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1 5 t h I NT ERNATIONAL P L A NNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFER E NC E
BİG URBAN WALKS: SAO PAULO/ ISTANBUL / SEOUL /
LONDON
MARTIN KOHLER
Address: HafenCity University Hamburg
Averhoffstr. 38
D-22085 Hamburg
e-mail: martin.kohler@hcu-hamburg.de
ABSTRACT
Big Urban Walks are new ways to explore and analyse large metropolitan agglomerations based
on perceived situations. The method is yielding from artistic, ethnographic and journalistic
practices and uses concepts of the dérive and relational and socially produced spaces to open up
the informal and real-dirt spaces of these large urban structures for urban research. In this text,
I will outline the theoretical framing and reference points that underlie the Big Urban Walks..
PROLOGUE
Three Urban Walks through some of the worlds largest urban agglomeration on
three different continents (São Paulo: 20,5 Mio / 2.914 km2; Seoul-Incheon: 22,5
Mio / 2.163 km2; Istanbul: 13.1 Mio / 1.399 km2) exemplifies an experimental
concept to relate the spaces of cities that underwent a rapid urbanization in the last
century.
Figure 1: Martin Kohler, Crossing São Paulo, 2011
The Urban Walks are multi-day long walks through the entire urban body of large
urban agglomerations by a group or a single individual resulting in maps of the
walked path, photographic descriptions of spaces and social encounters, field
notes and an animated sequence of the walk.
This text sketches the theoretical references for the walks.
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C it ies, nations and regions in planning h i s t o r y
DEPARTURE
The explosion of these three cities in the past 100 years is by no means a particular
singularity but only some of the most striking examples of a general global
revolution described as “from global cities to globalized urbanization” (Brenner,
2011).
Depending on whom numbers you believe, somewhen between 2005 and 2008 a
remarkable tipping point was reached. For the first time in human history the
planet's population lived mostly in the urban areas outnumbering the rural
population.This was not the result of a gradual growth of worlds population, but due
to a rapid increase that doubled the human population from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6
billion in 2000. The urban areas accounted for more than 60% of this.
In 2025, 56.6 percent of the inhabitants of the Earth (4.5 billion to 8 billion people)
will live in a city (United Nations, 2010). This increase was primarily hosted by the
urban areas of developing countries and countries in the southern part of the world.
While the rankings of the most densely populated cities were dominated by
developed countries (Paris, London, Berlin, New York, Tokyo), as was the fact when
Saskia Sassen wrote "The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo" in 1991, the list of
nowadays is much more heterogeneous, with many new cities, mainly African and
Asian settlements in the charts. Bombay, Lagos, Dhaka, Karachi, Hyderabad,
Shanghai and Seoul have left behind the most former metropoles of the North.
Brazilian cities are on this list for a long time already. Particularly São Paulo with 20
million people living in the metropolitan area (MRSP). In many cases this great
urban growth is not at all epic and glorious. This is dramatically true for urban areas
in Africa or Southeast Asia, however, in Brazil, a country experiencing rapid
economic growth1. The rapid urbanization in a capitalistic framework has reached all
the cities on the list caused huge problems, especially the enormous development
of slums. The ubiquitous appearance of the slums has dominated the debate about
the global cities of the South, but also has the ingenuity and capacity for innovation
of the new global cities.
THE GLOBAL SOUTH AS THE FUTURE OF THE URBAN
„The Urban Revolution“ (Lefebvre 1970), and the anticipated generalization of
capitalist urbanization processes through the establishment of a planetary fabric or
web of urbanized spaces is no longer the artists speculation only. Urbanization has
now „come to condition all major aspects of planetary social existence and .. the
fate of human social life.“ as Neil Brenner and Roger Keil state in their wrap-up of
the last decades of urban research and theory of the global cities (Brenner, 2011). A
stance on Lefebvre and the contemporary urban structure that is taken up by a
number of urban researchers (Duminyi, 2011) or (Ngo, 2007). This contemporary
urban world reveals new forms of global connectivity, new patterns of
disconnection, peripheralization, exclusion and vulnerability. Neo-Marxist
researchers like Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells explored these worlds
as subject to supranational or global forces and unleashed an abundance of new
methods and discourses to observe the flux of an urbanization as „an active
1Cited by Chiodeli, F. São Paulo, The Challenge of the Favelas )http://www.planum.net/planum-
magazine/francesco-chiodelli-sao-paulo-the-challenge-of-the-favelas)
1 5 t h I NT ERNATIONAL P L A NNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFER E NC E
moment within the ongoing production and transformation of capitalist sociospatial
configurations“ (Brenner, 2011, 602).
With the ground-breaking work of Saskia Sassen, Ananya Roy, Jennifer Robinson
and Peter Taylor the global city concept focused on studies of the role of major
cities as global financial centers along three trajectories: The formation of a global
urban hierachy, the contested restructuring of urban space and the transformation
of the urban social fabric thus developing to „a fundamentally disjointed, yet
profoundly authoritarian, new world order“ that might well lead to new „possibilities
for radical or progressive social change“ (Brenner, 2011, 607).
“Within this literature, we begin to see a systematic interest in the ‘South’ and in
urban form in the development of the category of the ‘global’. These works turn
‘South’ in order to reimagine the urban and, beyond that specific project, to
analytically grasp the terrain of the global. A different kind of historicism is at work
in them. The city seen from the South provides the occasion to rethink the
contours of modernity in a global age.” (Rao, 2006, 225)
In discussing the work of Mike Davis and Rem Koolhaas, Vyjayanthi Rao lays out an
argument about the recent “Southern turn” in urban studies that links their
reflections on the global Cities and especially the slums, as Western theoretizations
of a Western version of modernization. While in old industrial nations, cites have
always been the focal point of modernization and individual freedom, this does not
apply to the agglomerations of the global South. Davis's “The planet of slums” an
Koolhaas' work in Lagos are two distinct epistemological positions taking the
“Southern turn”.
Based on the UN-HABITAT's 2003 report “The Challenge of Slums” Mike Davis goes
much further. While the report argues that slums constitute a crucial ingredient of
the recent explosion in urbanization across the planet but especially in the South,
Davis’s extends the explosion to the emergence of a ‘surplus humanity’, the birth of
an informal proletariat.
The structural adjustments, dictated by the IMF, decoupled urbanization from
industrialization and development per se and cut off their inhabitants from the
formal world economy, thus generating ‘gigantic concentrations of poverty’ in the
cities of the South.The slum is the formal manifestation of this claim. The slum
housing the surplus humanity and the informal proletariat that has emerged from
over a decade of structural adjustments remains the only “fully franchised solution
to the problem of warehousing the twenty-first century’s surplus humanity” (Davis, 2,
28).
Thus it is both a demographic and territorial form. However created by the oblique
clash between the American imperium and the labor-power it has expelled from the
formal world economy’ (Davis, 2004, p14).
Another theory about the future of modernity is found in the architect and town
planner Rem Koolhaas' work on non-western cities by making them to incubators of
the future prospects of the global city instead of the dumpingground of Western
capitalism. Koolhaas published work on non-Western cities has focused on the new
cities in China and Lagos, but Rao is primarily interested in his work in Lagos,
especially in his film “Lagos/Koolhaas”, the gained considerable popularity.
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C it ies, nations and regions in planning h i s t o r y
Lagos has a population expected to reach to 24 million by 2020. The city is well on
the way to become the greatest city on earth. When Koolhaas embarked on his
research in 1998, the city had been nearly “entirely disconnected from the global
system” and fascinating and enticing as “alein and distant”. Lagos seems doomed
by its huge problems with electricity, transit, housing, water, and many more.
However, because Lagos is a city that still works, Koolhaas proposes that the study
of such cities from the perspective of the traditional urban studies must fail as it will
only convey their disability. But, as Lagos works somehow, the study of the
economical and social processes of Lagos and other large cities of the South will
reveal the African forms of modernization that can inspire the West.
Thus, Koolhaas states that ‘Lagos represents a developed, extreme paradigmatic
case-study of a city at the forefront of globalizing modernity” (Koolhaas 2000).
...AND AS İMAGİNARY PLACES OF WESTERN MODERNİTY
The way in which dysfunctionality is turned into a sort of virtue strucks as hyperbolic
gesture, as Okwui Enwezor points out, and can be seen as a ‘celebration of the
pathological . . . the unstable and the culture of make-do’ (Enwezor, 2003, 116).
The search for fantasies about cities – of wonder, speed, diversity, density,
verticality, innovation – developed in the context of observations about certain
European and American cities have been shifted to the „disconnected“ and „alien“
metroples of the South as Koolhaas states in an interview talking about Lagos. They
have persisted through the last urbanizing century, from Simmel through Park and
Wirth, to enliven contemporary analyses of the social life, cultural politics and
economic dynamism of cities. More importantly, they have profoundly coloured
what we are able to think of as a city, what is admitted as city-ness (Robinson,
2004, 570). The consequence is that many places which are indeed cities are not
adequately described through this set of fantasies that refer to the European
metropoles that show rather consolidation or shrinking and seem to detach from the
eternal and mythical growth of the past.
As Lagos expanded with virtually no planning, Koolhaas set out to theorize its
informality. The “ghost law” turned Lagos into “a city of permanent congestion and
stoppages.” The ad-hoc urban reality that “could seem random, included a number
of very elaborate institutional networks,” he argued.
Whereas Davis conceptualizes the Southern cities as mainly slums and thereby as
the outsourced problem of the capitalistic West, Koolhaas situates the Southern
city’s pathologies and excesses as proxy evidence for the values of modernity and
modernisation in its globalizing moment. All locations of the urban world are joined
together as evidence for this dialectic between ‘decline and return’, between the
‘phantasmic and destructive’, which runs through modernity. In other words, these
global cities of the South function as particular points in a specifically spatialized
history of modernity.
Not for nothing some of the same thematic focal points (self-organization,
informality and dysfunctionality, assemblage and improvisation) and theoretical
underpinnings (Debord, Foucault, Harvey) have been used to fuel another
contemporary debate of the Western world – the creative city.
1 5 t h I NT ERNATIONAL P L A NNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFER E NC E
In his critic of the creative city concept employed by so many cities, Andreas
Reckwitz focuses on the key protagonists Landry and Florida. He takes as point of
departure the double structure of a urban celebration of codes and esthetical
symbol on the urban surface and an underlying postmodern capitalism producing a
massive seggregation of classes. Pointing to Mike Davis, he relates the creative city
debatte to Davis imperial clash. The demise of the middle European city regions
and the uncontrollable growth of the megapoles of the South as results of the same
global processes of seggregation (Reckwitz, 2009, 4). Under this frame the creative
city debate is an European response to the transformation of Western urbanity and
the legitimation crisis of the modern city of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Overcoming the bourgois city, the functional city failed to prevent the social
desintegration of the suburban and the ghettos and left the city center open to an
occupation by a antimodern counterculture ranging from Jane Jacos to the occupy
movement nowadays. The functional city “appears as a functional
inhospitable, creativity-killing control machine and the vibrant urbanity as an inner
city practice as a combination of life and work and as a space depriving social
control and eluding new collective neighborhoods” (Reckwitz, 2009, 30).
Koolhaas' praise „Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather we may be catching up
with Lagos” and the bewildering negation of the also apparent realities of social
exclusion and simply poverty, might well be read as a mainly European search for a
replacement of the funtional city of the modern period without returning to the
bourgois city of the Citoyen. The turn to the South is heavily influenced by this
search for an imaginary to continue the project of modernity from a Western
perspective and thus creating the dichotonomies of ghetto vs center or local vs
global.
These dichotonomies criticized by Robinson, Rao and others, might be much more
an attribute of the intellectual lenses of Koolhaas et al. rather than helpful
categories to understand the complexity and comparability of São Paulo, Lagos or
Mumbai.
In the end, they are observations from far away.
AERİAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE PROJECT OF MODERNİZATİON
„Perhaps one of the most valuable gifts to us from the war has been the application
of photography to the making of aerial surveys. Every town should possess its aerial
survey [. . .].“ (Abercrombie, 1921, 33).
The World Wars left the European cities in shattered pieces. The enourmous task to
rebuild these cities became the all important issue. Shaken until the bones the
planning departments had to gain knowledge about the destruction and remainings
of their cities first and foremost. The systematic and comprehensive archives of
aerial photographs of military surveillance during the war became a most valuable
asset. Based on this source, maps and plans have been created to rebuild the
cities. Yet, the vast demolition of the urban cores with their mediaval road layout and
dense building blocks became also a unique window to re-design much more
generally the urban structure according to contempary ideas. The inner city of
Rotterdam was not only destroyed by the German airplanes in World War II. Many
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C it ies, nations and regions in planning h i s t o r y
buildings withstand the airraids even within the Brandlijn, but not the
“reconstruction” of urban planning.
The wars left two “gifts” for the urban planners: an extensive and systematic archive
of airial photographs and the open voids in the heart of their cities. The creation of
plans to re-adjust the urban shape to the new models of the functional city went well
along with these presents. The distanciation and the assumed objectivity of the view
from above corresponded to the functional view on the modern metropole and
helped to legitimize the new plans. Siegfried Krakauer noted in a remark about
“Photography” that the viewpoint of the aerial photography, entirely distanced from
the ground, tended necessarily to increase the natural “distance” inherent in the
photographic medium, and thus to increase its assumed objectivity and of course,
its inherent manipulability devoid of the difficult and intractable individual or social
subject. This privileged instrument serves the double desire of planners – utopian
and projective (Vidler, 2011, 317). The process of modernization and the use of
distant photograpy came hand in hand.
Le Corbusier embraced the view from above. The expanded field of view of the flight
induces a feeling of euphoria in the viewer, and because he sees so much more
than the people on the Earth, he imagines to know more as well. When Le Corbusier
flew the first time, he was emphatic, but also appalled by the density of cities and
announced what the plane means for the planner: “By means of the airplane, we
now have proof, recorded on the photographic plate, of the rightness of our desire
to alter methods of architecture and town planning.” (Le Corbusier, 1935, 11) Le
Corbusier's words in his publication in 1935 Air Craft convey the belief in aerial
photographs as scientific evidence. But an "evidence" of a town planning, that
depends many assumptions. His example of a crowded urban scene in central
London and its inscription is instructive: "The eye of the airplane's mercy. This time
we have the current record of reality. What a terrible thing! Do people live here? Do
they have given consent? Will they not rebel against it? " (Le Corbusier, 1935, 102).
Aerial photographs of photographs supplied by air were a strong element in the
development of a modernist perception of the world. Among those carried away by
such views was the artist John Piper, who in 1937 identified the visual experience of
an aerial view that the modernist painting. He also appreciated the work of OGS
Crawford, the archaeologist, the discovery of archaeological sites from the air
pioneer, like the French human geographers sought for human inscriptions on the
landscape (Spalding, 2009, 123). For many, as we have seen that modern planners
seemed be one of the most likely recipients of the possibilities of aerial
photographs, and this was often expressed as euphoric. The urban planner and
theorist EA Gutkind, in 1955, wrote: "Today we can look at the world with a
God'seye, take a look at the infinite variety of environmental samples spread over
the earth, and appreciate their dynamic relations [...]. The aircraft has given us the
synopsis of "(Gutkind, 1956, i). This statement gives the impression that the aerial is
an objective revelation and the danger of a ‘drawing board planning’ could be
tackled with the “proper” use of aerial photographs, the interpretation of an skilled
expert to incorporate the elitist tool of aerial photography in urban planning
(Hinchcliffe, 2010, 286). But the ambiguous nature in what was claimed to reveal
elements of the environment not usually perceived, also reinforces already accepted
wisdom as can be seen in many captions of aerial photographs by Le Corbusier
and others. Despite the claim of an objective description in the hands of the skilled
1 5 t h I NT ERNATIONAL P L A NNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFER E NC E
interpreter, the captions are full of preconceptions and judgements, that extended
the information in the described pictures beyond what can be read from the picture
itself.
“whether aerial views changed perceptions, or whether they confirmed already
accepted opinions. What we see is determined to some extent by what we know,
and it takes time before a new means of viewing the world informs what we know
to the extent that we see differently.” (Hinchcliffe, 2010, 277).
Here, the quality of aerial views as comprehensive sets of data becomes a lure, to
believe, what you already know rather than reveal something you don't. The distant
photographic plane becomes the projection surface for your former experience and
perceptive models. A bad starting point for a medium that got a certain stand in
how to cope with the sheer size and speedy dynamics of the global metroples. If
planning departments overlook the always moving boundary of their city by
helicopter, it seems questionable, what they get, apart from a rough knowledge
about distances. Also, the abundance of photographs of the new global cities from
an elevated vantage point outnumbers the photographs reflecting street level.
Especially for an non-local audience these pictures can be misleading. One of the
most iconic views of contemporary São Paulo, commonly used in international
publications dealing with the city, is a picture in Morumbi showing the favela
Paraisópolis on one side of a wall and a luxury building with tennis courts and one
swimming pool per balcony on the other.
Figure 2 Luiz Arthur Leirao Vieira (Tuca Vieira) ,Paraisópolis,
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C it ies, nations and regions in planning h i s t o r y
The photograph tells a compelling story about the social and economic inequalities
of the city. What it does not show, is the more complex picture of the street life in
Paraisopolis, the many invisible connections between the residents of Paraisopolis
working as servants and plumbers and some wealthy appartment owners visiting
the Baile Funk parties in the favela vice versa. The differentiation between the many
communities within the favela and the comparable comfortable living conditions is
also concealed by a striking picture “proofing” the social inequality and ignorance
Brazil is famous for “as everybody knows”.
COMİNG BACK TO LAGOS ON STREET LEVEL
It this very interesting, that Koolhaas film showed an remarkable absence of this key
tool of the urban planner – the airial photograph and the kartographic overview. In
his film, his reflections are based on strolls through the city that he explains and
develops in interviews and talkshows.
Obviously, he was aware of the fundamental change in the rhetorics and thinking of
urban studies. Whereas the origin of the research field flie in “the concern to
investigate relatively bounded urban settlements, understood as internally
differentiated, self-contained “worlds,” in isolation from surrounding networks of
economic, political and environmental relationships” the theory shifted to see the
worldwide generalization of urbanization as confrontation with “new forms of global
connectivity – along with new patterns of disconnection, peripheralization, exclusion
and vulnerability – among and within urbanizing regions across the globe. How to
decipher these transformations, their origins, and their consequences? What
categories and models of urbanization are most appropriate for understanding
them, and for coming to terms with their wide-ranging implications?” (Brenner,
2011, 601).
Koolhaas exposed himself to the actual concrete of the city. In strolls and
wanderings through the streets of Lagos during his and his students work in
Nigerias megacity, he collected the stories and events that later became the
empirical foundation of his reasoning. But the exposition was only allowed to a
certain extent. The introductionary scene of the film is revealing. In the first picture
you can see a panoramic view over the informal settlement in Lagos and the
extreme close-up of a mans face on a horizontally split screen. Only his eyes visible,
we can see the focused gaze of an expert overlooking the pitiful homes of the many.
Of course these are Koolhaas eyes and only in the next picture people from Lagos
appear on the screen – the assistents of a talkshow devotely holding microphones
and camera equipment into the scene. It is the talk show in which Koolhaas just
starts to explain Lagos.
Rem Koolhaas just swapped the gods eye view of Corbusiers airplane with the
helicopter flights of his intellectual reasonings. The expert selects without further
explanation urban scenes and compiles a theory of modernity in Lagos. In this
position, he still claims the authorative position of the “skilled interpreter” needed to
understand the social and economical structure of Lagos.
As has been pointed out in the former section of this paper, his narrative was
convincing for the audience in the Northern hemisphere as it extended the
imaginary of the modernization to this new found urban cosmos, but stirred up a
1 5 t h I NT ERNATIONAL P L A NNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFER E NC E
strong resistence in academic and local groups. Jenifer Robinson felt urged to state
in a review of publications on global cities, that the difficulty lies in not assuming a
general theory, but also not to accept the incomensurability of cities in different
contexts. Still, with some Western theory in mind, she ends with a rant: “But the
current situation, where an urban theory framed in a western context parades as
universally relevant knowledge while ignoring the urban experiences of most of the
world, is also unacceptable.” and “Rem Koolhaas and his collaborators, for
example, find themselves only begrudgingly able to assign urbanity to Lagos, one
of the largest cities in Africa, ‘for want of a better word’” (Robinson, 2004, 570).
Hinting at Orum and Chens “The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and
Historical Perspective” (Orum, 2003) and with reference to Thrift/Amin, Durckheimer,
Weber and “a couple of geographers (Soja, Harvey)” the understanding of cities as
places, “as sites of meaning and agglomeration and as places where people live” is
the necessary point of departure to carve the difficult path between an appreciation
of the world of diverse cities and the distinctive world hat is any given place.
At the same time as Koolhaas film hit the shelves, a exhibition in Barcelona put
together several artists to exhibit the different “Africas: the artist and the city”. It
“contains a double affirmation. It corroborates the existence of an "other" urban and
artistic reality in Africa and it asserts the these realities do not correspond with what
topics and stereotypes would have us see as Africas sole reality.” (exhibition text).
Among several photographers from the African continent, all of them born natives
and working in a documentarian style, have been a members of a Trans-African
roadtrip, the “INVISIBLE BORDERS” project. People like Charles Okereke and
Akinbode Akinbiyi and especially the later can provide interesting insights as his aim
and his method are comparable to Rem Koolhaas.
Figure 3 Akinbode Akinbiyi Photographs from Lagos: All Roads
Akinbiyi was born of Nigerian parents in Oxford, England, in 1946 and worked as a
freelance photographer for years. His main photographic interest lies on large,
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C it ies, nations and regions in planning h i s t o r y
sprawling mega cities, currently he is working on the four biggest cities on the
African continent – Lagos, Cairo, Kinshasa and Johannesburg. His photographic
accounts on these cities are yielding from aimless strolls as “zen like wanderings”
within the city for hours taking part and being part of the urban life and “coming
closer to the essence of the labyrinth of streets, dwellings, expressways, corners,
junctions and roundabouts” (Akinbinyi, 2001, 160) His photographs are not carefully
composed nor planned in any other way than by a mental “preparedness for that
image .. that say: Eko.” (Eko is another name refering to Lagos). In almost twenty
years of wandering and picturing the city of Lagos, his photographs tell a different
story about the condition of modernity in Lagos. “Lagos is a megacity that in many
ways defies description. It's free jazz and raga and fuji and afro-beat all together
and indistinct, but craziyl loud and jarring. In all this the black and white eye of an
insistent wanderer, trying to find form and understanding in images that go beyond
the dysfuncitonality and chaotic buzz.” (Akinbiyi, 2001, 160).
With a method similiar to the situationistic practice of drifting (Debord, 1967) and the
immersion in the street life with all his senses, capturing in photograph the essence
of his embodied knowledge of the urban spaces he transgresses, he comes up with
an account on the contemporary Lagos as network of particular sites, or places,
that are also profoundly extroverted and mobile, made up of any number of
connections and flows, symbols and meanings. Still, which parts of the urban
agglomeration his photos depict, remains unclear as there is no information given
about the locality of his walks.
...WALKİNG.
Based on the photographic practice of artists like Akinbiyi and the inspiring
framework of Debord's driftings, the Big Urban Walks translate the vast abstract
space of the megapolis into a string of places. The extension of the walks from the
neighborhood level to the full transect cutting the urban agglomeration entirely is a
still unfinished experiment to give an account of the global city as an
anthropological space. By the line of walking the microspaces „where people live“
connect with the Nigelian and Harveyian macrogeographies of the Global City and
thus being able not to compare, but to relate cities in their unique as well as their
general city-ness (Robinson, 2004, 572) like Seoul, Sao Paulo, London or Istanbul.
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