The Ideal City

The ideal city was the one built by the gods for men to live in. The reasons for settling in one place or another, for raising walls facing one way or another, were deduced from the advice of wise men; the ideas on health, defense or respect for the divinities determined the origins of places where towns were to be developed. Many of these primitive settlements have given rise, through historical superposition, to modern day cities. And we have seen that the gods’ rules were not always the most adequate for protecting us from our enemies or from the elements. Cities built over rivers, on pestiferous sites, facing away from the sea, against the wind… If some of the rules of the first architects were contradictory, there were others upon which urban planning is still based to this day. But cities are much more than urban planning, much more than architecture. Cities represent cultures, communities of people. Cities are defined by their citizens. In Politics, Aristotle defined the city as “a perfect and absolute set or communion of many villages or streets as a unit.” Religious reasoning and sacred council gradually gave way to social, economic and above all military logic. The interests of men began to outweigh those of the gods. The city then became a symbol of humanity and civilization. To this day, cities are the places where things happen. Cities are where the vast majority of commerce takes place, where culture develops, where power is concentrated. And to really belong to the world one has to live in a big city. Yet gradually, the excessive and overwhelming expansion of cities, property speculation and the difficult coexistence of many people in one single unit broken down into ever more drastically differing levels of social and economic well-being, which are markedly crueler than ever before, has led to a flight from cities toward the suburbs, and into the country. But cities reach out through the means of communication, highways and all sorts of paths that work as links. Small and mid-sized cities rise up as mirror images of large ones. Even the littlest towns are undergoing inevitable transformations. The Western city model has become so prevalent that even the evolution of Eastern cities is following the same pattern, albeit breaking the moulds and not only endowing them a very characteristic magnificence and spectacularity but also multiplying the intrinsic faults of the big European cities that are beginning to deteriorate physically as well as conceptually: injustice, alienation, overcrowding, isolation, the establishment of casts and social stratification. The existence of dormitory-cities, in addition to the dramatic growth in population, gives rise to the overpopulated favelas or ranchitos in countries such as Brazil and Columbia, as well as in Europe, the United States, and all over the world. Thus, the population relates in very different ways within the jungles big cities have become. Overpopulation leads to massive growth in outlying areas and depopulation of the historic city centers, now inhabited by offices, banks and luxury shops. Very few are those who can afford to pay the outrageous prices that have become public enemy number one.



Nowadays, all cities are similar. The cosmopolitan traveler tirelessly seeks in them those peculiar landscapes with distinctive identities, at times striving to find still virgin sights not yet blotted by those familiar contemporary cultural landmarks: fast food outlets, museums, traffic lights… places that are different, though only for the time being. And between cities, those sometimes romantic and other times chilling places, those territories for narration, unidentifiable, in limbo, places whose sole purpose is to place us in a boundless time of abstract sensations, in transit: airports, stations, roads… We move between the ideal and the real, witnessing a development, at different, increasingly mind boggling speeds, of the cities in a changing world, a world whose towns and country are increasingly alike, to the point where being in one place or another matters not. If we were to eliminate those characteristic buildings in our cities, the monuments partially differentiating them, if they consisted solely of their most ordinary streets, the places where we all live, we would not be able to distinguish Milan from Brussels, or Chicago from Hamburg. Asia is a bit different, but how can you tell a Shanghai suburb from one in Hong Kong? In the end, the magic of cities is captured in names full of references to trips, experiences, literature, maps and myths.

To mention Rome, London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam or Athens is not to name just any old place, it is to recall the origin of Europe, our very own culture. But to mention Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Shanghai, Peking (Beijing), is to name the megalopolis, a different way of living, a different way of conceiving the city. It is to speak of gigantic cities built toward an uncertain plight, buildings grazing the sky, with millions of inhabitants, bypass highways cutting right through the city itself… And to mention New York or Chicago is like entering a movie edited with footage from our own memories, scenes from so many stories, so many hours spent watching a silver screen. It is much different to mention Beirut, Tripoli or Havana. And with all these names of cities, marvelous in their photographs, terrible in their staggering miseries, we conjure up different worlds, sensations, stories, aspirations; we describe a map of improbable geographies yet recognizable imagery. In contemporary photography, the cityscape has become one of the most well trodden genres. At times resembling in excess the post card picture, other times looking down from the sky in an attempt to take in the entire city; other times consisting of its fragments, portraying its relation to citizens, or the very beauty of its confrontation with the horizon as an unavoidable homage to its architecture. But photography is not a document alone. It is also of undeniably artistic, as well as political and ideological value. In many of the images we have gathered for this issue devoted to the world’s cities, there is much more to behold beyond the beauty. We see the artist’s intention to look at and capture a reality that he transforms into something else. These are not merely straightforward images of the various cities we can see and visit. The artist’s eye cuts and isolates fragments, making what we are offered, what we see, unrepeatable. It would be naïve to believe that that same image will be there for us when we visit Havana or Shanghai. These pictures exist only in their author’s archives, in the memory of those who have seen them, in the art collections around the world and on these pages that on this occasion have become the most beautiful atlas, a random archive of fragments of art reshaping our world, demonstrating that the city is still the matrass wherein civilization develops.

Rosa Olivares, The Ideal City, In: Exit 17 (Translation: Dena Ellen Cowan).
http://www.exitmedia.net/prueba/eng/sumario.php?id=23