Red Star: Cities for the people

America is ugly. Every ruling class built the world anew in its own image. The American ruling class produces art that reflects a sterile, technocratic, inhuman class.

Buildings and public spaces should be humane and beautiful. You shouldn’t have to buy something to have access to a bathroom.

The neoliberal city is anything but humane and beautiful. Take Boston; it’s not terrible, but its downtown neighborhoods are dominated by huge glass skyscrapers.The Millenium Tower in Boston is a portal into a dystopia where everything is just a bit darker and more scattered than the present. In the winter, downtown is starved of sunlight by these glass tombstones.

Compare this with Roxbury or Beacon Hill. These neighborhoods have walkable sections, are built of brick and wood, have a neighborhood sense and are being devoured like a plate of spaghetti. Addresses alone are what separate one central business district from another.

The market is the problem. Rental units are aimed at rich buyers or landlords who let them sit vacant. Architects design corporate tombstones of concrete, glass and steel that are neither visually pleasing nor locally situated.

While the Zwinger in Dresden would look out of place just about anywhere else, modern buildings like condos or the dread Tour Montparnasse could fit in any major urban area. The international market, the relegation of the architect to a mere engineer for corporate needs or Chamber of Commerce fever dreams and the proliferation of undemocratic planning means that we are subjected to urban environments that are disorienting, ugly and cruel.

Democracy is the solution. We live under the thumb of architecture and design. Though we are never consulted about the aesthetics of architecture or design, we are those who toil in the shadows of prize-winning monstrosities.

It wasn’t until power passed into the hands of an inhuman market that this beast was delivered unto us. The people should have a say in our cities, as we once had a say in our drama, poetry and novels. The abstracted world we live in seems incapable of supporting what we want.

People want light and air and color. We thirst for green, for open vistas, for stone and brick and wood, for bright paint.

From the Ziggurat to Socialist Classicism, public buildings have reflected ease of access and the desire of rulers to show their prestige and closeness to god. Gargoyles, carvings, tree-lined streets, arches, domes, minarets, train stations, colonnades and cathedrals all reflected these imperatives. Now glass tumors suffice. It is an aesthetic crime, the same crime which turned villages to slums, replaced the town square with Disney Main Street and replaced the workers' pubs with Natty Light and The Apprentice. A developed artistic and aesthetic sense makes you a more complete person. But living in ugliness robs us of that.

Only our organizing will determine whether seas or socialism replace the cities of the present. One day, the glass blobs will be trifling monuments to a moment of unbridled corruption and inhumanity, if they don’t conquer our souls and swallow the world first.