Daniel Brook is an American journalist contributing to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The Nation and Slate. Author of The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. In 2010, he won the Winterhouse Award for Design Writing and Criticism, established by the American Graphic Arts Institute and the Winterhouse Institute, for architecture criticism.
The History of Future Cities arose by chance - from the recollections of observant American journalist Daniel Brook of a 12-year-old trip to St. Petersburg, which haunted him, 22, during an editorial trip to Mumbai. “I wandered the streets of the city, gazed at the neo-Gothic buildings of the university, court, railway station and recalled Petersburg again and again. In hot, sunny India it was strange to think about Russia with its fogs and snows. But Bombay, where the British colonial governor Henry Bartle Edward Frere invited the leading architects of England to build tropical London on the shores of the Arabian Sea, was unambiguously reminiscent of the Arctic Amsterdam-on-the-Neva invented by Peter the Great. So from walks in Mumbai and memories of St. Petersburg, the idea of this book was born."
Unless you are a linguist, you are unlikely to realize that the verb "orient" comes from the word orient (east) and literally means determining your location in space by the sun, which rises in the east. At the very beginning of the book, Brooke, playing with words, names four selected eastern cities - Shanghai and Dubai were added to St. Petersburg and Bombay - "disorientated", because with their western architecture and lifestyle they completely confuse a person. True, unlike travelers, their indigenous people do not ask the question “where are we?”, But rather “who are we?”. What does it mean to be a modern Russian, Indian, Chinese, Arab, living in such an environment?
At first glance, in The History of Future Cities, Brook criticized superficial Westernization - the transfer of external manifestations of progressive Western civilization (infrastructure, education, architecture, goods) to the patriarchal countries of the East without mastering such inalienable socio-political institutions and values of the Western Christian world as elected representative bodies of power, equality of all citizens before the law, human rights, freedom of speech, press, etc. But this is a simplification. It is impossible not to notice that for the author, the story of the history of four "upstart" cities, which have become testing grounds for modernization projects of authoritarian rulers and colonialists, is a reason to speculate both about the enormous price that the local population usually pays for implanted progress, and about the gigantic potential that rapprochement cultures and nations reveals in the "experimental" people.
Brook concludes that the “curatorial” approach to modernization is not viable, when the king / colonizer / sheikh chooses at his own discretion what is suitable for his project and what seems to him superfluous. Simple construction of modern buildings according to the designs of architects invited from abroad, "imported" entertainment not typical of traditional culture, etc. - in a word, limited copying does not really allow to catch up with the country-source of borrowings and leaves a bitter aftertaste of inferiority and lack of freedom among local residents who already feel themselves to be carriers of “that” culture in its entirety. Paradoxically, one of the delegates to the first conference of the Indian National Congress, held in Shanghai in 1885, reproached the British for "non-British" rule of India - in the sense that the metropolis did not allow its Indian subjects to have their own parliament. Such supervision is punishable. Events inevitably get out of control: progressive cities give birth to free citizens ready for protests, uprisings, even revolutions.
Social injustice, which is characteristic of the studied modernization experiments, works for the same result. In imperial Russia of the 18th century, in colonial India and China, even in today's ultra-modern Dubai, local peasants and / or immigrants from poorer countries work with almost bare hands (provided there are effective tools) on large-scale infrastructure construction projects. For customers of modernization, they are nothing more than a consumable. Brooke pays special attention to the privileged position of "progress-bearing" foreigners in comparison with the aborigines. In colonial Shanghai, extraterritoriality laws were in effect, making residents of foreign concessions (French, British, Americans, etc.) not subject to jurisdiction in China; in Bombay, as, indeed, in Shanghai, there was severe segregation, and people with non-white skin color were ordered to enter parks, restaurants, hotels for Europeans. In response to these prohibitions, there is growing distrust of the authorities, as well as indignation with the existing order - both of commoners and representatives of the new enlightened elite, in which national identity is awakening.
And in this awakening Brooke sees the benefit of the imposed progress. No matter how humiliating sometimes playing by someone else's rules, dignity and creative forces awaken among the people sooner or later, capable of giving rise to a complex and truly cosmopolitan culture. An example of this is the Golden Age of Russian culture that flourished in St. Petersburg, decadent interwar Shanghai, Bombay Art Deco architecture …
In the history of these three great cities, Brook sees patterns that, in his opinion, serve as lessons for Dubai, and the stability and importance of this grandiose project of modernity for modern civilization depends on their assimilation - and that is what Brook considers him to be. Dubai, the global metropolis of the future, is being built by migrant workers living in the most primitive labor camps on the outskirts of the city. Locals have been pushed out of the city by the high value of real estate, and expats from all over the world who have taken their place make up about 95% of its current population. Brook directly warns the rulers of Dubai, speaking about the inevitable consequences of the scenario, once already tried in St. Petersburg, Bombay and Shanghai: “When the locals were disappointed in the possibility of equal communication between peoples, these cities were fenced off from the outside world. It is no coincidence that St. Petersburg gave birth to the Bolsheviks, Shanghai - the Chinese communists, and Mumbai - the Indian National Congress: the forces that, to one degree or another, cut off the ties of their countries with the rest of the planet. And if these older sister cities give any idea of the future of Dubai, then its rulers should think about the dangerous game of Frankenstein, which they started to create their city."
At the conclusion of the book, Brook unexpectedly shifts from the private stories of four oriental but "disorientated" cities to a high level of generalization. In his opinion, the concept of dividing civilization into East and West, which is familiar to historical science and universal understanding, in the age of interpenetration of cultures and economies, is gradually losing its meaning. Usually, when starting to read, no one looks at the end of the book, but this time we suggest you do it. This is by no means "spoiling" - enjoyment from the text, by the way, in a brilliant translation, reading the final chapter will definitely not deprive you of it. But he will set the necessary frame of perception.
With the kind permission of Strelka Press, we publish an excerpt from the book: read it here.
