The Middle Layer

In our world today, the ideas and acts, the affirmations and effects, the very definitions of personhood are being constantly stretched. Related effects can then be seen on the places where people most intensely gather. Cities – home of 4.1 billion people, the world’s urban 55 per cent, squished together tighter and higher, competing with hustle upon hustle, cycles of creative advent and destruction, making money, making the future, recording images and stories and histories. So many images of the city! The top 10 location hashtags of 2017 are all places where the population exceeds half a million; London, Brooklyn, Paris (Instagram Press 2017).  From blog posts to news reports, news feed updates and check-ins, these images of the city are becoming perhaps more powerful in determining what the city is, and how it is defined, then ring roads or the actual feel of rough pavement underfoot.

What is it like, the city of downtown Hong Kong? There, tight packed walls of stuffy apartments reach to the sky and around the block, lines of washing waving damply at their neighbours, blue brown paint long faded and eroded away. There are wide streets, hemmed in by neon signs, and semi-circles of graves stepping up a hill towards receding rows of boxy towers. A bastion of technological fantasy; film producers and animators have sent their followers into this city to scroll through visions of imminent dystopia, while the residents (those people who actually live there) look askance at the litter, mouth-breathing to avoid the sewerage scent and mutter in the hallways about corruption, about train strikes, local elections, local rent. Their eyes see the same walls, these holders of smart-phones or grocery bags. With stories and real-time updates, they can be aware of the same events. The rent-payers might shield their eyes from urban glare or wrinkle their noses from city scent, but the Instagrammers are in the city all the same, traversing simply a different layer of its skin.

The images of Hong Kong that are posted online help form callouses, thick and well-worn reference points, in the digital skin of the city. This layer is an expansive point of contact between a city and people scattered across the world, yet it is highly uneven. Search on Getty Images for any urban space, and the results are predictable. The keyword ‘Paris’ returns rows of steel towers, jutting glass prisms, and exposed pipes. New York next – a public square, neon signs, a skyline reaching into the clouds. Bilbao is the image of a museum’s twisted metal façade, Sydney – overlapping white petals and a large curved bridge. These common depictions act as shot cuts – visual symbols that identify an entire urban environment in a single form. Yet their reach and ubiquity mean that when it comes to the digital skin of the city, these images are both reference and content – Paris is the Eiffel Tower, the icon is more real than the site. For cities are semiotic landscapes, perceptions of reality built from concrete, grime, selfie, and meme. Perceptions of the city are no different than perceptions of wave or light, which are captured and interpreted imperfectly through the interface of human senses, these interpretations then strung together into self-referencing models of reality. So it is that sites like Getty Images add layer upon layer to precise points of the digital reality of the city and create skins imbued with cultural power. The effects of this power can be dramatic.

In the middle of a paved square, an Eiffel tower has been erected. Wide, leafy boulevards have been built, interspersed with fountains, bubbling around statues of gallivanting horses. There is washing fluttering from wrought-iron balconies, and cheerful yellow umbrellas shading street-side cafes. Rows of rendered terraces, all picturesquely alike, sport banners - they advertise Ho Fun at half price. This is Tianducheng, China, where newly-weds pose for pictures with the Eiffel tower against the skyline and construction workers push wheelbarrows full of slate roofing tiles. They are building the Paris of the East – replicating the built forms of a foreign urban environment half the world away, in the hope that economic aspirants and wedding parties alike will image themselves and their memories in a landscape of superficial novelty. As an economic project, Tianducheng has failed – a city built for 10,000 in which only 1,000 live. It is testimony to the calloused digital skin of Paris, strong enough to shape an urban landscape half the world away. It demonstrates, in bordered shop fronts and vacant blocks, the foibles of crafting first a city’s image and then expecting people and vitality to flow in.  1972 was the year in which Alison and Peter Smithson constructed the (notoriously unsuccessful) estate of Robin Hood Gardens as an exemplar of healthy and pure existence, a conversion-call to the Modernist way of life. Tianducheng preaches cultural sophistication and economic mobility – yet the design methodology is similar in its imposing approach. 

Across the ocean from Tianducheng, there is a shopping centre in which hawkers sell pigs feet, lotus paste, and white powder under a sign that reads ‘rhinoceros horn’.  Children gather around a table and sticky their fingers with paper and glue, making fans printed with the face of K-Pop stars. Bag-laden shoppers clutch cups of bubble tea, and a young mother snaps a picture of a sign in a window; “We are Hiring – Cantonese/Mandarin speaking”. This is Box Hill Shopping Mall, in Melbourne, Australia; a suburb where 47 per cent of households speak something other than English at home, and over half of residents were the first of their family born on Australian soil (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016). Attracted by high quality education, larger land parcels, clean air and lighter competition for skilled jobs – people have moved their lives from North East Asia to Melbourne and Sydney (and all other Australian capital cities, although with lower intensity) in increasing numbers since the late 1980s. A pattern repeated in urban environments around the world, populations from contrasting landscapes bring with them practices and products of comfort and familiarity, until an image of someplace like Box Hill in Melbourne could act as a semiotic sign for Hong Kong, or Beijing. Yet Melbourne is neither of these two great cities – as Tianducheng is not Paris; rather the physical skin of contemporary cities is shaped by their specific means of layering contrasting practices and artifacts – purchase some rhinoceros horn after an espresso coffee, eat pigs’ feet from an oily plastic bag under the shade of a Eucalyptus tree. There is now a little piece of every city in every city.

People are migratory creatures who have built faster and faster methods to send their bodies, their money, their voices, their messages, and their data across the Earth. Where does any one thing actually come from? Composited of multiple parts, each the product of techniques and minds that are themselves the results of cross-pollination between geographies, time zones, and languages – the search for origins is never absolute. As people are defined by the proliferation through time and space of their behaviours and effects, so too are objects and cities – hence the rise of spaces, products, and practices that are crafted in the ceaseless factory of global functioning. Every city, with pieces of every culture and semiotic system found within, are produced through global production lines – but there is also the Everycity. Airports. Shopping Malls. Starbucks. Metros. Trade Centers. With universal codes of conduct and operations dependent upon constant movement, scholars in the vein of anthropologist Marc Augé have labelled these sites ‘non-spaces’, their spatial qualities erased as a result of disconnection from localised geographies. However – as thoroughfares and bridges between populations and economies, these sites are in fact the physically spatialised skin of an Everycity – a place defined through its hypermobility and stretched between the world’s urban environments. It is the specificity of how the Everycity functions that imbues its skin with character and culture – and while the skin of the Everycity today is far from porous (the particles that enter most easily are gilded with wealth and educational accomplishment), there are new ways that the Everycity’s skin is stretching and flaking.

Just as the digital skins of individual cities are consumed and produced online, so too is the Everycity. The Shard. Marina Bay Sands. The City of Arts and Sciences. The Birds Nest. These are built icons of the processes that finance, construct, image, promote, and hence justify them. Sheltering lives and businesses that are migratory, geographically mutable, or inherently international, these buildings shape the skin of specific cities purely because that is where they are physically located; collectively, these are digital layers of Everycity skin. The relationship between city and Everycity is complex. The Bilbao Museum has been dubbed ‘McGuggenheimism’; the production of generic and internationally controlled (Everycity) imagery over specific cultural content, regardless of how carefully Frank Gehry referenced Bilbao’s port history in the museum’s materiality and form. 20 years on from when the museum opened its doors, the city’s poverty rate is higher, more children are going hungry than two decades before. Maybe the euros that financed those glinting curves should have been woven into nets of social safety and support? Yet millions of photos and sketches and retold experiences have stretched and calloused the city’s digital skin, weaving it intimately with the iconic façade and channelling 20 million people through the museum’s doors; people who are pursuing art and concepts unbounded by national borders, spending money earned and processed through systems and networks dependent upon intense connectivity. The Bilbao Museum, its physical footprint and digital history, is a layer both of Bilbao, and the Everycity that exists all around it.

Tourism pollution. Along with waste management and rising sea levels, the noise, detritus and culturally jarring behaviour of foreign visitors is now an official policy concern of Kyoto, Barcelona, and Venice. Cities whose digital skin is stretched far and wide, through films, postcards and triumphant selfies, are grappling with the lived effects of jamming side by side travellers who wander with gaping mouths through a powerful, physical, manifestation of the digitised, semiotic landscape they know and love – and those who experience, day-in and day-out, the signs and smells of a city’s unromanticised physical skin. The interplay between physical and digital skin is rich with challenges and the shifting layers of the Everycity is ripe for further investigation. There are also moments of recognition or dislocation when a traveller – be it through online or physical space – stumbles upon a bit of one city within another that can be depicted or celebrated or interrogated for the hidden relations they reveal; relations between two places and between the Everycity that both links and constitutes them. Icons and symbols – the production, consumption, and proliferation of imagery builds layer upon layer upon the reality of cities, their digital and their physical skins.