Our Cities

Eurozine has published a very interesting article: New towns on the Cold War frontier by Michelle Provoost, an architectural historian living and working in Rotterdam. This article is a part of the research project The New Town. Link via Jackson Pollock in Sadr City

I highly recommend the original article, here are excerpts:

“Looking at the cities that were built from scratch during the 1950s and 1960s all over the world, it is astonishing to see how world population growth was accommodated along very similar lines in places very remote and different in culture and political background. A similar strategy and design method was applied in the construction of the villes nouvelles around Paris, the new towns close to London […] in developing, decolonizing countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The export of New Town principles can only be understood against the background of the Cold War period, in which the East and West were both competing for the loyalty of the Third World […]

A vivid illustration of this hypothesis is provided by the fascinating coalition of two parties, the Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis and the American Ford Foundation, who together formed a powerful duo of vision and money […]

[…] Doxiadis developed an extremely hermetic and theoretical system of design and engineering called “Ekistics“, the science of human settlements. It was a rational and scientific alternative to existing historical cities […] Doxiadis proposed his gridiron cities, which would provide for a human-scaled environment and at the same time facilitate unlimited growth in people, money, cars, and so on. In that sense, they were extremely well suited to development of any kind. Doxiadis was possibly the leading exponent of the explicit application of modernist planning and design as vehicles for freedom, peace, and progress according to a Western model.
[…] He probably constructed more urban substance than all his CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) colleagues together. […] He designed and built new cities all over the world: in Ghana, Zambia, Sudan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, and the US. […]

[…] the Ford Foundation was remodelled in 50 to extend its activities outside the US. Its main goals were formulated under the leadership of Paul Hoffman, formerly the coordinator of the Marshall Plan in Europe. […] Hoffmann led the Ford Foundation on an ambitious quest for world peace, aiming to better the world by educating the ignorant […] and easing them into democratic Western civilization […] mostly by investing in educational institutions […] and modernization programs in agriculture. Though urban planning was definitely not a main priority, the Ford Foundation spent five million dollars on Doxiadis‘s design and research, the largest sum it ever spent on one private party. Starting with a grant to Doxiadis‘s design work for the city of Karachi in Pakistan in the mid-50s […]

[…] There was complete consensus among the American elite to create peace and order in the world and it was seen as completely logical that private and governmental policies would mutually enhance and strengthen each other. […]

[…] Doxiadis was definitely no whimsical arty architect with crayons. He was a trustworthy engineer that could deliver. Ekistics was a visionary, but nonetheless scientific system, in which local data were entered and the design solution followed automatically. A touch of local landscape and architecture was inevitable and necessary, but not too much, since this was contradictory with the universal pretensions of Ekistics.
This objective and rational approach fitted perfectly the philosophy of the Ford Foundation […] the Foundation exported with this goal one of the most fundamental values of the US […] liberty, anti-collectivism, a reluctance to accept centralized political power, and an absolute belief in science and technology as the progenitor of “rational action“. The American elite were convinced “that liberty was not for everyone, but for those who, through property and education, possessed the necessary independence to be citizens of a republic“. So: civilization equals rationality. It was the task of the Americans to raise other peoples into a state of civilization. When turning to urban planning, it would have been hard to find an urban planning theory more rational than Ekistics. […]

Pollock and American values: […] To the American elite, Pollock‘s painting radiated the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. It was non-figurative and politically silent – the very antithesis of socialist realism. Pollock was new, active, and energetic, while socialist realist art was rigid and aped historical styles. Abstract expressionism was seen as a specifically American invention conquering the world, replacing the old centre of the arts – Paris – with New York. Pollock was exactly the right character to oppose the boy-scout Soviet painters, who obediently portrayed collective communist values. […]

[…] I suggest that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Ford Foundation, the US government, the Ivy League Universities, as well as other private bodies such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, all worked together in “the war on Communism“, to paraphrase a contemporary term. […] This period has been described by most people involved as a very passionate time, an exiting amalgam of covert operations, boudoir politics, spontaneous action, lots of travel, pretension, and money, and especially: no doubt that all this was completely justified, useful, and ethical. A beautiful, high-minded episode, which everyone loved being part of. They felt they were “the most privileged of men, participants in a drama such as rarely occurs even in the long life of a great nation“. One can’t help feeling envious.

A new theory of planning: To these men, Doxiadis was as much a mascot in the field of urban planning as Jackson Pollock was in art. Whereas Pollock was the antidote to socialist realist painting, the work of Doxiadis posed the complete opposite to socialist realist urban planning and architecture. Postwar Soviet cities, up to the arrival of Kruschev at the end of the 1950s, bore the strong mark of Stalinist planning. Up to a thousand New Towns were built all over the vast country, using a well-known historical repertoire both in urban planning and in architecture. The vista, the axis, the square, the closed housing block, the monumental, palazzo-inspired architecture all evoked an urban image aspiring to be recognizable and familiar to the common people. While Pollock proposed a completely new direction in painting, and freed himself from historical precedents and iconography, Doxiadis‘s Ekistics posed a completely new system in urban planning, freeing it from formal design and replacing it by organizing the urban area in ever-expanding grids and systems, eliminating monumental composition and replacing it with schemes for unlimited growth and change. […] The neighborhood unit […] was stretched and repeated and put in an endless grid, until every reference to existing urban settings had vanished. […] ideas of change and growth without boundaries and technology solving every possible problem, from demographic growth to energy shortage, from pollution to economic backwardness to ethnic and social unrest, all made Doxiadis‘s vision the perfect vehicle of the ideology of US development.

The Ford Foundation described its urban planning projects (in India, Yugoslavia, Chile, and Pakistan) as “white bread”: soft, with no particular taste, and liked by everybody. They could ease the way towards a different lifestyle – Western, efficient, and peaceful – and help Third World countries become rational civilizations and obtain well-deserved autonomy. […]

Planning in the Middle East: The Middle East, located right below the soft underbelly of the USSR and therefore a main stage for Cold War activities, was virtually a playground for American architects in the 1950s. They followed in the wake of American and international aid programmes such as the Point Four Program and the United Nations Development Decade. They were hired by the puppet regimes installed by the British-American “coalition”. In Iran […] Victor Gruen (see The Mall Maker) designed a master plan for the capital Tehran and numerous American offices flooded the country to work on New Towns. The Iraqi regime of King Faisal hired Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Gio Ponti, Alvar Aalto, and Frank Lloyd Wright. […]

The American aid programmes focused on Lebanon, Iraq, or Iran often underestimated the complexities of the countries. Without speaking the language, with insufficient knowledge about the local social customs, these well-intentioned but amateur efforts often missed the target. In Iran, a group of five American planners took up the challenge. When they arrived in 1957, they found out, to their disgust and disappointment, that the cities were not exactly metropolitan, had no comfortable means of transport, no services, no shopping, no education, and so on. They had the greatest trouble interacting with local officials, there were permanent issues of hierarchy, and there was frustration about lack of cooperation and lack of almost everything else. The most enthusiastic planner, working in the Kurdish city Sanandaj in western Iran, finally succeeded in setting up a small planning department along Western lines, complete with an office and drawing boards. But he returned from a two-week honeymoon to find that the office had been wrecked by a storm and that his newly trained planners had disappeared. […]

Compared to these rather naive efforts, what came out of Doxiadis‘s office was of the utmost efficiency and effectiveness. Especially in Iraq, where he was hired to design a modern national housing program including the capital Baghdad, Doxiadis showed what he was capable of: practically on his own he introduced a complete ministry of housing, planning, architecture, and architecture training. Gropius‘s office was struggling to get the designs for the Baghdad University built, and only succeeded in realizing one tower twenty years later; Frank Lloyd Wright saw his grandiose plans for the Baghdad Opera thrown out the window when the revolutionary regime took over from King Faisal in 1958. But Doxiadis had no problems: his multidisciplinary team made surveys, wrote reports, designed tens of thousands of houses, and was able to build them too. Nevertheless, official architectural history has shown a disproportionate interest in the failed designs of high profile architects and neglected the far more influential work of Doxiadis.
Unknowingly, everybody has seen the results of his work on CNN. By the end of the 1950s, Doxiadis built areas in Iraqi towns which bear the now well-known names of Mosul, Basra, and Kirkuk. The largest number of houses was realized in Baghdad, on the east bank of the Tigris; the endless repetition of square neighbourhood units are easily recognizable on any satellite image. This is the area called Sadr City. By now it is mostly known as a nightmarish ghetto and the gruesome backdrop for war footage. […]

Planning as political strategy: Sadr City was designed by Doxiadis as part of his 1958 masterplan for Baghdad. Doxiadis’s design follows the Ekistics rules and is almost identical to his other contemporary urban designs, be it Islamabad, Tema, or Khartoum. Doxiadis encased the historical centre of Baghdad in an orthogonal grid extending on both sides of the Tigris/Euphrates, composed of 40 sectors of some two square kilometres each, separated from each other by wide thoroughfares. Each sector was subdivided into a number of ‘communities’, with smaller neighbourhood centres and housing areas served by a network of cul-de-sacs. Each community centre consisted of a modernist composition of market buildings, public services, and a mosque. The row housing was organized in such a way that the smallest communities each had a “gossip square”, an intimate open meeting space inspired by existing local Iraqi customs. Though these small oases could be interpreted as contextual elements, as a whole, the extension of Baghdad was a generic, universal system Doxiadis thought appropriate for almost any developing city with a hot climate. The architecture itself was also generic, with some local touches: a restrained modernism with decorated panels in a pattern slightly reminiscent of Arab motives, built with local materials, but not in any outspoken vernacular. Local influence had a very limited, technical meaning for Doxiadis : it meant using local techniques and building methods, but did not involve using local identity or cultural traditions. The most appealing feature of Doxiadis ‘s plans for his American patrons and the Ford Foundation in particular was the emphasis on community building. Something that was to be avoided at all costs was that the cities should have an alienating effect on the millions who were often the first in their families to lead a modern urban lifestyle. After all, alienation would lead the population to turn in frustration to communism or to revert to archaic traditions of superstition and violence. We could therefore regard the cities designed by Doxiadis […] as finely-tuned “emancipation machines”. This emancipation was part of the modernization package, which included democratic institution building and free-market economic reforms.
In retrospect, one thing is certain: the urban planning projects in Iraq, Iran, or Pakistan did not have the effect the Americans had hoped for: a stable democratic mentality that would secure the way for Western foreign policy. […]

A signal failure: It is tempting to compare the present situation in Iraq with the Cold War episode. Again, the US has attempted to impose its own ideas on Iraq – […] the neoconservative idea of the free-market economy. Even officials who were part of the American policy making in the 1950s […] now issue warnings not to make the same mistake twice: of imposing structures, ideas, organizations and plans that are not wanted and not indigenous to the local culture. As Polk has simply and truly stated: it is not only the US that wants to determine its own destiny. We could add: it is not only the US that wants to determine its own architecture. Architecture and urban planning are not “white bread” as the Ford Foundation stated, they are not technical works with no inherent meaning or taste; on the contrary, by their organization they project a strong ideal image of a specific kind of society. But however you judge Doxiadis ‘ cities and however critical you might be, there was at least an ideal behind it; at the present moment it would be very difficult to find any positive images of the future Iraq. It may seem extremely ill-judged to compare Baghdad with the European New Towns, of which the problems and circumstances are of a totally different nature. However, there is one obvious parallel: in Europe, too, there was a cultural and political mission hidden somewhere in the technocratic project of the industrialized and standardized city – the idea that these New Towns could function as instruments of emancipation and modernization. In Europe, like in Baghdad, the open design had an extra meaning: to shape the minds of the inhabitants, to open their minds to the free, democratic society. And in Europe, too, these ideals have not turned out as planned. […]

[…] everybody in the architects and planning community agrees that the postwar cities have been a complete failure […] In academia, there is a tendency to study postwar modernist planning and original concepts to the point of obsession even.

Our modernist heritage: Minutes of the few CIAM meetings have produced libraries-full of analytical literature; the unrealized designs of Sert, Le Corbusier, or Kahn are still unravelled as if they were the Dead Sea scrolls. But studies such as these tend to banish modernist architecture and planning to a distant era, almost forgetting that there are real cities out there, with real people in them, that one can visit and walk around in, and that have problems to be solved. Practising architects and planners, on the other hand, have either completely ignored the existence of the not-so-sexy and glamorous New Towns or they have clung to the tabula rasa approach of erasing them and starting anew. This can hardly be the proper solution: the postwar urban substance is simply too big, there are too many people living there, and starting all over again creates the same problem all over again. The problem of the deteriorating postwar areas cries out for creative urban planning, research, and design, which re-uses the existing material, both in its physical and social sense.
And it doesn’t really matter if we talk about Baghdad or Hoogvliet: both are part of the same 20^th-century heritage we have to deal with – even the bottom line of the moral questions is the same. […] the values inherent in the modern planning – democracy, the collective, emancipation – are still relevant, even though their architectural forms may change. […]

[…] projects developed in the restructuring of European cities might well be an instrument to be used in the rebuilding of Islamabad or Baghdad. It is necessary that the legacy of modernist urban planning is reconsidered, that all these visions of its future are made known and exchangeable, and that the New Towns are treated as what they are: real cities not be erased, but waiting for a serious design strategy that will add another layer of urban material, and turn them into normal, growing, developing, aging cities.” Excerpts from New towns on the Cold War frontier

Relevant links:
How to survive the twentieth century, Michelle Provoost
Doxiadis.org
Constantinos Doxiadis: Ekistics, 1968, Nina Brown
Circa 1958: Lebanon in the Pictures and Plans of Constantinos Doxiadis, Hashim Sarkis, 2003
Worldview: Perspectives of architecture and urbanism from around the globe

1, 2, 3

1 – Marjan Satrapi‘s success story in the Cannes festival: “Persepolis had its world premiere today at 4 p.m. And at the end of the film, cheers and applause rang through the Palais; the rhythmic clapping that is Cannes’ way of saying “bravo” lasted for more than 15 minutes …” read more

An interview with Marjan at the IHT: ” … In the ’70s, we grew up with American culture – bowling with my cousins, the music, hamburgers, pizza like in Chicago. Nobody can believe how many parallels between where I come from and America – countries that are not very friendly these days. But now that I know the country and have done so many book tours, I think, how stupid we are to make these clichés about America…” read more. Her homepage.

 

«What we wanted to say is, if these people scare you, look closer: They have parents, they have lovers, they have hope, they have stories» …  more

2 – The news are as messy as usual. Monte (and 99 and Naz-banoo) mentioned the new covert action about Iran, a sort of follow up of a previous article: Subverting Iran – Washington’s Covert War Inside Iran. The comments- in the original article, are … sort of … well, worth reading.

See also Guardian declares war on Iran, and the Nah al-Bared tragedy at The Fanonite.

3 – I enjoyed reading the last Henry CK Liu article: A Mute Strategic Economic Dialogue, about the “The Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED) between the United States and China“. It provides a glimpse into the Chinese way of seeing things, and their way of dealing with the regime- change mega-plans. After all, as Fred wrote: ” … Asia … we are all going to be interested in before too many years pass …”

The Aboriginal Sin

PPGG sent me this picture. She added the Iran pin to her previous collection: Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq.

I didn’t recognize the 6^th flag, so I asked her and I learned that it is the flag of Australian aborigines. Without having ever read on this subject I had a vague idea of what this could be about, but I still asked PPGG to tell me some of the history.

I respect PPGG‘s vision of humanity as a whole and I wonder how come so many people fail to see it that way.

Really, what do they teach in schools to end-up having think-tanks and pompous organizations run by Ivy-blinds who tear pages of history, destroy cultures, spend trillions you-know-where and pretend that “we create the reality“.

Yes, you do, but it is a really ugly one.

Isn’t it amazing that in the 21^st century, with all that wealth and science and communication we can’t do any better? Can’t we go beyond Fred‘s rules: … doctrine and optimism should always outweigh history and common sense? Can’t we improve in our ways of treating other peoples? Is the Aboriginal model stuck deep in our brains?

Anyway, here is a short history of the Australian aborigines, courtesy of PPGG:

The Australian Aborigines are the original inhabitants of this land. Australia’s white (European settlement) actually only started just over 200 years ago, when the British decided this new land might be a good penal colony for their overflowing prisons! The Dutch and others also circumnavigated Australia before the British, but didn’t colonise.
Both prior to and upon arriving, the British had of course encountered the aboriginal natives, but declared the land “terra nullius”, empty and thus began the dispossession of the nomadic Aboriginal people who had a very special relationship to the land and to whom British property rights were completely alien.
As Australian settlement grew, Australia formally became a nation in 1901, the Aborigines were treated as second class citizens. Indeed, they weren’t even citizens until a referendum in 1967 (!!) granted them the right to vote.
Worse, the invasion of an alien culture, foreign diseases, forced assimilation and alienation led to increased crime rates, petrol sniffing and deaths in custody. The health of Australian aborigines in some remote outback communities is so appalling that it is called Fourth World: third world conditions in a first world wealthy country.
Australian Dreamtime and cosmology was little understood. It is a beautiful culture. Missionaries tried to Christianize them and would take children away from their parents until only a few decades ago, called the Stolen Generation.
There are many successful Aboriginal Australians and they are thriving as a community. They are a very proud and resilient people and have honored their culture and identity. Some social indicators still indicate that some communities are disadvantaged, but this is slowly improving. The Reconciliation movement that started in the 1990s was a good initiative.
Indigenious Australians

Update on Tissa: March 30 2007