Anatomy of a Street: an introduction

Welcoming Cities 

The London Festival of Architecture’s theme, ‘Welcoming Cities’, is open to a variety of interpretations: of cities welcoming the Olympic Games, as well as cities welcoming initiatives, diversity and eventually conflict. The Anatomy of a Street project poses the question somewhat differently: what if large-scale cultural or sporting events affect cities in far more diverse ways than we expect? How does the actual change taking place differ from the anticipated urban effects, and what are the side-effects of top-down, large-scale urban development? Do events or regeneration simply contribute to the process of gentrification and commercialisation of cities or, on the contrary, do they bring about complex bundles of effects and counter-effects?

Anatomy of a Street – an on-going research programme linking initiatives in Budapest, Pécs, London, Warsaw and Bratislava – is a proposal to take a closer look at these phenomena. The case studies of the AoaS project are locations in cities where top-down national or municipal planning, corporate development, small businesses and bottom-up initiatives of the civic sphere intersect, interact and create unique forms. The AoaS project questions some of the general assumptions that describe the relationship between public, private, civic and corporate elements in their effect on the city.

National contributions to architecture festivals and biennials have consisted traditionally of declarations of pride, and showcases of great architectural achievements in order to position nations in an internationalised competition for attention, investments and commissions. Contrary to this, the AoaS project draws its inspiration from critical studies examining the way how architecture is embedded in social, political and economic contexts, and how architectural objects and symbols can be described and decoded in specific local settings, as well as in broader global networks. The case studies – streets from various locations – differ geographically, historically and culturally, as well as architecturally. Notwithstanding this colourful variety, there is still a shifting degree of resemblance and interconnections informed by the global exchange of concepts, real estate and capital.

Anatomy of a Street takes the position of what may be called research architecture.¹

In order to investigate the global dimension of changes, we propose to look at cities on the micro-level and explore them in a comparative manner. The starting point for the AoaS is therefore a search for local answers to globally relevant questions.

To diversify a methodological urban study, we opened up the project to flexible approaches. We invited artists and designers to investigate aspects of urban change, and developed our inquiry into a travelling exhibition that takes the form of a series of study trips – both driving and feeding back to our research. The project is asym-metrically divided between the research workshops, the publication and the exhibition. Balancing between documentation and open-ended mapping processes, we consider research in the form of an exhibition, and vice versa, exhibition in the form of research.

Anatomy

Anatomy is ‘the scientific study of bodily structure (…), a detailed examination or analysis’.²

In this case, the study of a single street, a restricted area cut deliberately from its urban context. In this setting, the analysis may result in a distorted, yet condensed view of Budapest, Pécs and London, revealing complex Connections inherent in the detail. Statistics of demography and local economy may provide a clear picture of general trends and tendencies at large; however, they may also obscure processes at the micro-scale. Without distrusting statistics and their revelatory force, we chose to provoke an encounter between statistical and phenomenological evidence, by defining uncommon cultural, social and economic indicators.³

Walking down the street and looking at the streetscape, the signs, shapes, colours and lights, street furniture and advertisements, the old shops and new ones, the local off-license, merchants, residents and passers- by, the local paper, real-estate signs, vacant lots and empty buildings, hidden gardens, rooftops, street corners and open doorways, local cafes, restaurants, pubs and galleries, monuments and landmarks, sites of memory or fame, does, of course, offer much more than pure phenomenological experience. It opens up and delineates boundaries and different territories, and allows for glancing into parallel microcosms that co-exist beside, across and on top of one other.

The street enters the global exchange circuit through hidden processes: the task is to identify some of the mechanisms that made these streets became what they are today. To anatomise the unconscious infrastructure of social and cultural phenomena, and to analyse the underlying forces that generate changes in the chosen neighbourhoods requires the skills both of an ethnographer and a cartographer. Ethnology and cartography in this sense are the undertaking of locating the global and situating the universal, so that its mechanisms are unveiled. As the philosopher-ethnologist Bruno Latour reminds us, ‘Politics is not revolution but clarification, that is, the unfolding of artificial elements that we have not been aware of, on which we depend to exist. Politics, in other words, is a question of air conditioning, the progressive recognition that we live together within compounds that are as little natural as greenhouses, and the mechanisms of which appear to us bit by bit’.⁴

The Street as Indicator, the Street as Metaphor

The Anatomy of a Street project departs from the assumption that there is a methodological advantage in looking at a delineated area of the city and measuring change by analysing symptoms surfacing in the urban street. The idea of looking at a particular neighbourhood or a singular street to grasp changes of the whole city draws its inspiration from a variety of sources: the street has long been a philosophical, literary and political topos, the birthplace of ideas, movements and actions, and a generator of specific registers of perception, maintaining a dis-equilibrium between seeing and being seen.⁵

The street is more than a simple type of public space: situated outside of the frequently evoked dichotomy between space and place, the street is, unlike the square or the highway, simultaneously lieu et espace, space and place.

Certainly, the street cannot model the ‘whole’ city. So what is the use of looking at a street as if it were more than ‘just’ a street – a model concentrating the mechanisms that shape and constantly re-configure the city? In its linearity, the urban main street or high street (often more so than large avenues) gives passers-by the sensation of having their finger on the pulse of the whole city. Undoubtedly, there are neighbourhoods, blocks or streets that concentrate signs and symptoms of change in a particular way, thus accumulating symptoms of transformation and giving observers the opportunity to measure changes in their phenomenological directness. Like a gauge or a litmus test, or functioning as a barometer, the street may be seen as the smallest unit where complex urban tendencies can be observed and deciphered.

Of course, to consider the part as containing (or at least indicating) the whole is a tradition whose implications go further than the parameters of the AoaS project. From centuries-old philosophical ideas compatible with theorisations of contemporary science and technology, like Leibniz’s monadology, to literary forms, such as narratology’s ‘mise-en-abîme’ or ‘synecdoche’, looking innovatively at the relationship between the part and the whole still opens a fertile ground for the investigation of various cultural phenomena and the city.

Sometimes the street is a mere metaphor, an idea of community, of authenticity, of sparkling urban life, of a sense of adaptation, of street-smartness. Among thenumerous cultural undertakings that deal with the street metaphor, a most recent source of inspiration is the collaborative media project, Mapping Main Street, launched in the United States in 2008, aiming to deconstruct the generalising notion of ‘Main Street’, as opposed to Wall Street, in post-mortgage breakdown political discourses.⁶

Király and Church Streets

Our choice of Budapest’s Király Street (King Street) in exploring aspects of Budapest’s post-Socialist urban transformation is based on its history and location within the inner neighbourhoods of Budapest. Unlike any other neighbourhoods in the historic core – which follow the beaten path of gradual privatisation, renovation and consequently gentrification – it seems as if Király Street’s population has worked hard on enumerating the widest variety of arguments for and against specific directions in development, and correspondingly, for and against specific ways of urban living. A ‘swinging street’, in the sense that it cannot engage either with the vision that owners of the proliferating design stores paint on its face, or with the values alternative youth culture associates with it, or with the survival economy of second-hand stores.

Király Street is an incubator, where all the current plans for the city are constantly brought into question: mechanisms of corruption or citizen self-organisation, of new developments and heritage protection are tested here. New design and art galleries, squats and ruin bars, second-hand stores and food markets quickly emerge and disappear in this neighbourhood, thus ceaselessly drawing, shifting and re-drawing frontlines between different visions for the city. This is where words such as ‘development’ and ‘heritage’ become floating signifiers, used and abused by any occasional argumentative context.

Pécs’s Király Street is somewhat different, but is similar in its many aspects. The main street of a medium-sized Hungarian town, one would expect Király Street to be the showcase of what the city’s commercial capacity can offer to residents, as well as to tourists: a dense retail district, where strolling is always about discovering new places and meeting new people.

There are many reasons why Király Street is not like that. The economic crisis, combined with the heightened commercial expectations of the municipality in anticipation of the city’s 2010 European Capital of Culture status, have left some parts of the street devastated. Due to the  lack of flexibility in the rental policy and the lack of differentiation in rental fees (according to the leasers’ status and profitability), empty storefronts and buildings wait hopelessly for those who can afford the high rental fees. However, as on its Budapest counterpart, Király Street’s empty buildings do not remain disaffected for long periods: civic initiatives contributed to the mushrooming of alternative cultural venues and a flourishing garden culture in the neighbourhood.

What are the similarities between Paddington’s Church Street and these two high streets in Hungary? Mainly its variety and divisions, the mixture of council housing and Georgian, Victorian façades. The contrast between the two ends of the street: the daily street market, off-license stores, cheap coffee shops, fast-food restaurants; and the high-profile antique stores, new design galleries and fancy cafés. As if an invisible hand drew a line between the two parts: alike in Budapest and Pécs, where the two faces of the streets reveal differing visions, whose long-term compatibility may be desirable – and improbable.

Despite its central location (only minutes away from Regent’s Park, Marylebone, Paddington, Hyde Park and Marble Arch) Church Street is a hidden world trapped between the heavily trafficked Edgware Road, the canal and the railway network. Despite neighbouring the most expensive areas of London, Church Street counts as one of the poorest locations of Europe, with the highest numbers of unemployment, poverty and illiteracy. This often blamed isolation is, however, the very reason that made it possible to obtain and preserve one of the most precious qualities: a unique local feel to a street with a global mixture of communities and multi-cultural groups. Questions posed by the AoaS project about contrasting visions – gentrification, preservation and regeneration, privatisation and globalisation, commercialisation and secularisation – become highly relevant in relation to the current master-planning processes and other initiatives for regeneration that are there to shape Church Street’s future in the long term.

How does the localisation of the global, and the globalisation of the local occur? – and how do they contribute to the dynamics involved in the emergence and maintenance of intra-neighbourhood contrasts that tend toward the constitution of borders? To find answers to this question, we both looked at the chosen streets as particular, local entities, and juxta- posed impressions and reflections, objects and artefacts found in the two Király Streets and Paddington’s Church Street in London.

Belatedness and Transfer

Ideas often travel faster than contexts. While there is a single terminology to describe and analyse urban phenomena, it is worth taking a closer look at seemingly inconsequential details that might alter the way privatisation, gentrification, commercialisation or secularisation are brought about in different locations.

A common thread followed by researchers and theorists of the post-Socialist urban condition was the question of path-dependence.⁷

The arguments defending the idea of path-dependency claimed that cities that have lived through an important period of Socialist-type political and economic governance will not ‘find their way back’ to the kind of development that Capitalist cities have experienced: they will face evolutions which will always depend on their previous development path. Counter-arguments denied the importance of the Socialist path: they claimed that the globalised nature of urban economies forces every city to respond to similar requirements, and thus to follow a converging path.

Without offering any evidence for the case of path-dependency, one must acknowledge the important differences in the rhythm of transformation between Western and Eastern European cities. Natural disasters, major political and economic tendencies set a global scale and time in Europe; however, the centres and peripheries, or the Western vs. Eastern (post-Socialist) bloc function and move according to different rhythms. This difference lies not only in the accelerated pace of transition following the radical political and economic changes of the early 1990s and the consequent rapid liberalisation of real-estate markets, but also to ‘short-cuts’ caused by the ‘de-synchrony’ between development plans and socio-economic conditions.⁸

For instance, gentrification in its classical sense, as a process led by non-established young artists, cultural activists and freelance intellectuals (while being followed closely by real-estate developers), does not exist in the same form in post-Socialist cities. In Budapest, inner city neighbourhoods, however dilapidated, have never been unappealing for developers. From the first moment of the opening of the real-estate market, developers who were conscious of real estate tendencies in the West started investing in neighbourhoods that – according to the theory of gentrification – were expected to rise. New housing arrived in areas still consisting of degraded buildings, thus creating sharp contrasts between long-time residents and newcomers, without the relative continuity of the process of gentrification.

Anatomy of a Street: the exhibition and the catalogue

Contrasts, belatedness, parallels and synchrony are among the main questions that the Anatomy of a Street exhibition and publication raises, while addressing the evolution of various examples of the European high street. On the occasion of the London Festival of Architecture, Paddington is the first venue of the AoaS exhibition, a nomadic project – unfinished by definition, which will travel to and learn from such cities as London, Warsaw, Bratislava and Budapest.

The publication is designed to complement the exhibition, offering historical, sociological and political insight into the forces that produce Király and Church Streets. In the first edition, the essay by Edwin Heathcote sets the tone for a comparative approach between the chosen streets, focusing on their architecture as shaped by the constantly shifting political and economic circumstances. Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield, founders of TIANG (This is Not a Gateway) reflects upon its members personal involvements in research and activism. Allan Siegel evokes the images of the large constructions of Pécs, in the wake of its European Capital of Culture season, while Csaba Ders delves into a deeper analysis of the town’s principal street, Király Street. In his short reflection, Péter Lowas explores Pécs’s self-organised cultural networks in relation to municipal development plans. A text by Béla Káli introduces the complexities of post-Socialist real-estate management. László Muntean analyses claims of heritage protection in a context where the notion of heritage becomes a weapon in an ideological battle. Gabó Bartha tells the story of the activist group KAP-HT that succeeded in preserving the local open-air food market. Ádám Albert’s network visualisation depicts the mechanisms of complex transactions that helped local municipalities outsource public property by making it nearly impossible to follow the circulation of money and real estate.

Another section of the publication comprises an inventory of artworks that fed into our research. There is the photographic archive of Emo˝ke Kerekes’s and Anna Mózes’s portraits of the shopkeepers in Király Street. Péter Rákosi’s series collects theatrical displays of the everyday, and documents shop-windows in the Király Streets of Budapest and Pécs. Miklós Surányi’s series of temporarily inhabited spaces is a poetic but precise documentation of the overlooked, the imprints of everyday activities. Maps designed by Tímea Csaba and Gergely Kovács visualise the internal borders of Budapest’s Király Street neighbourhood, using data based on the research of university students of the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design and the Budapest Technical University.

The inspiration for the AoaS project came from Király Street, with the proposal for local research and a travelling exhibition that gathers material and experiences from different locations before finally coming back and taking place on the very site from which the first impulse originated. Our first venue for the exhibition, Church Street in London, came to us in a natural, almost unintentional way. We first arrived as strangers and wanderers, in the course of two and a half months, gradually becoming familiar and natural to the street, moving in and setting up our temporary office on Church Street.^*

Two letters from Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad and the House of Jonn are the documentation of a work-in-progress of research on-site, observations and early proposals of this period.

Based on the regular visits and conversations with the traders and visitors of the market, Aubergine NW8 is a project by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, a market stall for exchange of food and ideas (the cross-culturally popular staple ingredient aubergine for humble home-cooking recipes) seeking to explore and further understand the ethnically diverse community that surrounds and benefits from Church Street Market.

House of Jonn’s proposal, a gallery-guide system (map, audio-guide and way-finders), is linked to the idea of bringing the gallery to the street, as well as it is a playful reference to the walks of the Situationists, a map and audio-guide linking London with Budapest. Interviews conducted and used in this audio-guide informed profoundly our understanding of the street and the making of this exhibition.

While writing this introduction, the exhibition is still being shaped. Its final evaluation is entrusted to the visitor and will be the task of the second chapter, the next edition of our travelling inquiry.