... Citing Antonio Negri, Tafuri invoked the “Planner State” of a corporatist compromise where capital absorbed social democracy, making it all the more powerful in so doing. That his critique is still often cited is strange, given what a striking misreading this was of the way the wind was blowing in the 1970s, when capital was actually preparing to almost completely jettison this class compromise, favoring instead a war on everything from trade unions to municipal housing. ... Morris, then a member of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and a correspondent of Engels, was conspicuous both for the radicalism of his vision of class struggle and the conservatism of his vision of the city. His disciples would lose the first trait, but cling to the second. The architect and planner Raymond Unwin, a fellow SDF member, would return to the idea, ridiculed by Marx and Engels, of building the socialist society in fragments under capitalism, drawing on the self-organized but otherwise deeply Fabian “common-sense socialism” of Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City of To-morrow.” Between 1903 and 1913, Unwin designed the garden city of Letchworth just outside of London, the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the massive suburb of Wythenshawe to the south of Manchester. The first two were funded by philanthropists, and aimed to mix, to the point where it would no longer be obvious which was which, cottages for workers and cottages for the middle class. It was the latter that soon dominated. Letchworth is a commuter town like any other, while Hampstead Garden Suburb — birthplace of Jerry Springer and Elizabeth Taylor and home to a generation of Labour Party leaders — is by some measures the richest part of London. In Wythenshawe, meanwhile, where houses were rented out by the Manchester City Council to working-class residents on their municipal waiting list, the picturesque arrangements of homes with large gardens along winding tree-lined streets housed tens of thousands. However, they lacked all the facilities — the institutes, the town centers — that were planned and built in the philanthropic settlements. Wythenshawe lacked a center for an astonishing forty years, before one was finally built in the 1970s. It never even had a railway station. This combination of partial failure for workers and total success for the affluent suggested that Morris’ neo-medieval vision of the socialist city really was impossible under British capitalism. The state could build houses, but wouldn’t pay for the social and collective facilities that might create real urban spaces; while private philanthropy created a deeply insular middle-class utopia, where the conservatism of the suburban vision would become increasingly clear. ... The self-expression of the worker in building was increasingly seen as a remnant, mere nostalgia for the pre-industrial age. When asked by the German expressionist playwright Ernst Toller how he justified the exploitation of workers, the former head of the metalworkers’ union, Aleksei Gastev, claimed that scientific management was a step on the path to eliminating labor completely. With it, working hours would radically decrease until only a couple of hours a day would be necessary. After a time, the machines would do all the labor. ... Craft traditions were still practiced in the unusually radical social-democratic regime of interwar Vienna. Huge city blocks enclosing various collective facilities, almost mini-cities in themselves, were replete with statues, majolica, and mosaics, and were meticulous in their detailing and materials, with little sign of Taylorism. Partly, this avoidance of mechanization was dictated by the need to create employment, creating intensive work in an oversized city that was no longer the capital of an empire. It’s unlikely that a similar impulse was behind the Soviet Union’s sudden turn in the mid 1930s from modernism to a strange, eclectic neoclassicism, but the similarities can be striking. Engelsplatz, the last big project in Vienna before its estates were bombarded by fascists, was an immense, tile-clad, symmetrical neoclassical block with symbolic towers, beacons, and statues of burly, advancing workers. It is a short step from there to the huge, rhetorical “workers’ palaces” of Stalinism. As if in compensation for overcrowding, piece rates, terror, and the absence of political representation, a large and lucky minority of workers — usually those who had distinguished themselves in “shock work” — were given palatial apartments. These boasted high ceilings, abundant surface ornament and an infrastructure of schools, clubs, and cinemas, such as can be seen in workers’ districts of Moscow or in factory towns like Nizhny Novgorod. Ridiculed, perhaps rightly, as pure spectacle, these structures, like the metro systems below, had the virtue of a “world turned upside-down” approach to the city. They repurposed forms that were invented for the enjoyment of eighteenth-century absolute rulers, Parisian bourgeoises, or Khans and Tsars to house steelworkers and miners. Most, however, continued to live in tightly subdivided nineteenth-century apartment blocks, where several families would share a single small flat. ... The displacements caused by Stalin’s super-Hausmannism only exacerbated a disastrous housing problem — the first sign of de-Stalinization, in 1954, came with a decree recommending simplified, prefabricated construction and an end to architectural “excess.” What happened next is, of course, the familiar image of the socialist city in the world of cliché — the intensification of Weimar Germany’s cult of mechanization and prefabrication to the point where entire districts housing over one hundred thousand people, such as Ursynów, in Warsaw, would be built from identical concrete panels. ... Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, rather than a monolithic logic of incipient Fordism, the conjunction of socialism and architecture was conspicuous for its sharp shifts of argument, from prefab to crafted and back, from suburban to ultra-urban, from the abundance of social facilities in Red Vienna to the paucity of anything but houses and churches in Wythenshawe. This presents a complex index of possibilities. Is there a need to choose which of them was genuinely prefigurative of the future? Trotsky’s suggestion in Literature and Revolution that competing schools of aesthetics would replace political parties in the “age of rest” would suggest not. Yet these are still live questions under capitalism. ... https://jacobinmag/2014/10/imagining-the-socialist-city/
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 21:35:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015