THE CULTURE OF CITIES

​Recently, I’ve been thinking about the connection between public space and consumerism––an issue of particular interest to many contemporary architects, urbanists, and sociologists. Now removed from my lifelong North American home, it is blatantly apparent that the Netherlands (and perhaps much of Europe in general) presents a cultural ethos directly opposed to the hyper-consumerist culture of much of the United States (and perhaps Canada), one which is notably refreshing, but also somewhat unnerving.

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I’d always been somewhat aware of the consumerist tendencies of many North Americans, but it wasn’t until my arrival in Europe that I gained perspective on how my day-to-day was affected by consumer culture. When living in LA, my friends and I, when bored, would immediately seek activity which almost always involved going to a bar, dining at a restaurant, seeing a film in a theatre, or some other form of inhabiting a space of capitalist creation and control. Shopping also seemed a weekly necessity, and, by summer’s end, I was spending an uncomfortable amount of time (and money) purchasing, acquiring, collecting.

This may seem somewhat extravagant, but I think this is a fundamental component of life in Los Angeles; aside from drinking, eating, and shopping, there’s really not a lot else to do. Yes, it is possible to spend time at Santa Monica beach, hiking in the hills of Malibu, or lounging in Hollywood Cemetery, all forms of recreation decidedly removed from the expenditure of capital or the inhabitation of private development. But the city is a capitalist maze filled with Corporate America’s messages and influences, and truly public nodes are but cysts in the concrete labyrinth. Driving (never walking) to the beach, one is confronted with an endless stream of advertisements and other forms of consumerist iconography, providing Angelenos an endless supply of acquirable desires.

To be sure, it is possible to spend much time removed from the most commercial of spaces when living in the city (I would like to think my friends and I did a reasonably good job), yet it is still disconcerting how much of daily life within LA hinges on the flow of capital. An afternoon spent in a public park (a rare, free way to spend an afternoon) most likely involves exorbitant fees for parking. An afternoon spent at one of LA’s other “public” facilities will likely cost more: parking at The Grove is only free with purchase from a retail outlet. There is a distinct link between money and personal enjoyment; at every turn, the city seems to scream: the wealthier you are, the more you’ll be able to do, the more fun you’ll have.

Fast-forward to Rotterdam: public space, sans metered parking, sans validation, is everywhere. Commuting by bicycle is easy, and advertisements are noticeably absent from major intersections and city streets. Days are spent in public parks, at soccer fields, in backyards, reading in a cafe. Here, money does not equal happiness: the relentless pressure to buy, which I felt most strongly in Los Angeles, is markedly absent. The culture of Rotterdam seems to exude frugality, not only in terms of material possessions, but also in relation to how one spends his or her time within the city.

Given my recent analysis of Rotterdam’s urban fabric, I wonder: to what extent is the urban fabric of Rotterdam, with its endless corridors of (seemingly utopic) public space, or Los Angeles, with its endless miles of shopping malls and advert-filled freeways, responsible for the consumer culture (or lack thereof) present in its metropolitan culture? Does freely available and meaningful public space (a la Rotterdam) generate a culture of modesty, where a lack thereof (a la Los Angeles) generates a society obsessed with consumerism? Would the addition of habitable public zones slow the Angeleno culture, or might the installment of billboards across Rotterdam slowly erode the inherently modest nature of its residents?

Surely, the answer is not so direct. Like a game of pick-up-sticks, the cause-effect relationship of a city’s physical composition and its culture is not easily untangled. To view the culture of a metropolis as a mere product of its urban environment is surely reductive, a gross simplification the inherently complex urban environment. True, urbanists today increasingly understand cities as physical manifestations of culture, concrete remnants of intangible flows of capital, people, and values. Yet, surely, there is a complex feedback loop at play: the urban environment, conceived (at least historically) by its own inhabitants, goes on to influence coming generations of city-dwellers, who in turn build and modify their environment, and enact yet further influence of successive generations.

Should we permit cities like Los Angeles to function in their current state, to impart their consumerist values on millions of city-dwellers? Their lack of public space, and emphasis on never-ending consumption, sends one resounding message to inhabitants: “buy and be happy.” Surely automobile-, consumer-, and image-centric lifestyles are socially undesirable, yet the urban fabric of Los Angeles, though its composition and organization, implicitly imparts such lifestyle influences on residents. How can architects and urbanists intervene to right this wrong?

WEEKEND

A MEANINGFUL MOMENT THROUGH A MEANING(LESS) PROCESS

EPCOT, now known to much of the world as a science-oriented amusement park, was originally conceived as a Disney-designed utopian metropolis. Walt Disney, well known for his genius in animation and film, was also a highly polemical urbanist. His dreams were not confined merely to the animated output of his namesake studio; after achieving commercial success in film and animation, Disney went on to produce some of the most compelling plans for utopian cities drawn in the twentieth century. His utopian masterpiece, EPCOT (short for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), was conceived to house twenty thousand residents in Florida, and was designed in then-ubiquitous Modernist planning principles. At the time of the city's proposal, its concept was revolutionary; Disney’s own designs usurped that of many Modernist architects and urban planners.

From the eyes of the twenty-first century, however, Disney's original vision for EPCOT is a cliché of Modernist urban planning principles: a sad relic of the hope Modernist visionaries once possessed for reforming the metropolitan environment. In true Modernist fashion, all possible forms of urban activity in EPCOT are neatly segmented into distinct categories. Rings of residential development encircle a Central Business District, with little provision for other realms of urban life. A toyish monorail system (copyrighted by Disney as the PeopleMover) shuttles future residents from the suburban outskirts of EPCOT into the city center each and every day, in a manner not so far removed from the monorails of Disney's own theme parks. There is no allowance for accident, no accommodation for the ugly realities of life (and much of the “friction” which makes life in the contemporary American metropolis exciting)––only Disney’s fictionalized, fantastical conception of the future. It is oddly fitting that Walt Disney Studios, a film studio whose animated catalog canonizes the lobotomized exuberance of the 1950s and early 1960s, would go on to design such a hermetic vision for an idealized city. 

Though Walt Disney had already selected a site for his gargantuan development, the imagery produced for EPCOT shows the city as if floating in space: one can imagine these centers proliferating worldwide, immune to existing context. In a sense, Disney's vision is Le Corbusier's Radiant City enlarged to a gargantuan scale: each EPCOT represents one of Cobursier's gleaming cruciform towers, with an endless expanse of "Nature" benignly interrupted by these gleaming products of Modern mastery.

The rigid plan, cartoonish design, top-down design, and ever-cheerful ambience implied by the city's representation makes EPCOT into little more than an idealized argument: more specifically, an argument for a positive, ever-bright, technologically-fueled future, where then-contemporary concerns of urban sprawl are but a distant memory. It is unquestionably naive, yet does much to capture the political, social, and cultural climate of the early 1960s.

Though it is easy to criticize the shortcomings of Disney's utopian vision, several aspects of EPCOT's master plan are worthy of closer inspection. EPCOT’s explicitly finite urban development boundary is a prelude to contemporary calls for urban densification; one may view EPCOT as Disney's reaction to a proliferation of suburban development during his lifetime. What’s more, urban transit in EPCOT (and, as shown in the following video, already utilized in Walt Disney's theme parks) consists entirely of centralized mass-transit systems, a method of transit increasingly recognized as an efficient and sustainable means of conveyance (though, notably, without the theme-park ambience suggested by Mr. Disney in the following video). EPCOT’s sectional composition, too, displays a mastery of urban planning not seen in many Modernist designs: the city employs three primary layers of development to function, with automobile transit and other technological services submerged under the metropolis’s surface. In fact, the design of EPCOT looks not-too dissimilar from award-winning urban plans proposed in recent memory (namely, the Latent City project proposed by Yaohua Wang, or my own thesis).

Attached is Disney's animated proposal for EPCOT, accompanied with music by ambient musicians Stars Of The Lid. The listless soundtrack invokes a new reading of the city’s once-exuberant imagery: it plays on the utopic/dystopic dualism present in EPCOT’s simplistic vision of a better tomorrow.