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Title: City Air
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: June 16, 2007
Language: en
Topics: urbanism, Capitalism, Spain
Source: Retrieved on 8th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/city-air-end-freedom-generalization-urban-space
Notes: Transcript of a talk given at the Ateneo Libertario of El Cabanyal, Valencia, on June 16, 2007: http://www.nodo50.org/tortuga/article.php3?id_article=6125

Miguel Amorós

City Air

If, as Hegel said, city air makes one free, one is equally justified in

saying that the air of the conurbation makes one a slave. If the agora,

the forum and the public square made freedom and equality possible,

their disappearance has annihilated them. The conurbation that has

replaced the city—which some have called the post-city—has very

different characteristics. The conurbation is precisely the opposite of

the city, the exact contrary of a place whose scale fits its residents:

it is a non-city, a space made to accommodate the automobile. A random

pile of buildings scattered over the surface of a territory without any

more order than that imposed by urban belts and the highways that

separate them. What defines a city is public space, the common terrain

for the conditions of public life, where the residents, those whom we

may justly call citizens, can express themselves; where they can

formulate and defend a collective project. Thanks to this political

dimension, the polis, that is, the city, was the privileged locus of

history, of history as the unfolding of freedom. In the conurbation,

however, there is no public space; it is a neutral zone where urban

relations, political dialogue and citizen’s self-administration are

rendered impossible; a spectacle-space that does not invite

communitarian practices but rather circuses devoted to engendering

passivity. What defines the conurbation is the circulatory space, the

asphalt, which practically covers all the surfaces that are not occupied

by buildings. It is not only a space where one can go from one end to

the other without coming into contact with anyone else, but one where

encounters are impossible; a dead place in which freedom and history are

destroyed. Since the city is no longer a city, the citizens are no

longer citizens. Those who now call themselves citizens are really only

voters, without any sense of belonging to a particular place, since the

conurbation does not belong to those who inhabit it. Urbanism has been

the instrument of this dispossession.

Urbanism arose when the fate of the city fell into the hands of the

bourgeoisie. Urbanism in nothing but the projection of bourgeois

ideology into the civil space, or, which amounts to the same thing, the

tool with which the city is transformed into a center for the

accumulation of capital. Its first steps were carried out with surgical

precision; at the expense of confiscated monastery gardens, old city

walls and venerable alleys, huge squares and wide, straight roads were

built that laid the groundworks for the predominance of circulation

through urban space: the circulation of troops, commodities, carriages …

in short, of capital. The commodity colonized social relations and

introduced a new concept of time: time is money. The citizen masses are

set in motion, spurred on by the haste imposed upon them by the economy.

The city grew because it had to absorb the surplus paupers of the

peasant population who fled to the city in search of work and because

the new ruling class needed to make a space of its own. By way of

domestic reforms, the bourgeoisie created new centers where commercial

and financial activity were concentrated. The center was segregated from

the periphery, where industrial activities were situated, and where the

slaughterhouses, cemeteries, madhouses and prisons were relocated. For

their own living space, the bourgeoisie constructed new neighborhoods,

the suburbs, separated from the old neighborhoods where the artisans and

workers lived. Public space, once it was embourgeoisified, disappeared;

the bourgeoisie is a class that values its privacy above all. In the

exclusive suburbs the buildings are tall, with large houses, spacious

streets, with stores and luxury shops. The bourgeois idea of a public

building is not the palace, or even the modest “trade union center”.

Large buildings represent the bourgeois ideology of progress. Thus,

thanks to the use of steel, the new consistories would be built,

preferentially in an eclectic style, the edifices hosting the Post

Offices and Telephone Companies, the municipal markets, the train

stations and all the headquarters of the banks and big businesses.

Bricks, steel and cement have no other function than to proved a space

for new social hierarchy that rules in the city, one that is exclusively

preoccupied with the movement of commodities and money. The imposing

presence of the buildings must inhibit any typical everyday practice of

an egalitarian society, and paralyze all social dynamics in its

vicinity; in short, it must maintain order. The quadrilateral or

orthogonal design does not confer any meaning at all to collective

values, but rather reveals a parcelization of the terrain that obeys

economic rationality: the creation of the real estate market. At the

same time that the bourgeoisie made land into a commercial value, it

consecrated privacy as the supreme value, since, unlike the situation in

the workers neighborhoods, in the suburbs the interior is privileged

over the exterior and, as a result, social life is devalued. The

preponderance of circulation over the terrain is also the preponderance

of private life, urbanistically represented by the island of houses, the

block. The bourgeois city is a splintered city, in which every fragment

is made autonomous: the political center, the commercial and financial

center, the bourgeois residential suburb, the working class slums, the

industrial suburbs, the bullring…. The spaces that were once common lost

their capacities for hosting relations and communication, the streets

separated the houses, the stairways separated the floors, and neighbors,

enclosed in their rooms, were separated from the world. This movement,

repeated ad infinitum, put an end to the experience of space. It

separated space from time and from memory; its monuments are memorials

to forgetting. Because it was subjected to circulation the city lost its

rhythm. The street is no longer inhabited; it is only a place to pass

through to buy things or go to work.

In the Spanish State, at the end of the 1950s, the major cities took a

great leap forward with regard to urbanization. The Development Plans

and the injection of foreign capital were, for that era, the equivalent

of what the demolition of the old city walls and the arrival of the

railroad were for the previous era. Industrial activity became

preponderant and was concentrated around the cities, forcing an exodus

of the rural population. Within 15 years, the population of many cities

would double. The wave of migrants from the countryside could barely be

housed in apartment blocks and housing developments of a dismal

architectural cast, vertical and cheap, situated according to the cost

of the land for the purpose of putting as many residents as possible on

each square meter. The city block as the unity of residences was

definitively abandoned and the open block became the cellular unit of

the urban framework. Spatially, it meant a greater degree of privacy and

anonymity. Although growth was planned for the first time, or almost the

first time, the urban development plans only indiscriminately filled up

the terrains situated between the historic city and a purposefully

designed network of highways, giving shape to a scheme of concentric

growth—like an oil spill—that would never be modified. The decline of

the working class neighborhoods provoked the flight of the middle

classes to the periphery, which in turn resulted in long commutes and

generalized the use of the automobile. The city outgrew its limitations

thanks to the motor vehicle. By expanding, distances were multiplied and

it forfeited its form, and yet more means of transport would be

required. Automobile traffic inconspicuously appeared and then took

possession of the streets. In a few years it would be the absolute

master of the industrial city. During the 1960s, the cities not only

expanded; they became suburbanized. The motorization of the population,

the massive warehousing of people in the outskirts of the cities, the

decline of the historical centers of the cities and the destruction of

the urban green spaces were simultaneous phenomena. Economic problems

would be joined by problems relating to everyday misery, or, to put it

in sociological terms, to the “declining quality of life”.

But while every public demonstration was repressed, the personal

automobile, the television and a minimum capacity of consumption

expanded the boundaries of private life. Football replaced the bulls as

the most popular mass spectacle. Zoning as an exclusionary principle,

fully equipped privatization and the dictatorship of circulation

characterized urban development, which resulted in an agglomeration of

individuals with hardly any connections with each other, indifferent

with regard to place, motorized slaves of the laws dictated by the

“infrastructure”, whether on the bypasses or the freeways.

Urban development was not, however, a specific feature of the Franco

dictatorship. First formulated by the American President Truman in 1949,

it was the official doctrine of all the ruling classes and of all those

who spoke in the name of the oppressed. This is why the change of regime

brought to light a separate political class but did not imply a change

of direction with regard to urbanist fascism and much less a return of

public life. After a brief period of illusions, politics and trade

unionism underwent a process of professionalization that proceeded in

parallel with the de-activation of the neighborhood movement, processes

that replaced the previously utilized repressive mechanisms and

performed much more effectively. Spain was still “one big urbanizing

country”. The new municipal plans were seemingly different on the

surface but were designed according to the same patterns. A few

band-aids, some more verticality, more zoning, a lot more cars and, once

again, urban development without any other justification than the

continuity of real estate speculation, since the population stopped

growing almost twenty years earlier. Under the slogan, “the land for

those who reclassify it”, the speculators filled every empty lot in the

cities with buildings until they created a second, third and fourth

suburban belt, consuming the brownfields and what was left of the

agricultural land near the cities, in order to connect the adjacent

cities and towns into one big metropolitan region. The phenomenon has

been called “peri-urbanization”. The old central working class

neighborhoods were depopulated and partially reoccupied by a marginal

population, accelerating the process of decline of these areas. The old

suburbs also began to undergo a decline in population; a large part of

the younger generation sought housing in the first or second

metropolitan outer belts, either from a desire for a better environment,

or for lower-priced housing. Thanks to the defeat of the workers

movement the few places that had been liberated for public life could be

pacified and emancipatory unrest was successfully dissolved in an ocean

of consumerism and ludic distractions. The intellectual underdevelopment

of the residents was so much accentuated by urbanism that it was easy to

indoctrinate them for consumption and mortgages. Urban development

exacerbated all the traits of bourgeois urbanism: the fragmentation of

the city, the destruction of the territory, massification, mental

infantilism, the predominance of mobility over localities, unlimited

urbanization…. Prefabricated materials prepared the consumers for

absolute uniformity by way of millions of identical houses and

apartments. An anonymous architecture entailed an impersonal lifestyle,

one that is as insensitive to ugliness as it is to beauty, ruled by a

notion of private comfort that is based on the elevator, windows, air

conditioning, bathrooms and above all in a kind of bunkerization, with

alarms, access codes and steel doors. Urban development, in the

post-dictatorial democracy as well as in the Dictatorship, transformed

the city into a mere support for autonomous circulation, and everything

else follows from there. One can no longer call the final result a city,

since it is an urbanized extension without any limits, without form and

without character; a node, or a “hub”, or a point of articulation of the

reticulum of the global economy, and all of them are more or less the

same. Patrick Geddes called this a “conurbation”; others called it an

“urban system”. It was not the fruit of globalization; it was the

conditio sine qua non for globalization’s operation. Globalization is

based on a network of hyper-urbanized territories where information and

capital circulate in real time; thus upon a cluster of conurbations. The

conurbation of the era of globalization has three traits that always

characterize its exemplars: absence of borders (“the generalization of

urban space”), a variety of centers (“multipolarity”) and an extreme

degree of social breakdown (atomization). These are the traits that are

required by a tertiary economy that, by geographically separating the

productive process from the sites of consumption, raises circulation to

the level of the preponderant activity. And with this circulation, all

its related aspects: warehouses, assembly, distribution and transport.

In order to adapt to a service economy, the conurbation must, on the one

hand, attain a critical size that makes it profitable as a market; on

the other hand, it must dissolve its center in an effective network of

specialized poles of activity. The necessary population comes from far

away, expelled from their countries by the liquidation of the forms of

society that preceded globalization. Finally, the conurbation must be

linked with all the other conurbations in every possible way and in such

a way as to facilitate high velocity relations. In order to retain its

place within the network of capitalist flows, it must have large-scale

infrastructures, a regular supply of gasoline, excellent business

services and spectacular marketing based on world events like sports or

cultural celebrations. The conurbation is a territory-business in a

perpetual state of self-promotion and festival, which must be

comfortable to enter and easy to leave. The activity to which its

residents devote the majority of their time is circulatory; they go from

their dormitory-suburb to work or to the shopping mall. Urban space is

now a space without conflicts, without events, where nothing ever

happens; a space without a past and therefore without a history. The

twenty- or thirty-storey towers are the paradigms of urban solitude and

tranquility. An inhospitable place, where no one enters into gratifying

relations, or establishes solid connections, or thinks they will stay

there forever. A dangerous place where chance allocates bad luck, since,

despite the fact that individuals have sacrificed their freedom, their

independence and even their health for the protection offered by the

economy and the State, the sensation of insecurity is considerable; a

place that is suitable for gregarious personnel and unhappy and

predatory people.

Historical memory has been erased thanks to the destruction or the

museification of the places where, once upon a time, there was life and

tension. Their meaning has been utterly uprooted or denatured by the

narrative that expresses something like the antiseptic happiness of a

visitor’s center. Their tours are organized to the rhythm of the museum,

mixing everything up in touristic itineraries. The conurbation has lost

any sign of identity, any cultural or historical significance, any

specificity: it could be anywhere, a provisional and sterile place, a

non-place. The ruling classes try to provide it with a new identity by

means of monumental “brand-name” architecture. This architecture is

independent of the place where it is built; it might as well be anywhere

and it is for that reason ideal for conurbations: it faithfully reflects

the dissolution of the city, the rootless condition that reigns over the

corpse of communitarian values. The “artist” architect is indifferent to

the social environment, an enemy of the continuous narrative, hostile to

the idea of equilibrium with the surroundings. The technological

outrage, the expression of dissonance, in short, the building that is an

insult, is precisely what he is looking for; that reflects his “personal

touch”. The ostentatious building does not have to set down any roots at

all; it only has to land on the surface of the conurbation. It therefore

has a strange feel, as if it came from a “Martian” reality. It cannot

establish the least relation with the inhabitants, since the latter, in

a way, are also “Martians”. The monuments of the era of globalization

destroy the reality of places and exile them to the realm of virtuality.

As images, they are signs of a separate reality, where everyone must

behave like spectators. They are like macro-events: enormous publicity

operations that make a tabula rasa of history. Their presence in this

neutralized chaos materializes the conception of the world of the

managers of urban totalitarianism, and conclusively affirms the criminal

model of society that they have chosen in our names.

If the politics of infrastructure has a weak point, it is not the

dwindling supply of fresh water, the enormous production of wastes or

the generalization of abnormal behavior; the conurbation long ago left

behind any human living conditions. The Achilles Heel of the conurbation

is petroleum. The growth of the suburbs depends on the proliferation of

automobiles and an unlimited supply of fuel. Thus, the end of urban

hyper-development—and of capitalism—will not come at the hands of

climate change or an unprecedented deadly epidemic, but from a simple

energy crisis. Fossil fuels are what made modern industry,

transportation, and therefore conurbations possible. They are so

intimately linked to the global economy that when they begin to become

scarce that economy will not be able to survive. Growth in a context of

declining oil production will lead to social collapse. At this time, no

form of energy, not even nuclear power, can replace oil. The entire

economic system will cease to be profitable. The conurbations, without

automobiles, will not be viable. Millions of second homes will be

abandoned or will be occupied by fugitives from the metropolis. And this

is just what will happen within a few decades. Once again, the objective

conditions will arise that will force proletarianized individuals to

look soberly at the world and to act accordingly. It is therefore not a

matter of sitting and waiting for the corpse of capitalism to make its

exit. It is advisable to take action and to know where to strike. The

struggle to liberate urban space will be the new class struggle. A

radical program must oppose urban development and demand a return to the

city, that is, to the agora and the assembly. It must propose to set

limits to urban space, to restore its form, to reduce its size, to put

brakes on its mobility. To reunite the fragments, to rebuild homes, to

reestablish relations of solidarity and fraternal bonds, to recreate

public life. To de-motorize, to live without haste. To leave the market

behind, to re-localize production, to preserve equilibrium with the

countryside, to demolish three-quarters of what has been built, to make

the territory less crowded. The economy must once again be a simple

domestic affair. Put anonymity behind us. The individual must develop

until he finds his place in the collectivity and puts down roots. The

city must generate an atmosphere that, when breathed by its inhabitants,

will make them free.