Future City

What will be the future of the city? I like to think it will be vaguely utopian—like Jane Jacobs re-written by David Harvey, but in my less optimistic moments I can’t help but think of fantastic, dystopian spaces like Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”. But this betrays my own preconceptions--the instinctive way I discount culture (even though I'm a cultural anthropologist).

When most people imagine the future, they concentrate their attention on emergent technologies—the advances in medicine, IT, energy that promise (or threaten) to transform our lives forever. “Culture” has a kind of shadowy half-life in these formulations—it is usually thought of as an obstacle to technological development, a kind of atavistic “drag” on the furious pace of change. Ultimately, though, I believe that this blinds us to alternative ways of thinking about (and planning for) our possible urban futures.

An example: a story that appeared in the New York Times, “When Feng Shui Helps to Determine a Deal’s Fate” (August 24, 2010), caught my eye: a feature piece speculating on the impact of feng shui on real estate and development in New York. But, actually, I've seen many articles like it before. Globalization brings Asian “tradition” into Western modernity. It could be feng shui, acupuncture, ayurveda. Extra points for journalists who show business people in suits—it’s that juxtaposition of modernity and tradition that, I guess, sells newspapers.

Another recent story—this one from Seoul, where, After 4 years of busy (re)construction, the arch-way to the Kyeongbok Palace (경복궁), Kwanghwamun (광화문), (pictured) has been moved a few meters northeast and rotated approximately 4 degrees. This was accomplished in accordance with Korean beliefs in geomancy (풍수), in the process allowing Ki (氣) to flow unhindered throughout the country. The Japanese had originally moved the gate when they erected their Governor General Building during the colonial era–ostensibly to accommodate the scale of the building, but also to weaken Korea on a more cosmological scale. By (literally) blocking the flow of energy from the main palace, the Japanese were ensuring that Korea’s indigenous rulers would not threaten their domination of the peninsula. Repositioning the Kwanghwamun along that North-South axis completes the work that the destruction of the Governor General Building began in the 1995.

Two stories ostensibly about the past percolating up into the present cityscape. The NYT piece rehashing some familiar stereotypes—“eastern superstition” warping real estate markets in Manhattan, with the indomitable Western businessman adapting to the influx of “eastern culture”. But the re-positioning of the Kwanghwamun suggests something else—here geomancy is at the crux of a contemporary problem—the unresolved tension from the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945). This is a problem that originated with the modern nation-state—the economic, political and cultural domination of Korea. And it did so in a profoundly industrial context—the fengshui subjugation of Korea involved huge construction schemes, iron wrought in Japan’s military-industrial complex, massive civil works projects. This isn’t feng shui (p’ung-su) as some atavistic, cultural survival, it’s the geomancy for the industrial age.

Perhaps we might see the multiplication of real estate services offering feng shui to real estate shoppers as a contemporary phenomenon as well. And why not? There are many businesses utilizing feng shui techniques and equipment to advise developers and home buyers. But they’re not “traditionalists”. Were Neolithic geomancers concerned with buying real estate and developing office complexes?

Feng shui is a future discourse, in the end, not about the slavish veneration of the past, but the multiplication of benefits in the future. Likewise, the feng shui built environment is very much about the shape of the future city, one not stuck between a staid utopian city or a disastrous dystopia, but to something else, another urban narrative based on Taoism, the compass and the astrolabe. Whether or not people buy into it is, in a way, beside the point: it promises to impact the way we inhabit metropolitan areas far into the future—and an alternative way of narrating the future of our cities.

References

Yoon, Hong-key. Culture of Fengshui in Korea: An Exploration of East Asian Geomancy, Lexington Books, 2006.

About the Author
Samuel Gerald Collins, Ph.D., chairs the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice at Towson University in Maryland. His personal page is here.