cities

The Zakkyo Biru of Ginza

I spent a few days in Ginza recently. I always enjoy walking the backstreets and alleys crowded with narrow miscellaneous-occupancy buildings—zakkyo biru—dating from the 1960s through the 1980s, each with a backlit directory sign listing tenants floor by floor. It’s become cliché that Tokyo annihilates its past. It still hurts me to think about the 2022 demolition of Nakagin Capsule Tower, which I visited four years beforehand. But so many zakkyo biru were built that plenty have survived, leaving a landscape of diverse small businesses, in contrast with Manhattan, which is now a sea of chain stores.

During my last half hour in Tokyo, I was on my way back to my hotel to pick up our luggage and head to the airport. I realized I should have been documenting the zakkyo biru, but having a camera in my hand, I still managed a brief survey, which follows. Jorge Almazán of Studiolab has already told the story of the zakkyo biru in Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, but his book explains the system of regulations, inheritance taxes, and zoning that made these buildings possible, not what’s actually in them.

With half an hour left, I didn’t have time for a survey of the architecture, but I could read the directories. Having Anthropic’s Claude in Japan was transformative—it allowed us to read daily specials, not just stale English-language menus—and it was equally indispensable here, letting me read the Japanese signs and look up the individual businesses on the web. A project that, just two years ago would have been unimaginable now just took a bit of time (and a lot of double-checking to catch hallucinations).

Ginza Sazan Building, Tokyo, 1980

The Ginza Sazan Building on Hanatsubaki-dori consists of eight floors and one basement and, like most of these buildings, is served by a single elevator. This building has a horizontal directory alongside the more usual vertical format, the directories stacked like the buildings they index. This building contains a hookah bar in the basement, a FamilyMart at street level, a custom-order suit shop on the second floor, a yakiniku restaurant on the third, three floors of billiards and karaoke, Yasai no Ōsama (“King of Vegetables”) on the seventh, and Ginza Kani Matsu, a high end crab house on the eighth that is only open from November through March, during Matsuba (snow) crab season. Relatively low rents allow such extreme specialization to flourish in the zakkyo biru. Louis Kahn called the city “the place of availabilities … the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life,” for example, run a snow crab restaurant open for half the year.

Ginza Church Hall Building, Tokyo, 1982

Clad in olive-green glazed tile, the Ginza Church Hall Building stands on the site of a Methodist church, founded in 1890 and rebuilt three times. The last rebuilding incorporated the church into this eight-story commercial structure. The chapel, which can hold three hundred people and has a pipe organ, is on the third floor. On one side of this building, the church is clearly legible on the façade. On the other side, in the above photograph, it seems like a paradigmatic zakkyo biru. A bell tower on the corner acts as a hinge between these identities. The current directory includes the Fukuinkai English School, founded in 1885 by members of the Tokyo Gospel Society and at this location since the church opened, a branch of Lemon-sha—a well-known dealer of vintage Leica and Hasselblad cameras, MCM, a German luxury leather goods brand, a law office, and BDC Pilates, Japan’s first group reformer pilates studio. In the lobby, a vitrine displays scale models of the church’s previous incarnations beside a prize-winning sōsaku ningyō (creative doll) diorama by Nakamura Akako, recreating Georges de La Tour’s painting St. Joseph the Carpenter. The display is itself like a zakkyo biru, incommensurate objects next to each other, somehow cohering into one thing.

Ginza Itō Building, Tokyo, 1983

The Ginza Itō Building on Namiki-dori has eight floors and a basement. A red vending machine greets passersby, its attached trash bins one of the few places to discard anything on a Tokyo street (public trash cans were removed after the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack on the subway, their absence reinforced by a waste-sorting system that expects citizens to carry their garbage home). The entrance belies the high-end businesses inside. The directory reads, bottom to top: Ginza Shaving, a women’s facial shaving salon, in the basement, Aya, an eight-seat kaiseki—formal multi-course—restaurant on the first floor, Égoïste cuisine française, a nine-seat counter French restaurant on the second, Liebe, a hair salon and head spa on the third, Bar Four Seasons on the fourth, and Rakurai, a Taiwanese relaxation salon offering massage and foot reflexology on the fifth. The remaining three stories are mysteriously unlisted. The directory gives someone just enough to find a business they already know about, but nothing to someone who doesn’t know it. Where the flagship stores on Chuo-dori, such as Hermès and Rolex, treat the building as an advertisement, the zakkyo biru reduces information to a minimum.

Ginza Avenue Building, Tokyo, 1986

The Ginza Avenue Building on Namiki-dori once again has eight floors, the optimal height in this area, determined by zoning rules that limit building height according to street width. Ginza Sanchome Bar, noted for its Showa-era atmosphere, is in the basement. A branch of the well-known pastry shop, Cafe Miyuki-kan occupies the first two floors, Brand Off, a luxury thrift store, the third, Ginza Avenue Orthodontics the fourth, and a law office on the sixth. A sign of a strawberry parfait replica advertises from the entrance—cream, fruit, and sugar stacked into a tower. The menu and the display of fake food is sweets piled upon sweets: parfaits, mont blanc, millefeuille. Chairs crowd the elevator landing for patrons waiting to be let into the cafe. Whether the seats are ever occupied is unimportant; they signify an abundance of patrons and echo the overflowing parfaits in the signage.

New Center Building, Tokyo, 1981

The New Center Building on Hanatsubaki-dori has six floors. Its street-level directory wraps around a pillar at the entrance. L’Odorante par Minoru Nakijin, a Franco-Japanese restaurant by a chef trained in Grasse (the perfume capital of France), is in the basement. Sushiya no Kanpachi, in Ginza since 1953, occupies the ground floor. Charcoal Grill Ginza Matsumoto is on the second, its lunch menu of Wagyu hamburger steak advertised on a lit board beside the entrance. The two restaurants define the building’s street presence, occupying a postmodern base inflected by traditional Japanese architecture. Above, the upper four floors rise as a white gridded facade, their tenants legible only from the directory. The third floor is between a hostess mini-club named Yukari, a magic bar called Tejinakkuru, and Bar Futara. Chikyūboshi, another French restaurant, this time run by a female chef, takes the fourth. Saburina serves steamed hot pot and teppanyaki on the fifth, and Nico-ginza-Tokyo, a South French gypsy music bar, occupies the sixth. Signage for Matsumoto spills out onto the street. English in zakkyo biru signage typically serves to perform cosmopolitanism for a Japanese clientele, but these signs are different, a bit more desperate in their attempt to lure passing tourists in.

Rem Koolhaas, writing about Manhattan in Delirious New York, called this the Culture of Congestion: the stacking of unrelated programs that speculative real estate produces when it builds vertically on small lots.

Ginza Nishi Gobankan, Tokyo, 1999

The Ginza Nishi Gobankan on Nishi Gobangai—West Fifth Street, a narrow back street running between Namiki-dori and Suzuran-dori—has six floors and two basements. Café de Luton, a kissaten whose owner collects antique clocks—five hundred at last count—and displays them among Art Nouveau antiques, occupies the second basement. On the sidewalk, two signs advertise the same kissaten: one by its French name, the other reading simply “coffee shop, basement two.” A small Pierrot in a red polka-dot suit balances on a silver ball atop one of the lanterns—the one piece of the owner’s collection that made it to street level. Sushi Karaku, an Edomae-style counter unique for serving wine pairings by a chef who is also a certified sommelier, is in the first. Eleventy, an Italian smart-luxury brand, takes the ground and second floors. Moisteane, a skincare salon, is the third. Sakura Travel, a discount airline ticket agency, the fourth. The upper two floors are offices.

Nishi Gobangai Building

Down the street, the Nishi Gobangai Building—named, like the Gobankan, after the street itself—announces its tenants through a silver signage cabinet at the entrance. The backlit panels read: Omatsuya, a charcoal-grilled ita-soba house on the seventh floor, Jukou, a kaiseki restaurant, the members-only Karankiku, and Ushi Goro Yakiniku & Wine Ginza. A folding stand of food photographs and a lunch-course board compete for the same two meters of pavement. Where the Gobankan directory is a clean vertical grid—each tenant assigned a row, at the Gobangai entrance every restaurant fights for visibility in a space barely wider than a doorway. Atelier Bow-Wow’s Made in Tokyo calls such objects at this scale “pet size”—between furniture and building, domesticated, not quite architecture, filling the last available opening. Bow-Wow called this condition “void phobia”—the urban compulsion to occupy every residual space.1

GInza 111 Leisure Buliding, Tokyo, 2013

Next door to the Ginza Church Hall Building is the Ginza 111 Leisure Building, built in 2013 and named for a triple meaning: its 111-tsubo (about 370 square meters) footprint, a total investment of ¥11.1 billion, and three anchor facilities. When I took the photo, I didn’t realize that this entrance was a ruse, offering access to a nondescript, modern thirteen-story building, but that was the point. The developer built a building ten times the size of a typical zakkyo biru—giving this away through the name—but disguised it as one. The result is a perfect simulation of this typology: the functional entrance is a corridor of signage leading to mirror-glass elevator doors. There is no architecture, only a void with its backlit directories. Time Cafe—you rent time, drink all the coffee you want—fills the ground floor and basement. ALBUM, a hair salon that claims to be the most-booked in Japan, with over 400,000 Instagram followers, occupies the eighth and eleventh floors. A twenty-four-hour manga café with locked private rooms and showers, serving as a capsule hotel for anyone who missed the last train, is on the ninth floor. Two cosmetic surgery clinics—one specializing in rhinoplasty, the other in aesthetic dermatology—share the twelfth and thirteenth.

In the US, the Culture of Congestion is long gone and the city is no longer Kahn’s “place of availabilities.” For me, it is only a memory from my childhood in 1970s Chicago, and even then, it was nothing like the zakkyo biru, with their bars and restaurants mysteriously hidden throughout the structure. I have been harping on architecture having lost its sense of direction for some time, and the zakkyo biru isn’t great architecture. On the contrary, it is usually relatively anonymous infill material. In Japan, there is little love for it. Even the name is dismissive—zakkyo means miscellaneous occupancy, implying disorder. In their famous 2001 investigation of the city, Made in Tokyo, Atelier Bow-Wow spoke of “da-me architecture”—no-good architecture—buildings that give “priority to stubborn honesty in response to their surroundings and programmatic requirements, without insisting on architectural aesthetic and form.”2 Jorge Almazán, in Emergent Tokyo, notes that Japanese planners and critics have long treated these buildings as eyesores, symptoms of a city that failed to modernize properly.3

The biggest threat to the zakkyo biru is the iconic architecture that Koolhaas himself has aggressively promoted in this millennium, namely the luxury flagships lining Chuo-dori together with malls like Ginza Six. Structures like Maison Hermès, Chanel, Coach, Bottega Veneta, and Louis Vuitton are built icons—architecture reduced to a logo, enlarged to the scale of a building. None of these structures has any relationship to the architectural history of Ginza. They could stand on Fifth Avenue, in Polanco, or Dubai without altering a single detail. The ideal site for this sort of architecture isn’t even the city, it’s the duty-free zone; the flagship stores are Marc Augé’s non-places made architectural.4 In his last consequential essay, “Junkspace” (2002), Koolhaas described this as the terminal state, where branding and starchitecture replace the programmatic independence that congestion once produced.5 The Chanel building stacks a concert hall above a boutique above a gallery, but it is a simulation of the culture of congestion—it is a single organism simulating variety.

In contrast to the corporate strategy of junkspace, the zakkyo biru is the product of an accumulation of independent decisions, each floor a wager that a snow crab restaurant, a magic bar, or a vintage camera dealer will find its public. The flagship store knows its audience before it opens; the zakkyo biru discovers one. The flagship store exposes itself and demands passersby enter; the zakkyo biru seduces with mystery. The zakkyo biru directory lists a taxonomy of incommensurable things, each entry as precise and arbitrary as a listing in a Chinese encyclopedia.

  1. Atelier Bow-Wow (Momoyo Kaijima, Junzo Kuroda, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto), Made in Tokyo (Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, 2001), 24-25. ↩
  2. Atelier Bow-Wow, Made in Tokyo, 9. ↩
  3. Jorge Almazán, Joe McReynolds, Naoki Saito, and Studiolab, Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City (Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2022), 60–96. ↩
  4. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). ↩
  5. Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 175–190. ↩

2020 in Review

Grayness in Maine
Grayness on Mount Desert Island, 2020.

According to conventional chronological schemas, 2020—not 2019—is the last year of the 2010s.* This is convenient since, as I pointed out in last year’s premature review of the last decade, the 2010s were “the decade of shit” and 2021 is a stinking pile of shit. The worst decade since World War II ended with the worst year since 1945.

My “year in review” posts are usually almost as late as my taxes and when I finished last year’s post on February 12, we were all well aware that COVID was out there. Now, no question that I missed the severity of the pandemic back then, but I was on the money about its psychic effects. For all of the horror of COVID, it isn’t horrible enough. COVID is banal. Instead of bleeding out through all of our orifices as with Ebola, COVID is “a bad case of the flu” that leaves people dead or with debilitating cardiovascular and neurological ailments. But how different is my diagnosis, really, from what happened?

Now sure, this year [2020] we’ve already had firestorms the size of Austria ravaging Australia, a rain of rockets in Baghdad, Ukrainian jetliners getting shot out of the sky, a deadly pandemic in China caused by people eating creatures that they really shouldn’t, and the failure of the Senate to uphold the rule of law, but the banality of it all is crushing. While the Dark Mountain set drinks wine around a campfire, gets henna tattoos, and sings along to songs about the end of nature, for the rest of us, it’s just an exhausting, daily slog through the unrelentingly alarming headlines.

COVID brought us yet more crushing banality. The Idiot Tyrant is gone, but we are trying his impeachment yet again. Everything changes, but nothing changes. We were all the Dark Mountain set this year, sitting around our campfires, singing songs about the End. It was another atemporal slog, one day bleeding into another, every day a Sunday in a country where everything is closed on Sundays and there is nothing to do, every day stranger and more disconnected than the last, something captured in comedienne Julie Nolke’s series of videos entitled “Explaining the Pandemic to My Past Self.”

Amidst the disconnection, the Jackpot—or William Gibson’s term for a slow-motion apocalypse—cranked up a couple of notches. Just surviving the year was an accomplishment. The balance of life has been thoroughly disrupted and that disruption isn’t going away any time soon. It’s not just COVID: we now feel certain that there will be more pandemics, more massive wildfires, and more superstorms in our future. The Earth isn’t dying (sorry, climate doomers), but there will be huge losses of species worldwide, human population decline is well underway in advanced societies (the US is finally on the bandwagon here), and massive deaths will take place across the planet until the population comes back to a sustainable level decades from now.

But the premise of the Jackpot is that it isn’t a final apocalypse: there will be another side. In his Twitter feed (@GreatDismal), even Gibson focuses on the horrific and unjust nature of the Jackpot, but there will be winners, selected on the basis of wealth and sheer dumb luck. What might this say about the US election and the fact that 46% of Americans voted for a cretin? Now, there is nothing particularly new about melding Tourette’s and dementia into a public speaking style, there are plenty of lunatics sitting on their porches screaming obscenities at their lawn ornaments. Everybody knows that Uncle Scam’s persona as a billionaire—or rather the King of Debt (his own term!)—is an act. The man with the golden toilet is not a successful businessman. He is weak, a loser who can’t stay married or stay out of bankruptcy court. Four years of misrule ended in abject failure: defeat in both electoral and popular votes, being banned from social media and, with his businesses failing, being forced out of office in shame to face an unprecedented second impeachment, an array of civil litigation as well as criminal indictments for fraud, tax evasion, incitement to riot, and rape. But this—not a misguided notion of him as a success—is the real point of his appeal. The short-fingered vulgarian is a life-long loser, a reverse Midas whose every touch turn gold to lead. But in the face of the Gibsonian Jackpot, his appeal was not as a stupid version of Homer Simpson, grabbing whatever scraps he can and, when that failed, LARPing as President, destabilizing society, and just blowing everything up.

LARPing was big in 2020, which saw the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Witmer by wingnut idiots, various insane protests by COVID deniers, the attempted coup of the Capitol Insurrection, and the riots developing after the Black Lives Matter protests. BLM was the standout among these, not only a good, just cause, but also because the majority of the protests themselves were peaceful—such as the one in our town of Montclair, New Jersey. None of that was LARPing, but the riots that accompanied it were. For the most part, this was less people with genuine greivances and more Proud Boys, Boogaloos, anarchists, and grifters who came in to loot and burn whatever they could down. Although there were kooky moments on the Left like the Capital Hill Automonous Zone, Antifa, for however much it exists, didn’t do much, certainly proving to be far less trouble than white supermacist-infiltrated police forces in paramilitary gear. Still, the widely-vaunted second Civil War never came about and the arteriosclerotic LARPers on the Right limped off the field in defeat after their they got a spanking at the January putsch.

A number of observers at both the Capitol Insurrection and CHAZ —including some of the idiots who took part in it—noted that these events felt much like a game, specifically an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). In a typical ARG, players look for clues both online—think of the QAnon drops, the Trumpentweets, or the disinformation dished out by the skells at 4chan, 8chan, and so on—as well as out in the world. Jon Lebkowsky, in a post at the Well’s State of the World and Clive Thompson over at Wired compare QAnon to an ARG. Indeed, gaming is taking the place of religion (whichever grifter figures out how to meld this with Jesus and his pet dinosaurs will get very rich indeed), with the false promise that playing the game and winning will deliver one to the other side of the Jackpot. Somewhere, I read that when asked what he would do differently if he had made Blade Runner a decade later, Ridley Scott replied that he would be able to skip the elaborate sets and just point the camera down the streets of 1990s Los Angeles. Today, the same could be said for the Hunger Games today.

But not everything was LARPing. If Cheeto Jesus is an icon for LARPing losers, Biden was elected on the premise of staving off the Jackpot by returning adults to the White House. This is not a bad thing, we might as well try. Still, from the perspective of Jackpot culture, the most interesting political development of the year was the candidacy of Andrew Yang whose cheery advocacy of Universal Basic Income (aka the Freedom Dividend) masked the dark, Jackpot-like nature of his predictions. Let’s quote Yang’s campaign site on this: “In the next 12 years, 1 out of 3 American workers are at risk of losing their jobs to new technologies—and unlike with previous waves of automation, this time new jobs will not appear quickly enough in large enough numbers to make up for it.” No matter how friendly Yang’s delivery, there is a grim realism to his politics, an acceptance that things will never be better for a massive sector of the population. Certainly some individuals will find ways to use their $1,000 a month freedom dividend as a subsidy to do something new and amazing, but 95% will not. Rather, they will form a new and permanent underclass as they fade into extinction. Again, the point of Yang’s candidacy isn’t the cheerleading for math and STEM, it’s the frank acknowledgement that the Jackpot is already here.

On the other hand, toward the end of the year, Tyler Cowen suggested that we might be nearing the end of the Great Stagnation (he is, of course, the author of an influential pamphlet on the topic) and you can find a good summary of the thinking, pro and con by Cowen’s student Eli Dourado here. In this view, advances such as the mRNA vaccine, the spread of electric, somewhat self-driving vehicles, the pandemic-induced rise of remote work, and huge drop in the cost of spaceflight are changing things radically and could lead to a real rise in Total Factor Productivity from the low level it has been stuck at since 2005. Is this a sign of the end of the Jackpot? Unlikely. That won’t come until a series of more massive technological breaks, probably (but not necessarily) involving breakthroughs in health (the end of cancer, heart disease, and dementia), the reversal of climate change, working nanotechnology, and artificial general intelligence. But still, there are signs that early inflection points are at hand.

Personally, we experienced one of these inflection points when we replaced our aging (and aged) BMWs with Teslas. I wound up getting a used Tesla Model S last January and then immediately turned around and ordered a brand new Model Y that we received in June. No more trip to the gas station, and while “Full-self driving” is both expensive and nowhere near fully self driving, it is a big change. Longer road trips—which under the pandemic have been to nurseries on either side of the Pennsylvania border to buy native plants—have become much easier, even if I still have to keep my hands on the wheel and fiddle with it constantly to prevent self-driving from disengaging. But harping on too much about the incomplete nature of self-driving is poor sport: in the last year, Tesla added stop light recognition to self-driving and a new update in beta promises to make city streets fully navigable. Less than a decade ago, self driving was only a theoretical project. Now I use it for 90% of my highway driving. That’s a sizable revolution right there. Also, the all-electric and connected nature of these cars makes getting takeout and sitting in climate-controlled comfort in my vehicle when on the road a delight. Electric vehicles were a big success this year and in our neighborhood which is a bellwether for the adoption of future technology (when I saw iPhones replace Blackberries on the bus and train into the city, I bought a bit of Apple stock and made a small fortune) and Teslas have replaced BMWs as the most common vehicle in driveways.

Back to the pandemic, which accelerated a sizable shift in habitation patterns. Throughout the summer, there was a lot of nonsense from neoliberal journalists and urban boosters about how cities are going to come back booming, but with more bike lanes, wider sidewalks, less traffic, and more awesome tactical urbanist projects to appeal to millennials. Lately, however, those voices have fallen silent and with good reason. In this suburb the commuter train platforms are still bare in the mornings and the bus into the city, once packed to standing room only levels every evening, hasn’t run in five months. A friend who works in commercial real estate says that occupancy in New York City offices is at 15% of pre-pandemic levels. Business air travel is still off a cliff. Remote work isn’t ideal for everyone and every job, but neither was going into the office. For sure, the dystopian open offices, co-working spaces, and offices as “fun” zones are done and finished. People are renovating their houses, or upsizing, to better live in a post-pandemic world of remote work. Another friend who works for a large ad agency told me that they did not renew their lease for office space and do not plan to ever go back to in person work, at least for the vast majority of the staff. When employees gain over two hours a day from not commuting and corporations save vast fortunes on rent, remote work seems a lot more appealing. Retail sales here and in the surrounding towns have gone through the roof, just as they have in many suburbs.

But it isn’t just suburbia that has prospered at the expense of the city, exurbia has returned too. Way back in 1955, Auguste Comte Spectorsky identified a growing American cultural class that he dubbed “the exurbanites” made up of “symbol manipulators” such as advertisers, musicians, artists, and other members of what we today call the creative class. Spectorsky observed that many of these individuals eventually tended to drift back to the city. This time may be different. After two decades in the city, the creative class is turning to places outside the city with attractive older houses and midcentury modern properties, walkable neighborhoods (virtually all of Montclair, for example, has sidewalks), good schools (which generally mean high property taxes but are an indicator for a smarter, engaged populace), amenities like parks and places to hike, decent bandwidth, as well as independent restaurants, shops, and cultural attractions. There will always be variations in taste: some people really do want to eat at Cheesecake Factory and live in a Toll Brothers McMansion, but these will appeal to relatively few of the people fleeing cities at this point. Thus, the Hudson Valley—full of older, more interesting architecture, great natural resources and quirky towns—is booming. I predict some reversion to toward the mean after the pandemic ends and some of the people who fled to the country realize they aren’t suited to a place without Soulcycle, but this will be only a partial and temporary reversion.

I predict that even after the pandemic ends, there will be a greater interest in self-sufficiency among young people who move to suburbia and exurbia. Manicured laws will be less important than vegetable gardens. Homesteading, permaculture, and a drive back to the land not seen since the 1960s are under way. It would be a very good thing if the next generation was more in touch with their land and less prone to hiring “landscapers” who treat properties as sites subject to industrial interventions such as chemical fertilizer for lawns, a phalanx of gas-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers to remove any stray biological matter.

As far as cities go, the pandemic is triggering a necessary contraction. The massive annihilation of real estate value it has caused should go a long way to undo the foolish notion that urban real estate is always a great investment. It’s not, just ask anyone who bought a house in Detroit in 1965. Real estate in first and second tier global cities has become wildly expensive, disconnected from the underlying fundamentals. When individuals are paying rents that absorb over 30% of their salaries to investor-owners who are not covering their mortgage with those rents, something is very wrong. This broken system has been able to function due to the perceived hedonic value of restaurants, bars, and cultural events, but these things too have been failing over recent years. Long prior to the pandemic, the cost of rent decimated independently-owned restaurants and retailers, with the latter also hurt by on-line shopping. The golden age of dining out (if it really was the golden age… I would say that better food could have been had in other, less copycat eras) was already declared over in 2019. “High-rent blight,” in which entire streets’ worth of storefronts were empty due to ludicrous rents, has been common for some time now. Tourists made up more and more of the street crowds while loss-leader flagship stores for chains like Nike and Victoria’s Secret replaced local businesses. With the hedonic argument for staying in the city rapidly disappearing, it was only a matter of time before individuals began departing and, in New York, population had begun to drop by 2018 (see more on all of this in Kevin Baker’s piece for the Atlantic, “Affluence Killed New York, Not the Pandemic”). Perversely, this is a good thing as it will likely lead to a bust in commercial real estate prices and a decline in unoccupied or AirBNB’d apartments, thus making global cities like New York places that have potential again. Moreover, many second tier cities such as St. Louis, Kansas City, and Cleveland are experiencing new growth as individuals able to work remotely are looking for places that are less expensive—and thus have more potential—than New York or San Francisco.

These shifts are huge and for the better. As I tried to tell my colleagues at the university, there is no housing crisis, at least not in the US and Europe, there is only an appearance of one because of the uneven distribution of housing: a glut in some areas, a shortfall in others. The pandemic has likely undone this a bit. Of course, places that are too politically Red, too full of chains, too full of copycat McMansions are unlikely to come back anytime soon, if ever. The Jackpot continues.

Still, I’m observing a perversely rosy future for the urban (and suburban and exurban) environment is the Biden administration’s interest in infrastructure. Back in 2008, I shocked design critics when I stated that there would be no progress in infrastructure for the foreseeable future. “But, Obama,” they complained. “But, Obama,” I clapped back, “just appointed Larry Summers as his chief economic advisor and Summers will bail out the banks, not fund infrastructure.” I expect the opposite from Biden who has adopted a “nothing left to lose” position as purportedly one-term President, is a devotee of train travel and is eager to make great progress on climate change. Appointing Pete Buttigieg, one of his two smartest opponents in the primary (the other being Andrew Yang, of course), to Secretary of Transportation is a key move. This will be Buttigieg’s opportunity to prove himself on the national stage and he will fight hard to do that, just as Biden expects. Expect more electrification across the board and, I suspect, more advances with self-driving vehicles. Although certain measures—such as, in the New York City area alone, the Gateway Tunnel between New Jersey and New York, now delayed over a decade thanks to Chris Christie and Donald Trump’s vindictiveness against commuter communities that would not vote for them and the reconstruction of Port Authority Bus Terminal—will help cities, again, I predict more emphasis on decentralization and activity outside the city.

All this may have salutary cultural implications. The global city is played out. Little of interest happens in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, or Barcelona. These cities are too expensive for the sort of experimentation that made them great cultural centers and the diffusive nature of the Internet, capitalism, and overtourism have made them all the same. Residents of cities that have been victims of overtourism have seen this as an opportunity to reset, while the physical isolation of cities is going to increase reliance on local institutions. With some luck, all this leads to a new underground, with greater difference creating greater diversity and potential. Of fashion, Bruce Sterling writes, “Fashion will re-appear, and some new style will dominate the 2020s, but the longer it takes to emerge from its morgue-like shadow, the more radically different it will look.” The same could be true of all culture. Globalization was an incredibly powerful force but has been played out. I don’t agree with the protectionist instincts of the Trumpenproles but today culture’s hope is to thrive on the basis of the difference between places and cultures, not on greater sameness. Architecture has been very slow to react to all of this, in part because many intelligent young people have drifted into other fields, like startups, but I am optimistic that we might soon get past the ubiquitous white-painted brick walls and wood common table (the architecture of the least effort possible, to match fashion and food driven by the least effort possible), the tired old Bilbao-effect, and quirky development pseudo-modernism.

So much optimism on my part! Even I am shocked that I am so positive. But why not? The end to this exhausted first phase of network culture is overdue. Time for a new decade, at last.

*The reason for this is that there is no Year Zero. 31 December 1BC is followed by 1 January 1AD.

Infrastructural Fields

One of my favorite journals, Quaderns has posted an essay that I wrote for them a year ago, entitled "Infrastructural Fields." There, I make the argument that architects need to embrace the new, invisible world of Hertzian space as they design. What are the tools by which we will do this? How will we create an architecture that, as Toyo Ito once stated, can float between the physical and the virtual world? If Ito set out to do this in the Sendai Mediatheque, why have architects been so reluctant to go further?