the noncity
I was just reading an article about Atlanta, a city I hate. My hatred is born from sad experience, for Atlanta is the worst major city in the world. It is too boring to be Hell. It is a city of nonplaces, a noncity.
You’ve been to nonplaces: airports, shopping malls, Jiffy-Lube muffler shops. Some place called “Chipotle Mexican Grill” recently opened in my neigborhood, and mrs. august, the instant upon seeing it, made me promise never to go there. The nonplace invites ennui because it’s impossible to figure out where you really are. If I were to pass out and awake in a McDonald’s, how long would it take to figure out, from visual cues, the city I was in. Picture Atlanta as a gigantic fast-food restaurant.
Is there an agency of non-ness more celebrated than the Olympics? Friends tell me that Barcelona is a shining exception, but elsewhere the progress of the games has been followed by a swath of architectural urban drabness. In Beijing, the city is being bulldozed and dug up and rearranged and made — what? Made into a sports stadium.
In China the transformation has been going on for some time. I used to live in an apartment building that was near a sprawling market — a cacophony of vendors, huts, newspaper sellers, fabrics. IIf you walked down the street, it was impossible to be lost – there could be no other place like that one. And now, it is gone, flattened, all in the hopes of making Nanjing more — what? More clean. More wealthy. More accessible. More like Atlanta.
If I told you the name of the article you would be convinced it was the sort of boring anthropological jargon that made you hate half your college courses. It even has a colon (”Making Place in the Nonplace Urban Realm: Notes on the Revitalization of Downtown Atlanta”), and an impressively credentialed author (Charles Rutheiser). You might think that Ruthheiser is recycling a complain that you’ve heard over and over again. But his point isn’t merely that Atlanta is boring — he shows the motivations of urban planners in creating such uniform dizzying drabness.
The planners of Nanjing, Beijing, and Atlanta will say they are trying to benefit the greatest number, trying to revitalize, trying to root out decay and poverty. And yet, the victims of such “renewal” iare inevitably the poor, who are shunted to slums or to the far reaches of the suburbs. The effort to make the city “accessible” in fact only makes it available to a thin, managerial class, the sorts of foks (like me, on occasion) who bunk at the Hilton.
The effect is to destroy ourselves. Our cities lose their markets and public spaces. It loses its individual culture, traded for flourescent indoor weatherproof people-moving corridors. And the people pushing such measures argue that they seek the greatest good for the greatest number.
One of the reasons for paying attention to aesthetics: to recognize the ways we make ourselves unfree.
2 Responses to “the noncity”
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testing, don’t mind me
mostly, you see this complaint brought up by people into travel. why bother travelling the world anymore, if every place is going to wind up the same?
it’s indicative, i think, of the nature of capitalism. to make the most profit, one must appeal to the broadest swath of humanity. unfortunately, this tends to result in bland food, mcmansions, terrible movies and music and dull, orderly cities. and so on, but you get the point. everything, everywhere, is the same.
however, i think this is only a cursory view. at a glance, everything is the same: dull, whitewashed and aimed to please all (thus pleasing none). if you look, you can still spot the differences. moreover, and also part of the nature of capitalism, is the growing reaction to it. despite the commonality of humanity; despite our innate desire to conform, we also crave our differences. and so, growing beneath the cultivated beds laid down by urban planners, the wildflowers start to poke back up. roots are stubborn and hard to completley remove. the pendulum may not swing all the way back, but that also isn’t desirable (stagnation and all). but it does swing. you can see it happening: craft and artisan food movements, buy local campaigns, etc.. as far as cities and architecture goes, the change is slower. but it’s there, if you look for it.
(cross-posted to the forum)