The Physical Manifestations of Societal Forces

The city is shaped by intangible lines of force; it is social, political and economic pushes and pulls, rendered visible. The ordering of the city is the ordering of society. 

In One Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Manuel De Landa compares the unseen forces that shape cities to the geological agents of time and pressure. Like lava hardening into rock, a molten culture hardens into a material landscape. De Landa unites all of Earth’s processes, both natural and man-made, in terms of the flowing and the stiffening of ‘stuff’ — physical matter as well as ideas and information. Such a reading allows De Landa to understand the formation of human landscapes as a simple continuation of a bio-geo-physical process. Cityscapes, like geo-scapes, are constantly in flux, responding to sub-surface pressures, albeit on a much-reduced timescale. 

De Landa understands these formations “not in static terms as mere physical patterns . . . but in dynamic terms, as patterns capable of self-replication and catalysis.” The physical spaces that one moment in culture casts off invariably become the cradle, the actual mold, from which the next will arise — a matrix that mints ‘what is to come’ just as much as ‘what came before’ minted it. These cycles, repeated throughout history, amount to an accumulation of hierarchical structures through which society is performed. They build up into a cultural exoskeleton, growing like coral. Thus, the city becomes a crystallization — culture fossilized. Such an imagining of cities allows us to treat space as artifact. Understanding space — the way it is produced and used and abandoned and reborn — can be a key to understanding a culture at each moment in the cycle. 

It's a powerful way of conceptualizing the built environment as an extension of the natural environment. Like naturalists, we may examine the physical artifacts we find in order to reveal the underlying principles of nature by which they were created. Any good naturalist, though, will explain that it is just as important to use these underlying principles, once they are revealed, to predict what will continue to happen; that is, the metaphor becomes cyclical. 

The metaphor is particularly striking when applied to a culture that is changing rapidly — where the forces shaping cities cause radical reappropriations and reinterpretations of space. Perhaps nowhere are these cultural clashes, eruptions, earthquakes rendered more clearly than in South Africa. 

In under a century, South Africa grew from birth (with the 1910 union of the Cape and Natal colonies) to sovereignty (won from the British in 1931) to complete independence from the Commonwealth of Great Britain (finally declared in 1961). In under a century, the state consolidated power into the hands of the white minority which swelled to majority only to be overtaken by African migrants, passed a series of Land Acts (starting in 1913) that prohibited blacks from purchasing property and restricted the areas in which they might live, formalized the policy of apartheid (in 1948), underwent a massive economic restructuring, endured an intense period of political upheaval, and finally in 1994, officially dismantled the formal policy of apartheid and held a democratic and multi-racial election for the first time ever. In 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) grasped power, and has maintained it ever since. And yet, what is left to be uncovered in the geography that this maniacal overturn of cultural epochs has left behind? 

For South Africa’s cities, particularly its largest, Johannesburg, the transition from colonial outpost to modern metropolis is layered in the cityscape. Johannesburg has been the canvas upon which world-wide paradigms of development have been painted — particularly in the fifty year transition from newly-independent post-war South Africa to a South Africa that has indisputably entered into the phenomenon of globalization. By treating this spatial legacy as artifact, we can begin to understand those paradigms. 

 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books. 1997.