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The political support needed for cultural activities to reach the conceptual level of urban sustainability – Hatto Fischer (Lavrion 1995)

Introduction

 

(Note: this paper was given at conference about urban sustainability of medium sized cities: Lavrion 1995)

In her paper on "Visions and Actions for Medium-sized Cities" as part of reports from the European Workshops of Alicante, Volos and Oviedo (1994) VoulaMega mentions Aristotle's belief that "every city is built upon politics". She interprets this as the "forms" which a city takes on as being reflective of "the political values predominating in its management" while, at the same time, these forms have their "impacts on its government". Two aspects follow immediately out of such a principal viewpoint:

1. When urban affairs become a matter of direct management, to what extent are resources made available within the urban space still shared?

2. To what extent are these forms conducive to values other than democratic ones, leaving the political culture of that city by necessity at the mercy of a management type of government? While the former points out that a key factor to sharing resources made possible through urban life depends upon "accessibility", high transportation prices already having discriminatory impacts and thus social segregation, the second problematic context comes to mind when thinking, for instance, about Detroit as being driven by the big three motor companies to a city with endless highways to serve the car while increasing the need for car as transport vehicle owing to that system component overriding all other concerns. Clearly sustainability at an urban level still allowing governance in the democratic sense must guarantee both accessibility and human forms of existence. If neither is guaranteed, then the problems of urban sustainability become inverse negative aspects of forms out of place, that is without content and not open to any "human content", that is the citizens of that city.

In a light deviation from the main argument, reference to "forms of existence" is highly problematic. First of all, forms in terms of language are related to what we tend to see as existing. Certainly "water" differs greatly from river or lake; only the last two are contents of water having a clear, identifiable form. They sustain themselves in that form as long as the river does not dry up or the lake is not filled with earth to make it disappear. Then, by analogy, urban forms, especially at the level of perception and existence, require something more than just mere existence, for life can take on shape and disappear after the people have gone home and the streets are quiet again. It is exactly the early quality of many different forms coming and going that originally attracted people to the city. They no longer wanted to live in a deterministic, one-sided manner in some village, but to experience the world by coming into contact with people they will never see again the next day. Such attraction of urban forms as a life sustaining on its own ever rapidly changing forms, that became known as "urbanity".

Urbanity: A Place to Live

Nikos Stavroulakis, in his book about "Salonika: Jews and Dervishes" (Athens, 1993) describes it as being a living soul:

"One mark of a great city is to be found in its pluralism: its ability to productively and creatively sustain a multiplicity of ethnicities, languages, traditions and perhaps even gods and religions."

Yet precisely in an age of "ethnic assertiveness" (Louis Baeck), even cities are not free of attempts to "cleanse" them, ethnically speaking. When Richard von Weizsaecker became Mayor of West Berlin, in 1981, he responded very directly to the need of insecure Germans who wished that "their city belongs again to them", that is rather than to the Turks, Greeks, Eastern and Western Europeans, etc. He did so by calling upon everyone to make up their minds, in order to become either German or to get out. The philosopher Habermas calls this politics of "either/or" as the presentation of false alternatives. Yet most political choices seem to work against multiplicity, the Flemish Block in Antwerp or the Le Pen movement in France, but contemporary examples of the wrong answers to what cities need, namely their urbanity. A professor at the Free University of Berlin, Klaus Heinrich, would go as far as to claim that without such urbanity, democratic life would be impossible. In brief, there is a real danger that popular calls for a single identity will destroy the multiplicity of ethnicities and with it bring the destruction of the inner core of the cities. Nikos Stavroulakis refers in his book to Salonika, but the example can be taken to Chania, Jerusalem, Berlin, Antwerp, Beirut, Sarajevo, etc., because rather than sustaining a democratic life, cities become empty, destroyed, monolithic, interconnected only by over-expensive mega-projects and in the end basically boring and monotone, while underneath the surface the majority of the population, in other words those who have to bear the crunch of the modernization pressures upon cities (André Loeckx), pay a high price: over-expensive rents for houses, bad quality of life (noise and air pollution/threatening neighbourhoods/poor standard of living/diminishing health, etc.) and no perspectives for a positive future in sight.

In a poem of mine written in November 1994, I describe this situation as follows:

Blue print

Sad are the tears that she could not see alone,

while he was gone and thus the song repeats

like a refrain of hunger for love a bit nebulously

run away broken spirits. They shine like shoes

in the sun or else deplorable spirits elongate

walks along bridges such as the one linking

Manhattan and Brooklyn, for forgotten are the tales

nor do the notorious winds arouse interest

in the well-protected stadiums of New York.

Who knows how long he reaches out for

sunflower seeds, a piece of bread and a guitar

on which melodies resound like mockeries

experienced in childhood:

locked in are the feelings, locked in side looks, because

disturbances come no longer from the winds,

but from commercials interrupting the viewer's program,

that privileged position of boredom and

unromantic adherence to something true.

There is something driving everything out of town:

money, birthplace, stake of religion and not just forget

the left behind relatives standing last in line

due to family tradition at the bus stop.

Again there is the horse. Put up signs or even shelter,

but leave alone the question of interaction. There are

hooves scratching the surface of the earth, as if

time delays mediation between reason and dream. It is nothing

to be proud of, say the sailors:

forgotten sake, or is there still the treasure

around like sea remnants of the past: an episode or

another one of those wild stories that do not make sense.

It is crystal clear that this is a beginning.

 

The Irish poet Brendan Kennelly responded to that poem by saying, indeed "there is something driving everything out of town" - "that one line says a great deal about city life. The need to escape created by the need to live leading to the need for money dictating the way to live creating the need to escape so..." (Dublin, 19.2.95). Indeed, if life becomes an endless chain of coercion, the means to reproduce and to sustain life becomes slimmer and slimmer until risks and problems overdemand the entire urban structures.

Culture and Urban Policy by the European Commission

Last year I organized the Fifth Seminar, "Culture, Building Stone for Europe 2002" which had ten workshops to make proposals for "cultural actions" in various fields so as to sustain not only European integration, but equally "cultural diversity" within Europe. Among these ten workshops was one about "Regional/Urban Planning and Culture". It was chaired by Anua Arvanitaki, architect and regional planner at the Greek Ministry for the Environment; among the ten participants were people like Phil Cooke from Cardiff, Wales and Michael Parkinson from Liverpool.

The reason I mention these names is that they are linked to an increasing awareness of the following constraints or axioms for future cultural actions:

1. The technocratic bias of European programmes and hence financing of projects have neglected completely culture and cultural activities, the budget of the Kaleidoscope programme insignificant compared to what projects like SMILE, DELTA, etc., receive for the promotion of telecommunications.

2. Yet every regional plan/urban plan comes upon this stumbling block: if, for instance, plans are made to transform the old fishing port into a new high-class yacht club in order to cater to the needs of high-tech, big business, well-to-do tourist interests, then the question is will that new activity be sustained by the average citizen of that town?

3. There is a struggle going on right across Europe in cities, villages, small coastal or mountain settlements on how to sustain themselves, for the youth is leaving and traditional forms of existence are collapsing; a trip along the British coastline will give anyone a dismal picture of what is to come, while recent revivals of the Syros shipyards, that traditional pivotal point of the Aegean, came about owing to the highest political intervention, but also owing to a conscious restocking of the historical and cultural values of that city.

4. The modernization pressures upon cities have led to a collapse of their historical centres and their becoming wildly fragmented (André Loeckx).

Three policy recommendations followed out of that workshop:

a. Cultural actions to revive cities must regard them as places of "ambivalence" (the meaning of the Edge City) with one street intact while around the corner freeways and decay of buildings has made it inaccessible, especially to pedestrians (André Loeckx), so that organizational forms must first of all recognize positive potentials and work out meaningful alternatives in this maze of ambivalent feelings residing in the rest of the population not knowing in which direction they would favour future developments. If anything, the increasing pressures to survive worries many, and all sorts of escape routes are tried, but only some failures become positive learning models - itself an important cultural contribution, the working through failures, in a "culture of consumption" basing everything on success and the need to be a winner rather a difficult thing to do. Living with difficulties, that is open questions, to try to find out answers through living these questions, receives hardly any support. There is a lack of understanding as to social and human needs, for culture has become blind in what it should recognize and in giving feed-back owing to "cultural industries" and "consumption" (Dimitri Stathakos), that is support.

b. The usual dilemma of urban centres is that they have isolated ghettos trapping people as much inside as those with high incomes establish their own ghettos in an everexpanding process of urbanization. The problem of urban centres is really the extent to which they are rooted in their regions and can become innovative centres by creating the cultural conditions for "industrial excellence" (Phil Cooke). This would mean people reinforce each other positively, motivate themselves to do better in their lives rather than reproducing a hard core attitude of cynicism without trying anything with conviction in certainty of failure. It was Vincent Van Gogh who explained why so many people make the choice just to make business out of mere cynicism, indeed resignation, because even if one makes the choice to be on the side of humanity, writes Van Gogh to his brother Theo, there will continue to linger in one's mind that nagging doubt, "but what's the use". Thus a "culture of excellence" recreating daily conditions to be innovative is not self-understood, especially if it lacks the ability to overcome the vindictive spirit of cynicism and thereby fails to be convincing that life can be sustained in another way, that is free from coercive needs and the fear of failure and/or negative reactions. As one student put it bluntly after listening to a lecture about Van Gogh: "but why did he continue to paint if he did not sell a single picture". Human values cannot be translated into dollars and cents, DMs or ECUs, but there is a need to be realistic about what sustains any economy as much as culture has to become operative at one point or another. The degree of difference is always an expression of the freedom that exists in reality to live according to real, not artificial needs. Certainly advertisement does not contribute to the recognition of real social needs, but Benetton has already caught on that business practices must be based on feed-back systems, constantly re-evaluating consumer needs, while realizing that quality products are not enough as guarantee for economic success, but it must be known how the firm, in this case Benetton, stands on key issues like AIDS, "Desert Storm", etc. As always, culture in sustainable terms is really a reflection of the extent to which it wants to be known for what it is, stands for, upholding what values, etc.

There is always a danger that unsustainable cultures, like those many modern touristic traps, become more and more dull with time because they exploit imagination-making sources, but are by themselves unable to renew them. Greek hospitality is a case in point; it has almost vanished and with it the smiles, the freedom that went with it that made it possible to treat the stranger as a welcomed guest of honour. In other words, if excellence can no longer be sustained by the culture, then something has gone wrong. It is driving life out of the cities, making the escape become the threat to life rather than a city an urban form by which problems of the past, present and future can be faced, knowing that there are other people to whom one can talk and who care, like oneself, about the future.

c. The real challenge for the European Union is at the moment that an integration model based solely on economic and political factors is bound to fail. By having neglected the cultural dimension for too long, the integration process has come virtually to a halt. Europe is no longer so happily in the consciousness of people. One reason for the long neglect of culture, aside from the heavily technocratic bias within all European programmes, is that culture was considered to be really a true concession to the sovereign rights of the Member States; that is, while giving up their rights in fiscal and economic matters, they could keep their cultural sovereignty. That has changed with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, for culture entered for the first time the conscious level of European concerns and considerations. That is positive, but there are already many signs of forces in Europe which want to take that aspect of culture out of the treaty again. It reflects clearly what these forces wanted, for instance with the creation of the "Committee of Regions", and are not getting and thus the disillusionment, especially in cultural terms, will spell difficulties for the debate around the follow-up treaty to Maastricht which ought to be ready by 1996.

The fact that this follow-up treaty is put under a heavy lid of silence by the major power stakeholders in Europe, like Chancellor Kohl of the Federal Republic of Germany, indicates that integration processes are rather coercive in character and not based upon "cultural consensus", that is mutual understanding and respect. Here then comes the major recommendation of Michael Parkinson who clearly states that "urban policy can become a concern for the Commission precisely because the 'social cohesion ' of Europe is threatened the moment European Cities are no longer capable of resolving the problems themselves". The significance of that shift in policy adaptation is that urban affairs was until now considered really a national, regional and even more so local concern, except in such countries as Greece, with a heavily centralized form of government, but still with the same interest as all other Member States to safeguard cultural sovereignty and identity. The question is if this recommendation to the European Commission to become active in policy matters related to the governance or not of European cities has any real basis in cultural terms, or else legitimizes but another kind of approach to urban affairs, which are linked especially when it comes to cultural questions immediately to safeguarding "cultural heritages", a rather conservative, backward looking approach to what culture involves when looking at both the present and the future.

To come back, therefore, for just a moment to Nikos Stavroulakis, he describes cities not in terms of "cultural heritages" which stand out like relicts of the past for tourists to take photos of, projecting thereby upon the past without sensing any continuity between life then and now, rather the cultural sustainability of a city depends upon many complex factors which should not be reduced to but one cultural denominator like that of a nation state.

Rather he suggests a city should be regarded as follows:

"Like the human body is made of parts, some working in coordination, others in some form of effective opposition, but each, in the final analysis, necessary. The diversity of its parts is drawn together effectively by some teleology that eludes definition but must be there or else the city dies. The fragmentation of that great urban accretion, Babel, we are told, was brought about through its assertion of aims beyond the human sphere. Its destruction was reflected in the dispersion of its parts into a chaos of languages and diverse elements that no longer had a unifying core. "

The question of sustaining that "teleology", the vision of goals, that is what culture is all about.

It should come to no one's surprise what the German writer Günter Grass said, at the time he was director of the Academy of Arts, that Berlin West (at that time) that the city was on the best way to destroying just that,  and this by making culture be subservient to the fact of whether or not a cultural event fills hotel beds, when in reality culture, artists in particular, need phases of doing nothing in order to become creative again.

When Christie packed up the German parliament building in Berlin he certainly filled hotel beds and was thus a two-week success story for Berlin, badly in need of finding new attractions to lure people into the city.

However, if political support for culture and the arts applies the same criteria as the cultural industry, then something is wrong in the perception of how culture is brought about. For Vincent Van Gogh was not recognized during his lifetime. Important things were created at the periphery of society, went almost unnoticed and yet the philosopher Kant noted that only those individuals who can combine private and public reason both in their work and in their lives, would form the nucleus of future independent, autonomous societies able to bring about that needed change, in order to adapt to future conditions of survival. Not everyone is capable of doing that. Certainly the Indians for a long time had difficulties in sustaining their way of life owing to the sudden influence of alcohol and only lately are they beginning to manage to sustain themselves again, that is to find some "social cohesion" compatible with their own needs and that of the different world of the "white man" and his institutions of power, money, construction, even habits of immediately building fences and walls around properties instead of enjoying wide, open spaces accessible to everyone and yet not touched permanently by man's hands. Indeed, sustainability needs wise political support, but it is also a sign of whether or not the political wisdom to live influences judgements and decisions taken rather than overt needs within an endless chain of coercive needs leading to the need to escape...

If this is a philosophical reflection about sustainability with an indirect approach, then certainly it is also a response to what seems to be amiss and which cannot be so easily rectified. Reality speaks always a different, indeed harder language. I would like, therefore, to just complete my quotations of Nikos Stavroulakis, who is deeply concerned as to what is happening to a city like Chania, Greece where he lives. For he states emphatically in that book about life in Salonika when both Jews and Dervishes still influenced, shaped and coloured the culture of that city:

"Every city has a soul, a personality and character, that mysteriously unites and reflects diversities in its inner make-up and, at the same time, gives them distinguishing marks. Whether he be black, white, Chinese, Jew, or Pole, there is something distinctive and characteristic about a Londoner or a New Yorker, despite even radical differences that may flare into harsh social confrontations within the context of everyday urban life. In fact, it appears that frictions, tensions, and stress are necessary to ensure that a city remains alive and does not stagnate into an incohesive agglutination of people. Cities reflect the people who live in them in being organic unities that function according to a directive force or common goal. They suffer and die from the ascendancy of one part over the others. Like the human beings who live in them, cities can fall victim to cancerous social diseases or, even worse become senile and fail to provide a common aspiration or ideal that will continue to unite their parts."

 

Sustainability in Terms of Size

In seeing these and other problems, Voula Mega herself emphasizes that the "migration pressure" upon cities has increased (whether now to be attributed to the escape syndrome or to other factors); that cities face enormous challenges with regards to environmental conditions; that there are worrying signs of "increasing social exclusion and segregation of certain segments of the population"; that owing to these increasing problems for larger cities, there is an "increasing potential for medium-sized and smaller cities" and this has become a targeted programme of approximately 40 city networks. She qualifies this, however, with the remark that only the "Healthy Cities Network" "requires policy achievements in order to accept a city as a member" (Voula Mega, "Visions and Actions for Medium-sized Cities" in: Reports from the European Workshops of Alicante, Volos and Oviedo, 1994, p. 3).

In other words, the solutions attempted and offered by the European Commission indicate a full option for "sustainability", thus obviously a term in need of further clarification as to what this means in terms of what kind of political support for what cultural activities.

Management of resources and type of governance are here directly the outcome of what kind of support is given in recognition of what needs. As the philosopher Michel Foucault would say, that in itself is a reflection of the level of reflection attempting to be achieved by such a political discourse using the term "sustainability".

To restate that in more simple terms, again Brendan Kennelly, having reflected not only on my poem, but on the programme for our "cultural action" aiming to take at the beginning of September 1995 poets and architects, urban planners and philosophers through cities and villages in Crete, all in all a response to the ACT-VILL initiative of DG XII of the European Commission acting now to find new terms for urban policy, wrote the following thoughtful lines:

"What seems to be emerging is that it's almost impossible to contemplate the big cities without the image of the small community suggesting itself as if the image of the vast, moving, restless anonymous togetherness must always return to a small, shared, communal intimacy. Why does the village we were born in haunt us in midcity?"

(Dublin, 19.2.95)

He added that such a "cultural action" with its evolving ideas/programmes will elicit many responses, "many autobiographies trying to be analyses, which is probably fair enough". In other words, it is worth trying to find out exactly what is the potentiality of the small over the large, the subsidiarity principle applied along the urban scale. If this is a beginning of a revival of European Cities to which the European Commission has contributed already a great deal, then several clarifications of the terms to be used by such initiatives seeking political support have to be undertaken. There are several reasons for this.

 

The Impact of the Economy upon the City Regardless of Size

As a general rule, urban planning/policy and decision making is accompanied by a rhetoric which reflects current fashions; the practice and the real living conditions look in the end quite different. Sometimes it is a matter of aesthetic taste and hence difficult to bridge differences, but there are also other, more substantial issues underneath all controversies and problems to start a fruitful debate.

To take but one example, the state of the economy and its immediate impact upon cities, the latter are affected by centres of economic power wishing also to be recognized, culturally speaking. The present dispute in Berlin about the shape of the Potsdamer Platz is decided upon not by "wisdom", but by Mercedes Benz and a larger investment group representing business firms with a scale and international degree of involvement way beyond the limits of any living human being. Thus it is important that modern cities and their crises in terms of sustainability have something to do with an economy that has got out of hand.

In considerations and reflections of the findings of the workshop "Culture and Economy" of the Fifth Seminar, I came to the following conclusions:

 

Several premises follow from this:

(a) The failure of acknowledging the "economic" issues at hand.

The modern kind of politics does not reflect itself so much in terms of failure, except for gains or losses at the polls, but as a kind of management orientation interested only in reason as "exchange" to keep power conflicts away from the state and institutionalized forms of decision making. They no longer have the capacity to truly reach the conceptual level in their argumentation for or against something, that is where knowledge in a self-critical manner becomes accessible. That is, politics itself succumbs to daily business as usual and responds more to pressure groups and counter moves rather than sustaining a normal language, open to listening to problems and to even risking a "no" against exploitation of human and natural resources. Such a style of politics merely adds to the confusion about the major issues needing to be decided upon, namely how to economize the usage of resources (natural, human and socio-cultural as much as historical). Sustainability in terms of the future here clearly means that the options of future generations are being ignored, as if this society wants to live only "here and now" without leaving free space, energy and resources for future generations.

(b) What leads to a loss of concepts.

There is a lack of clarification of terms used in reference to what is really taking place, i.e. wastage (of time and resources) is no longer or never was looked upon as social costs incurred by an economy having gone into overproduction of everything while producing, aside from too many cars, poverty and unemployment, unliveable cities and destroyed natural landscapes. Poverty and unemployment should not be linked together as being one and the same; people can have a job, but live in "poverty" owing to urban squalor, bad schooling for their children, lack of public provisions and especially low income preventing the compensation for these deficiencies by hiring private teachers, extra help, etc., to overcome the severe crisis to be faced, if alone in a technical world prone to producing as much as it can because only the abstract "more" seems to count: more cars sold, more profits! At the same time, this lifestyle based on "escape" depends on the need to get more money to escape. As Brendan Kennelly describes it, this leads to an endless production of needs referring 'to other needs.

(c) Or "poverty " is forgotten by entering a system in which people no longer seem to know the sound of birds in the morning or no one listens any more to the wind.

There is a difference between natural and human sounds, as much as the symphony of voices making up languages. It lets "memories" relive and revisit old places with their haunting spirits while the mind becomes aware that the conditions of continual survival are not selfunderstood; but if things are taken for granted while those sources of reflection are lost, culture can no longer transcribe to the economy something basic, namely that the economy is a means to live and not an end unto itself, that is something like an ontological being.

Furthermore, any economy losing its "moral base" and therefore the freedom to give and to ensure that distributions are just, like the family situation with four kids around the table and all hungry, then that economy will not even have a chance to stand up to a loss of "morality of payment", one of the most simple prerequisites of remaining independent. Or to say it simply in a poetic manner, the "poverty" of the soul goes along with a lack of socialization to be social and helpful to other people, which goes along with any normal integration of the individual into society and community creations on a larger scale in which everyone can become a painter of impressions upon the house walls of the streets he or she walks through daily on the way to work. There is an "art to living in cities" and special loves of people ensure that the place has meaning, whether now an honest grocery store in Mexico city is like an island of peace in an ocean of sharks or else a former sailor and now lover of jazz, while adhering to the "Blue Note" of New York, sets up a place of his own in Agia Gallini, Crete and transforms a jazz bar into a living museum of jazz history. It always takes something special to make the place become special and without that extra it would not have that characteristic element Nikos Stavroulakis talks about when referring to a Londoner or a New Yorker. Cities have a story of their own when good, that is adjusted to the winds and to the cries of those living out on the streets with nowhere to go. Brendan Kennelly, as a poet, has made it a point to connect those voices in the streets of Dublin with a major thesis, namely that of "Judas", as a symbol of our socialization and education process, teaching us not to listen to certain voices and hence we never reflect the "betrayals of our deepest and truest dreams".

(d) There is, of course, alienation owing to the materialization of the "soul " left out in "Gone with the Wind".

This means simply down-town as a place to go to in order to watch movies with everyone else, that has disappeared from the urban landscape. André Loeckx wonders, for instance, how is it possible that people can live at the far end of a suburb and think it is enough to watch television or play video games as if there is no need for public space where one can go and discuss the latest political developments, but also the sport results over the weekend.

The ACT-VILL programme of DG XII tries to revitalize such concepts as the 'Agora', in order to make European Cities liveable in again, that is by making the urban centres into humanones and thus accessible again. But it is not just a matter of abolishing cars and creating pedestrian walks. There are those cement blocks that look more like anti-tank defences and painful for anyone coming out of the Antwerp train station and not watching out for these artificial obstacles when trying to see the historical buildings hidden behind all the commercial signs and images of consumer society shrill in voice, but also ugly in tone of colours and ever so prepared to outdo the other next door in blending out reality. The problem of aesthetics is that human relationships have become material obligations; interactions only take on meaning when there is money in play and thus the word friendship, never mind "political friendships" in the way Aristotle understood it, is an almost forgotten thing. Poverty in urban life begins, however, with this loss of real friendship, that is people willing to risk an honest word, but not afraid to tell the truth without severing the relationship if someone shouts back at them, wounded by that truth. It seems that there is no true relationship, but only a game being played almost all the time and yet no one seems to clearly understand the rules, set in order to establish the winners and losers. Yet the psychologist Piaget pointed out that morality amongst children is already developed when they play marbles, for if someone oversteps the line, then he loses a turn or else he has to give up a marble. Morality means rules are being created and accommodated, in order to know where one stands with respect to society, but without feed-back there is no knowing.

The writer Robert Musil said the worst thing for a young man when he sends ideas out into the world is not criticism, but rather not getting any answers. That is the beginning of nihilism and cynicism: a hard reality trying to support itself without caring any more about the others. The philosopher Horkheimer would say, at the beginning of destructive movements against freedom, there was always egotism.

(e) The so-called real world is beset by "romantic" notions hiding really intolerant and brutal views.

The philosophical principles of an urban society enabling people to develop a human consciousness of their own have gone astray because needs for productivity are no longer matched with needs to be creative, that is to live in uncertainty positively. Some poets like Paula Meehan would say there are few places left in cities which have a nature that can do what it likes; these places which are untamed and not straightened out by the municipality department in charge of parks are rare indeed. In Berlin, for instance, as long as the division of the city prevailed, there were many empty spaces, Gleisdreieck is a beautiful example. As a former railway station having closed down completely it became a rich botany garden. The theory has it that many freight trains having passed through fields and other areas of vegetation took with them seeds which dropped off once the train stopped in Gleisdreieck of Berlin. I wonder what will happen to that place now that the Koran law in the westernized version is being applied to Berlin, namely to leave no place wasted, for otherwise it would create economic damage. This deeper law has to be thought about as being rather absurd, for cities need empty spaces, just as the human body could not breathe if depending solely upon the nose; empty spaces are the pores of a city and the suggestion about reversing romantic notions is really a way to reconsider what we value more: empty spaces or an urbanization process which covers the entire surface of the earth until there is nothing left that has not been touched by man's hand. The escape to medium-sized cities or to even smaller unities like villages is really a reflection of that need, to have some human proportion between untouched space and urban forms of existence. However, the more brutal and intolerant views are not willing to listen to other such opinions. Why? They have closed themselves off owing to a sort of driving force that is a strange mixture of fear and of having too much money. As a result they can live in some desolated area, out in the countryside, but their houses will be like fortifications since they are afraid thieves would come and take something away from them. Thus, their houses will use up the entire area that can possibly be built on, rather than having smaller housing units and much more natural space. The ratio housing/nature must really be reconsidered in favour of the latter for otherwise there is no sustainable life possible in the near future. Since 1945 and the introduction of the car on a massive scale, nature has been destroyed to a degree not conceivable in the 2000 years or more since Western Civilization departed from its Greek origin. It is also deeply ironic and equally sad to see, especially in Greece, year by year wonderful landscapes disappearing because still another person has built a house on a slope until now free for the eye to look at and not confront any signs of human settlement. There are many scars and tattoos which mark both the natural and urban landscape which makes it difficult to reverse this trend.

Sustainable it is not in question solely because elementary needs of human beings are being no longer fulfilled. Rather the question is what will the generations coming after us do when they have only this endless and needless destruction to face and no one knowing any answer. Yet all need to earn money in order to live somewhere, which requires more money in order to live in better conditions. The replacements of the old places by the apparently new places have accelerated in pace, but so also the losses and the costs.

(f) If all these viewpoints about the need to make money go unchecked, then they will endanger life simply because they will make the world appear to be hostile to life, when in fact this justifies only violence.

Not only urban centres become fragmented as a result (André Loeckx talks here about brutal interventions into city fabrics and against which any kind of "cultural action" is helpless), but knowledge as well. Adorno and Horkheimer would say violence erupts when "distances" break down, above all the distance which we can create in our languages while communicating with others. Violence is here and now a phenomenon that refuses any mediation. One of its sources is impatience. When demonstrations erupt with stones thrown into shop windows, then because they are outside society, that is its times, hence they want to break into the "present" as defined by a way of being which they cannot realize or maybe do not want to, but which is still a focus of attention since everyone else seems to want that kind of existence. It is clear that the sustainability of any kind of city, and by now it must be clear that urban centres, whether large or smaller in size, really face the same problems of sustaining life free of violence and brutality, depends upon leaving spaces to experiment with other living forms. If only the model of consumption dictates all behaviour, then the reason to leave a village with only one model of behaviour has become obsolete. The sustainability depends upon overcoming "violence in cities - violence against cities", a topic of discussion between the youth of Chania and the participants of the cultural action called "Myth of the City" that took place this September in Crete.

(g) The loss of concepts, but also the break-down in knowledge based on objectivity and universality in terms of truth and human values requires another, indeed artistic, approach to regain knowledge.

As a matter of fact, the whole argumentation of this paper is based on the assumption that politics needs independent knowledge, in order to come to good decisions. The terms used must not be rooted in arbitrary, subjective flows of information, but have their own cultural background known otherwise as epistemological and etymological orientation. We have to know what we are talking about when referring to cities of all sizes just as much as the very concept of "sustainability" is really the question can politics sustain actions at the conceptual level, in order to make consciousness become a prerequisite for decision taking? If knowledge is fragmented and the conceptual level not really strived for, the dialogue with reality will go empty handed and negative developments will not be anticipated. Segments of that broken off knowledge will become outlets for speculations about the whole. One finding of another workshop at the Fifth Seminar was that European projects do not communicate cultural differences so well because everyone picks out of a common project that which each partner of the project wants. The project is applied in such a coded way that there is no longer time for experiences to be shared with the other partners. Thus, around these European projects there develops almost the notion of a transnational language ghetto fortified by what many consider to be "broken English", speeded up by code words taken out of the computer culture and made adaptable to everything, as if the very own cultural terrain is clearly unique while the same holds for everyone else. There is an illusion about how knowledge is shared within European projects and how integration processes can be helped by obtaining the necessary cultural, that is long-term support. A child growing up with a European identity is quite a different citizen of the future than one stuck to some locality and not even aware that Germans can be just as dark haired as Greeks, an example taken from a conversation with university students in Crete. The role of images and stereotypical thinking is but one case of how resistance against all changes works in an adverse manner.

There is even a loss of student exchanges, because leaving a place means giving up a house and a workplace, difficult to obtain in the future when returning, for the prices will have increased too much and the workplace will no longer be there. Everyone speaks about mobility of labour and about the need for communication and yet at the cultural level the cities are no longer providing that basis for freedom of travelling and of working in places other than the society and culture in which one has grown up. That also means that cities, rather than sustaining cultural differences, begin to look alike. James Clifford calls it the "cultural predicaments" to be faced by cities: how to stay unique and equally respond to the growing world pressure to keep up with the latest developments, in order to be considered competitive at a certain, if not world, then abstract level, not determined conceptually, but by the chances to enter the "game" being played by everyone, as would say a former Mayor of Kamilari, a small village near Phaistos in Crete. Yet where directed policy often fails, it is because these local authorities do not know under which terms they ought to make the application. The same goes for European projects; when an architect attempted to obtain information about certain European programmes, he could not get them in Berlin. There is no access to the really important flow of information and that is not only affecting the kind of work done in these European projects, but they very quickly lose over time the national, regional and local cooperation needed in order to stay in touch with reality.

Should Terms to be Used Take on a "Holistic Character"?

It is interesting, therefore, that the response of DG XII to urban problems, in particular to the need for new terms, becomes what it calls a need for "holistic terms". Now there is a real stumbling block here in so far as the "philosophy of knowledge and of science" has long rejected social theories based on holistic terms, that is on claims to know the whole. Adorno, in response to Hegel's old saying, "the whole is the truth" reversed that after the Second World War and said "the whole is not the truth", that is something is always left out, disregarded, not recognized as being relevant, etc. Thus while there is a feeling of loss owing to things becoming too complex, at the same time one executive meeting after another rushes through flow charts and good slogans that give the impression of being innovative, when in fact it is a sign of resignation, for the outcry is always there, "but who will read all of these pages". Practically politics no longer reaches the conceptual level because things are no longer read thoroughly and with patience and time, so that knowledge can come to the conceptual level and be experienced as working through the contradictions.

These contradictions can be named:

These three possibilities have always been discussed in our philosophical seminars in Heidelberg when trying to come to terms with what Hegel meant by "contradiction". Popper had a more simple definition: any theory must be refutable, if predictions fail to materialize, the theory is wrong and must be rejected. In other words, every kind of theory or concept thereof, must be open to refutation by reality. Popper would argue that holistic concepts and hence theories using them do not have that quality of scientific knowledge. Now I do not want to get further into that argument, but it serves as a reminder that such a call for "holistic" concepts is not self-understood. Equally the question must be asked how is the concept of "sustainability" intended to be used, especially in relation to what concept of knowledge as based on what kind of approach to reality?

Conclusions

Let me close this paper with two questions that can complete the points mentioned above and which have to be understood as a way to elucidate questions of knowledge even when it comes to urban affairs and urban policy. Political support has to be given to gain independently from any kind of political power knowledge about our urban state of affairs.

In the past these were called academic and artistic freedoms, but at the level of practical politics, especially in cities, this must be related to the old Agora concept, namely the independence of the citizen. He has a right to be informed and to judge before a decision is made and not as H. Schmidt, the former chancellor of Germany once said, namely that parliament and democracy are just tools to make acceptable decisions already made. To really arrive collectively at decisions, that is an art in itself, but worth trying especially if sustainability depends upon the cultural support given by people living in those cities.

Now the two notions of sustainability can be as follows:

(h) What is not useful to oneself can be useful to another person, hence sustainability and categories linked to necessity and usefulness are not compatible.

A culture sustaining life and growth in a city is based on the realistic assumption that not everything works immediately nor will it be complete, perfect and without any mistakes; rather learning from mistakes and recognizing the interplay between completion and incompleteness, whether to leave a park in a natural condition as nature wants it or to what extent it has to be planned so that it effectively becomes a garden. At the level of concepts, a word of caution is needed: many concepts land on the rubbish heap of history before their value could have been discovered, yet as the painter Ferruccio Marchetti used to say sometimes the most interesting developments he discovered were lying around on the floor in that heap of canvases cut off from paintings after he had finished with them. He added the thought that there are many important side themes which can in future become crucial themes at the centre of all decision taking. In other words, the question is what apparently trivial problems and concepts are ignored by using the concept of sustainability? That would be like a first reflection of how this concept is intended to be used or to put it into the form of a question: what if it becomes focused on only certain issues, ignoring thereby the complexity of life; will the concept be on weak grounds once human development is taken fully into account?

(i) In admittance to reality, the steps leading up to a "culture of consumption " are many, but few can cope with that culture once there.

By now almost all urban centres have succumbed to that culture, even Athens, known for its interesting mixture of formal and informal structures, mixture of functions, here work, there home, even a garage beside a hospital and a tiny church underneath a sky scraper, is steadily losing to the mono-functional fractions of interest. That comes in the wake of an urban sprawl based on the ideological consensus that the city of Athens has become unbearable to live in and can only serve the purpose of a place in which to make money and then leave again as quickly as possible. To take an example, the real impacts of the ATTICO Metro project are not really anticipated. Why? Owing to a fear of delaying the construction, everyone plays the safe game and allows nothing to interfere, not even public participation in the discussion of how the areas around the newly built metro stations will look in the future. All the impact studies for these stations have been made but the local authorities do not pick them up and discuss them openly. Thus, the creeping office block syndrome can be seen everywhere and yet no one wishes to anticipate that this means functional separation of human activities, that is quite the opposite to what is being claimed by undertaking in the first place this mega-project, namely to make Athens liveable in by relieving it from traffic congestion and all the problems that go with it. The rhetoric is one thing, the contradictions between good intentions (and claims) and reality still another. Changes in culture, the way of doing things, go along with these new projects, but the real cultural impact, its significance is hardly noticed, for right now the justification for everything is easily at hand:

without such a management style as institutionalized in ATTICO Metro the project would never be completed, never get done. There is reality and there is reality. Sometimes it is good that mega-projects fail for it means that the citizen of the city still has a chance to raise his or her voice.

I want to come to a sort of final remark by returning to the beginning and to something that Voula Mega expressed so well when she, like Brendan Kennelly, responded to this "cultural action" around the theme "Myth of the City", a cultural action intended to bring together analytical orientated people and poets, in order to discuss contemporary, future and historical problems of life in cities. She wrote "planning systems need to improve their imaginative capacity to envisage a better future" while she believes "that each citizen can be a little poet and contribute to the planning system if there is a context of effective participation and co-decision".

In other words, the paper is really about the wish to find the political support for projects which enhance, as Voula Mega puts it, "the enlightening abilities of planners who in continuation will enhance the context and substance of citizens' participation". I agree with her that the clarification of terms such as sustainability should have that understanding of culture, namely how people can become involved so that the substance of life in cities is determined freely by the citizens' participation: the key word for a political culture mature enough to stand up to contradictions and complexities of life itself because there is a theoretical background which allows the comprehension of what is going on in reality.

Indeed, the European Commission is showing more and more an active interest in the important linkage between culture and theoretical work, the call for ACT-VILL by DG XII with the purpose of developing a new terminology around the key concept Agora in order to make European Cities liveable in again, but one important indication.

 

Source:

INTERMEDIATE CITIES IN SEARCH OF SUSTAINABILITY ...

bookshop.europa.eu/...sustainability.../SY9396952ENC_001.pdf;...
Lavrion, 4 - 6 October 1995. * * * .... to Reach the Conceptual Level of Urban Sustainability .... The urban sustainability of SMC depends to a larger extent on the ...

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