Truth and Meaning in Concrete
He could not complete it before he died (in escape of a regime repeatedly reborn, it seems), but Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project still had reverberations across the twentieth century. A book of personal notes and reflections combined with analysis and fiction combed from academic and historical sources, Arcades was a loosely organized patchwork of what the material could mean to materialists.
Among its many achievements was one of the more complex deployments of the ‘dialectical image’ or ‘dialectical montage’*, a technique of layering facts – about pieces of history and their relations – to reveal deeper meanings. Within Arcades, Benjamin used this technique to discuss the political projects led by the elite in nineteenth century Paris, as the working class fought to realize their democratic ideals through constant cycles of revolution. He studied all manner of objects and wrote extensively, trying to identify their value – as appliances or ornaments to social, political and economic beings. By placing them beside each other, he sought to force revelation.
In that spirit, let us take a moment to wade into a similar exercise in critical theory by considering linked questions relating to economic growth, here in the twenty-first century:
- What spurs growth? How do we manage it? Why do cities grow the way they do? How do they develop in context of competing visions of growth?
- What are we, collectively, trying to achieve through this growth? How is it tempered by our cultural, economic and climate realities? Is the emergent political project within our control?
And here’s a last set connected to all the above:
- What kind of growth are we talking about? Who benefits from it and in what proportion? How do changing definitions of growth reshape our social relations?
These questions are regularly at the front of my mind as I think about the promised outcomes of policies touted by the highest offices. Allow me today to point you to two short films addressing many of the headaches above, in a brief juxtaposition aimed at bringing forward the deeper political relations at play.
They are both thoughtfully constructed and well worth a watch. By attempting to answer the questions above with different lenses (and from very different vantage points), they create an image of a historical moment defined by the grandeur of the downtown sprawl. Its driving forces, appeal, purpose, value and drawbacks.
The first, by Youtuber Uytae Lee, addresses the threads in 1 and 3, focusing on a budding metropolis in the Lower Mainland of B.C.:
The second, from a collective on behalf of the Antipode Foundation, focuses on the queries in 2 and 3, providing the backdrop of New York for David Harvey’s musings on urban life:
“The city is a concentrated space in which many different functions can coexist and can work together in such a way as to facilitate social reproduction. Unfortunately, that social reproduction has to include in our case a reproduction of capital as well as reproduction of people. And so what we see is a concentration of resources to build the city which is going to facilitate capital accumulation and is therefore functioning for capital accumulation. […]
This process is about capital which is expanding at a compound rate of 3% forever, having a harder and harder time finding sensible and serious things to do, in a world which obviously needs a great deal in terms of facilities and services and the rest of it. We’ve got a politics of austerity which cuts back on all of the things you really need and at the same time goes off and builds these crazy monuments…feeding the downtown monster.”
(If you are unfamiliar with Harvey, I would recommend starting with his seminal work A Brief History of Neoliberalism.)
I suppose I can leave it there. A couple of timely deliberations on assembling a city, and the meaning behind the assemblage. Of increasing relevance to all as the shadows of skyscrapers spread.
*Not to be confused with the phrase ‘dialectical montage’ as used in filmmaking. Though they are connected, they have different definitions.