The City in the Eye of the Beholder
We will only start to make our cities more socially just places that we all want to live in when we radically shift our perspective on them. Center for Spatial Justice shows how to do that with its new documentary, 95cm: Mega City’s Mini Citizens.
There is a hegemonic way of looking at cities. Male, able, adult, property owner perspective defines the norm, assumes a uniform urban experience and dominates urban planning and design in general. Despite the fact that there is a growing critique on this exclusive and reductionist view on cities by feminists, disability rights activists, environmentalists, informal communities, etc., still we do demolish and rebuild our cities according to this “norm.”
In fact, this goes all the way back to the ancient history; take for instance the search for perfect body in art or highly formalized characteristics in architecture of Ancient Greeks. The Athenian City State was not only spatially exclusive but also politically. Citizenship was defined extremely narrow excluding women, minors, slaves, immigrants. In city and body, an unattainable perfection was demanded, and set the ideals for the millenniums to come.
The hegemonic perspective on cities continues to shape the modern urban planning and architecture, again informed by the so-called “ideal human proportions,” depicted repeatedly in history, from renaissance period by Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man to the 20th century modernism, by Neufert’s Modular Man.
Once an ideal is defined for human beings, by standardising and normalising a particular perspective (of male, able, adult), lack of fulfilment of that ideal becomes a deviation from the norm, hence a “special case”, such as disability, requiring “special measures” in design to deal with.
This perspective is not only illusionary, since body and space / humans and cities are much more complex than what they are assumed as, but also exclusionary as a practice; thus wrong, ethically and functionally.
Let’s say by shifting the perspective to 95cm, to the perspective of an average 3 years old kid, we already start looking at the city beyond and above this hegemonic perspective. The gaze obviously is a search for and an act of empathy. Yet this act is not aimed towards the formulation of actor-specific spaces such as playgrounds or kindergartens. Shift in perspective is a counter-hegemonic act, emphasizing multiplicity of perspectives and beings. And it is a radical and political call for more diverse and democratic design practice. Because the shift is followed by the acknowledgement of the agency of “the other”. It challenges planners and designers to be more open in their practice and calls the city officials to take the responsibility to do the right thing in their positions.
In the cities of multi-lane highways, high-rise towers, unaffordable houses, constant constructions, mega projects… it is an humble way to start asking: Really for whom are our cities?
