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8/12/2019 A History of Future Cities
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A History of Future Citiesby Daniel Brook
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ByJonathan Yardley,Published: March 8, 2013
This uncommonly interesting and intelligent book considers how two powerful
human urges to imitate the things we admire and/or envy, and to be in the
vanguard of modernization have played out in the histories of four of the worldsoddest and most prominent cities: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai. A
History of Future Cities is not a linear account of how these cities developed but is
divided into four stages in which they sought to become more modern and,
specifically, more Western.Daniel Brookwrites:
These four unlikely sister cities are unified by the sense of disorientation they
impart. . . . The disorientation imparted by St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and
Dubai results from their being located in the East but purposefully built to look as if
they are in the West. Their occidental looks are anything but accidental. . . . For
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8/12/2019 A History of Future Cities
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Western visitors to these cities, love/hate reactions are common. Yet love them or
hate them, these dis-orient-ed metropolises matter. They are places to be reckoned
with because they are ideas as much as cities, metaphors in stone and steel for the
explicit goal of Westernization. . . . These global gateway cities raise the question of
how to be a modern Arab, Russian, Chinese, and Indian, and whether
modernization and globalization can ever be more than just euphemisms for
Westernization.
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(W. W. Norton) - A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook.
Brook, a freelance journalist who lives in New Orleans, is not your basic patronizing
First Worlder turning up his nose at cities whose powers-that-be think that erecting
an ersatz Big Ben will somehow turn them into London or that cramming the royalpalace with the greatest art of France and Italy will somehow turn them into Paris
http://www.washingtonpost.com/jonathan-yardley/2011/03/02/ABEVd6M_page.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/jonathan-yardley/2011/03/02/ABEVd6M_page.htmlmailto:[email protected]://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/entertainment/bookshttps://account.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-history-of-future-cities-daniel-brook/2013/03/04/2e9e503c-82a4-11e2-a671-0307392de8de_modal.htmlhttps://account.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-history-of-future-cities-daniel-brook/2013/03/04/2e9e503c-82a4-11e2-a671-0307392de8de_modal.htmlhttp://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/entertainment/booksmailto:[email protected]://www.washingtonpost.com/jonathan-yardley/2011/03/02/ABEVd6M_page.html -
8/12/2019 A History of Future Cities
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or Rome. Brook is sympathetic rather than condescending to their ambitions. The
draw of Dubai in the twenty-first century as the draw of St. Petersburg,
Shanghai, and Mumbai historically is more than just the lure of great wealth, he
writes. It is the lure of participating in modernity. To go from being a South Indian
rice farmer to a construction worker who erects the tallest building on earth is to
untether oneself from the past and build the future. . . . Writing off Dubai is writing
off the world as it might be. It is writing off modernity itself, smothering the hope
that in the age of jet-powered globalization, we can all learn to live together as a
community, sharing a single city and, ultimately, a single world.
That is a laudable if somewhat sentimental goal that is not remotely within the
reach of any of these cities. Dubai, for example, could not exist in its present form
without air conditioning and as a result it has a carbon footprint of astonishingdimensions, wildly out of proportion to its minute population and territory; global-
warming deniers to the contrary, sooner or later a huge price will be paid for this by
the rest of the world, not merely by Dubai. There and in the other three cities under
discussion, efforts to improve the lot of the poor have been half-hearted at best;
that rice farmer who left India to help build the 163-storyBurj Khalifa may be
participating in modernity, but he and his family almost certainly live in a slum,
probably with undrinkable water. Many of the grandest buildings of central St.
Petersburg have glittering facades, but their interiors are crumbling.
A central difficulty is that all of these cities havent so much evolved as sprung into
being full-grown. Legend has it that St. Petersburg was built in the heavens and
dropped whole to earth, which ignores its fairly long history (one that includes its
incarnations as Petrograd and Leningrad) but gets to the point that it was
artificially created by Peter the Great in the early 18th century as Russias window
to the West, artificially re-created by the communists in the 20th century and now
artificially polished up as a tourist destination. Shanghai in the 19th century was
refashioned by Western traders who built and inhabited their own settlements, or
concessions: They would wrest Shanghai from China and build a Western city that
just happened to be in the Far East, just as the mighty high-rise Shanghai of the
early 21st century has flung aside most remnants of its Chinese culture and has yet
to live up to the citys historic promise to sort out what it means to be Chinese
and modern. As for Mumbai, in its long earlier history as Bombay it was a kind of
factory for producing Westernized Indians, while today it is in danger of becoming
a city of world-class institutions walled off behind fences where unconscionable
numbers of people live in poverty.
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8/12/2019 A History of Future Cities
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In todays Mumbai, an architectnamed Hafeez Contractor has made a fortune
designing offices and residences: Contractors philosophy is market nihilism he
will build anything, for anyone, in any style, as long as the checks clear. And what
his clients typically want is a funhouse-mirror image of the West transposed onto
the East like more-Western-than-the-West neoclassical St. Petersburg edifices
taken to their most unhinged extreme . . . less a copy of the West than a fantasy of
the West whose totemic power of modernity even in its most mundane
incarnations appeals to upscale Indian customers. It is a West as experienced by
the global Indian, where all its differences from India rise to the fore and the
distinctness of the Indian city, most notably its vibrant informal commerce, is
dismissed as an embarrassment that must be expunged.
The sad irony is that all of these cities, in their ardent (and wholly understandable)ambition to be powerful and great, have cast aside the local, regional and national
characteristics that brought them into being. Even Dubai, youthful though it may
be, has a history rooted not in Las Vegas but in Arabia, and Shanghai, before
foreigners discovered its supreme advantages as a seaport and made it over, had a
past that was Chinese and had nothing to do with Miami on steroids. Todays fast-
lane, first-class global businesswoman can travel from Dubai to Mumbai to
Shanghai and believe herself to be in the same place all the time; then, if she wants
a taste of Disney World with a slight foreign accent, she can have a nice vacation inSt. Petersburg: The city built out of [the Russian] inferiority complex is now firmly
a world capital of high culture, and it revels in its ability to look down on upstart
Eastern metropolises as Western Europeans once looked down on it.
Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, famously wrote
that old imperialist Rudyard Kipling, and the jury is still out on whether he was
right. Reading A History of Future Cities leaves one sensing that he was more
right than wrong, that in copying the cities of the West, those of the East are losing
more than they are gaining in the exchange. But Brook is quick to defend imitation.
That the Romans copied the Greeks hardly means that their civilization was a
fraud, he writes. The Romans went on to make their own contributions, far
surpassing the Greeks in fields like engineering and logistics. That the Romans
copied does not mean that history is nothing but copying. But it does mean that
copying is an integral part of history. Indeed, evidence of it is all about us here in
Washington, where many of our most notable edifices and monuments are pretty
much direct steals from Greeks and Romans alike.
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We may be right to wonder around the directions in which the big new cities of the
developing world are taking themselves, but we do well not to turn up our noses at
them. Been there, done that.