## "The flaneur has become a part of the heritage industry"



Owen Hatherley lebt und arbeitet als Autor in Süd-London, wo er über die
politischen Implikationen von Architektur schreibt. Sein bei Zero Books
erschienes Buch Militant Modernism widmet sich dem Modernismus als politischem
Projekt. Hatherley entdeckt im Theater Bertolt Brechts oder brutalistischen
Architektur einen Willen zur Transformation auf eine sozial gerechtere
Zukunft. Dadurch positioniert er den Modernismus als Gegenpol zum postmodernen
Politikstil New Labours, der durch durch eine zunehmende Privatisierung und
Kontrolle öffentlicher Räume gekennzeichnet ist.

Mr. Hatherley, in your book Militant Modernism you argue for a continued
relevance of modernist ideas in film, theatre and architecture. Modernism, so
you claim, is important in that it has provided a vision of futurity for
British society. You claim that Modernism's radical rupture of traditions in
art and architecture is worth preserving and constantly remind your readers
that in modernist urban planning "nothing was too good for ordinary people."
Yet modernist architecture is frequently associated with renouncing street
life in favour of a hierarchical idea of planning. Therefore the streets seem
to be conspicuously absent from a lot of modernist thinking. Do you agree with
this?

There is certainly some sort of anti-street movement in early 20th century
modernism, yet quite often Le Corbusier's recurring slogan 'we must kill the
street' is mistaken for the position of modernism in general. Most of the time
this slogan is considered to be appalling because ever since gentrification
started taking hold in the 1980s, received opinion has it that traditional
streets are exciting, 'vibrant' places rather than the dens of crime or sin
that they were considered to be in the 19th and much of the 20th century. Le
Corbusier's attacks were invariably aimed at the 'rue corridor', the side
street. One reason for this is because of the lack of light and air, the
generally cramped and unpleasant conditions for the inhabitants of said
streets. At the same time, he was trying to appeal to governments and
businesses by promising to obliterate the spaces the police couldn't get into,
the unplanned spaces. This was where, in theory, people could build barricades
and take over the city – hence 'Architecture or revolution, revolution can be
avoided', as another famous Corbusian slogan has it.

What was Le Corbusier's alternative to the dark and narrow street?

The alternative to the street in Corbusier's case is blocks spaced out in
parkland, where there simply isn't anything remotely resembling a street
anymore. This has been criticised on political, social and spatial grounds as
creating places without the sound, activity and life which make the urban
experience different and superior to the rural. Yet while most modernists
shared Corbusier's hostility to the 'rue corridor', to slums, alleyways and
what in English were called 'rookeries', in the process they created very
public, usable spaces such as the 'social condensers' of the Russian
Constructivists or the courtyards, parks and community centres of Bruno Taut's
Berlin housing estates. Nonetheless, there was by the 1950s a kind of
anti-street orthodoxy where the more complex planning of the 1920s' Siedlungen
was reduced to the 'Zeilenbau', which again is very much an anti-street. The
space inbetween can accommodate some sort of street life though, and it often
does.

This sounds as if any any attempt to eradicate street life results in an
appropriation of inbetween spaces.

There are fairly few examples of pure Corbusian anti-streets, because it's
very expensive and 'wasteful' of land. London's closest example is the Alton
Estate and its parkland which was supposed to be part of the 'radiant city'.
Yet most of the time planning has resulted in a mish-mash of modernist ideas
along with the later planning ideas of 'mixed development', which combines
low-rise, medium-rise and high-rise buildings together in one place. In some
cases, estates are influenced by the 'Brutalism' of Alison and Peter Smithson
and Team 10, of which the Sheffield estate 'Park Hill' is the most spectacular
example. Here you can find the attempt to recreate that street life in the
sky, via walkways, corners, wide access decks and such. All of these things
are now regarded as incitements to petty crime, as much as the corners,
alleyways and such of the Victorian streets were in their day. In most
Modernist estates in London, you will find a lot of 'street life', in that
there are young people hanging around using the inbetween spaces, although
curiously nobody seems to think this is a good thing. Meanwhile the idea of
'the streets', the mythologised streets of Bow or Brixton, today quite often
refers to estates which don't have streets in the traditional sense – it's
used as a synonym for places that are poor, basically, with or without the
suffix 'but sexy'.

Modernism created its own counterfigure to the ordered urban planning in the
figure of the 'flaneur', who wanders the streets and - according to Walter
Benjamin - appropriates the city this way. Do you think the idea of the
'flaneur' is useful in describing inner city life in contemporary London?

The idea of the flaneur drifting around but never engaging in the spaces of
commerce is an enormously seductive one. However I do think that the idea of
'psychogeography' and the 'flaneur', this mix-and-match of ideas from Iain
Sinclair, the Situationist International and Walter Benjamin, has become a
conformism. The flaneur has become another part of the heritage industry,
consisting of sponsored heritage walks round over-familiar 19th and 18th
century spaces, whether Jack the Ripper's East End or once-radical
Clerkenwell. This involves a disdain for the planned, supposedly channelled
and rationalised cityscapes built between the 1940s and the 1970s. It's the
intellectual wing of gentrification, and every time Iain Sinclair or Peter
Ackroyd write about a place I'm sure they're aware that the house prices in
the area will go up accordingly.

Iain Sinclair's favourite walking spot is Hackney, which is oversaturated with
myths of a radical past, but whose architecture mainly consists of
Victorian-style houses.

Architecturally, I think this rather misses where the interesting places to
wander actually are. If I were to think of a really labyrinthine part of
London, an area whose complexities, multiple levels, different ways of walking
and aesthetic pleasures are incredibly, overwhelmingly rich and fascinating,
it would be the Barbican, a gigantic modernist estate in the City of London.
It would most definitely not be the Georgian streets of Spitalfields, where
every space has been overdetermined with heritage and history to the point
where it's impossible to experience it as something fresh or surprising.
Modernism created wonderful labyrinths as often as it created ordered grids.

But the Barbican is a cultural centre, a space where flaneuring is not only
welcome, but might also be specifically encouraged. This is something which
one could say about other areas of London, the lower numbers of Brick Lane
near Trumans Brewery, for example.

Sure. This is not necessarily connected with Baudelaire or Benjamin's idea of
the flaneur, mind you. The flaneur is someone who wanders the shopping Arcades
and boulevards not buying stuff, and dressing spectacularly, showing himself
off. The argument could be made that our flaneurs today are very far from the
inner city - the 'Mallrats', those who go to shopping malls without buying
things. The gigantic Bluewater shopping centre on the edge of London has
banned this practice, which implies that they were deeply worried about the
possibility that they could have reappropriated that particular space.


Your comment about the Bluewater shopping centre, however, reminds me of a
scene in Patrick Keiller's movie "London" in which the narrator describes a
person reading Walter Benjamin in a shopping mall, which seems to
defamiliarize common connotations of Benjamin's concept of the flaneur. You
make a strong case for the defamiliarisation effect of Brutalist architecture,
can you think of any other possibilities of defamiliarization in the
cityscape?

Keiller's use of Benjamin is far more interesting than that of his
contemporaries, and his work seems to be consistently about using
defamiliarisation to investigate the politics of space. His movie Robinson in
Space does this through a genuinely Benjaminian or Brechtian attention to the
'bad new things' - the exurban landscape of gigantic distribution sheds,
business parks, call centres, US military bases, 'American-style boot camps'
and out-of-town retail complexes. At a talk Keiller said about the 'new space'
of riverside flat complexes for the middle classes, the spaces of
gentrification, that he didn't think that anyone really lived in them. So
defamiliarisation seems something which really takes place outside of the
cities, in the supposedly classless new spaces of the outer suburbs, the
Americanised landscape of 'just-in-time' production, sitting next to the
country houses where the interminable Jane Austen adaptations are shot.

But isn't that landscape particularly overdetermined by the endless chain of
representations of suburbia in film and television? Are there any
preconditions for defamiliarization?

Perhaps, although it's always a prettified, 1950s version of suburbia rather
than the suburbia of exurban new space. But that landscape seems strange to me
mainly because - at least since moving to London ten years ago - I don't
experience it often. For an urban intellectual there's nothing so alienating
as Bluewater, and the most common way of responding to this is snobbery. But
it is a truism that it's difficult to defamiliarise something if you've grown
up in it. A landscape as extraordinarily complex and politically
overdetermined as the east end of London can become something that's just
'there', and this produces a narcissism of small differences for London youth
- postcode wars and suchlike. Meanwhile, the young hip bourgeoisie would no
doubt fail to see the strangeness of the suburban landscapes from whence they
came. I suppose various kinds of youth cultures engage in defamiliarisation,
through seeing concrete landscapes as potential skateparks to the utility of
tower block roofs for pirate radio - but both are fairly depoliticised.

The Bluewater shopping centre is (in)famous for banning hoodies in 2005, a
move which drew a lot of criticism and once again highlighted the disastrous
effects of the privatisation of urban spaces on civil liberties. Although I
suspect you to share their political goals, you seem to pay very little
attention to movement such as Reclaim the Streets or the anti-gentrification
walks that are being staged in places like Hackney and whose aim seems to be
the reappropriation of spaces that were once public. Why is that?

Reclaim the Streets always ended up seeming like a lifestyle thing, where a
very particular demographic who dressed a very particular way and were
generally from a very particular class, got together and did something which
had little effect on those who usually use that space. I was on the
peripheries of Reclaim the Streets in the early 2000s and was involved in a
few of their Mayday actions. Turning bits of inner London into temporary
autonomous zones is necessarily a more interesting political act than turning
up and selling papers and asking people to sign petitions, but in retrospect,
the idea that political action should be a party in the street with samba
bands and sound systems has become as much a dead-end as the more traditional
kinds of protest. The use of urban space is maybe the most interesting thing
about Reclaim the Streets, but its assimilation into flashmobs, and the
assimilation of flashmobs into advertising tells its own story. More permanent
or semi-permanent uses of space are more worthwhile, but the idea that these
momentary actions could transfigure everyday spaces seems to be romantic and
ill-conceived. There's a more general point worth making here about the way
that the lifestyle politics and moralism of green and anarchist politics has
the effect of reclaiming the streets from the working class rather than vice
versa. Having said that, lots of those involved have gone onto formulating
ideas about 'communisation', setting up more concrete, less temporary spaces,
whether occupations or climate camps. That's very encouraging, and much closer
to the kind of uses of space I talk about in Militant Modernism.

This almost sounds as if you don't believe in a politics of micropolitical
intervention.

While I don't think they're of great political use on their own, there's no
doubt that temporary interventions in London can be great exercises in opening
up small groups of people to the politics of their environment. Laura Oldfield
Ford, an artist who produces the Savage Messiah zine, has staged walks around
particular areas which vividly showed the political uses of London's streets.
I took part in one around King's Cross, where she gave out old maps which were
quite deliberately impossible for use in a terrain which had been transformed
by gentrification, by the building of the new Eurostar station, by
deindustrialisation - you could literally see where the new enclosures were
taking place. Walking around the city is still one of the best ways to
experience the politics of space, but you need some sort of spur or guide, no
matter how unreliable, to read those spaces otherwise you end up with vague
ramblings.


Werthschulte, Christian. “‘The Flaneur has Become a Part of the Heritage Industry.‘ An
Interview with Owen Hatherley.” _Hard Times_ 87 (Frühjahr 2010). 29-31.

cwerthschulte@yahoo.de