The Halles: Tearing Down, Lifting Up (IV)
“In the face of these developmental dynamics, we believe there is an increasingly urgent need to rethink our most basic assumptions regarding the site, object and agenda of ‘urban’ research. The ‘urban question’ famously posed four decades ago by Lefebvre, Harvey and Castells remains as essential as ever, but it arguably needs to be reposed, in the most fundamental way, in light of early 21st-century conditions. In other words: do we really know, today, where the ‘urban’ begins and ends, or what its most essential features are, socially, spatially or otherwise? […] More radically still, a case can be made that Lefebvre’s postulate (2003 [1970]) of an incipient process of ‘complete’ or ‘planetary’ urbanization is today being actualized in practice. Despite pervasive sociospatial unevenness and persistent territorial inequality, the entire fabric of planetary settlement space is now being both extensively and intensively urbanized (Schmid, 2005; Soja and Kanai, 2005; Madden, 2011). In the face of this prospect, and especially given the unprecedented pace, scale and volatility of contemporary worldwide urbanization, it seems essential to consider whether inherited concepts and methods for understanding and transforming cities remain at all adequate to contemporary conditions. Quite simply, the oft-repeated mantra that a global ‘urban transition’ has recently occurred due to the apparent fact that over half of the world’s population now lives within cities does not even begin to capture the intellectual, representational and political complexities associated with grasping the contemporary global urban condition.”
Neil Brenner, “Assemblage Urbanism and the Challenges of Critical Urban Theory” (2011)
“Le problème permanent d’Unibail[2] est de devoir concilier la vaste clientèle captive des 800 000 «banlieusards» qui passent quotidiennement par le pôle RER juste en dessous avec celle des «Parisiens» de la rente immobilière et du tourisme du dessus. D’autant que cette dernière avait pris ses distances, en même temps que des enseignes prestigieuses comme Dior, Cardin ou Céline, lorsque le site fut estimé envahi de banlieusards durant les années 1980. D’où le projet aujourd’hui énoncé de faire revenir les «Parisiens», «requalifier» le commerce et la clientèle, «reparisianiser», pour contrer «la mauvaise image » des Halles […] Paris est à présent un pôle métropolitain […] Les jeunes de la métropole expriment très exactement cette situation lorsqu’ils disent privilégier les Halles parce qu’elles sont «moit-moit» des divers lieux, des gens, très fractionnés et éloignés les uns des autres. «Moit-moit» est ainsi bien autre chose que la centralité, ou l’équidistance de la fonction transport, pour désigner d’abord la qualité d’un lieu, d’un territoire. À cette contextualisation s’ajoute le privilège d’une dimension festive. La densité de gens de tous les horizons parisiens aux Halles est ainsi spécifique de ces lieux particuliers qui caractérisent toutes les grandes métropoles modernes. Le problème est que ce passage du statut de centre de la capitale à celui de territoire investi des affects de multitudes de métropolitains n’est pas pris en compte par l’ancien centre, ni par ses institutions ni par ses bobos. Il exigerait en effet des équipements, des espaces communs, dont nul ne parle. On en donne ici deux exemples […]”
Thierry Baudouin & Michèle Collin, “Territorialisations métropolitaines et projet urbain” (2008)
The Halles: Tearing Down, Lifting Up (III)
“If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built (more about that later) product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown . . . Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inven- tions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory . . . Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not reg- ister on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids. According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is already more Junkspace under construction in the twenty-first century than has survived from the twentieth . . . It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the twentieth century. Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century; we have been reading a footnote under a microscope hoping it would turn into a novel; our concern for the masses has blinded us to People’s Architecture. Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing. . . the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air-conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain . . . It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish, echo) . . . Junkspace is sealed, held together not by structure but by skin, like a bubble.”
Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace” (2002), p. 175-6
“Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization. Rebuilding Paris absorbed huge quantities of labour and capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with suppressing the aspirations of the Parisian workforce, was a primary of social stabilization. He drew upon the utopian plans that Fourierists and Saint-Simonians had debated the 1840s for reshaping Paris, but with one big difference: he transformed the scale at which the urban process was imagined. When the architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff showed Haussmann his plans for a new boulevard, Haussmann threw them back at him saying: ‘not wide enough . . . you have it 40 metres wide and I want it 120.’ He annexed the suburbs and redesigned whole neighbourhoods such as Les Halles. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crédit Mobilier and Crédit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. In effect, he helped resolve the capital-surplus disposal problem by setting up a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural improvements.”
David Harvey, “Right to The City” (2008), p. 26
Guest post and all photos: Antoine G.
The Halles: Tearing Down, Lifting Up (I)
“If the break that Haussmann supposedly made was nowhere near as radical as he claimed, then we must search (as Saint-Simon and Marx insist) for the new in the lineaments of the old. But the emergence of the new (as Saint-Simon and Marx also insist) can still have a not-to-be-denied revolutionary significance. Haussmann and his colleagues were willing to engage in creative destruction on a scale hitherto unseen. The formation of Empire out of the ruins of republican democracy enabled them to do this. Let me preview the sorts of shifts I have in mind (…) The provisioning of Paris through Les Halles had long been recognized as inefficient and inadequate. It had been a hot topic of debate during the July Monarchy. The former prefect Berger, under orders from Louis Napoleon as President, had made it a priority to redesign it. Figure 7 shows the old system (soon to be demolished), where merchants stored their goods as best they could under the overhanging eaves of the houses. Louis Napoleon suspended work on Baltard’s new building of 1852—known locally as “the fortress of Les Halles”—as a totally unacceptable solution (figure 8). “We want umbrellas” made “of iron,” Haussmann told a chastened Baltard in 1853, and that, in the end, is what Baltard gave him, though only after Haussmann had rejected (thereby earning Baltard’s perpetual resentment) several hybrid designs. The result was a building that has long been regarded as a modernist classic (see figure 9). In his Mémoires, Haussmann suggests he saved Baltard ’s reputation (when Louis Napoleon asked how an architect who produced something so awful in 1852 could produce such a work of genius two years later, Haussmann immodestly replied “different prefect!”)”
David Harvey, “Introduction” in Paris, Capital of Modernity (2003) p. 12
“This issue of how to see the city and how to represent it during phases of intense change is a daunting challenge. Novelists like Balzac and artists like Daumier pioneer ways to do it in interesting but indirect ways. It is a curious fact, however, that although there are innumerable studies and monographs on individual cities available, few of them turn out to be particularly memorable, let alone enlightening about the human condition. There are, of course, exceptions. I have always taken Carl Schorske’s fin-de-siècle Vienna as the model to be aspired to, no matter how impossible to replicate.19 An interesting feature of that work is precisely how it manages to convey some sense of the totality of what the city was about through a variety of perspectives on material life, on cultural activities, on patterns of thought within the city. The most interesting urban writing is often of a fragmentary and perspectival sort. The difficulty then is to see the totality as well as the parts, and it is on this point that fin-de-siècle Vienna works its particular magic. This difficulty is pervasive in urban studies and urban theory. We have abundant theories as to what happens in the city but a singular lack of theory of the city; and those theories of the city that we do have often appear to be so one-dimensional and so wooden as to eviscerate the richness and complexity of what the urban experience is about. One cannot easily approach the city and the urban experience, therefore, in a one- dimensional way.”
Ibid, p. 18
Guest post and all photos: Antoine G.
