Cities: Urban Centers or Transfer Points for Capital?
Cities have always been centers of capital; I don’t think you can have cities without something (in our history, initially agriculture) to produce surpluses of goods that can (must?) be stored (hoarded? selectively distributed?), and the centralization that such storage encourages has always been a fundamental part of why cities exist.
I love cities. I love them for their concentration of people and culture (the modern form of which, it could be argued, arises out of the former), for the intermingling they encourage and for the aspects of cultural and social choice they provide. I’ve always disliked other aspects, however: the concentration of capital and the power dynamics this creates, and the shaping of cities as feeding/breeding grounds for capitalist/consumerist expenditure/exploitation. I don’t care that these dynamics have thus far been prime drivers for the existence of cities; an optimist (yes, really) about human potential, I believe it’s possible for us to reorganize cities to have the good without the bad. In any case, cities have always had this tension (among others) between capital and people, but they’re still understood largely as spaces for inhabitation—that is, as places for people.
This may be changing.
In an interview with BLDGBLOG, Greg Lindsay discusses the “aerotropolis”, subject of the book he write with John Kasarda: Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, which is:
[A] new kind of human settlement, they suggest, one that “represents the logic of globalization made flesh in the form of cities.”
—Geoff Manaugh & Greg Lindsay. “Aerotropolis: An Interview with Greg Lindsay”. BLDGBLOG, 15 March 2011.
Kasarda says:
I would describe the aerotropolis as any city that has a closer relationship to the air, and to other cities accessible through the air, than to its immediate hinterlands. It’s a city that was basically invented because of the necessities of air travel.
—Geoff Manaugh & Greg Lindsay. “Aerotropolis: An Interview with Greg Lindsay”. BLDGBLOG, 15 March 2011.
Two statements from the interview I find particularly chilling:
The city is not an expression of human culture, so to speak, but a kind of 3-dimensional graph of economic activity.
—Geoff Manaugh & Greg Lindsay. “Aerotropolis: An Interview with Greg Lindsay”. BLDGBLOG, 15 March 2011.
and:
[T]he aerotropolis … is less about urbanity than repurposing the city as a “machine for living”.
—Geoff Manaugh & Greg Lindsay. “Aerotropolis: An Interview with Greg Lindsay”. BLDGBLOG, 15 March 2011.
The whole interview is fascinating. I got the book as a result of reading it, and will hopefully report on it at some point.