embalmed
c. tamed …
e. sirens
f. fabulous …
j. innumerable …
n. which from afar resemble flies9
In the currently prevailing urban discourse, power is submerged in conceptions of economic nodality, certainly a legitimate and important research topic in itself – but with city power measured by the zip codes of major corporations and/or business services firms.10 For all its other merits, which are many and have been deservedly applauded, this approach has two limitations in a context of cities and power. Its economism leaves out the power manifestations of the urban built environment itself. Even the most imaginable capitalist city is not only business offices and their connections to business offices elsewhere. Second, the political economy conception of world/global cities seriously underestimates the power of states in the current world.* After all, this is a world where the latest US president (Barack Obama) has been at war for the whole of his two terms of office, longer than any president in US history, making war in seven different countries of the world.†
The analytical framework deployed here – forms of state formation and their consequences, combining structural and symbolic perspectives on the city, identifying and exploring moments of major historical urban change worldwide – does not seem to have been used before. But no claim to originality is made with regard to studying power dimensions of contemporary cities. Apart from the vast monographic literature, which will be referred to repeatedly below, there are a number of distinguished comparative contributions. As this is not an academic thesis requiring a literature review, I shall confine my collegial respect to a short list only.
The portal work in the modern field is Lawrence Vale’s Architecture, Power and National Identity, a masterly study of architecture and capital city design in a wide range of national contexts, focusing on ‘capitol complexes’ of governmental buildings, with a critical political sense and the professional eyes of a city planner.11 Contemporary and intercontinental in scope are also Wolfgang Sonne’s deep-digging Swiss dissertation (Habilitation) Representing the State12 on the early-twentieth-century design of some capital cities, from Washington to New Delhi, and the collective overview edited by David Gordon, Planning Twentieth-Century Capital Cities. An impressive global study on the relocation of capitals is Vadim Rossmann’s Capital Cities: Their Development and Relocation, similar to this book.13
Incisive, non-parochial analyses of power in contemporary cities have also come significantly from outside the academia of urban history and social science, from architecture and architectural criticism. Two works have blazed the trail: Deyan Sudic’s The Edifice Complex14 and Rowan Moore’s Why We Build,15 both focusing on architects and their patrons. From a similar milieu also comes Owen Hatherley’s remarkable Landscapes of Communism.16
All built environments in human settlements are manifestations of the power relations among the inhabitants. Two sources and several kinds of power are highlighted in this book, which is not meant to be a general treatise on power. With its focus on the capital cities of nation-states, political power is naturally central. But political power in itself means no more than power by coercion and/or persuasion through institutions and processes of government. We are here explicitly interested in the character and the operation of political power in capital cities of the world.
Modern processes of urban power form a quadrangle of competing actors and types of influence. In one corner is political authority – national and/or urban – identifying the character of which is a major aim of this study, with variable powers and resources of design and regulation; in a second corner is capital, global as well as national, with economic power and resources of design and ‘development’; third, there are the classes of privilege, with their desires, fears and resources; and finally, there are the popular classes, with their grievances and their capacities of resistance and of change.
We begin with the national elites’ political power, emerging from the welter of nation-state formation. In this macroscopic global analysis, the national elites will be approached through the specific contexts of nation-state construction and the latter’s relationship to prevailing capitalism.
Then we shall look into two types and two eras of challenges to the historical national elites. One is a popular challenge, coming out of the rise of social and political forces once excluded from the nation-making process. The other is a global challenge of non-national forces and issues. The former is clearly a different kind of political power; the latter may posit a supremacy of economic power.
Political power can, of course, take many different forms, from the same or similar social roots. Here we shall look into the apotheosis of national elite power under perceived popular threat, i.e., at fascism and kindred military dictatorships. Furthermore, we shall analyse urbanistic Communism as an enduring radical popular challenge to historical elite rule, and into post-Communism as a new kind of political power.
After World War II there was concern with democratic versus non-democratic architecture and urban design, especially in West Germany.17 This is here taken into account, but it would not work as a master distinction, given the fact that most of the nation-states of the world for most of the 225 years covered in this book were non-democracies.
Popular political power has asserted itself in different ways: in access to institutional power, as in ‘municipal socialism’, welfare-state cities or, recently outside Europe, in city governments by middle-class coalitions with the urban poor, but also in successful protest moments: stopping the ravages of the ‘Car City’ in the North Atlantic of the late 1950s to 1970s and, even more recently, in a spate of urban revolutions – or better called, given their basically ambiguous (but always non-working-class) social character, extra-constitutional regime changes. It may also make up bargaining power in cities where public participation in urban planning and development is recognized.
Capital cities are by definition sites of political power. But popular challenges mean that they are often also sites of resistance, of political counter-power, of protest rallies and headquarters of opposition movements, parties and trade unions.
Most of the constitutive national elites were capitalist or pro-capitalist, and their imprint on their nation and its capital is duly taken into account. But there is also the raw economic power of capital and wealth outside political channels. This – economic – is the second source of power we have to pay attention to. It operates in two major ways in our story. One is its imprint on the spatial layout and on the patterning of buildings, and most specifically through skyscrapers. The other refers to the urban exclusivity of wealth and economic prosperity, as manifested in gating and private cities of the privileged.
At some level, all systems of political power need representation, in the sense of public display. Power needs public representation to be recognized, respected, awed or admired, in order to be obeyed and followed. A new reign of power is publicly and ceremoniously inaugurated. Secondly, modern nation-state power (in particular) needs representation in order to give direction to the self-identity, thoughts, beliefs, memories, hopes and aspirations of its citizens. This is the second function of monumentality, as well as of flags, cocardes, symbolic pins, public banner slogans and rhetorical addresses to the nation.
Economic power as such needs no representation; money is force enough in itself. Many times it is wiser to let it operate in the dark rather than in broad daylight.* Corporations and capitalists often want to display their wealth, though, and to bask in admiration of their buildings.
‘Representation’ has a connotation of intent, which would be much too narrow a perspective for what
