A tale of two territories

Two e-books analyse the history of two urban territories: Los Angeles' Silicon Valley, a "pastoral capitalist" home to dot-com companies, and São Paulo's periphery, home to the favelas of the informal city.

Alexandra Lange, The Dot-Com City. Silicon Valley Urbanism, Strelka Press, Moscow 2012, 273 KB

Justin McGuirk, Edge City. Driving the Periphery of São Paulo, Strelka Press, Moscow 2012, 955 KB

This article was originally published in Domus 961 / September 2012

Both Alexandra Lange and Justin McGuirk's e-books for the newly founded publishing house founded by the Strelka Institute — for which McGuirk is publishing director — are tales of divided cities, critiques of the lack of government or corporate responsibility for city making leading to polarised outcomes, which according to the authors waste opportunities for positive change. In both cases, the authors embark on a critical dérive, necessarily by car, exploring these isolated, disjointed communities, speculating at the same time on the lack of political will to regenerate the downtown.

Lange argues that both the city and the dot-coms have a lot to gain by applying some of the creativity they engage with to build online technology empires to engagement with the space between the metropolis and their inward-looking suburban enclaves. She draws on Louise Mozingo's Pastoral Capitalism: a history of suburban corporate landscapes (MIT Press, 2011) to support many of her points, maybe too heavily. Both agree on the unsustainability of the suburban corporate architecture, but while Mozingo's objections are about reliance on the car, Lange's case study underpins a bigger protest: dot-coms promote city campus zones free of public realm, that elusive space of difference. Unwrapping her points from her ample descriptions of their corporate locales, the reader gradually gets drawn into her polemic about their enclavism and at what cost it comes to the spatial identity of the civic as a concept.

The iPad covers of Alexandra Lange's <em>The Dot-Com City. Silicon Valley Urbanism</em> and
Justin McGuirk's <em>Edge City. Driving the Periphery of São Paulo</em>, both Strelka Press, Moscow 2012 — The iPad covers of Alexandra Lange's *The Dot-Com City. Silicon Valley Urbanism* and Justin McGuirk's *Edge City. Driving the Periphery of São Paulo*, both Strelka Press, Moscow 2012

The other cardinal sin in Lange's book is that dot-coms occupy buildings that don't appear to need contemporary architecture. Whether Facebook's adoption of hacker chic, Google's dated office design with "insulated yurts" or Apple's un-campus, she lambasts their inward-looking corporate creativity, obsessed with "groupthink" and a transparency hardly allowing for mavericks. Packed with seductive options for eating, modes of working and offering private shuttle buses — Facebook — due to security issues, their patriarchal culture sucks its employees into their working culture. This is hardly new: corporate culture has a strong history of patriarchal embrace. In other cultures, like Scandinavia, corporate giants such as Ikea offer on-site housing, kindergartens, canteens and gyms, but seemingly, of the dot-coms, only Google has expressed a wish to build worker housing and to lobby for a zoning change.

Alexandra Lange, <em>The Dot-Com City. Silicon Valley Urbanism</em>, Strelka Press, Moscow 2012 — Alexandra Lange, *The Dot-Com City. Silicon Valley Urbanism*, Strelka Press, Moscow 2012

By contrast, McGuirk focuses on the ways in which housing deficit, as the result of speculation taking precedent, impinges on the health of the formal city. The city's 1971 masterplan led to its endless landscape of towers, but did not include the periphery, a place where settlers were allowed to fend for themselves. He lists architects like Jorge Jáuregui, Urban-Think Tank (UTT), Christian Kerez and MMBB, who have been retrofitting the favelas in conjunction with SEHAB, the City's Housing Authority. But his road trip continues on without discussion of their innovations — Jáuregui's Urban Attractor Cell, or what UTT call their "natural arena" at Grotão, for example.

That could be because the point of his e-book is to argue why the informal city cannot be incorporated into the formal city through better transport, infrastructure and employment. McGuirk worries about the status of the favelas, suffering actual and threatened evictions in the lead up to the 2014 World Cup; the legacy of successive mayors pandering to the real estate lobbies that fund their campaigns rather than come up with a vision for the periphery. What is the formal city? Impeded by traffic-clogged roads, the author finally makes it to Alphaville, one of the largest gated communities in the world. Planned in the mid-1970s, this is a town ringed by a steel fence topped by barbed wire, concealing neat streets of mansion houses with swimming pools. But this isn't the formal city, and nor is "formal" entirely defined by the historic centre, seen as either in decline or enjoying a new quarter, Nova Luz, with a cultural centre by Herzog & de Meuron.

Typifying a new genre of polemical writing about the city and its evolution, about how civic aspirations should avoid being swallowed by corporate and real estate interests, both e-books valuably open up major debates about the future of urbanism and the kind of game-changing it can effect in the 21st century

The favelas are still "subject to the social logic" of the fazendas, coffee estates, where the slaves had their own quarters — senzalas —, from which, in the view of architect Jorge Jáuregui, favelas, still being off the grid, descend. But along his tour McGuirk learns that the roads are good, there is electricity and very often sewerage and home ownership is on the rise — the periphery is better developed than he thought.

There are amusing insights gleaned from each journey. Along the way McGuirk spots an image of the model Jesus Luz, erstwhile boyfriend to Madonna, posing like Rio's statue of Christ the Redeemer in an advert for boxer shorts — there are a few black and white shots from the car in his e-book, while Lange's is unillustrated. But the deifying symbols of retail, while diverting, are not an answer to the condition McGuirk diagnoses.

Justin McGuirk, <em>Edge City. Driving the Periphery of São Paulo</em>, Strelka Press, Moscow 2012 — Justin McGuirk, *Edge City. Driving the Periphery of São Paulo*, Strelka Press, Moscow 2012

Meanwhile Lange is irritated by her immersion in the hothouse "collage city" — epitomized by Facebook's cafeteria décor — and its cultish tendencies, but has Silicon Valley really "spent the last 20 years transplanting everything they thought was good from the city into their suburban soil" as she claims? There must be a myriad reasons the dot-coms here do not grow organically in the urban downtown, as they do in London's Shoreditch, for example. Whatever they are, besides the need for security, Lange quotes the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association's recommendations for investing in mixed-use downtowns to strengthen the regional economy and reduce sprawl — and improve the Bay Area's "social performance". But it seems that dot-coms do not do more than pay lip service to discussion of these issues — Lange calls Facebook's recent "hack-a-thon" debate with architects "a stunt".

Integration, responsibility: who is going to make the next move? Who really wants to make a stand? Typifying a new genre of polemical writing about the city and its evolution, about how civic aspirations should avoid being swallowed by corporate and real estate interests, both e-books valuably open up major debates about the future of urbanism and the kind of game-changing it can effect in the 21st century. Lucy Bullivant

A tale of two territories

Two e-books analyse the history of two urban territories: Los Angeles' Silicon Valley, a "pastoral capitalist" home to dot-com companies, and São Paulo's periphery, home to the favelas of the informal city.

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