by OWEN HATHERLEY
Satellite view of Abuja, Nigeria, Federal Capital Territory (FCT), located just north of the confluence of the Niger and Benue River PHOTO/Bryn Pinzgauer/Nations Online
The main theoretical frame for analysing cities over the last two decades has been the notion of the ‘Global City’—an urban studies paradigm which runs in tandem with official, pseudo-scientific rankings of where is the most Global (is yours an Alpha or Beta Global City?). These cities, which usually grew out of imperial entrepôts—London, New York, Shanghai, Barcelona, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Lagos—are the spokes of global networks of media, tourism, ‘creativity’, property development and, most importantly, finance capital. Of that list, only one—London—is the capital city of a nation-state, although Rio is an ex-capital and Barcelona a devolved one. Göran Therborn’s Cities of Power, although it doesn’t let itself get bogged down in the issue, is explicitly a riposte to the idea of the Global City, and the peculiar Monocle-magazine vision of trans-national, interconnected, intangible (yet always apparently locally specific) capitalism that it serves to alternately describe and vindicate. The ‘economism’ of Global City studies, he argues in his introduction, ‘leaves out the power manifestations of the urban built environment itself. Even the most capitalist city imaginable is not only business offices and their connections to business offices elsewhere.’ [1] Cities of Power is instead an analysis solely of capital cities, as built and inhabited ‘forms of state formation and their consequences’. In an unusual move for a sociologist, Therborn pursues this study for the most part not through local economies or societies, but through the architectural and monumental practices of representation and expression of power.
This can’t entail a total break with the Global City narrative, given that some of the cities which feature heavily in the book fit both descriptions, loci at once of state formation and representation, and major centres of financial capitalism—London being the most obvious, but including also Tokyo, Paris, Madrid, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Cairo. Much of Cities of Power, however, devotes itself—in an era which, at its more goofily utopian times, likes to announce the abolition and irrelevance of nation-states—to cities which have been explicitly designed to serve solely as national capitals and embodiments of national culture and power: Washington, Canberra, Pretoria/Tshwane, Ottawa, Brasília, New Delhi, Islamabad, Abuja, The Hague, Beijing, and the heavily subsidized, relatively poor post-1989 German capital, Berlin. In keeping with Therborn’s work over the past twenty years, which has consistently employed the same framework, each of these cities is allocated to one of the four ‘pathways to modernity’ that make up the master typology of his sociological thought, as either European capitals, settler capitals, colonial capitals or capitals of ‘reactive modernization’, in societies that never succumbed to Western domination, but were forced to transform themselves to resist it. Modernity here is defined simply as an orientation to the present and the future, rather than to a traditional past, and a modern polity as any nation-state, of the kind first founded in America and France in the late eighteenth century. Distributed across these different zones, the various capitals are analysed in a dual optic, structural and symbolic, looking at their spatial layout, functionality (provision of basic services), patterning of buildings, architecture, monumentality (sculptures etc.), and toponomy. Throughout, attention will be paid to ‘closure’, ‘weight’, ‘size’, ‘distance’, ‘symmetry’, ‘verticality’, as key expressions of built power. [2]
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