micro-urbanism 2 The tianquis of Mexico City described by Joseph Heathcott – long straggling lines of tarps and aluminum poles, are not unlike the channels that Metis wishes to cut through a city: under each tarp is a rich, complex, colourful life of barter and trade, transaction and obligation, things to sell and things to buy. Each tarp sits in front of a formal storefront, or apartment building, or house, or a highway; people are local, rural, urban, honest, criminal; they have life histories that bring them to this particular tarped table to meet face to face another life history. What is the infrastructure that allows this? In the tanquis it is minimal – tradition and a prefactorial blind-eye. In Metis micro- urbanism it is notional – a way to find a social complexity where laws and tradition prevent it. micro-urbanism 3 Hong Kong and the indistinct laws of the public realm in the acme of the late- capitalist city. For Joanne Lam’s Hong Kong, decolonised in 1997 and a minute later recolonised with a vague promise of a fifty-year transition to authoritarian rule, the breaking of this promise has been enacted in the public realm, under duress, fragile and contestable. Micro-urbanism, inherently subversive and anti-authoritarian, intimate and communal, at first appears to be absent. Yet, we have long known about the Sunday meetings of the city’s Filipina nannies and domestic workers on the shaded plazas of the banking disrict; this magazine itself has published photo-essays of tower roof informal housing, of night-time dice and card games set up on sidewalks under the flare of streetlights. There is an insistence on an informal street life that is carried, through emigration, to major cities of North America and Europe where there are still historic Chinese communities in the downtown cores. In Calgary, Canada’s possibly newest and most arid high rise city centre, there is an old and resident Chinese population that uses the city, inside and outside office hours, for everyday life — the kind of intergenerational population city planners strive, but fail, to introduce through downtown condo towers. There is a narrative here, not manufactured or borrowed, that is deeply cultural and deeply allied with the shape of the developed city. I would hazard that there is a strength to such a narrative that gives strength to the pro-democracy protest movement that is enacted in the streets of Hong Kong: the streets are theirs.
macro-urbanism 1 Calgary’s corporate PPOS-lined streets are not mine. This is the most extreme version of zoning, access and exclusion. ‘Who owns the public realm’ is a question that returns regularly to the pages of On Site review . Maria Portnov asks, ‘If we want women to feel safe walking in urban surroundings it does not suffice to add lighting, just as a pink laptop is not gender- oriented, just lazy.’ It is the coarse grain of stereotypes that characterises macro-urbanism; boundaries are transgressed simply by being the wrong kind of citizen in the wrong place at the wrong time. One would hope that the future city will be more fluid, more forgiving of difference. macro-urbanism 2 On May 21, 2019, the indefatigable Yann Ricordel-Healy suggested an essay for this issue: «I would be greatly interested to write on Nôtre-Dame’s destruction and the French debate after Emmanuel Macron’s urging to rebuild it ‘plus belle encore’ in only five years! It can be correlated to the recent reception of an advocacy for accelerationism , principally supported in France by philosopher Laurent de Sutter, and an ‘intelligentsia’ originated from what one could call a ‘scientist-leftist french tradition’.» Yann didn’t write this essay as a screenplay intervened and he was trying to find Laurent Sutter’s La petite bédéthèque des savoirs10, Histoire de la prostitution: de Babylone a nos jours. Macron’s accelerated building program has run into a very material set of issues. The 250 tonnes of melted lead roofing which ran between the cobbles, under the ground and produced lead dust blowing through Paris, has made the site toxic. Water blasted from firehoses saturated Nôtre-Dame’s stone columns which, on drying out, have become structurally compromised. The whole site is too dangerous to work in. One year in, the rebuilding has not yet begun. Les gilets jaunes are obstructing the transfer of budgetary funds, needed to advance transitions to automation, AI, unfettered technology and market forces, from the austerity that dismantles social programs, cuts pensions and raises taxes. A basic tenet of accelerationism is that one accelerates capitalist processes until either they explode, ushering in radical change, or they succeed, and world problems are solved. With progress itself in question as an operative principle that allows rapid exploitation of underdeveloped theories, technologies and ideologies that bring us ultimately to the climate crisis, conservation emerges as a kind of resistance, parallel to George Monbiot’s ‘political rewilding as an antidote to demagoguery’. 4 The apartheids of macro-urbanism are a kind of demagoguery: something we feel powerless to even query. Micro-urbanism, whether that proposed by Metis or the materially conservative nature of micro-urbanism – the ‘make no large plans’ aspect – is a deceleration, a fragmentary evaluation of place, a turning away from automatic growth, a folding-in on itself. We are, like it or not, in a world of accelerating speed; we are, as slow and fairly obdurate human bodies, mostly being swept out of the way and left behind. Material resistance might be our unwitting anchor.
4 Georges Monbiot, ‘There is an antidote to demagoguery – it’s called political rewilding’ The Guardian , 18 December 2019. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/ dec/18/demagogues-power-rewilding-party-trust- power-government
Stephanie White is the editor of On Site review .
on site review 36: our material future
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