Splintering Urbanism - Reviving Resistance - Book Review

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2002 by Dean Hawkes

SPLINTERING URBANISM

By Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. London: Routledge. 2001. [pounds sterling]21.99

In Technics and Civilization (1934) Lewis Mumford showed, probably for the first time, the critical relationship that exists between technics and the development of human institutions, including what was for him the most significant institution of all, the city. In this extensively researched book Graham and Marvin, in some respects, revive Mumford's project by examining the state of contemporary urbanism from the perspective of the complex infrastructure networks that inhabit and interconnect cities throughout the globe. They construct a description of the extent, complexity and diversity of these networks. 'A critical focus on networked infrastructure -- transport, telecommunications, energy, water and streets -- offers up a powerful and dynamic way of seeing contemporary cities and urban regions. When our analytical focus centres on how the wires, ducts, tunnels, conduits, streets, highways and technical networks that interlace and infuse cities are constructed and used, modern urbanism emerges as an extra ordinarily complex and dynamic sociotechnical process. Contemporary urban life is revealed as a ceaseless and mobile interplay between many different scales, from the body to the globe.'

A major achievement of the book is the way in which historical narrative, documentary review and case studies are brought together to reveal with clarity this complex terrain. Using and connecting multi-disciplinary sources, from planning, geography, urban studies, engineering, sociology and architecture, a convincing, if disturbing, picture emerges. The 'Splintering Urbanism' of the title is characterized, at its most extreme, as a nightmare of shopping malls, skywalk cities, secure housing developments, international hotels at traffic interchanges, all sustained by privately owned infrastructure networks bringing essential services and interlinking them digitally across the globe.

The purpose of this characterization, however, is to establish a critical platform from which to examine strategies for management and continuing study of the reality of this new urbanism. There is much that is constructive and reassuring in this. It is here, however, that the situation of architecture becomes more visible and where a crucial weakness in the argument may be detected.

It is suggested that, in Splintered Urbanism, architecture, 'will rest less on Le Corbusier's dictum "the magnificent, skilful art of pure volumes bathed in light" (sic) than on the organization of programmes and process; in a city which depends equally on the programmatic activation of its voids as much as the maintenance of its built volume; a city represented by an architecture that is less and less material; and architecture that is primarily process and secondary fragments'. This is objectionable on two counts. First, the suggestion that architecture has not changed in its agenda and relationship to the city since the early decades of the twentieth century. The second is the implication that architecture has little more than a subservient relationship to the economic and technological forces that shape the splintered metropolis, that its role is primarily to accommodate the banalities of the process.

In a very good passage in the conclusion to the book, Graham and Marvin cite Michel Foucault on 'the possibilities of resistance'. One of the potentialities of architecture, with its capability to operate both technologically and culturally, and with its historical sensibility, is to be a tool for appropriate resistance. This was always powerfully evident to Mumford in his penetrating and progressive analyses of the city. Perhaps, in the spirit of this important book, it is the job of architects to rise to the challenge and show how this might be achieved. In any case they should read it.