Images of Power and Place:
. . . a first step in understanding our built environment is to understand how we understand our built environment.
For the first time in history, a majority of the global population lives in urban environments – landscapes that, increasingly, bear little resemblance to the centralized and self-contained cities of yesterday. Whether the sprawling metropolises of recently industrialized nations – billowing with untold numbers of new residents daily and blossoming into vast swatches of informal settlements as intricate and fragile as a patchwork quilt – or the urban agglomerations that have rippled out from the dying city centers in wealthy countries – pegging tract homes and strip malls to a measureless concrete substrate – once-stable cities are feeling the effects of expansion and decay, development and disenfranchisement.
Now more than ever, we must look at the problem of urbanization as a global phenomenon, exploring and dissembling, if necessary, the dichotomies that define our approach to planning: urban/rural, wealthy/poor, public/private, organized/chaotic, developed/vacant, modern/outdated.
POST/modern: images of power and place explores how the process of image-making has mediated our approach to the built landscape, helping to root these dichotomies at the very core of our understanding, and thus preserving them in the physical forms which we ultimately impress upon the land. POST/modern confronts this process at its most readable, in developing (or: underdeveloped) countries where a legacy of colonialism and intervention has rendered most visible the effects of oversimplified, black-and-white approaches to urbanism.
Focused on postcolonial Johannesburg, a city of almost mythical inequality and contradiction, POST/modern examines how drawings, diagrams and even photographs have helped to construct lasting metaphors – particularly the notion of the "organic" – that served to justify and naturalize an urban agenda of clarity and control. Unwrapping the thing portrayed from the highly politicized mode of portrayal sets free an alternate narrative about the benefits of a more flexible and fine-grained approach to urbanism — one that celebrates the complex, vibrant urban fabric that inhabitants weave for themselves.
Colonial and postcolonial cities the world over have suffered from a history of highly rigid, rational planning initiatives, arising from the West and advanced across vulnerable landscapes, often to the detriment of existing communities. It is a history that, today, many urban thinkers are struggling to repair. And while it is crucial to address this legacy as it has been exported around the world, POST/modern argues that it will prove equally valuable to bring what is learned home, where just as much stands to be gained from revaluing the communal, the chaotic, the diverse, and the ever-changing.
POST/modern was awarded the Fermin R. Ennis Memorial Fellowship for undergraduate or graduate research at Yale School of Architecture.
Confronting a history of developmentalist thinking at its root, POST/modern begins by delving into the original papers of Maurice Emile Henri Rotival, a postwar high modernist and former dean of the Yale School of Architecture responsible for devising and justifying a centralized and far-reaching planning scheme that organized Johannesburg into a landscape of efficiency and extraction. As part of the early jet set, Rotival dealt with planning for newly bourgeoning cities all over the developing world. The ephemera from these productive years – hundreds of feet of unsorted and forgotten drawings and diagrams, as well as bills and personal letters dating from the late ’30s to the early ’60s, tucked away in Yale’s department of Manuscripts and Archives – proved to be as productive a mine as the ones he helped establish in South Africa.
POST/modern treats these bits as artifacts — read not only for what they depict, but for how they depict it. The philosophy underwriting his mode of image-making (and therefore placemaking) sheds light on a history of urban intervention that justifies and naturalizes – primarily through the metaphor of the “organic” city, or city as body – a rigid, top-down agenda thought that continues to underscore urban planning the world over.
But what Rotival’s school of thought failed to account for, even while drawing parallels to the functions and flows of organs and veins, is that no body is static. Cities grow and adapt to the forms imposed on them, editing built history and writing it in new ways.
Today, that history is visible not only in the monuments to progress, commerce and modernity left by Rotival and his contemporaries, but in the messy, complex settlements that arose in service to, and in spite of, such agendas of power. These peri-urban areas share ever-shifting and intertwined stories of hope and despair, creation and destruction. They are the concomitant result of developmentalist planning; the unintended sites of postcolonial architecture. Traditionally, they have been seen as "what's left over," understood only in terms of what they lack – a view enforced by images like the ubiquitous low-angle aerial photograph above. Such a misreading keeps these sites vulnerable to misguided – or worse, malicious – planning schemes. But it also discounts what they have to offer as rich and fertile places with their own story to share. They are the laboratories of a new form of organic architecture, infinitely more alive than Rotival's "city as organism" model.
Juxtaposing Rotival’s organic city with a newer, fluid understanding of urbanism, POST/modern turns to the work of contemporary design firms active in Johannesburg today, tracing the history of urban planning to an age in which small, dispersed, bottom-up design solutions can provide a real, viable alternative to centralized, top-down planning. Drawing on the work of postmodern urbanist Thorsten Deckler of 26'10 South, a contemporary Johannesburg-based design firm, POST/modern explores how more nuanced and sensitive modes of image-making can help develop positive approaches to urban intervention in cities which remain heavily influenced by a history of colonialism.
For Deckler and his contemporaries, this is the new "organic city" – one which is iterative, adaptable and ever-changing. In an age when designers are struggling to reinvigorate the urban core, discovering the benefits of this new urbanism holds great possibility, not only for the postcolonial city, but for cities everywhere.
Rotival described the city as an organism. His relied on an understanding of Johannesburg as service center and "heart" of the region, with arteries reaching north and south to link up with supporting centers of industry and transportation. He assiduously drew graphs and charts calculating the flow of every conceivable piece of his urban system, like cells in a body. He documented the population by racial demographic and income, industry of employment and daily mode of transportation, even looking at various diets for of the vast throngs of miners that laborers that supported the city. He mapped migratory patterns of all Johannesburg's extractive industries, and graphed production. For him, these figures were stats not unlike heart rate and blood pressure: a way to chart an organism's health and predict what should be done in order to medicate. His use of biological metaphor, and the images it produced, lent a "scientific" validity that naturalized his plans for a Johannesburg that relied heavily on the exploitation of people and the environment.