Is there life after death for cities?

by George M. Chatzistergiou

According to reports in the international press, for several months before the war in Iraq Baghdad experienced an unprecedented boom in its real estate market. The reason behind this investing activity is supposed to have been the expectations for better growth prospects after the war. An informed Greek reader of such news may not be able to avoid remembering a sad parallel. Only months before the Destruction of Smyrna in August, 1922, adverts placed in Greek newspapers spoke of great opportunities to invest in property in that city in Asia Minor. After the fire and the persecution that followed it, all such property forever disappeared from the map. So is there an afterlife for cities following a devastation? If yes, what kind of life?

The book “Out of Ground Zero. Case studies in Urban Reinvention” deals with such issues. After the tragedy of the World Trade Center in New York, the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University, organised a series of lectures on the reaction of various cities to a ‘disaster’ and their passage from destruction to rebirth and growth. The book “Out of Ground Zero” is a compilation of essays based on all those lectures and covering a broad spectrum: the cities examined span most continents as well as the most typical phases of the age of modernism.

The earthquake of a magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale in Lisbon (1755) –presented by Kenneth Maxwell– was one of the mightiest natural disasters in recent European history. However, instead of disappearing from the map Lisbon was rebuilt from scratch following the principles of the Enlightenment, and the Portuguese capital was transformed from a backward, medieval city to a modern urban and commercial centre. In the case of Chicago –as described by Ross Miller– the destruction was caused by the Great Fire (1871), which burned down 1,800 blocks and left 90,000 people homeless. Chicago was at the centre of the rapidly growing American capitalism, so the drive for rebuilding was led by the forces of ‘private enterprise.’ The downtown area was treated as a tabula rasa, and a frenzy of construction of new –but low-quality– buildings ensued, during which “great fortunes were made”. In the second and more mature phase of rebuilding, after the limits of the cheap structures had become obvious, the famous Chicago skyscrapers rose as the gleaming symbols of a new era.

The cycle of ‘optimistic stories’ is completed by the accounts of the rebuilding of Rotterdam in Holland and Plymouth in England –by Han Meyer and Alan Powers, respectively– both of which had been bombed by the Germans in the 2^nd World War. In both these examples it was not a case of rebuilding just one city but of dealing with devastation on a national scale, especially in Britain. The “grey modernism” which prevailed in post-war cities in Britain may well have to do with the resources available for such an extensive operation. On the other hand, given that the book focuses on ‘happy stories,’ there is a marked awkwardness in the rest of the texts which deal with the “stagnating” cities in former Yugoslavia (Milan Prodanovic), with Hiroshima (Carola Hein), but also with Jerusalem (Kanan Makiya) and New York (Max Page).

The book has its weaknesses, as it does not examine certain crucial issues. For instance, what were the resources available for rebuilding in each case? What was the system for the production of buildings, and the associated technology? What was the makeup of the city’s society, and the dynamic of its change in relation to the rebuild process? Also, what are the characteristics of those cities which meet the conditions for ‘rising renewed from their ashes’, like the phoenix?

Despite its shortcomings –which it shares with much of the international bibliography on the subject, anyway– the book “Out of Ground Zero” is essentially a panorama of examples of large-scale reconstruction, and this is interesting in itself. However, it can also be read in the opposite way, as a panorama of destroyed cities. The book does not examine the various instances of latent or erupting violence in times of peace (the American intellectual Mike Davis speaks of “potential civil war” because of the existence of black ghettos in major American cities), but the destruction by natural or man-related causes (especially war). The parameter of ‘potential destruction’ was hitherto neglected in the theoretical discourse about the city. Steeped in modernism’s fundamental notion of constant, unbroken ‘progress,’ many relevant books or theories discuss mostly the ‘achievements’ of cities (the steps forward), or perhaps the difficulties and problems in achieving the desired ‘visions.’ Yet ‘destruction’ –as pointed out by the French thinker Paul Virilio, who introduced this concept in the contemporary theoretical discourse– is among the structural elements of ‘growth.’ As he says characteristically in A Landscape of Events (Collection of Essays, The MIT Press), the innovation of the ship introduces the innovation of the shipwreck… Each new technological advance, with its system of instruments and machines, comes with a possibility of new dangers arising from it. In this sense, it is not only war which can cause ‘destruction’, but also the ‘dark or rear side’ of the means of production.

The gravity of the problem lies in the huge magnitude of potential destructiveness in our age. This is due to the advances in technology as well as to the way modern cities are organised (highly concentrated population, the nature of infrastructures, etc.). Indeed, the magnitude of destructiveness keeps rising exponentially. Suffice it to compare the cases of Lisbon (1755) and Hiroshima (1945), as they are described in “Out of Ground Zero”, and then contemplate the developments in the field of destructiveness from the end of World War II to this day.

Acknowledging destruction as a momentous parameter of the developments in today’s world certainly does not mean accepting ‘calamity’ as an inevitable consequence. The realisation that the vector of ‘growth’ may have a negative as well as a positive direction must be combined with the acceptance that this direction is determined by human actions. In this respect, the ‘stories of optimism’ in “Out of Ground Zero” make sense, even if they are about remedying rather than preventing devastation. No matter which way it is read, the book opens up ways for more mature reflection.

Joan Ockman (ed.),

Out of Ground Zero. Case Studies in Urban Reinvention

Prestel, 2002; pp. 208