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April 1, 2010
In her essay "The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe" in October, Vol. 73 (Summer, 1995), Susan Buck-Morss says that an industrial dreamworld dominated the political imagination in both East and West for most of the century. In the East the dream-form was a utopia of production, whereas in the West it was a utopia of consumption. But both shared intimately the optimistic vision of a mass society beyond material scarcity, and the collective, social goal, through massive industrial construction, of transforming the natural world. She says that though cities worldwide have continued to attract immigrants to them in ever greater numbers, drawn by the promise of work and by dreams of consumption, a countertrend is increasingly apparent:
dreams are divorcing themselves from the space of the city. Recent urban planning has been more concerned with security against crime than with staging phantasmagorias for the crowd's delight.
Shopping malls as shrines to consumption have detached themselves from the urban landscape and are capable of relocation anywhere. While the automobile as dream-image is now tarnished by the sobering awareness of ecological realities, the accommodation of this individualist mode of mass transportation was disastrously destructive of urban space.
She adds that Postmodern architecture initially was committed to improving cities as a social space. But the economic and political climate was not favorable for urban reform. Rather, a postmodern virtue was made of the accidental way that cities evolve, justifying the lack of any urban policy whatsoever. Style has become eclectic, a melange of neo-, post-, and retroforms that deny responsibility for present history.
They reproduce the dream-image, but reject the dream. In this cynical time of the "end of history," adults know better than to believe in social utopias of any kind-those of production or consumption. Utopian fantasy is quarantined, contained within the boundaries of theme parks and tourist preserves, like some ecologically threatened but nonetheless dangerous zoo animal. When it is allowed
expression at all, it takes on the look of children's toys-even in the case of sophisticated objects-as if to prove that utopias of social space can no longer be taken seriously; they are commercial ventures, nothing more.
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