Fleeing the city as a boot camp

We continue, here, the reflexion started in the framework of our series on the world of UTOPIES. In a context where citizenship is threatened even in its most perennial foundations - real estate rent as a tool of control - we thought it appropriate to question urbanism at the level of its contemporary dreams and utopias.

Montreal, with the complicity of its stipendiated political elites, has become the target of real estate developers and speculators. No escape, the alienation is total.

By Patrice-Hans Perrier

A review of the famous essay THE EVAN CITY by architect Frank Lloyd Wright

Beyond the fortifications

The working-class suburbs of the late 18th century represent much more than the simple destruction of the fortifications of the feudal bourgeoisie's cities. It was the beginning of conurbation, in a context where the productive forces were increasingly established outside the so-called classical city. The means of locomotion allowed for a greater mobility of the workforce and ensured that the cities had a continuous supply of raw materials. The city - the City within the city of London - became a stronghold for economic exchange and stock market speculation. A financial center. Production was relocated to the periphery before being exfiltrated to the "developing" countries at the end of the 20th century.

If the balance that could prevail between the countryside and the city has been broken, it is still land rent that dominates urban organization. At one time, only the censitaries had the right to vote since they honored the CENS (payment of a rent in exchange for the right to occupy the land - feudal protection in less elegant terms) to the local Lords.

A link: https://www.prologue.qc.ca/edgon/universite/seigneurial.htm

The right to vote is a lure

With the advent of universal suffrage - the right to vote for Montrealers came in 1970 - all citizens can vote, in exchange for the income and property taxes they pay. Nothing has really changed, while the big landowners still dominate the game.

Urbanity, despite much theorizing and experimentation, refers to the living conditions of citizens concentrated within spaces that eventually shrink by force of circumstance. Urban planners, who are supposed to be the doctors of the city, are, in fact, only the managers of spatial organization (cadastres and other measures of evaluation of land ownership) confronted with the activities of property speculation. This explains why the latter have long been hated by architects, who are in charge of city planning.

The planning departments are - unless otherwise stated - still part of the faculties of architecture. It is amusing to see that some technocrats have set up courses dedicated to urban design, a sort of hybrid subject halfway between architecture and urban planning.

Nowadays, the expression urban development is on everyone's lips and constitutes a huge catch-all that allows the mystification to continue. It is as if the councillors (those elected by the "pigs of payers") enjoy the privilege of designing the transformation of the city. All this is worthy of a sad urban legend, while the banks and their affiliates are the only ones presiding over the destiny of this rogue city.

The consumer has replaced the citizen

The consumer buys, against the fruits of his labor, goods and services. But, he only rents (like the censor) his living space. The bank, via the land rent, remains the de facto owner of the housing units occupied by the tenants or the so-called owners. The speculation playing its cards, the land mechanics force the occupants of the city to give up their places to new, more fortunate players, often from abroad. This axiom has been on the minds of many thinkers and politicians for ages. If the common man benefits from the ramifications of a production and distribution system that gives him access to a large number of "conveniences", he has, on the other hand, given up his true "right to live".

On the trail of the American pioneers

We propose a review of a seminal essay by the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. This essay, entitled The Disappearing City, is still an important reflection for those who dream of a feasible end to the road. In 1932, this visionary architect described the state of affairs in large American cities such as New York and Chicago.

Three quarters of a century later, we have the impression that the same situation is at our doorstep, as the city of Montreal seems to be in the grip of a growth crisis. As a teenage city, Quebec's metropolis is unable to free itself from its tutelary burdens. Powerful lords still own the bulk of the classic city in the heart of Montreal, nearly three quarters of the city's residents are renters, and a growing mass of small homeowners are suffering from the pressure of land speculation, which is getting out of control these days.

Our island city seems dispossessed of itself, becoming an interface for exchanges linked to the world of finance, speculation and organized crime. Will Montreal become the Miami of Canada?

A visionary with a head start

Frank Lloyd Wright is the proud surgeon of the Arts & Crafts spirit, at a time when capitalism had already entered its ultimate phase: the financial sphere as a unit of production of securities and stock market valuations. Observing the state of the big cities, in the middle of the economic crisis (following the crash of 1929), the humanist architect was indignant about the decadence of the modern city. One only has to read his cry from the heart at the very end of the essay, as he concludes that "we have reached the point where everything that concerns life is more or less a stopgap, or at best an accident. It will be so until the basis on which life as architecture and architecture as life must function is fundamentally strong and authentically free" . What exactly was he getting at?

Integrity: a pillar of architectural truth

Wright's father was a Baptist minister who later became a Unitarian. This lineament of his father's thinking undoubtedly influenced this architect, who was the first to draw inspiration from biblical culture to create buildings with a telluric power that contrasted with the works of the neo-classicists and other forms of plastic expression stemming from a Hellenic tradition. Very early on, this disciple of architect Louis Henry Sullivan, one of the pioneers of the so-called Chicago School and one of the first builders of skyscrapers, became passionate about the integrity and truth of the architectural project.

Influenced by the thoughts of Henry David Thoreau, an author who celebrated the virtues of civil disobedience in the face of the despotism of certain governments, Frank Lloyd Wright oriented his thinking towards an integration of architectural creation with the natural environment. Like Thoreau, a precursor of ecology, Wright believed in reconnecting with nature, in a context where he felt that "urban life, having served its sentence, has become a life sentence of vicarious acts and a petty claim of expediency. An outdated life". He denounces the debasement of the citizen prisoner of structures that prevent him from blossoming, having been built only to satisfy the law of speculation.

The concentrationary city

F.L. Wright's humanism is in line with the concerns of the Pre-Raphaelites and other emulators of the Arts & Crafts, in the wake of a profound questioning of the consumer society resulting from an industrial revolution led with an iron hand by a handful of patrician fortunes. He protests against the predation of the great landowners who capture the labor power of the people to convert it into urban alienation. Thus, he points out that life "on probation" that is the lot of the crowds. To the alienation of the concentrated city, Wright opposes the search for a new life "outside the city", in the wake of the pioneers of the American West who left in search of new spaces of freedom.

Freedom is a theme dear to many American thinkers and artists. Having fled the famines and persecutions that were rampant in Europe, the American pioneers maintained the myth of a promised land and founded the cult of individuality as an emancipating force. Wright uses the pen of the great poets of the mid-nineteenth century when he states that "the soul grows as much because it gives as because it is nourished. But the soul does not grow by what is extorted from it ". Like 19th century idealists such as Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and William Morris, this great architect asserted that the great landowners had taken over from the old feudal lords in order to institute a new type of serfdom.

The serial housing unit: a trap for citizens

He compares the post-industrial city to a real urban monster. "This man-trap of gigantic dimensions, which devours virility, denies all forms of individuality. This Moloch knows no other god than 'Always More'". Wright believes that the speculators have completely subjugated the city to their designs, that is to say, the desire to turn it into a real machine for building spaces devoted to capital gains.

The few efforts of embellishment or development made by this caste of prevaricators are nothing but smoke and mirrors for him. "In other words, the interests that built and own the city, and that spend millions in the arts with prowess to make its purpose, namely rent, acceptable to millions of people, these interests are in immediate danger of destroying each other because of this eternal race to devise bigger and better building baits and to hold back confused tenants."

The art of deceiving onlookers

This assertion brings us back to 2013, to the Quartier des Spectacle in Montreal. Indeed, this development project seems to have been conceived as an interface intended to capture the attention of tourists and entertain onlookers, while real estate speculation is raging in the heart of what was once the "Latin Quarter of Little Paris" in North America. While the public authorities are developing interfaces for entertainment and "cultural" activities, speculators and developers are having a field day with a conversion of the real estate stock that looks more like a game of massacre than an operation of "urban requalification".

The mendacious prose of technocrats does not move the author of The Evanescent City. "Architectural values are human values, otherwise they are not values". If he castigates the real estate speculators, he also condemns their respective allies, the architects and the town councillors. His thinking took off following the stock market crash of 1929, when the entire Western economy sank into a descent into hell that would lead to the Second World War. Like spider webs, the great metropolises serve to capture surplus value, while alienating their inhabitants. The urban space is mineral, dense and polluted, in contrast to the great natural spaces that constitute authentic living environments.

Access to land

"But organic architecture requires that land be made accessible on an equitable basis to all who can use it as an intrinsic human value, as it is with all other elements" . It is a re-foundation of the city, beyond the reach of the predatory caste. In 1911, after a long trip to Europe, Wright settled in Wisconsin and founded a Unitarian community. A veritable small campus was built - including domestic, community and agricultural buildings - to foster the self-sufficiency of the fledgling community, and the architect named the complex Studio Taliesin, after the poet Taliesin, an important figure in Celtic mythology and Welsh literature.

The Midwestern architect was simply reinterpreting in his own way the founding experience of the missions or outposts of the developing colonies. This form of refounding the city can be found at work in various utopian projects, from the free cities of the Italian Renaissance to the first Kibbutz in Palestine. The ideal of the pioneers and other settlers was, most of the time, to escape the predation of the old feudal systems from which they came. The free city was superimposed on the ideal of the utopian city, in a context where a community of pioneers tried to re-found civic life. Notwithstanding the context of intervention, it is surprising to see how much this type of attempt has been repeated throughout human history.

Frank Lloyd Wright did not invent anything, he used the mechanization of construction techniques, the spirit of discovery of his peers and the great American spaces to revive this hopeful idea. This "return to the land", which would inspire certain communities in the 1960s and 70s, is inseparable from an authentic architecture that is not a work of mimicry. "What is a building, insofar as it is architecture, without an intimate relationship with the ground?" he takes the trouble to emphasize at the heart of this prophetic essay.

The free city

Long before the revolt of the Luddites, these armed bands of workers and citizens who broke the machines of an industrial revolution that was assimilated to the appearance of mass unemployment, several populations of the mountainous regions of Italy fled the oppression of the princes and other tyrannical prelates who ruled over the polite cities of the Italian Renaissance. In the same vein, one could compare this movement of refoundation of the city with the villages and other small hamlets of the Gnostic minorities in the south of France. Some missions were also founded in South America with this same idea of escape in response to the prevarication and abuse imposed by the ruling classes concerned.

Frank Lloyd Wright speaks of "Usony" when he wishes to emphasize the unique genius of the American people, different from the more centralizing European models of governance. This is why the author relies on decentralization as an approach likely to reinvigorate the living forces called upon to contribute to the refoundation of this free city. Let us listen to him again: "Economic and political decentralization, direct democracy, emphasis on agrarian wealth at the expense of large-scale industrial production, primacy of local community life, proximity to natural landscapes, values of individual initiative: all the ingredients of this critical trend towards urban concentrations are found at the foundation of 'Broadacre City' ".

This program of re-founding the city and its spatial and socio-economic organization is not unlike the theoretical presuppositions of the anti-globalization movements that took off in the 1990s. However, Wright was not questioning the foundations of capitalism. He was attacking, above all, the deleterious action of large landowners and their armed wing, the speculators.

On mobility

Contrary to our emulators of less energy-intensive urban development, Wright praised road transport and more particularly the automobile. This means of transport represents an equipment that can provide a gain in freedom for the worker, who can move around more easily and, in the process, enjoy a new autonomy. The same logic is applied to the workplaces, distribution areas, and service and leisure units that will enhance the experience of this peripheral urbanity.

"Much of the storage and distribution activity will be from hand to hand, from factory and farm to family, or from producer to exporter, or from importer to distribution center, by means of these universal circulation routes to which all units of production or consumption will now have quick and easy access." This conceptual scheme reminds us of the new "Edge Cities", those proto-towns scattered in the four corners of the current suburban conurbation. However, the roads did not fall apart, the atmosphere was less polluted and the cost of fuel was obsolete at that time. Remember that Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959, the same year that Montreal's last streetcar line was dismantled.

The automobile had become a universal panacea, allowing citizens to travel from their homes to work, through commercial sites and other entertainment areas, without losing too much time. "Time is not money" for Wright, it is rather the differential gained from coherent arrangements that occupy spaces adapted to individual and collective fulfillment. The author even advocates the mass production of "caravan" type vehicles in order to allow nomads to move around as they wish. On the other hand, he is not very enthusiastic about the linear aspect of railroads which invariably lead to huge stations that act as terminals allowing the crowds to be spurred on in the manner of cattle being led at the whip.

The man-machine

Curious paradox or simple return of the pendulum... Frank Lloyd Wright believes that the machine represents the tool that will allow the human being to free himself from the confinement of the medieval city. According to him, technology - an extension of the human body (technè) - will make it possible to generate modes of design, manufacture and development of a habitat in harmony with the natural environment. Influenced by Bauhaus thinking and the efficiency of American engineering, Wright borders on technocratic totalitarianism when he argues that the man of the free city will be close to a Prometheus, perpetuating himself through the serial process of the machine. However, philosophers like Heidegger have warned us that this "Deus Ex Machina" invariably leads to the dissolution of the being in its relation to the world.

Techni-cité

Disregarding the risk involved, Wright seems to sketch a circular scheme that would start from the mind, go to the hand, then end up in the "techni-city" and come back to the natural environment.

The myth of the laboratory or the alchemist's workshop is revived, taking into account the production capacity of the new industries and mobility as the modus operandi of the new relationships of proximity that would be called upon to develop on the bangs of obsolete metropolises. In contrast to the old monasteries, comparable to autarkic production units, the proposed housing unit - as well as the other production or leisure centers - unfold as if they were an extension of the body of their inhabitants. Following the example of Le Corbusier, he compares the house to a "machine for living".

This utopian vision leads him to profess that "its exploitation (the occupation of the ground by the citizen of the new housing unit) would increase as he himself would grow; he would earn this development by himself to the extent of his capacities". A sort of hermit crab who would transform his habitat according to his needs and the evolution of his existence, the citizen of this free city escapes the censal rent by becoming a self-producer capable of extracting from the land he occupies, a part of his subsistence.

The evanescent city, in spite of certain conceptual errors and although it was composed in another time, represents a capital essay that sets the table for a solid prospective reflection about the future of our cities in connection with the world of the rurality. An essay that is still relevant today and, in short, unavoidable.

REFERENCE:

The Disappearing City

An essay translated by Claude Massu

Written by Frank Lloyd Wright

170 pages - Pocket format

ISBN : 978-2-88474-714-1

Reprinted by Infolio editions, 2013

LINK : https://www.infolio.ch/livre/la-ville-evanescente.htm