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The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction
Cities originally came about as projects for the future: People moved from
the country into the city in order to escape the ancient forces of nature and
to build a new future that they could shape and control themselves. The entire
course of human history until the present has been defined by this movement
from the country into the city—a dynamic to which history in fact owes its
direction. Although life in the country has repeatedly been stylized as the
golden era of harmony and “natural” contentment, such embellished memories
of a life spent in nature have never restrained people from continuing on
their chosen historical path. In this respect, the city per se possesses an intrinsically
utopian dimension by virtue of being situated outside the natural order.
The city is located in the ou-topos. City walls once delineated the place where
a city was built, clearly designating its utopian—ou-topian—character. Indeed,
the more utopian a city was signaled to be, the harder it was made to reach
and enter this city, be it the Tibetan city of Lhasa, the celestial city of Jerusalem,
or Shambala in India. Traditionally cities isolated themselves from the
rest of the world in order to make their own way into the future. So, a genuine
city is not only utopian, it is also antitourist: it dissociates itself from space
as it moves through time.
The struggle with nature, of course, did not cease inside the city either.
At the beginning of his Discourse on Method, Descartes already observed that
since historically evolved cities were not entirely immune to the irrationality
of the natural order they would in fact need to be completely demolished if
a new, rational, and consummate city were to be erected on the vacated site. 1
Later on, Le Corbusier called for the demolition of Paris to make way for a
new rational city to be built in its place. Hence the utopian dream of the
total rationality, transparency, and controllability of an urban environment
unleashed a historical dynamism that is manifested in the perpetual transformation
of all realms of urban life: the quest for utopia forces the city into
a permanent process of surpassing and destroying itself—which is why the
city has become the natural venue for revolutions, upheavals, constant new