The Authority of Beauty
Sze Tsung Leong
In About
Beauty, edited by Akbar Abbas and
Wu Hung (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2005).
Cities attain a state of
beauty—however subjective, contested, or difficult to
define—either as a result of a long, unplanned process of
evolution, or by being constructed according to particular
definitions of beauty. Unplanned beauty emerges out of an
organic process of growth where a city or town reaches a state
of aesthetic and structural harmony, not though any willful
design, but through the slow accretions of time. The general
agreement that medieval street patterns or traditional hillside
towns are beautiful relates to the aesthetics of the natural
order, which is one of the most accepted forms of beauty. In
other words, these streets and towns are regarded as beautiful
because they have reached a perceived harmony with the natural.
Beauty, in these situations, is not so much intended as evolved
over time.
There is another expression of beauty on
an urban scale that has achieved particular dominance, because of the
forcefulness necessary for its execution. Planned beauty, like
its unplanned counterpart, conveys the idea of harmony. But,
unlike its counterpart, it does not necessarily align with the
natural. Instead, the aim is to reach an ordered harmony with
ideologies, forms of power, or social structures. Beauty in
this case is a tool defined and enlisted to convey beliefs,
orders, and hierarchies. The scale of forces needed for this
type of urban planning and design means, more often than not,
that the definition of beauty rests with those with the power
to construct it. Planned beauty, manifested at the size of the
city, is imposed.
The belief that beauty can be conflated
with social ordering in the urban scheme has historically
formed one of the main goals of the discipline of city
planning. In China, the tradition of Imperial city planning was
seen as a form within which society could be organized. The
urban plan was considered beautiful primarily because it
reflected the structuring of society within a divine order: the
plan was centered on the palace, the symbolic form of the
emperor as the personification of heaven, around which tiers of
society were arranged in hierarchical order within a planned
grid. In Europe, the concentration of monarchial and military
power, which developed prominently during the seventeenth
century, enabled the planning of cities not only as symbolic
forms for authority, such as Versailles, but as tools to
facilitate control over society.
This lineage of beauty as a way to
represent and foster social harmony and control forms the basis
of “urban beautification,” a term now widely in use
and synonymous with urban regeneration and redevelopment.
Planned beautification, which began in the domain of the
imperial and monarchial, continued and expanded its development
through the social changes of the mid-nineteenth century that
underly modern society. During this time, Europe and the United
States were rapidly transforming into societies driven by the
market economy, and urban environments had to be adjusted to
accommodate the new life.
Beautification was seen as a method to
package and deploy the significant urban changes required by
the new society. One of the clearest expressions of beauty
imposed on an urban scheme was Baron Georges-Eugène
Haussmann’s “strategic beautification” of
Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, under Napoleon III. As
opposed to the Imperial urban plans of China or Versailles,
which were built from blank slates, Haussmann’s
beautification was a strategy to transform the existing. This
strategy incorporated two of the most influential tools of
urban beautification, slum clearance and the widening of
streets. What constituted a slum was defined by those with the
power to transform urban areas, and the arguments for slum
clearance were linked with the perception that urban
configurations characterized by tight, medieval patterns of
streets promoted disease, social degeneracy, poverty, and
crime. Demolishing these areas, perceived as difficult to
police and control, was seen as a way to promote sanitation and
social health.
The visible manifestation of urban
beautification was achieved by the boulevard, which provided
the city with visual and formal consistency. In Paris,
boulevards were faced with uniform facades and defined by
vistas of monuments such as the Opéra, Arc de Triomphe,
and the Louvre. Yet the purpose was not merely aesthetic, for
the functions of beautification transcended the visible. The
boulevards were intended to give the city a symbolic structure
by connecting and clarifying the hierarchies of urban
institutions, to allow rapid movement throughout the city for
the many forms of traffic (official, military, commercial, and
public), and to aid in the policing of the city by the
elimination or containment of labyrinthine urban districts.
The elements that came to be accepted as
requirements for urban development—slum clearance, wide
avenues, and uniform facades—were the basis of one of the
most explicit movements to impose particular ideas of beauty on
the city, the City Beautiful Movement. This movement was
manifested most clearly in built form at the 1893 World’s
Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, also called the “White
City.” Its main proponent, the architect and city planner
Daniel Burnham, believed that the unsightly aspects of city
life embodied by crowded tenements and narrow streets should be
cleared away and replaced with airy, ordered avenues and
uniform facades in the Beaux-Arts style. In turn it was hoped
that social ills of poverty, disease, and crime would be
eliminated through the elimination of their environments.
Beauty, like many social constructions, is
a product of specific periods of history. In the urban context,
one period of history’s idea of beauty is often imposed
on past notions—and the form that this takes, as in
Haussmann’s Paris and the City Beautiful Movement, is
through the demolition of the past. Presently, there is perhaps
no clearer manifestation of these tendencies than in
contemporary China, where the combination of unchallenged,
centralized power and extreme economic development have enabled
one of China’s most significant and extensive urban
transformations.
The tradition of authoritarian power that
enabled the uniform construction and ordered layouts that once
defined Chinese cities is also the tradition enabling their
destruction. The rationale for the large-scale demolition of
traditional urban fabrics is not so different from the goals
expounded by the urban beautification movements in Europe and
the United States. In Beijing, many traditional neighborhoods
have been officially labeled as “dangerous” and
“dilapidated”. The decay of traditional
neighborhoods is the result of an ideologically driven
reconfiguration of the original fabric, as the Communist Party,
in the early years of its new state, ordered traditional homes
to be transformed from private family households to multifamily
compounds. As a result, unregulated constructions and additions
dismantled the architectural integrity of the homes, and filled
the courtyards with haphazard shanties. The decades of
state-sponsored disdain of history during the Mao era
effectively turned urban fabrics once symbolic of Chinese
culture and society into slums.
The demolition of traditional urban
fabrics is, in most cases, total. With little or no historical
encumbrances, new street patterns, wider streets, and buildings
of uniform facades can be imposed on a blank slate. The
rationale for this process is primarily economic. As in
Haussmann’s Paris, the new city gives an urban face to
the new society, while driving out the poor from the city
centers. The social order, and its corresponding aesthetics, is
one based on giving an urban face to the new wealth, the
departure from an uncomfortable past, and the pursuit of the
new goals and requirements introduced by the market economy.
The form that urban beautification takes in China is not the
adjustment and modification of existing fabrics, but is, most
often, the complete erasure of the past and its replacement
with the new. The urban beauty of the socially ordered,
imperial past, decayed through ideological neglect, has become
a casualty of a new form of beauty. To ask whether this new
reality is beautiful or not is irrelevant. The more significant
question is, who does this beauty belong to?
Text © Sze Tsung Leong