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