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Vapor City

by Ulf Treger

(Journal for Northeast Issues Nr. 4: Spacemaking, 2005)

Administrative systems, like that of cities, try to look modern and efficient by supporting free growth of business enterprises, reducing regulations and regular outcomes. They follow neo-liberal concepts, which on the other hand have no place for bureaucratic administrations. This contradiction evolves a couple of effects on the city administration’s scope of action. As far as it gives up social concepts, like of welfare or of cultural and educational support, it looses its own fields of action and makes urban living more and more desperate. One strategy to cover this problem and to warrant its own continuing existence is the administration’s simulation of activities and urban development. What started as »brandscaping« and »disneyfication« of cities gets enhanced by a vaporization of urban entities, by augmenting and overlaying urban space by means of imagery and re-coding, marketing and fictitious competitions – by generating vaporspace*.

For example, Leipzig, the largest city in the east of Germany, applied in 2003 to become official applicant for the Olympic Games in 2012. This application was rationally useless, because of a simple computer program, operated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This program works really simple, it has only to check a couple of threshold values, like the “necessary amount of hotel beds”. If an applicating city has values below these thresholds, it gets automatically a negative result and the application fails.

But Leipzig, which has a way to small “amount of hotel beds” and therefore never a chance to win this computer test, started a big and intensive campaign with the production of emotions, with the mobilization of people, with computer animations of olympic buildings and a nation-wide variety of other marketing activities. Leipzig made the public believe in a non-rational-decision, the believe that Leipzig will get the most points because of a general sympathy for the former-GDR-city and because of the spirit of a small, but wealthy and highly engaged city. But the recipient of the town’s activity was a dump computer program, which could not calculate emotions but a bunch of simple numbers.

This is a significant example of vaporization through urban politics. Because the administration of Leipzig knew their lack of positive threshold values, it has taken to produce an image of engagement that should make believe that everything runs well. Perhaps this point does not explain perfectly why a city spends millions to undertake an obviously senseless enterprise. However, the real target for this undertaking could not have been the IOC's computer, but the inhabitants of Leipzig and the national public.

Another example of vaporization is the project of “Hafencity” in Hamburg. A large area close to the city centre once belonged to the port zone, lost its former functions. It was handed over to estate investments and therefore shrouded in an image of a »real« urban district. It is doubtful if this simulation of an urban district ever becomes a reality, that it's models and computer simulations are already telling. To generate the image of a yet existing, vivid part of the city, cities administration undertakes a variety of measures. One pretty simple, but effective measure was the extension of an public transport bustour to the pretended, but now empty center of »Hafencity«. Now every ten minutes a bus leaves the downtown area of Hamburg with a sign, which indicates its final destination »Hafencity«. The bus is nearly empty, only some few tourists are using this busroute, expecting to visit a city, that not yet exists. Other measures try to implement handsome artistic and cultural projects to augment this empty space with auratic productions. These productions encounters the dilemma, that they mostly can't influence (or even don't publicly discuss) the transformation of urban space, but just be a surface beautification of a vapor city.

Bremen’s “Space Park” is another variation: Once promoted as Europe's first combined entertainment and shopping center, it was calculated on imaginative numbers and statistics. After 10 years of planning, public announcement and construction, it was closed successless nine months after its opening. C3, a group on urban issues, where I belong to, has accompanied and documented the development of this project and criticized its concepts. we planned to do a kind of candid camera game, too: Equipped with a big business car, dressed in black business suites and backups with a real answering machine in, let’s say, Liechtenstein, we wanted to appear in Bremen as rich, financially well equipped investors with some threadbare vaporspace projects, visualized as powerpoint-presentations on our laptops. If we could do this play good, we expected huge feedback of the cities administration, hungry waiting for fantastic, hyperreal projects. We never did this performance, it would have being fun.

The described process of vaporization doesn't mean the disappearance of power and and it's methods of control and discipline. The abandonment of welfare and public infrastructures doesn't mean, that cities has been comfortable places to live in earlier years. By the current development, the inhabitants rights and possibilities of participation and influence disappears. Cultural interventions should clarify if they just undertake beautifications (and therefore commit the loss of influence) or try to reflect and criticize contemporary urban issues and to develop own perspectives of acting on the terrains beyond vaporspace.


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Last edited February 10, 2006 5:40 pm by Ulf T (diff)
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