Cities and the Sky: Closed Systems

In my first unit assignment, I discussed the garage that once stood in Boston’s Post Office Square as an example of Sennett’s functional concerns with this type of control. Built to serve the growing parking needs of downtown Boston, the garage instead became a dilapidated eyesore thanks to its inability to accommodate the need for a public gathering space. Although it was not constructed according to any “master plan,” the garage still serves as a mark against Le Corbusier’s ends-based urban strategy. While able to fulfill its original purpose, it was unable to adapt to the evolving needs of an urban population.

Robert Lowell's poem allows us to interrogate the sociopolitical biases behind certain urban visions, specifically that of Boston as a city divorced from a nostalgic past.

“Closed” urbanism, however, can also be critiqued using a cultural lens. In his 1964 poem “For the Union Dead,” Robert Lowell paints a bleak picture of modernization in Boston that closely echoes my own view of the Post Office Square garage. He writes: “Behind their cage, / yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting / as they cropped up tons of mush and grass / to gouge their underworld garage. / Parking spaces luxuriate like civic / sandpiles in the heart of Boston” [4] Lowell’s distaste for the physical effects of development is evident in his word choice: shovels violently “gouge” into the Common, and parking spaces are unsightly “sandpiles.” Yet he also uses this critique as part of a broader assault on the crass commercialism of the city’s new Irish-American leadership, in contrast to the dignified airs of his own Brahmin class [5]. Both Lowell’s garage and my own are “closed” structures, but Lowell also attacks the sociopolitical agenda behind the urban vision that created his.

Ex-Soviet writer Josef Brodsky was born in St. Petersburg, and would later characterize his birthplace as overly intentional and artificial in "Guide to a Renamed City."

This is echoed on a grand scale in our unit on Russia. Both of the cities we studied—St. Petersburg and Moscow—have undergone successive waves of refurbishment, to fit their status as the country’s semiotic emblems of “national identity,” and both have suffered from subsequent consequences. In my blog post on Moscow, I reviewed Josef Brodsky’s depiction of St. Petersburg in his essay “Guide to a Renamed City,” noting his characterization of the city as “frozen” and artificial. Brodsky claims that St. Petersburg’s classical European structures “have nothing to do with the present and still less with the future,” and that they “[ignore] these new times and their concerns” [6]. Fastened in time, the structures created by Peter the Great are relics of his now-vanished agenda, out of step with the culture of a modern Russia.

The Zaryadye district, razed to make way for one of Stalin's titanic "Seven Sisters" skyscrapers, was eventually replaced by the equally bombastic Rossiya hotel.

In a similar vein, I used the Moscow unit assignment to discuss several casualties of the 1930s Stalinist program of renovations in that city. These renovations hurt the city’s urban life in favor of Stalin’s monolithic agenda. Jane Jacobs, with her love of tightly knit street-level communities [7], would have been horrified to see the narrow medieval alleyways of the Zaryadye district demolished to make way for a monumental “Seven Sisters” skyscraper. As Sennett argues, such structures form opaque barriers with the outside world, and are meant “as objects to be looked at, to be viewed, as with other theatrical spectacles” [8]. Zaryadye was an example of organic, or “open,” urban development, as were the walls of Kitai-Gorod, which served as social gathering spaces for the surrounding community. Their demolishment may have cleared the way for Stalin’s agenda, but only at enormous cost.