Megaprojects: Beneath the Pavement, Excess

Author: Gareth A. Jones & Maria Moreno-Carranco
Year: 2007 (City 11(2), 144–164)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/jones-moreno-carranco-2007-megaprojects.md

Summary

Jones and Moreno-Carranco examine two of Latin America's largest megaprojects — Santa Fe (Mexico City) and Angelópolis (Puebla) — to argue that, "seen through everyday practice these global spaces are highly differentiated and present forms of spatial appropriation and possibilities of transformation and subversion." Against the homogenizing/neoliberal reading of the megaproject, they trace how informal vendors, workers, and the "excess" spaces and people of the megaproject reveal "the local production of the global," drawing on Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Augé's notion of "excess."

Key Claims

• The megaproject and global capital: cities forward megaprojects to draw down the "Bilbao/Guggenheim effect" and "reinvent themselves as postmodern centers of creativity"; but globalized projects "seem to look and maybe even feel increasingly the same" (Sudjic: "the same relationship to an authentic multilayered city as Starbucks does to a family-run Milanese expresso bar"). The state becomes "the exception, acting at the margins and sometimes outside the rule of its own regulations" — megaprojects require public-private partnerships and "exceptions to regulatory practice."
• Spectacle, blandness, and "aura": "it may not be the produced superficiality of spectacle that kills the icon but blandness and lack of 'feel'"; cities become "non-places" (Augé) resembling airports; "megaprojects ... appear to substitute neutrality and conformity for icon." Koolhaas's "generic city" — the more generic, "the more vital it becomes for inhabitants to struggle to reinscribe meaning."
• Everyday contestation / "the local production of the global": mall ethnographies reveal small acts of defiance (Warren's Disneyland: shoplifting, sex, violence) and status/identity construction via consumption; consumption can become "the site for working out the new politics of citizenship" (García Canclini).
• Excess: Augé's "excess" (an "intense daily need to give it meaning") as a double analytic: (1) the megaproject built "on an excess of capital, cheap credit and disposable income"; (2) the "excess" spaces/people — abandoned plots, parking lots, street vendors, garbage recyclers, informal food sellers — the "alter-ego spaces of the megaproject ego."
• Case studies (Santa Fe, Angelópolis): both built by expropriating poor land ("built on misery") and displacing original users (garbage pickers; agrarian communities); spaces excluded and segregated (gated communities, "a tropicalized Business Improvement District" governance); malls as "virtual catwalks" where class/ethnicity is visibly ranked.
• Subversion: street vendors (Jenny, Carlos, Doña Amalia) resist removal, adapt to the global era ("the new modality of street food stands: using cars" and cellular phones), and momentarily make "an accommodation of difference and equality ... possible for a few moments in streets designed to promote segregation." Graffiti, improvised football pitches, and vacant-plot uses contest the pristine image.

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Neoliberal Metropolis · Gentrification · Consumerism
Authors: Gareth A. Jones & Maria Moreno-Carranco
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: The Everyday: Wandering, Wondering (Heindl) · The Architecture of the City (Bismarck)

Direct Quotes

"[S]een through everyday practice these global spaces are highly differentiated and present forms of spatial appropriation and possibilities of transformation and subversion. Everyday contestation reveals 'the local production of the global.'"

"[I]t may not be the produced superficiality of spectacle that kills the icon but blandness and lack of 'feel'."

"An 'accommodation of difference and equality' [is] made possible for a few moments in streets designed to promote segregation."

"The new Santa Fe paid little consequence to this past ... The vision of a shiny megaproject was ... 'built on misery.'"

Open Questions

• Does "everyday contestation" (street vendors, informal reuse) genuinely subvert the megaproject, or does the informality/excess become absorbed into the very flexibilized economy the megaproject represents — including its "tropicalized" governance?