ARCH+ feat. 47: Kockelkorn – Can the Universal be Specific?
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Transcript: German(auto-generated)
00:16
So, if my last presentation took the present destabilization of the right of
00:20
access to clean order as a starting point for her investigation of the past, my presentation will follow the chronological order from past to present. So I will investigate specific contexts within which Henri Lefebvre stated his famous claim for the right of the city in 1968, which emerged from the specific situation of Paris' urban development during the postwar always.
00:43
And from there I will trace a theoretical pathway to contemporary research approaches in the field of urban studies in the present, based on Lefebvre's theories and claims that I will focus in particular in the research project that I am involved in, that is urbanization in a comparative perspective. And in the end of my talk I will conclude with a few theoretical reflections on the notion of a productive or performative universal land,
01:08
which I currently develop with the art historian Nina Czocha in our book Productive Universal Specific Situations here in 2017, and which draws from postcolonial discourse to develop operative approaches to the question that Leila just raised,
01:24
how to think of and how to think with a universal that can never be universal. So even if the wrong narrative of the French history of postwar boom years is quite unknown, I think it is still possible to recall a few basic features of that specific historical situation,
01:44
to contextualize Henri Lefebvre's claim for a right to the city, which he developed before and under the political appeals of May 1968. So the first premise is growth from the 50s until 1973, France in general, and the urban region of Paris in particular, in a way a tremendous phase of growth.
02:04
In size of population, life expectancy, living standards, consumption patterns and so on, all that is increasing. So it is that imprint of growth and progress that influences the thinking of that time, and not only that of Henri Lefebvre. So urbanists of that time will project a vision of the city with a population city, urban region of Paris,
02:23
having a population of 30 million people by the year 2000. Of course that didn't take place. It's not half, but it was really completely over the top. And what is important to consider also that this growth is uneven. So what you hear in this slide in blue is the city center of Paris.
02:46
So the city center of Paris is shrinking and that growth is essentially taking place in the urban periphery, or what one would consider the periphery. And here I come to my second point, which is specific for the French situation, and that is the entanglement of state and the market, which is specific for French state capitalism
03:04
as the only Western country producing economic plans until 1989 like the state socialist countries. So the incapacity or difficulty to produce urbanity in these suburban regions, a general feature that post-war urbanism has been accused of,
03:21
but the specific materialization of that incapacity in the Paris region derives from that entanglement between state and the market. So in urbanity I refer to right of access to infrastructure of all sorts, as well as right of access to spaces of leisure and consumption. So with that entanglement I refer to contradicting maneuvers of regulation and deregulation
03:45
of real estate and retail trade, combined with the centralized administration that assigns housing allocations and the position of industries. So it starts with the state-induced deindustrialization of the inner city already in the 1950s and then continues with the deregulation of retail trade
04:03
that will accelerate the implantation of large-scale malls in the early 60s and then followed by an attempt to regulate the strategic positioning of these new town plannings, the strategic positioning of those malls in the new town plannings in the mid-60s. So these large malls, which you see here, will structure the urban region
04:22
as important centralities until the present. And the last aspect of that entanglement is what is called denovation de portation, so the deportation of working class neighborhoods from the inner city to modernist housing estates that started in the 50s
04:45
and goes on until the 80s, but it hasn't peaked around the turn of the 1970s. So it's a very violent process that is referred to as deportation. So architects and urbanists of that time were very well aware of those problems
05:03
of large-scale housing not being able to contribute to the notion of urbanity. And so Lefebvre claimed the right of the city in 1968. So official planning protocols already had claimed urbanity as an indispensable goal to achieve in the 1960s. And that expands even to the self-image of architects at the time,
05:22
so conceived of housing from the perspective of urban space. So the idea of housing doesn't stop at the frontier of ordinary shelter, but aspires to create a living environment that includes and claims the street. And those approaches start with things like or concepts like the stand of Katalysiosic Woods and to lose the eye here,
05:43
or with the works of urbanists of areas such as this project, obviously half of it, project has been entitled, very tenderly,
06:00
Eiffel Tower for the Paris region, like a horizontal Eiffel Tower, meaning that it would have all the effects that the Eiffel Tower has, or this project of the city and space in collaboration with Lefebvre in 1968. So these are the common grounds from where Lefebvre states that organization is a planetary phenomenon deriving from the logic of capitalist expansion
06:24
to the outer edges of the planet. And the lens through which we analyze this expansion is space and the process of organization which produces space. So the perspective of the world as a whole undergoing a totalizing process of organization means that the need distinction between city, its hinterland, countryside and nature resolves
06:43
and that those categories stop being helpful designations to understand the process of organization. So the non-city and anti-city would conquer the city,
07:04
penetrate it, break it apart, and in doing so extend it immeasurably, bringing out the organization of society and the growth of the urban fabric that covered what was left of the city prior to the arrival of industry. So the timeliness for Lefebvre's thought is that he conceives of organization
07:22
as a process of planetary scale where space is an active agent within the mediation and implementation of political interests. What is even more noteworthy is that he conceives of the space as the site of difference, difference emerging within the violent encounters of specificities and universities.
07:41
The tendencies within a process of planetary organization towards difference generate conflict with the brutal tendency towards quantified uniformity. The violence inherent in these forces that deny differences elicits another violence, that of countercultures, that of specificities, and consequently that of other procedures for the production of space.
08:02
These positions, these contrasts, these conflicts can be observed in space and can only be conserved in relation to space. Lefebvre made these statements between 1968 and the mid-70s.
08:22
He said it's only after his death in 1991 that his urban theory underwent renewed attention among urban researchers and theorists. I won't trace the particularities of the pathway of the research of Lefebvre, but instead I will quickly fast forward to a contemporary research project at the ETH Zurich based in many regards on the theoretical presumption of Lefebvre
08:41
and in a way aims to overcome the defect of Lefebvre's theories as being too complex and opaque to be useful. So two aspects of Lefebvre's thinking can be considered as a given for contemporary urban theory, which takes the conditions of planetary organization closer into account and both derive from the disposal of the term city
09:01
as a primary reference point and an easily definable object.
09:20
Yeah, shouldn't look like that, but yeah, let's go with that. So, yeah, two aspects are essential to think of and with or are given for contemporary theory, that is to dispose of the term city as a primary reference point and an easily definable object.
09:43
So the first aspect is the blurring and re-articulation of urban territories, dissolving the frontier between city and hinterland, and the second aspect is the replacement of city as an object of study with a process of urbanization. And at that point arises a contradiction, namely a contradiction between Lefebvre's claim for the right to the city
10:01
as a rightful rallying cry for political mobilization related to the right of housing, transportation, infrastructure and so on, and the observation that this claim refers to something which no longer exists as a category of thinking. That question was raised by David Harvey himself in a conference in 2012. So how can we make the right of the city operative
10:21
if we don't know any longer what the city is? So this research project, Organization and Comparative Perspective, by Christian Schmid and his team addressed those questions by developing a new epistemology of the urban. And the research approach adopted here disposes of the privilege of first world cities as being a starting point for any conception of urban theory
10:42
and defines urbanization processes as relational in a double sense. So first of all, any process of one specific location is framed and therefore defined in relation to the processes emerging in other locations. So these maps that you may see represent temporary snapshots
11:00
of the process labeled multi-layered picture of urbanization in the urban regions of Tokyo, Polar River Delta, Paris and Los Angeles. And they're actually quite beautiful. And so that process consists of urban restructuring characterized by strong functional and social heterogeneity. It's related to definitions like in-between city or edge city
11:22
as something which evolves out of contradicting processes of urbanization over long-standing periods of time, leading to a complex patchwork of more or less disjointed urban fragments over the territory. Historically it emerges often from spillover effects from the center, but then grows independent from it and establishes new centralities.
11:40
And that might become hopefully a little clearer in that image. So that is the map of the Paris region, where you have Paris in its center and a highly centralized logic of the whole pattern of urbanization. So everything merges to the center, also the infrastructure. And that centralized logic is then superposed
12:02
with that multi-layered picture of urbanization here in blue, consisting of that whole set of new town fragments, infrastructures, malls, housing estates, industries, but also golf courses and parks, which constitute the Paris of the 20th century. So the Paris center is really just that.
12:21
This is the whole, what we would call a multi-layered patchwork urbanization. So my personal viewpoint to this project is that the strong parts most probably not fixing a new name to a process, but a thinking mode within which this definition is developed. And this is not only about defining new universal global processes
12:41
and state that they manifest themselves differently according to specific contexts. The quest is to define those universalizing processes as something essentially unstable and open to revision. So although at times this approach has been criticized for intellectual auto-referentialism,
13:01
I would reply that the claim for universals and objective knowledge is indispensable to make any political claim. At the same time one has to acknowledge the views of universals for the sake of imperialism and colonialism and equally that universals by definition constitute an outside and exclude specific locations from where to articulate certain processes.
13:26
Literature scientist Gayatri Spivak has framed that very nicely in 1999. The universal is what we cannot not want, even as it so often excludes us. So from this double function of the universal as repressive and emancipatory,
13:41
I conclude my talk by arguing in favor of a productive universal understood as an ongoing process of political negotiation. And I developed this definition of a productive universal together with my colleague Ina Chokut for our publication on that topic. And he derives that from positions that emerge from postcolonial discourse in anthropology and comparative literature in the mid-80s
14:02
as a consequence of the shortcomings of radical deconstructivism. So from disciplines that either create the discursive objects in relation to others or have to reflect on their origin in the literal exercise of power such as anthropology in the use of colonialism. So one of the first prominent positions of that kind
14:22
what was made by her in her claim for a feminist objectivity or what she calls a successor science project aiming for better accounts of the world. Her way out of the dilemma between abstract male science and what she calls a multiple personality disorder in use by post-structuralism
14:42
can be simplified in a twofold approach. First would be to consider knowledge always as being situated and embodied and never separate knowledge from its naturalization in bodies, locations, buildings or media. And second never to think of knowledge as singular so replace knowledge with knowledge that are situated and emerge from multiple locations.
15:06
So scholars like Galatis Bivak, Donald Harrow, Judith Butler all tie the idea of a productive universal to an ongoing process of transformation which occurs in the very moment of their performative effectiveness. So it occurs while one is engaging with it or acting with it.
15:23
This mode of thinking defines the universal as performative and that is entirely different to a translative structure which fixes thoughts, bodies or feelings according to a pre-existing static structure.
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