Award-winning design architecture awards

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Simon Wollan and Ian Woodcock on video production and editing of this essay.

Art and advertising

Author's photographs

Bakhtkin 1984

Barthes 1973

Berman 2000

Bourdieu 1984

Bourdieu 1993

Bourdieu 2000

Brownill 1990

Calvino 1979

Camouflaging difference

Author's photograph

Conceptual Toolkit

Introduction

The broad framework for this miniessay is that of the city as a field of power and as a site for various flows of capital, narratives and desires. The ways in which architecture mediates power relations are multi-dimensional and are explored more fully in the book, Framing Places (Dovey 2007), where I argue that critiques of the ways built form mediates practices of power have three primary dimensions: experiential, discursive and spatial. A range of conceptual frameworks is necessary to this task, and I will sketch a few of them here. While these are each quite disparate theoretical positions, they share a quest to understand the relationship of aesthetic practices to power and politics.

Symbolic capital

From Bourdieu's perspective, architecture can be construed as the production of 'symbolic capital'—a form of capital value based in aesthetic taste. Symbolic capital is not reducible to economic capital, although it can be 'cashed' under certain conditions. Symbolic capital flows not only through buildings, but also through their representations, publicity (coffee-table books and magazines), and the name of the 'signature' architect.

For Bourdieu, symbolic capital is embedded in culture as one form of 'cultural capital'—a broader complex of practices and beliefs through which social 'distinction' is created and reproduced. From such a view aesthetic practices are primary sites for camouflaging practices of power because they are seen as autonomous; distinctions between people are camouflaged as distinctions between things. To view the aesthetics of architecture as symbolic capital is not to reduce architecture to economics, nor to extinguish the ideal of aesthetic autonomy. Without creative innovation, and particularly the relative autonomy of the avant garde, the field would become stale and production would cease. Symbolic capital is not something one possesses so much as something which circulates through fields of practice rather than accumulating in individuals.

A key part of the definition of symbolic capital is that it is 'denied capital'. Its potency relies on being seen as a form of 'distinction' rather than a form of 'capital'. It relies on the masking effect of aesthetic autonomy. Symbolic capital is a fixed resource within a social field; there is only so much distinction to go around. The production of symbolic capital is the architect's key market niche.

Spectacle

The concept of symbolic capital is linked to that of the city as spectacle, which has its roots in Debord's prophetic 'Society of the Spectacle' where he argued that the experiences of urban life are reduced to images for consumption: 'all that is directly lived becomes mere representation' (Debord 1994: 14).

Narrative myth

From Barthes I want to use the semiotic insight that images and signs tell stories and construct narrative myths (Barthes 1973). He uses the term 'myth', because signs evoke a way of seeing or making sense of the world; they tell us a story. Politics operates through the illusion of being apolitical—myth is 'depoliticised speech', it transforms history into nature. Architecture constructs and stabilises certain visions of the world, making the world credible and legible. Meanings are 'cooked' to produce 'truth effects'. This is not to simply reduce architecture to a didactic function; indeed the irreducibility of architecture to literal interpretation is a key to its potency.

This early work of Barthes remains the most accessible for understanding the ways in which discourse constructs subjects. The task here is a decoding of urban discourse, not to uncover a 'real' meaning, but to unpack the ways that multiple meanings are socially constructed. Such an approach relies upon discourse analysis, one of the least verifiable yet most crucial of critical research methods.

Desires

From the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) I want to utilise some ideas about the production of desire. This work articulates a range of flows of desire, privileging movement over stasis, the 'line of flight' over stable points of order, 'smooth' over 'striated' space. Striated space is stabilised territory in contrast to the smooth space of identity in transition. From such a viewpoint we can rethink the city and the waterfront as a network of flows of desire—the desire for waterfront views and amenities; desires for profit, status and identity; desires to attract jobs and investment, to re-brand the city and get re-elected.

A key term for Deleuze (1993) is 'folding': a focus away from things, elements or points of stability and onto the movements and 'foldings' between them. This focus on the 'between' is also a way to rethink binary and dialectic oppositions as an enfolding of each other; public/private spaces, architecture/planning practices.

Public interests

For my purposes here I want to link this Deleuzian notion of desires to Habermas's (1984) concept of human interests and particularly the enfolding public and private interests. From this perspective public interests are multiple and constructed through a process of communicative action. I suggest that 'interests' can be conceived as forms of congealed 'desires'.

Carnival

For Bakhtin (1984) carnival is a time and place of fantasy, intoxication and exaggeration where normal social rules and identities are suspended in a spectacle of collective transgression. The carnival is associated with the sense of liberation that comes with losing oneself in a crowd, where identities and social classes are equalised or masked.

Costar and Economou 1999

Costello and Millar 2000

Crilley 1993

Crown 2007

Debord 1994

Deleuze 1993

Deleuze and Guattari 1987

Dovey 2001

Dovey 2005

Dovey 2007

Edwards 1992

Esso Greenhouse

Author's video recording

Etlin 1991

Eureka Tower 2007

Exhibition Centre

Author's video recording

Fainstein 1994

Federation Square 2007

Freshwater Place 2007

Global Waterfronts

Introduction

The regeneration of urban waterfronts is one of the key urban design and planning stories of the late twentieth century.

No longer required to serve as working ports, waterfronts have become places of urban transformation played out in a context of tensions between global capital and local place identity, mediated by state imperatives to attract flexible investment and get re-elected. This is also the new battleground over conflict between public and private interests.

Various models for waterfront regeneration were developed from the 1970s to the 1990s, with project types including heritage districts, shopping malls, theme parks, housing, commerce, hotels, convention and exhibition centres and museums. Such developments are generally mixed use and hybrid projects that invent new conjunctions of entertainment, tourism, sport, culture and commerce.

Global branding

In the global market, intercity competition turns the city into a product that is branded and marketed, focusing attention on the urban imagery which identifies the city and differentiates it from other cities. Such imagery includes the iconography of architecture and landscape, as well as the more subtle dimensions of heritage and culture. Urban iconography is produced and constructed since cities without brand image have little market presence.

The 'image of the city' originally explored by Lynch (1969) as a constellation of landmarks, districts, paths, and so on, takes on a crucial economic role as a form of advertising discourse. The weaving of 'place mythologies' becomes a key, and local experiences of place are mined for those images and dimensions, which may have global caché (see Ward and Gold 1994; Kearns and Philo 1993).

Waterfront developments have a premium in this process because of their visibility, the availability of public land and the opportunity to produce an urban spectacle that can service both global and local agendas.

The triumph of the image

The shift towards an information economy since the 1970s has led to a substantial rise in the symbolic component of commodity value—the symbolic capital produced through design and brand marketing. This valorisation of the symbolic dimensions of urban form has led to a realignment of the relationship between the architecture and planning disciplines and an alliance of the production of symbolic capital with broader planning strategies. Architecture has become more integrated into place marketing as the production of imagery plays a key role in the advertising and legitimation of projects to both clients and community (Crilley 1993: 235).

Hyperreal hybrids

Waterfront developments are part of a larger Disneyfication of the city as a themed, scripted and branded form of place-making (Hannigan 1998; Sorkin 1992). The 'urban entertainment district' is a collage of mix-and-match components—mall, theme park, cinema, sports arena, casino, and so on. Such zones are saturated with simulation technologies that produce a hyperreal urban experience where boundaries between the 'real' and its representation are effaced. Hannigan invents neologisms such as 'shoppertainment', 'eatertainment' and 'edutainment' to describe these new functional hybrids.

Public/private

Waterfront projects are often implicated in the production of problematic liminal spaces between private and public space, between culture and commerce (Zukin 1995). The pseudo-public space of the shopping mall is imported to the waterfront where public meanings become merged with private control, blurring the line between public and private interests.

Diversity without difference

Waterfront entertainment districts are often designed to meet a middle-class market for diverse place experience without risking contact with genuine 'difference' (Hannigan 1998). The avoidance of risk leads to the enclosure and sanitisation of such experience. Waterfront developments often construct an illusion of a cosmopolitan society of difference where gender and racial inclusion are coupled with strong social control and a subtle exclusion of lower social classes.

Melbourne Riverscape

Author's photographs