House as city

This essay intends to add to the debate around Nine Elms. The scheme has been heavily criticised since 2012 when Ballymore Group announced their plans for redevelopment. Much of the criticism has already delved into the technical, political and social shortcomings of the project and for this reason, I won’t be touching on any of these topics. 

Instead, what I argue below is a straightforward point; how we see the city impacts the way we engage with it. I start by summarising the basis of this argument, which I see as ontological and then I show how this basis relates to the failures of modern urban theory; the legacy of which pervades schemes like Nine Elms today. 

Ontology is flat

Ontology, for those who might not be aware, is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with being. When we talk about ontology we are talking about how things exist, not why they exist, or what they are made of - those questions belong largely to science. I think there is an ontological fallacy that pervades modern urban theory and it affects Nine Elms; but we’ll get to this shortly. 

Throughout the history of philosophy, many thinkers have grappled with questions about how things are in the world. Fundamental to this argument are disputes to do with appearances and reality. Take for example an apple. Intrinsic to ‘apple-ness’ are certain appearances like; red, round and crunchy. 

Some philosophers have argued that these appearances are all we can know about things and therefore an apple is simply an object that correlates with redness, roundness and crunchiness. These philosophers are broadly referred to as correlationists. On the other hand, realists would say that apples are things that exist independently of what we might know about them. This idea is based on the fact that what we know is limited to what we can observe and therefore; objects must be more than our finite capacity to see things. 

Others still, like Graham Harman - a philosopher known for his work in the relatively new field of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) - believe that objects are not just one or the other - that is; correlated appearances or things in themselves - they’re both. 

Harman’s thesis aims to bridge the correlationist/realist divide by introducing the idea of a ‘flat ontology’. This idea states that all things exist in the same way - in that; what they are and how they appear are simultaneously separate and yet interconnected. Thinking in this way is very unintuitive and seems like total gibberish at first. How can something be two things at once? The answer, argues Harman, is found in the physics of spacetime. If time is a linear continuum, then to exist is to be in a constant process of becoming. It follows, then, that for an object to be in this world means that it is simultaneously itself while becoming something different.

The idea of a flat ontology reconfigures the way we think about objects. In particular, it radically challenges the ways we conceive of parts and wholes. The notion that a city like London is ontologically greater than the sum of the parts that make it, for example, is commonplace across the western world. But when viewed through the lens of a flat ontology, this perception breaks down and no longer makes much sense; for instance, to think about parts and wholes as being greater or less than one another implies that certain objects are of intrinsically lesser-importance than others.

Reality, according to Harman, appears to defy this way of thinking. How can a house be intrinsically less than a city? The answer is that; unless we’re talking about ideals, it can’t be. If we place ‘the city’ on a pedestal of transcendent importance, then we must accept that we are doing so within the realms of idealism, not reality. This is what I see as the ontological fallacy, mentioned at the beginning of this piece. It is to conflate the appearances of the world with the reality of the world. 

But how does this fallacy affect urban planning? The answer lies in the context from which modern planning arose and a detour is required to fill us in.

Seeing like a state

Scientific and technological progress during The Enlightenment gave rise to, among other things, a new capacity for state control. High Modernism - described by some scholars as an ideology characterised by its confidence in technology, bureaucracy and specialist-led governance - gained traction during this period among the upper echelons of society. As James Scott describes in ‘Seeing like a State’, this ideology became the foundation on which modern statecraft in Europe was built. 

The reason for this, argues Scott, was that prior to the enlightenment, society was immensely difficult to understand in clear, quantifiable terms. Technological and scientific advancements changed this, making legible to those in power the landscape, demographics and finances of the state they governed. This process of ‘making legible’ that which was previously opaque involved the application of various techniques that simplified reality into abstracted vignettes such as maps, standardised metrics and indices. The High Modernists were convinced that this newfound legibility was society’s ticket to a utopian future - one which was, above all else, comprehensible and malleable. 

The process of mapping and standardising transformed the way local authorities saw their cities. Many European urban centres were renovated in order to rid themselves of their organic, seemingly chaotic and disorganised order - Paris being possibly the most famous example of this. Making cities legible in abstracted terms meant that they were easier to govern. Authorities understood the lay of the land with a degree of precision suitable to bureaucratic management and this helped leaders make better informed economic, social and political decisions. New cities, such as those in the colonies of European nations were designed as gridded blocks, simplified and logical in form. 

This new urban design profession championed standardisation, clarity and efficiency and this inevitably gave rise to homogenisation. Cities in India, Brazil, Australia and the United States had differing densities and scales but were fundamentally similar. Variability, after all, meant complication and this was the ultimate faux pas of the High Modernist clerics in charge of planning society.  

Urban planners viewed ‘the city’ as a singular object of design. It was placed on a pedestal of transcendent importance relative to the individual components that made it and by doing so, these designers had embraced High Modernist idealism and not the more nuanced reality before their eyes. In other words, High Modernism was predicated on an ontological fallacy and conflated the appearances of the world with the reality of the world. 

House as City

Though viewing a city as a singular object of design might be idealistic and flawed, perhaps large scale urban planning is impossible without an overarching narrative to guide it? High Modernist idealism certainly structured modern planning, for instance, bringing with it enhanced organisation, clarity and efficiency - all no doubt necessities when building at the scale and speed required by contemporary societal conditions. However, it also reduced the complexity of cities; making them diagrammatic and two dimensional and it was on this basis that modern urbanism was criticised most by people like Jane Jacobs, Colin Rowe, Robert Venturi and Aldo Rossi. Despite all of this pushback, I believe the legacy of High Modern urban planning still pervades many developments across the globe today. 

I think the underlying reason for this is quite simple; investor risk. On the face of it, nobody is willing to invest their capital in an inefficient plan or something that lacks a grand narrative to structure it. The straight-lined, right-angled and mono-variate nature of modern urbanism may have initially appealed to the Enlightenment-era local authorities, eager to increase their control over society. But over the years, and with the steady development of capitalism, it appears the benefits of simplifying urban design have also manifested in the returns on investment of private developers.

On the face of it, Nine Elms doesn’t appear as simplified as the gridiron urban plans of the past. The crooked and curved facades that surround the old Power Station do not scream ‘efficiency’. But these Starchitect designed apartment buildings have been carefully factored into the overall feasibility plan that has allowed for such pricey buildings on the basis that their ‘High Culture’ significance will raise the overall land value of the site. This thereby justifies extortionately high retail prices which then offset the losses made throughout the rest of the development, where some social and affordable housing has been allocated to meet local authority requirements. 

It is only when you scratch the surface of Nine Elms that the High Modern spectre raises its head. The financial balancing act described above reveals something telling with regards to how the scheme has been conceived. Like the High Modernist planners, it appears that the developers of Nine Elms see this project as a singular object of urban design and as I started this piece, the way we see impacts how we engage. The success and viability of the project as a caricatured whole seems to have mattered most to the makers of Nine Elms and the result is a scheme that appears out of step with everything around it, detached from the character of the area. Perhaps Harman’s flat ontology is a clue to why this is? If reality requires nuance in order to grasp it, then maybe we need to stop viewing our cities as caricatured objects and embrace the complexity and contradiction that the great critics of High Modernism espoused. Bottom-up and self-determining; house as city.