The metropolis: Europe’s destiny

The metropolis: Europe’s destiny Jean-Louis Cohen

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Jean-Louis Cohen

Biographical Note Jean-Louis Cohen is an architect, historian and curator. He is also the author of many studies on architecture and cities from the 19th century to today. After studying architecture at the École Spéciale d’Architecture and the Unité Pédagogique d’Architecture n° 6 in Paris, where he graduated in 1973, he obtained a doctorate in Art History from the l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1985 and qualified for professorship at the same institution in 1992.

After directing the French Ministry of Infrastructure’s architectural research programme between 1979 and 1983, from 1983 to 1996 he held a research chair at the École d’architecture Paris-Villemin and from 1996 to 2004 the City History Chair at the French Institute of Urban Planning at the Université de Paris 8. In 1994, he was appointed Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. In 2014 he occupied a three-year post as guest lecturer at the Collège de France.

His research has focused on architecture and urbanism in the 20th century. He has studied in particular the architectural cultures of Russia and Germany, the colonial situations of Morocco and Algeria, and architecture during World War II. He has devoted himself to interpreting the work of Le Corbusier and the history of urbanism in Paris.

A central question in his work is that of cultural transfers in architecture, the urban landscape and visual culture, which he has approached through the relations between Italy, Germany and France, and recurrently through the relations between Russia and the West.

Between 1997 and 2003, the Ministry of Culture charged him with creating the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, which associated a museum and an exhibition hall in the Palais de Chaillot, Paris and was inaugurated in 2007. During this period, he was director of the Institut français d’architecture and the Musée des monuments français, the two main elements in the Cité.

He has conceived and developed many exhibitions, including The Lost Vanguard, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2007); Scènes de la vie future, at the Centre canadien d’architecture de Montréal (1995); Architecture en uniforme, at the Centre canadien d’architecture, and then at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine and at MAXXI (2011 and 2014). At the Centre Georges Pompidou he was head of architecture for Paris-Moscou (1979) and scientific adviser for L’aventure Le Corbusier (1987). More recently he was the curator of Le Corbusier, taïny tvortchestva at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow (2012) and Interférences – architecture, Allemagne, France at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg and at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt (2013). His exhibition Le Corbusier, an Atlas of Modern Landscapes, presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013, was also presented in Barcelona and Madrid in 2014. He was also curator of the French pavilion at the Venice Bienniale of Architecture in 2014.

Jean-Louis Cohen has been elected to the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences in Moscow, the Accademia di San Luca in Rome and the Académie d’architecture in Paris. He was a guest researcher at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1987), and researcher at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (1992-93 et 2009). His work has received support from the Graham Foundation and the John S. Guggenheim Foundation.

He has been awarded the Grand prix du livre d’architecture from the Académie d’Architecture on two occasions (1996, and 2012); the Médaille de l’analyse architecturale from the same institution (2003); the Art Book Prize in London (2013) and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award from the American Society of Architectural Historians (2013). The Schelling Foundation in Karlsruhe awarded him the Schelling Architekturtheorie Preis, the main European distinction in the field (2010).

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He has published over thirty works in many countries and several languages. The main ones are the following: L’Architecture au XXe siècle en France ; modernité et continuité, Paris, Hazan, 2014.

Le Corbusier: an Atlas of Modern Landscapes, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013.

Interférences / Interferenzen : architecture, Allemagne, France 1800-2000 (ed., with Hartmut Frank), Strasbourg, Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg et Tübingen, Wasmuth, 2013.

L’architecture au futur depuis 1889, London, Phaidon, 2012.

Architecture en uniforme ; projeter et construire pour la seconde guerre mondiale, Montréal, Centre canadien d’architecture, Paris, Hazan, 2011.

New York, Paris, Mazenod, 2008.

Mies van der Rohe, Paris, Hazan et Bâle, Berlin, Boston, Birkhäuser, 2007.

Architectures du béton, nouvelles vagues, nouvelles recherches, Paris, Éditions Le Moniteur, 2006 (ed., with G. Martin Moeller, Jr.).

Le Corbusier, la planète comme chantier, Paris: Textuel, 2005.

Alger, paysage urbain et architectures 1800-2000, Paris, Éditions de l’Imprimeur, 2003 (ed., with Nabila Oulebsir and Youcef Kanoun).

Encyclopédie Perret, Paris, Éditions du Patrimoine / Institut français d’architecture, 2002 (ed., with Joseph Abram and Guy Lambert).

Casablanca, mythes et figures d’une aventure urbaine, Paris, Hazan, 1998 (with Monique Eleb).

Les Années 30, l’architecture et les arts de l’espace entre industrie et nostalgie, Paris: Éditions du Patrimoine, 1997.

Scènes de la vie future ; les architectes européens et la tentation de l’Amérique 1893-1960, Paris, Flammarion, 1995.

L’architecture d’André Lurçat (1894-1970); l’autocritique d’un moderne, Liège, Pierre Mardaga, 1995.

Américanisme et modernité, l’idéal américain dans l’architecture, Paris, Flammarion / École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1993 (ed., with Hubert Damisch).

Des fortifs au périf, Paris : les seuils de la ville, Paris, Picard, 1992 (with André Lortie).

Paris, la ville et ses projets, Paris, Éditions Babylone / Pavillon de l’Arsenal, 1988 (ed., with Bruno Fortier).

Le Corbusier et la mystique de l’URSS, théories et projets pour Moscou 1928-1936, Liège, Pierre Mardaga, 1987.

Opening conference The metropolis: Europe’s destiny March 13th 2015

Modern Europe has been shaped by cities, yet their preeminence has long been overshadowed by state policies. Since the end of dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece, and the collapse of the Soviet block, metropoles have regained their role of protagonists, of engines of social and cultural change. They have opened wide spaces for innovation and imagination. To paraphrase the medieval saying, understood in an extensive way: “metropolitan air makes one free.”

A new urban society has emerged, and not only in the capital regions, as “second” cities, and other urban areas have dealt with the organization of markets and the networks of real or virtual communication, which have required new forms of governance, creating an expanded civic conversation.

Metropolitan space has been structured by the unplanned encounters of technology, culture, and creativity. Besides

the economic contribution of the metropoles, museums, operas, or concert halls, as well as railway stations and airports, have become powerful features of their identity in the past decades.

Creative urban designs, refined landscapes, and the labyrinth of its neighborhoods, squares and streets, remind us of the potential the big city has at providing beauty. This ability has been in the center of the modern experience for more than a century. Whereas Nietzsche’s Zarathustra hated cities, because they were tainted by human lust, architects and writers celebrated, in echo to impressionist painting, the “beauty of the metropolis.”

A beauty made of the many sensual experiences made possible by their atmosphere.

Rather than reduce the metropolitan condition to the sum of its parts, imaginative design can generate beauty in the metropolitan everyday, while responding to the expectations of the citizens in respect to everyday life.

But in order to achieve this, a new alliance between the forces of politics and the force of imagination has to be created and nurtured.

The metropolis: Europe’s destiny Modern Europe has been made by cities, although their specific role has often been concealed by the policies of States. After the end of the Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships and the colonels’ regime in Greece, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, cities have recovered their place as leading elements and driving forces for social and cultural change. Within the network of cities, metropolises have become essential centres for physical and symbolic production. They are by nature the “creative cities” of Charles Landry’s theory, where innovation develops, assuming their extended territory is considered, including university campuses and production zones as well as historic centres. Whether they rank as capitals, second cities or occupy a “lower” position in a nation’s urban hierarchy, their network is decisive in the organisation of markets and direct or virtual communication between groups and individuals.

In this respect, I could paraphrase a medieval adage by saying that “the air of the metropolis makes you free”, which is confirmed by the apparently irresistible flows of migration leading from the world’s countryside to the very large conurbations. But that would be to ignore the conditions in which a good number of their citizens live and work. The metropolises remain places of tensions and conflicts between classes, interest groups and generations. Their political, economic and social governance is not only more complex because of this, it must also, at the same time, take account of their place in national and global space and their division into local bodies.

Their powers are therefore subject to permanent negotiation and adjustment.

Definition and origins You will forgive a historian like me for basing my remarks today on a brief retrospective look. The metropolis – or mother city – is a product of the industrial revolution.

The notion undoubtedly goes back to Antiquity and denoted initially cities located at the centre of a network of colonies. Since it was used in about 1830, referring to London, which had 7 million inhabitants at the end of the 19th century, its meaning has changed. The Metropolis evoked in Guillaume Doré’s engravings is a complex urban area exercising its hegemony over the country and the empire, whose reform became a constant concern for governments. With the establishment of the London County Council in 1888, a new form of urban governance appeared with a model that, ten years later, spread to New York and then to Berlin in 1920. Since then, the

metropolitan phenomenon has done nothing but grow and new attempts to understand it on an extended territorial scale appeared: Patrick Geddes’ “conurbation” (1915), the geographer Jean Gottmann’s “megalopolis” (1961), or the “metapolis” of the economist François Ascher (1995).

Defined by the centrality of its institutions and businesses, the modern metropolis was crisscrossed by physical communication networks and punctuated by the polarities of institutions. It became the market regulating capital flows and quickly the framework for the organisation society, as well as appearing to be the theatre of consumption. The emerging philosophy and sociology observed and interpreted it closely. Georg Simmel analysed the emergence to the metropolitan phenomenon with empathy and described the new mentalities it engendered. By contrast, in 1885 in Thus spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche formulated a radical warning: “Spit on the great city - the great slum where all the scum frotheth together!” He was only the most virulent of a cohort of ideologues hostile to the new forms cities were taking. In an almost contemporary and no less famous text, Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies stated that the metropolis promised moral disintegration. As he saw it, “the great city and society in general represent the corruption and death of the people”. By contrast, he underlined the virtues of smaller scale forms of socialisation.

This dichotomy was at work in the schemes put forward in the 20th century to guide urban transformation: largescale regional projects, on the society side, and autonomous garden cities, related to the community.

After the Impressionists had painted the spectacle of rivers and stations, which the Futurists set up against the ancient cities and museums, in 1908 the Munich architect August Endell celebrated The Beauty of the Metropolis, in which he saw “a miracle of beauty and poetry; a fable, with more shapes and colours than any ever told by a poet; a homeland; a mother filling her children with new joys every day”. In his view, this beauty was inseparable from the sensory experiences made possible by the urban atmosphere. It was just one more step for Marcel Duchamp to be able to state, when disembarking in 1915 in the American metropolis, that “New York in itself is a complete work of art”. Meanwhile, the hypothesis of rational organisation of the structures, networks and buildings of very big cities began to mobilise elected representatives and professionals.

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Organising very big cities

Rediscovering geography

After the 1920s, the dichotomy introduced by Tönnies from a critical perspective became clear in the reformi programmes undertaken on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1929, the New York regional plan began to move to the age of the car, without, however, providing solutions to the housing issue other than dealing with localised residential projects.

By contrast, in Berlin and Paris the search for a structure for the whole urban region was, until the mid-1930s, accompanied by the creation of garden cities on the outskirts, forming so many happy islands in a rapidly expanding stain.

At the same time, the levels of governance overseeing these projects, including sometimes visionary elected representatives, remained distant from the population.

Big cities are affected by a dual process tending towards uniformity. The first is global commodification, which tends to make the space saturated by worldwide businesses increasingly generic, as has been noted such an astute observer as the architect Rem Koolhaas, a critic of what he calls “junkspace”. The second is the universal multiplication of repetitive buildings and, in particular, spaces without quality, escaping all understanding – the “non-places,” as subtly described by the anthropologist Marc Augé. Ultimately, the latter’s interest in the everyday landscapes of towns reflects a phenomenon that can be classified as the “urbanisation” of the social sciences, which sees them making the urban territories increasingly the field for their activity and theorising.

In period following the Second World War and to the end of the 20th century, there was a highpoint in urban and regional planning at the same time as a rural exodus, forced migrations following the war and decolonisation led to vigorous population growth. The connection between the metropolis and its components has therefore been decided on another level. Through a sometimes cruel balancing act, urban renewal emptied the impoverished districts of the centres, and their population was relocated in large and often isolated schemes. New metropolitan objects, such as government, or business centres and new towns, which were the reincarnation of the garden cities of the previous period, appeared. The horizontal sprawl of Los Angeles, criss-crossed with freeways, became a model replacing that of the denser American cities ruled by rail.

The great plans and their excessive infrastructures ran into a double obstacle at the end of the 20th century: the reflux of public finance and the criticism and rejection they met from residents. A new balance was then established between planning attempts at metropolitan level and specific projects overdetermined by the respective political situations surrounding the urban areas. This was the way how Margaret Thatcher’s vindictiveness ended in the liquidation of the Greater London Council in 1986, while conflicts between the region and the central State were heightened in the case of Paris after the beginning of the millennium. The mistrust with regard to overall planning, and notably large regional plans, resulted in project, or programme-based planning, in which strategies affecting roads, parks and public spaces or housing are separated from one another. This trend has undoubtedly had liberating effects, but it has also resulted in the fragmentation of public intervention. Its first laboratories were Barcelona and Berlin, with the Internationale Bauausstellung and the projects following reunification.

Not catastrophism, however. A tendency towards uniformity is not the only feature of the current situation, as shown by the increasing trend towards urban tourism. Encouraged by low-cost airlines and Airbnb, this focuses not only on monuments and museums but,significantly, on cities themselves, their atmospheres and their architecture. The diversity, reflected by flows that have undoubtedly an economic impact, is not only the result of European history and what I might call the genetic differences between Hanseatic cities and Mediterranean cities, between cities that have preserved their medieval hearts and cities marked by the industrial age, but it also reflects the cultural and commercial vitality of the metropolisesIn the face of strong tendencies towards greater uniformity which local authorities cannot attempt to master without establishing bureaucratic or tyrannical control systems, the professional agents, in alliance with elected representatives, have drawn up a set of alternative strategies which together are transforming European metropolises before our eyes. The first of these strategies is what I would call reconciliation with geography, which has seen cities rediscover their topography, their watercourses and their coastlines. This is combined with the opening up of landlocked sites occupied by industry or military establishments or of precincts enclosed for Customs purposes. The second strategy is reconciliation with a history freed from any fetishism for historic buildings and the urban picturesque, and leading to the reassessment of the vernacular and industrial heritage. The third strategy which, like the first two, can be deployed on a metropolitan scale, concerns infrastructures and wasteland, tending to civilise them to some degree.

The motorways cutting across districts are covered over or become urban boulevards. Industrial and railway land is reintegrated into the continuity of roads and blocks to house programmes open to residents and visitors.

In this way a new identity is profiled, different to the previous ones. The metropolises are no longer only places of production, exchange and the exercise of power they were in the 19th century, or the places for the deployment of the welfare State they were in the last century, they have also become the core sites of innovation and experimentation.

The founding model, that of Route 128 in Massachusetts in the 1950s, or, more recently, that of Silicon Valley, must not make us forget the role of Berlin for electricity before 1914 or that of Paris for aeronautics in the 1930s. It is precisely the geography of metropolises which allows them to develop in a dense network the central decision-making and exchange sites and the peripheral places on more accessible terrain, where experimentation and production can take place. It is only because of their inclusion in a metropolitan region that the new research campuses at Paris-Saclay or on Roosevelt Island in New York can be developed.

Social and spatial fractures These metropolises, reconciled with their physical sites and their history and busy recycling their obsolete areas are not, therefore, as we all know, unitary or unified entities. As revealed by their contrasting spaces and the reports of everyday events taking place there, the social mosaic they consist of generates plenty of opposition and tension. Despite the fiction according to which they would mainly house a middle class and residual working classes, they are characterised by a growing inequality between the more fortunate fraction of their population and the other social groups, with, at the bottom of the scale, the recent immigrants and those excluded from growth – or stagnation. The phenomena described in 2013 by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the 21st Century are accentuated to the point of caricature, as shown on one hand by the level of top-of-the-range property transactions and, on the other, by the growing needs in terms of social care for the unemployed, the poorly housed and the homeless.

It is therefore not surprising that metropolises, which were the scene of insurrections and big popular movements from the 19th century onwards, still see demonstrations on political or social issues and also revolt movements, recently marked by long-term occupations. We can all remember those at La Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the Maidan in Kiev, Gezi Park in Istanbul and Tahrir Square in Cairo. These traumatic episodes turned the spotlight on the public spaces in these cities, which, in this way, have rediscovered their role as crucibles of democracy and collective action.

Deep down, such movements hardly concern real metropolitan issues, because they express a criticism of State

policies and national powers even though, as in the case of Istanbul, the issues at stake might seem local. Cases of movements opposing local policies, like those that shook the metropolises of Brazil in 2013, beginning with protests against the increase in the cost of transport before finding other objectives, are more unusual. While their effects are less paroxysmal, metropolitan policies arouse no less tension and opposition, to which existing systems of governance have not yet managed to provide a response.

These tensions concern the redistribution mechanisms, through local and regional taxation, which can allow a degree of solidarity inside the urban area or which can, by contrast, in some way confirm inequalities when public investments remain strictly dependent on the income collected in a district or municipality. The ravages of such tax selfishness are clear in the big cities of the United States.

One of the most important fields of public action to reduce spatial inequalities is mobility, generally financed by a combination of contributions: from States or regions, from local groups and from users. The distribution is a measure of the relationship of forces between these three levels.

This political register is decisive not only in allowing access to jobs and education but also to give the inhabitants of economically marginalised districts the feeling of belonging to a human group representing more than the sum of its constituent parts.

In the realm of development and town planning, the inevitable tensions are of a different order, as they bring the level of the metropolis as a whole into conflict with the different levels that make it up, where the electoral system is sometimes extremely stratified. How can we make sure that the decisions made at the level of the metropolis level take into account the expectations of the neighbourhoods? Conversely, how can we match these aspirations to the demands for continuity and metropolitan solidarity? It is not only a matter of ensuring the proper division of powers, but also of giving urban democracy a clear, open basis. The personal quality of elected representatives and activists and their capacity to ally political power and thematic power are the keys to this problem. Symmetrically, the capacity of professionals and experts to dialogue with politicians, activists and the public is another crucial factor.

In this connection between issues at metropolitan level and local issues, the question of time is one of the most acute. Once again, the perspectives are different here. If we consider long-term structural decisions – new infrastructures, the extension of the perimeters of urban developments or large new facilities – whose cycle of programming, planning and implementation spreads over decades,

The metropolis: Europe’s destiny their impact can seem relatively intangible when considered on the almost microscopic scale of districts. The construction of a consensus around these decisions therefore involves true didactic qualities on the part of the authorities or metropolitan assemblies.

Configurations other than those of elected assemblies at different levels have proved effective in bringing out ignored issues and for beginning conversation between partners, even on hypothetical projects. Two experiences come to mind in this respect, corresponding to very different political situations. The first is that of the Stadtforum, set up in 1991 in a reunified but unreconciled Berlin, where both central and peripheral projects were afterwards argued over for many years. The second more recent example is that of the international consultation on Greater Paris, initially conceived in 2007 by Nicolas Sarkozy as a weapon against the Île-de-France region but which, thanks to the mobilisation of many hundreds of designers and researchers, ended up as a hotbed of ideas, many of which were developed following dialogue with local groups, within a collective design workshop. In this specific case, the formulation of all kinds of spatial proposals, from the most reasonable to the wildest, had a cathartic effect in the political field, leading to the agitation which, in 2014, resulted in the establishment of the Greater Paris Metropolitan Area.

Shared cultures After almost two centuries, metropolises are undoubtedly the ultimate places for creation, via the institutions they have been equipped with, from museums to libraries and opera houses, and through their position and role in the birth of modern culture, as they inspire novels, poems, paintings and films. They are not, however, simply a setting or a reference horizon, as their very form and that of the elements they consist of makes them equivalent to artefacts and works of art.

Unplanned encounters between urbanity, technical expertise and creativity have found a setting in programmes that certainly correspond to cultural uses. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is a classic example of this, yet the conditions from which it emerged should not be forgotten. It is the result of a commission inseparably involving the Basque regional government, determined to mobilise its resources to receive part of the New York museum’s collection on loan; an obsolete but central industrial site, and an architect capable of transfiguration with a brilliant design. Despite the efforts of many decision-makers, such an operation is not easy to reproduce.

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The contribution of architecture to the identity of cities is not limited to such cultural monuments; it extends to more prosaic programmes such as stations and airports.

These new city gateways have become as effective as ancient monuments in defining their image and character. At the same time, the elements making up the urban space – housing and small collective facilities – continue to form the constituent fabric against which the large objects stand out, if they are not designed exclusively with a view to maximum economy. Modest, sometimes repetitive, these elements in the everyday landscape cannot be abandoned solely to market forces, and require the use of subtle strategies.

The desirable alliance between the forces of politics and the forces of creativity can be extended beyond the consensual spheres of culture and city architecture. An essential example of this concerns an area often forgotten because it is either considered decorative or is taken for granted and does not call on any specific programme: the sphere of urban landscape. Not limited to the art of gardens or the planting of trees on the sidewaks, this notion is more inclusive than that. Based on taking account of the different scales of landscape, the metropolis can rediscover its unity beyond the fractures between the territories making it up, often crystallised by large infrastructures.

The systems of parks and parkways imagined by Frederick Law Olmsted at the end of the 19th century are still so relevant that they have become sources of inspiration for today’s planners, concerned to make the inevitable traffic networks a positive experience. While metropolises can generate the beauty spoken of by August Endell, they will not do so by turning their backs on their physical skeleton, but rather by considering it as an aesthetic resource.

Another example, decisive when it comes to its political implications, is that of building cultures shared by the metropolis. I understand by this, cultures allowing the residents of the most distant districts to feel they are truly part of an entity larger than their urban village or district.

Many young people from the Paris suburbs discover the centre only very late in their life, as I have been able to see often when watching some of them emerge, astonished, from the regional metro at Les Halles station. As anyone will realise, this feeling of marginality is potentially dangerous, as it can lead to asocial behaviour. It is therefore useful to give all inhabitants a very early feeling of belonging to the big city by creating cultural sites that make it possible for them to discover it. Urban museums form a powerful tool for allowing such exploration, provided they do not content themselves with celebrating the glorious past of cities or exhibiting pictures and decoration from

their ancient centres. One of the solutions to this problem involves creating true metropolitan museums making it possible for people to understand the past and present of the city as a whole, or at least to create, as has been done at the Museum of the History of Barcelona, a network of places adapted as museums that make it possible to discover how many supposedly “peripheral” places can be integrated into the metropolitan whole. It is one of the vectors for creating citizenship in the big city.

While today there are not many undisputed models of an ideal metropolis, the exchange of experiences, from the most exciting successes to the most instructive contradictions and failures, is an essential condition for bringing about the renaissance of Europe’s big cities. London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Antwerp and Stockholm – the list would be a long one – base themselves on mutual observation, exchanging documents and plans, thanks to affinities that have lost them none of their vigour. They share an expectation, however: that supranational public policies, notably those of the European Union, will take into account all dimensions of the metropolitan situation. This would be ensured by including more of them in the packages of policies presented by their spokespeople.

Barcelona, March 13th 2015