The metropolis, a social factory

The city becomes a metropolis the moment it turns into a series of facilities and buildings linked together in a network and transforming each access road into a productive flow. A web of connections, shaped by public transport systems, bridges and express ways, wireless networks and video surveillance circuits, is activated daily through the circulation of the inhabitants of the metropolis, who pass through offices, factories, theatres, concert halls, shops, schools, hospitals, gardens and shopping centres where social life is produced and reproduced. The metropolis then resembles a social factory, a place for the cooperative mobilisation of the workforce, where raw materials are to be found and goods circulate, and where consumption takes place, feeding the circuits of a global economy.

This productive nature of the metropolis is echoed in some debates. When members of the government and town planners invoke the image of the “creative city”, they partly acknowledge the productive nature of the metropolitan spiritual life. And when they talk to us about the need to create a “brand” image for a city, in some ways they repeat the entrepreneurial gesture of creating a logo, a symbol that is inscribed on the product and whose purchase enables us to consume a certain lifestyle. Meanwhile, the metropolis as a social factory goes far beyond what can be contained within those formulations.

Look at the case of the “creative city”, a formula that tends to reduce the metropolitan production to an elitist dimension, reducing the metropolis of the producers (which connects the south bank to the north bank, which encompasses centres and peripheries, which links industry, services and trade all together) to a small and very noble city of creators, with restricted access for some professional groups of an artistic nature, a city that is preferentially located in the new boutique neighbourhoods emerging inside the old popular neighbourhoods of the historic centres. Attempting to counter this emerging conception, the theme of the first session of this four-day seminar will begin by discussing the concept of the “creative city”.

On the second day, with the help of those working on the metropolis at such different levels as transport policies and cinematic representations, we move from the city of the creators to the metropolis of the producers. This transition will allow us, on the third day, to analyse the metropolitan government, looking in particular at its involvement in the work of architects and town planners. Such a city’s free layout frequently constitutes the most visible face of practices and discourses of “urban renewal” aimed at the redevelopment of rundown areas and the enhancement of the public space, but the art and skill of architects and town planners also involves (in a less evident way) the strategies aimed at the administration of people and goods.

Finally, on the fourth day, we will focus on the conflicts that take place in the metropolis and which are normally regarded as separate and non-political affairs (the so-called “local questions”) or treated as questions of a criminal nature (the invention of “dangerous neighbourhoods”). In this debate about the metropolitan struggles, searching for old and new links between various antagonisms, we will count upon the participation of activists involved in the struggles to improve public transport, members of residents’ committees, promoters of cultural associations, etc.