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July 14, 2009
I have just come across the Cultural Studies e-archive, which is a supplement to the Culture Machine e-journal.
Stumbling around I uncover Frederic Jameson in Future City in New Left Review; a review of two texts from Rem Koolhaas' Project of the City, which reaches beyond architecture’s traditional definition of ‘making buildings’ to the mutations of the contemporary city. Project of the City is a research programme conducted by thesis students ‘to document and understand the mutations of urban culture . . . that can no longer be described within the traditional categories of architecture, landscape and urban planning’.
Jameson asks: After the dilapidation of urban modernism, what kinds of city and what forms of architecture await us? Is it the city as a shopping mall? Post-industrial consumption is transforming the city almost as much as industrial production did. Does this mean that ‘In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop’. He adds:
The world in which we were trapped is in fact a shopping mall; the windless closure is the underground network of tunnels hollowed out for the display of images. The virus ascribed to junkspace is in fact the virus of shopping itself; which, like Disneyfication, gradually spreads like a toxic moss across the known universe.
Airports have become shopping malls; shopping malls have become parts of museums, and so the city, not only by housing huge new malls within itself, but by becoming a virtual mall in its own right. A mall constitutes itself as a modern-day Main Street, and they are the temples of capitalist consumerism’. The commodification process is now a whole new life style, which we call consumerism in which we shop for images rather than objects per se.
Shopping is so successful that it has become the:
the last remaining form of public activity. Through a battery of increasingly predatory forms, shopping has been able to colonise – even replace – almost every aspect of urban life. Historical town centres, suburbs, streets, and now train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the Internet, and even the military, are increasingly shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. Churches are mimicking shopping malls to attract followers. Airports have become wildly profitable by converting travellers into consumers. Museums are turning to shopping to survive. The traditional European city once tried to resist shopping, but is now a vehicle for American-style consumerism. ‘High’ architects disdain the world of retailing yet use shopping configurations to design museums and universities. Ailing cities are revitalised by being planned more like malls.
In this analysis, as mega-stores increasingly govern movement through cities, architecture and urbanism are more and more exposed as the mere co-ordination of flow.The preservation of city centres produce a non-urban (suburban) space given over to malling. A Junkspace’.
‘In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop’. So dam depressing. In despair to turn to photography as a way out.
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