99 Percent Invisible: Blood, Sweat & Tears (City of the Future, Part 2)

The Bijlmermeer (or Bijlmer, for short) was built just outside of Amsterdam in the 1960s. It was designed by modernist architects to be a “city of the future” with its functions separated into distinct zones. To Modernists, it represented a vision of the city as a well-oiled machine. Upon completion, it was a massive expanse of 31 concrete towers. There were 13,000 apartments, many of them unoccupied. Just sitting there, totally empty.

The Bijlmermeer is noisy, thanks in part to planes constantly flying in and out of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport nearby. And in the 1970s, many of those planes carried residents from Suriname, a small nation on the northern coast of South America.

Suriname, and a handful of islands in the Caribbean, had been Dutch colonies since the 1600s, serving as a lucrative source of revenue from slave labor. Slavery was abolished in Suriname in 1863, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that its predominantly black population become citizens of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

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99 Percent Invisible: Bijlmer (City of the Future, Part 1)

In 1933, a group of architects boarded a ship and set sail from Marseille, France to Athens, Greece. On board were several of the world’s most famous modernist architects and artists, including Erno Goldfinger, Le Corbusier, Alvar Alto, and dozens of others.

There was a silent film made of the voyage that shows the architects on the deck in short-sleeved white shirts and sunglasses. The cruise was the setting for the International Congress of Modern Architecture, commonly known by its French acronym, CIAM.

The subject of this particular congress was city-planning. The members of CIAM thought that cities were too congested, noisy, polluted and chaotic. And they believed some of these problems could be solved by separating out the functions of a city into distinct zones for housing, working, recreation, and traffic.

Zoning wasn’t a new idea, but the architects from CIAM wanted to take it farther. The living spaces would be in high-rise apartments so that the ground-level was open for recreation and collective spaces— live in the sky, play on the ground. Cars would even drive on elevated roads so that pedestrians could have the space below all to themselves. There would also be separate districts for industry and shopping. Where old European cities were winding, cluttered and polluted, this new one would be linear, open, and clean, with everything in its proper place.

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The Calvert Journal: Empire state of mind: projecting power in post-Soviet architecture

The 12-storey house with a tower of 18 stories connects seamlessly to the monumental buildings of the Stalin era. “It is terrible to say it” — Belov hesitates for a moment — “but it is still true: Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, simply had good taste.” Belov also has at the ready the politically correct superstructure for his empire project. He says it is about “de-Stalinising neoclassicism.” In lieu of the enormous Imperial Palace, a playful “House of the Avant-Garde” had originally been planned, with individual wings conceived according to motifs from the painters Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko. It would have been Moscow’s version of the Friedensreich Hundertwasser House. [...]

On the other hand, the photographs include futuristic-looking structures, like the government ministry buildings in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan; the “Zeppelin” high-rise in Moscow; the headquarters of the Russian Railways, also in Moscow; or the chess centre in the oil town of Khanty-Mansiysk in far northern Russia. The point is always to shine with a particular geometric form. [...]

In Moscow City, the symbol of Russian turbo-capitalism, communism seems light-years away. But capitalism and communism have one thing in common: the human being is small, and always just an object. Herfort’s photographs illustrate this as well. When people can be seen at all, they are tiny in comparison to the buildings photographed.

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openDemocracy: Radical democracy and municipal movements

Jeremy Gilbert (JG): That’s a good question and arguably it depends on what you mean by ‘traditional notion’. If by this we really mean ‘mainstream liberal-democratic notions’ then obviously, these are being challenged. But in many ways, the demands of these movements, and the basic desires and assumptions informing them are nor particularly new. There isn’t much in the ‘new’ radical municipal politics that the Barcelona anarchists of the 1930s, or the Paris Communards, would not have recognised. Internationalism was always a part of their ideology as well. [...]

JG: The answer here is pretty simple. We don’t live in city-states. Even in the most urbanised country in Europe, the UK, more people live in small-to-medium-sized towns than in large towns and cities. We live in essentially suburban societies. How to scale up and extend practices of radical democracy beyond specific urban locations is a key question. In the age of instant horizontal communication, it ought to be easier to resolve this question than ever before, at least technically and organisationally. Ideologically, culturally and politically, it may be more difficult. [...]

I am very happy to say that at the present time, the Labour Party leadership in the UK is moving strongly in the direction of advocating forms of collective ownership of businesses and services that are distributed, democratic and co-operative in nature rather than being centralised, technocratic, bureaucratic or paternalistic. They have recently promoted a ground-breaking document on ‘Alternative Models of Ownership’, as well as calling a national conference to discuss it, which is quite inspirational in its vision. [...]

Secondly, it’s often difficult to persuade people (organisational comrades, local communities or political constituencies, trade unionists, whoever) that radical democratic objectives are necessary or desirable, or are more than pleasant diversions from the ‘real’ business of protecting their material interests. I think it’s almost always crucial to make the case for radical democratic practices and demands by emphasizing how necessary they are to the realisation of many basic material objectives.

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The Observer view on Theresa May’s calamitous Brexit strategy | Observer editorial

It is certainly the case that Donald Tusk, president of the council of ministers, caught Mrs May unawares with his blunt declaration that her Chequers plan was unworkable. For the past two years, Mr Tusk has played good cop to bad cop Michel Barnier, the chief EU negotiator. But while Mr Tusk is an anglophile, he is also an ardent believer in the European project, as befits a former Polish prime minister. He has been a candid friend to Mrs May, but he could not force her to listen, so in the end he mockingly cast her adrift. [...]

From the start, EU leaders insisted no cherrypicking of withdrawal terms would be allowed. But Mrs May ignored them. The complex issues raised by the Northern Ireland border were flagged up early on. But only in recent months, to the profound frustration of the Irish government, have Mrs May and her cabinet taken this question seriously – and she still lacks a solution. EU officials complain, with justice, that her inflexible negotiating stance revealed an ignorant disregard, or lack of understanding, of the basic principles upon which the EU is based, namely the single market, free movement of people and goods and a common regulatory and legal framework. [...]

Perhaps the most startling aspect of Mrs May’s performance last week was that the EU leaders’ multiple rebuffs clearly took her by surprise. Why so? They were merely reiterating positions they have maintained for the past two years or more. Does she now, finally, grasp the evidence of her own eyes and ears? Does she understand her Chequers plan, rejected at home and abroad, is doomed? And does she really still believe a no-deal outcome could be anything other than a catastrophe? Judging by Friday’s negative, aggressive Downing Street statement, she remains in denial. She has learned nothing – and has absolutely nothing new to offer. Mrs May is in a very deep hole, but she will not stop digging.

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