City as a Masterpiece

It is tempting to think that different cities beyond being centers of regional and sometimes global influence can, for a historical time period, have a cultural appeal that shines beyond the cycles of their rise and fall. Even though their place in the historical narratives of their economic, political and cultural flowering secures them a respectable position in the media that turn this memory into points on maps of trade, warfare and literature, the complexity that attends to this relationship between space and culture begs the question of the configuration that possibly a variety of perspectives in this relationship make available to thought and feeling. In other words, New York, in its components that make up its urban space - underground transit, downtown architecture, landmark landscapes and communications networks - appears to gradually lose its unique position as a city where many of the features that we recognize as typical of New York were pioneered. From a city of the future - that many poets, writers and scholars took for a model, whether desired or not, of a modern urban form -, it has almost imperceptibly become city of the past. It joined Rome, Paris, and London in a row of venerable seats of regional and global affairs that acquire patina of period pieces on the moving scale of urban development.

Cities take their place in the museum without walls of urban memory of historical globalization. As each emergent center of global accumulation - be it cultural, economic, or political -, claims for itself a timeless transparency of being contemporary without a shade of historicity, as older urban quarters become repositioned within a rapidly transformed urban space - one only needs to think of Haussmann's introduction of rectilinear avenues to Paris, of Rockefellers' skyscraper construction in New York, or of Meiji's transformation of Tokyo -, so does the terms on which the relations between space and culture are articulated undergo constant change. Emergent urban centers appear to have an aesthetic side to their rise. Paris as a capital of modern art has above all been a modern city in the making just as the artistic movements of modernism and avant-garde were in ferment in its coffee-houses, art galleries and literary salons. Artistic sensibility appears to have undergone a change that like a cultural double has followed urban change that has inscribed cities associated with it into collective memory. One needs only to think of Eiffel tower or Crysler building in Paris and New York respectively. A sign of the contemporary times may be that memory fails to serve other landmark structures and cities other than Beijing, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, or Shanghai as having the same staying power of visually iconic architecture.

In terms of urban spaces heading towards rapid modernization Beijing could be a far outlier in terms of the tempo, scale and scope of its modernization. Its CCTV building, designed by Rem Koolhaas, is just one landmark in a city that in a series of simultaneous processes of change - spatial, social and economic -, promises to spill over in the sphere of culture as well. The rapid rise of Chinese artists into the ranks of highest ranked artists of the world can provide only one indicator of this. With unprecedented density across more than one hundred of still growing Chinese mega-cities, one might expect that the wave of cultural innovation will not wait in sweeping wide beyond the borders of China. After all, French literature, art and ideas can be said to be consequences of its continuous process of urban innovation when first structures of thought, than social relations and then urban configurations have remade Paris into a modern city par excellance. It was New York that has supplanted Paris in all these relations in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first, as an Asian century in the making, it could be the Chinese articulation of cultural ideas, social relations and urban forms that will be supplying a signature style of places of collective memory in the terms of which this century will be described.

Historically, changes in urban hierarchies in a global scale have never been without friction, resistance and crisis. However, the dynamics of relations between different crises is not given in advance. Crises may reinforce each other, cancel out, or combine into patterns that escape definitions. The current moment may, from this perspective, become just such a moment when to speak of a global crisis may fall short of the complexity of the global structure of relations that connect what happens in different regions, states and cities into a dynamic pattern of change that allows for polyvalent and local interpretations rather than for an overarching reading of its directions. Bruce Mau speaks of massive change that ecological, energy, financial, and governance challenges may trigger singly or severally in the medium term of development around the world. Historical record, as seen from urban perspective, suggests that it was the cities that successfully capitalized on the opportunities that rapid change offered that rise to the more visible positions in the urban hierarchies of the period. In other words, cities of the future of the past were laboratories of effective coping with the disruptions that unfolding modernity has introduced into society, economy and politics.

However tempting the thesis of post-modernity may be, it could exactly be the rational foundations of modernity that lay at the root of the present day disruptions that may have in the meanwhile undermined the forms of containment of modernity that Western capitalism has put into place in the twentieth century. Much like in the manner in which Ulrich Beck accounts for the unintended consequences of modernity that undermine the social, economic and political structures that were responsible for managing the modern condition on institutional, collective and individual levels, one may propose that, as older forms of Western modernity come into question, other configurations of modernity may be finding their paradigmatic urban expressions in the present moment, since it is not precisely conceivable that unprecedented urban transformation of Beijing takes place without concomitant, and as rapid, changes in other spheres that are much less easy to visualize, document or grasp. One is challenged to think what changes the culture, economy and society of Beijing has gone through as this city catapulted itself into the ranks of the more modernized metropolices of the world. The scholarly and media discussions of whether the Chinese path of modernization will ever lead to a configuration of modernity that can reasonably resemble its Western precursor seem to lose in relevance as the foundations of Western modernity enter into what appears to be systemic crisis.

The attractiveness of French literature, philosophy and art, the appeal of American movies, technology and trends, the spread of English language, fiction and institutions provide historical examples that the world spends little time before jumping at the next big thing be it in culture, society or economy. The geography and history of each phase of globalization is far from homogeneous. However, those cities, countries and regions that manage to adapt themselves to the challenges that each stage of modernization poses become highlights in the dynamic geography of spaces and places that plays central role in its unfolding. Signature structures in the cities that successfully claims a dominant position in historically emergent configurations of urban spaces that bring developments in society, politics and economy into relations specific to key cities for each stage of modernity become shorthands for these periods and places outright. Moments of urban glory become signs of cultural distinctions. The cultural appeal of Renaissance painting tells something of these complex relations between time and space that define the relations between masterworks and their wide appreciation. The transformations that modernity has brought about may allow to speak of a fund of ideas, knowledge, and images that find their adequate representation on an urban scale only. City as a masterpiece becomes a signature imprint of modern times in a tradition as old as the world itself.