Cities of Power. Göran Therborn
to conclusions of interpretation we had better see them, and others of their kind, as first of all raising questions and providing incitements to historical and contextual queries.
Architecture
Architecture is often what first catches the eye looking at a city. It has two dimensions. One is aesthetic, expressed in historical styles or in contemporary iconicity. The style chosen is loaded with meaning, which any urban scholar has to pay attention to. However, the meaning is historically path-dependent, depending upon the historical experience of the power-holder. The European Gothic of the Westminster Parliament is the style of the ‘free-born Englishman’, the Gothic of the Strasbourg Münster or the Kölner Dom is echt deutsch, that of the Vienna City Hall is the style of autonomous cities, in the Flemish tradition. Neoclassicism is republican in Washington and imperial in Paris and Saint Petersburg.
The second dimension is political, viewing built forms as expressing a ‘grammar of power’, as the Norwegian architectural theorist Thomas Thiis-Evensen has called it.22 I have found his sketch very useful. Six building variables and their power implications are listed in this ‘grammar’:
•Closure: the more closed, the more inaccessible
•Weight: the heavier
•Size: the larger
•Distance: the more distant from its immediate environment
•Symmetry: the more symmetrical
•Verticality: the taller the building, the more concentrated and the more authoritarian the power of the builder is likely to be.*
Five of the six may be interpreted as indicators of imposing awe, pomp, haughtiness, even arrogance. Symmetry is an expression of order, of a central mastering of the whole.
By size, modern power tends to be overshadowed by ancient, showing a certain popular approximation of power. The château de Versailles was 16 acres, the Moscow Kremlin 68 acres and the Vatican compound about 110 acres, which may be compared to the 175 acres of the Beijing Forbidden City, the 255 acres of the Delhi Red Fort and the 1,200 acres of the 200 BC er fang complex of Chang’an. But Saint Peter’s in Rome is much larger than the main temples of Tenochtitlán and, even more, of Cuzco. In terms of verticality, the Great Giza Pyramid of 2500 BC, at 146 metres, commanded the skies until the skyscrapers of the twentieth century.23
The ‘grammar’ will not be used for any declension exercises of a Latin-school type, nor for any taxonomy. It is a list of variables to bear in mind when looking at buildings and thinking about their meaning.
Monumentality
Monumentality is directly geared to the production of meaning. The Latin monere means to remind. Through its built ensembles, statues, plaques and museums, a city’s monuments try to remind us of events and persons and to convey a particular historical narrative, urban and/or national. A built landmark may also constitute a monument, without an intrinsic narrative but reminding us of the identity of a place. Beijing’s Tiananmen is such a monumental landmark, figuring in China’s national emblem. Though not in the national heraldry, the Brandenburg Gate and the Eiffel Tower play similar roles for the identity of Berlin(ers) and Paris(ians).
Monumentality is often neglected in hard-nosed urban social science and was dismissed by the modernist architectural and urbanist vanguard of the years between the two world wars. However, in 1943, three leading figures of CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne, the architectural vanguard movement) – its soon-to-be president Josep Lluís Sert, the long-term secretary Sigfried Giedion and the painter Fernand Léger – published ‘Nine Points on Monumentality’, pleading for a modernist reconsideration.
Monuments are human landmarks which men have created as symbols for their ideals, for their aims and for their actions … Monuments are the expression of man’s highest cultural needs … They have to satisfy the eternal demand of the people for translation of their collective force into symbols … Monuments are therefore only possible in periods in which a unifying consciousness and unifying culture exist.
From their sixth point the authors then move on to argue for a new, modernist monumentality without being very concrete, other than arguing for ‘modern materials and new techniques’, for ‘mobile elements’ and projections of colour.* They evade answering their own implied question, whether a ‘unifying consciousness unifying culture’ still exists. We do not need to answer that question here, because monumentality can also thrive among divided consciousnesses and cultures.
Madrid at the end of 2014 is a good illustration. On 15 October the Spanish king inaugurated in Madrid a big monumental statue to the eighteenth-century admiral Blas de Lezo. It had started as a private initiative, which soon got the enthusiastic support of the then right-wing mayor of Madrid. This happened in the build-up to the Catalan crisis, and knowledgeable Catalan nationalists soon pointed out that de Lezo had taken part in the bombardment (and final Spanish capture) of Barcelona in 1714. The Barcelona municipal council formally demanded the withdrawal of the statue, something the Madrid mayor declared she would never do under any circumstances.24
In Budapest in the same autumn of 2014, liberal opinion was very upset by a new sculptural ensemble with a monstrous bird descending on an angelic Hungary, commemorating the ‘German occupation’ (from March 1944 to the end of World War II). It is interpreted, correctly, as whitewashing the reactionary, anti-Semitic regime that ruled Hungary after 1920 and aligned itself with Nazi Germany at the outbreak of World War II.25
Monumentality may actually be a good indicator of the division of the country. By the outbreak of the protest rallies in Kyiv in the autumn of 2013, Lenin had been taken down in the country west of Kyiv, surviving in the capital with a battered nose, but stood tall east of the Dnipro River in the main square of every important city. After the successful regime change, Lenin is now confined to the Donbass region.*
Modern monumentality in the narrow sense of statues, triumphal arches, allegorical and other sculptural ensembles, pantheons and columns is of Greco-Roman European origin, and processional portraits are of Christian European origin. Monumentality has had its golden ages – imperial Rome and nineteenth-century Paris – but it is very much still with us, capable of arousing civic passion. This symbolic repertoire has been imported into other civilizations in modern times and its relative scarcity in, for example, East Asia, should be interpreted in the context of its alienness. Mausoleums and symbolically charged tombs, on the other hand, are part of the heritage of all Asian cultures.
Toponymy
Urban meanings are also constructed through naming streets, places, buildings, institutions – by toponomy. The official naming of streets was a European post-medieval practice. The original, vernacular naming referred to a street’s artisans and shops, some feature of its natural location or some colourful inhabitant of the neighbourhood. Concentrated national and city governments had more representative concerns.
The first such street of any note was probably the Via Giulia in Rome, named after the great early-sixteenth-century Roman planner Pope Giulio II. In London, beginning with Henry VIII, several King Streets were laid out, none very grand. In 1765 a law was passed that all streets and squares should have a name and a name tablet.26 In Paris official names started to appear in the seventeenth century, first drawn from royalty, but soon also from statesmen and high servants of the king: Colbert, Mazarin, Richelieu. By the eighteenth century, before the revolution, there were also streets named after guild heads and city leaders, and after 1728 there was a police ordinance that all Parisian streets should have a name plaque.27 In the 1630s, the idea of official street naming reached the new (short-lived) big-power capital of Stockholm, whose Regency government began by commemorating itself, in Regeringsgatan (Government Street).
The practice later radiated across the European imperial area and into Republican Beijing,28 but it never stuck in Japan, which has kept a block-based address system. In contrast to Communist Europe, street (re)naming was not important in Communist China, although it did happen occasionally. In the 1990s,