Madrid’s iconography is strictly prewar. Between the gratuitous ornamentation dripping from the buildings lining Gran Via and the interiors of crowded tapas, the city centre appears decked out in full late-19th century regalia, fit for admirers of coattails and opera gloves. Tread out along the boulevards bursting from the city’s heart, however, and Madrid’s palette of pale yellows and burnt ochres takes on a slightly different form.
In ways, the commercial outskirts of Madrid reprise a sort of cityscape that’s as rare in Europe as it is fatiguingly common elsewhere. Black-ribboned towers wrapped in shades of brown and black will slump along streets that gape by whim, rather than necessity. The packs of pedestrians thin out. Walk along the arteries feeding the gargantuan Avenida de la Castellada, drown out the cheers from the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu, and one is in downtown Denver.
The geography of Lisbon bends pespectives - up, down, and around its seven hills. Beyond the occasional slow-swooping streetcar, the dramatic undulations of the city’s streets are broken only by its graffiti, which boldly explodes against pastel-painted houses, or grafts messages - somehow both timely and timeless - deep into centuries-solid walls.
Even if they can’t bear to go there, practically all Montrealers know a place that they call the Underground City. But by no means is Montreal the only city with such a thing. Across the Atlantic, the city of Warsaw also has a network of underground passages spanning a good part of its downtown.
But you’d never think to associate the two. Where Montreal’s is shiny and commercial, Warsaw’s is gritty and low-slung. Montreal’s underground contains many of the finest international fashion chains, but in Warsaw, those are dispersed throughout the city’s various upscale malls. The underground passages in Warsaw are strictly a utilitarian affair, home to hardware stores, bakeries, arcades, and other small, independent shops.
In a sense, Warsaw’s underground world compensates for the barren landscape above the surface: where Montreal has Saint Catherine street above, the Aleje Jerozolimskie is wide, barren, and more or less devoid of commerce. The passages, on the other hand, teem; at busier moments, they almost resemble the arabic souk in intensity. The central train station is knit right in; some exits from train platforms even skip the train station, emptying out into the corridors. It’s a good thing I missed those when I arrived for the first time in the sleeper train.
At night, the stores close but the passages stay open. It’s only then that you can walk slowly enough to notice the imperfections: the dripping water, cracked floors, peeling yellow paint. A close friend and I passed through once at 1 AM on a wet spring night. There were only two things to be heard: the dripping of water, and our scuffing footsteps.
Toulouse is a large, cosmopolitan but relaxed and laid back southern French city. It feels like it has as much in common with nearby Spain as with northern France.
The bilingual street signs here are a tantalising reminder of how the city’s history could have been different. Had Occitanie remained a distinct culture and society from that of Northern France, Toulouse would have been its capital. Perhaps the street signs would have Occitan on top, and might not even be accompanied by a French translation.
In fact, you will not see Occitan on commercial signs, or hear it spoken on the streets (or, at least, I did not) in Toulouse — after French, Arabic and English predominate. And yet, the bilingual street signs serve as a reminder that, although clearly integrated for a long time into the French Republic, there is something distinctively Toulousain. This is an example of the use of language as a common shared heritage, a cultural signifier, if you will, rather than simply as a means of communication.
When you mention the name Liverpool to a non-Brit, they are likely to think of one of two things: Liverpool Football Club, whose worldwide brand power is second only to their Premiership rivals Manchester United, or The Beatles (indeed, mention the city’s name to a typical North American and they will likely only make a connection with the latter).
Liverpool, the perennial underdog of British cities and the butt of many jokes from Londoners, is this year’s European Capital of Culture — far from being just a city of football and youth gangs. Large-scale redevelopment projects carrying designs by such ‘Starchitects’ as Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli are flowering up all along its UNESCO World Heritage Site-designated waterfront. Liverpool is hoping that its cultural coronation by the EU will shake the image that many hold of the city — that of a rough-and-tumble, crumbling port town where the locals speak a perplexing dialect, Scouse, which can be best described as a cross between Gaelic and Swedish.
Today’s Liverpool is more akin to the boomtown of the 19th century, when the steamship lines and related merchant industries held great sway in the city. However, despite the attention that Liverpool has recently been receiving for its cultural and economic revitalization, the city will perhaps always be umbilically tied to the fab name of its most famous export.
Most people don’t think of coffee when you mention Helsinki. The usual things that come to mind are death metal bands, formula one racers, and blonde people. Nevertheless, statistics show that Finns are the biggest coffee drinkers on earth. They drink almost twice as much coffee as the French, and nearly three times more than us. It is no surprise that Helsinki, the capital city, has loads of great coffee shops.
But I don’t drink coffee, though I still like to linger in cafés. So I stopped by the oldest café in town: Café Ekberg, which opened on February 3, 1852. It is small, yet quiet and sophisticated. More importantly, it provided me with the instant shelter from the chilly Finnish winter I was seeking.
I went for a delicious frothy hot chocolate. The place was full of formal Finns in evening attire. But then the sun rose and I remembered it was daytime, 10:00 AM, still somewhat dark, not really helping my jet lag. I looked around at the stiff elderly blond women and quiet gentlemen serving themselves heaping plates at the Nordic breakfast buffet table. I felt surreal, like an extra in a David Lynch movie, or should I say Aki Kaurismäki.
But that’s how I expected to feel in Finland, so there wasn’t any culture shock.
What do you do with an abandoned building? Turn it into art. Such is the case in Liverpool where the British sculptor Richard Wilson has created Turning the Place Over, an ambitious intervention that removes an eight metre chunk of façade from a building in central Liverpool, rotates it and puts it back into place. An introduction to the piece by the Cass Sculpture Foundation describes it in more detail:
Turning the Place Over consists of an 8 metres diameter ovoid cut from the façade of a building and made to oscillate in three dimensions. The revolving façade rests on a specially designed giant rotator, usually used in the shipping and nuclear industries, and acts as a huge opening and closing ‘window’, offering recurrent glimpses of the interior during its constant cycle during daylight hours.
The ovoid section of facade is then mounted on a central spindle, aligned on a specific angle to the building. When at rest, the ovoid section of facade would fit flush into the rest of the building. The angled spindle is, however, placed on a set of powerful motorised industrial rollers and will rotate. As it rotates, the facade not only becomes completely inverted, but will also oscillate into the building and out into the street, revealing the interior of the building and only being flush with the building at one point during its rotation.
This astonishing feat of engineering will stun audiences on many levels. Disturbing and disorientating from a distance, from close-up passers-by have a thrilling experience as the building rotates above them.
Some observers have noted that Wilson’s intervention draws heavily from the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, an American architect and artist who carved up houses with a chainsaw in the 1970s. His work dwelled on the disintegration of the United States’ public life, including the decay of its cities; one of his more well-known efforts, very similar to Turning the Place Over, involved cutting out a large piece of wall from a New York warehouse and suspending it from a crane.
It’s not entirely clear what Wilson’s installation, which was commissioned by Liverpool in celebration of its designation as 2008’s European Capital of Culture, is trying to say. But it’s still remarkable, if only because it merges the public and private spheres of life into one, revealing the inner workings of a building that is normally shielded from passersby.
I have a hard time conceiving of the Berlin Wall. The above photo, taken in 1985 by Robin McMorran, a visiting British tourist, only adds to my incomprehension. Look at the way it snakes through the city almost arbitrarily, cutting off squares, streets, streetcar tracks. It was absurd and surreal yet it defined the day-to-day reality of Berlin for more than a generation.
The first incarnation of the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, when Soviet and East German leaders agreed that the flow of refugees towards the West needed to be stemmed. Over the next two decades, the wall was rebuilt four times, until it reached its final and most infamous state in 1975. The wall became a backdrop to speeches by Western leaders; it was there, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, that Ronald Reagan uttered his most famous pronouncement: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Despite its rhetoric, though, the West did little to prevent the construction of the wall in the first place. For nearly three decades, it divided families and neighbourhoods. Even Berlin’s complex subway system was cut in two by the wall.
Berlin’s wall was far from unique. Walls have, for centuries, divided cities from their hinterland, but they are increasingly being used to restrict movement within cities themselves. In the early 1980s, the Turkish and Greek halves of the Cypriot capital of Nicosia were separated by a barrier. Jerusalem has long been divided by the border between Israel and Palestine, a border that has been reinforced in recent years by the addition of a tall separation barrier. In Baghdad, military forces have laid the groundwork for a new wall that will separate Shia neighbourhoods from Sunni ones.
In some ways, the walls that exist along many stretches of the US-Mexico border, dividing otherwise contiguous urban areas like Nogales, can be seen in the same light. (Compare this photo of the border, marked by an imposing wall, with this one from 1898 in which there is no barrier whatsoever.) This is especially true as border cities grow larger and even more intertwined, despite the ever more burdensome restrictions on movement.
Andrew Chau, on his blog urban-ism, looked last month at the “(un)intended consequences of building walls. “In our capitalist system, goods and capital are allowed to move freely, but migrants cannot,” he wrote. “For the corporate elite and their companies, this is essential to distance themselves from the growing inequities between the rich and the poor.”
In cities divided, their main effect is to entrench social inequality by restricting free movement, just as the Berlin Wall did for 28 years. That wall was torn down, but in its place have risen many others.
French culture is dead, Time magazine’s Don Morrison recently proclaimed. Complacently subsisting off plentiful government subsidies, it has failed to keep up and compete with any of the noise issuing forth from the anglophone world. If France’s capital city is any reflection of the country’s cultural decline, one might be inclined to agree with him — superficially, at least.
The museum-like quality of Paris, which remains a sort of improbable continuation of its late 19th century self, has long been lamented. The City of Light is bathing, perhaps, in too much of a stage-set’s glow, and one could be forgiven for feeling like one was traipsing through a theme park when strolling through the Tuileries in the evening - especially since half the park literally serves as a sort of fairground. It’s telling that the two most controversial building projects in central Paris - the reconstruction of Les Halles, a former marketplace turned mall and train station, and the potential rebuilding of the Tuileries palace, are, respectively, an attempt to snuff out one of the few 20th century intrusions into central Paris, and the attempt to restore a building lost to fire in 1871. The recent installation of a bike-rental system has only added further to Paris’ 19th century flair: never since then have there been so many pedal warriors on the city’s boulevards. All in all, Paris is not only ossifying, but taking active steps to turn back the clock.
Place Vendôme: Sepulchral City
Morrison claims that that hope for French culture lies in the twin engine of neoliberalism and the immigrant ghettoes of French cities’ banlieux: the latter providing new twists on what “French” means, the former allowing France to competitively export itself to the rest of the world. It’s true that these two forces have brought considerable change to Paris, though not, perhaps, in the positive ways Morrison expects. The offices of American law firms have quintupled along the Avenue Georges V, and St-Germain has steeply declined from Bohemian Rhapsody to Banana Republic. This sort of sterility, more than the mere preservation of belle époque facades, has paralyzed Paris.
It would hardly be an original observation to point out that a simple set of steps can become a well-used hangout. One of the world’s most famous public spaces is, after all, known as the Spanish Steps. But for all their ubiquity, only some steps become popular places to sit. What makes some gathering places and others just passages to somewhere else?
There are at least three key elements to making a successful set of hangout steps. The first is openness: no matter how wide they actually are, the steps must feel and appear accessible. People should feel comfortable sitting on them, which won’t happen if they’re getting in the way of passersby. The second element is location: the steps need to be located in a high-traffic area where people would actually want to sit down. Finally, the steps must have a view: there’s no point in sitting somewhere if there’s nothing to look at.
The steps in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery are one of Vancouver’s favourite gathering spaces precisely because they fill all of these criteria. They don’t actually lead anywhere — the entrance at the top of the steps has been sealed off — so they serve no purpose other than as seats in an urban amphitheatre. Similar are the steps at Montreal’s Place des Arts. Their panorama view of busy Ste. Catherine St. and the city beyond attracts a lot of people, but they’re broad enough that sitting on them doesn’t impede access to the second-storey plaza to which they lead.
In London, the steps around the statue of “Eros” (actually the “Angel of Christian Charity”) in Picadilly Circus and the sundial at the Seven Dials are popular gathering spots (even if, in the last case, there are only two steps on which to sit). Quite possibly my favourite set of steps, however, are those in front of the Arts Building at McGill University, from which the entire city seems to unfold.
McGill University’s “Arts steps” in downtown Montreal
In last week’s issue of the Economist, a couple of interesting articles looked at the challenge of building mosques in Western cities. All too often, it seems, cities and neighbourhoods in Europe and North America become divided when faced with the possibility that a minaret might rise on the horizon. What is it, though, that scares people about mosques? Is it the fear of terrorism fed by media reports of radical imams preaching their jihadist rhetoric at suburban mosques? Or is it something more elemental, a simple fear of a changing society?
In Cologne, whose population population numbers about 120,000, the question of whether or not to build a lavish central mosque has split the city along deep, though unexpected, lines. Apparently, many Roman Catholic clergy support the mosque, but one prominent Jewish intellectual — Ralph Giordano, a Holocaust survivor — has come out strongly against it, claiming that it would encourage the creation of a parallel Muslim society in Germany. The whole matter has given a boost to Germany’s far right, which has used the mosque issue to win support for its extremist agenda.
If anything, though, the establishment of proper mosques — that is to say, grand and highly-visible public structures — is one sure way to integrate Muslims into mainstream society. But that is exactly what mosque opponents are fighting against: they don’t want Muslims to be accepted by the mainstream. They see Muslims as fundamentally foreign, so their opposition to mosques is rooted in xenophobia and little else. (Even Ralph Giordano admits that his opposition to the Cologne stems from his belief that Germany is a fundamentally “Judeo-Christian” country.) The idea of minarets becoming an everyday part of the urban fabric, like church steeples, is abhorrent to them. Perhaps that is why a number of Swiss politicians are currently advocating a nation-wide ban on minarets; not mosques, just minarets.
North America, the Economist notes, offers better legal protection to mosque builders, despite having its own “Islam-bashers ready to play on people’s fears.” There have been many controversies over the construction of new mosques but, in the end, Canadian and American courts are likely to rule on the side of religious freedom.
A picturesque garden city or a gritty ghetto? Both can be claimed about Södra Sofielund, a small neighbourhood in Malmö where high rates of criminality and poverty go side by side with idyllic homes of the intellectual middle class.
Rosenlundsgatan is a nice little street with row houses and small detached houses from the early 1900’s with hollyhocks on the front and gardens on the back. The street is also in the top three of places with lots of car break-ins in the city. One street away you find the home of Malmö’s mayor. Yet another street away is Sevedsplan, an area with low-rise residentials from the mid 1900’s. It’s one of the poorest parts of town, and by Swedish measures a gritty place.
There is a gentrification process going on among the small houses, but it is going surprisingly slowly. Even in the more idyllic parts there is still a big diversity among in the population. Södra Sofielund is one of the most central parts of Malmö where you can get a house with a garden, and the house prices have been going up a lot during the last years. The neighbourhood is located next to Möllevången, a young, hip and vibrant part of town, and lots of the not-so-young-anymore-but-still-claiming-to-be-hip people from Möllevången dream of a small house with a garden at Sofielund. I’m one of them.
This summer the National Gallery in London has brought the fine art to the public, by lining the streets of West End with reproductions of some of its paintings. The campaign is clearly a comment on street art culture — and of course a way to draw people to the gallery. It also raises interesting questions about the importance of authenticity and context.
Montreal Apartments
