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JULIAN BEINART: OK.
Before we start, I've spoken to a quite number of you
about your papers.
I'm a little surprised that you have so much intelligence
and so show little in this class.
It often fascinates me.
I have various theories to explain it,
but they're not important.
Let me start off by asking you what
you thought about the story of Johannesburg.
What struck you?
[INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: What was the story you told of the additions
to the houses?
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
I guess what struck me with that is that, you know,
on the one hand, there's this constant appreciation
of sort of individuals' efforts and vernacular practices
that come about.
But then those so rarely are institutionalized
and are often restricted.
So that was one thing that struck me.
JULIAN BEINART: Well, these were not restricted,
nor institutionalized.
AUDIENCE: No, they weren't.
Yeah.
But I guess in common in practice--
but here in the States, if you're zoning through so many
things, you know that that is--
even if that's appreciated, there's
never much thought into how to encourage that.
JULIAN BEINART: Well, we presume that we
passed the stage of needing to externalize our importance.
We haven't got the motive for doing it.
If we have, we do it in tyranny and not externally,
so the theory would go.
We still believe, probably, that we've
reached a level of civilization that
doesn't require idiosyncratic or highly personal expressions
in public.
We look at popular art all over Africa
and say that this is a culture which has properties, but is
still moving towards a climax.
Its climax will be--
much, though, the world of Manhattan would be a climax.
That's one theory.
Another theory is that, in people in the developing world,
there are not many resources available to them.
So they have to develop their own resources.
Later in this class, when I talk about Slum Dwellers
International and the latest configurations
of self-help organization, you will
see that the strength of people to organize themselves,
a fundamental premise of anarchism,
is now rearing its head as the only resource
that poor people have against enormous bureaucratic odds.
So you can see it is a very optimistic idea.
The successes of SDI and its equivalent on three continents
so far would suggest that there is something
to be gained from not exploiting but using or collectivizing
the resources of people in poverty
towards organizing a better situation for them.
John Turner in Latin America, John Aubrachen in Holland,
were both at MIT at the time I arrived here.
And we shared stories about what this kind of thing meant.
Any other reactions?
What about the imposition of racial classification?
Does the market impose similar strictures
on the location of people?
Was the South African situation just another version,
an extreme version, of what the market does anyway?
Remember Western Native Township was located next to a dump.
Soweto was located next to very obnoxious land.
I think sewage farms and so on.
Isn't this what happens?
Look, I'm looking at extreme situations
in order to do the difficult thing of generalizing back
to normality.
I'm not taking Boston as a case.
I'm not taking [INAUDIBLE]---- well,
I am taking [INAUDIBLE] as a case.
And what I'm trying to do is what perhaps medical professors
do when looking at teaching about cancer.
They look at the worst case, the most extreme case
of the disease, in order to make the point
as clearly as possible.
I think there is a sense in my using Johannesburg.
South Africa would not have been marginalized had it not put
race classification into law.
Nobody boycotted America in the early years of the century,
of the last century, by having local conditions
against Black people.
Many of the countries who voted against South Africa
in the United Nations were imposing
harsher, but not legalized national constitutional devices
in favor of the separation of white and Black
or poor and rich.
Does that make any sense?
What about rejoicing on the products of poor people?
When poor people struggle to maintain some decent life
beyond poverty, we rejoice.
AUDIENCE: Are you saying this from a schadenfreude
perspective or from a--
JULIAN BEINART: Probably.
AUDIENCE: --or from a-- we just enjoy what they produce
and enjoy the--
JULIAN BEINART: It's difficult. I'm judging from the response
that I have had in many parts of the world when
showing this material over a number of years on the BBC
and all over the place.
It was on the cover of three architectural magazines
in the same month in 1966.
It's a long time ago, but there was something.
Whenever I went somewhere, architects
were saying, gosh, if only we, our clients in social housing,
had that capacity to individuate the buildings.
And John Aubrachen, amongst others,
made big theory in his book supports and others
of the process of indwelling as being something
that we should cultivate.
Architects should only build if it required support systems
to let people finish the work themselves.
In the three cases which I want to deal
with very briefly this afternoon,
we find a number of different things operating.
The Mexican-American border is 1,952 miles long.
It's the longest border in the world, the least defended
and the most patrolled.
It's the largest tourist crossing in anywhere
in the world.
Yet it has 11 binational cities along the border.
They vary from Tijuana, San Ysidro, San Diego,
to Ciudad Juarez, and El Paso to the wonderful mix Californian
pair of Calexico and Mexicali, which
is a wonderful anagram of the linguistics.
Nogales, Nogales, Brownsville, Matamoros on the Gulf.
How should we regard the cities?
I will show evidence to show that they operate
in some ways as unified metropolitan areas, which
would mean that this subregion along the border
could be justified as a separate identity
from either Mexico and the United States.
AUDIENCE: When I was in the Mexican government,
we used to study the thesis a lot.
And I remember talking to people especially,
in Tijuana San Diego, on both sides of the border.
They actually refer to the city as the Metropolitan area
Tijuana San Diego.
And their perspective on the crossing point,
on the checkpoint right at the border,
is [INAUDIBLE] sort of a permanent nuisance
that they have to deal with in their daily lives.
Because people work and commute daily to the city.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
In all of these cases, there's an important friction system
operating.
In this case, it's between white people and non-white people,
between people of Hispanic heritage or an Indian heritage
and--
El Paso is amongst the poorest parts of the United States.
When I was on the border in--
after Jimmy Carter became president,
I attended some of the meetings which
he and the Mexican president set up
on some of these border towns.
Octavio Paz says that Mexico, crossing the border,
is one of the ways in which Americans
satisfy their obsessions.
It refers to a larger idea.
And that is the uses of slums in metropolitan areas.
In Sherlock Holmes, the Prince Royal
goes off to smoke or take cocaine in the East Indian
London.
Sherlock Holmes himself smokes something or other.
The poorest part of the population
provides a setting for the doing of semi-legal or illegal
things, prostitution and so on.
So if you enlarge that and you see Tijuana and San
Diego as a pair--
in Kevin Lynch and [INAUDIBLE] study of San Diego of Tijuana,
which is in the reading, it's one
of the best pieces of small scale difficult planning
that I know.
It's in the reading for today's class.
You get a sense of this idea that--
remember Steve McQueen?
He's a famous American male actor
who got cancer and a lot of publicity associated with him
crossing the border to the South to get the illegal drug
laetrile, which is not available in the United States.
Of course, it didn't kill his cancer.
But the phenomenon of there being
a haven, a special environment which
provides the majority or the superior,
quote "superior" class, with satisfactions
which are elicit in their own surroundings.
AUDIENCE: The phenomenon still stands today.
Close to the border, there's a huge amount of pharmacies.
JULIAN BEINART: Yes.
AUDIENCE: They sell medicines that here, in the States,
would be either restricted by a prescription or not available.
JULIAN BEINART: Well, two reactions to that--
the border between East Germany and West Germany--
also, borders attract a kind of marginal population.
There's a wonderful little book in your reading called
On The Border by Tom Miller--
he's a New York Times journalist--
which records a trip from Brownsville, Matamoros
all the way to Tijuana and the extraordinary things he find.
He finds a town which specializes
in the smuggling of peacocks to Chicago in the back of trucks.
He finds the most powerful AM station in the United States,
a right-wing propaganda radio station
which the government of China asked the United
States to intervene with.
So there's a kind of erotic condition
where you bring two notions together.
I don't know what the theory behind that is.
But it seems to be the case that the behavior
of a lot of activities on this border
are different from the internet.
AUDIENCE: There is a book by the editor of Foreign
Revue [INAUDIBLE] Moises Naim.
The book is called Illicit, where
he studies borders in details as constructs that,
because of their--
artificial blockage of goods, services, and people's
daily activities, it brings out a particular kind
of inhabitant of these places.
JULIAN BEINART: This Mexican-American border
serves a number of other functions.
It serves as the major avenue of illegal immigration
into the United States.
I don't know if there's illegal immigration south
from the United States into Mexico, but--
AUDIENCE: There are a lot of people that go to Mexico.
We don't ask Americans for a visa.
They enter, and then they stay in Mexico and live there.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
There are, according to government sources,
12 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
The census or one of the government agencies
claims it only arrests one out of four people who
try to take their bodies.
56% of illegal immigrants in this country are Mexican.
So this border serves as an avenue for the movement
of people from--
what would you call Mexico?
What would you call the United States?
The United States offers more, presumably more, opportunities
for increasing wealth.
There are many stories that are humorous
surrounding that there are people who live in Mexico
and work in the United States illegally every day.
One of the stories in our meeting
was told by a young man who dresses up in jogging clothes
like an American, crosses the border every morning at 5
o'clock, starts jogging on the American side
and works as a gardener, returns home at night.
These are funny stories.
Immigration into the United States
is politically and spatially still very unresolved.
America was built by immigrants.
I'm an immigrant.
And I've taught here for 34 years.
It shows how poor the local population is.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm jumping all over the place.
I just want to cite you statistic about immigration.
"United States remains a magnet for immigrants.
The US is among the best at assimilating them.
As a result, half the world's skilled immigrants
come to the US.
Between 1990 and 2005, immigrants
started a quarter of the new venture-backed public companies
in the United States."
So again, we are at the crossroads theory.
On the one hand there's the conservative position
that a nation should take care of its own people
and selectively choose people who
wish to get into that country, not
have a random system of entry.
The US Congress is likely to take up immigration following
the failure of the previous President Bush
who comes from Texas and was under a lot of pressure, set
about building a $60 billion fence over the 2,000 miles.
He reduced it to 700 miles, ran into enormous problems
of land rights in Texas and was sued and abandoned
the whole project.
What else about the Mexican-American border?
AUDIENCE: Right now in Mexico, there
is a huge [INAUDIBLE] immigration
reform because of what happened on [INAUDIBLE]..
But they were talking about immigration reform
in the early Bush days in 2001.
Actually, President Fox came as well to the conference--
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: --one week before 9/11.
As soon as 9/11 happened, that whole discussion got derailed.
And the priorities of US policy shifted.
So it moved from an idea of having an immigration
reform to an idea of security.
And we've been talking about immigration.
There's a lot of talk about immigration reform
again or getting back into the political agenda.
And now that the marathon bombings happened again,
you can follow it up in Mexican media.
There's another notion of, oh my god, it's
this story all over again.
It's happening all over again.
It's going to be the security concerns are going to take over
the political discussion.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
Cheap labor is important in a capitalist industrial economy.
So immigration will be supported by capitalists--
AUDIENCE: Yes.
JULIAN BEINART: --i.e.
people who politically are normally conservative.
So there's an ambiguity about this position.
The strength of cheap labor--
Mitt Romney was accused of using Mexican workers
to fix his garden without paying them legally.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
JULIAN BEINART: Anyway, what do you--
you have a population in this belt
on either side of the border where
people speak two languages, share telephone services.
Industries in one country are located across the border
into another--
there's 3,000 American industries which pay no taxes.
They move south across the border,
but pay tax only when the finished products are
returned to the United States.
This is the second largest labor source in Mexico
according to a recent item that I read.
So we have the United States exporting its industries
around the world to pools of cheap labor.
One of the closest and, therefore, reducing the costs
of transportation is Mexico.
So you have another version of the relationship
between these two countries.
Pro this kind of effort are people
who believe that it stimulates jobs in a poor country.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
And then there is a backward relationship of strong--
actually, a relevant part of the Mexican population
that feels that it's a highly unjust situation
because the territory of most of the western [INAUDIBLE] states
in the US used to belong to them.
So there's a social resentment that
has grown in parts of the population that
has been instigated.
JULIAN BEINART: Yes, I should have mentioned.
For so many of you not Americans or Mexicans
that the present status of the border is the result of war.
Much of Texas, California, Arizona, a number of states
even going as far as Wyoming--
AUDIENCE: Yeah, it's California, Nevada, Colorado, part
of Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas.
JULIAN BEINART: And California.
AUDIENCE: And California.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a long history to all of this.
Between 1846 and 1854, the United States
won a war against Mexico in which the United States
took possession of a large part of the Southwest
of the current United States and paid Mexico $18 million.
That includes the Gadsden Purchase, which
was an additional operation.
So this border dates back to the same date
that Haussmann took power in Paris,
a number of European conflagrations in 1848.
1848, there were 137,000 British troops in India.
It's a signal date, 1850, 1848.
1850-- London, the largest city in the world,
the first European city to be the largest since Rome.
So many things have a [INAUDIBLE]..
But I think it's important to point out
that this heritage, which you point to,
is probably more likely to be absorbed now except for people
who wish to maintain their political enemies
against the United States.
The future for all of these situations-- and I'm
going to try to cut these stories short
and ask you to ponder as to what the urban mystic response
should be to these places.
You are likely to be asked, like I
was, to venture an opinion about one of the days on the border
the chief planner of Juarez, who is Mexican,
and the chief planner of El Paso, who's Mexican-American,
met for the first time in these discussions.
They discussed water.
They discussed illegal settlement.
They discussed fumes that were coming from the Asarco lead
plant into Mexico.
That night there was a dinner.
And I was sitting next to the woman who
was the representative of the US government Foreign Service.
And she asked me how I was enjoying the day.
And I said, it was remarkable.
It felt so positive about this interaction and the promises
that the people made to each other.
She said to me, remember, we fought a war
against these people once.
So my naive academicism was piloted off
in a very bad direction.
What else can I say about--
read Tom Miller's book if you want to know
what the border is like.
I think we'll leave the Mexican-American bipolar
series.
The piece I gave you in the handout
today from 1981 US News and World Report--
"Where Yanks and Mexicans Live Together and Like It."
"Linked by twin industries, two-way trade,
and now by trolley line, San Diego and Tijuana
offer an object lesson in international cooperation."
I don't know if that is justified,
but I leave it to you to make a judgment about that.
The fact is that there are not many conditions
in the world where two nations, one presumably belonging
to the First World, another belonging presumably
to the Second World, go inside.
European cities extend their labor relationships
across to North Africa to Turkey as migrant labor.
South Africa built its gold mines on migrant labor
from as far north as Malawi and Tanzania.
But here we have a conjunction of two systems
around urban areas, which are just a fence away
from each other.
One of the models for the future of Jerusalem
was, in fact, a kind of city which
had no border running through the city.
It wasn't a divided city at all, but the city
which mediated issues such as customs and security
in other ways.
Maybe with electronic technology we'll
be able to introduce ways of assessing
personal movement and personal behavior more adequately.
One is always fascinated by what happened on Monday afternoon
here in Boston.
This lecture is being recorded, so I have to add the date.
This is the Monday after the marathon bombing.
How much evidence seems to be available
simply through the common practice of people, teenagers
having telephones which record material?
So one maybe in future be able to see enormous diversity
to cities, given an environment of relative peace.
If you look back historically at Europe, the wars between Spain
and Holland, between Spain and England,
between France and Germany, between Germany and Poland
and Russia, between Napoleon and northern Italy,
between the Muslim city of Istanbul and Budapest
and Vienna.
I mean, I'm not even going very far back.
I'm going back to the 18th century, 17th century.
To believe, at that time, that there
would be a common union in which there would
be no passports required to move from France into Belgium
or from France into Germany would have
been impossible to imagine.
One of the things I learned from Kevin Lynch
was his incredible belief in the capacity of human beings
to improve themselves.
And his evidence was always that urbanism
could be properly administered, be a vehicle for doing this.
Cities educate people.
They teach them new ways.
Johannesburg is not the city that it
was when Soweto was created.
The reason, as I mentioned over and over again last week,
was the South Africa sought for a rural solution
to its problems because urbanism educated people
to their political right, to [INAUDIBLE]..
And the Bantustan policy which was
the last of the major efforts by the Afrikaner government
in South Africa was anti-urban.
We move to the broad body of stuff,
which we normally refer to as colonial-native relationships.
A colonial-native relationship is a relationship
in which a dominant external force occupies another country
and imposes its will around a number of polarities.
For Britain it was dangerous to go to India.
The life expectancy of a British soldier,
if they stayed in Britain in 1883, was 59.5 years.
If they went to India, it was 37.7 years.
So the preoccupation of the British
was that India was an extraordinary environment.
It was dangerous.
It was also seductive.
The British, under Victorian rule,
by and large repressed sexuality.
You come to India where sexuality is abundant
not in terms of personal behavior,
but in terms of cultural expression.
If you really E.M. Forster's book of Passage to India
in 1924--
has anybody read Forster?
He's one of the greatest English writers.
You must read him.
Read a Passage to India.
You'll get a-- look what happens.
A young English woman called Adele
arrives in India to marry the son of the Mrs. Briggs,
I think.
I'm not sure.
I don't remember.
They meet a handsome young Indian doctor called Dr. Aziz.
Dr. Aziz is a trained medical man.
And the interaction is quite spontaneous.
Dr. Aziz invites them, the mother and this young woman,
to visit some caves nearby called the cave the Macabar.
This is all fictitious, of course, but you see the story.
This young woman is so distraught in the caves
by the echo that come back whenever
they speak that she goes off.
She goes crazy and runs away.
She comes back to the British civil station
and accuses Dr. Aziz of having assaulted sexually.
The British claim that Indian men are sexually
attracted to white British women and should
be punished for that.
The Indians claim that this is a hoax,
that this woman was hysterical.
It goes to court and Dr. Aziz is, at the end of the book,
freed from the case because this woman breaks down in court
and admits that she made the wrong accusation.
AUDIENCE: There's a very telling part
of in the story about the button on the back of the shirt, which
Dr. Aziz shares to an Englishman, but had forgotten.
And then when they're qualifying Dr. Aziz
and they get to the button, they link that to the notion
that no Indian could ever behave like a true gentlemen
because they forget the small details.
[LAUGHTER]
So they tie it down.
And it tells you a lot of the rigidity
that society played on all those small constructs
as artificial classifiers of people.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
You know, it raises another issue for me.
And that is we require novelists to see a situation and write
about it in a way that reality cannot do.
That is for those of you interested in film
and its impact on our understanding of cities.
There's so many movies which depict conditions
in cities in heightened form.
It took E.M. Forster sitting at Cambridge to write a book at--
he visited India.
Anyway, so here the polarities are complex.
For the British, they were three diseases
that had to be counted, environmental diseases
of the air, vegetation, soil, water, humidity.
Number two-- behavioral diseases, diet, alcohol.
And number three-- social diseases, sexual diseases.
I will show you some of the images
from some of the literature.
One of the notions was that disease,
as in London about the same time,
was carried through the air.
So the ventilation system in the bungalow and in the hat
was a similar situation which allowed air to pass through.
I will show you a section through a parade ground, which
is ventilated up and down.
I'll show you a diagram of the amount of air
you need to be safe.
This is all before Snow and the discovery of cholera
as the waterborne disease.
The choice, you will see, for an Indian,
at least for an English bureaucrat,
was between a bungalow--
bungalow, again, is a term which comes from the native language,
from [NON-ENGLISH].
You must remember that the headquarters
of the capital of India with Calcutta before it
was moved by the British to Delhi from a [LAUGHTER]
world, world of speaking another language to Hindu.
The word veranda is also a word that's
been built into English architecture.
There are a number these terms which
refer to spatial components of the colonial city--
the maidan, which is that breathing
space of open space between the native city,
much like South Africa.
The native city and the new white enterprise
would be separated by space.
Critical distance was another feature
of the dominant-native relationship.
You want to be as far as possible from them.
A book colonial city argues that the French colonial environment
was different because the French have always
assumed a more liberal position about body contact.
And the British have always resisted.
So the British-- the notion of staying
as far away from the native not only because of the air,
but of some kind of distancing of context,
metaphysical perhaps, but also physical and spatial.
Typically, the British built a military presence first
or the cantonment on the other side of the maidan,
and then built what is called the civil station just
beyond the cantonment.
The civil station was, again, a set
of bungalows spaced like a suburban American landscape
with enough air floating around, and nothing was dense.
The native city was dense.
I'll show you some images of the native city
from the British view.
So attenuated space was an important component.
I've given you two pages on the next big adventure,
and that's the building of New Delhi.
The building of New Delhi, or the planning in New Delhi,
took a number of forms.
One of the important members of the committee
was a man called Lanchester, John Lanchester, who
was an acolyte of Patrick Geddes and believed
in constructive surgery.
So his first ambition was to link the new plan
to the native city of Shahjahanabad, which
is one of the oldest cities in the Far East.
I think since--
God only knows-- the 13th.
When was the origin of Shahjahanabad?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Prior to Shah Jahan, it was a settlement.
In the 14th century, it was considered the largest city
in the Far East.
So Shahjahanabad, after the riots,
the British took over parts of Shahjahanabad
and made it a military presence as well.
But Lanchester's plan was to try to link Shahjahanabad
to this new development.
There are various iterations by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens
and Sir Herbert Baker.
Here what I've given you is a sketch
of five different planned discussions ultimately
resulting on the Raisina Hill solution, the [INAUDIBLE] Hill
Solution.
The notion which prevails throughout
is that British classicism or the British interpretation
of Greek and Roman classicism was
a way of educating the native population to standards
which they couldn't achieve by themselves.
The second one was that the site needed to be high in elevation,
so that it would dominate the world.
These are primitive ideas which you
can see in the laws of the Indies
as well of a colonial proposition
needing to educate and subdue the population.
Remember, in the laws of the India,
the rules are that the natives are not
allowed to see the cathedral until it's finished.
You have to use the force of the cathedral's elevation
to dominate.
You cannot see the construction of the cathedral.
The construction is a process of admitting viability--
not admitting viability-- admitting weakness.
So Edwin Lutyens, who was a very good architect--
you should look.
For those who are interested in architecture,
look at his project Lindisfarne in England quite different
from this.
Anyway, I'll just quote the manifestation
of some of these ideas.
"Indian buildings, even the Taj Mahal,
were picturesque and decorative, but pervaded
by childish ignorance of the basic principles
of architecture.
The Indic style, he argued, simply
does not have the constructive and geometrical qualities
necessary to embody the idea of law and order, which
is being produced out of chaos by the British administration.
Would [INAUDIBLE],, he wrote sarcastically,
had he gone to Australia, have burnt his knowledge
and experience to produce a marsupial style?"
Can you imagine a marsupial style in Australia?
His argument is that to disembody classicism, which
had been produced out of centuries of thought
by Europeans, to disembody it and to make it into Indianism
would not only be difficult and foolish,
but would not embody the purposes
of British colonialism.
That is to educate and maintain dominance over people.
So correctly speaking, classicism used in this sense
is a disembodiment of the universality
of human experience.
He says that human experience is manifest at a higher
level in 500 BC in Greece and is maintained
for 2000 years as the dominant form of expression
in architecture not to be vitiated
by any local cultural evidence.
Of course, there were no great Indian architects.
One has to look at Chandigarh as another importation
of a European architect to deal with this question of what is
Indian and what is universal.
We'll deal with Chandigarh in this class if we have time.
I recently wrote a piece on Chandigarh
for a book, which is a result of a talk we
gave at the 50th anniversary of Chandigarh.
So all of this adds up to a very concise explanation
of the planning and architectural content
of New Delhi as being an expressive and controlled
system of dominance.
We need to know now--
and I have many post-colonial Indian architect friends
and have been in partnership with one.
So I think I understand a little bit about their reaction.
Modernism was a vehicle for destroying
all kinds of notions of colonial-native relationships,
I think.
Do you think so?
AUDIENCE: In some way, not entirely.
JULIAN BEINART: Not entirely--
but there were people like Rudyard Kipling and his father,
who also were British, who took a different view of India.
So I suppose they were eccentric to India.
but modernism has allowed India to bypass
the question of style in a sense as being politically important.
I mean, people like [INAUDIBLE] and many others have used
modernism as a free liberal expression of what they think
a new society should be about despite the polarities between
Hindu and Muslim in the current India,
despite the enormous polarities between wealth and poverty
after--
anyway, so what do you think?
AUDIENCE: I think modernism has replaced
even a lot of the traditional Indian [INAUDIBLE] have.
The Indian architecture has been influenced by [INAUDIBLE]..
And there's so many influences.
JULIAN BEINART: Absolutely.
AUDIENCE: By saying that modernism is a free expression
or is something that negates all of that does not really--
I don't know.
It doesn't sound--
JULIAN BEINART: Well, it doesn't negate it.
But it was agnostic.
It did not associate itself with anything else,
but its own invention.
In doing so, it denied the aspirations of Indianism maybe.
AUDIENCE: But what is Indianism?
Because [INAUDIBLE].
JULIAN BEINART: Well, absolutely.
So Chandigarh was easy to--
Nehru understood that to get Corbusier
to come along and design his image of new capital
city for the Punjab would require somebody
who had the capacity to overwhelm
the Indianness in the same way that Louis Khan in Bangladesh
built his world in Dhaka.
Le Corbusier traveled all over India before.
He writes all about Indian construction
and Indian materials.
Louis Khan does the same thing.
Louis Khan buildings, parliament building,
marks the end of a day of work.
And then the next day, the bricks or the stones
are sort of marked in relation to the labor as if this is--
I mean, this is another big story.
But let's leave the story to concentrate
on racial polarities.
Maybe these extreme polarities disappear with education,
disappear with change, so liberals would believe.
AUDIENCE: So what are you saying,
that through education [INAUDIBLE]??
JULIAN BEINART: Through education one
presumes that changes in idle worship
transform people to being religious [INAUDIBLE]
in history.
The European evidence of the--
there's no animation-- no, not animation, no active hostility
between Spain and Holland.
Although the Spanish did terrible things to them.
We're going to do a class on architecture and memory
or urbanism and memory because some of this
has been written about.
I do believe that the only solution for Jerusalem,
if there is any solution, which is going to take time,
is if there were some force which introduced itself
into Israeli education.
Israeli education is dominated by the religious groups, who
insist on portraying Arabs as rapists, and villains,
and so on.
The reverse is true.
If you look at the high school books, some
of the books in Jordan, and Syria,
and so on, they depict Jews as Shakespeare depicted
the Merchant of Venice.
Now, you don't go around England any more writing
books about Jews as the Merchant of Venice.
That stopped in the 16th century.
So there's historic evidence that people do,
cultures do, change their mind.
What about the future of Johannesburg?
There are 40 million Black people in South Africa today.
There are 6 million whites and 6 million coloreds making
a [INAUDIBLE] population.
That means that Black people are 80% of the total population
of South Africa today.
What is the policy with regard to Soweto?
You are a brilliant MIT graduate.
You're hired by the United Nations
to advise the South African government, as I was.
What do you do?
You've got to take care of rebuilding education
for 40 million people.
You've got to introduce health systems.
You've got to provide jobs.
25% of young Blacks in Johannesburg don't have jobs.
You can't socialize the society quickly enough
because foreign investment, which
is fundamental to South Africa's capital, will flee.
So you cannot nationalize the gold mines,
as many of the ANC people have wanted to do.
So let's look at Havana and Cuba for a moment
simply before we write all of these
off as the dustbins of history.
Look, this is tough stuff.
It's not urban designers planting a few trees in Iowa.
This is what is happening by and large in important parts
of the world and has happened.
You've got to have some understanding
of these extremely difficult situations.
Havana was a Laws of the Indies city.
Between 1959 and 1988, it was host to Soviet sponsorship.
And as I look at the plans for when
we were in Havana and in end of 1978, I think--
a couple of things.
One of the ideas taken from Russia
was to normalize the relationship
between the country and the city.
If you remember Shirov's plan for Moscow,
which I discussed with you, there
was an attempt to increase public space
on the periphery of the city in a wide belt around the city.
The only city in the world where this has been put into place
is Havana.
Lenin Park has increased the number of square foot.
In 1959, there was 1 square meter of open space per capita
in the city.
In 1978, when we were there, it had
increased in 11 square meters per capita, 3 in the city,
8 outside in Lenin Park.
Whether people are actively using
Lenin Park is another story.
Right from the first Castro invasion,
it seemed that the idea was to frustrate
the growth of the city and favor the development
of the countryside.
Again, this idea is central to South African apartheid, which
I mentioned over and over again, but with a different meaning.
You couldn't easily migrate into Havana
unless you could find a job.
At least you had somewhere to stay.
The population of Havana decreased
after Castro's takeover.
Instead of the huts and small property ownership,
a new rural environment was created.
Small towns of 2,000 people about 10 kilometers apart
were attempt--
I'll show you some of them--
to put a kind of layer of measles across the land,
all an attempt to rejuvenate the idea of the country.
One of the first things that Castro did--
Castro himself, his government, his policies--
were to take to send young men and women from Havana out
into the country to talk to older people
and to try to teach them how to read and write.
The whole image was a kind of world
in which there was the division between rural poverty
and urban wealth would be destroyed.
I often think Israel and Cuba have
a lot in common by virtue of being small countries.
In small countries, you have a presence of the land in much--
how does a kid growing up in New Jersey know about Yosemite?
It's too large.
It's too long.
It's too big.
It takes special effort.
But if you're living in Havana and it
takes 5 minutes to get into the country,
it's a different story.
Young Jews in Israel are enormously
competent at biblical history partly for political reasons,
but also partly because the sites are there.
You go south to the Negev, and you
can see where [INAUDIBLE] sacrifice sheep or whatever.
I'm just making that up.
[INAUDIBLE] didn't sacrifice any sheep.
So the Picadura Valley, one of the major changes
in the rural landscape, was to the Picadura Valley was--
there are two major industries, agricultural industries
in Cuba, the production of tobacco,
which is a refined cultured the industry
and the production of sugar, which is the harshest industry,
agricultural industry there is.
Castro made important efforts to utilize these symbols.
He didn't nationalize the tobacco industry.
He allowed it to remain under local control,
but not nationalized.
He nationalized the sugar production industry completely
and reduced its size.
In the Picadura Valley, for instance,
he removed all sugar growth and resurfaced the land
with new agricultural material, got
Canada to help them to produce a cow which could produce milk
in the tropics.
The Picadura Valley now produces milk for Cuba.
These are important elements of transforming
the rural productive world.
So the polarity, which I want to focus on here, is just--
there are many other aspects of--
by the way, modernism, when we visited,
was the only style of building that
was available in modern Cuba, decorated modernism
using super graphics was very--
I'll show some of these products.
The use of the past selectively--
for instance, the operation which
sent Cuban troops to Angola to help the African Liberation
movement was called Operation Carlota.
Who is Carlota?
Carlota was this woman slave who led the rebellion
against the United Fruit Company.
It was a political move to--
oh, god, I forgot about the time.
This is so interesting.
Let's just leave it at that.
The Cuban story has transformed, of course, since 1978.
I'm talking about a time when the pure impulse
under Soviet dominance, the change--
the use of micro brigade labor and so a whole set of things
which operated at that time.
Cuba is now a semi-socialist state,
opening up to diverse forms of homeownership,
property ownership, different categories of tourism,
and so on.
You see how much land of the Southwest of the United States
Mexico controlled in 1821, 1836, 1848 to 1854, and 1980.
This diagram indicates the special list
of a region of 11 bipolar cities strung over 2,000 miles.
Next.
This is a famous--
Ricardo, you were referring to this image.
This is a Mexican settlement up to the border
in the case of Tijuana, various conditions from Tom Miller's
book of the border running across this vast distance.
Next.
Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard's work
looking at the regional relationship between Tijuana
and San Diego showing how water--
water is one of the biggest concerns between the United
States and--
the United States claims that Mexico owes the United States
something like 60 billion whatever, gallons of water,
which Mexico has illegally used to supplement its population.
Water is an issue in Mexico--
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
JULIAN BEINART: --severe issue.
Next.
This was at the time--
tourists, $5 million per year.
It's obviously much more today.
Next.
Use of the region by La Jolla High School students--
use of the region by Tijuana residence.
Next.
The linear, dense, arterial street
of the Mexican environment--
the isolated shopping center in the San Diego space.
Next.
This is a plaza in Ciudad Juarez.
This is a view of the central part of El Paso.
There's one person, two people available in the photograph.
This is all due to a whole complex juxtaposition
of urban renewal and so on.
Next.
Despite the operation of two separate cities,
the daily traffic volume represents that
of a unified metropolitan area.
Next.
This is a happy picture on the right
of border guards on the American side
on the right playing against Mexican border
guards on the left.
Nobody knows who wins.
The border is in the air.
Next.
Immigrant crossing-- next.
Next.
An Octavio Paz--
Americans come to Mexico to satisfy their obsessions.
AUDIENCE: There is a [INAUDIBLE] that is very much
ingrained in Mexican psyche.
And it's about the crosses and the little memorials
of people that have died crossing
from Mexico to the States.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: They turn up in places like Arizona.
They're actually actively hunted down.
JULIAN BEINART: I thought you were
going to refer to the 6,000 people who were
killed per annum in Juarez.
AUDIENCE: Oh, yeah, yeah.
And then it goes on the other way around in Juarez.
Especially women working in rural maquilas.
JULIAN BEINART: In the maquila industries.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, in the maquila industries.
[INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
Apparently, real estate in Juarez,
according to The Wall Street Journal,
is more expensive than in an American industrial site.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
JULIAN BEINART: What accounts for the violence?
AUDIENCE: What?
JULIAN BEINART: What accounts for the violence?
The 6,000--
AUDIENCE: There's been a lot of wild theories,
anywhere from gang to cults to women trafficking
to the States for sexual purposes.
But what is very strong is the fact that the majority of them
are women that work in maquilas.
And most of them are abducted while on their way to work.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
Sorry, we have to carry on.
Maquilas are the name given for American industries which
locate in Mexico, maquiladoras.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
JULIAN BEINART: Next.
Here's the native city Shahjahanabad, 1683 Shah Jahan,
and so on and so on, the cantonment,
and the civil station.
Next.
The dense native city--
and the depiction on the postcard of the British view
of that city.
It looks a bit like Moscow in its early days.
Everything is seen from a distance.
Next.
Here is the calculation of the amount of air
you need to be safe.
Here is the attempt to ventilate a parade ground.
Next.
The basilica form, which allows ventilation
through at upper level--
and the headdress modeled after the basilica form.
Next.
The layout of the civil station, this
is an interesting cartoon from [INAUDIBLE]..
Ensign Green is appointed as junior commissioner
in [INAUDIBLE].
His friends suggest he needs to get a house on the right.
The house on the right is the scientific version,
above the ground, ventilation everywhere.
He's determined to build this kind of house, however.
This kind of house negates all the scientific premises,
but it has all of the meaningful elements to which we associate
with formal exposition.
He hasn't got the money to build this number two,
so he ends up with number four, a native kind of construction
called the bungalow.
Next-- from the bungalow to the various versions
of construction.
Next.
The British maintenance of some of the outdoor practices--
here the playing of garden games or social events.
The maidan-- the space that's left
between the native settlement in Calcutta, the veranda.
Next.
The final plan--
Shahjahanabad about on the north Connaught place,
a commercial environment as a stepping stone
to the New Delhi.
Next-- many of the spatial forms used
from the day of the Persians onwards.
Next-- Connaught Place.
Next-- the great Viceroy's Palace with the chanceries
on either side--
the secretariats, I'm sorry, on either side.
Herbert Baker is regarded as attempting
to introduce the Indianic experiment into the [INAUDIBLE]
system in detail.
Next.
Havana-- the Laws of the Indies plan on the right.
Next.
The empty city--
I'm sorry the slide is so dark on the left.
Next.
1978-- the suburban house is divided into two.
And a major attempt is made to use Eastern European
prefabricated material--
We'll be through in a second--
with micro brigade labor, teams of 33 people
from industry building their own housing with specialist help.
Next.
Buildings which are kept, a hut on the left,
is an attempt to show what Cuba was like and colonial power.
The building on the right has only recently
been opened again.
This building was closed.
When we were there, it was considered unsafe.
But in fact, it indicated the kind of architecture
which was too personal.
Next.
This is an interesting--
this is the premises of the City Bank of New York.
Just on the wall as you go beyond these columns,
there's a plaque which says, this building
is now used for the children of Cuba, not for capitalist use.
So you maintain the distinction between what it was
in the past and the present.
This is the same version.
What is this saying?
The Picadura Valley on the right is
a bunch of new rural people with a Bulgarian television set.
Next-- Lenin Park and the super graphics on the right.
Next-- the use of powerful political images.
Next.
I think that the last.