The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

70 The passage from modernity to postmodernityIt would, I think, be both erroneous and unjust to depict these'modernist' solutions to the dilemmas of postwar urban developmentand redevelopment as unalloyed failures. War-torn cities wererapidly reconstructed, and populations housed under much betterconditions than was the case in the inter-war years. Given the technologiesavailable at the time and the obvious scarcity of resources, itis hard to see how much of that could have been achieved exceptthrough some variant of what was actually done. And while somesolutions turned out to be much more successful (in the sense ofyielding widespread public satisfaction, as did Le Corbusier's United'Habitation in Marseilles) than others (and I note the postmodernistpenchant for always and only citing the bad ones), the overall effortwas reasonably successful in reconstituting the urban fabric in waysthat helped preserve full employment, improve material social provision,contribute to welfare goals, and generally help preserve acapitalist social order that was plainly threatened in 1945. Nor is ittrue to say that modernist styles were hegemonic for purely ideologicalreasons. The standardization and assembly-line uniformity ofwhich postmodernists were later to complain were as omni-presentin the Las Vegas strip and Levittown (hardly built to modernistspecifications) as they were in Mies van der Rohe's buildings. Bothlabour and conservative governments pursued modernist projects inpostwar Britain, though it is curious that the left is now largelyblamed for them when it was the conservatives, by cutting cornerson costs of low-income housing in particular, who perpetrated manyof the worst examples of instant slums and alienated living conditions.The dictates of costs and efficiency (particularly important in relationto the less affluent populations served), coupled with organizationaland technological constraints, surely played as important a role asideological concern for style.Nevertheless, it did indeed become fashionable in the 1950s tolaud the virtues of the international style, to vaunt its capacities tocreate a new species of human being, to view it as the expressive armof an interventionist bureaucratic state apparatus that, in conjunctionwith corporate capital, was reckoned to be the guardian of all furtheradvances in human welfare. Some of the ideological claims weregrandiose. But the radical transformations in the social and physicallandscapes of capitalist cities often had little to do with such claims.To begin with, speculative land and property development (to gainland rent and to build profitably, quickly, and cheaply) were dominantforces in a development and construction industry that was amajor branch of capital accumulation. Even when contained by planningregulations or oriented around public investments, corporatePost modernism in the city 71capital still had a great deal of power. And where corporate capitalwas in command (especially in the United States), it could happilyappropriate every modernist trick in the architect's book to continuethat practice of building monuments that soared ever higher as symbolsof corporate power. Monuments like the Chicago Tribunebuilding (built from a design chosen by competition between manyof the great modernist architects of the period) and the RockefellerCenter (with its extraordinary enshrining of the credo of John D.Rockefeller) are part of a continuous history of celebrating supposedlysacrosanct class power that brings us in more recent times to theTrump Tower or the postmodernist monumentalism of PhilipJohnson'S AT & T building (see plates 1.11, 1.12, 1.13). It is completelywrong, I think, to lay all the blame for the urban ills ofpostwar development at the modern movement's door, without regardto the political-economic tune to which postwar urbanization wasdancing. The postwar surge in modernist sentiment was, however,widespread, and could be so at least in part because of the considerablevariety of on-the-ground neo-modernist constructs to which the. .postwar reconstructIon gave nse.It is useful here, I think, to go back and look at Jane Jacobs'sattack upon all of this in The death and life of great American cities,published in 1961, not only because it was one of the earliest, mostarticulate, and most infl uential of the anti-modernist tracts, but becauseit sought to define a whole mode of approach to understandingurban life. While the 'pointmen' of her wrath were Ebenezer Howardand Le Corbusier, she in fact aimed her barbs at a whole range oftargets from city planners, federal policy makers, and financiers, tothe editors of Sunday supplements and women's magazines. Surveyingthe urban scene as it had been reconstituted since 1945, shesaw:Low income projects that become worse centers of delinquency,vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums theywere supposed to replace. Middle income housing projectswhich are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealedagainst any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housingprojects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with vapid vulgarity.Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore.Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who havefewer choices of loitering place than others. Commercial centersthat are lackluster imitations of standardized suburban chainstoreshopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhereand have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great