In the first decade of the 2000’s, 18 award-winning photographers embarked on a long-term project to document cities around the world. They traveled to 22 urban centres to capture their images that range from the futuristic architectural excesses of Dubai to the slums of Manila, and shattered ruins of Gaza. The result is a major touring exhibition called The City – Becoming and Decaying, opening this weekend at Aratoi, (its sole venue in New Zealand).
Curator Marcus Jauer notes that daily almost 200,000 people around the world leave the countryside, lured by the promise of a better life in the city. From 2008 onwards, according to the United Nations, more people were living in cities than in the country.
“Statistics tells us that the African city is growing most rapidly, the Asian city is most populous, and in Europe the city extends furthest into the countryside,” says Marcus Jauer. “Meanwhile, we now have 30 cities with over ten million inhabitants, earning them the title of ‘megacities’.”
So are cities providing for, nurturing and enabling humankind, or isolating, impoverishing and brutalizing us? Overall, The City seems to suggest the latter. Dawin Meckel shows the human cost of the demise of a city’s primary industry in his views of empty lots and deserted streets in Detroit. A man speaks into his cellphone, safely enclosed in a glass bubble 400 metres above the gigantic metropolis of Shanghai, while Joris Schlosser’s images of Berlin suggest that people are still living a walled-in existence twenty five years after the collapse of the city’s most famous Wall.
Throughout history, architects and urban planners have tried to create utopian cities, with varying degrees of success. This was the aim for Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer when they were given a blank slate to create Brazil’s new capital Brasilla in the late 1950s. Swiss architect Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus designers envisaged high functioning ‘machines for living’ for their urban citizens, and Ebenezer Howard conceived self sustaining ‘garden cities’ in England in the late 1890s – a concept that looks inspired even today. Out of catastrophe, Christchurch has received a rare opportunity to reinvent itself, as did Napier 80 years ago.
But this is type of aspirational planning is usually out of reach for various reasons in developing countries. Town planning has clearly bypassed the water-logged slum photographed by Espen Eichhofer, and the social problems in store for the Lagos – captured by Julian Roder and described as “expanding uncontrollably” – can only be imagined. Land is currently being reclaimed from the Atlantic coast to cater for 400,000 people in the Nigerian capital whose disputed population figures range between 8 and 15 million. The earthworks themselves have already caused erosion, ocean surges, loss of life and infrastructure damage.
The fall out from unemployment, nuclear family living, and wider social disparities is dramatic when played out in a vast city, but it's also an issue for us in our cosy 'villages'. Viewing these images from the relative comfort of Masterton (urban pop. 17,664) throws up its own set of questions.
Wairarapa Museum of Art and History