On my voyage of epic proportions from Kotor to London by train, I passed through Basel and visited the Swiss Architecture Museum. Specifically to the Balkanology exhibition, which played to one of my interests (urban development), one of my locations (the Balkans) and one of my criteria (it was cheap).
The exhibition was divided into two parts. The first was a recital of modernist architecture in the former Yugoslavia, which proved surprisingly effective at making me take a second look at some buildings that I’d previously dismissed. The key problem for structures such as the National and University Library of Kosovo is that while on their own terms they’re quite interesting architecturally (although not necessarily charming aesthetically), when you put them in the middle of (for example) a large patch of waste ground next to a bombed-out orthodox church, they’ll always look terrible. While some of the buildings in the exhibition can probably be salvaged, most of them can’t – for reasons explored in the second part of the exhibition.
This was devoted to the problems of rapid urbanisation in the Balkans, particularly the proliferation of improvised housing in a largely unregulated urban environment. Prestige projects such as the buildings displayed in the first section – buildings designed to inculcate a sense of national identity, or to communicate an ideological bearing – fail completely in such environments, overwhelmed by the vigour of their constantly mutating surroundings. In the Balkans, there’s a particular problem because the dominant communist style of solid concrete blocks looks pretty ridiculous next to an apartment block with three extra storeys built on to it, all of which are daily decked out with laundry, and suffering from a rash of satellite dishes.
It would be tempting to use an urban jungle metaphor here, with the generic building (say, the National Theatre) playing the role of a rare architectural orchid and the urban sprawl around it representing weeds that choke the life out of that precious flower. However this would play into a hegemonic interpretation of the city space, one that privileges the large public and private projects that the powerful prefer because they can control. This approach to urban planning is a guaranteed fail as soon as the spaces in which it is presented takes in more people than they were designed to manage. In those cases their purity can only be maintained by controlling access either through economic or physical barriers – a good example here would be Islamabad, contrasted with its unruly neighbour Rawalpindi.
So that urban jungle metaphor is doomed from the start, and instead we should prefer a gardening metaphor. Those large buildings are the private estates of stately homes, designed to be contemplated rather than lived in, accessible to the public only upon the whim of the landowner, serving an aesthetic (or ideological) purpose more than a functional one. Meanwhile improvised housing is the kitchen garden – much smaller, built for productivity not beauty, serving the household or community much more effectively, accessible to anybody with a few square inches of land. If that latter metaphor is right, however, it presents a problem on two levels.
The first is that cities need public space, and that means those private estates need to be protected somehow. How we maintain public space against the weight of numbers is going to be a huge problem in the twenty-first century – I shudder when I think of Tbilisi, a relatively pleasant city where the government is determined to privatize everything (including the traffic islands). Public space includes infrastructure, of course, the roads and pipes and wires that make the city work. Is it possible to preserve the public space without attacking the kitchen gardens – without starting to treat them as weeds?
This leads to the second problem, that of regulation. Some form of urban planning is necessary for any city that doesn’t want to collapse under its own weight, but without sufficient regulation in place urban planning runs the risk of becoming meaningless. Too much regulation leads to static cities – but a city is a living organism and, if it doesn’t grow, then it dies. If I was feeling foolish, I’d predict that in the twenty-first century, we’re going to see the trends of urban growth morph into urban necrosis, particularly in developing countries, as whole sections of city simply collapse – either into massive slums or static citadels.
Too little regulation, of course, leads to Balkanology.
