agglutinations.com

November 10, 2003

Postscript to "Critical Regionalism Revisited": A Response to Mark Gilbert and Bart Lootsma

Almost two weeks ago, we published Kenneth Frampton's "Critical Regionalism Revisited: Provisional Thoughts on the Future of Urban Design." In the postscript that follows, Frampton elaborates his position, reacting to criticisms posted recently by agglutinations.com contributors Bart Lootsma and Mark Gilbert.

I very much appreciate the responses of Bart Lootsma and Michael Gilbert, although I am left somewhat at a loss as to how our exchange can be meaningfully continued. I do not believe I am alone in thinking the culture of urbanism is largely a lost cause outside the historic core. Jean Nouvel, among others, has publicly made similar statements, and there is hardly anything Heideggerian about his discourse. Certainly, the vestige of the welfare state in Europe still justifies a certain optimism, particularly, say, in Scandinavia, where I am given to understand that the building of “out of town” supermarkets and shopping malls is now forbidden on the grounds that they destroy the socio-economic life of existing urban settlements at varying scales; so much, for now, for Wal-Mart! But, like Wal-Mart, Americanization goes everywhere as many are surely aware. The “think tank” publication produced by the British government in the year 2000 under the chairmanship of Richard Rogers, Towards an Urban Renaissance, gives one cause for hope in its recommendations for the next 20 years of planning policy in the UK, particularly when one reads the recommendation that two-thirds of the estimated need for 3.2 million dwelling units over the next 20 years should be built on existing brownfield sites, amounting, if I recall correctly, to some 45,000 acres in terms of now-vacant industrial land in the UK. However, carrying this plan out would entail a.) the central government restraining local municipalities from releasing greenfield sites for development and b.) subsidizing the detoxification of brownfield sites. All of this could happen, but I seriously doubt that Tony Blair’s (only too Americanized) New Labor will be easily brought to impose such draconian legislation. In short, as in the land-scarce Netherlands, there will nonetheless persist a policy of total suburbanization exactly as Adrien Gauze satirized it in a Venice Biennale (I forget which one) with little “green houses” scattered all of the place! When shall we finally say a long goodbye to the Mondrian landscape of The Netherlands? This brings us back to politics and to Chantal Mouffe who not long ago wrote:

There are many reasons for the decline of the political. But I intend to concentrate my attention on the one dimension I take to be particularly important, the lack of democratic forms of identifications... through which passions could be mobilized towards democratic designs and which would provide the basis for a vibrant agonistic (as opposed to antagonistic) debate as to the shape and the future of the common life…The blurring of frontiers between right and left that we have steadily witnessed in Western countries and which has been presented as a sign of progress and maturity is in my view one of the most pernicious aspects of the disintegration of the political dimension…[O]nce passions cannot be mobilized by democratic parties because they privilege a “consensus at the center,” those passions tend to find other outlets, in diverse fundamentalist movements, around particularist demands or non-negotiable moral issues that cannot be managed by the democratic process.

How exactly do we reenergize and reactivate the design professions and, above all, our digitalized, consumer society, politically speaking, given the way it is currently sequestered by the triumph of globalization? How do we recover the references we have lost or are in process of losing (and here I am not talking about the Heideggerian “loss of nearness”)? Of course, I still do believe that certain “guerilla actions” remain possible, through public transport, for instance, landscape, low-rise, high- density housing, etc., but both of you seem to have much more global projects in mind, the process and form of which remain unclear to me.