Instant Order and disorder in urban space and form: ideas, discourse, praxis and worlwide transfer p
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The global application of Enlightenment-derived concepts to create social order through urban form suggests that we believe we know how to create a (future) ordered environment. But these notions of order and disorder need interrogation, especially as the world rapidly urbanises.
Not only have such approaches failed to produce more social order, but it has become clear that the imposition of these ideas in cities of the South cuts across alternative systems of social and cultural order and creates new disorder. Thus, if we are serious about forms of urban order, then it is time to rethink what we mean by order in the first place. As this provocative and timely book shows, what we think of as urban order is partial and restricted, and what we perceive as disorder usually masks underlying orders of social nature.
The book is intended for architects, urban designers, planners and urban scholars, as well as urban policymakers, managers and residents, to consider a different approach to emerging urban space and form, starting from an understanding of the cultural imaginaries and social constructs that underpin the production of most urban fabric and engaging with these concepts and organisational forms to improve urban life for the majority.
Paul Jenkins is Emeritus Professor of Architecture Research at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Visiting Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He has also been a visiting professor in São Paulo, Brazil, and Maputo, Mozambique. For five decades he has engaged with a wide range of aspects of the built environment: architecture, construction, housing, planning, urban design and wider social studies. Much of his work has focused on sub-Saharan Africa, where he has been based for more than half of his working life, and he focuses on social engagement and cultural change in the ‘urban’, including the role of different forms of knowledge. He has published extensively, including three prior books with Routledge. Now retired, he lives primarily in Maputo, Mozambique.
Harry Smith is Professor of Global Urbanism at The Urban Institute, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland. He has over 30 years of experience working with urban design and development issues, having worked as an architect and planner in the Global North and then having become an academic engaged in urban research in Europe, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Much of his research has focused on issues in so-called ‘informal’ settlements – ranging from housing, through access to land, to community-based disaster risk management – and has often taken an action-research approach linked to achieving changes in policy and practice. He has published previously with Routledge on planning and housing in the rapidly urbanising world, waterfront regeneration, and placekeeping.
The two images on the front cover are Google Earth images which show the same area of Maputo city northern administrative boundary in October 2022 compared to that of February 2004.
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Contents
ForewordbyRichardJ.Williams
Preface
Acknowledgements
Listofacronymsandabbreviations
1 The beginnings of ordering urban space and form in the modern era
2 Aspiring to polite society: the transfer of Enlightenment urban design to Rio de Janeiro
3 Garden city planning is translated into São Paulo
4 The functional city and Brasília
5 Functionalism translated into Brazil and then reexported: Curitiba
6 Parallel innovations in urban space and form: Alphaville in Brazil and New Urbanism in the United States
7 Innovations in engaging with urban disorder in Brazil: slum upgrading
8 A change of focus from physical to social urban order in Brazil: the right to the city and participatory planning
9 New forms of urbanism re-exported: gated communities, waterfronts and consumerism-oriented order in Angola
10 Understanding order and disorder in urban space and form: discourse and praxis
Index
Foreword
Predictions about the future of cities are often dire. We already know from the famous United Nations statistic of 2008 that most of the world’s population already lives in cities, and we are getting used to the idea that most urban growth in the foreseeable future will be in sub-Saharan Africa, the population of which is set to double by 2050. The Nigerian metropolis Lagos is well on the way to becoming the world’s largest city by the end of the 21st century. The fears that lie beneath our urban future are invariably those of various kinds of disorder: social, political, environmental, aesthetic, and so on. But what if, as the authors of this provocative book argue, ‘order’ is not much more than a fantasy of the better-off, capable of creating isolated islands of regulation but not much else? What if ‘disorder’ is in fact just another kind of order? And what if we can be more clearsighted about the interrelation of the terms, about order’s necessary implication of disorder, and vice versa, so we can build more realistically? As the authors put it, ‘[S]ocial order is always more important than any ordered physical manifestation, especially as the world becomes a predominantly urban place’.
In the mid-1960s, the architect John F. C. Turner said as much in relation to the barriadas he explored on the edge of the Peruvian capital, Lima. The self-built dwellings he saw there and reported on in the pages of Architectural Design might have affronted international modernist ideals of order, but they represented an authentic, local, social one and were therefore good. The
anthropologist Janice Perlman wrote something similar in 1976 about her experience of Rio’s favelas. What looked like disorder to official eyes was in fact a well-regulated, self-ordering system. Those arguments regularly need remaking, as the architectural urge to create images of order is always there.
This book locates the dialectic between urban order and disorder in a historical context, describing its origins in European Enlightenment thought and its manifestation in cities such as Edinburgh. It then shows how those ideas were adapted in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly in Brazil, and this is in many ways a Brazil-centric history. Brazil’s urbanism was always unusually pragmatic and, therefore, open to different forms of order. It expressly did not adopt the urban grid characteristic of the cities of Hispanic Latin America. Brazil’s approach allowed the adaptation of European models of urbanism in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasília, and Curitiba in sometimes startling ways. In more recent times, it has been open to adopting the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s radical concept of the ‘right to the city’. The results of that might have been varied, but as the authors argue, it shows Brazil’s ability to consider other urban order in non-traditional ways, with sometimes striking results (the pragmatic remodelling and incorporation of the favelasof Salvador are a great example). To pay attention to Brazil in the way the authors do here necessarily means to pay better attention to the actually existing social order, rather than to architectural fantasies of it – and that is a vital step towards understanding the way in which most of the world, not just the rich part, builds cities.
Richard J. Williams
Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Preface
Key focus of the book
This book focuses on two key themes: firstly, and most explicitly, how what we call urban design and planning (or the deliberate physical ordering of urban space and form) became a vehicle for normative social ordering in the modern age and, subsequently, how the key ideas which determined this were developed, consolidated through discourse and in praxis, and then transferred and embedded into very different contexts worldwide. Secondly, and more implicitly, we discuss how this physical ordering of urban space and form with normative social objectives (largely driven by dominant political and economic interests) inevitably creates its alter ego of ‘disorder’ – and how the latter in fact has forms of embedded socio-cultural order, which usually become ignored in the processes of rapid urbanisation, despite becoming more widespread – to the detriment of global urbanity.
As argued in previous publications by the book’s authors, the response to rapid urbanisation worldwide over the past two centuries has always had a relationship with political and economic ‘modernisation’, and underlying this have been strong ideas of modernity, usually dominated by concepts which emerged in the Global North. Political and economic modernisation has then often been closely associated with modernism in spatial theory and practice, including approaches to urbanism. However, where urbanisation and modernisation are less strongly associated –
generally in places of relative global political and economic ‘weakness’ (albeit often aspiring to similar concepts of modernity) –different forms of urbanity that have emerged have strong values in their own right.
This seeming disjuncture between dominant ideas of modernity and emerging forms of urbanity is also expressed in complex relationships between ‘other’ forms of urbanism and modernism as perceived in the canon of urban theory and practice – and nowhere more so than in places where normative modernisation lags behind, or ignores, rapid urbanisation. As such, the book argues that the resulting approach to urban ‘disorder’ is still mostly perceived in terms of Northern values of modernity and urbanity, when in fact emerging forms of urban ordering – mostly in the Global South – are much more aligned to actual socially and culturally derived spatial trends.1
Our interest in these two key themes arises primarily from our experiences of teaching urban design and planning mostly in the Global North, while researching and working with urban trends mostly in the Global South. Arguably, these latter trends are soon to be dominant in global demographic terms (and probably also in economic terms not long after). Here, although the normative ideas of urban order from the North still continue to be seen largely as the ideal to be achieved, our experience is that these are manifestly inadequate and/or inappropriate in the scale and success of their application.
Despite at least five decades of normative urban development theories, policies and practice (i.e., ideas, discourse and praxis), the insignificance of this effort for emerging urban areas in many countries of the South is clearly manifested in social statistics, spatial analysis, projected (often ‘doomsday’) scenarios, and personal experience through research and travel. This has led us to an enquiry in some detail concerning where and how key ideas on such deliberate physical ordering developed into wider ‘discourses’ – and
then policies and professional practice – and how these were transferred to other places (and often in other times). Such transfers were more like ‘translations’ because in the process the ideas were transformed, though usually not through appropriate adaptation, often becoming almost totally lost in the process.
The first chapters of the book thus examine what happened with concepts of urban order arising in the North and how these then were transferred through discourse into praxis – and subsequently a range of ambitious attempts at praxis transfer geographically to the South. For this we start with a focus on their adoption into Brazil –chosen not because this is an exceptional case (many other countries have had parallel experiences) but because it is one with which we have both had significant research engagement and which has clear examples of the processes we analyse.
That then permits us to lead on to chapters in which the discourse in fact emerged within the translation process and in which Brazil also significantly adapted and further developed the original ideas; Brazil has begun to also transfer the resulting discourse and praxis elsewhere. Here we continue to examine how Brazil has developed innovative ways of attempting to order the perceived ‘disorder’ in its urban areas and how the resulting ideas and praxis are also now being ‘translated’ to other places – with case studies in sub-Saharan Africa, mainly focusing on Angola (as a location where both authors have again had significant research engagement).
The lack of successful transfer of these initially Northern forms of physical order to (and then between) cities of the South does not mean these latter cities do not possess order. Our enquiry has equally been stimulated by the examination of physical manifestations of urban space and form which are based primarily on actual social order and cultural values – and how this could be the basis for a more successful exchange (not ‘transfer’) of ideas.2 This leads to a discussion in the last chapter of the book concerning how concepts of socio-cultural order need to become the basis for
new approaches to physical urban development in a rapidly urbanising world in which resources for physical urban ordering are relatively scarce – and thus what this means for the processes of normative urban design and planning in general – that is, especially, but not exclusively, in the South.
In this we believe there is an opportunity to learn from the past and also to study the embeddedness of Northern and Southern ideas of urbanism in their present context – and thus how ideas and discourse can be better dis-embedded and re-embedded in different contexts in future. We argue that the key to this analysis is to separate the key concepts of the social and physical vis-à-vis deliberate ordering and to accept that social order is always more important than any ordered physical manifestation, especially as the world becomes a predominantly urban place. The role of deliberate physical ordering is thus to understand and enhance social order –not to impose foreign/out-of-time concepts and approaches (i.e., where concept becomes precept).
Overall structure of the book
The book commences with an introductory chapter examining the emergence of deliberate urban design and planning in European cities starting with the 17th and 18th centuries. It argues that the way in which concepts developed in the Enlightenment period underpinned the emerging ‘modern’ perception of physical disorder and links this to perceived problems with social order. These were then deeply embedded in long-lasting conceptions of what is ‘good’ urban space and form – still largely extant today.
We do not query the relevance of the concepts of the Enlightenment per se in the book, although of course these can be queried, especially the assumption that these are the best values for human societies in all places and times (as exported through imperialism, colonialism, westernisation and developmentalism and
the association of these with dominant ideas of ‘modernity’). However, we do argue that the particular forms of spatial ‘order’ that then developed as the ideal for urban space and form (often drawing on even older historical precepts) have come to be assumed as inevitably ‘good’ and desirable for all. This chapter thus sets the basis for ideas analysed in the rest of the book.
The subsequent four chapters then discuss how different manifestations of linked physical and social order became embedded within renowned urban planning and design approaches in Europe and how these were then transferred to, and adapted temporally and geographically in, Brazil.3 The deep embedding of these concepts within the foundations of the emerging disciplines and professions of architecture, urban design and planning came to spread these ideas worldwide in the colonial and neocolonial periods of the 19th century, when they largely became the only desirable precepts and were generally imposed authoritatively. In this process, these approaches produced effects that were often contrary to what was intended, and hence we examine how that happened.
The first of these chapters examines how neoclassical urban design concepts that developed in the immediate postEnlightenment period in Europe became adopted by and impacted on late 18th- and early 19th-century Brazil, with a case study from Rio de Janeiro. The subsequent chapter then investigates the late 19th- and early 20th-century ideas of the garden city (which particularly underpinned the professionalisation of town planning) and their adoption by/transfer to São Paulo. This is followed by a chapter examining the transfer of the mid-20th-century ideas of the functional city of Le Corbusier and the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM; which embedded the approach in the new discipline of urban design) to Brasília. The last chapter in this mode then examines how functionalism became adapted in Curitiba in new Brazilian ways, synthesising various prior urbanist discourses,
and how this started to be transferred and adopted elsewhere, with a brief case study example from Cape Town in South Africa.
The next three chapters then trace and analyse initiatives in new urban ordering which emerged as a response to the Brazilian national and local contexts, though still applying Enlightenmentbased concepts and modes of thinking, and in parallel with trends in the North. The first of these chapters explores how Alphaville (São Paulo) paralleled the emergence of New Urbanism, despite the very different structural context, with the result also being transferred elsewhere North and South. The next chapter then takes up the innovative approaches to urban ‘disorder’ as perceived in Brazilian ‘favelas’ and the emergence of a new discourse on slum upgrading –which became a standard for transfer elsewhere in the Global South. Associated then with the post-dictatorship and re-democratisation in Brazil, the new idea of rights to the city led to innovative urban discourse in Brazil on institutionalising participatory urban planning –again becoming a recommended standard for export elsewhere.
In a final case study chapter, we look in more detail at Angola in southwest Central Africa, examining how modern urban development discourse and praxis are being transferred both through South-South transfer via Brazil and through continuing direct North-South links with the former coloniser Portugal, in ways that ignore or attempt to eradicate local forms of urbanity. In this process, new adaptations have emerged in praxis as professional discourse becomes moulded by the changing realpolitik of the country, while continuing to deny the urban space and form reality of the rapidly urbanising majority.
The final chapter then returns to the second key theme of the book: how we can perceive urban order differently, how this can help to create new urbanist discourse, and what form of deliberate urban ordering can thus be engaged with in praxis. We look briefly at this next by way of a general overview before we explore the details of the case studies.
The basis for new perceptions of the urban
Urban form has existed for six millennia with early spatial variation: whether the oldest ‘organically’ structured urban areas of Mesopotamia, the Indus or the Nile valleys, or the ‘geometrically’ structured Chinese cities and later Greek and Roman urban areas. These latter powers spread physically ordered urban form geographically far further than any previous polity through widespread colonisation. The collapse of the Roman Empire in circa 500 CE resulted in a period of urban decline in northern Europe but extensive adaptation and expansion of urban form in the Mediterranean region under Islam – once again ‘organic’ in form.
In several parts of the world, other urban cultures emerged or continued to develop during the time of urban decline in northern Europe, as well as during the early stages of its re-urbanisation. Cities in China’s ancient urban civilisation continued to evolve from walled to open cities between the 7th and 10th centuries. In the Americas, in addition to the already well-known and welldocumented urban civilisations in Central America and Andean South America, recent research has shown the existence of ‘low-density urbanism’ networks of human settlements in the Amazon. And in Africa there is a long and diverse history of cities at the centre of different polities and societies that evolved prior to European colonisation.
While urban space has been structured historically in either socalled ‘organic’ or ‘geometric’ ways, or a combination of both, urban form in many of the previously mentioned cultures was often determined by the repetition of the individual courtyard house – or similar unitary structure – with strong distinctions between public and private space. In fact, whether urban space was ordered geometrically, as opposed to organically, tended to be linked with more hierarchical forms of governance in which the state strongly
subordinated the family, tribe or clan – that is, the predominant form of social organisation.
What can be seen as ‘urban’ is essentially a flexible concept, but key attributes include higher density spatial use and specialism in function – especially governing and/or religious institutions and trade, with the latter leading to predominantly money-based economies and wider social structures based on institutions beyond kinship. Such settlements required larger political units than those that existed previously in many societies, and they were most successful in city states with craft-based industries and mercantile trade. Although these developed worldwide links, their urban areas crucially retained close links with rural hinterlands for natural resources and were, thus, relatively restricted in size (Rome being the exception with its enormous imperial concentration of surplus and capacity for long-range transport).
Hence, although urban areas based on defence and trade reemerged in northern Europe from the 12th century onwards, the 18th century saw the emergence of urban areas based on concentrated manufacturing and international trade which far outstripped these ‘traditional’ mercantile urban areas and their governing/religious elites and were the basis for a wide range of new urban forms and spaces. These ‘modern’ urban forms did not have the same spatial constraints (often due to innovations in the use of carbon-based energy and associated transport), were able to grow far beyond the carrying power of the environmental resources of their surroundings, and were in turn the basis for the start of the continuing worldwide trend in ‘urbanisation’ (i.e., the growth of urban-based populations in relation to rural-based populations).
The urban spaces and forms which developed in this so-called ‘modern’ period of urbanisation were thus tied inevitably to significant changes in economic structure and also to political influences – that is, the emergence of both industrialisation and nation states, as well as international expansionism through trade
and imperialism/colonialism. Embedded within these were newly emerging concepts of society and – most importantly – of how to control order and disorder, including the role of urban space and form.
In the modern period, normative ways of controlling physical urban development, as a means for social control, were also developed and exported far beyond their initial context. For example, urban planning – as a set of state-based control mechanisms of land and natural resource use – emerged in northern Europe through centuries of land reform in tandem with the emergence of strong, central nation states and independent government administration. Urban design emerged in a context of increasingly specialised design professions and (again) centralised control over key urban decision-making and resources, including taxation as a state resource base.
These preconditions were always assumed in the process of exporting concepts of the ‘good’ urban, and the relevance of the preconditions for the ‘receiving’ context was not questioned – mainly due to the centre-periphery nature of the power relationships. These power relationships were not just political and economic: they also had social and cultural implications – with built-in assumptions about what was more ‘advanced’ and, as such, the basis for aspiration. In this process, the emergence of the increasingly specialised professions of urban design and planning came to ignore indigenous forms of land/environmental use control and urban resource decision-making structures, and external ideas were summarily implanted, which most often proved largely irrelevant for the majority – but also often for the power bases in existing societies.
Not only were these ideas often irrelevant – given the political, economic, social, and cultural context (for which they needed to be significantly adapted) – but they were often inadequate for a very different scale of activity. The concepts and approaches of urban design and planning were developed generally in a time of rapid
urbanisation in the North – and usually to combat the perceived disorder this produced – but the scale of this urbanisation was much more limited than that of the contexts within which they came to be transferred. On top of this, the period of their development was at a time when the North expanded its political control over the South, exploiting enormous quantities of economic resources and concentrating these in the urban areas of the North – permitting forms of deliberate activity there that would prove to be impossible elsewhere, as such concentration entailed forms of (costly) subordination.
The increasingly global nature of economic modernisation processes led to rising urbanisation rates in the South, many parts of which by the end of the 20th century came to have a majority of their population located in urban areas – as in the North, but under extremely different conditions. The result has been that the normative approaches to urban planning and to the design of cities that have been developed – whether in forms inspired by Northern experiences or modified versions of those adapted in the South –have positively impacted only an increasingly small minority of the fast-expanding urban areas of the world and have generally negatively impacted on the majority.
Rather than leading to a fundamental questioning of the contextual relevance of such physical ordering concepts and approaches, it has led to the exact opposite – continual alarm calls about the ‘explosive’ potential of the perceived social disorder this lack of physical order is seen to represent (see, e.g., Davis 2006). However, in fact most cities of the South continue to function in fairly orderly ways, culturally and socially – and even economically and politically. The underlying forms of order, however, often do not match those envisaged in the North – especially in liberal, capitalist, representative democracies – and hence are seen as aberrations, as the dominant values of what is ‘urban’ (in both North and South) are still largely based on such ideals.
The current situation is one in which urban ‘development’ discourse continues its attempts to find the solution for scaling up deliberate physical ordering in different rapidly urbanising contexts in the South, albeit with increasing growth of South-South transfer of ideas. These more recent transfers tend to be based on the countries which have had a certain capacity to implement ‘modern’ change at scale – generally middle-income countries. While such attempts are far from conclusive in terms of their own successful upscaling, they are increasingly the focus of ‘best practice’ transfers by international agencies to other parts of the South (and even North) and, hence, the process of ‘translation’ of discourse continues. As the context is so often different, the process of distortion in praxis also continues – with the urban majority sidelined, albeit producing the spatially dominant urban form. This book argues, therefore, that the non-contextualised nature of South-South transfer of these normative urban interventions means that these are likely to have as little success as those transferred previously from the North –especially when transferred into countries with weaker economies and weaker political systems.4
The origin of the book
This book has arisen from a long-term collaboration between two authors sharing an interest in, and reflections on, cities North and South.5
Professor Paul Jenkins has 50 years of experience working with urban issues – initially as a practicing architect and planner and then engaging in teaching and research over more than half of the past five decades. Much of this was in the Global South (sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil), but also in the North where he started as an academic mid-career. He has direct experience of much of the postWWII alternative approaches to urban design and planning in cities of the South, which underpins the critical analysis that he brings to
the book. In this he also draws on his studies of the historical urban development of cities in the North and South, in which he has focused on locating normative design and planning aspects within their wider context (see, for example, Edwards and Jenkins 2005). His half-century of engagement with the discourse and praxis of urban development both North and South has led to his querying the basis for deliberate engagement in urban areas as argued in the book, particularly the negative implications of the concept of ‘informal’, instead of which he advocates the use of the term ‘nonformal’.6
Professor Harry Smith has over 30 years of experience working with urban design and development issues, having worked as an architect and planner in the Global North (in Spain and the United Kingdom) before becoming an academic engaging in urban research in Europe, Latin America (Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico) and Angola. Much of his research has focused on issues in ‘nonformal’ settlements – ranging from housing, through access to land, to community-based disaster risk management –often taking an action-research approach. This has led to his questioning of the relevance and impacts of the transfer and application of ‘formal’ urban planning and design discourse and praxis to these contexts and to his exploration of the emergence of locally based responses to urban challenges and conditions.
Drawing on the authors’ background and experience, the book argues that instead of continuing to try to impose normative physical order on what is assumed to be disorder in urban areas through urban planning and design (and in the process attempting to instil social order), an understanding of the nature of the existing social order which underpins the emerging urban areas of the world –North and South – can lead to reflection on the role of deliberate physical engagement with and not on forms of social order. It thus fundamentally challenges the embedded positivistic values of the Enlightenment – which essentially abstracted a set of social values
from an elite and projected these on the majority and which continue to be the basis for the exclusion of the majority of urban residents from better conditions.
Neoclassical urban design and its embedded physical control as a means to promote social order in parts of cities; the garden city and its aims of decentralised political, economic and social order at regional and national scales; the functional city and its avowedly centralised concepts of control at the metropolitan scale; and New Urbanism and its focus on community-level social and physical order – all were/are based on a form of deduction of projected impact based on an essentially positivist scientific approach which embedded socially elite value systems. While these approaches may have held sway in the North for more than two centuries of urban development and redevelopment under forms of worldwide political dominance and economic concentration, it has proved impossible to replicate these on the same scale elsewhere with the (eventual) wider global dispersion of such power in the South during the second half of the 20th century.7
As such, the cities of tomorrow cannot be governed and ordered on the basis of such positivistic and deductive assumptions, as the resources which they would require for their imposition are now dissipated – although they remain strongly concentrated within regions and nation states. We argue that the cities of tomorrow – as they grow in demographic importance worldwide, mostly in the South – can alternatively be governed and ordered on the basis of inductiveideasfrom the values of the majority of their residents and can be planned and designed by understanding and engaging with these values, not by imposing a set of predetermined values from a different system.
However, how do such concepts of urban planning and design develop? More importantly, how do they become embedded within existing systems with predetermined power bases (including disciplinary and professional knowledge discourses), and how can
they be disseminated – that is, translated and re-embedded within different contexts? The book hopes that (re-)examination of this process concerning existing urbanist ideals, discourses and practices can shed some light on how this might take place as it demythologises these processes and locates them in their context. Although these ideals were generally developed by visionaries and associated avant-gardes, they were deliberately disseminated through emerging disciplinary and professional networks, although often the resulting implantation had very different effects than originally intended in both their places of origin and elsewhere. Thus, it is less the process of the particular diffusion of the ideas of ordered urban space and form which interests us than the mechanisms of ‘translation’ of ideas within a disciplinary and professional context.
The first step in translation is the process which takes places both in the act of (often an individual) defining an idea/ideals and refining this through iteration – whether speaking, writing or design (thus creating a discourse). How this is understood and taken on board by a group of interested actors who then promote the ideas in practice – further ‘translating’ these – creates forms of ‘praxis’. The most powerful of such ideas subsequently become ‘transferred’, generally through wider media. But usually only a narrower understanding gets translated, which can, however, have a very widespread impact. This stage may involve deliberate ‘movements’ as organisational forms which institutionalise the ideas and reinforce them – but at the same time often reduce them in scope. Translation also takes place where the ideas/ideals are received more widely, but also inevitably more remotely, with much less control over their ‘purity’ vis-à-vis the original. They then become embedded into new contexts, often in very different ways from the intention in their wider dissemination, let alone their initial declaration (and even more so from perhaps the original synthesis). By this stage, the ideas become more or less self-perpetuating as they become known (in their much-translated
form) by a wider non-professional, non-disciplinary group, which often translates these yet again.8
As highlighted previously, we argue here for an alternative approach to urban design and planning that is conceptually linked to previous ideas of ‘conservative surgery’ (Patrick Geddes) or ‘incremental planning’ (Nabeel Hamdi). This approach aspires to gain an understanding of socio-cultural values in urban space and form from urban residents and other actors, focused on assisting the selfconscious evaluation of their values and how these could become enhanced. In so doing, this approach would socially and culturally embed innovative practices of urban space and form creation. This essentially changes the role of the professional from a normative one (as ‘specialist’) to a facilitative one (as a ‘practitioner’) and challenges the boundaries of existing disciplines, in that it focuses on ‘popular’ as opposed to ‘vernacular’ or ‘erudite’ forms of architecture, design and planning. This, the authors argue, is the basis for strengthening socio-cultural values within emerging forms of urbanism, which will not be adequately controlled and exploited by public and/or private sectors in the emerging and rapidly expanding cities in many parts of the world. How these forms of participative social urban ordering will be expressed in terms of physical space is a matter for the wider societies and their cultural values – which architects, urban designers and planners then play a part in assisting to understand, develop and embed.
Notes
1. The terms Global South and Global North are used in this book as alternatives to those which emerged after World War II in the context of ‘development’ discourse – that is, the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds. With increasing political and economic globalisation (and similar social and cultural impacts), ‘development’ can no longer be distinguished geographically at
such a macro level, but it is present in all parts of the world, albeit highly differentially at the meso- and micro levels. However, ‘North’ and ‘South’ are still imprecise terms – as, in fact, parts of the South have closer relations to, and manifestations of, aspects normally associated with the North –but they are used here as a form of shorthand which is quite widely understood. The terms also come with a critical warning of potential bias due to the dominant nature of Northern academic hegemony – at least as far as urban analysis is concerned.
2. See especially Jenkins (2013) and Jenkins (2022); the latter contains a bibliography of more examples.
3. This, of course, does not exhaust the urban planning/design approach repertoire, but these approaches to urban design and planning have been chosen for their specific impact in transfer to Brazil.
4. This activity has generally been the area of expertise of urban development planners, but new interest in the seeming disorder of urban space and form in the South has been evidenced by urban designers and architects – such as that exemplified in the 2006 Venice and 2007 Rotterdam Biennales and a number of architectural texts on such cities [e.g., The Endless City by Burdett and Sudjic (2008)]. However, this emerging discourse tends to be split between continued attempts to apply theory developed in the North and a new expression of exoticism for the urban realities of the South – with limited (if any) engagement with social theories focused on the South. As such, it either celebrates the dynamism of the perceived disorder or proposes superficial architectural engagement – the latter repeating the problems of assuming that physical order can bring social order.
5. While the book is a joint effort, with both authors involved in all chapters, Paul Jenkins initiated the book and has led on this
Preface and the first half of the book, as well as the conclusion, while Harry Smith has led on the second half of the book.
6. In this book we use the term ‘non-formal’ to indicate areas where the state engagement is limited. In reality, there is a spectrum of state engagement with complete non-engagement being rare (if it exists at all), through to so-called ‘formal’ areas, where limited state capacity can also lead to significant lack of engagement and enforcement of regulation. As such the term ‘non-formal’ can include planned and unplanned areas. We consider this term more appropriate than the commonly used term ‘informal’, with its negative connotations, though we also use ‘informal’ in a qualified way to acknowledge its widespread use.
7. The rapid urbanisation of China is an exception, made possible by a combination of increased economic power through rapid industrialisation and a highly centralised political system that controls and benefits from economic development.
8. It is important that this process is not seen as one of ‘acculturation’, as this assumes a simplistic acceptance of a dominant position. An alternative way of considering this has been ‘transculturation’, which accepts that the process of translation is – to some extent at least – two-way. The authors, however, would see this as a more nuanced Foucaldian interplay of forces which is contingent on many factors and not either a simplistic ‘zero-sum game’ of imposition and resistance or an open negotiation which ignores power relations. The authors instead view it as a complex interaction of values which change geographically and temporally and which impact on the process of translation in unpredictable ways.
References
Burdett, R. and Sudjic, D. (eds.) (2008) Theendlesscity, London: Phaidon Press.
Davis, M. (2006) Planetofslums, London: Verso.
Edwards, B. and Jenkins, P. (eds.) (2005) Edinburgh:Themaking ofacapitalcity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Jenkins, P. (2013) Urbanization, urbanism, and urbanity in an African city: Home spaces and house cultures, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jenkins, P. (2022) ‘A capital in history – widening the temporal and physical context’, in Montedoro, L., Buoli, A. and Frigerio, A. (eds.) WEF-sensitive territorial developmentperspectives in the Global South. A study for the Maputo Province, Mozambique, Cham, Switzerland: Springer Research for Development Series.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Gondola days
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Title: Gondola days
Author: Francis Hopkinson Smith
Release date: August 31, 2023 [eBook #71528]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1897
Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GONDOLA DAYS ***
FICTION AND TRAVEL
By F. Hopkinson Smith.
TOM GROGAN. Illustrated. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50.
A GENTLEMAN
VAGABOND, AND SOME OTHERS. 16mo, $1.25.
COLONEL CARTER OF CARTERSVILLE. With 20 illustrations by the author and E. W. Kemble. 16mo, $1.25.
A DAY AT LAGUERRE’S, AND OTHER DAYS. Printed in a new style. 16mo, $1.25.
A WHITE UMBRELLA IN MEXICO. Illustrated by the author. 16mo, gilt top, $1.50.
GONDOLA DAYS. Illustrated, 12mo, $1.50.
WELL-WORN ROADS OF SPAIN, HOLLAND, AND ITALY, traveled by a Painter in search of the
Picturesque. With 16 fullpage phototype reproductions of watercolor drawings, and text by F. H S , profusely illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches. A Holiday volume. Folio, gilt top, $15.00.
THE SAME. Popular Edition. Including some of the illustrations of the above. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
B N Y .
GONDOLA DAYS
BACK OF THE RIALTO (PAGE 87)
GONDOLA DAYS
BY F. HOPKINSON
SMITH WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS CAMBRIDGE 1897
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
NOTE
THE text of this volume is the same as that of “Venice of To-Day,” recently published by the Henry T. Thomas Company, of New York, as a subscription book, in large quarto and folio form, with over two hundred illustrations by the Author, in color and in black and white.
PREFATORY
I HAVE made no attempt in these pages to review the splendors of the past, or to probe the many vital questions which concern the present, of this wondrous City of the Sea. Neither have I ventured to discuss the marvels of her architecture, the wealth of her literature and art, nor the growing importance of her commerce and manufactures.
I have contented myself rather with the Venice that you see in the sunlight of a summer’s day—the Venice that bewilders with her glory when you land at her water-gate; that delights with her color when you idle along the Riva; that intoxicates with her music as you lie in your gondola adrift on the bosom of some breathless lagoon—the Venice of mould-stained palace, quaint caffè and arching bridge; of fragrant incense, cool, dim-lighted church, and noiseless priest; of strong-armed men and graceful women—the Venice of light and life, of sea and sky and melody.
No pen alone can tell this story. The pencil and the palette must lend their touch when one would picture the wide sweep of her piazzas, the abandon of her gardens, the charm of her canal and street life, the happy indolence of her people, the faded sumptuousness of her homes.
If I have given to Venice a prominent place among the cities of the earth it is because in this selfish, materialistic, money-getting age, it is a joy to live, if only for a day, where a song is more prized than a soldo; where the poorest pauper laughingly shares his scanty crust; where to be kind to a child is a habit, to be neglectful of old age a shame; a city the relics of whose past are the lessons of our future; whose every canvas, stone, and bronze bear witness to a grandeur, luxury, and taste that took a thousand years of energy to perfect, and will take a thousand years of neglect to destroy.
To every one of my art-loving countrymen this city should be a Mecca; to know her thoroughly is to know all the beauty and romance of five centuries.
F. H. S.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
AN ARRIVAL
OU really begin to arrive in Venice when you leave Milan. Your train is hardly out of the station before you have conjured up all the visions and traditions of your childhood: great rows of white palaces running sheer into the water; picture-book galleys reflected upside down in red lagoons; domes and minarets, kiosks, towers, and steeples, queer-arched temples, and the like.
As you speed on in the dusty train, your memory-fed imagination takes new flights. You expect gold-encrusted barges, hung with Persian carpets, rowed by slaves double-banked, and trailing rare brocades in a sea of China-blue, to meet you at the water landing. By the time you reach Verona your mental panorama makes another turn. The very name suggests the gay lover of the bal masque, the poisoned vial, and the calcium moonlight illuminating the wooden tomb of the stage-set graveyard. You instinctively look around for the fair Juliet and her nurse. There are half a dozen as pretty Veronese, attended by their watchful duennas, going down by train to the City by the Sea; but they do not satisfy you. You want one in a tight-fitting white satin gown with flowing train, a diamond-studded girdle, and an ostrich-plume fan. The nurse, too, must be stouter, and have a highkeyed voice; be bent a little in the back, and shake her finger in a threatening way, as in the old mezzotints you have seen of Mrs. Siddons or Peg Woffington. This pair of Dulcineas on the seat in front, in silk dusters, with a lunch-basket and a box of sweets, are too modern and commonplace for you, and will not do.
When you roll into Padua, and neither doge nor inquisitor in ermine or black gown boards the train, you grow restless. A deadening suspicion enters your mind. What if, after all, there should be no Venice? Just as there is no Robinson Crusoe nor man Friday; no stockade, nor little garden; no Shahrazad telling her stories far into
the Arabian night; no Santa Claus with reindeer; no Rip Van Winkle haunted by queer little gnomes in fur caps. As this suspicion deepens, the blood clogs in your veins, and a thousand shivers go down your spine. You begin to fear that all these traditions of your childhood, all these dreams and fancies, are like the thousand and one other lies that have been told to and believed by you since the days when you spelled out words in two syllables.
Upon leaving Mestre—the last station—you smell the salt air of the Adriatic through the open car window. Instantly your hopes revive. Craning your head far out, you catch a glimpse of a long, low, monotonous bridge, and away off in the purple haze, the dreary outline of a distant city. You sink back into your seat exhausted. Yes, you knew it all the time. The whole thing is a swindle and a sham!
“All out for Venice,” says the guard, in French.
Half a dozen porters—well-dressed, civil-spoken porters, flat-capped and numbered—seize your traps and help you from the train. You look up. It is like all the rest of the depots since you left Paris—high, dingy, besmoked, beraftered, beglazed, and be——! No, you are past all that. You are not angry. You are merely broken-hearted. Another idol of your childhood shattered; another coin that your soul coveted, nailed to the wall of your experience—a counterfeit!
“This door to the gondolas,” says the porter. He is very polite. If he were less so, you might make excuse to brain him on the way out.
The depot ends in a narrow passageway. It is the same old fraud— custom-house officers on each side; man with a punch mutilating tickets; rows of other men with brass medals on their arms the size of apothecaries’ scales—hackmen, you think, with their whips outside—licensed runners for the gondoliers, you learn afterward. They are all shouting—all intent on carrying you off bodily. The vulgar modern horde!
Soon you begin to breathe more easily. There is another door ahead, framing a bit of blue sky. “At least, the sun shines here,” you say to yourself. “Thank God for that much!”
“This way, Signore.”
One step, and you stand in the light. Now look! Below, at your very feet, a great flight of marble steps drops down to the water’s edge. Crowding these steps is a throng of gondoliers, porters, women with fans and gay-colored gowns, priests, fruit-sellers, water-carriers, and peddlers. At the edge, and away over as far as the beautiful marble church, a flock of gondolas like black swans curve in and out. Beyond stretches the double line of church and palace, bordering the glistening highway. Over all is the soft golden haze, the shimmer, the translucence of the Venetian summer sunset.
With your head in a whirl,—so intense is the surprise, so foreign to your traditions and dreams the actuality,—you throw yourself on the yielding cushions of a waiting gondola. A turn of the gondolier’s wrist, and you dart into a narrow canal. Now the smells greet you— damp, cool, low-tide smells. The palaces and warehouses shut out the sky. On you go—under low bridges of marble, fringed with people leaning listlessly over; around sharp corners, their red and yellow bricks worn into ridges by thousands of rounding boats; past open plazas crowded with the teeming life of the city. The shadows deepen; the waters glint like flakes of broken gold-leaf. High up in an opening you catch a glimpse of a tower, rose-pink in the fading light; it is the Campanile. Farther on, you slip beneath an arch caught between two palaces and held in mid-air. You look up, shuddering as you trace the outlines of the fatal Bridge of Sighs. For a moment all is dark. Then you glide into a sea of opal, of amethyst and sapphire.
The gondola stops near a small flight of stone steps protected by huge poles striped with blue and red. Other gondolas are debarking. A stout porter in gold lace steadies yours as you alight.
“Monsieur’s rooms are quite ready. They are over the garden; the one with the balcony overhanging the water.”
The hall is full of people (it is the Britannia, the best hotel in Venice), grouped about the tables, chatting or reading, sipping coffee or eating ices. Beyond, from an open door, comes the perfume of flowers. You pass out, cross a garden, cool and fresh in the darkening shadows, and enter a small room opening on a staircase.
