DG Shane - Metacity - Origins and Implications.pdf - DECLASSIFIED BOOKS - rc51

Metacity; origins and implications.

D.G.Shane

The Dutch group MVRDV first used the term “Metacity” in 2000 to

describe a city that was formed from information, meta meaning about or

above in Greek, as in meta data or meta phor (Shane 2011, Shane and

McGrath 2012). The city thus became a statistical entity formed of masses of

data, describing relationships amongst its populations, its environments, and

its various systems of flows and stasis. MVRDV's Metacity was a data cube

containing information about all the inhabitants on earth, a cube based on

the demolished Kowloon Walled City: a three-dimensional slum, The City of

Darkness (MVRDV 1998). This heterotopic and chaotic, hyper-dense urban

village, used in some action movies before demolition, was a messy and

informal, a maze of corridors, stairs, wires and rooms, far from the clean,

transparent cube of data envisioned by the Dutch architectural group.

The metacity of information contained three other contemporary urban

models. In part the data cube reflects the metropolitan model, the idea that

the complexity of the city can be controlled from a single center by a single

urban actor as in the dream of earlier imperial regimes with power residing

in their original, "mother" city, but at a new global, United Nations scale. In

part the metacity incorporates the widely distributed, mega-scale

characteristics of Gottmann's (1961, 1990) auto-dependent megalopolis

model that is in crisis as the true costs of petroleum powered growth become

clearer in terms of global climate change. The metacity also includes

elements of the fragmented metropolis model especially its powerfully

interconnected digital realm that created the dense urban fragments and

informational clusters to provide resilience and back up for the megalopolis

in the crises of the 1970's and 80's, leading to the megamalls of the 90's and

early 2000's (Shane 2011).

Besides supporting giant new nodes and sites, the important point of the

metacity refers to the role of information in shaping the perception and use

of the city, so that areas that formerly appeared as countryside or peri-urban

territories now fall under the urban umbrella (Gleick 2012). Urban form

thus becomes at once urban and rural, a conditioned described as “desakota”

(village-city) by Terry McGee (1971,1991, 1995, 1997,2002, 2007). This

paper will examine the origins of the metacity in earlier urban models and

D.G.Shane Metacity; origins and implications.

implications of the city of information for the definition of the city in the

future, including the need for new hyper-dense urban nodes.

1. Information and Urban Models in the megacity/metacity.

After the Second World War many governments in the modern world

realized the importance both of controlling public propaganda information

channels and maintaining secret communication channels for their own use.

In the metropolitan model this meant that the largest number of people could

assemble in one place at one time to be addressed by the great leader with

obvious implications for urban space, as in Mao's remodeling of Tiananmen

Square, Beijing in 1956. The new square could hold one million people,

twice the number of Stalin's Red Square in Moscow (Judt 2006). East

German technicians provided a special electronics dan wei work factory unit

798 (now the Beijing art complex) that could build a public address system

for the lampposts in the square (Woorden 2008). The state radio system in

China, like many other states including Britain's BBC, would carry the

leader's speeches to every living room and kitchen in the metropolis,

controlling channels of information and shaping the perception of the city

and world.

This "propaganda model" of top down, metropolitan information distribution

still exists in many countries of the world (Herman and Chomsky 2002),

perpetuating the metropolitan model. In Gottmann's (1961) megalopolis

model modern communication systems on the American East Coast from

Boston to Washington played a big role in his definition of the urban

territory. He detailed the volume of information exchange by counting the

number of telephone calls, the flow of telegraph messages and mail volume,

as well as the human flow by rail, road and plane along the corridor (Shane

2011). Television broadcasting, with its three main companies controlling

three syndicated channels, also formed an important informational

innovation in this territory, an innovation that proved to have a political

dimension with the election of President Kennedy in 1960.

While the Federal highway programs allowed the wide distribution of the

city over a vast territory of the megalopolis and federal loans financed the

new single-family homes of the American dream, the Federally licensed and

D.G.Shane Metacity; origins and implications.

approved TV and radio networks held the urban system together. The big

American media companies of the megalopolis, many owned by the same

families as the newspapers of the metropolis, fought to get the TV installed

in every megalopolitan living room (Geller 1990). Here wives and children

would be exposed all day to commercials for goods and services available at

nearby malls spaced at regular intervals (Gruen 1964). From the

informational and broadcasting point of view the megalopolis had its own

geography and morphology of gigantic broadcasting towers and domestic

antennas, spaced with regard to topography and market share as on Long

Island, New York around Levittown (Bertomen 1991).

Information channels multiplied in the Fragmented Metropolis as various

urban actors, previously excluded from the media and made their voices

heard to air their grievances (Jacobs 1961). Both the metropolis and

megalopolis fell apart during the oil shocks of the 70's and 80's as oil prices

rose and inflation took off in industrialized societies, destroying the

consensus around social and democratic goals established after the Second

World War. Simultaneously the rise of OPEC and the massive flows of

petrodollars in the global system established a new network of financial

control centers in London, New York and Tokyo (Sassen 1991).

These financial centers required high speed communication systems,

initially in micro-wave towers and later by fiber optic cable, to trade 24

hours a day around the world (Graham and Marvin 2001). SOM's design for

the Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan tower (1958) provided a key example of

the architecture of this new money making machine, with its podium with a

roof terrace plaza and modern tower, looking down on the New York Stock

Exchange and Federal Reserve Bank (Shane 2011). Later Manhattan's World

Financial Center (Cesar Pelli 1986), expanded this architecture to include a

mall and tower combination, located in the middle of the Battery Park City

residential new town in town urban fragment (Cooper Eckstat 1978).

In the informational metacity each of these urban models with their urban

actors, sets of goals and values, even symbolic forms, retains its own

consistency and logic within a larger network. Foucault (1967, 1984)

described three similar systems of organizing information as separate

systems of thought. One system focused on emplacement or place making,

one concentrated on displacement or flow, and one system created a hybrid

D.G.Shane Metacity; origins and implications.

mixture of both of these systems with an emphasis on mixing fast-changing

information in shifting sites (Shane 2005, De Cauter +Dehaene 2008).

ILLUSTRATION 1. 4 urban models diagram.

2. Heterotopic informational systems in the metacity.

The metropolis, megalopolis and fragmented metropolis all continue as

layered, informational systems in the metacity. Foucault (1967, 1984)

proposed that one way to look at a system of thought or information in a

society was to look at what was excluded from that system, what was placed

in the "space of the other", the heterotopia of the system. Each urban model

implies a system of information that for logical consistency requires the

exclusion of non-conforming patterns. Foucault proposed that heterotopias

in systems of thought were good places to quickly the study the logic of the

dominant system that made the exclusions. He also argued that heterotopias

were not abstract or invisible spaces, but real places on the ground, in the

D.G.Shane Metacity; origins and implications.

city or countryside that held non-conforming elements, reflecting the

dominant values of the system operators. Urban geographers especially

valued this "spatial turn" in the late 1980's (Harvey 1991, Soja 1989).

One of the advantages of Foucault's analytical system is that it connects

specific urban actors and knowledge systems with specific urban sites or

institutions that hold non-conforming people and thus bring into focus key

values of the system of thought. In Lynch's model of the city of faith for

instance, a feudal, hierarchical elite of warlords or priests tied many people

to the land as slaves or peasants. Here McLuhan (1962, 1964) emphasized

how medieval priests used the European cathedral as a heterotopic, mass

communication and advertising device, saving souls while enriching the

church. In this society Foucault found hidden heterotopias of "crisis", spaces

that people could enter and leave voluntarily while they passed through a

temporary, personal change in private. Amongst many examples he

highlighted charitable almshouses in the medieval period. Such places were

known by word of mouth and hidden in plain sight, using normative urban

morphologies as a disguise. The famous almshouses of Leuven, Belgium, for

instance, lie trapped within a perimeter block system of row houses (Shane

2005). Foucault saw this non-repressive, voluntary, consensual, word of

mouth tradition continued in modern society in the boarding school,

honeymoon house and modern motel.

Foucault also closely examined a second, modern heterotopic informational

system, the heterotopia of "deviance", symbolized by Jeremy Bentham's

Panopticon prison design from the 1780's that held those rejected by the

modern system of thought. In this design people who could not conform to

the new industrial norms of the modern world were taught to be modern

subjects who internalized the voice of the jailer who was hidden in the

darkened tower at the center of the ring of cells. The design involved

extreme measures to isolate each prisoner and restrict communication during

retraining (Evans 1982). Silent prisoners, for instance wore leather

facemasks in exercise yards so that they would not recognize each other

outside in the city. Walls were thick to prevent communication. The jailer

had a voice tube to each cell to issue instructions. Foucault emphasized how

modern scientific knowledge was applied in the precise micro-codes that

regulated the design and behavior of prisoners and jailers alike. For

Foucault, writing from France, the state controlled and fixed the rules of

D.G.Shane Metacity; origins and implications.

DG Shane - Metacity - Origins and Implications.pdf

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