It was precisely this sort of relationship that the sabra architects were seeking. In his recent book Ram Karmi suggests that ‘emulating the local gave birth to an empathy toward the lifestyle of the Arabs and the Bedouins, and led to a renewed examination of different identity options’.37 Like Arab 238

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11.8 Yoram Segal, ‘The Arab village in the Galilee’

words in Hebrew slang, Arab attire for Israeli youth, or Arab food in Israeli cuisine, the evocation of ‘the Arab village’ in Israeli architectural culture was a protest through which sabras aimed to identify themselves as natives. In a 1965 essay, Karmi combined New Brutalist tendencies with his sabra identity to explain the theory behind his acclaimed multifunctional megastructure in Beer Sheva.38 In this essay, he divulges his inspiration from ‘the Arab village’, which he portrays as a set of formal and functional characteristics conducive to a harmonious built environment and a cohesive community. The Arab village, he explains, is ‘at home’ in the region – it is a sensual place where one can intimately experience space, stone, wind, and light (Figure 11.9). Naturally, the Palestinian inhabitants of these villages play little part in the picture. Their presence is at best generic, and their communal life is typically Mediterranean. Karmi explains that his intention was to translate rather than mimic regional values and moulds. In the Arab village, he further elaborates, he found typologies that accord with the desert – the cohesiveness of the built material; the shaded, ventilated bazaar; and the dissolution of the traditional façade into a volumetric play in which the sun sculpts ever-changing shadows. But, Karmi stresses, this typology is not yet part of the Israeli culture which ‘we’ Israelis are so laboriously trying to define. Karmi’s attempt to translate Palestinian architecture is subtle. It is interesting to contrast it to the Israeli Museum, built by the European Israeli, Al Mansfeld, which is also modelled on an Arab village. Mansfeld drew on the formal characteristics of the village, particularly on its morphological appearance of multiple cubical units, whose silhouette complement the landscape of Jerusalem.39 In contrast, Karmi’s architecture hardly resembles the Arab vernacular in formal terms. Its interior spaces, however, emulate the spatial experience of shaded passages and enclosed courtyards that he considered indigenous. Unlike the modernist Mansfeld, who sought in this vernacular a formal architectural system, Karmi’s turn to the Arab village precedent intended to evoke the ‘homeness’ of the region. The wishful nature of such Israeli ‘homeness’ was eagerly debated. The founders of the state insisted that a home for the New Jew be free of past memories – a modernist 239

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11.9 Ram Karmi, An Arab Village; drawing

new beginning on a clean slate. Nearly four decades later, Moshe Safdie contested Zionist modernism with the opposite argument. Observing post-1967 Jerusalem, Safdie delineated a clear-cut dichotomy between the noble Palestinian fellah, who ‘takes time out from farming to build himself a house’, and the modernized Israeli professor, who ‘has a house built by a professional architect’. ‘The fellah’s house’, says Safdie, ‘will in all likelihood be the better one.’40 Safdie listed issues such as identity, scale, and public space that is both conducive to social life and complementary to the topography, as the human qualities that would make the Arab village of Sillwan a better living environment than contemporary Israeli modernist housing. All these merits depended on a longstanding heritage that the Zionist movement either ignored or erased. These examples demonstrate the cultural impasse in which Israeli architects were caught. Zionist revolutionary socialism, which attempted to redeem the country through its modernization, did not accord with their generation. It had emerged in Europe, and its sweeping Judaization of Mandate Palestine intentionally ignored indigenous architecture. It also operated from top down, locating at the top the Zionist pioneers who ‘salvaged’ a land conceived as tabula rasa. The sabra approach, however, turning to the local vernacular in order to build from bottom up, was no less confusing. A genuine national architecture required an unmediated expression of the place, but the search for authentic expression yielded perplexing results: native architecture was mostly Arab. The Israeli search for an alternative to Zionist modernism in the local Palestinian vernacular was contradictory – at exactly the time when Arab culture was most denigrated by the Israelis, its secret code for local connectedness was deeply admired. In the wake of this contradiction, notions of colonizer/colonized, or Western/Oriental, gave way to the 240

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ambivalence of colonial subjectivity. Scholarly analysis of this condition emerged in critical response to binary oppositions, such as Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism.41 It habitually focused on the incapacity of the colonized to retrieve an ‘authentic’ identity that was not always already entangled in colonial subjugation.42 My interest here is in a similar yet inverted ambivalence, for the study of which I look at the dominant professional discourse rather than at the ‘natives’ as the object of ethnography.43 Accordingly, I focus on the colonizer’s dependency on the identity of the colonized in order to define an ‘authentic’ national identity of visceral ties to the place. The Israeli desire to achieve the Arab’s nativeness – which was seen as the ultimate expression of locality – sheds new light on a subject seldom frequented by postcolonial scholarship.44 The national and professional sentiments of the sabra, I argue, underlined the Israeli architectural praxis that shaped the urban landscape of post-1967 Israeli Jerusalem. These sentiments were developed as an internal Israeli debate logged in between post-World War II architectural culture – the modernist crisis of which echoed in the sabra generational revolt against Zionist modernism – and a national identity built on a formative lack which provoked a desire for, and fantasy about, the intimate relationship of the Arab native with the place, its landscape, stone, and light. After the 1967 War, when the object of this fantasy – the Arab habitat – became tangibly present and heavily populated with the Palestinian residents of the occupied territories, this seemingly internal professional debate was caught in the urgent politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The question is how the architectural convictions of the sabra endured the political moment? How could Palestinian built culture be accepted as a model for the post-1967 architecture of Israeli Jerusalem? In what follows, I study three strategies for Israelizing the Arab vernacular – reading this as Biblical architecture, reading this as an uncontaminated primitive origin of architecture, or reading this simply as typically Mediterranean.

‘Biblicalizing’ the landscape After the 1967 conquest of Jerusalem’s Old City, Israeli Jews rejoiced in a metaphorical return home, especially to the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter – the symbolic centres of the Jewish people. The consequent increased focus on the vernacular architecture of the Jewish Quarter prompted a national strategy that weakened the authority of Arab architectural forms over Israeli architecture. When Segal wrote on the Arab village in the Galilee in 1966, or when sabra architects simultaneously launched a preservationist approach to the reconstruction of Old Jaffa, they expressed admiration for the human values and identity embeddedness of what they saw as generic examples of the region’s vernacular architecture. But when architects of this generation started reconstructing the Jewish Quarter immediately after the 1967 War, this vernacular was no longer generic, and it was seen by Israelis as an embodiment of Jewish history. The tangible presence of the Quarter and the Western Wall substantiated for Israelis their national confidence and anchored their claim over a disputed land. ‘The Wall’, said architect Karmi, ‘symbolizes the place in which I feel direct roots to King David. I can greet him shalom.’45 Cutting 241

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edge archaeological research authenticated this biblical connectedness. While architects were seeking locality on the ground, archaeologists sought Jewish history underneath its surface. The two were combined in the reconstructed Jewish Quarter, where archaeological finds were embedded, as Nadia Abu El-Haj recently demonstrated, in the physical fabric and spatial experience of the Quarter.46 If the architecture of the Quarter testified to the continuity of Jewish habitation since biblical times, the new sense of locale could be applied to the surrounding Palestinian villages, whose architecture was perceived as biblical, with the inhabitants as its custodians. Indeed, the ‘special zone’ – the planning unit of Jerusalem’s most symbolic part – reached beyond the Old City. It included the Palestinian rural hinterland of East Jerusalem, the planning of which often fell under the rubric of landscape design. The central feature of the national landscape scheme was a green belt around the Old City – previously a British colonial dream, which would visually arrest the Old City of Jerusalem. Officials wanted to include the Arab village of Sillwan in this park because ‘its character gives us a good picture of how the landscapes and villages of Biblical times looked’.47 Publications of the army’s educational system compared this village to the archaeologically informed openair model of Herod’s Jerusalem.48 This 1:50 scale monumental reconstruction of the socalled Second Temple Period – a major tourist attraction in and of itself – confirmed the sameness of Sillwan and Herod’s Jerusalem, again emphasizing the continuity of ancient building traditions (Figure 11.10).49 There was an explicit effort to differentiate the new interest in the vernacular from the romanticism of nineteenth-century Orientalism, the indication of which was the scientific accuracy of present research.50 A study of the Palestinian villages in the Hebron hills, for example, enlisted archaeology, Talmudic sources, and anthropology to validate the continuity of residential built tradition from ancient to present time. Contemporary visitors to the region, the study reported, encounter ‘a lifestyle which seemed familiar from biblical and Talmudic sources’.51 Following a painstaking survey the author concluded that the ‘houses, which have remained as they were hundreds of years ago, allow us to study and to deduce from the private construction of our time the ancient private building’.52 While this meticulous study contributes greatly to the documentation of endangered Palestinian culture, its scholarly operation at the heart of the Israeli institution confirms the role of Palestinians as custodians of biblical culture, the Jewish copyrights of which were always taken for granted.

The noble savage and the origin of architecture Moshe Safdie, an Israeli-born architect, immigrated during his youth to Canada, where he became internationally known for his groundbreaking Montreal Habitat (Expo 1967). Endorsed by the Israeli administration upon his return home in December 1967, he designed the (unrealized) prefabricated Jerusalem Habitat (Figure 11.11). Safdie called the Arab village site of his project by its Hebrew/biblical name, Manchat. ‘Here’, he stated, ‘was the prototype, the ancient village, with which any modern development 242

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11.10 Professor Avi-Yona, Model of Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period, scale 1:50 (left). Sillwan village, aerial view (top right). Sillwan village and Temple Mount, View of the City of David, the Qidron valley and the ‘Kings Gardens’ (bottom right)

would have to co-exist.’53 Realizing the absolute dichotomy between the Arab village and the Israeli superblock, he clearly intended to emulate the former, to contrast an architecture derived from abstract intellectual premises with one stemming from the primal instincts of habitation. Furthering the roots of these instincts in primary habitation, such as the structures built by ‘the tree people’, Safdie advanced a Darwinian logic that directly evoked his inspiration from the seminal Architecture Without Architects of his acquaintance, Bernard Rudofsky. The Arab village, untouched by Western sophistication, exemplified for Safdie the true origin of architecture. To his eyes, even villages of 1948 Palestinian refugees, built with ‘fairly limited resources’ and devoid of historical depth, were ‘awesome environments’.54 They proved for him that habitation was a product of ‘the compassionate search for the way people live their private and public life’.55 Safdie explained his incorporation of advanced methods of construction into this ‘original’ vernacular model of habitation: I wanted to build something that was wholly contemporary, an expression of life today, but that would be as if it had always been there – a kind of fugue with two instruments, a counterpoint on a remembered melody. Thus evolved the Habitat Israel building system: modular, concrete units, sandblasted to expose the yellow Jerusalem stone aggregate, room sections made out of fiberglass domes, and rotating windows and shutters, all interlocking on the hills.56

‘The remembered melody’ of masses ‘interlocked on the hills’ echoed the Palestinian 243

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11.11 Moshe Safdie, a comparison between an Arab village (Manchat) and his Jerusalem Habitat

vernacular. By creating a ‘fugue with two instruments’ – one vernacular and one technological – Safdie’s Jerusalem Habitat could fulfil the Zionist dream of fusing the ancient with the modern. In Jerusalem ‘the origin’ was biblical, the modern progressive, and the combination of both a validation of a people enduring from a remote past to an unforeseen future. A further integration of this formula with ancient Jewish history brought the Palestinian vernacular to the primary site of the Jewish religion. Informed by Josephus, the Roman historian who documented Herod’s Jerusalem, Safdie’s authorized design for the Western Wall Plaza followed the description of his Jerusalem Habitat. Likewise, it ‘was akin to an Arab village in the sense that it followed the hill, each unit had its roof garden, and a series of pathways followed the topography intimately’.57

Mediterraneanism Inspiration from indigenous architecture similarly underlined the ordinary housing which defined Jerusalem’s post-1967 vernacular. The year 1977 saw the publication of Ram Karmi’s essay, ‘Human Values in Urban Architecture’. Essentially a manifesto, the essay prescribed a list of Mediterranean architectural forms as guidelines for future planning. They were intended to help architects resolve the most pressing question – that of belonging. How could architects establish an architectural language that encouraged personal expression but also defined a vernacular for the national community? Karmi’s 244

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reference for such active re-rooting was the revival of the ancient Hebrew language, which addressed biblical origin, kinship, and blood. Israeli architecture, Karmi contended, should connect those attributes to the land. In different contexts, scholars have termed the strategy Karmi chose for this task Mediterraneanism.58 He invoked the timeless patterns of Mediterranean architecture as guidelines for a hierarchical ordering of the built environment – from the house to the cluster, quarter, square, street, bazaar, and, finally, to the entire system. Then he compiled a manual of Mediterranean ‘structural elements’, which should constitute the alphabet of the Hebrew built landscape: the wall, the gate, the balcony and porch, the stairs and threshold, the streets and alleyways. Finally, under the banner of ‘values’, he discussed the application of the lesson learned from Mediterranean architecture to the present day, advocating such post-World War II trends as the separation of pedestrians from vehicles and the creation of public spaces in between buildings. The architectural precedents that Karmi looked to were no longer tied to the Arab village – his prime reference of the 1960s – but to the Old City and Greek villages on the one hand, and to architects such as Le Corbusier and Safdie on the other. Karmi’s precedents go back to his architectural training in Britain. The architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham, who was closely associated with Alison and Peter Smithson, has chronicled the emergence of New Brutalism. He writes that at the Architectural Association of the early 1950s, where the Smithsons taught and Karmi was a student, a new generation ‘saw in Mediterranean peasant buildings an anonymous architecture of simple, rugged, geometrical forms, smooth-walled and small windowed, unaffectedly and immemorially at home in its landscape setting’.59 Hence, Karmi’s search for homeness in Mediterranean culture, or earlier in Arab-built culture, had strong European roots that associated him with the interests of the likes of Aldo van Eyck, James Stirling, and the regionalism of his friend Kenneth Frampton.60 Politically, the idea of Israeli participation in a larger Mediterranean culture divested Palestinian architecture of its authority over the genius loci because it was subsumed into a larger geocultural realm.61 It could thus relieve the Israeli architect of the disturbing conflict between admiring native architecture and disregarding the larger Arab culture that produced it. The association with Europe’s cradle of civilization was pacifying and flexible, and could accommodate the early modernism of which Karmi’s father was a major proponent.

The ethics of Israeli place making When Karmi moved from the private sector to the heart of bureaucracy, he was making an ideological claim on behalf of the architectural profession for the right to shape the physical image of the state. It was, as Karmi suggests, an attempt to manage the identity of the ‘national home’ bureaucratically.62 Karmi first distinguished between ‘building’ and ‘architecture’, and then between ‘space’ (or ‘roof’) and ‘place’. His claim was that the extant government buildings fell short of being ‘architecture’ at all, that they were merely 245

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a system of ‘roofs’ that failed to create any sense of ‘place’. He demanded a complete overhaul of national decision-making, and argued that only then, . . . the creation of a ‘National Home’ and of ‘place’ will achieve its legitimacy as an element that represents and reflects, in physical terms, the cultural aspirations of the community and builds the community in its own land, and expresses its physical and spiritual right to, and ownership over, that land.63

This is a momentous statement. Karmi identified the makom (place) his Israeli-born generation was seeking with the national home Zionism promised. Makom, Karmi argued, is a prerequisite for a national home because only an identifiable Israeli place can provide the moral basis for the ownership over the land. Seeking ‘the physical and spiritual right to . . . that land’, was for Karmi at the heart of Israeli place making. ‘Creating a “place”’, he reminded us, ‘is a qualitative, symbolic and emotional process’, a task that architects – rather than planners or bureaucrats – should undertake. Architecture, as distinguished from ‘building’, ‘can reflect and represent the cultural aspiration of a community’, – that is, it can create a symbolic place rather than a mere conglomeration of dwelling units. Making the built landscape into a makom was a way to nationalize the territory – a way to Israelize Jerusalem.

Trapped in the crossfire of architecture and politics During the 1970s and well into the 1980s, this generation of architects created a recognizable style that spread from the reconstructed Jewish Quarter to the new housing settlements on the outskirts of the city. Inspired by the aforementioned Brutalist and regionalist architectural trends, the stone-clad buildings were broken into small terraced masses that tried to echo Jerusalem’s mountainous landscape and emulate its vernacular. Densely laid out, these buildings typically form groups of row houses facing into courtyards. The buildings are thus said to mark ‘a shift from architecture of facades to architecture of [communal] interior spaces’ in Jerusalem.64 The state of Israel and its architects promoted this architecture of a ‘united Jerusalem’ in official exhibitions and numerous publications that celebrated locality through housing clusters and various preservation projects.65 Intriguingly, the devaluation of this architecture in Israeli professional consciousness coincided with the first intifada of 1987 to 1993, which staged the Israeli-Palestinian contest over locality. Located in the midst of political tension, the residential neighbourhoods in Jerusalem were microcosms of the Israeli reality – they consolidated its Jewish population, and instead of becoming the slums contemporary critics were dreading, they encouraged a social mobility that significantly upgraded the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem’s lowincome housing.66 At the same time, building on confiscated land undermined the possibility of sharing ‘locality’ with Palestinians. The combination of local architectural motives and the presence of massive bulldozers turned this local ‘place-sensitive’ architecture into the hallmark of the Israeli occupation for Palestinians. In spite of the successful social programme of these housing estates, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 246

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began to erode the architectural reputation of post-1967 neighbourhoods, whose style, even in Israeli culture, was derogatively coined ‘neo-Oriental’, ‘crusade’, or, worst of all, ‘postmodern’. I nevertheless argue that the architecture of post-1967 Jerusalem, particularly that of its residential neighbourhoods, is a manifesto of the dominant generation of Israeli architecture. The larger-than-life architectural commissions of post-1967 Jerusalem offered architects of this generation a vast testing ground for implementing their architectural programme. The unprecedented power that sabra architects exercised during the decade following the 1967 War has established them as leaders of the architectural profession in Israel to this day. The team working on the satellite neighbourhood of Giloh, for example, was based in Tel Aviv and had little regard for the national romantic depiction of Jerusalem. Their initial schemes of high-rise buildings or radical row house megastructures in Giloh were intended to evade what they dismissed as ‘Jerusalemism’.67 The Ministry of Housing favoured instead the so-called ‘neo-Oriental style’, with its four-storey stone buildings, arguing that they would suit Jerusalem, and also sell better than the proposed housing megastructures. The head of the team, Avraham Yaski, decided that ‘if you’re raped, relax and enjoy it’.68 Responding to the Ministry of Housing’s demand, he tried to compromise between the Brutalist architecture they had previously built, and the stone to which they had now to surrender. The rough tubsa stone and the concrete arches are evidence of this drama. The story Yaski told me was deliciously laden with the contradictions that characterize his generation. After the 1967 War, state officials invested Jerusalem’s architecture with Jewish symbolism and adhered to the British colonial rule of stone cladding, evoking, as a result, a romantic style that embarrassed Yaski’s secular and socialist team. But the criticized romantic Jerusalemism that the Ministry of Housing imposed on Yaski’s team was the product of the architects’ own sabra architectural programme: the cluster, the courtyard, and the lessons learned from the Arab village and the Palestinian vernacular. Throughout the 1970s, Yaski admitted, they continued to explore the city’s traditional neighbourhoods in order to find inspirational models for Jerusalem architecture. But nobody noticed the Arab village that was caught between the bulldozers preparing the ground for Giloh and the city of Jerusalem, because ‘nobody talked about these things in those days’.69 ‘These things’ referred to the Palestinian dispossession, and ‘those days’ were the days of the post-1967 euphoria. Yaski honestly admitted that architects, unlike the writers and the artists with whom they associated, were confined to an institutional framework, which eroded their critical perspective. Does institutional dependency explain the contradictions that the sabra architectural programme inherited? I suggest looking instead, and more closely, at the Israeli identity that was suspended between Zionist modernism and Palestinian rootedness. This cultural location had a significant effect even on architects and artists who were ardent critics of the Israeli occupation. In a contested territory, the powerful desire of one culture to ‘belong’ to the place, to adopt as its own the physical surroundings and the cultural 247

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trappings of that place, can be, in itself, part of a process of alienating the other. This holds true even for those who recognize the legitimacy of the other’s claim to the territory. Take, for example, Itzhak Danziger, whose sculptural forms and materials communicated to sabra architects local identity and the essence of the Israeli landscape, and who led the basic design studies at the Technion from 1955 to his death in 1976. Danziger levelled harsh criticism at the Zionist project – not as an idea, but as an expression of a typical modernization process. For Danziger, the East embodied potential resistance to the injury caused by Labor Zionism. The makom (i.e., place) for which Danziger searched for years was found in Palestinian religious sites, many of which were linked to a Jewish past. This place was an environment, a landscape, a ritual, and an opportunity for connected Israeliness.70 Connected to what? To Palestinian authenticity that had not yet been ‘spoiled’ by the Zionist project. Danziger’s admiration for Arab culture, as Sarah Hinsky insightfully demonstrates, was often incompatible with his commitment to the Zionist cause. His land-healing memorials for fallen soldiers were underpinned, she argues, by the same culture of dispossession that uprooted the Palestinians whose connectedness he admired.71 Micha Ullman, an acclaimed Israeli artist, followed Danziger’s teaching at the architectural school of the Technion. For the 1988 exhibition To the East: the Orient in Israeli Art, Ullman prepared a striking buried house of perfectly ordered residential elements made of iron and earth.72 The work was situated at the dead end of a gallery dedicated to ‘the villages hidden from sight’, a dedication which criticized Israeli blindness to the Palestinian forced exile. Ulman’s inclusion in the category of hidden villages is intriguing despite his obviously critical voice because his own identity was concealed. An earlier exhibition catalogue prepared by Yigal Zalmona, the curator of To the East, characterized Ulman as ‘a digging man: farmer-soldier-archeologist’.73 If one had to define the Zionist equation of displacement, its components would include conquering the land through agricultural, military, and historical means, which the farmer, the soldier, and the archaeologist employed during the process. My interest lies exactly in this ambivalence resulting from dual identity – the artist criticizing the products of the same Israeliness that defines him and his work. The work of the internationally renowned artist Dani Karavan further illuminates this complexity. In the same exhibition, Karavan displays an uprooted olive tree, hanging upside-down in the air by its roots. He invokes the olive tree as a Palestinian emblem of rootedness and dispossession, as the same tree had been repeatedly uprooted and replanted. Replanted finally in the museum’s sculpture garden, it became a living document, tormented and charged with the memory of uprooting, exhibition galleries, indoors and outdoors, politics, and art. At the same time, in a different exhibition, Karavan juxtaposed his work of the 1990s with earlier drawings (Figure 11.12) under which he wrote:74 In the 1950’s, I painted the abandoned village of Beit-Jiz and Kibbutz Harel – social realism? Since then, my work has been dedicated to peace and tolerance between Israelis and Palestinians, and I plant olive trees everywhere. Is that political art?75 248

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Karavan’s questioning is appropriate, and corresponds to the layers of meaning in his works. The displayed early sketches of abandoned villages hardly pay any heed to the ugliness, distress, and pain of the desertion. They arouse instead a certain romantic feeling, a unity of structure and landscape, perhaps even a sense of archaeology. These are the villages that sabra architects, who warmly embraced Karavan long before he was recognized by the art world, referred to repeatedly in the context of the ‘localism’ that they attempted to create. At the heart of this inability to see the distress that the abandonment of these villages must have occasioned is a yearning to be ‘of the place’. The very localities that Israeliborn artists and architects identify as points of connectedness to a place – the familiar landscape of the abandoned village – are sources of pain and alienation for the former inhabitants. What is more Israeli than an abandoned Palestinian area? What conveys local Israeli ambience more than Ein-Hod, old Jaffa, or Ein Kerem – all populated by artists who incorporated the abandoned villages into their existence and their lifestyles, and made them as beautiful as can be?76 The beautification of abandoned areas dulls the pain of the battle. These villages of exile – the heart of Palestinian pain – were transformed by their hands into artists’ colonies, or, more significantly, into inspirational models for ‘local’ Israeli building. This predicament indicates a need to examine the founding generation of Israeli sabra culture, the generation that today bemoans the by-products of its yearning for a local,

11.12 Dani Karavan, catalogue page showing drawings of Beit Jiz, 1953 249

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connected Hebrew nativeness that was, in many cases, constructed on the ruins of the localness of the other. In some intriguing way, the housing of Giloh – which is regularly being targeted by the gunmen of Beit Jala during the current Palestinian intifada – may be the most accurate chronicle of Israeli architecture. It brings together the process and the result. It combines Brutalist aesthetics and the image of traditional stone building, reversing therefore the traditional use of concrete and stone (the arches in Giloh are made from exposed concrete while the prefabricated panels are covered with tubsa stone). This reversal can be read as a metaphor for Giloh’s political position – it was industriously produced by a centralizing state on confiscated land, yet succeeded in fostering a sense of community and securing the Jewish middle class of Jerusalem. The architecture of Giloh is indeed both hospitable and brutal, simultaneously building the nation and divulging its colonial practices. The roots of this architecture in a great concern for the integrity of human life in the age of progress and technology sheds light on its problematic focus on Man. In postWorld War II architectural culture, the notion of Man, by and large, implied a generic identity. This Man was real, invulnerable, and entertained essential sameness across cultures and times. In Israel, however, when this generic Man was a new immigrant, when his community had roots in foreign countries, and when his place was a contested territory that he had to conquer and protect through military power, his identity had to take on a host of different and more complex meanings. Local architects, trying to construct for this Man a coherent and identifiable Israeli ‘home’, drew on the ethics of New Brutalism, and the nascent regionalism of Team 10. Ultimately, the ‘home’ they constructed was intended to house the personification of the Zionist dream of a New Jew in the image of the native sabra. The model of the native Jew that the sabra embodied, however, was itself the result of an insecure possession of place. Sabra architects defined themselves vis-à-vis a modernization project – which they thoroughly criticized – and a place for which they longed, but whose ‘genetic code’ was defined as Arab once it was juxtaposed with the Zionist project’s strictly modernist path. Eventually, the efforts of Israeli architects to crack the Palestinian code for local habitation on unequal political grounds diverted their focus on the structuralist Man of post-World War II architectural culture away from its humanistic path, depriving other men of the symbolic ownership of their built heritage. Recent architectural critics enumerate the political pitfalls of this localist architectural tradition, which they want to divest of its leading role in Israeli architectural practice. According to this view ‘concern with localness after 1967 reflects the release of dark tendencies that are fundamentalist in essence’.77 The clear separation between the social role of this architecture and its aesthetics characterizes the production of criticism during the politically charged time of the Palestinian intifadas. But, does this criticism mark the end of ‘the tradition of the place’, of the search for locality? Not necessarily. The ‘true’ locality is now being attributed to Israel’s modernism – the ‘Bauhaus Style’ of the 1930s and 1940s as well as the state’s ‘grey’ modernism of the 1950s. Recent exhibitions and monographs clearly indicate that the tradition of the modern, uncontaminated by the 250

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conflict or the Orient, is taking command. This recovery has a global appeal. A proponent of ‘grey modernism’ explains that for a younger generation, who ‘knows that the 1950s are now in style’ and whose ‘memory works in megabytes’, it offers escape – ‘plain and simple – they are sick of fabricating “local” architecture and getting bogged in the provincial swamp’. The global in this happy reversal prompts the local to redefine a modernist tradition for an Israeliness in a state of crisis.

Notes This chapter is based on my doctoral dissertation at MIT. I am grateful to my committee, Mark Jarzombek, Stanford Anderson, and Sibel Bozdogan as well as to Uri Ram. In preparing this chapter I benefited from the comments of Nasser Rabbat of MIT and Caroline Elam and Kevin Chua of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Special thanks go to the architects who guided me through the culture of their generation, particularly to Dan Etan, Ram Karmi, Avraham Vachman, and Yaakov Yaar. 1. 2.

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8.

9.

M. Safdie, Beyond Habitat, Montreal, Tundra Books, 1973, p. 216. Israel performed the act of unification unilaterally by expanding the city’s municipal boundaries and changing Israeli municipal law in order to enact Israeli jurisdiction in the newly-defined Israeli capital. The Palestinian population of Jerusalem refused to participate in the state practices of the new regime, an act that was intended to validate their resolute demand to recognize in East Jerusalem the occupied capital of Palestine. The Minister of Housing, Mordechai Bentov, explained on the Knesset (Israeli parliament) podium: ‘the planning principles are: building in stone, relatively low-rise building, within the limits of three stories, in accordance with the neighborhood that borders the area under development. Also incorporated are elements of Oriental building such as arches, domes, etc; building types are especially adjusted to the topographic condition and the slopes of the sites (terraced building) . . . The architects and planners are exerting extra efforts to bestow on these neighborhoods an image that accords with the landscape and character of Jerusalem’. See ‘Planning and Building Methods in East Jerusalem’, Ha’aretz, February 2, 1968; D. Kroyanker, Jerusalem Architecture – Periods and Styles: Modern Architecture Outside the Old City: 1948–1990, Jerusalem, Keter, 1991, pp. 41–42; and Yehuda Drexler, interview, September 2, 1998. The Ministry of Housing was eager to build quickly on land confiscated immediately after the war in order to create a continuous built area between North Jerusalem and Mount Scopus. They therefore recruited completed housing plans that Itzhak Perlstein had designed for another site and added to them prefabricated arches in order to provide Eshkol Heights with the appropriate Oriental look. Elinoar Barzaki, interview, August 20, 1998. Barzaki studied in Europe during the 1968 events and was recruited by Ram Karmi upon her return to join his team at the Ministry of Housing. Later she became the City Engineer of Jerusalem, and, at the time of the interview, she was the head of the architectural school at Tel Aviv University. A. Hashimshoni, ‘Architecture’, in B. Tamuz (ed.), Art of Israel, Israel, Massada, 1963, pp. 199– 229. The English edition is ‘Architecture’, in B. Tamuz, M. Wykes-Joyce, and Y. Fischer (eds.), Art of Israel, Philadelphia, Chilton Book Co., 1967. For the triple negation of the Jewish Diaspora, the bourgeoisie, and the Orient, which preconditioned the adoption of modern architecture as a Zionist expression see A. Nitzan-Shiftan, ‘Contested Zionism-Alternative Modernism: Erich Mendelsohn and the Tel Aviv Chug in Mandate Palestine’, Architectural History, vol. 39, September 1996, pp. 147–180. See J. Mali (ed.), Wars, Revolutions, and Generational Identity, Tel Aviv, Am Oved; Merkaz Yitshak Rabin le-heker Yisra’el, 2001, particularly M. Brinker, ‘The Generation of the State: A Cultural or Political Concept?’, pp. 143–157. Dan Etan, interview, July 29, 1998. Etan pointed out that the founders of Labor Zionism did not entrust his sabra generation with political duties but assigned to them instead professional tasks. 251

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10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

252

Indeed, one of the main questions facing scholars of this sabra generation is its members’ political inefficacy in comparison to the founders of Labor Zionism. See Y. Shapira, An Elite without Successors, Tel Aviv, Sifriyat Po’alim, 1984. Anita Shapira argues that this generation conformed to the activist message of Labor Zionism and saw in politics a field of verbal articulations rather than accomplishments. Following her comment that they turned instead to professional careers, this study questions the political efficacy of their action through ‘the profession’. See A. Shapira, ‘Dor Baaretz’, in A. Shapira (ed.), Old Jews, New Jews, Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 1997, pp. 122–154. Not all the protagonists I study were actually born in Mandate Palestine. However, interviews have revealed that the great majority of the group under focus was indeed native-born. Others assimilated to the culture of the sabra at an early age, being young enough to study in the appropriate high schools and to participate in the activities of Zionist youth movements, which led to the required cultural path I describe below. The high schools were Tichon Hadash, Gimnasya Herzlia, and Bet Hinuch Tichon. Each of them was a hub for different youth movements. Interviews with Dan Etan (July 29, 1998; May 15, 2001; and June 6, 2001) and with Avraham Vachman (August 8, 1998, and ongoing personal communication). This war started immediately after the U.N. resolution to divide Mandate Palestine between its Arab and Jewish populations. Israelis call it the War of Independence, the result of their national struggle for Jewish sovereignty. Palestinians call this war the Nakba, the disaster that dispossessed them of their homeland. The foundation of Israel was therefore based on a national project that was at the same time both liberating and oppressive. In the group sent to Rosh Hanikrah were architects Se’adia Mendel, Moshe Lofenfeld, Avraham Vachman, Ram Karmi, as well as one who remains unidentified. Their commander was architect Dan Etan. The training in such groups was called hachshara. This particular hachshara was drafted to the hagana, the mainstream Zionist military organization, and was sent to Kibbutz Rosh Hanikrah. After the declaration of independence, they were drafted as a group to the newly-formed Israel Defense Force, the IDF, the Soldierly Pioneering Youth (nahal) which was modelled after the combined military- settlement training of the hachshara (Interviews with Avraham Vachman). Moti Sahar, phone interview, July 2001. The circle’s core consisted of Dan Etan, Yizhak Yashar, Ram Karmi, Ora and Ya’akov Ya’ar, Avraham Yaski, and Amnon Alexandroni. Moshe Zarhi and Yaakov Rechter also frequently participated. The circle, however, associated with other architects, whom they often invited to present their work, such as Eldar Sharon, Zvi Hecker, and David Best. Best, together with David Reznik, who belonged to an earlier formation of this group (when he was working with Zeev Rechter in Tel Aviv) were the most influential non-sabras among Israeli architects. Handasah ve-Adrichalut (Engineering and Architecture), the Journal of Israel Association of Engineers and Architects, was the single architectural periodical in Israel until the mid-1960s. At that time, Dan Etan edited some special issues for the journal. The group of participants (who were usually associated with the circle) alternated according to the topic. They met to discuss issues such as new housing developments, institutes for higher education, and so forth – issues which preoccupied their generational group. The meetings were recorded and their transcriptions published in the journal in lieu of a manifesto. Particularly important was the Model Housing Estate in Beer Sheva (1959–1964), where a team experimented with different housing types, ranging from a kilometre-long housing block (Yaski and Alexandroni) to casba-inspired carpet housing (Havkin and Zolotov). The unrealized plans for the new town of Bsor (1961–1964) generated new ideas that were strongly influenced by the British plans for Hook. Avraham Yaski headed both teams. Other examples of influential experiments are Etan and Yashar’s Victory Housing in Dimona of the mid-1960s (whose name was inspired by the Six Day War immediately after which the housing complex was populated), Yaakov and Ora Ya’ar’s housing and commercial centre in Givat Hamoreh (1958–1961), and David Best’s plans for housing quarters in Arad (Yeelim, 1961, Avishur, 1965). Elinoar Barzaki headed the Tel Aviv University School of Architecture together with Avraham Yaski, a leading member of the 1960s Tel Aviv architectural circle. Zeev Drukman headed the School of Architecture at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem.

Seizing locality in Jerusalem

20. In interviews (for example, with Avraham Yaski and Dan Etan), the date of the conference was uncertain. In Handasah ve-Adrichalut (Engineering and Architecture), however, the 1957 conference in Ohalo is covered in detail as a typical modernist event, in which Ben Gurion tied national and architectural goals. See ‘Addresses delivered at the 31st General Conference at “Ohalo”, March 8–9, 1957’, Handasah ve-Adrichalut, March 1957. 21. Avraham Yaski, interview, August 23, 1998. 22. This is by far the most studied period in Israeli architectural historiography. For an analysis of this phenomenon see A. Nitzan-Shiftan, ‘Israelizing Jerusalem: The Encounter between Architectural and National Ideologies 1967–1977’, Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 2002. For a primary source, see Habinyan 1–3, Tel Aviv, 1937 and 1938. Examples of secondary sources are M. Levin and J. Turner, White City: International Style Architecture in Israel, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum, 1984; J. Fiedler and Friedrich-Ebert-Stitftung (eds.), Social Utopias of the Twenties: Bauhaus, Kibbutz, and the Dream of the New Man, Wuppertal, Germany, Müller + Busmann Press, 1995; G. Herbert and S. Sosnovsky, Bauhaus on the Carmel and the Crossroads of Empire: Architecture and Planning in Haifa During the British Mandate, Jerusalem, Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1993; G. Herbert, ‘On the Fringes of the International Style’, Architecture SA, September/October 1987; I. Kamp-Bandau et al., Tel Aviv, Neues Bauen, 1930–1939, Tübingen, Wasmuth, 1993; W. Nerdinger and P. Goldman (eds.), Tel Aviv, Modern Architecture 1930–1939, Tübingen, Wasmuth, 1994. 23. For recent historiographic activity in scholarship and exhibitions, see Tzvi Efrat and Meira Yagid (curators), The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture, 1948–1973, Tel Aviv Museum, 2000; Chapters from the 2004 catalogue are: Tzvi Efrat, ‘Size (Godel)’, Studio 118, 2000; and Tzvi Efrat, ‘Emergency (Herum), Vernacular’, Studio 120, 2000–2001. Also see M. Tuvyah and M. Boneh (eds.), Building the Country: Public Housing in the 1950s, Tel Aviv, The Israel Museums Forum and HaKibbutz HaMeuhad, 1999. During the year of Israel’s Jubilee, there were two art exhibitions that prepared the ground for the architectural interest in this period. See B. Galia, Hebrew Work, Ein Harod, Mishkan le-omanut, 1998. G. Blas and I. Tatenbaum, Social Realism in the 1950s, Political Art in the 1990s, Haifa, The New Haifa Museum, 1998. 24. See for example A. Klein, ‘House Planning Principles and Methods for Plan Analysis’, Handasah ve-Adrichalut (Engineering and Architecture), nos. 4 and 5, 1942. 25. Ram Karmi, interview, Tel Aviv, July 7, 1998. 26. Jacob Bakema, in A. Smithson and Team 10, Team 10 Primer, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1968, p. 24. 27. S. Anderson, ‘Memory without Monuments: Vernacular Architecture’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 1999, pp. 13–22. 28. Aldo van Eyck in O. Newman, New Frontiers in Architecture: CIAM 59 in Otterlo, New York, Universe Books, 1961. 29. B. Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: An Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1964, caption for illustration 1. 30. A. Afrique, ‘Statement of Principle’, in Smithson and Team 10, Team 10 Primer, p. 74. 31. Early New Brutalism stressed reverence to materials, affinity between building and man, and inspiration from peasant architecture (particularly from the Mediterranean vernacular). Aesthetically, the trend is known for its brute materials, especially its characteristic exposed concrete. The building that most inspired this trend is Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, a monumental housing complex by Le Corbusier. The first history of this trend by a contemporary critic is R. Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic, New York, Reinhold, 1966. 32. Ram Karmi, interview, June 8, 2001. 33. Dani Karavan in Blas and Tatenbaum, Social Realism in the 1950s, Political Art in the 1990s. 34. See Z. Gurevitz and G. Aran, ‘Al Ha’makom (Israeli Anthropology)’, Alpayim, vol. 4, 1991. 35. Y. Segal, ‘The Traditional House in the Arab Villages in the Galilee’, Tvai, vol. 1, 1966, pp. 19– 22. 36. Ibid., p. 20. 37. R. Karmi, Lyric Architecture, Israel, Ministry of Defense, 2001, p. 12. 38. R. Karmi, ‘On the Architecture of Shadows’, Kav, vol. 3, 1965, pp. 55–56. 39. On Mansfeld, see A. Mansfeld and A. Teut, Al Mansfeld: An Architect in Israel, Berlin, Ernst & Sohn, 1999. 253

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40. See A. Rabinovich, ‘Why Fellah has Better Home than a Professor’, Jerusalem Post, August 8, 1975. 41. In the wake of Said’s Orientalism of 1978, many studies have demonstrated the Western/Oriental dichotomy in different contexts and locales. For the Israeli context, see E. Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1989; G. Eyal, ‘On the Arab Village’, Teoria ve Bikoret, vol. 3, 1993; and Y. Zalmona and T. Manor-Friedman, Kadima: The East in Israeli Art, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1998. Particularly important in this context is D. Rabinowitz, Anthropology and the Palestinians, Ra’ananah, ha-Merkaz le-heker ha-hevrah ha‘Arvit, 1998. 42. See, for example, R. Ferguson, Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, New York and Cambridge, New Museum of Contemporary Art, MIT Press, 1990; H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York, Routledge, 1994. 43. For critical discussions of the object of ethnography see J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986; T. Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, London, Ithaca Press, 1973; and G. W. Stocking, Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. 44. New directions in postcolonial studies, which address the colonizer by focusing on issues such as ‘Occidentalism’ and ‘whiteness’, were found particularly apt for the Israeli context. See Teoria ve-Bikoret (Theory and Criticism) 20, Jerusalem, Van Leer Institution, Spring 2002. 45. D. Cassuto, The Western Wall: A Collection of Essays Concerning the Design of the Western Wall Plaza and Its Surrounding, Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Post Press, 1975, p. 95. 46. N. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001. 47. A. Dvir (architect), ‘Overall Plan for the Jerusalem National Park’, in The Jerusalem Committee, Proceedings of the First Meeting, June 30–July 4, 1969, Jerusalem, Israel, p. 24. 48. The publication of the Israel Defense Force, Bamahane, preached for the love of the country. It published stories and detachable centrepieces of images from ‘the Land of Israel’. These posters became major visual stimuli in the military physical environment, the service in which is obligatory. Many of these features were compiled in I. Zaharoni, Israel, Roots and Routes: A Nation Living in Its Landscape, Tel Aviv, MOD Publishing House, 1990 (this edition is based on the Hebrew book: Derech Eretz: nofe artzenu). 49. The open-air model was reconstructed and largely imagined in the absence of accurate archaeological data by the archaeologist Professor Avi Yona. A recent appraisal of it in a publication dedicated to ‘knowing the country’ is G. Barkai and E. Shiler, ‘A Tour in Second Temple Jerusalem in the Holyland Hotel Model’, A Periodical for the Study of the Land of Israel, 2001, pp. 21–50. 50. Y. Tzafrir, ‘Preface’, in Y. Hirschfeld, The Eretz-Israeli Residential House, Jerusalem, Yad Ben Tzvi, 1987. 51. Hirschfeld, The Eretz-Israeli Residential House, p. 4. See also the English edition The Palestinian Dwelling in the Roman-Byzantine Period, Jerusalem, Franciscan Printing Press, 1995. Considering Palestine and Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) as synonym implies a teleology in which the Land of Israel is a constant, which in spite of its many rulers keeps its Jewish identity. 52. Ibid. 53. M. Safdie, Jerusalem: The Future of the Past, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1989, p. 27. 54. Moshe Safdie, Safdie in Jerusalem, Slidcas no. 3, London, Pidgeon Audio Visual (extracted from a talk he gave to the Royal Institute of Architects in May 1979). 55. Sadie, Jerusalem: The Future of the Past, p. 29. 56. Safdie, Beyond Habitat, p. 216. For Safdie’s design for the Western Wall Plaza see Nitzan-Shiftan, ‘Israelizing Jerusalem’. 57. Safdie, Jerusalem: The Future of the Past, p. 28. 58. This concept was particularly important in the context of Italian colonialism in North Africa, where architects integrated European and North African built traditions under the banner of the Mediterranean tradition in which Romans had rights of authenticity. For a succinct and 254

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59. 60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

65.

66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

illuminating account of the term in architectural culture, see M. Fuller, ‘Mediterraneanism’, Environmental Design, vol. 8, no. 9/10, 1990; and M. Fuller, Colonial Constructions: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism in the Mediterranean and East Africa, London, Routledge, 2004. For an in-depth study of this phenomenon and its remarkable influence on Italian modernism, see B. Lloyd McLaren, ‘Mediterraneita and Modernita: Architecture and Culture during the Period of Italian Colonization of North Africa (Libya)’, Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 2001. Banham, The New Brutalism, p. 47. Kenneth Frampton, who studied together with Karmi at the AA and worked in Israel for a while, invested these British regionalist attitudes with critical theory. The resultant ‘Critical Regionalism’ turned into one of the most influential texts in late-twentieth-century architectural culture worldwide. For Mediterraneanism in the Israeli context, see Y. Shavit, ‘The Mediterranean World and “Mediterraneanism”: The Origins, Meaning, and Application of a Geo-Cultural Notion in Israel’, Mediterranean Historical Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 1998, pp. 96–117; and Y. Shavit, ‘Culture Rising From the Sea (Tarbut Ola Min Hayam)’, Zmanim, vol. 34/35, 1990, p. 38–47. For the bureaucratic management of national identity, see M. Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993. Karmi, ‘Human Values,’ p. 44. Interview with Amir and Ofer Kolker, July 27, 1998. The Kolkers were deputies to Ram Karmi, the head architect of the Ministry of Housing from 1974–1979. They were part of a large team that Karmi assembled in order to devise strict design guidelines for the entire country. Ofer was responsible for the central region while Amir was responsible for the Jerusalem region. For example, G. Duvshani and H. Frank, ‘Build Ye Cities: an Exhibition of Israeli Architecture’, Institute of Architects and Town Planners in Israel A.E.A.I., 1985; Y. Kiriaty, Special issue, ‘Contemporary Israeli Architecture’, Process: Architecture, vol. 44, 1984. During the fierce debate over the building of Nebi Samuel, later known as Ramot, Yehuda Drexler convinced Prime Minister Golda Meir to violate the 1968 Jerusalem Masterplan, which recommended building a suburb of 2,000 units on the site of Nebi Samuel, where Drexler intended to build a neighbourhood of 20,000 units. His argument was as follows: why not upgrade lower-income families that previously lived in frontier neighbourhoods instead of settling Jerusalem’s wealthy population in a luxurious suburb? Golda Meir accepted this logic and approved the project. See protocol of the State Council for Planning and Building, the Subcommittee for Principal Planning Issues, The Ministry of Interior Affairs, February 1, 1971 (courtesy of Yehuda Drexler). Avraham Yaski, interview, August 23, 1998. Ibid. Ibid. For texts by Danziger, see M. Omer (curator), Yitzhak Danziger, Tel Aviv, Gan ha-taasiyah Tefen, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Open Museum, 1996. S. Hinsky, ‘The Silence of the Fish: Local and Universal in Israeli Art Discourse’, Teoria Ve’bikoret, vol. 4, 1993, pp. 105–122. Zalmona, and Manor-Friedman, Kadima. Y. Zalmona (curator), Mikhah Ulman: 1980–1988, Jerusalem, Israel Museum, 1988. Blas and Tatenbaum, Social Realism in the 1950, Political Art in the 1990s. This is the text that Karavan scripted in Hebrew on a wall as an integral part of his piece in the exhibition. This text does not appear in the catalogue. For the case of Ein-Hod, see the excellent anthropological study: S. Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. E. Zandberg, ‘The Lost Dignity of the Shutters’, Ha’aretz Weekend Supplement, October 27, 2000, p. 42.

255

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Selected bibliography Abu El-Haj, Nadia, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Agnew, John and Michael Corbridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory, and International Political Economy, New York, Routledge, 1995. AlSayyad, Nezar and Bourdier, Jean-Paul, (eds.), Dwellings, Settlements, and Tradition, Lanham, University Press of America, 1989. AlSayyad, Nezar (ed.), Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage, London, Routledge, 2001. AlSayyad, Nezar (ed.), Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment, Westport, CT, Praeger, 2001. Amin, Ash and Thrift, Nigel, Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, revised edition, 1991. Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Augé, Marc, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (translated by John Howe), London, Verso, 1995 Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology, New York, The Free Press, 1960. Berman, Marshall, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York, Penguin Books, 1982. Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture, London and New York, Routledge, 1994. Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000. Cosgrove, Denis E., Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, London, Croom Helm, 1984. Cox, Kevin, Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, New York, Guilford Press, 1997. Cresswell, Tim, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. de Kadt, Emanuel (ed.), Tourism – Passport to Development? Perspectives on the Social and Cultural Effects of Tourism in Developing Countries, New York, Oxford University Press, 1979. Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, The Free Press, 1992. Fuller, Mia, Colonial Constructions: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism in the Mediterranean and East Africa, New York, Routledge, forthcoming 2004. Gelder, Ken and Jacobs, Jane M., Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1998. Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990. Grossberg, Lawrence and Nelson, Cary (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1988. Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989. Harvey, David, Spaces of Hope, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000. Hayden, Dolores, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995. 256

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Heelas, Paul, Lash, Scott, and Morris, Paul (eds.), Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, Oxford, Centre for the Study of Cultural Values at Lancaster University with Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996. Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence The Invention of Tradition, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1983. Huntington, Samuel, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996. Jacobs, Jane M., Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, New York, Routledge, 1996. Jacoby, Russell, The End of Utopia, New York, Basic Books, 1999. Judd, Dennis R. and Fainstein, Susan S. (eds.), The Tourist City, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1999. Kaplan, Robert, An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America’s Future, New York, Vintage Books, 1999. King, Anthony (ed.), Re-presenting the City, London, Macmillan, 1996. Leach, Neil (ed.), The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis, New York, Routledge, 2000. Massey, Doreen, Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Mathews, Gordon, Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket, London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Mele, Christopher, Selling the Lower East Side, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Mitchell, Timothy, Colonizing Egypt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988. Nash, Dennison, Anthropology of Tourism, London, Pergamon, 1996. Ohmae, Kenichi, The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies, New York, Free Press, 1995. Ong, Aihwa, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1999. Roy, Ananya and AlSayyad, Nezar (eds.), Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America, Lanham, Lexington Press, 2003. Shils, Edward, Tradition, London, Faber and Faber, 1981. Slyomovics, Susan, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Smith, Neil, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, New York, Routledge, 1996. Soja, Edward W., Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1996. Soja, Edward W., Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2000. Sorkin, Michael (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, New York, Hill and Wang, 1992. Sparke, Matthew, Hyphen-Nation-States: Critical Geographies of Displacement and Disjuncture, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming. Stocking Jr. George W. (ed.), Objects and Others: Essays of Museums and Material Culture, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Young, Robert J. C., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, London and New York, Routledge, 1995.

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Index 1967 War 231, 241, 247 9/11 vii, 1, 4, 6, 25, 28, 29, 104 Abbas, Ackbar 66 Aboriginalism 35–41, 111, 113 Abu El-Haj, Nadia 242 Abu-Lughod, Janet 9, 10 acculturation 206 aestheticization 63, 65, 90, 91, 101, 102, 250, 251 Africa 136, 146, 154 agriculture 130 and new towns 171–186 development 123, 173 employment 123, 130, 130 land 120, 137 landscape 138 programmes 174 region 118, 121 tradition 133 Alaska 94, 99, 106, 107 Algiers 14, 73–77, 78, 79, 80, 90 AlSayyad, Nezar 81 America (see also United States and U.S.) 121 Anderson, Benedict 23, 89, 100 anthropology 31, 189 apartheid 187, 189, 197, 205, 206 apocalypse 1, 13, 45–61 Appadurai, Arjun 11, 16, 29, 81, 92, 93, 97, 100, 102, 105, 106, 11, 113 Arab 145, 151, 155, 232, 238, 250 culture 245, 248 memorial 145, 151, 155 slaves 189 village 231, 232, 233, 238–245, 247 archaeology 242, 249 architecture 129, 144–166, 231–256 258

Aboriginal 12, 35–41 Arab 238, 240, 241 Bo-Kaap 198–209 Biblical 241–242 Brutalist 245, 247, 253 global 145 hybrid 38, 40, 41 icons of 151 indigenous 35, 38–39, 244 international 180, 181, 234 Israeli 232–256 Malay 193, 196, 197 Mediterranean 241, 244–245, 253, 255 modern 8, 180, 181, 234, 237, 252 modernism 232, 233, 237 Modern Movement 22, 180, 181, 233 neo-vernacular 172 of place 234–241 Palestinian 232, 233, 234, 239, 240, 244, 245, 147 postmodern 150, 156, 165 public 150, 166 restoration 20, 193–206 traditional 7, 37, 175, 179, 180, 181, 224 vernacular 8, 180, 181, 234, 237, 238, 240 Asad, Talal 31 Asia 91, 109, 111, 151, 190 Australia 35–41, 101 authenticity 13, 14, 23, 63–67, 71, 72, 76, 77, 79, 80, 238, 248, 255 authority governmental 128 indigenous 40–41 place-based 32 sacred 30 traditional 119, 134

Index

Babylon 46, 47, 48, 59 Barthes, Roland 72 Beer Sheva 236, 252 Beijing 21 development of 218–219, 224 Bell, Daniel 2, 3, 26 Bellamy, Edward 65 Bengal 70, 73, 77–79, 80 Berger, John 147 Berman, Marshall 57 Bhabha, Homi 66, 76, 78, 81–82 Bible 1, 46–48, 50 binationalism 87, 103, 108 bioregion 16, 94, 98 Black Servility Theory 119 Bo-Kaap 20, 187–209 boosterism 92, 97, 98, 101, 108, 113 border (see also cross-border) 4, 15, 16 borghi 171, 175, 181 borgo 179, 181 Boyer 147 Brazil 144 Britain (see also England) 109, 188 British Columbia 87, 96, 101, 106, 108, 109 building (see also architecture) 242, 246 design 90 materials 220–221 public 145, 151, 152, 163, 164 traditional 7, 211, 214 built environment 6, 8–11, 19, 22, 33, 144, 161, 165, 166, 239, 245 Burgess, Greg 39, 40 Cairo 60, 81 Calcutta 67, 69, 70–72 California 120 Canada 111 Cancún 17, 116, 121, 122–126, 129–131, 135, 137, 139 Cape Town 20, 187–209 capitalism vii, 13, 17, 18, 21, 29, 45–61,

97, 116, 121, 132, 134, 137, 138, 158, 160 accumulation 15, 159 evils of 126 free-market 45, 51, 52–54, 88 global 59 international 92, 122 Late 29, 32, 59, 60 Caribbean 82 Casbah 14, 73–77, 90 Cascadia 15, 16, 56, 60, 87–113 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 31, 33, 212 China 109, 110, 154, 210–230 citizen 19, 56, 97, 100, 102, 159 city 60, 61 as spectacle 151 as theme park 144, 153 Chinese 213–230 colonial 73, 75 contested 232 cosmopolitan 145, 147 global 49, 52 medieval 81 postmodern 56 service 119–120 socialist 218, 227 walled 213–230 zoning 191, 192 colonialism 10, 14, 15, 73–76, 78, 79, 80, 90–91, 109, 110, 112, 113, 119, 138, 212, 240, 241 colonization 136, 148, 188 commerce 105, 107, 111 commercialization 225 commodification 101, 113, 119, 136, 147, 148, 150, 225 of traditions 64 communism 210, 224, 228 community 55, 56, 61, 238, 250 conservation 187, 192, 193, 196–204 development 18 ethnic 18 259

The End of Tradition?

global 13 imagined 23 indigenous 12, 41 Malay 196–197, 205 national 239, 245–246 values 50 conservation 219–220 consumption 63–66, 72, 78, 79, 81, 147, 159, 154, 161 of tradition 64, 66, 144, 147 cordon sanitaire 73–74 cosmopolitanism 159 critical transnationalism 144–166 critical regionalism 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164 cross-border 15, 16, 52, 56 region 87–115 Crystal Palace 67, 68–69, 73, 80 Cuba 17, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 126– 129, 131–139 Cullen, Gordon 33 culture 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 17, 21, 22, 23, 30, 32, 102, 108, 111, 145, 150, 151, 153, 154, 159, 160, 162, 164, 165, 166, 187, 188, 189, 190, 197, 198, 205, 211, 232, 234, 237, 241, 245, 248, 250, 151 Arab 238, 240 centre 12 colonial 76 environment 17 exchange 224 global 145 heritage 157 identity 20 indigenous 35 influence 188 Israeli 236, 239, 247, 250 Palestinian 242 Western 237 Curitiba 144–166 Cyurbia 146, 153 260

Deleuze, Gilles 116, 138 democracy 3–4, 6, 210, 228 demolition 218–220, 223, 224 Derrida, Jacques 45, 46, 50, 70, 116 deterritorialization 29–44, 92, 100, 105, 112–113, 147, 153, 166, 183, 192 development 14, 93, 94, 95, 109, 122– 129, 225 commercial 93, 94 economic 134, 146 regional 122, 123, 130 tourism 120–131, 224 diaspora 158, 224, 234, 238, 252 discourse architectural 237, 238 geopolitical 4 of endings 1–5, 51 of modernity 10 Western 210, 228 Disney 120 displacement 248 Djebar, Assia 77 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 68–69, 71 Dovey, Kim 35 dwelling 64, 66, 67, 72, 78, 79, 82, 83 dystopia 56 ecology 95 economy 95–98, 102, 107, 126, 127, 160 barriers 124 development 94, 146 global/globalization 88, 91, 92, 99, 111, 134 market 215, 222, 224 productivity 171 regional 122, 125, 130, 131, 146 tourism 121 ecotourism 17, 116, 117, 134–138 end discourse of 1–5 Egypt 15 Eiffel Tower 67, 70, 72, 80 employment 121–122, 130, 132

Index

England (see also Britain) 188, 191, 199, 202 environment (see also built environment) 87, 88, 94, 109, 165 agricultural 120 cultural 17, 116, 117, 118, 120, 136, 188 damage 16, 17, 118, 134, 142, 162 determinism 65, 107 global 18, 159 hybrid 11 hyper-real 153 physical 187, 188 traditional 8, 9, 11, 16, 17, 116–139, 187, 189 environmentalism 108, 165 eschatology 45, 46 ethnicity 6, 92, 146–147, 194 absolutism 105 communities 150, 155 identity 187, 189, 190, 191, 194, 206, 215 tradition 180 ethnoscape 92, 105–112 Europe 31, 153, 154 exclusion 117, 119, 121–122, 132, 138, 145, 146, 154 Fanon, Frantz 74–76 farmstead 171–186 Fascism/fascist 19, 20, 171–186 fellah 238, 240 financescape 92, 97–100 Florida 116, 117, 120, 121, 135, 137, 139 Foucault, Michel 71, 116, 138, 159, 179, 187 Frampton, Kenneth 160, 161, 245, 255 France 73, 76 free market 59, 88, 93, 228 free trade 87, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96 Freud, Sigmund 21, 22, 210, 212, 213, 227

Fukuyama, Francis 3, 4, 54, 210, 211, 212, 213, 227 Fuller, Mia 19, 20 gentrification 63, 64, 65 geopolitical interpretation 5, 12 Germany 101, 145, 151, 153, 155, 156, 157 ghetto 119 Giddens, Anthony 30 Giloh 247, 250 Glassie, Henry 8 globalization 18, 29–41, 52, 68, 72, 92, 93, 98, 108, 113, 139, 147, 148, 159, 160, 166, 213, 224 discourse of 10, 14 glocalization 18, 19, 159, 161, 162, 166 Gottlieb, Erika 58 governance 52, 53, 81, 96, 97 government 159 central 121, 195 communist 70, 71 Department of Coloured Affairs 194, 198 Department of Community Development 195, 198 Department of Cultural Affairs 196 Fascist 171–186 national 191 Gramsci, Antonio 178 Hall, D.R. 122 Harvey, David 59, 82, 98 Haussmann, Baron 73 Havana 126, 127, 128, 129, 131 Hebrew 245, 250 Hegel 3 hegemony 23 Heidegger, Martin 117 Hemingway, Ernest 128 heritage 145, 153, 154, 240 architectural 146, 205 261

The End of Tradition?

colonial 128, 136 Historic Monuments Commission (HMC) 192–196, 197, 198, 203 highway system 120 history 210 Jewish 241, 242, 244 Hobsbawm, Eric 15, 23, 32, 88, 148 Hollywood 66 Holston, James 81 Holy War 1 Hong Kong 158 housing 171–183, 192, 194, 195, 196, 198–204, 205, 206, 232, 236, 237, 238, 240, 244, 245, 246, 247, 250, 251, 251, 252, 253 costs of 120, 130–131 demand 188 design 172, 179–183, 191 farmers’ 171–186 National Housing Commission 195, 196 traditional 172 workers’ 174 hybrid/hybridity 10, 38, 40, 145, 150, 158, 159 people 11 places 11

imperialism 214–215 inauthenticity 63–64, 66, 75, 80, 81, 88, 90 India 136 Indonesia 189 industrialization 225 inner city 63 institution political 20 intifada 246, 250, 251 Irazabal, Clara 18 Islam 4, 76, 81, 189, 206 Israel 231–256 Ministry of Housing 231, 232, 235, 236, 247, 251, 255 Italy 145, 149, 151, 153, 156, 171–186

identity 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 23, 79, 81, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 247, 250 Aboriginal 12, 35–41 authentic 241 black 190 cultural 187–209 ethnic 187, 189, 191, 194 national 241, 246 spaces of 52 urban 224 ideology 2, 3, 4, 5 ideoscape 92, 93–97 image 144–170, 187–209 immigrant 146–148, 152, 156

Kahn, Louis 70 Kaplan, Robert 109, 112

262

Jacobs, Jane M. 147, 153, 183 Jacoby, Russell 5 Jameson, Fredric 29 Japan 109, 145, 157 Japha, Derek 20 Jencks, Charles 150 Jerusalem 231–256 Jew 231, 238, 241, 246, 250 Judaization 235, 240

labour immigrant 130 indentured 189 unskilled 130 Lamprakos, Michele 74 land 192, 193, 194, 196 agricultural 137, 171–186 ownership 174, 175 reclamation 178 rights 35 urban 226, 227, 241 value 192

Index

landscape 87–113 agricultural 137, 138, 174–186 cultural 9, 23, 144 indigenous 39 invented 15–19 natural 9 postnational 93, 98 public 151 traditional 133, 157, 213 urban 222, 223 vernacular 9 Las Vegas 67, 71, 72 Latin America 122, 128 Latour, Bruno 38 Le Corbusier 73–75, 77, 124, 236, 245 Leach, Neil 66, 83 Lefaivre, Henri 19 Lochert, Mathilde 35 London 60, 67, 82 Los Angeles 60 Lu, Duanfang 21 Luke, Timothy 31, 148 MacLeish, Archibald 45 makom 238, 246, 248 Malay 20, 21, 189–209 Malaysia 189 Mao 224, 225 market (see also free market) borderless 93 economy 215, 222, 224 global 93, 151, 159 tourist 147 marketing places 150, 151, 152, 153 Marx 3, 67, 68 Massey, Doreen 43, 158 Mathews, Gordon 23 Maya 129, 130, 136 mediascape 92, 100–105 Mele, Christopher 63, 65 memorial (see also monument) 147, 148, 152

Arab 145, 151, 155 Curitiba City Memorial 145, 151, 162–165 ethnic 145–159 German 145, 151, 155, 156, 157, 158 Italian 145, 151, 155, 156, 169 Japanese 145, 157 Polish 145, 151 Portuguese 145, 168 Ukrainian 145, 151, 155, 156 Mexico 117, 122–126 Miami 120, 121 migrant 225 Mitchell, Katharyne 72, 73, 158 Mitchell, Timothy 15, 90 modern, the 7, 8, 10, 12–15, 63–86, 90, 148, 173, 181, 183 modernism 10, 16, 21, 68, 73, 172, 173, 180, 181, 187, 192, 231, 232, 233, 237, 240, 241, 245, 248, 250, 251 modernity 7, 19, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 21, 30, 31, 33, 51, 54, 55, 58, 66, 69, 72, 76, 77, 78, 80–82, 105, 116, 144, 148, 171, 173, 211–213, 216 discourse of 10 modernization 31, 32, 67, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 81, 123, 124, 136, 179, 213, 218, 224, 233, 240, 248, 250 monument (see also memorial) 18, 193, 195, 197, 198, 206 Moore, Charles 150 mosque 197, 231 Mugerauer, Robert 17, 18, 95 multiculturalism 158, 159, 161 multinationalism 106 Murcutt, Glenn 38 museum/museumification 155, 156 Muslim 74, 190, 197, 198, 205, 206 Mussolini 171–186 nation building 5, 6, 10 263

The End of Tradition?

nation-state 4, 5, 16, 30, 75, 87–113 national park 35, 36, 37, 38 national territory 54, 55 nationalism/nationalist 74–79, 100, 108, 181, 190 neocolonialism/neo-colonialist 52, 118 neoliberalism 52, 53, 54, 56, 59, 81, 86, 93, 94, 96, 97, 100, 102, 105, 108, 113 neotraditional design 13 Nevada 99 New Age 35 new town 171–186, 236 New Urbanism 65, 80 New York 24, 25, 26, 63, 64, 67, 69 Nitzan-Shiftan, Alona 22 nostalgia 13, 63–86 Ohmae, Kenichi 4, 26, 91, 92 Oliver, Paul 7 Ong, Aihwa 81, 160 Oregon 94, 96, 102, 109 Orientalism 107, 231, 232, 234, 240, 241, 242, 247, 251, 252, 254 Ottawa 98 Palestine 234, 235, 237, 240, 241, 242, 247, 248, 250, 251, 252, 254 Paris 71, 109 park (see also theme park) 152, 162, 219 German 145, 153, 156, 157 Italian 145, 153 Polish 145, 148, 150, 153, 155, 156 Portuguese 145, 146, 148 Ukrainian 148, 149, 155, 156 patriotism 54 peasant 182, 214, 218, 222, 225, 227 performance 13,14, 64, 66, 67, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81 Pevsner, Nikolaus 33 Plan Obus 73, 74 planning 90–91, 124, 130, 177, 179, 264

183, 190, 191, 192, 193, 199, 215, 218–221 city 146, 153, 157, 223, 235, 242, 251 practices 121 Pontecorvo, Gillo 75, 76 Portland 98 postcolonialism 4, 11, 14, 15, 16, 67, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 110, 111, 112, 113 postmodernism/postmodernity 7, 10, 14, 65, 71, 80, 81, 87, 88, 105, 109, 110, 112 postnationalism 88, 89, 91, 93, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 111, 112, 113 poststructuralism 161, 165 posttradition 14, 80, 81 post-World War II power civic 176 colonial 68, 71 social 159 state 177 structure 138, 148, 151, 161 struggle 166 precolonialism 16, 77 preservation 192, 197, 198, 219 cultural 187 production agricultural 178 economic 171 geographies of 52 Rabinow, Paul 74 racism 106, 108, 109 Ranger, Terrence 23, 32, 88 Rapoport, Amos 7, 8 Rationalist/Rationalism Ray, Satyajit 78 redevelopment 192, 194, 195 region 239, 241, 242 and tradition 172, 181 agricultural 118, 120, 122

Index

of origin 172, 179, 182 postnational 91 rural 119–121, 133 regionalism (see also critical regionalism) 245, 246, 250, 255 region-state 4, 91 religion 1, 7, 8, 238, 244 restoration 187, 193, 195–199, 201, 203, 204 reterritorialization 16, 32, 87, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 106, 109, 111, 112 Rome 47, 60 Rossi, Alberto 156 Roy, Ananya 13, 14, 90, 148 Russia 67, 68 sabra architects 233, 234–241, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252 Safdie, Moshe 240, 242, 243, 244, 245 Said, Edward 81 São Paolo 60, 155 Sartre, Jean Paul 68 Sassen, Saskia 29 Seattle 87, 89, 90, 98, 101, 107, 110 segregation racial 187 September 11 (see 9/11) service centre 118, 119–121, 122, 124, 125, 131 employment 130, 131, 139 industry 130 social 221, 225 settlement 10, 188 agricultural 172, 173, 174, 178, 179, 183 programme 171, 175 Shils, Edward 211 slave/slavery 145, 188, 189, 190, 197, 199, 207 Sloterdijk 54, 59

Smith, Michael 153, 160, 161 Smith, Neil 64 socialism 220 Chinese 224, 240 socialist development 218, 219 era 216, 218, 219, 225 regime 210 revolution 217 society 45, 54, 55, 59, 60 non-Western 31 traditional 31, 35 Sorkin, Michael 144, 153, 166 South Africa 187–209 space 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 66, 77, 79, 160–161, 164, 166 contemporary 45–61 cross-border 15 global 13 ideology of 6 postnational 16, 100 public 24, 25, 151, 152, 153, 240, 245 social 210 urban 150, 152, 153 Sparke, Matthew 15, 16, 56 Spivak 74 squatter settlement 130 St. Petersburg 67 Stalin 68 state Fascist 171–186 Israeli 233, 234, 236, 239, 246 ownership 222 Strathern, Marilyn 38, 40 subjugation 241 sustainability 134 symbolism 231 Tagore, Rabindranath 78, 79 Taylorist 124 technoscape 92, 100–105 tenement 63–64 265

The End of Tradition?

territorialization / territorialized 16, 109 theme park 144, 153, 154, 166 Thompson, J. B. 32, 33 Todeschini, Fabio 20 tourism (see also ecotourism) 11, 13, 16–18, 35–41, 72, 100–103, 110–111, 116–139, 144, 147, 149, 151, 152, 154, 224 architecture of 35 consumption 32, 35 development 18, 120–131 international 35 mass 16, 17, 116, 117, 124, 132 townscape 33–34 tradition 6–8, 11, 13 and Freud 211–21 authentic 23 consumption of 63–64, 144 indigenous 36 invention of 15, 32–33, 88, 148, 177, 182 of the modern 12–15, 32, 33 of wall-building 213–216, 220–224 rural 133, 171 transboundary 95 transnationalism 18, 92, 93, 100, 102, 108, 112, 144–166 Tuan, Yi-Fu 7 Turner, John 9 U.S. (see also America and United States) 111 United Kingdom 101 United States (see also America and U.S.) 101 Upton, Dell 9, 10, 11 urbanism modern 192 New 65, 80

266

utopia 2, 5, 6, 13, 15, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57–61, 65, 68, 80, 152 neoliberal 13, 94 van Eyck, Aldo 237, 245 Vancouver 87, 89, 90, 98, 100, 111, 158 Venturi, Robert 151 vernacular settings 144, 147, 153–159, 166 village (see also Arab village) 248, 249, 250 Virilio, Paul 72 Washington 94, 96, 102, 109 Washington, D.C. 98 Watts, Michael 55, 75 Weber 55, 106, 107 welfare state 52 Whitman, Walt 69 Williams, Raymond 6 Wojcik, Daniel 50 work unit 213, 220–227 worker 133 agricultural 130 immigrant 122 tourism 120, 135 unskilled 130 working class 191, 912, 193, 203 World Tourism Organization 134 World Trade Center 58, 59 WTO (World Trade Organization) 53, 69 xenophobia 118 Zionism 22,232, 234, 235, 238, 246, 248, 250 modernism 233, 237, 240, 241, 248 style 232, 237, 252 zoning 191, 192