I n George Orwell’s Spanish Civil War book Homage to Catalonia , he speaks about taking the streetcar out to the front. This has always struck me as almost absurd, that war could be so domesticized. Somehow, I have great spatial divisions in my understanding of the killing fields and everyday life. However, the streetcar that takes old ladies to shops and soldiers to battle is simultaneously military and public space: there is no functional transformation, for the function, transport, remains the same. What is transformed is only a personal relationship with a spatial practice. The streets of the cities hosting meetings of the WTO, the G8, the IMF, or APEC, with their attendant anti-globalization protests, are similarly transformed. Before and after the fence, the riot police, the tear gas, the street theatre and the surveillance, the streets are full of business people going to work, tourists, vendors: the usual. The streets — the public spaces of the city — promiscuously support anything that wants to occur in them. They appear as neutral spaces, apolitical, mere scaffolding for events in Colin Rowe’s terms, or in Lefebvre’s sense, a firm representation of civil, efficient, modernity. One particular building type, the stadium, offers an extreme example of structures which support conflicting kinds of spectacle. In liberation movements, rebellions and other wars, the incarceration of large groups of people is one of the constants. Often the prelude to disappearances, the question must often arise: where to put them? The soccer stadium offers controlled entrances and exits, concrete superstructures, and soundproof privacy. All those things that support singing sports spectators who pay to see the game can also work to hide terrible abuses. In June, large screens were set up in the stadium in Kabul so that Afghanis could watch the Argentina-Italy World Cup match.This would have been impossible under the sport- banning Taliban just six months earlier, when an average of three public executions a week took place in the same stadium after Friday prayers ( Australian Broadcasting Corporation newscast 14/10/02). Daniel Igali, a member of the Toronto presentation committee to the IOC for the 2008 Olympics, was appalled that the committee “ignored China’s human-rights violations, including the mass execution of prisoners in stadiums that would be used for the Games” ( Globe & Mail 14/07/01).
Not a new history, there are the stories of the Velodrome d’Hiver in 1942 Vichy Paris and the National Stadium in Santiago in 1973. No transformation takes place in the form — crowds have looked down on the field since the Coliseum — but the spectacle changes.This spectacle, as a spatial practce, differs from that outlined by Debord: a capitalist conflation of event and commodity. While this is definitely a workable analysis of professional sports, it is the more primitive, primordial spectacle of struggle that is being discussed here.Tim Parks, in A Season with Verona , writes that the fan activities around Italian football contain a ritualized version of the warring city states of the Italian peninsula. For a day, Verona can battle Bologna to the chanted insults of the fans. Tighter crowd control within stadiums, such as fewer entrances, has proved lethal to spectators who can so easily be trapped and crushed in the panic to avoid violence: no less frightening in its way than being assembled unwillingly in a velodrome. Sport is a metaphor for war and this particular architecture of sport slips easily into being a tool of war. This slippage is all the more effective because in an unsuspecting society such as Canada, where stadiums are all about the Grey Cup and Lilith Fair, the lethal possibilities of the form seem to be completely risible. Stadia are in our midst, in the centres of our cities, and our universities. It is not that we can’t visualize spatial practices, but we seem to have difficulty placing them in our own territory. At the tag end of modernism, the belief that a neutral position is possible gives us streets without judgement and public spaces that take no sides. But do they emerge from the tear gas and water cannon with any scars? Are the stadia washed in the blood of the lamb simply with the reinstatement of riotous football fans singing We are the Champions ? There is no obvious physical transformation here, such as the removal of two 200-storey office towers in lower Manhattan, or the flattening of the 18th century tomb of Vali Gujarati which now lies under a newly paved road in Gujerat. What has been transformed is a perhaps unthinking trust in civic space: there is a new realization that public venues are simultaneously ominous and innocent in the most banal sort of way.
Stadiums — not just for soccer Stephanie White
Stephanie White is an architect, the editor of On|Site review and is currently researching issues of nationalism and urban form.
Des stades et autre choses Dans son livre Homage to Catalonia , George Orwell parle du fait que le tramway doit prendre les devants. Cette notion m’a toujours paru comme étant des plus absurdes, que la guerre soit si domestiquée. Il me semble qu’il existe un grand espace entre ma compréhension des génocides et de la vie de tous les jours : le tramway qui mène les vieilles dames aux boutiques et les soldats à la guerre est, d’une façon simultanée, un espace tant public que militaire. Ce qui se trans- forme n’est que la relation per- sonnelle que l’on accorde à une pratique spatiale.
moment où ils étaient sur le point d’être emprisonnés dans le Stade national de Santiago. Les stades sont au cœur de nos sociétés, au centre de nos villes et de nos uni- versités. Dans le cas qui nous concerne, il n’existe aucune transformation physique. Ce qui a été transformé, peut-être, est la confiance aveugle que nous accordons à l’espace public : on remarque une nouvelle constatation du fait que les endroits publics sont un présage simultané et innocent, de la façon la plus banale qui soit.
Un type particulier d’immeuble, le stade de soccer, offre un exemple extrême de structures qui viennent appuyer des genres de spectacles conflictuels. Les entrées et les sor - ties contrôlées, les superstructures de béton et le privé insonorisé – toutes ces choses qui viennent appuyer les spectateurs chanteurs de sports peuvent aussi dissimuler de terribles abus. En juin, de grands écrans ont été installés dans le stade de Kaboul afin que les Afghans puissent regarder la partie de la Coupe mondiale entre l’Argentine et l’Italie, une chose complètement inimaginable sous le
régime taliban d’il y a six mois. On se souviendra que ce régime avait banni le sport et qu’en moy- enne, trois exécutions par semaine avaient lieu dans le même stade après les prières du vendredi. Le sport sert de métaphore pour la guerre et cette architecture de sport particulière passe facilement comme étant un outil de guerre. Ce passage est des plus efficaces au sein d’une société peu méfiante comme celle du Canada, où les possibilité létales de la sorte sem- blent complètement risibles, tout comme les intellectuels du Chili ont dû se sentir en 1972 au
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O n S ite review
T ransformations
I ssue 7 2002
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