Villes-Noires

In environments where many things don’t work, are broken down, are even beyond recognition through overuse and lack of upkeep, it is easy for certain things to lose meaning or substance. So trying to keep things intact as a shelter against the easy parasitism of both desperate and powerful others, economy is a device to keep the value of things open to new uses and sites.  Thus, to grasp the fierce ambivalence of many clearly impoverished urban districts requires an appreciation for the oscillations of value.  An appreciation of how bodies, lives, built environments and materials continuously enjoin and break from associations that enable temporary shelters and opportunities—where the civil and uncivil, the benevolent and the manipulative propel each other somewhere else, momentarily away from homogenized misery or individual advantage.  No one can go it alone; yet it is not clear with whom one should or could go; and one must go, somewhere or else be swallowed by “more powerful mouths”, always plentiful.

Recently, I lived for one year on the 39^th floor in one of the fifteen towers making up Podomoro City in Jakarta.  I rarely saw my neighbors.  Even more rarely ever had any kind of conversation with them. The first person on my floor I ever spoke with was a middle aged woman from Abidjan.  I stupidly asked how it was for an Ivorian woman living in Indonesia, and she replied that on the 39^th floor , “where are we really anyway?”  As both the fascination and exigency of vertical living becomes more extensive throughout the world’s cities, does this woman’s somewhat throw-away remark have anything to say about a growing sense of dislocation and uncertainty as to where the spaces of inhabitation really are?  Or, is identification of location simply a pragmatics, a way of pointing to a relation of difference or similarity without it mattering what the content of those contrasts might be?  Where advances in the technologies of reachability render vertical living viable in the first place, do they not also obviate the need to have a clear sense, when we say, “ I am here, and you are there”, of clear-cut implications of that distance?  So was an urban theory infused with political meaning about first and third worlds, north and south, simply a function of the streets; of a street sensibility concerned with divvying up spoils and allegiances?

Across the upper stories of urban living there is at least an implicit communion of dissociation.  This is perhaps what is meant in advertisements for superblocks that invite people to be a “part of the world.”  This is a world that no longer is burdened by differences, or is at least able to cleanse them of their rough edges and controversies. We all know that we will have to go up, that intensive urbanization which encompasses most of the world’s population will have to reduce its footprints and carbonated atmospheres, and this will require densities that no longer will allow people to “space out.”  Putting people and identities into territories will hardly cease, but the usual spatial crutches and tricks conventionally required distinguish people on the basis of nation, region and ethnicity will require readjustment.

Of course many will simply be relieved to escape the mess below.  Dealing with traffic gridlock, bad air, bad manners, collapsing infrastructure, and always renewable corruption seems to take up inordinate portions of people’s lives.  Meeting the exigency of personal efficiency and constant make-overs would seem to require more social rarified environments where the idea of sociality—the counting of friends, the mapping of networks, the unencumbered profusion of constant chatter—prospers away from fumes, sweat, and noise. 

At the same time, sitting on the balcony of the 39^th floor, looking into hundreds of living spaces in three directions, there is an appreciation of the ability of these upper stories to contain just about anything.  The contiguity of all kinds of “household compositions”—from three generations of families to packs of singles crowded into a small two bedroom apartment to “rent a piece of floor by the day”—seem to domesticate, soften the inevitable tensions and clashes.  From here it is possible to, at least in idiomatic fashion register the scope of urban life in its various textures and as a patchwork surface. 

For on the street, full of its potential interruptions that no matter how proficient and predictive the surveillance remain an immanence of danger, one has to quickly and arbitrarily decide what to pay attention to and what to leave out, filtering out what in the immediate surrounds has relevance to your capacity to navigate a particular route or task and what doesn’t.  Here, assessments of who people are and where they come from in relationship to what they may be capable of doing remain important, if only as short-cuts or ciphers.  But even these glyphs, drastic as they are in the seemingly always revitalizing viciousness of fights over race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, glare as they do in part because the city, like the colonialists of past, are finding higher regions to run away from them.

image Cedric Nzolo

As preaching, policing, politicking, servicing, informing, mediating, reconciling, buying and selling come together in a mix where it is sometimes not clear what kind of activity is As trading precisely going on—simply because they all may be taking place at once and through a variety of actors who are switching their roles at “high speeds”—there are opportunities for many to assume any role that they can imagine at the moment and see where it takes them.  At the same time, the messiness of the intersection and the need to adhere to some kind of coherent way forward means that strictly defensive maneuvers may be of limited value.  In other words, in these intersections of heterogeneity where many different modes of operation are simultaneously enacted—everyone simultaneously trying to buy or sell something; everyone trying to convey a particular objective or history in the midst of an intermingling of aspirations and backgrounds—a certain opportunism becomes the primary vehicle of wading through the complex mixtures.

In urban environments where things are weakly “spaced-out” there will be a great deal of suspicions about complicity, about things not really being what they seem to be.  There will be anxieties about being tricked or betrayed, of being drawn into associations and implications with which one has little control.  People will worry about being held culpable for things of which they are not aware. They worry about situations where they have little recourse for definitive arbitration and where the process of trying to “explain” oneself may further arouse suspicion or even be seen as definitive proof of culpability, Circumventing this problem then may take the form of actively availing oneself to be used in someone else’s “game” as a means of conscious triangulation.  To not stand out at the end of the day; to be not left “holding the bag” may require a facility to “blend in” to as many scenarios as possible, where others cannot get a precise “angle” on you for sure, and thus remain unsure about the implications of dealing with you in a particular way.  In the deployment of these multiple hedges, then, it sometimes is impossible to discern who or what is doing what to whom.  How far do the implications of a particular argument or agreement travel; where does it unfold; what impact does a particular event in a particular household, market, church or bar actually exert; how and upon whom does it ramify?