The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

76 The passage from modernity to postmodernitydiversify spatial form than was the case in the immediate postwarperiod. Dispersed, decentralized, and deconcentrated urban formsare now much more technologically feasible than they once were.Second, new technologies (particularly computer modelling) havedissolved the need to conjoin mass production with mass repetition,and permitted the flexible mass production of 'almost personalizedproducts' expressive of a great variety of styles. 'The results arecloser to nineteenth century handicraft than to the regimented superblocksof 1984.' By the same token a whole new range of buildingmaterials, some of which permit of almost exact imitation of mucholder styles (from oak beams to weathered brick) can now be procuredquite cheaply. To give the new technologies prominence in this wayis not to interpret the postmodern movement as technologicallydetermined. But Jencks does suggest that the context in which architectsand urban planners now operate has altered in ways that liberatethem from some of the more powerful constraints that existed in theimmediate postwar period.The post modern architect and urban designer can, as a consequence,more easily accept the challenge to communicate withdifferent client groups in personalized ways, while tailoring productsto different situations, functions, and 'taste cultures.' They are, saysJencks, very concerned with 'signs of status, history, commerce,comfort, ethnic domain, signs of being neighbourly' and willing tocater to all and every taste, such as those of Las Vegas or Levittown- tastes that the modernists tended to dismiss as common and banal.In principle, therefore, postmodern architecture is anti-avant-gardist(unwilling to impose solutions, as the high modernists, the bureaucraticplanners, and the authoritarian developers tended - and still tend -to do).It is by no means clear, however, that a simple turn to populism issufficient to answer Jane jacobs's complaints. Rowe and Koetter intheir Collage city (the very title of which indicates sympathy withthe postmodernist thrust) worry that 'the architectural proponentsof populism are all for democracy and all for freedom: but they arecharacteristically unwilling to speculate as to the necessary conflictsof democracy with law, of the necessary collisions of freedom withjustice.' By surrendering to an abstract entity called 'the people,' thepopulists cannot recognize how manifold the people happens to be,and consequently 'how much in need of protection from each otherits components happen to stand.' The problems of minorities and theunderprivileged, or of the diverse counter-cultural elements that sointrigued Jane Jacobs, get swept under the rug unless some verydemocratic and egalitarian system of community-based planning canPostmodernism in the city 77be devised that meets the needs of rich and poor alike. This presupposes,however, a series of well-knit and cohesive urban communitiesas its starting point in an urban world that is always in fluxand transition.This problem is compounded by the degree to which the different'taste cultures' and communities express their desires through differentiatedpolitical influence and market power. Jencks concedes,for example, that postmodernism in architecture and urban designtends to be shamelessly market-oriented because that is the primarylanguage of communication in our society. Although market integrationplainly carries with it the danger of pandering to the rich andthe private consumer rather than to the poor and to public needs,that is in the end, Jencks holds, a situation the architect is powerlessto change.Such a cavalier response to lop-sided market power scarcely favoursan outcome that meets Jacobs's objections. To begin with, it is justas likely to replace the planner's zoning with a market-producedzoning of ability to pay, an allocation of land to uses based on theprinciples of land rent rather than the kind of principles of urbandesign that someone like Krier plainly has in mind. In the short run,a transition from planned to market mechanisms may temporarilymix up uses into interesting configurations, but the speed of gentrificationand the monotony of the result (see plate 1.15) suggests thatin many instances the short run is very short indeed. Market andland-rent allocation of this kind have already re-shaped many urbanlandscapes into new patterns of conformity. Free-market populism,for example, puts the middle classes into the enclosed and protectedspaces of shopping malls (plate 1.16) and atria (plate 1.17), but itdoes nothing for the poor except to eject them into a new and quitenightmarish postmodern landscape of homelessness (see plate 1.18).The pursuit of the consumption dollars of the rich has led, however,to much greater emphasis upon product differentiation in urbandesign. By exploring the realms of differentiated tastes and aestheticpreferences (and doing whatever they could to stimulate those tasks),architects and urban designers have re-emphasized a powerful aspectof capital accumulation: the production and consumption of whatBourdieu (1977; 1984) calls 'symbolic capita1.' The latter can bedefined as 'the collection of luxury goods attesting the taste anddistinction of the owner.' Such capital is, of course, transformedmoney capital which 'produces its proper effect inasmuch, and onlyinasmuch, as it conceals the fact that it originates in "material" formsof capita1.' The fetishism (direct concern with surface appearancesthat conceal underlying meanings) is obvious, but it is here deployed