Gerhard Vinken Zones of Tradition - Places of Identity

**Urban Studies**

*für Martina*

**Gerhard Vinken**, born in 1961, holds the chair of heritage studies (Denkmalpflege) at the University of Bamberg. His research focuses on urban studies and built heritage, heritage politics, and international heritage cultures. He is a founding member of the Center for Heritage Studies and Technologies (KDWT) in Bamberg.

## Gerhard Vinken **Zones of Tradition - Places of Identity**

Cities and Their Heritage

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### **First published in 2021 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld © Gerhard Vinken**

Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Palermo, Porta Felice, © Gerhard Vinken 2019 Translated by Graeme Curry unless otherwise indicated Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5446-2 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5446-6 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839454466 ISSN of series: 2747-3619 eISSN of series: 2747-3635

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## **Contents**

## **Setting the Framework**

## **Zoning the City. Heritage and Modernity**

## **Doing Tradition. Heritage Politics and Identity-Building**

**Setting the Framework**

## **1 The Heritage of Cities** An Introduction

Cities are: dynamic, chaotic, dense, big, heterogeneous, anonymous, meaningful, inscrutable, dazzling, contradictory, eternal. And so on. Studying cities in terms of their heritage means focusing on issues different to those addressed by conventional debates on monuments and conservation. The city slices through the images of homogeneity that the concept of heritage often invokes, whether in terms of homeland/*Heimat*, region or even nation, and that also contaminate recent debates such as those on heritage communities, for instance around indigenous heritage.1 Cities are distinguished by density and heterogeneity, and by comparatively high levels of dynamism, both social and spatial. As a result, debates over heritage, over the ways heritage is articulated and the ways claims to heritage are staked, merge with other structures of the imagination. Even if these, too, are at times not entirely free of traces of essentialism, the heritage of cities nonetheless reveals unmistakably that heritage production is a process.

It is thus no accident that new topics in the theory of heritage conservation have often emerged on the territory of urban heritage conservation. For instance, the concept of the monument, which, since the 19th century, had been focused on the individual monument, on exceptional architecture, was successfully enlarged around 1900 via the concept of the urban ensemble. This concept embraced not only everyday architectures but also the spatial relations between buildings and their broader environment.2 The trend towards conceiving of heritage as a societal process or discourse3 and the inclusion of non-material aspects also occurred internationally with an emphasis on urban heritage conservation. In the USA, calls for heritage conservation to become more "than a cult of antiquarians", for its conceptualization as a matter for society as a whole, emerged as early as the 1960s. This resulted in the establishment of the Historic District as a preferential preservation tool.4 With its focus on the city, the European

1 Cf. Adell, Between Imagined Communities, 2015.

2 Breuer, Ensemble, 1989.

3 Smith, Uses of Heritage, 2006; Harrison, Critical Approaches, 2013.

4 Quoted in: Murtagh, Keeping Time, 2006, 50–51. Cf. the essay on New York in this volume (Chapter 7).

Architectural Heritage Year 1975 also gave the topic a major boost. In the run-up to the event, demands by 'reformists' from countries including Germany for a new, more social conception of conservation5 were thwarted by the heritage conservation establishment, which criticized the "almost medically therapeutic zeal" with which "urbansocial matters" were being approached and the "tendency to think of and to accept conservation primarily in connection with urban planning considerations".6 The primacy of this defence of conservation as a matter of protecting the original material substance was fateful and meant that in Germany, to this day, the "conserve as found" conception is prescribed in law and rarely questioned.7 Only recently have calls for greater participation begun to have an impact on official procedures, not coincidentally in the sphere of urban heritage conservation once again.8 The heritage of cities is without doubt a key issue for the future, and not only because ever greater numbers of people live in cities. It also poses a challenge because, in their dynamism and heterogeneity, urban heritage figurations often resist established conceptions of heritage typified by concepts such as endurance and persistence, homogeneity and integrity.9 When we consider cities, it is particularly clear how hard it is to speak about heritage without also speaking about social and political issues, about interest groups, and ultimately about questions of power.10

The city, as should not be forgotten when considering questions of urban heritage, was long considered the locus of modern life and in many societies still represents the "open" locus of aspiration that enables liberation from traditional ties. For long phases in the modern period, city planning was dominated by a powerful hostility to tradition. In the shaping and reframing of urban spaces in line with functionalist technological ideals, the vital tasks of meaning-making and identity-formation were neglected.11 With the renaissance of antitechnicist urban research, Jane Jacobs, among others, drew attention to social cohesion and community-making processes,12 while Kevin Lynch focused on the production of the image of the city and its orientation function in a very broad sense.13 This new conception of the city as a meaningful living environment – an environment that 'means' in the literal sense – also revived the topic of its "heritage" in debates about city planning, architecture and conservation. A foundational text in the section *Setting the Framework* explores this conflict between habitat and technology-driven planning, between "place" und "trajectorial space", as the one in which the

5 Scheurmann, Konturen und Konjunkturen, 2018, 254–261.

6 According to Georg Mörsch in: Mörsch/Vereinigung der Landesdenkmalpfleger, Denkmalpflege 1975, 1976, 87–89.

7 See Vinken, Escaping Modernity, 2017.

8 See Sandmeier/Selitz, Das Kommunale Denkmalkonzept, 2020. Lisa Marie Selitz is currently completing a dissertation on the topic of *Erhalten – Erneuern – Beteiligen. Partizipation als Verhandlungsgegenstand der städtebaulichen Denkmalpflege* (working title, forthcoming 2021).

9 See Sophie Stackmann's dissertation on *Integrität als Konzept für das Erbe der Vergangenheit – eine kritische Lektüre* (working title, forthcoming 2021).

10 Harvey, Heritage Pasts, 2001.

11 Cf. for example, the essay on Cologne in this volume (Chapter 9).

12 Jacobs, Death and Life, 1961.

13 Lynch, The Image of the City, 1960.

formatting of heritage in modern urban space must also be decided. The latent tension between the designation of the city as both "modern" and "significant" or "meaningful" is a leitmotif in many of the essays collected in this volume.

In reducing the heritage question to a social one, however, we do not do justice to the complexity of the issue. After all, cities are not only characterized by heterogeneity and contradictions, dynamism and fluidity; as "ancient" nodes and meaningful habitats, they are often also privileged sites of heritage, characterized by a high degree of architectural and structural tradition and stability – of "monumentality" in other words. Of course, their perdurability should not be understood in static terms; urban spaces are subject to penetration and layering, connections, disruptions and breaks. The fundamental observation that many cities are distinct not only in terms of their ambience, but also with regard to their structures, spaces and architectural manifestations, is one that Aldo Rossi was able to demonstrate vividly with reference to the European city.14 Rossi did not focus his thought on a concept of heritage – or did so only to the extent that the "urban artefacts" and structural features and peculiarities of a city can be used to derive a specific local (in Rossi's terms a "rational") architecture. And yet his *Architecture of the City* details key elements (alongside urban artefacts primary elements, locus, aura, etc.) that should be analysed in order to understand the built heritage of cities. For Rossi, the city, with its layers of deposits and overlays, reutilizations and reinterpretations, continuities and breaks, is more than a passive stone stage-set: it becomes an effective "actor" by prestructuring significations, "setting" standards, suggesting ways of reading (or not) that may become active in processes of constituting and claiming heritage. Drawing on these considerations, heritage may be considered a specific mode of reproduction rather than a mode of production.15 This approach, outlined by an interdisciplinary research cluster on "The Intrinsic Logic of Cities"16 attempts to open ways to seeing heritage as a social practice without disregarding specific "given features" of the urban environment that contribute to the particularity or distinctiveness of urban heritage.17

This position in no way contradicts the view formally articulated by Critical Heritage Studies, according to which heritage heritage has no intrinsic value but only value that is socially negotiated, communicated and made.18 As early as 1903, in his influential work *The Modern Cult of Monuments*, the Austrian art historian and conservationist Alois Riegl described built heritage as a phenomenon of reception.19 If today we correctly understand heritage to be a social practice, the question of what is specific to this practice and which concept of practice we wish to apply nonetheless often remains underarticulated.20 My working hypothesis is that heritage positions itself as a practice of reproduction or making permanent, a practice whose key principle is the projection of

14 Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1984 (1966).

15 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, From Ethnology to Heritage, 2004.

16 Berking/Löw, Die Eigenlogik der Städte, 2008.

17 Cf. the essay on *The Distinctiveness of Cities* in this volume (Chapter 3).

18 Smith, Uses of Heritage, 2006.

19 Riegl, The modern cult of monuments, 1982 (1903).

20 Harrison, Understanding the Politics, 2009.

endurance forwards into the future. And many "political" treatments of the concept of heritage very much underestimate that these processes appear to be determined more by phenomena belonging to the repressed and the unconscious than by intentions and political goals – a circumstance that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida summarized in his concept of hauntology.21

These preliminary remarks cannot do much more than roughly outline the field in which my approaches to cities and their heritage have been undertaken. The aim of this collection of texts is less to make a contribution to theory than to establish a research practice that seeks explorative and occasionally playful access as a means of revealing the scintillating complexity of urban heritage via constantly proliferating cross-sections and shifting perspectives. At the same time, these studies, which were written over a period of more than ten years, also seek to go beyond established approaches to urban heritage, most of which are tied to specific disciplines. To put it another way, I attempt to take approaches from the archaeological sciences, which take heritage in its materiality seriously and which also concern themselves with historical monuments and city quarters, topography, city layouts and plot structures, and fuse them with methods of inquiry drawn from the social sciences, which focus on the processes by which heritage is formed and reproduced. In this, particular attention is paid to urban places and spaces and to the relevant orderings and relationships within them that often have a lasting effect on heritage. The contribution made to heritage-making by different spatial practices is expanded upon in detail in one of the introductory chapters.22

\* \* \*

The section entitled *Zoning the City: Heritage and Modernity* focuses on the intersection of spatial segregation and heritage-making processes, and on the question of how the often-contradictory demands made of the city (identification, orientation vs. function, market, etc.) are each organized in a spatial sense. By bringing to bear insights from critical spatial theory, patterns can be recognized here that are often reproduced over long periods and through political ruptures, and that are reinterpreted and re-evaluated in accordance with the changing conditions. The first example to be considered is the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, a city that, since the colonial period, has been shaped by the dual structure of modernity – tradition and a variety of planning logics (Asian-Islamic, "Western" – Tsarist and Soviet, etc.). It is only against the background of these spatialsocial constellations that conflicts over cities' heritage develop their full depth. In societal debates around tradition and identity, which are permeated by social, ethical and ideological tensions, a question central to all heritages discourses is clearly articulated: that of the "right" way to live.

21 In *Specters of Marx* (originally published in French in 1993) Jacques Derrida develops the concept of "hauntology", a philosophy of haunting, in which the repressed returns as a ghost and deploys its potency for society in a spectral, in-between status (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 1994). Sophie Stackmann theorizes heritage as spectral in her dissertation *Integrität als Konzept für das Erbe der Vergangenheit – eine kritische Lektüre* (working title, forthcoming 2021).

22 Cf. the essay on *The Spaces of the Monument* in this volume (Chapter 4).

Overall, the texts collected in this section show that the making of heritage enclaves, historic districts and similar urban heritage formations can be understood less in terms of intentional heritage-planning than as a complex interplay of established structures within the urban environment and societal processes of value attribution. It is the specific features of the urban environment and the attributions of meaning embedded latently within them that first offer the specific possibility of claiming, reactivating and formulating heritage. The fact that this social process of ascribing value is itself also pre-structured (and subject to historical shifts) by means of categories such as race, class and gender is self-evident. Since the publication of my book *Zone Heimat* in 2010, I have frequently discussed how practices of spatial separation and segregation can take the form of heritage-making (or more precisely heritage-formation).23 The European *Altstadt* (old town, historic city centre) – or rather its production – involves the articulation of anti-modern images of nostalgia and ideological residues that were formed within European Romanticism and remain effective in the evaluative standards, goals and aesthetic norms of urban heritage to this day. This is discussed in detail in the book with respect to the Swiss city of Basel. However, "historic" quarters and districts are not the result of a desire to protect or preserve; their existence can rather be ascribed to the specific goals of modernization that were formulated since the 19th century and the planning practices that went along with them. By means of zoning, the establishment of specific building zones, the *Altstadt* is afforded a place in the modernized urban body; it is this spatial segregation that first makes possible the integration of contradictory development goals in the modern city.

Zoning and the establishment of Historic Districts have been inextricably intertwined from the start. This can be seen clearly with respect to the development of preservation legislation, for instance in the USA. As one of the key achievements of modern city planning, zoning pursues a strategy of outward demarcation and inward homogenization. For America's Historic Districts, established as "special zones", this leads to the aesthetic homogenization of urban heritage, which can be read as a yearning for the "lost" integrity of the "good old days". The processes of homogenization that go hand-in-hand with the declaration of a Historic District are associated with the flattening of heterogeneity and difference and the elimination of everything that is foreign or alien. The example of New York makes clear that these fantasies of homogenization and demarcation via heritage-zoning are fuelled in equal part by social and by economic interests. In the case of the Historic Districts, the modernization of the zone aims not only at formal and aesthetic standardization "in the image of the old" but also at the creation of socially homogeneous neighbourhoods (in terms of ethnicity and class), and ultimately at the safeguarding of property values.

From a German perspective, what is remarkable about heritage preservation law in the United States is the fact that urban heritage conservation, in particular, is considered a societal undertaking, and that the use of participatory mechanisms, up to and including the involvement of residents in listing processes, has become the norm. The 'innocent' wish of preservationists and many residents for "historic" and beautiful

23 For a comprehensive overview, see: Vinken, Zone Heimat, 2010; Vinken, Im Namen der Altstadt, 2016.

urban spaces has nonetheless been corrupted by the prevailing patterns of ownership and power: the spatial and legal demarcation of historic quarters and the social desire for segregation are directly linked. It is a tension that is increasingly also articulated in German debates, for instance in the conflict around the role of heritage conservation in processes of gentrification,24 or in calls emanating from the left for the protection of established populations and their social and cultural networks. In the image of a homogeneous and socially vulnerable established (East German) population defending itself against mobile and privileged (Western and global) newcomers of all kinds we certainly see repeated patterns of defensiveness and fear of otherness latent in concepts associated with identity formation, such as *Heimat* and neighbourhood.

Heritage – armed with claims about background, origin, permanence and identity – has established itself as a (necessary) counterpoint to a 'modern' present, which is progressing, forgetful of tradition, towards a wide-open future. At a time when many countries are including the remnants of modernism on lists of protected monuments, this dialectical process, in which the origins of the heritage concept lie, reaches its conclusion. Taking as an example the debate over the heritage of modernism in Düsseldorf, I discuss how perspectives are shifting now that the megastructures from which the preservationist movement once sought to protect the city from are themselves being recognized as worthy of preservation, and how new fronts and arguments are emerging in this debate about urban heritage.

The section on *Doing Tradition: Heritage Politics and Identity-Building* pays closer attention to the political aspects of urban heritage That heritage structures in urban spaces are being harnessed not only to desires for prestige and distinctiveness, but also to revisionist and reactionary conceptions of history, can be demonstrated with reference to three German case studies, each of them subtly different and all located somewhere between restoration, reconstruction and revitalization. However, these are not examples of the national instrumentalization of heritage politics; rather, the cases of Cologne, Berlin and Frankfurt make it possible to reveal the ideological implications of such projects, which understand themselves to be unpolitical and the innocuous continuation of local traditions. Characteristic of such projects, which can be located in time between post-war reconstruction and the recent present, are lines of argument that invoke aesthetics in support of the "historic" framing of urban areas, and by the same token reject modernism and the modern formal language. Moreover, the efforts expended on urban heritage that are examined here are underpinned by promises of continuity, in that they are presented as "recovering" or "regaining" something by means of repair, restoration or reconstruction. In this way, the act of *making* and its political and societal goals are effectively disguised. It is therefore all the more important to recall these acts, in order to promote critical engagement with cultural heritage and to allow for multiperspectivity and contradiction.

The image of a static and homogeneous identity that characterizes many urban restoration projects is opposed to this goal. In Cologne, it is not well known that the current *Altstadt* is the result of a reconstruction campaign that was driven by heritage conservation and that sought to preserve the identity of a city almost entirely destroyed

24 Takahashi, Berlin Heritage Conservation, 2018.

in the war. It is even less well known that the area which was rebuilt did not exist in this form before the comprehensive rehabilitation efforts of the 1930s and 40s. The fantasies of homogenization that were radicalized and reinterpreted in racist terms during the era of Nazi rule were revitalized in the post-war era in the vestments of (supposedly unpolitical) compromise formulae. The consequences of these acts of repression are deeply inscribed in the appearances of German cities: to this day they can be read in the ongoing debates within institutional heritage conservation, a field which, shielded by claims of scientific objectivity, considers itself to be unpolitical and seeks to cast its abstention on questions of heritage and heritage politics as a virtue.25

It is hardly surprising that other actors move in to fill this gap. The particularly vehement wave of reconstructionism that has been rolling over Germany since the 1980s has largely suppressed other debates on city planning in the public consciousness, establishing standards to which heritage conservation can no longer refuse to conform: restoration and reconstruction "in renewed splendour" are once more in vogue.26 In Berlin, one can see where this unholy alliance might lead. Around the newly reconstructed palace of the Hohenzollern Kaisers, a combination of restoration, reconstruction and rehabilitation is creating a historic centre that is full of nostalgia for Prussia and its megalomaniacal imperial fantasies. The aim is to erase memories of the historically and ideologically divided heritage landscape of central Berlin. A city shaped by destruction and ruptures, whose heterogeneity is again approaching pre-war levels, is marginalizing and suppressing undesirable narratives, particularly East German perspectives and cultures of remembrance. Yet even this level of revisionism is surpassed by the beloved fake historic districts of cities such as Dresden and Hildesheim, or, as analysed here, Frankfurt am Main. In Frankfurt, urban heritage takes the form of a homogeneous *Altstadt* clone, brand new and constructed above an underground car park. Marketed as "reconstructions", these projects are revisionist erasures that thin out and contaminate urban heritage. Such practices can thus be located within the grand narrative of the European city: the tale of the good old days. It is this one narrative of original, meaningful order that is opposed to the presumed senselessness and formlessness of the present – a narrative that was already used to encourage a moral and aesthetic renewal of society by the conservative reformers of the 19th century,27 and one with which, more recently, UKIP and the now defunct Brexit Party campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union, illustrating their arguments with images of Poundbury, Prince Charles's fake Olde England suburb near Dorchester.28

Today, the boundary between heritage figuration and historically themed architecture has in many regards become fluid – materially, aesthetically, ideologically. The repoliticization of debates about heritage, which has finally reached Germany not least

25 Vinken, Erbe und Emotionen, forthcoming 2021.

26 Buttlar, Denkmalpflege statt Attrappenkult, 2011. Cf. the essay on Berlin in this volume (Chapter 10).

27 Pugin, Contrasts, 1836; Pugin, Gothic Architecture, 1920 (1821–1838).

28 Website YouTube, Building for the Future, marketing trailer UKIP. Cf.: Vinken, Erbe und Emotionen, forthcoming, 2021.

in the form of the "decolonize" movement, can therefore only be welcomed. And I understand my book to be, among other things, a plea for the stakeholders in this debate to become more aware of their social responsibility, in order to reformulate heritage as a contribution to productive coexistence in a pluralistic and heterogeneous society. My text on the Sicilian capital, Palermo, reveals what an urban community can achieve when various actors understand the heritage of the city to be a political platform that can be used to bring about positive social change. By means of a coordinated heritage politics that attempts to draw together a disparate range of voices, a real turn-around has been accomplished in recent decades in a city that appeared irredeemably lost to organized crime. The reappropriation of the city by its residents was in fact achieved in the name of an urban heritage that aimed to counter the established narrative of a "city of crime", attracting significant support. Alongside determined political coordination, the key to success was the involvement of a variety of political and social groups as well as a broad palette of activities. These embedded conventional heritage conservation measures, such as inventorization and restoration of monuments, in a broad spectrum of support measures as well as social and educational projects in order to achieve a revitalization and rehabilitation of the historic centre, to stop processes of decline and desertion, and to disseminate new hope.

Finally, the section *Reclaiming Heritage. Conflicts, Contestation, Canonization* examines the potential of heritage to generate conflict. The focus here turns to social processes of contesting and reclaiming heritage, and to the highly varied constellations of actors involved. These are often manifestations of conflicts between global and local perspectives. Interwoven with them, however, though not paralleling them entirely, are other dynamics, which can be gathered together under the heading of the canonization of heritage. Canonization reflects fundamental power relations; it strengthens, marginalizes and contests heritage.29 Yet cultural heritage is fundamentally a phenomenon grounded in collective perception and requires consensus to be effective. The various texts presented here provide arguments and observations that may help to evaluate these processes of negotiation and meaning-making, but ultimately it is always a matter of perspective and the standards applied, i.e. of positionality.

The chapter on how Sicily's cultural heritage came to be included in the (northern) European canon of taste and culture through the writings of the pioneer travellers of the late 18th century shows, with reference to Palermo, that the conflict between the global and the local is anything but new. It is possible to read this story as one in which Sicily grows closer to Europe, as an Enlightenment project that is associated with a major increase in positive knowledge (archaeological, historical art-historical, etc.). Yet it is clear that a significant body of knowledge was also lost in this process of canonization: not only the legacy of Arab-Norman culture, but also mediaeval sites were excluded from the local canon after failing to satisfy the aesthetic judgment of the representatives of the northern Enlightenment. The irony, not further elaborated in the chapter, is that these same Enlightenment thinkers, in their later garb as Romantics, were to rediscover the Middle Ages, raising it up as a model for their respective national cultures. These acts by which Sicily was 'discovered' certainly fit the pattern of colonialism:

29 Silverman, Contested Cultural Heritage, 2011.

questions of evaluation and, above all, of evaluative hegemony are matters of power and are accompanied by marginalization and loss.

In this context, the "foreign" and the "familiar" are certainly ambivalent and shifting categories. In the name of heritage, the foreign can be appropriated as exotic or as a primal origin, or else can be excluded and eliminated as hostile, inappropriate, ugly.30 In addition, travelling heritage also provides a good opportunity to study processes of contextualization, framing, rejection and appropriation.31 In this context, an essay on a "German" monument in the Bronx explores the emotional residues of heritage making. A monument forced to "travel" by anti-Semitism was adopted by the German community in New York and then banished to the Bronx; processes of appropriation and marginalization, destruction and redemption are are revealed as through a magnifying glass.

The tension between global and local evaluations is analysed once again with regard to Salvador da Bahia (Brazil). The starting point here is the rehabilitation, with international support, of the city's Pelourinho district, one of the largest contiguous Baroque city centres in the Americas, which was recently granted UNESCO World Heritage status. The rehabilitation of an important urban monument has taken its toll in terms of displacement, population transfer, and the weakening of social and cultural ties. The complexity of this example emerges from the fact that the former centre of the global slave trade is today a vital tourist destination, above all for Brazilians who come here to seek reconnect with their African roots. The *africanità* which is ascribed to the city is located less in its colourful building traditions, however, than in its cultural practices – precisely those aspects of its heritage that have experienced significant weakening as a result of the forces of homogenization and gentrification to which the historic centre has been subject as part of the heritage-making process. The lines of conflict and ambivalences are not always easy to resolve in a former city of slavery that is energetically reclaiming its African heritage, and that is assigned a specific role in the national consciousness: For in Bahia's urban heritage are also articulated the highly fragmented conflicts that surround the definition of a Brasilian identity.

Similar questions can be asked from a different perspective about New Orleans's Black heritage. In contrast to Brazil, the official historiography of the United States is unambiguously white; Blackness is not a component of American identity as a matter of course, as it is in Brazil. To this day, Black culture is generally considered to represent an exteriority. The starting point for my examination of this are the many irreversible instances of destruction that the city experienced in the disastrous floods caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I analyse changes that have taken place in the city since reconstruction and the suppression of Black heritage artefacts, a phenomenon that takes its place in a long history of marginalization, domestication and commercial exploitation. In this context, once again, the urgent question arises of what we want to speak about when we speak about the heritage of a city; who can this "we" be? On which side do we wish to place ourselves? Here we can observe how racist discrimination proliferates monstrously, even in discourses around cultural heritage and indeed precisely in

30 Vinken, Das Erbe der Anderen, 2015.

31 Juneja, Mobile Heritage, 2015.

### 18 Zones of Tradition – Places of Identity

these discourses. The re-politicization of this debate, which is being pursued by Post-Colonial and Critical Heritage Studies, has already reached "the streets" of our cities in the form of the conflicts over Confederate monuments, the decolonization movement and Black Lives Matter activists. To research urban heritage is to write against the homogenization latent in established conceptions of cultural heritage; it means analysing heritage process in their contradictory modes of reproduction in the knowledge that the question of heritage is always a political one.

## **2 The Crises of the Modern City1** Place and Trajectorial Space

As we know, the great obsession of the nineteenth century was history […]. The present age may be the age of space instead. We are in an era of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the near and the far, of the side-byside, of the scattered. *(Michel Foucault)2*

Two categories of space, the place and the trajectorial space, are paradigmatic figures of space in the modern city.3 The two concepts articulate the contrary and irreconcilable demands and functions the city has faced since the age of industrialization. To this day, an especially conspicuous feature of our cities are areas where a conflict plays out that remains unresolved: the conflict between the spaces of habitation, of human encounter and exchange, and the 'trajectories', open spaces of traffic, which are supposed to guarantee unlimited access and unhindered passage, an undisturbed "flow" – the spaces, in a word, that I will in the following call trajectorial spaces.

Urban planning as an independent discipline came into being first and foremost as a set of procedures of the organization of space aiming to arrange various "functions", including abidance/encounter and connection/rapid transit, in one and the same space. Yet the different attempts to provide a rational subdivision, order, and "zoning" of the urban surface according to different functions, and the call for "traffic-friendly" cities in particular, in fact led to a crisis Alexander Mitscherlich aptly described as the "inhospitability" of the city.4 The hypothesis that this effect can be attributed directly to the intrusion of the trajectorial space into the dense core spaces of the cities is supported by Marc Augé's theoretical reflections on space.5 Even in simple geometric terms, the

1 Translation from the German by Gerrit Jackson with assistance from Johanna Blokker.

2 Foucault, Different Spaces, 1998 (1967), 175.

3 On the term "trajectorial space" cf. Vinken, Ort und Bahn, 2008, and Knoblauch/Löw, The Re-Figuration, 2020; Löw, Re/figure(e)/ation, 2020.

4 Mitscherlich, Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte, 1965.

5 Augé, Non-Places, 1995 (1992).

"centers" or "crossroads" that are places block the axes and paths that lead from one place to another.6 Yet what I have described as a conflict between the different "demands" on the city reaches deeper. For the city center is one of those "anthropological places" Augé has described as identical, relational, and historical to the extent that they embody the "particularity" of a city: their various elements and practices can be seen as interrelated, and they convey continuity and stability not in the form of dissociated recollection but as participation.7 It is into the city centers, as spaces "where individual itineraries can intersect and mingle,"8 that the trajectorial space enters and with it a new spatial category of the "non-place." For the trajectorial space can be grouped with those spaces of transit and travelling Augé has called "the archetype of *non-place*."9 To conceive place and trajectorial space as forming a dichotomic constellation means, moreover, to acknowledge that they tend to exclude each other, rather than constituting partial spaces that integrate into a larger shared space. The conflicts of the modern city cannot indeed be resolved by shifting the distribution of "space" in favor of one or the other pole. The history of modern urban development can be read in this perspective as a series of attempts to overcome a fundamental conflict over space with inadequate means. In a study of the example of Le Corbusier, the following analysis will examine how the trajectorial space becomes the paradigm of the modern city in the functionalist utopias, and will ask which qualities and potentials for conflict break the traditional urban spaces apart. Organic urban planning sought to reconcile place and trajectory; the example of Rudolf Schwarz, one of its champions, illustrates the factors that made the failure of this reconciliation inevitable.

The trajectory is the product and the icon of traffic. Long before mechanized individual traffic becomes a mass phenomenon that defines the cityscape, "traffic" begins to change the way people think about the city. Urban planning becomes traffic planning. Modernization now means a "correction" of the city,10 a removal of its constrictions, a process of breaking open – and that includes opening the city toward its environment. As the fortification walls of old European cities are razed, the contrast that has long defined them – that between city and country – is dissolved.11 Industrialization and, later, a new degree of mobility give this development additional dynamism, as well as creating a double problem: the congestion of the urban core, with the attendant negative consequences for the health of its residents; and the cancerous growth of developments in the surrounding countryside. From the Garden City movement onward, all influential urban utopias seek to remedy this doubly negative balance by conceiving city and country as a unified space for planning purposes.12 The implementation by means of urban planning of a new reality that transcends the traditional dualism culminates in the concept of the urban landscape. In 1949, the architect and urban planner Rudolf

6 Augé, Non-Places, 1995 (1992), 57

7 Augé, Non-Places, 1995 (1992), 52–55.

8 Augé, Non-Places, 1995 (1992), 66.

9 Augé, Non-Places, 1995 (1992), 86. Italics in the original. In the same context, Augé also introduces the highway as a prominent non-place (ibid., 79).

10 Gurlitt, Handbuch des Städtebaues, 1920, 240–288.

11 Warnke, Natur nach dem Fall, 1994; Vinken, Die neuen Ränder, 2005.

12 Fehl/Rodríguez-Lores, Die Stadt wird in der Landschaft sein, 1997, 19–54.

Schwarz, seeking to establish the urban landscape as the general model of postwar reconstruction, writes: "The large city has become fluid, it flows out into its landscape, filling it to the brim. […] City and country have come into flux, and out of their murky intermixture the urban landscape crystallizes."13 The urban cores, too, are accordingly subjected to a process of space planning guided by criteria of order and functionality, which instate the guiding vision of a clearly structured city rich in greenery and open spaces, a hygienic and "traffic-friendly" urban landscape traversed by – ideally: intersection-free – roads and railroads embedded in wide green areas.

That the city is categorized as a space that can be planned, controlled, and subdivided is the trajectorial space's first triumph. The trajectory turns out in this regard to be the agent of a homogeneous "Euclidean" space conceived as preexisting what is in it; seen from the trajectory, everything becomes a destination – or an obstacle. The tabula rasa, the empty and zonable space in which the modern city comes into being and at whose mercy it has been ever since, is the trajectorial space. The sway of this space has changed the heterogeneous spatial structure of the traditional city, which Marc Augé has described as a fabric of interrelations between interpenetrating and overlapping places as well as an "active place."14 Le Corbusier's urban projects and utopias present an illustrative example that can help us gain a better understanding of this process and the specific qualities of the trajectorial space. For as we will see, the great variety of such projects designed by the man who was probably the single most influential protagonist of functionalist urban planning15 at once marks a radical end point of the trajectorial space's dominance over the city.

The motif of the trajectory already occupies a central position in Le Corbusier's early urban utopias. He first comes to public notice as an urban planner at the Paris Autumn Salon of 1922, where he presents his project of a "Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants" (figs 1, 2).16

The *Ville Contemporaine* is considered the first ever functionalist urban development project.17 For the first time, the urban area is strictly divided into spatially separate zones that also differ in their formal designs – a downtown of skyscrapers is surrounded by a residential city consisting of linear residential structures meandering across wide open spaces and, further out, by factory areas with the associated working-class housing estates. The project's main feature is the generous use of open space in conjunction with a high population density; the architect described his design as a "vertical garden city." Buildings occupy only five percent of the total area; the slender high-rises are set several hundred meters apart.

13 Schwarz, Von der Bebauung, 1949, 205–206.

14 Augé, Non-Places, 1995 (1992), 66.

15 Huse, Le Corbusier in Selbstzeugnissen, 1976, 56–79. See the recent summary discussion in Petrilli, L'urbanistica, 2006.

16 Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow, 1987 (1925), 176–177.

17 Huse, Le Corbusier in Selbstzeugnissen, 1976, 56, 59–63.

*Figure 1: "Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants", overview, Le Corbusier 1922*

*Figure 2: "Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants", layout, Le Corbusier 1922*

The center of the entire project is given to traffic, with a landing field for air taxis atop a multi-level train station. Numerous highways and roads provide access to the entire metropolitan area, forming a complex fabric of thoroughfares of gradated capacity. The ornamental aspect of this fabric, which patently owes more to a concern for formal aesthetics than to functional considerations, renders it glaringly obvious that the trajectory is the project's guiding principle. The building designs, too, derive from this primacy of the trajectory. From roads and parking levels, elevators, as "vertical mass transit," catapult people to their workplaces and apartments off the hallways of the meandering blocks. Despite the inclusion of dedicated pedestrian levels, the enormous dimensions and spaces of the "Contemporary City" are designed for rapid movement, for the car and the driver. A multi-lane highway reserved for individual traffic forms the rigorously geometrical layout's spine. The fact that this highway, moving away from the city center, abruptly narrows down to a much smaller road highlights the representative and symbolic function of the so-called *grande traversée*, whose beginning and end are designated by triumphal arches: the center of the modern city marks the triumph of the automobile. In this regard, the project renders a very literal interpretation of the concept of "Fordism": Le Corbusier reiterates the fundamental disposition of Ford's groundbreaking car factory in Detroit, a gigantic industrial compound whose layout obeys rational considerations, with a central production line linking the various elements.

Despite the highway axis dominating the project, the *Ville Contemporaine* remains committed to the tradition of centralistic urban layouts. Still, the consequences of the city's integration into, and subordination to, the trajectorial space are unmistakable. Ample spaces designed to enable a neat separation of functions as well as a high degree of mobility isolate and distance the individual elements from one another, privileging gazing over doing, driving past over lingering. The density and superimposition of structures of interrelation and spaces of action of the traditional city disintegrates into a space conceived from the perspective of the trajectory and furnished with architectonic sculptures. The rich choreography of visual axes between these elements Le Corbusier presented in various drawings18 is best seen in the sequences that emerge as one drives past them (fig. 3). The city becomes an aggregation of marginal objects in a trajectorial space to be traversed in rapid movement.

*Figure 3: "Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants", view from the central highway, Le Corbusier 1922*

In the 1930s, Le Corbusier elaborated his Contemporary City into the *Ville Radieuse*, the "Radiant City".19 The spatially separate zones (administrative, residential, industrial, recreational) are now placed in alternation along the central highway. The conveyor belt of traffic has become the sole defining principle giving the urban design its

18 Le Corbusier, Œuvre complète, 1960, 34–39.

19 Le Corbusier, La ville radieuse, 1935.

structure and shape, creating the arbitrarily extensible linear city.20 This renders the integration of the city into a space conceived as total (and homogeneous) even more obvious. The radiant city itself is trajectory-shaped, perfectly aligned, dynamic, endless. The trajectory is the principle of this space in two ways: as a principle of distancing and remote views; and as the principle of a homogeneous functional space of movement that presupposes additional homogeneous spaces dedicated to specific functions such as habitation, work, etc.

The trajectory remains the leitmotif of Le Corbusier's urban planning well into the postwar era. As early as 1929, he had designed ribbon-shaped megastructures that would snake through the bays of Rio de Janeiro (fig. 4) like the sandworms of Frank Herbert's desert planet. Not much later, he wanted to connect two outlying suburbs of Algiers with similar linear cities (fig. 5).21

*Figures 4, 5: Urban planning for Rio de Janeiro, "Project Obus" for Algiers, Le Corbusier 1929 and 1931*

The central aim of these visions is to achieve a complete synthesis of trajectory and residential unit. The new urban form consists of wide highways atop a gigantic support structure made of reinforced concrete into which apartment units are inserted; in the case of Algiers, Le Corbusier's plans included housing for no less than 180,000 inhabitants. The arterial road is the "roof " of a ribbon-shaped apartment block on stilts; habitation is formally and literally subordinate to the trajectory. In a gesture almost of modesty, the revolutionary structure of this urban utopia is motivated as a technical alteration to the urban structure: "The project provides the city with what it urgently needs: rapid transit and apartments."22 In fact, it entails massive interventions into the spatial structure that are illuminating for our inquiry into the qualities of the trajectorial space, as they concern its relation to the old city and to the surrounding countryside. Indicatively enough, the first point, the relation between the trajectorial space and the

20 Le Corbusier, La ville radieuse, 1935, 170.

21 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the present State, 2015 (1930), 233–245; and see Boesiger/Girsberger, Le Corbusier, 1999, 324–328.

22 Boesiger/Girsberger, Le Corbusier, 1999, 327.

old city, was only of marginal interest to Le Corbusier. In many sketches, built-up areas are indicated by nothing more than summary hatching. His linear city is, first and foremost, a grand system for automotive traffic that "frees" the old city "of confusion and clutter […] without interfering with the existing state of affairs in any way."23 For, the conciliatory argument goes, "nothing is easier than to build, with little disturbance, supports of reinforced concrete rising well above the roofs of existing neighborhoods."24 Rather than "scraping off [and] removing" "that swarming mass that until now has clung to the ground like a rigid crust" – these words are meant to describe a reorganization of the historic center of Paris25 – the design calls for traffic to traverse the old Rio with its heterogeneous spaces and layered components on stilts. Transcended by the technological constructions of the new machine age, the old city languishes in the shadow of the trajectory.

The distancing and marginalization of the old city we can observe in this instance is positively a precondition for the new kind of urban landscape to which Le Corbusier plans to give shape. This urban landscape, rather than consisting of city and countryside, abruptly confronts both with the trajectorial space and its architectonic implementation. Seen through the eyes of the creator-architect, nature and architecture allow each other to appear in the most flattering light: "The whole site began to speak […] of architecture […]. The city announced itself by the only line that can harmonize with the vehement caprice of the mountains: the horizontal."26 The freedom of the open road corresponds to the freedom of the distanced gaze: "The steamers that passed, magnificent and moving constructions of modern times, suspended in the space above the city, found a response, an echo, a rejoinder there."27 At night, in particular, ships entering the harbor would come upon a magnificent spectacle whose effect would surpass that of New York's skyline. This urban utopia of a grand form composed, in sculptural fashion, into the landscape aims both at total functionality and at the aesthetic appeal of distanced spectatorship, uniting two central qualities of non-places: constituted to meet specific purposes, they do not engender spaces of encounter and assembly, instead establishing unambiguous and functionalized relationships between the isolated individual and the space.28 The highway on stilts moreover permits no more than a passing glance at the existing places with their centers and crossroads. In the privilege it accords to the distant view, too, this "trajectorial-city" belongs to the spaces of transit occupied by travelers.

The *Cité linéaire industrielle* (fig. 6), a project Le Corbusier begins drafting in 1942–43, represents the synthesis and quintessence of his ideas about urban development.29 In

23 Boesiger/Girsberger, Le Corbusier, 1999, 324.

24 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the present State, 2015 (1930), 242.

25 Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow, 1987 (1925), 280–281. At the time, Le Corbusier planned to build a "Contemporary City," the *Ville Voisin* (named after a automobile brand), in the center of Paris (ibid., 277–289).

26 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the present State, 2015 (1930), 245.

27 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the present State, 2015 (1930), 245.

28 Augé, Non-Places, 1995 (1992), 96–97.

29 Le Corbusier, L'Urbanisme des Trois Établissements humains, 1959, 97–125. On the genesis of the "industrial linear city" cf. Fehl/Rodríguez-Lores, Die Stadt wird in der Landschaft sein, 1997, 153–158.

this "industrial linear city," which is conceived as the centerpiece of a comprehensive reorganization of space, the trajectory becomes the principle of the global order of space and indeed of civilization as a whole.

*Figure 6: "Industrial Linear City", Le Corbusier/ASCORAL 1942–43*

In several sketches, Le Corbusier lays out the vision of a global order of space based on gigantic urban belts that extend across the continents from harbor to harbor. The slightly cryptic annotation reads in translation: "The world has spread across the entire surface of the earth, from one pole to the other and even across the poles themselves, a world made up of storage facilities, gigantic productive forces, and transit and transportation infrastructure."30 The industrial linear city is a loose aggregation of factory compounds, residential units, and infrastructure along transportation and traffic routes laid out in parallel lines. At its center runs a highway – wide green spaces shield the rest of the city from its noise – reserved for individual traffic (!). At some distance from it, the various routes of freight traffic run in parallel to it: road, railroad, and canal. The factory zones are inserted between these lines. On the other side of the highway are apartments, communal buildings such as athletic and recreation centers, and cultural

30 Quoted in: Boesiger/Girsberger, Le Corbusier, 1999, 336.

and administrative facilities. This urban landscape lacks all traditional urban attributes, or rather: it is conceived as the antithesis to the historic city: loose, permeated by greenery, and dynamic rather than dense, built of stone, and centered. The trajectory as the principle of spatial order creates functionally unambiguous and homogeneous zoned spaces in order to realize the explicit aim of the functionalist urban models. The industrial linear city, too, clearly evinces the qualities of the trajectorial space. The city is reduced to spatially isolated zones, each composed of homogeneous functional units devoted to habitation, work, and play; modern man, ideally, is always efficient: now as a sleeper, now as an eater, now as a worker. The city's resident becomes its user – especially so on the central trajectory, which remains Le Corbusier's privileged perspective of its representation. Here, as in all non-places, man is free from his "usual determinants" and "no more than what he does or experiences in the role of […] driver."31

Le Corbusier's urbanistic proposals are remarkably consistent in the way they take the concept of the functionalist city to its logical extreme – also as regards its spatial dispositions. In the linear city, the modern city is entirely conceived around the central trajectory – and with the trajectory a non-place has intruded into the center of the urban fabric and broken it apart into isolated zones, modes of access, and views. Linear cities have played a supporting role at best in the history of urban development.32 Yet beyond such instances in which the trajectory formally shapes the modern city, most evidently so in the linear urban forms, we can note structural changes – or rather, spatial dislocations – that result from the rise of the trajectorial space as the new paradigm of urban development. A direct path leads from the trajectory and the trajectorial space to the crisis of the modern city and its "inhospitability" mentioned above. In the historical perspective, however, responsibility for this development is borne not by utopian visions of the linear city but rather by the organic urban models that prevailed in the postwar era, promising to correct the construction flaws of the functionalist city33 by replacing a mechanical and "empty" order with one that would be "animated," meaningful, and lively. In his influential textbook *Organische Stadtbaukunst* (The Art of Organic Urban Development, published 1948),34 Hans Bernhard Reichow dedicates himself to a renewal of the city as a harmonious entity "in accord with the laws of life", and to the "development of a cohesive, organically structured, ordered, and integrated metropolitan body possessing natural and meaningful unity".35 The new urban landscape is to be based on a cellular and hierarchically gradated structure, from the single-family residential unit to the apartment block, from the neighborhood to the urban district. Green spaces or woodlands and agricultural areas separate the individual urban cells or neighborhoods from one another. Metaphors taken from the (human) organism undergird this structure of order. Cells and organs, arteries and nerve cords are to be placed in organic – which is also to say, meaningful and purposive – arrangement. This image,

31 Augé, Non-Places, 1995 (1992), 103.

32 Fehl/Rodríguez-Lores, Die Stadt wird in der Landschaft sein, 1997, and Kainrath, Die Bandstadt, 1997.

33 Cf. the summary discussion in Düwel/Gutschow, Städtebau in Deutschland, 2001, 165–174.

34 Reichow, Organische Stadtbaukunst, 2005 (1948).

35 Reichow, Organische Stadtbaukunst, 2005 (1948), 59.

it would seem, assigns places as well as trajectories their respective locations within a shared whole, the "urban body." And yet, as I will show in the following, the city under the aegis of the organic has been no less subject to the dominance of the trajectorial space and its non-places.

The champions of organic urban planning took far from negative views of technology, traffic, and mobility. Just like Le Corbusier, they claimed to have the right answers to the new demands the city faced; they, too, were heralds of modern progress. As early as 1928, Rudolf Schwarz, a theorist of the modern city whose importance has not yet been fully recognized, had devoted a book to the "path-breaking power of technology";36 in his subsequent writings, he had repeatedly placed the demands of the age of mechanization, the "intrusion of technology into the cities,"37 at the center of his reflections on urban development.38 When Schwarz was appointed head of general planning for the rebuilding of Cologne in 1946, he drafted an urban landscape that would subject the entire Cologne Bight to a new spatial structure. *Das neue Köln* (The New Cologne),39 a programmatic book published in connection with these plans, illustrates the project in striking graphic representations that show the Cologne Bight as a network of more or less autonomous urban units (fig. 7).

*Figures 7, 8: "The Cologne Federation of Cities" – "Double City Cologne and Mülheim", Rudolf Schwarz 1950*

This "federation of cities" is shown in sketches deliberately designed to recall the images of cells and nuclei in biology textbooks. Upon closer examination, however, the heritage of the functional city is tangible in the plans for Cologne not only in the rational

36 Schwarz, Wegweisung der Technik, 1979 (1928).

37 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 11.

38 See the recent detailed discussion in Pehnt/Strohl, Rudolf Schwarz, 1997.

39 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950.

organization of the region as a whole but also, quite concretely, in the figure of the "double city" (fig. 8): the urban nucleus of Cologne, as the "acropolis" (*Hochstadt*) and "city of education and community," is complemented by Mülheim as the "city of labor," a structure that unmistakably recalls the linear-city conceptions. The two centers are organized along two conveyor belts, the "double curve" of traffic, formed by the river Rhine and a planned new highway. Mülheim itself functions as a linear city along a central trajectory, quite as proposed by Le Corbusier for industrial cities; the "acropolis" (*Hochstadt)* of Cologne, by contrast, is "embraced and delimited" by the highway – a configuration we will need to discuss in greater detail.

In fact, Rudolf Schwarz had closely studied the industrial linear city as early as 1941, when he worked on the plans for Thionville (Diedenhofen), on which his proposals for Cologne would later draw.40 The drafts for the organically structured "urban landscape of Diedenhofen"41 were commissioned by the National Socialists, who sought to redevelop war-ravaged Lorraine, which had come under German occupation, radically Germanizing and modernizing it in the process. In this context, Schwarz transformed the guiding model of an organic structure into a concrete structural schema that profoundly influenced the German debates of the postwar era, not least importantly through his widely read 1949 programmatic essay *Von der Bebauung der Erde* (On the development of the earth),42 which explicitly describes the organic urban landscape as an elaboration of the linear city (fig. 9).

*Figures 9, 10: "Development Scheme from the Linear City to the Urban Landscape" –"Industrial Ribbon with Residential Developments and 'Hochstadt'", Rudolf Schwarz 1949*

40 Pehnt/Strohl, Rudolf Schwarz, 1997, 100–112.

A "three-ribbon city" (with an industrial, a green, and a residential ribbon), mirrored across one axis, becomes a five-ribbon city with a central industrial ribbon, and finally an industrial ribbon with residential developments forming lateral appendages. Another illustration (fig. 10), which depicts a schematic view of the entire urban landscape as it was to be realized in Cologne as well, confirms the extent to which the linear element of the central trajectory has penetrated the organic plans: here, too, the city's spine and its structurally dominant element is the "maelstrom of the industrial zone." This model city, however, is enriched by the addition of a new element. Whereas Le Corbusier puts issues of transportation front and center, which leads to a design that seeks to insert the zoned city as smoothly as possible into the trajectorial space, the organic model has two poles. The residential cells are arranged in relation to the transportation belt without adopting its spatial structure, forming their own centers of gravity. Schwarz compares this pattern to the spatial organization of a cathedral: the length of the central nave is flanked by chapels that are accessible and yet intimate and self-enclosed spaces, just as the autonomous spatial units of a "pearl necklace" of residential cells are arrayed along the "maelstrom of the industrial zone."43

The trajectorial space of the industrial linear city has thus been reinterpreted into a polar order of the sort that is characteristic for the entire concept of the urban landscape. City and countryside, too, are presented as interrelated categories: the city, Schwarz writes, is "another countryside. The landscape exists doubly, once spread out outside as countryside, and then comprised in a narrow space, transformed into head and countenance, as city."44 The city itself is accordingly a "double entity." It is a home, homelike, associated with domesticity and the female; but at once also "disclosed toward the open and wedded to the man."45 This polar order is also, and primarily, a spatial order. On the one hand, the city as a home is "pervaded by the power of places" that can be assigned to the "forever unvarying processes of human lives" and are charged with "the unceasing repetitions of the quotidian." "That means much for planning. In order for residential developments to be able to become a home, their dimensions must remain within the compass life can pervade." Every narrow domain "must contain everything that belongs to the generation of community life."46 The anthropological place, it would seem, has been rehabilitated in this theory as one "pole" of considerations in urban development. Complementing his theory of the place, Schwarz elaborates a theory of the trajectorial space. The figure that to his mind marks the polar opposite of the home is traffic, as the expression of openness par excellence. This pole, he argues, did not fully develop until traffic was mechanized. The man of old, the pedestrian, now shared the city with man as the "commander of technology, with great speeds and spaces at his disposal."47 The human being of the modern era is accordingly described as a double creature, at once "pre-technological" and "meta-

43 The image continues with an equation between the altar, the inner sanctum, and the "acropolis" (*Hochstadt*) or "central sun", Schwarz, Von der Bebauung, 1949, 106.

44 Schwarz, Gegenstand des Städtebaus, 1997 (1948), 218.

45 Schwarz, Von der Bebauung, 1949, 196.

46 Schwarz, Von der Bebauung, 1949, chapter "Die Stadt", 193–212.

47 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 11–12.

technological"; as a pedestrian and "conductor and director of technology."48 This double being, Schwarz argues in his essay on "Das neue Köln," necessarily requires a double structure of his habitat: "the ample and spacious city and the other one for the quiet and precious things and the homes of human sentiment."49 The new city of Schwarz, we might translate, merges place and trajectory.

How is this simultaneity conceived in spatial terms? How can place and trajectory be integrated in such a fashion that neither pole takes on the spatial qualities of the other, with the attendant adverse effects? For the "double entity" of the new city to be realized in full, Schwarz is convinced, both components need to "mature into their fully developed figure."50 This process of the clarification of home and technology, of place and trajectory described here as one of maturation also implies a radical reconstruction and reorganization of the city. And once again, the guiding figure of modernization is the trajectorial space and the structure it imposes: "The technical [component], in particular, must be developed to its full clarity and size, as unconstrained as possible by petty considerations. The large conveyor belts of traffic must flow through the lands in free movement and be equipped with everything required for a smooth discharge of traffic," Schwarz writes – Le Corbusier would have concurred without qualification.These wideopen spaces of knowledge must then "be complemented by a meta-technological component that, undisturbed by technology and its traffic, is the province of unencumbered man."51 This privilege accorded to one pole, that of the trajectorial space, provides, in the practice of urban planning, the argument that it is necessary to reorganize the city in order to make it traffic-friendly. Still, from now on – and no earlier theorist has put it quite so clearly – the urban planner's task is double: not only must he create wide and fluid spaces; he must also "restitute" to the pedestrian city its proper dimensions, since traffic, Schwarz writes, had brought about "the general dissolution of the historic town center."52 In Le Corbusier's model, the city was an uncompromising trajectorial space; in the organic model, it becomes a space traversed by polar opposites, "the dynamic [space] of the belts of traffic and the static one of the pedestrian". "Belt and domain," Schwarz writes in looking back on his work on the plans for Cologne, "needed to be woven into each other."53

The Cologne plans offer insight into the details of how the modern dichotomy of place and trajectorial space was to be translated into a new spatial order – and analyzing them can help us detect the flaws in the procedures applied to attain this goal. As we saw, the "maelstrom of technology" remained the principle on which the urban landscape's order was based; in the Cologne Bight, the highway from Cologne to Mülheim would be one such trajectory. The trajectory has the double function of providing

48 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 11–12.

49 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 11–12.

50 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 12.

51 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 12.

52 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 11.

53 Schwarz, Der Aufbau zerstörter Städte, 1997 (1955), 220.

access to, and imposing order upon, space: "Rapid traffic fringes the place, branching off from its fringe toward its center" (fig. 11).54

*Figure 11: "General Concept of the Suburb", Rudolf Schwarz 1950*

This second task of the trajectory, here designated by the term "fringing," which was already recognizable in the sketch "The double curve of traffic" (fig. 8), merits closer examination. Unlike Mülheim, an industrial town fed, and bisected, by the trajectory as though by a conveyor belt, the urban nucleus of Cologne is fringed by the trajectory, which turns it into an island of sorts. This constellation returns in the structure imposed on the urban cores. The "reorganization of the inner city" looks peaceful and hardly spectacular in the plans: it shows the newly organized, largely independent residential neighborhoods, each comprehended by higher-order roads. These multi-lane arterial roads are laid out wide enough to accommodate not only car traffic, but also the tramway on its own track bed separate from the street. The "general concept" summarizes this method as follows: "Calm and internally complete neighborhoods need to be formed and separated from one another, and the suitable means to this end is the thoroughfare."55 "Internally complete" – that refers to the desired autonomy of these units, which usually comprise several parishes and generally coincide with a school district. Traffic infrastructure, as Schwarz puts it concisely in the same context, has "today almost taken on the function formerly fulfilled by city walls; it delimits and circumscribes

54 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 29.

55 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 43.

the quarter. The planner will fringe the latter with such roads and distance it from adjacent quarters."56 The trajectory is here not just the central element of spatial planning; it is also meant to supply the definition and protection classically afforded by the city wall: the trajectorial space and its non-places are suddenly charged with circumscribing and assembling.

The mismatched comparison between the highway and the city wall reveals where the blind spot of the project of organic reconciliation lies. For there is no spatial overlap between the wall and the trajectory: whereas the wall separates an (open) outside from a (protected, enclosed) inside, expansiveness from narrowness, city from countryside, the trajectorial space cannot serve as a boundary in this sense. As an agent of the infinite, open, and expanding vector space, it occupies adjacent spaces in order to subject them to its order. Schwarz was in fact perfectly aware that the two spaces to be "woven into each other" were incommensurable opposites: "The fact remains that modern traffic requires urban planning on a different spatial and temporal scale than the traffic of the old cities, largely defined by pedestrians. Modern traffic requires wide, fluid belts to be rapidly traversed. The driver condenses the space he traverses, whereas the pedestrian gradually gains access to it."57 Yet Schwarz's use of the term "condensed" to describe the trajectorial space quite plainly shows the inadequacy of the instruments he proposes. The two spaces and their different scales cannot indeed be interwoven into peaceful coexistence in a greater space of the urban totality. The condensed space of the trajectory evinces a characteristic urge to unrestrained expansion. It is unsuitable as the boundary of a small-scale "interior" because as a consequence, the emptiness and distancing of the trajectorial space invade the protective urban spaces of guarding and assembling. The plans for Cologne are clear evidence in this regard: in Schwarz's conception, the expressways that enclose the neighborhoods are to be as "frontage-free" as possible. Rather than being lined by businesses, roads should preferably widen into square-like exterior spaces used as parking lots interspersed with tall and large administrative buildings that, erected at large distances, "are more commensurate with the scale of the belt."58 The trajectory exports its scale into the spaces adjacent to it, transforming them into space congruous to itself. Distancing and emptiness, the qualities of the trajectorial space, distinctly come to the fore.The new city Schwarz imagines already faintly suggests the specific qualities of the car city Venturi and Scott Brown taught us to recognize in their exemplary study of Las Vegas (fig. 12).59 Seen from the highway, the city in this model shrivels into an agglomeration of isolated buildings on the edges of wide parking areas, while omnipresent advertising billboards and information signage provide the required rapid orientation.

56 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 29.

57 Schwarz, Das neue Köln, 1950, 11–12.

58 Schwarz, Der Aufbau zerstörter Städte, 1997 (1955), 221.

59 Venturi/Brown/Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 1972.

*Figure 12: Traditional city and car city. Rome and Las Vegas, Robert Venturi/Denise Scott Brown 1972*

The urban landscape of Cologne, with its desired "interweaving of belt and domain," was not realized except in isolated locations; but it served as a guiding model in the rebuilding of many war-ravaged cities. The reorganization of Essen into a "shopping city with direct Autobahn access," for instance, begun under mayor Gustav Heinemann, who would later be Federal President of West Germany, clearly evinces comparable structures. The historic urban core is "fringed" by a wide ring road directly connected to the Ruhrschnellweg highway. Constricted and isolated rather than "delimited and circumscribed," Essen's center has been rebuilt as a commercial and business district.60 As envisioned by Le Corbusier and Rudolf Schwarz, parking garages function as hinges between the trajectorial space and the "pedestrian area" where the driver switches "roles," becoming a consumer. The trajectorial space thus abuts a functional zone that is no less spatially homogeneous; the city under the sway of the trajectory is pervaded by nonplaces: it is not a place of encounter and assembly.61

Le Corbusier probably saw the extent of the conflict between the traditional city and the new trajectorial spaces more clearly than did the champions of the organic urban landscape. In his vision, the old cities have in the machine age sunken into a sort of enchanted oblivion: "The beauty and splendor of the concentric city derived from the royal roads; but where the railroad, appearing on the scene, ignored it and passed it

60 Loth, Essens Wiederaufbau, 2005, 131–133.

61 Löw/Vinken, Die Dichte der Entleerung, 2007.

by in a wide arc, the city fell asleep."62 Yet even if the future the architect confidently envisions belongs to the "villes vertes," the "vertical garden cities" and "unités d'habitation" embedded in green areas, he does not foresee a complete disappearance of the traditional "radiocentric cities." In accordance with their origins, he sees them located, as "cities of exchange," at the intersections of the major traffic arteries.63 And although sweeping "surgical" interventions ought to prepare these sleeping beauties for the future,64 Le Corbusier fears a collision between the linear city and the traditional city: "Attentive measures will be able to prevent the industrial city from penetrating and altogether dissolving in the concentric city: a wide protective greenbelt will need to be laid out around the old city, a belt of fields, meadows, and forests. This peaceful space enables people from both spheres to meet, allows for a rapprochement and harmonious exchange between them: one city brings to this meeting the enormous tension of machine technology; the other, the pertinacity of things that are, as it were, forever unchanging, having been contemplated, experienced, and tested for a long time."65 The city, as a place of assembly, now appears as nothing more than a monument to forever unchanging things. And protecting the trajectorial space, with its functional efficiency and beauty, from the relics of the old world requires a wide *cordon sanitaire*. Indicatively enough, the city of the past is to be embedded in peaceful greenery, a schema we can trace back all the way to the romantic ruin in the park; Le Corbusier's plans for the new Paris had envisioned a similar setting in which the national monuments would be "salvaged."66 Modern life, however, has moved into the dynamic spaces of transit. In Le Corbusier's city, as Hugo Häring wrote, man is "a mere visitor, merely passing through."67

62 Le Corbusier, L'Urbanisme des Trois Établissements humains, 1959, 102.

63 Le Corbusier, Concerning Town Planning, 1948 (1946). The new spatial order, composed of industrial linear cities, radiocentric cities, and agricultural production units, is laid out in detail in Le Corbusier, Les trois établissements humains, 1946.

64 Surgery rather than the paltry remedies of traditional medicine: that was already the architect's motto in his first comprehensive work on urban planning, see Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow, 1987 (1925), 258–273. For a more detailed discussion of the proposed modernization measurements to be implemented during rebuilding, see also Le Corbusier, Concerning Town Planning, 1948 (1946).

65 Le Corbusier, L'Urbanisme des Trois Établissements humains, 1959, 102.

66 On the plan to 'salvage' the national heritage in the *Ville Voisin*, see Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 1987 (1925), 287–289. Cf the essay on *The Spaces of the Monument* in this volume (Chapter 4).

67 Hugo Häring, Zwei Städte, in: Die Form, 2/1926, 172–175, quoted in: Düwel/Gutschow, Städtebau in Deutschland, 2001, 71.

## **3 The Distinctiveness of Cities1** Heritage as a Mode of Reproduction

In the dispositions of towns and cities are manifesed the memory of societies and landscapes. *(Karl Schlögel)2*

The concept of *Eigenlogik* – of a city's particular or intrinsic logic – has contributed to the debate which is now attempting to comprehend the ways in which every city is particular and different from all other cities, and to understand how this particularity takes definite form and is stabilized.3 At first glance, built heritage would seem to play an obvious leading role in this function. Indeed, a city's built heritage is considered to be almost definitive of with its particularity and identity. However, seeing the "identity" or "DNA" of a city in its built heritage is an essentializing shortcut that runs counter to the concept of *Eigenlogik*. *Eigenlogik* might be understood as a 'mode of reproduction' that is operative in locally specific and long-lasting ways and is unconsciously implicit in all practices and routines.4 That is to say, *Eigenlogik* as a locally operative praxis should be traceable also in those processes and practices through which heritage is reclaimed and shaped, interpreted and handed down. It is accordingly first and foremost the making and managing of a city's heritage that constitutes a rewarding field of study.5

### **The local as a research problem**

What is 'local' about a built monument? At first glance, this would seem to be a simple matter, given the monument's fixed location. Upon closer inspection, however, locality turns out to be a parameter fraught with questions. All discourses of heritage, from the official designation to the attribution of 'meaning', evidently refer to contexts that

1 Translation from the German by Gerrit Jackson with assistance from Johanna Blokker.

2 Karl Schlögel in the preface to Anziferow, Die Seele Petersburgs, 2003 (1922), 38.

3 Berking/Löw, Die Eigenlogik der Städte, 2008; Löw, The City as Experiential Space, 2013.

4 Bockrath, Städtischer Habitus, 2008, 76.

5 Frank, Wall memorials and heritage, 2016 (2009).

are barely, or not at all, tied to local circumstances, a fact that has come to be recognized as a major problem; note, for instance, how the World Heritage label spreads Western notions of value in parts of the world where people have very different understandings of collective memory and abide by different concepts of heritage.6 And this is not, as many claim, just another effect of globalization; it is a problem that is as old as heritage preservation itself. When local construction businesses in post-revolutionary France dismantled the walls of the abbey at Cluny – Europe's most significant medieval monastery complex – to burn the stones for quicklime, it was scholars from Paris such as Prosper Mérimée who travelled to Burgundy to save the abbey. It was a civil servant with Berlin's building inspectorate, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who 'discovered' the ruins of the abbey at Chorin as a national monument; in the countryside of Brandenburg it had fallen into oblivion, and locals were using it as a stable, among other things. The discovery of the Venus de Milo, too, initially elicited only a tepid local response. Even today, the ways in which global elites and local residents judge the value of cultural heritage often differ considerably.7 The history of preservation is also the history of an attribution of meaning performed by outsiders. And even when the significance of a monument is undisputed on the local level, the local is not the framework within which this significance is attributed to it. Instead, local processes of recognizing and ascribing value to a monument generally take place in relation to global, national and regional frameworks. On the one hand, recent experience in the field of World Heritage in particular has produced striking evidence that local acceptance is indispensable to sustainable monument preservation. Yet on the other, in the logic of international heritage policies, value is defined precisely with regard to a monument's general significance: 'universal' heritage enjoys the highest status. By comparison, 'merely' national or regional significance would seem to carry a penalty; the local stands at the very bottom of this hierarchy.

This may be one reason why differences in local ascriptions of value have rarely been the focus of significant research. To be sure, differences between urban and rural populations, between higher and lower levels of education, between laypeople and heritage professionals – all have meanwhile become topics of scholarly interest. The extent to which cities belonging to a similar cultural sphere nevertheless reach decidedly different conclusions regarding the value of their heritage is a question that has not, however, been closely examined. Do these processes reflect city-specific features regarding, for instance, the selection and treatment of architectural monuments? Are there differences among the meanings attributed to comparable monuments in different cities? An initial study undertaken by the urban studies group at the Technical University in Darmstadt seems to confirm our sense that the issue presents a fertile field of research awaiting exploration: a comparative look at the ways in which reference groups of monuments – in this case medieval buildings – are treated in the three Hessian cities of Mainz, Frankfurt and Darmstadt, and an analysis of the significance they hold for each city's self-

6 Ashworth/Graham/Tunbridge, Pluralising Pasts, 2007.

7 Vinken, Pranger von Bahia, 2015.

image, turns up revealing differences, including initial evidence for widely diverging local constructions of identity.8

### **Local history and** *Eigenlogik*

In Frankfurt, the Middle Ages are a firmly established parameter in the self-image of a trading city steeped in tradition. The *Dom* (the city's main church) and the *Römer* (the medieval town hall), both of which were rebuilt after World War II, seem to occupy such an unquestionably central position in Frankfurt's urban self-image that preservationists feel no need to pay them particular attention. Instead, they focus their energies primarily on the 'unloved' monuments: post-war and industrial buildings such as the central market hall, now slated for conversion. In the perspective of city marketers, the *Römerberg* or main square in Frankfurt's old town, like the skyline dominated by the towers of German and international banks represents one of the main go-to vehicles of the city's brand, which can be adapted to appeal to individual target audiences. An island of tradition focused on the *Römer* and set before a backdrop of skyscrapers – this is the contrast in which the city probably recognizes itself most fully. A shriveled medieval remnant, an appendix, one might think; and yet a decisive point of reference and a conceptual lynchpin at the centre of vigorous debates over building policies, such as those currently revolving around plans for new construction and planned reconstruction at the site of the *Technisches Rathaus*, a large post-war administrative complex slated for demolition.9

The situation in Wiesbaden is different. A spa town that is not particularly rich in relics of medieval culture, the city, to quote its leading architectural preservationist, Martin Horsten, "shows astonishingly little passion" for the monuments of its early history. Experts cherish the Romanesque Sonnenberg castle, an impressive complex whose history reaches back into the 12th century, as well as the medieval town fortifications, as incomparable monuments of the era's military architecture. In the 19th century, during the rise of *Rheinromantik*, the castle was developed as a tourist destination for paying visitors and was staged as the terminus of a picturesque promenade through the spa gardens; it quickly became a popular postcard motif. Even today, however, it is proving difficult to elicit public interest in this neglected object; questions regarding the uses of the city's extensive parks, by contrast, routinely draw a great deal of public attention.

The situation in Darmstadt is more difficult to describe. The former artists' colony *Mathildenhöhe*, a famous Art-Nouveau ensemble, is unrivalled as the city's premier piece of architectural heritage and is currently being considered for nomination to the World Heritage list; the great public interest in plans to erect new buildings in the area demonstrates that it is not only outsiders who recognize the ensemble's significance. In the highly heterogeneous cityscape, where post-war rebuilding has had a profound impact, architectures of different eras appear in impassive contiguity. In the early 20th century,

8 Vinken, Lokale Sinnstiftung, 2011.

9 The *Dom-Römer Areal* planned at that time has now been realized (cf. the essay on Frankfurt in this volume (Chapter 12).

the city added an additional story to the *Weißer Turm*, a remnant of the town's old fortifications now located next to a major department store, with the explicit aim of improving the structure's visibility and prominence amid a city that had grown larger and taller around it. Additional vestiges of fortifications stand, slightly perplexed, outside the *Darmstadtium* convention centre, as well as in a nearby green space (these remains can be a little difficult to find). According to Nikolaus Heiss, the city's appointed preservationist, Darmstadt values all eras of its past. The goal is to exhibit the city's history in its variety, operating on the broadest basis possible. As to the Middle Ages, they occupy their allotted place without much ado, as well-restored and clearly labelled architecture.

This initial and cursory diagnosis is neither coincidental nor arbitrary. There are tangible reasons why the Middle Ages are of different relative significance to the three cities I have discussed. Frankfurt, the modern banking metropolis, is identified as a medieval establishment by its very name: legend has it that the town arose near a ford (*Furt*) held by the Franks and once used by Charlemagne to escape his Saxon pursuers. The *Römer* represents two central features of the city's self-image: the German kings were crowned here, and, perhaps even more salient, the building housed the most important market of this free imperial city and mercantile centre – a tradition that Frankfurt likes to regard as living on, uninterrupted, into the present. By reconstructing and simulating 'medieval' showpieces, Frankfurt keeps its mythical roots in sight. A city that has dedicated itself to global trade finds stability in an assertion of its origins set in stone: we are reminded that monument preservation is always also a medium of self-assurance.

By contrast, Wiesbaden, the erstwhile ducal residence and present-day state capital, sees itself primarily as a spa town. Although it was already known for its baths in antiquity and during the later reign of Charlemagne, the city did not rise to supraregional significance until the 19th century, when it became known as the "Nice of the North"; its baths, casinos and expansive parks attracted the courts of the German emperors, and in their train, it became a meeting point for the wealthy and fashionable from all over the world. To this day, the facilities that define Wiesbaden – sometimes called "Pensionopolis" (Retiree-opolis) – as a spa town and ducal residence, namely its gardens, representative bathhouses and villas, dominate the city's self-image. The Middle Ages simply do not fit into this picture: they bring connotations of the dark, the primitive and the provincial to mind that are incompatible with the desired image of a fashionable, elegant and modern resort town. If the Middle Ages have a place here, it is in the form of a *point de vue*, a picturesque ruin set in a park that frames and tames its otherness as a showpiece. That was indeed what happened in the 19th century, although as more recent history shows, this adaptation was not enough to build an emotional attachment to Wiesbaden's medieval monument among the city's residents.

Darmstadt presents a less clear-cut diagnosis. The town was granted its charter as a city in the 14th century. Its history is inextricably tied to that of the palace, which was expanded in a representative fashion in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The old town, whose history reached back into the Middle Ages, burned down almost entirely in 1944 and was rebuilt after the war on a new street plan; outside the city centre, by contrast, many historic buildings were reconstructed. The result is a paradoxical picture that is difficult to read at first glance: a modern city is surrounded by architectural

monuments from various eras. A former ducal seat whose economy is dominated by service industries and public administration, the city has always been oriented towards the palace and never developed a strong civic image of its own. When the university moved into the palace, Darmstadt became an academic centre. Yet, other competing images continue to exist, including Darmstadt as "City of the Arts", as "City Amid Forests" and, the favourite of preservationists, as "Art-Nouveau City". Who can dispute that the *Mathildenhöhe*is more important to Darmstadt's image than are its medieval town walls? Still, these stand as a generally accepted part of the city's architectural heritage, living in placid coexistence with their more renowned neighbour; the different parts of this city's history do not interfere with each other. These findings merit further study, which may contribute to a more defined hypothesis about the way in which *Eigenlogik* operates.

With all this in mind, a fertile field in which to begin the scholarly examination of urban *Eigenlogik* would be a comparative exploration of the ways locals engage with cultural heritage, a look at the local specificity of how heritage is 'made and managed'. A second and, to my mind, even more interesting line of inquiry would address the special character of built heritage as a phenomenon of permanence having a physical basis, and thus as a medium of collective memory.10 In her work on *The Sociology of Space*, Martina Löw has shown how any production of space must be described as taking place in an interplay between given physical circumstances and social practices.11 How exactly can we conceptualize this interplay in relation to urban *Eigenlogik*? Helmuth Berking speaks of an "elective affinity among spatial organization, the physical environment, and cultural dispositions".12 He continues: "Urbanity is associated with patterns of perception and emotion, of action and interpretation that, taken together, constitute what we can call the urban *doxa*".13 How does this "association", this elective affinity between a built environment and cultural dispositions, come into being, how does it take definite form, stabilize and reproduce? With a view to built heritage as a privileged subset of the physical world, can we say that it operates in this interplay as a stabilizer of such interrelations – that it operates, to use Ulf Matthiesen's term, as an amplifier of *Eigenlogik*? 14

### **Memory**

We are used to thinking of the distinctiveness of a city in terms of the particularity and permanence of its urban spaces and architectures. A city's built heritage, in particular, is seen as making a significant contribution to the formation of its urban identity. Theoretically ambitious conceptualizations of the interplay between the specific and historically-developed urban environments and social valuation processes first emerged in

10 Halbwachs, Das kollektive Gedächtnis, 1950.

11 Löw, The Sociology of Space, 2016 (2001).

12 Helmuth Berking and Martina Löw in their introduction to: Die Eigenlogik der Städte, 2008, 8.

13 Berking, Skizzen zur Erforschung der Stadt und der Städte, 2008, 23. Italics in the original.

14 Lecture held by Ulf Matthiesen at the colloquium "Space, Place, Power" in Darmstadt in January 2011.

the 1960s. The timing was not coincidental: resistance to the dictates of modernist instrumental functionalism arose in the name not only of the city's image and its individuality,15 but also of the regional and the local. Against the doctrine of the International Style and its claim to universal validity, critics took recourse to the specific site and its history. The famous book *Architecture of the City* published by the architect and theorist Aldo Rossi in 1966 strikes me as containing several particularly interesting points that might be taken up by the hypothesis of *Eigenlogik*. 16 The city, Rossi writes, has a biography that is manifest in its buildings and spatial structures. This biography is a matter not so much of sedimented history but rather of collective memory, an unconscious that participates actively in present-day processes of urban design and interpretation. This point is of decisive importance for a city's future viability, Rossi argues in a radical turn away from technocratic planning traditions, since the productive creation of new architecture is impossible without recourse to this 'memory'. Rossi indeed reads the city's architecture as a 'mode of reproduction', or as "conditioned and conditioning", to use his own words.17

This mode of reproduction, Rossi goes on to argue, is anchored in permanent structures such as the urban layout and local architectural typologies of a city, but most importantly in its so-called "primary elements": its key buildings, which are the privileged sites where meaning aggregates. And it is these key buildings, which are profoundly imprinted on the collective memory, that can be described as built heritage in the full sense of the term.18 The meaning and great significance these monuments have for the city, Rossi argues – and this argument is particularly interesting in our context – are tied to their permanence, to their survival as vehicles of meaning that is not bound to functions more strictly conceived. To the contrary, Rossi writes, these buildings retain their ability to define the image and identity of a city even as their functions change and even after they have lost all 'useful' function.19

Rossi's *Architecture of the City* seeks to conceptualize the elective affinity between the attribution of meaning and the physical circumstances as the result of an interplay between permanent meaningful structures and buildings on the one hand, social practices of value ascription on the other; it is in this sense that architecture is 'conditioned and conditioning'. Urban spaces are, according to this view, not merely the products of design and planning processes, of changing social actions and attributions. Rather, they themselves 'inform' the social actions performed on them and with them. The material givens of a city do not merely reflect general and local power relations and interests, they actually shape and stabilize social actions and lend them their specific local character. To my mind, Rossi's theses read like a theory of *Eigenlogik* avant la lettre: each city is individual and each is particular because it reproduces its features in a constant interplay of proposed meanings and attributions, a dynamic process in which the permanent architectural elements act as stabilizing factors. In the following sections, I will

15 Lynch, The Image of the City, 1960.

16 Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1984 (1966).

17 Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1984 (1966), 32.

18 Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1984 (1966), 22.

19 Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1984 (1966), 88–94.

examine the question of how these architectural elements, and built heritage in particular, act as amplifiers of *Eigenlogik*. Since I am exploring largely uncharted territory, I can only offer a sketch of some major aspects of the issue.

### **Permanence**

Built heritage is involved in processes of collective meaning (re)production in a very special way. Its privileged role in the stabilization of urban distinctiveness is a virtue of its social construction as a permanent and stable marker of identity. The monument is permanent – not so much in its physical existence (which of course is limited) but rather in its construction as heritage – at least for as long as it is recognized as such.20 All production of meaning that envisions heritage produces permanence. Practices in the field of heritage preservation aim at perpetuation and reproduction, at making their object everlasting and present – not unlike the liturgy: eternity achieved by means of ceaseless reenactments. On a side note, this construction of permanence explains all measures directed at heritage preservation, down to the creation of replicas and reconstructions.21

My first hypothesis, then, is that heritage is predestined to serve the formation and amplification of city-specific modes of reproduction because the attribution of permanence is intrinsic to it. Heritage preservation, as a 'liturgy of commemoration', is by design a mode of reproduction. Dominant among the practices and routines that are directed at, and constitute, the monument are those that are framed as reproduction or re-enactment. The authority of heritage is rooted in an assertion of its permanence, and this permanence is delegated to its materiality. But it is again important to note that this property of permanence is not to be confused with the actual material presence of the heritage object, which may be attenuated to the point of complete disappearance; rather, it is an integral structural component of the concept of the monument. The power of the monument lies in this very ability to attract new ascriptions of meaning and to legitimize them by virtue of its apparent permanence. These processes of meaning attribution are not unrestrained, however, but are structurally stable and directional to a large degree. This is because every ascription of meaning to a built object, if it is to be successful, must adhere to the perpetuating formula of the liturgical: that is, it must be a "reproduction".

That is my second hypothesis on heritage as an amplifier of *Eigenlogik*: to be successful, an attribution of meaning to a monument must be a reproduction or re-enactment, one which in extreme cases can also accommodate breaks and contradictions. The monument's material construction is necessary to its complex figure of permanence. On the one hand, the physical reality of the monument produces and enables the notion of simple duration in time, and hence its credibility or authority as heritage. On the other

20 Pred, Place as Historically Contingent Process, 1984.

21 Nerdinger, Geschichte der Rekonstruktion, 2010.

hand, the physical substance of the monument literally serves as the material on which successive attributions of meaning can be inscribed.22

### **Alienness**

The monument is the product of an attribution of stability: it is a permanent sign and a sign of permanence. The attribution of collective meaning to such objects and the aggregation of (originally religious) practices around them that promised physical permanence were among the earliest cultural activities of human society, as was the production of them. Particularly illustrative examples include prehistoric megaliths and sites such as Stonehenge. Yet the decisive point about these objects is not their permanence as such, but rather their ability to store meaning. By 'store' I do not mean that they serve as passive reservoirs, but that they can act as vehicles of meaning, vehicles driving an ongoing process in which meaning is rendered relevant to the present in a relational fashion. The authority of the 'always already' is coupled to current relevance by the monument's physical reality. The latter lends the monument its presence: it is visibly and palpably part of the spaces in which we live. But at the same time and just as evidently, as the very definition of the monument implies, its origins do not lie in our own time. In its physical reality it precedes us, it is "old". Alois Riegl, the great theorist of the monument of the turn of the 20th century, wrote a treatise on the "modern cult of monuments" in which he ascribed central significance to what he called "age value" (*Alterswert*).23 The most salient quality the monument possessed, he believed, was not its historic value, not its ability to attest to a past era, but rather its quality of being visibly and palpably old. It is this quality that enables us to experience the fundamental truth that becoming and passing never cease; it is this quality that allows us to participate on an emotional level in something that exceeds our own limitations, that reaches far into the past and the future.24

The monument's age, authenticated by its physical reality, engenders a highly powerful double experience: that of familiarity – the object has always been there – as well as that of alienness – the object is not of our time, and thus not (entirely) ours. It projects from a different time, from another world into ours. Our interpretations and attributions of meaning do not entirely exhaust it; hence, the monument is alien in the sense that it is not (entirely) comprehensible. Built heritage cannot be understood in a concrete way because many aspects of it may be incomplete, fragmentary or just 'missing': aspects such as the circumstances of its production, the stages of its transmission, or its original use or meaning. At the same time it is inaccessible in a very fundamental way simply because it is old, and thus produces a figure of difference relative to current and past interpretations and attributions.

22 Wohlleben, Theoretische Grundlagen, 1999. The intangible heritage would require a separate study at this point with regard to its *Eigenlogik* effects.

23 Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, 1903.

24 Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, 1903, 150.

Now the figure of difference so produced, which eludes complete comprehension or resolution into a precisely defined meaning, by no means makes the monument any weaker. On the contrary, its aura and authority are directly linked to this (attribution of) alienness, alterity or excess. In his book on *Bau und Überbau* (Structure and Superstructure), the art historian Martin Warnke has described the Gothic cathedral as a figure of excess or '*Überschuss*'.25 The question he was trying to answer was this: What motivated people in the Middle Ages to erect these gigantic buildings, which by virtue of their sheer size and the effort and expense required to build them are conceivable only as the joint accomplishments of many different social groups? How was it possible to keep these social groups with their divergent interests committed to a shared goal for many decades? Warnke's novel idea is that the cathedral is a "figure of excess" that eludes any attempt to offer a final or complete interpretation or to subordinate it in its entirety to any specific intention or plan. It is precisely because the cathedral literally "surmounts" everything that it can become, beyond all divergent interests, becoming a screen on which community can be projected, that it can serve as a vehicle of collective meaning.

The monument is more than the "witness who can be interrogated again and again" which heritage preservation institutions like to invoke. It is more than a product of competing 'makings' and processes of negotiation. Its meaning resides in the very fact that it is inexhaustible: a figure of excess whose authority and ability to sustain the emergence of consensus are ultimately rooted in a double experience – that of its evident permanence and its evident alienness.

### **Mode of reproduction**

Built heritage is constructed as a figure of excess that proves resistant to complete interpretive comprehension and time and again requires reinterpretation. With regard to the interrelation between built heritage and *Eigenlogik*, another point is crucial. The attribution of meaning to a monument is indeed fundamentally open in the sense that it is always incomplete; but it is by no means open in the sense of being unrestricted or free of presuppositions. Readings or attributions of meaning in the context of built heritage are oriented towards an origin – not unlike the exegeses of a sacred book, the meaning of which is obscure and yet presumed across all interpretive approaches to be present and powerfully operative. The relevance of the monument is rooted not in its current topicality but in its authenticity. The logic of the attribution of meanings is the current exegesis of something that is said again and again; it is the act of rendering present an older, original and hence true meaning.

This ability to render the past present also proves to be a structural bridge across profound ruptures. When the power of interpretation shifts radically, for example, in the transition from a colonial to a postcolonial society, heritage is transformed. Exactly what is important is now different. The Jesuit church may be joined by the pillory. Yet even these new interpretations, as scholars in the field of postcolonial studies have emphasized again and again, are not trapped between the alternatives of affirmation or

25 Warnke, Bau und Überbau, 1984.

### 46 Zones of Tradition - Places of Identity

rejection, but instead create palimpsestic appropriations, fusions whose heterogeneity allows them to melt down older and contradictory layers of meaning as well, suspending the various origins.26 The monument is accordingly not (or certainly not first and foremost) a mirror of conflicting powers of interpretation or successive processes of negotiation. Operative in it are echoes of older attributions: repressed and almost illegible information regarding its meaning, which is now present only in the form of displacements, disfigurations and palimpsestic inscriptions – and which, not unlike the unconscious, nonetheless has an effect, helping to shape present-day attributions of meaning. 27 A structural form of self-reference is characteristic of the monument, a mode of reproduction that persists through all 'makings'.

26 Lagae, From Patrimoine partagé, 2008.

27 For Derrida heritage is a ghostly phenomenon, "haunting" us with older, latent or unconscious layers of meaning; cf. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 1994 (1993).

## **4 The Spaces of the Monument** Exposing – Framing – Zoning

We are able to perceive objects only as parts of a spatial arrangement. Being social is therefore explained in a fundamental way by the spatial orderings in which we are embedded.

*(Martina Löw)1*

The construction and production of the spaces of monuments has received little attention and has never been systematically researched. Despite the spatial turn, heritage conservation has a certain ongoing spatial blindness that is built into its origins. It is "a true daughter of historicism"2 and was given its form as a discipline in the late 19th century. The highest task of the historic monument was originally to commemorate and immortalize the great moments of history. Worth protecting as a "piece of national existence",3 the historic building presents itself as a historical document of a previous age that is worth preserving, and, on account of its age, as a fragile, endangered "remnant". From the temporal perspective of "survival", the task of heritage conservation is one of constant care and maintenance, of "preservation" – a procedure that should ideally be neutral. As Georg Dehio, one of the early theorists of heritage conservation from the turn of the 19th century – a moment so productive of new disciplinary programmes – put it: "conserve, do not restore".4 More recent additions to the stipulations of the heritage-conservation catechism, such as preservation of substance and reversibility also argue for minimizing the impact of conservation measures.5 And conversely, every intervention is considered a falsification. Every embellishment and "renovation", copy and reconstruction goes against a practice that exists as an unbroken chain going back to

1 Löw, Space Oddity, 2015, 7.

2 Dehio, Denkmalschutz und Denkmalpflege, 1988 (1905), 97.

3 Dehio, Denkmalschutz und Denkmalpflege, 1988 (1905), 92. For a critical perspective cf. Riegl, Neue Strömungen, 1995 (1905), 220–223.

4 Dehio, Denkmalschutz und Denkmalpflege, 1988 (1905), 102. Cf. Scheurmann, Vom Konservieren und Restaurieren, 2005.

5 For a critical view: Petzet, Reversibility, 1992.

the 19th century and is considered an exception that can only be justified by exceptional circumstance such as destruction in war.6 The history of heritage conservation is correspondingly presented as a story of progress, in the course of which the norms for the sensitive and appropriate treatment of monuments have become ever more stringent, leading to the ultimate triumph of the obligation towards neutrality – that is until the outbreak of postmodernism, which caused much valuable ground to be lost to visual and pictorial effects, reconstruction, and simulation.7

The uncompromising notion that every conceivable interference with a monument is equivalent to an act of destruction has also been repeatedly expressed since the earliest theories of the monument. Its target is the *vandalisme restaurateur*: those embellishments, purifications and reconstructions undertaken in the name of historical accuracy.8 The call to let monuments "die in peace" is a consequence of the view that every intervention necessarily means appropriation and alienation: "We have no right whatever to touch them",9 was how the English writer, art historian and social philosopher John Ruskin justified this ideal, which later became known as the principle of "*non toccare*".10 It should be noted, however, that the supposed neutrality of this principle is only prima facie. Even those ruins entering the twilight of their years in "untouched" beauty only become monuments through systematic measures, such as the allocation of a special status (as monuments that are legally withdrawn from all forms of use). And, above all: it is tied to the ascription of a peculiar spatial status that differs from the functional spaces of modernity. It is precisely in consideration of the substance of the radically neutral ideal of "*non toccare*" that it becomes clear that every historic building is the outcome of planning decisions and spatial operations, which are therefore to be considered as literally constitutive of monuments. An analysis of these procedures not only shows significant differences regarding spatial practices of monumentalization, it also generates new criteria for categorizing and evaluating practices of heritage conservation and urbanism and is, moreover, certainly relevant to the theory of space.

The precondition for the shift in perspective described here was established by the art historian Alois Riegl, who applied his reception-theory approach to the theory of heritage conservation.11 In the context of his effort to fundamentally reconceptualize the "modern cult of monuments" Riegl considered that the central category of the mon-

6 On the debates on reconstruction in Germany: Sauerländer, Erweiterung des Denkmalbegriffs, 1975 and Lipp/Petzet, Vom modernen zum postmodernen Denkmalkultus, 1994.

7 On the state of this debate cf. Meier/Will, Paradigmenwechsel, 2005.

8 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the leading theorist of the 19th century, also a strong critic of the *vandalisme restaurateur*, was, however, in favour of critical completion: "To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness which could never have existed at any given time." Viollet-le-Duc, On Restoration, 1875, 9 (originally Dictionnaire raisonné, 1875, VIII:14–34, 14).

9 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps, 1849, 187.

10 Used in this sense by Cesare Brandi, cf. Brandi, Teoria del Restauro, 1963.

11 Kemp, Kunstwerk und Betrachter, 1988, 241–242.

ument in the 19th century, that of "historical value", had given way to "age-value".12 Typical of the new age, he wrote, was "the effort to grasp all physical and psychological experiences not in their objective essence, but in their subjective appearance, i.e. in the effects that they have on the subject".13

For Riegl, the replacement of historical value by age-value corresponds to a shift in the effect of the monument (*Denkmalwirkung*) from an experience of culture (*Bildungserlebnis*) to one of feeling (*Gefühlserlebnis*), as well as to a related "mass efficacy" (*Massenwirksamkeit*; which Riegl also described as a "socialist tendency"). In contrast to the exclusive historical value that rests on conventions and knowledge, age-value as "visible antiquity" is accessible to all. In this way, it conveys a quasi-religious "irresistible feeling of participation in the eternal cycle of becoming and passing away" that promises sentimental modern humans "complete redemption".14 Age-value is thus also a temporal category,15 one, however, that is not grounded in the substance of the monument but its effect. By means of this turn towards effect, the spatial preconditions of the monument – largely ignored by the theory of the monument – come into view: the perspective and the standpoint of the observer, just as the location of the monument in space, and finally the production of space itself. All measures that constitute and preserve monuments create spaces.16 Today, it is above all the field of Memory Studies that has started to follow this path again.

For the historian Pierre Nora, the past is given to us as something radically "other" ("radicalement autre"), an "hallucination artificielle", as a world from which we are forever separated and which may only be experienced under conditions of a "régime de discontinuité". The "truth of memory" lies in the fact that this discontinuity may be removed at one stroke ("qui d'un coup la supprime"). Sites of memory are, from this perspective, places where a subtle interplay of insurmountable distance from and unguarded nearness to the past is staged.17 This ambiguity of the monument, which is the focus of a paradoxical interplay of distancing and appropriation, has shaped the various forms of spatial production that have accompanied the monument since its institutionalization. They can be described as a sequence of processes of inclusion and exclusion, which can switch from exposing and framing to isolation and exclusion. The

12 Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, 1995 (1903). A translation of this text does exist (Riegl, The modern Cult of Monuments, 1982). However, to remain as true as possible to the wording of the passages cited here, we have opted to translate them ourselves.

13 Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, 1995 (1903), 156–157.

14 Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, 1995 (1903), 150.

15 With regard to Riegl, Wolfgang Kemp spoke of a "dehistoricization through temporalization", Kemp, Gesammelte Aufsätze, 1995, 220.

16 There are several relevant passages in Riegl's book on the modern cult of the monument, including, in the chapter on the relationship of present-day values to the cult of the monument: "For age-value, even more energetically than historical value, must oppose the ripping-out of a monument from its previous, quasi-organic contexts and its confinement in museums […]." Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, 1995 (1903), 177.

17 Nora, Between memory and history, 1996, 12. Our translation remains as close as possible to the wording of the original; cf. Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoires, 1997 (1984–1992), xxxi–xxxii.

background to this shift is an intensifying fundamental conflict at the heart of modernity: the tension between heritage and contemporaneity, between origin and progress, a conflict that – originally grasped dialectically – ultimately finds its culmination in the functional spaces of the modern city.

### *Exposing***/Monumentalization**

In her book *The Sociology of Space*, the sociologist Martina Löw illustrated her theses on the social production of space with reference to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall.18 The composer and pianist Josef Tal describes two very different impressions of space that he received on successive visits to the wall. The first time he approached it through "a dense network of narrow, winding alleyways," of the Arab Old City and ended "all of a sudden […] in front of a sheer wall of huge stone blocks. High above there was a slender strip of blue sky between the confined walls of the alleyway" (fig. 1). On his second visit, after the Six Day War, "the tangle of alleyways in front of the Wailing Wall was cleared. Today, the approach to the wall is via a large, expansive tract that provides space for thousands of visitors" (fig. 2).

*Figure 1: Jerusalem, Wailing Wall, around 1910*

Tal observed that, although these were "the same stone blocks" that he was visiting, their "language" had been changed by the new surroundings. While the closeness of the space had originally made the wall of the destroyed temple appear more powerful, awakening the impression that the divine presence was hovering "inaccessibly above the immeasurable stone", the constellation had changed as a result of the creation of the wide-open plaza in front of the wall, giving prayer there "a different sense": "The broad space […] sends their wailing echo in the breadth instead of in the height."19

18 Löw, The Sociology of Space, 2016 (2001), 129–130, 136–139, 144–145*.*

19 All quotes from Löw, The Sociology of Space, 2016 (2001), 129–130.

*Figure 2: Jerusalem, Wailing Wall today (Photo: EvgeniT 2013)*

Löw uses this example to illustrate the physical aspect of the constitution of space before subsequently examining how institutionalized arrangements, such as power relationships, are reproduced in space.20 With regard to the example of the Wailing Wall, this concerns the transformation of a religious space into a "security-oriented" space shaped by the "secular demonstration of power".21 The interventions at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall that Josef Tal describes were politically motivated. Following the capture of East Jerusalem by the Israeli army, Israel planned to develop the city as the symbolic capital of the Israeli state – a development in which the framing of the Wailing Wall as a national monument and the principal locus of political and religious identity played a key role.22 But there is indeed a long tradition of such spatial practices in the service of heritage politics. In the 19th century, it was established practice to expose monuments by means of demolition – a technique known as *dégagement* or *isolement* – so as to give them a new *mise en scène* in the form of an open square in front of them or around them. Conventionally considered as a means of establishing symbols of the grandeur of power, this was monumentalization in the most literal sense, namely the establishment of a spatial disposition for the newly established category of the historic monument. Exposing is, as the example of the mediaeval cathedrals shows, *the* definitive procedure for the constitution of monuments.

Today, nearly every cathedral presents itself as an isolated or disengaged monumental building whose western façade, topped with towers, is visible across a large and usually symmetrical square or plaza (fig. 3). This image, which we take for granted today and which is closely associated with the building type of the cathedral, is in fact the result of modern urban-planning measures, an early example of which was documented by the architect Le Corbusier for Notre-Dame de Paris (fig. 4).23

20 Löw, The Sociology of Space, 2016 (2001), 144.

21 Löw, The Sociology of Space, 2016 (2001), 145.

22 Ricca, Shifting Symbolism, 2005.

23 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow, 1987 (1925), 269.

*Figure 3: Paris, Notre-Dame (Photo: J. Blum 2006) Figure 4: Paris, Exposing Notre-Dame, Le Corbusier 1919*

Prior to this, Notre-Dame had, like nearly all sacred buildings in similar urban settings, been situated in a densely built neighbourhood. In mediaeval city centres, large open spaces were usually only reserved for the market. Nor were the lines of sight of main thoroughfares oriented towards religious buildings – whether their towers or main façades. Furthermore, the unimpeded view of these grand structures was also obscured by smaller buildings, such as market stalls or masons' lodges, as well as residential houses, which were often built right up against the walls of the great churches. In the Baroque period, as can be seen in Le Corbusier's drawings, the first efforts were made to create a grander setting for the churches by establishing small squares in front of them. Yet the major work of clearing the cathedral squares generally only took place after they had been classified as *monuments historiques*.The aim of the measures that first made it possible to experience the west façades as the "principal view" and an iconic image was not only to expose this façade to panoramic view, thereby transforming it, but also to enhance the effect of the churches on urban space at a distance. In Paris, this was achieved by creating connections with the Seine quays, undertaken as part of a large-scale urban rehabilitation of the *Île de la Cité*. This creation of a new *mise en scène* for historic buildings can be linked to the great modernization projects of European cities, which were largely defined in terms of axial streets and grand squares. In Paris, for instance, the key modernization initiatives of the 19th century went hand in hand with the creation of "broad, purposeful thoroughfares connecting monuments, radiating from *places*, endowed with uniform architecture, and their perspectives closed at each end by some public structure."24 Laid bare within the body of the city, those mon-

24 Jordan, Transforming Paris, 1995, 195. Italics in the original.

uments, churches or public buildings serve as *points-de-vue* for the new boulevards hat Baron Haussmann had blasted through the densely built quartiers of central Paris*.*