The Starlight Nights
They came that chilly spring night; on February 16; it happened for the first time. There was no advance warnings, and everyone was at loss to explain what had happened come morning. It had been a tranquil night, save a strange commotion all around the city at approximately one in the morning, when there was a sudden burst of barking of dogs and erratic songs of birds; but soon this was forgotten, save by the restless souls spending the night watching television with insomniac eyes. Some of them might have seen what had happened, noticed the difference in the urban landscape.
Where they came from, no one knew, but they seemed to materialise out of nowhere, and anything that was in the way was gone, missing, as if it had dropped off the earth and out of the known universe. Buildings, they were buildings, yet there was a certain sinister quality to them like you could only find in humans and organic entities. Like sea monsters dragging themselves onto land.
They appeared all around the city. The people dwelling or simply being in the houses and buildings they displaced were lost forever. Police reports the day after spoke of at least 21,000 people displaced, lost in some sort of esoteric limbo in the great voids beyond our world. One could imagine them, dancing as if in trance, their bodies bending and flexing in impossible ways, out there in the vast nothingness over which no laws of physics or nature can ever hope to rule.
They had the appearance of three-pointed stars, were five stories tall and had balconies. They were ostensibly housing blocks from an era past, cute-ish and pleasant to the eye if it were not for the uncomfortable confrontation that they entailed; the confrontation with the unknown. The words were on everyone’s tongue, but few people spoke of them, and none dared speculate from where they had come. Even the Internet was dead; the insane conspiracy nutters even found themselves struggling to come to terms with and rant about the things.
The old forlorn public housing estates of old had come back to reclaim what was rightfully theirs, someone whispered on the train; the devil was sending back the dejected and loathed blocks with their small flats, with their tatami-mats and their little coloured balcony railings, red, turquoise and orange, brown; it was as if they were getting back at us, humanity; getting back at us for creating them and then banishing them without a thought, banishing them amidst indefensible homelessness and rising housing prices. They were not going to let our crimes slide.
Every night that followed, the star-shaped little blocks seemed to advance. In one part of the city, a large one appeared; thirty-five stories tall it rose like a magnificent monolith, weathered concrete reaching up impossibly. Clothes lines hung from the balcony railings red like blood. What were they? What did they want? And every night they moved, advanced across the landscape; they disappeared one second and re-appeared the next, somewhere further ahead. Displaced another few homes. By March, the city was in an uproar. Military had tried to demolish a few – blew them to pieces. The next night they were back, immaculate, as if they had never been wounded, never torn and worn; it was as if they were newly built.
They continued their journey across the metropolitan fields, across the sprawling fields of little single family homes; they destroyed them all; the other houses seemed at times to crumble before their arrival, as if the fright of their presence was so great that their materials simply fell away, withered with fear.
By March, the entire city of thirty million was gone; people had taken up living in the hills at nights, sleeping under the star-lit sky, exposed to the elements in sleeping bags, just to avoid being displaced. As the buildings advanced, new ones sprung in their paths; more star-shaped blocks, some small, others tall, and the city was starting to look nothing like it had done in the past. Homes were lost; but also regained. On March 16, the process was completed. All housing had been replaced with the star-shaped blocks, and the city lay silent and innocent like virgin snow, and the people returned from the hills and the mountains and forest, and they realised they had no alternative; they lived in the star-shaped blocks, they were now their homes, forever.
The Terror Tower.
It was time for the building to go. Not because there was anything really wrong with it – it had been a hard battle getting the tenants out of it – but because of a political decision by the city council. The resolution that had passed with ease was short, and stated simply that such tower blocks were a disgrace to architecture and were unacceptable in the city, thus the two such complexes that existed had to go. This was the last such complex – the other building, a 14-story tower from 1971, had already been ‘neutralised’ as the city council communiqué described it – and preparations had been going on for over a week
It was a magnificent tower – 18 stories tall – and consisted of two building bodies, each with two flats, arranged as two wings to a central elevator and staircase structure; this stood upon a square single-story base which housed a day care centre and a small convenience store, or rather, had housed; now, the entire building was empty, dirt and rubbish crowded the hallways and big banners of a demolition company hung red and swollen from the upper floors, swaying gently in the autumn breeze blowing salty from the cold seas.
The vicinity of the building complex had been cleared; demolition crew barricades blocked the streets passing within two-three hundred meters; and at these barricades had gathered crowds of people eager to witness the awesome destructive force of a collapsing tower block; concrete pulverised and like a pyroclastic flow deposited; such joys to be had from coughing in that cloud of dust. What at one time had taken almost a year to construct was razed to a pile of concrete, steel and glass and rotting wood in a span of a few seconds.
The bombastic fanfare of sirens sounded and the count-down started; at five seconds left till detonation of explosives planted every 4th floor of the tower, the piping of the warning signal begun, increasing in frequency till the critical moment arrived. Silence fell over the crowds that just moments ago had been engaged in ecstatic conversation.
Sirens and warning sounds stopped. Crowd kept its silence. Then, the first detonation, progressing downwards, one by one the explosive charges were detonated, sending clouds of glass and concrete dust into the air from inside the building; the building soon begun to tilt and as the last batch of charges exploded, the building started falling down like a ferocious avalanche of concrete debris; around it formed that typical cloud, like those from a volcanic eruption of an explosive nature, bellowing forth like the unholy ejaculations of indescribable daemonic forces; indeed, something was off, for through that cloud soon shot up tongues of orange flame, and big round rocks with trails of black smoke like the return of ancient long-buried meteorites came flying, flying out of the debris.
The clouds that rolled and shifted like swimming whales wallowing indecently in rough tidal waters attained a darker colour, and the crowds of spectators soon worried were, for this was no ordinary demolition; lightning appeared out of nowhere and then, all of a sudden, it all fell silent.
The explosion that followed upon the silence flattened five-hundred city blocks and destroyed all that new single-family housing that was going up in the vicinity. Many thousands of people were presumed dead, but not a single body could be found, though pets and other animals in the area were found turned to charcoal-pieces imitating their former shapes, falling to pieces brittle as they were to the slightest touch or poke. Where the tower block once stood, an enormous crater opened, and at the bottom of the crater, midst the black sleek rocks, a cave was found, from which a constant wind came; and some investigators, though never daring to get too close, said they heard the distant beating of vile antique drums in bizarre inhuman rhythms.
Nothing to Say.
“Nothing to say”, I say it – you say it – we all say it. And what do we mean? Are we too shy to talk? We are – but is that the point? Are we afraid; afraid of what, then? Afraid to reveal ourselves, expose our weaker sides. Exposing the belly like a hedgehog turned upside-down by a badger to freely access the insides.
Who is that greasy-looking man with the vile voice? That slick hair and those empty eyes hiding the psychotic fire? He is the David Cameron. He and his ilk, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, and their would-be greatest ally where it not for the vestiges of a time when there was a difference, if ever so slight, New Labour – parties with no ideological differences whatsoever – they dance now in orgasmic celebrations, revelling and firing off their guns, as do their fellow travellers; the writers of the Euston Manifesto, or the pseudo-intellectual tirades of imperialist apologist Howard Bloom. Massacres of decency proceed at rapid rate. Developments of some positive aspects continue in Greece, with a hopeful eventual second great collapse of financial markets to follow as Spain and Portugal get to face the business-end of capitalism’s loaded metaphorical shotgun.
But where have we gotten since last we spoke? Are we still just sitting in the quicksand, slowly sinking? Going nowhere? Probably. Dark clouds on the horizon challenged still any hopes for a better tomorrow. All over the world, vilest architecture now abound; weak post-modernist imitations of functionalism leave cities full of wicked scars of tasteless shit. The architectural regurgitations, the visual vomiting of relentless leaders of the armies of filth; there he stands, that vilest of men; Sir Norman Foster, proud of his latest rape of urban space. His buildings metamorphose into vulgar displays of genitals and sex-toys, twisting mazes of tools of defilement, fat-rich cakes tipping over for the wind; symbolism and abstract displays of shapes for no reason whatsoever; a mile high his terrible taste like rotten apples in my mouth; why is he allowed to continue, why is he not stopped? His crimes against urbanity, humanity, history and time and space, why has he not been stopped yet?
And Santiago Calatrava, him too, shall be put against the wall for his crimes! Yes, we will never forgive, Turning Torso and his wickedly nauseating museums and cultural buildings, the Milwaukee Art Museum, what a rape of visual and navigational senses, destroy it, blow it up, no value, empty; soulless abstractions to distract from reality, “exciting, exciting, how unusual and exciting!” they shout, the dregs with passion for the abstract, the revolting new design for the World Trade Centre site; REVOLTING, REVOLTING, THE VILNESS OF THE UAE. DEMOLISH AND REBUILD DUBAI, you’re doing it wrong. Your soulless shopping hell-hole and capitalist haven is built on the backs of the dead immigrant workers that you discarded like the used condoms and un-processed refuse you dump into the Persian Gulf. DEFILE THE LANDSCAPE OF THE WORLD NO MORE WITH YOUR VILE BUILDINGS, SIR NORMAN FOSTER; YOU TASTELESS HALFWIT LIBERATED FROM ALL ACCEPTABLE TASTE.
CRUSH. SQUISH LIKE BUGS, THE INGRATES!
Death to TollRoadsNews
Toll Roads News, a “journalistic venture” by some liberal cretin, is truly the stuff of legendary nightmares capable of inducing suicide, heart attack, coma and even death in some. Such generic, and furthermore excessively stupid, nonsense is vile. A pro-toll propagandist, to this end using liberal rhetoric that surely finds fans amongst the anti-tax and individualist imbeciles, a vile monsterous perversion of all sensibility of any worth–
CRUSH THE TOLLCISTS!
Anyway, let’s closer examine the idiocy of this nonsensical “background” article closer:
Around the world there’s an upsurge in toll roads because tax financing is not producing good enough highways.
Of course, this is strictly not true. There are several reasons that a State would want to pursue toll road financing rather than tax income and public spending; but “good enough” (quality) is not one of them. The state might have very limited funds available, or desire to shift the responsibility onto a body which it in turn can blame (to avoid it self being blamed) for any potential problems that arise with the execution and operation of a motorway or a system of such.
The reason for this “upsurge” is many, but this “upsurge” is largely illusory outside of parts of Europe and the U.S. Much of the world has for long time had motorways being primarily tolled networks. British advisor’s in the 1950′s encouraged Japan to establish a network of toll roads to speed up the development of new roads and infrastructure. In the U.S. and Europe, those politicians and organisations arguing for the establishment of more toll systems (many always have and still do, exist) use various ideological arguments at times to justify their decisions, arguing from (like the author of that moronic piece of yellow “journalism” that is the TRN) the liberal market-loving perspective, but the true reason is simply one of cheapness. The U.S., burdened by the perverse disease known as Congress and the corrupt Senate, full of failed politicians the brain-dead American public constantly vote in and cherish like the sacred cow of liberty, has for long time been unwilling to provide funding for roads, and thick-witted local governments remain just as unwilling and inexcusably inept. Thus, they ponder different solutions, and one of those is giving the mission to a corrupt money-hungry investment banker, the vilest devils of them all; a good example of this kind of verminous dregs are the filthy criminal scum of Macquarie Infrastructure Group.
Voters reject tax hikes because they don’t get highway value for the tax dollar.
Voters reject tax hikes because most of the time they are short-sighted idiots, something politicians and corrupt commercial enterprises like to encourage. This is not always the case however. Phoenix voted yes to a series of tax increases to fund the regional motorway network, and Phoenix is a terrible desert hell-hole. This has nothing to do with “highway value for tax dollar”, a majority of voters don’t think in such terms, and furthermore, even if they did so, there would be no meaningful way of comparison, no picture complete to make it easy to comprehend, the geography of the matter is far too complex. Something our intellectually challenged “journalist” would have a hard time understanding.
And they are frustrated by congestion on inadequate overloaded roads & tie-ups which cost tens of billions in wasted fuel, missed meetings, downtime from work, and unnecessary pollution and accidents.
Oh, personalisation of the problematique, great. Never fails to convince idiots of whatever you’re trying to sell.
Tolling is a way to build and rebuild roads without having to resort to taxes. Toll roads dip into the capital markets for their funds, not into taxpayers’ pockets.
Capital markets funds came from nowhere. Typical liberal rhetoric, “not into tax payers pockets”. Alluding to the whole “tax is theft” argument. If something is theft, property is. Propertarian cunt.
It’s the fairest system and the most efficient…
As fair as fair tax. Never seen that nonsense before.
And the prospective toll revenues will often allow special measures such as the complete undergrounding of roads in environmentally sensitive areas, special services such as separate cars-only roadways, and electronic guideways for hands-off, feet-off driving (the ‘automated highway’) to make roads safer.
Prospective. An often absent prospect, I might add. Since when is the automated highway a good thing anyway? It’s basically an new form of that old stupid concept of Personal Rapid Transit. It’s as stupid and loathsome as flying cars. And those other things apply to tax-funded projects all the same, but to be honest, roads are rarely tunnelled due to environmental concerns. As is known, at best, it only shifts the location of the pollution. It’s generally done to satisfy whiny NIMBY’s and people whose idea of environmental concern is fighting something they think is “ugly” from being near them.
Because of the logic in favour of tolling
Shit logic.
major new road projects around the world will mostly be built as toll facilities
Not because of your great toll-logic, even if so.
And increasingly as old highways need rebuilding private sector funds and management will be needed. Tolls will be the way people pay.
Fuck your system.
The important thing is they all bring highway service into the market economy.
Oh, no, I know where this is going. Do you?
Change is difficult. The automobile is an intensely ideological contrivance and its associated infrastructure is equally controversial. An important part of elite opinion dreams of a return to rail transit and bicycles, and opposes most new provision for motor vehicles. Populists denounce tolls as “taxes” and assert that “we have already paid for roads” in gas taxes.
ELITE! Is that the so called “liberal elite” (meaning soft-centrist social-liberals in the U.S.)? We can see from what political perspective this person speaks. He speaks for the liberal capitalists, the children of the 1980′s, the Raygunites, the psychotic lunatics, the raving insane, for the owners of investment banks, for the supporting pillars of world capitalism. You’re not being controversial, your controversy is an illusion. You’re perfectly in line with what is expected.
Tolls are not taxes but the price for a service. Now that service may be well or poorly provided. It may, or may not, be considered value for money. But the user-pays principle of tolls – that those who benefit from a road pay directly for its use – is good.
No. The user-pays principle is always bad. That’s the argument of those who oppose any social programs. “Why should I pay for their (insert some nonsense about homeless, hobos, drunks, criminals as slurs for poor people) health care/ education / whatever?” Mind you I am not a supporter of the price system whatsoever however. But this is not about what I want. This is about how vile this person is.
So army engineers have built roads and general taxes have been used to finance them, but in the early days of the industrial revolution the most common method was the corvee, or forced labor. Each able-bodied citizen was required to present himself with pick, shovel or other tools to work for several days per year fixing the local roads & or else send a substitute. ‘Pitching in’ for the common good worked when the people doing the work were the ones who benefitted so the corvee sometimes worked on a very small scale, but most roads are used by outsiders and the people doing the work then resent it.
“Why should we slave away, take time off from our income-producing job when the guy who benefits is that merchant passing through or those sightseers going by?” they ask. The ‘corvee’ was described in the late 18th century in England as a “ridiculous farce” because of evasion, favoritism, loitering and general ineffectiveness (p101) In Virginia citizens eligible for statute labor were described as “working out the road tax” and taxed the equivalent hourly wage rate if they failed to show up for statutory road work. Like other kinds of taxation the corvee was seen as unfair and oppressive and enlightened thinkers argued for the user-pays principle.
Enlightened scum argued for the user-pays principle. Notice also the intentional induction of “forced labour” and the comparison of this with taxation (as well as classic liberal slurs, “unfair” (poor rich folks worked so hard to earn their honest money!) and “oppressive”, totally original nonsense. Fuck you.
“When the carriages which pass over a highway or bridge…pay toll in proportion to their weight or tonnage, they pay for the maintenance of those public works exactly in proportion to the wear and tear which they occasion of them. It seems scarcely possible to determine a more equitable way of maintaining such works.” So wrote the famous thinker Adam Smith in his “Wealth of nations.”
What’s with this use of the strange wording “thinker” anyway? Fuck Adam Smith. Fuck the Wealth of Nations.
At a time when Americans (and many other peoples) are skeptical about the value they get back for taxes paid seeking loans and investment secured against toll revenues is often the only practical way to finance needed new roads
Blah blah. Ugh. I get a headache.
Only overhead gantries such as those used for signage are needed for the electronic toll ‘readers’ and for video license plate recognition cameras. In this way electronic tolls can be collected more economically than road taxes and are less likely to be squandered by politicians and bureaucrats!
Typical anti-tax liberal American.
A further major advantage of tolls in the era of microcircuitry and electronic communications is that toll rates can be varied by time-of-day to help combat traffic congestion and guarantee a swift trip through to those who really need it, as measured by their willingness to pay a premium for that privelege. As the stop-&-go traffic on the urban highways of America and Europe make painfully clear, highway space is a scarce and highly valued commodity, especially during rush hours. The prices of food, telephone calls, fuel, airline seats, metals and many other items vary according to supply and demand to the benefit of consumers and suppliers alike and there is every reason why urban highwayspace should do the same. It will provide revenues to improve transportation facilities, help transit compete, and persuade those who can reorganize their movement to leave the scarce roadspace to those motorists who need it most. Best of all it will offer people choices & spend less, get less or pay a premium for premium road service. It’s the way the rest of the market economy works.
So much for being controversial. The market economy is failure.
Such toll projects if properly implemented will be win-win reforms.
Reformist! I hate reformists! Shitty reforms at that.
“There’s a simple solution to this traffic problem. We’ll have business build the roads. And government build the cars.”
- Will Rogers quoted Bay Area Council
Liberal humour is so unfunny.
“There’s no such thing as a free road. There’s a toll road, or there’s a taxing road, or there’s no road.” Our adaptation of an IBTTA (the tollsters trade association) slogan. 1996
If free is the absence of the price system, then there is such a thing as a free road. Tollroad Pigs Lobbyist Propaganda Association.
“Road building is not a government monopoly any more. Those days are over.”
- Federico Pena, US Secretary of Transportation, Transportation Research Board address, Washington DC, January 8, 1996.
Again, what a surprising thing for a populist idiot to say. Since when was road building a government monopoly anyway? The only thing that has been anything even remotely approaching that is planning and funding… But idiots, etc.
Apparently the ingrates in the Netherlands are planning to enact a road pricing scheme… sickening– the world is spiralling into an abyss of failure the likes of which never have been seen before.
In closing, Toll Roads News suck.
Stop the Crazy Brits
The notorious Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke, south east London – used as the gritty backdrop for the film Nil By Mouth – is being demolished and a new 4,000 home suburb built in its place.
Aylesbury Estate, soon to follow suit and be demolished and “regenerated”, probably as something equally revolting as the Ferrier Estate.
Commieblocks of the World (Pt. 1)
Some form of large-scale and high-rise public or social housing estates exist in most of the major cities around the world. Their characteristics are different in many regions, and sometimes drastically different within a region, sometimes depending on from where certain influences have come. In some areas, there are even subtle differences and unique designs occurring in different regions of the same nation. This will be a multi-part series on so-called “commieblocks”, so named for their prevalence in the SSSR and nations in their sphere of influence. To some extent, they have evolved independently in many places around the world for the same purpose – to provide cheap but relatively high-standard housing to the masses. They are rarely built to this day with a few exceptions; in Russia, Japan, Turkey and Hong Kong, new estates are still going up. In the west, the concept and design of those buildings have become considered as discredited by social problems most clearly illustrated in the United States.
United States
In the United States, the city of most interest regarding housing estates is obviously New York City. The New York City Housing Authority has a great number of housing estates of some size, providing some 8% of the city’s flats and homes. As is to be expected from a country like the U.S. , the NYCHA is underfunded and delegated to managing by the best of its abilities an aging housing stock in dire need of renovation. Most of the housing estates were built during the 1950’s and 60’s, with the help of Robert Moses, a man who has been insulted in such rubbish books such as “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, a piece of character assassination blaming motorway construction rather than other social factors for the decay of inner city New York.
The housing estates of New York are generally speaking of a poor standard, even when ignoring their poorly kept status. Often they were built on the cheap. In many of the older towers, there are no balconies. An interesting design is featured on the Luna Park Houses in Coney Island, next to the old Coney Island Amusement Park (what’s left of it) and on the site of the old Luna Park site. Built in 1959-1961, the 23 story towers feature a central elevator tower surrounded by an open space that serves the purpose of hall and a communal balcony. The flats are arranged in four wings connected to the communal balcony and elevator tower in the middle. The areas around the towers consist of lawns and trees, playgrounds and various recreational facilities. A metro station is found in the south of the estate, the West 8th Street – New York Aquarium station. There are five towers in the estate. They were also featured in the videogame GTA IV as the “Firefly Projects”, though significantly scaled down.
Close by is also the Peter Warbasse Houses, consisting of 5 more conventional but nevertheless interesting and in the New York area unique design. Also of some note in the Coney Island area are the Sea Rise Apartments, a greyish white brutalist complex of buildings of varying heights, to some extent reminding of classics such as the Trellick & Balfron Tower’s in London. Most housing estates in New York City have brownstone and brick façades, but the Sea Rise Apartments offer a pleasant change from this with stark grey concrete and curious alignment of building components, as well as an ornamental treatment of the façades themselves. The estate was completed in 1974 and has three tall sections of each 24 stories. Elevators for the complex are provided in elevator towers external to the main building bodies, clinging to them like ladders.
Of further interest in the area are (in Brooklyn): the Linden Plaza Houses (built over a metro yard) in East New York the many estates of Brownsville, Brooklyn, the Tompkins Houses and the Lindsay Park Houses (22 stories and with renovated balconies), the Bushwick Houses, and many more. Of special interest in the Bronx are the curious Morrisania Air Rights, a large complex of three towers with some brutalist ornamentation, tallest one being 29 stories and completed in 1980, the Concourse Village Apartments, six towers of 25 stories each in a more traditional commieblock design, completed 1963-64. Along the East River of Manhattan all the way up to the Trans-Manhattan Expressway, plentiful wonderful housing estates can be found, particularly the wonderful 27 and 26-story Esplanade Garden Cooperative complex deserves mention, found between 145th and 147th streets and 7th and Lenox Avenue, next to the Lenox yard of the New York Metro.
Last but not least deserving of a mention is the wonderful estate of Co-Op City, featuring wonderful towers in a nice park-setting on the outskirts of Bronx in Baychester. 
Housing estates do exist elsewhere, but they have typically been demolished, as in the case of Pruitt-Igoe and many of the estates in Chicago (Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini Green) and replaced by the incompetent and fail Chicago Housing Authority with hideous so called “mixed-income developments” or exclusively more up scale housing.
SEARS TOWER, SEARS TOWER
On July 16, 2009, at 10:00 am Central Time, the building was officially renamed Willis Tower.
Sears Tower is Sears Tower. Structural names ought to be kept for historic consistency except when the nature of the business in the building is reflected in the name (if a structure housed a court but no longer do so, former hospital, etc). Fuck Willis Tower.
Paris Housing Estates
I love tower blocks.
The hate for the Tower block
“the massive scale prohibiting meaningful sense of community—“; “the anonymity of the grey concrete monoliths”; “a failed social experiment”;
Always, forever, in perpetuity, the hatred for the tower block ravages through society. High-rise housing is okay only if it is some flashy office skyscraper or a luxurious tower filled with enormous flats larger than a majority of single-family houses, not some terrible eyesore of a functionalist or brutalist tower with balconies in stark grey concrete. No, terrible things like that must be demolished. The Glasgow Housing Association has lately been in the progress of demolishing numerous tower blocks around town, leaving ravaged war-zone ruins in their wake, space now ready for “mixed-income” houses, where some of the flats will be “sold on the market” to mix the poor and unfortunate with some of more “successful” classes to… mitigate the delinquents, the crime, oh, I’m sure that is how they see it. In the U.S., they call it “gentrification”, more like luxuriousation, right?
Let the area become desirable; make sure the land value skyrockets. In the suburbs of Paris, political messages hung from balconies of tower blocks: This is not a condominium; NOT FOR SALE. In Sweden, the conversion of public housing associations to for-profit companies, the sale and privatisation of large parts of the housing stock; Mr. Latrine, also known as Sven Otto Littorin, spoke lyrically about how the Swedish housing market needs to become more “flexible”. The rigid definitions will be no more; it must be the way it is down in Brussels, the home of the corrupt cabal we know as the “European Union”; when asked whether some areas of the flexible housing market down in Brussels could be considered slums, Latrine said yes, indeed they could. Latrine, by the way, got his degree from an American diploma mill. Seriously.
And the towers blown up – falling down like houses of cards, whilst the ideas of Le Corbusier are collected in piles and set alight, all the while big burly men pee petrol on the fire. “No more”, they say as the flames lick the doomsday red sunset sky, “no more shall we be confined to your concrete abstractions, death to Unité d’Habitation! The Radiant City, looks like the burning city to me”, and they laugh, a laugh with a callous machine-like quality, like the Tyrannosaur in the Jurassic Park movie. The Garden City, the Towers in a Park concept, failed, long-live the endless seas of single-family houses! Long-live the American Dream; a car, a house, a job at Wal-Mart and a guard dog to keep your house safe, and a gun under your pillow.
The towers that once climbed the sky like pencils thin and slender, and the wider blocks like tipped-over dominoes, like veritable Berlin walls of communist oppression; flashes of Moscow in the winter, the 1980 Olympic Village; a desolate landscape, snow all over like volcanic ashes, cold and empty, not a soul in sight; and over it all a menacing cloudy evening sky. And then the suburbs of Paris, towers of Babylon, queer shapes, twists and turns and serpentine lingering blocks—public housing, what a mistake – the brown sandstone towers of New York City, the glorious Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini Green, Robert Taylor Homes; “perpetuation of poverty”, it only counts as perpetuation if the residents stay in one spot, if they move around, it’s not at all the same thing! And the towers fall, explosives and clouds of dust and pulverised concrete, picked apart like patients under the surgeon’s knife—we’re correcting the mistakes, paving way for the more profitable development of this here district—
Red Road towers occupy such valuable real estate, one day they’ll crush those towers too; let’s build a mall there, parking lots and office park, and a few expensive row homes too; to make the whiny little buggers get off the developers backs, they offer some tiny number of flats for rental social housing. That is what we call “mixed-income housing”. It builds towns with a character, just look at that great Family Friendly city the psychopaths at Disney built outside of Orlando, Celebration they call it. A perfectly choreographed nostalgic trip to a past that never was: Main Street U.S.A.
Soon, the towers will have fallen, and they will give way to endless fields of sprawling single-family housing districts. Enormous tracts of “subdivisions” – as U.S. developers call it – stretching for miles and miles in all directions from the city centres. In some cities, already the sprawl spreads for out like a cancerous growth over forty miles in either direction from the downtown area. Over-sized motorways, concrete valleys with rivers of speeding cars; noise barriers, fast food restaurants, trailer parks, wide avenues with no central barrier or separation, endless forests of billboards and oceans of parking lots, midst the puke-green fake-lawns and plastic-surgery shiny windows of the glassed modernist shoeboxes.
Tower blocks and commieblocks remain popular elsewhere, outside of the west. They are still built in most of eastern Asia, in Russia – reminiscing the magnificent Soviet housing estates, the 15th microdistrict—in India, they are now touted as the solution to the terrible conditions of many revolting slums of metal scrap shacks.
But the failure of a district is absolutely the fault of the buildings, not the people that live there, not the people responsible for the decision not to provide services in some of the areas, not the people that neglect maintenance; no, it is all the buildings fault, the anonymous blocks, they lack the communal spirit that ugly New-Urbanism communities offer, pastel coloured lipstick and odd cubes and artsy shapes. It is all the buildings fault. Blame the towers! And they decide not to do fix the poor insulation, they decide not to deal with the leaking pipes, they neglect upkeep and then say the building is inefficient, dilapidated and then they schedule it for demolition. Sweep the trash under the carpet, where it cannot be seen, so it won’t be our problem no more. Let it sort itself out. Let it be. Lassies faire, as the liberal dregs say.
