Lock living: Urban sprawl in Mediterranean cities

Lock living: Urban sprawl in Mediterranean cities

Francesc Munoz,

Department of Geography, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain


"‘Our house isn’t difficult to find. But here’s a map’. He gave me a sheet of paper with many different lines on it indicating primary and secondary roads, paths and things like that, with arrows pointing in the four cardinal directions. A large X marked the location of his home"

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

1. Introduction: metropolitan dynamics in the "multiplied city"
During recent decades, structural changes in the economy and the proliferation of digital technology in communication networks have produced significant impacts, such as the dispersion of population, production, and consumption over space. New strategic spaces have appeared within the periphery of urban and metropolitan areas. At the same time, we also encounter a redefinition of economic functions and territorial potentialities of urban cores or, to be more precise, of parts of the central cities integrated in far reaching metropolitan processes. These processes of spatial de-concentration show today how the forms of centrality are not exclusively urban (or at least not in its traditional meaning of this concept). We witness processes where the spatial limits of production and consumption have ceased to coincide with the limits of the more densely occupied urban space. These dynamics re-organise a metropolitan network that tends to take a dispersed spatial form ([Soja, 2000 and Indovina, 1991]).

In the discussion of this multiplication of the urban phenomenon, two simultaneous dynamics must be considered. First, there is a multiplication of forms of habitation. In the pre-industrial city, these were clearly defined by the model of the "inhabitant of one place", but have been multiplied and have given way to a whole range of possible situations: the "resident", the different types of "users" or "visitors", who are more or less specialized. Additionally one could create a new category that would synthesize these in the different temporalities that represent as much habitation as the utilization of territory. The "territoriants" ([Muñoz, 2002]) are those metropolitan inhabitants that engage daily in different activities in different parts of the territory. They are not only "inhabitants" or "residents" of a place, but are "users" of other places and "visitors", intensively and extensively, of other places, depending on the time of the day or the day of the week.

Second, there is a multiplication of both the scale and the typology of mobility flows. In the first instance, because of the enlargement of the territorial arcs of mobility and the growing numbers of people involved in these movements, and in the second instance, because of the expanding new itineraries linked to consumption, leisure, and the temporal use of the metropolitan space (for instance, at weekends).

In the last fifteen years, the cities of southern Europe, the centres of the "Mediterranean" urban tradition, have witnessed these far-reaching changes in their territorial structure. The rapid processes of metropolization have been reflected in the appearance of new urban centralities, in zones once considered as being on the fringe of the processes of urbanization. A wide range of territories, previously labelled "peripheral" have, in this way, assumed new functions and their urban value has increased, as they are favoured by the intense flows of people, goods and information.

2. Landscaping urban sprawl in Mediterranean cities
As far as residential territory is concerned, this new scenario has been defined by the development of a new model of production of built space, characterised by the proliferation of low-density housing typologies. The detached terrace-houses and semi-detached houses condense the new type of residential landscape in the metropolitan peripheries of the cities of southern Europe. Cities that already exist on a regional scale in Spain, France or Italy, clearly reveal this new development along the edges of the motorways and orbital ring roads.1

Second ring towns in the metropolitan regions of Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, in Spain, or Milan and Turin, in Italy, show a residential landscape that was, until not so long ago, exclusively associated with the cities of the Anglo-Saxon urban tradition. This is the same "sprawlscape" ([Ingersoll, 1999]) that has paradoxically assumed, in the last two decades, a fundamental role in explaining the metropolitan processes at work in the so-called "Mediterranean compact cities". Thus, for example, in the case of the metropolitan region of Barcelona, , 2 the volume of newly-built single-family houses was running at more than 40% during the period 1985–2000 in zones close to the central city, and in the case of certain areas in second metropolitan rings, the production of single-family houses in this period even topped 70%, especially in small and medium-sized towns.

This is dispersed residential production that has increasingly overflowed metropolitan boundaries and come to present itself more on a regional scale. In functional and morphological terms, the traditional Mediterranean model of the dense and compact city is subsumed into more diffuse urban sprawl—a model of localisation of dispersed housing that "selects" territories and landscapes for this growth, on the basis of how well they are connected to the metropolitan motorway network, and, simultaneously, how near they are from the less or non urbanised areas of the region.

3. ‘A-territorial’ landscapes: thematization and commodification of residential space
From the point of view of the kind of landscape that characterises these new urban environments, the process of metropolization shows how very different areas are becoming formally closer to one another. Furthermore, these sprawling low-density residential areas show the proliferation of territories manifesting the same morphological criteria in different cities. In short, a new suburb in a Mediterranean city looks much the same as the archetypical images of the American "dreamscape" of suburbia.

A new "semi-detached" landscape appears and reveals itself as composed, designed and structured as a discontinuous sequence of physical elements: the semi-detached houses themselves, the roundabouts for the distribution of domestic traffic, or the medium and large shopping malls. In these urban contexts, the easy acceptance of repetitive standardised discontinuities suggested by Edward Relph is progressively becoming the main urban feature:

To drive around a city in the 1980’s is encounter a limited range of different types of townscapes, indefinitely repeated. These are, in fact, so different that they seem to bear little or no relationship to one another. There are drab modernist renewal projects, gleaming towers of conspicuous administration, gaudy commercial strips, quiet residential suburbs, the blank boxes and great parking lots of shopping malls, quaint heritage districts, industrial states; then there are more modernist housing projects, more suburbs another commercial strip, another industrial district, another post-modern townscape, another suburb…. It seems that modern life is filled with an easy acceptance of repetitive standardised discontinuities". [Relph, 1987]

From a cultural and sociological perspective, these standardised landscapes clearly show the production of residential areas designed on the basis of a thematization of the American sprawling city. This aesthetic discourse can be seen in the form and materials of specific elements such as porches, front doors, façades or chimneys, and in each of the domestic spaces that compose the housing. This thematized domesticity condenses different iconographic traditions. First, a "mythic" iconography—the "Mediterranean" taste synthesized in such decorative elements as the vegetation of gardens and parterres. Second, a "vacational" iconography—the swimming pool, the Sunday barbecue and the play area at the back of the house or in the garden. Third, a "filmic" iconography—the "open-plan" kitchen, the living room, the car parked in the garage, or the whole idea of the house and the motorway. This third iconographic tradition is the more complex and refers to the images offered during the second half of the 20th century, not only by the American cinema but also by cartoon films. The success of some of the Warner Brothers and Disney characters provide good examples: the Bugs-Bunny adventures, for instance, do not take place in the city but in the suburb, in those suburban landscapes intensively developed after the Second World War in the US. This is an urban landscape very different from with the city images that used to appear in the former cartoon films made in the previous decades. As Anthony Sutcliffe suggests, the urban images shown in the Betty Boop stories, for example, are closer to the landscape of the dense vertical city ([Sutcliffe, 1992]).

Through these very different iconographic elements, the semi-detached residential landscapes are presented as the perfect urban environment to be in contact with nature and the countryside. This iconographic display dresses them up as private-urban-ecological-thematic paradises and, in this sense, dresses them up as places to smile: enjoying both simultaneously nature and some selected attributes of urban life, consuming part-time thematic versions of the suburb and the suburban dream, appropriating the softer and cleaner images of urban sprawl offered by a residential landscape that becomes image more than territory and, in this sense, a commodity.

Similar processes to those that have been taking place in urban central areas during the last decades can be observed in this very different scenario. The "domestication by cappuccino" suggested by Sharon [Zukin, 1998a and Zukin, 1998b]—referring to urban public spaces clearly orientated to consumption—can be redefined as "domestication by barbecue" in Mediterranean city sprawlscapes. A commodified (semi-detached) landscape perfectly adapted to the temporal use of territory, according to the hour of the day or whether it is a working day or the weekend:

"I could live….without a calendar or a clock. When I make up feeling a bit dazed, I know the day is just beginning by the red lights of the cars that heading off to the city, and I know the day is at an end when I see the white lights of the cars coming back.

And how do you know if it’s a Saturday or a Sunday?

Because those mornings there are no cars, but men in track suits on their way to buy the bread and the paper".

Félix Bayón, Adosados (1995)

4. The urban future of the "semi-detached" landscapes
Paradoxically, and despite this previously mentioned iconographic display that supports commodification, it must be said that, in the urban context of the Mediterranean cities, these new residential areas represent a kind of urbanisation which is clearly anti-ecological and even more unsustainable than the model of the dense and compact city against which they are willing to appear as an alternative. In this way, the multiplication of these landscapes represents evident risks in two different directions. First, these new urban developments can be labelled as clearly unsustainable from an environmental perspective. Urban un-sustainability resulting from the very high consumption of territory, in relation both to the physical characteristics of low-density housing and to the land uses that go hand in hand with this kind of territorial transformation (the infrastructure required for the private automobile, as highway connections and roundabouts, shopping malls, large retail outlets, sport areas or peripheral specialised leisure centres) ([Nel.lo, 2002]). , 3 This is an un-sustainability that also stems from the indiscriminate use of the car associated with this type of urban growth. This is because, in most cases, the new inhabitants of these semi-detached environments continue to work in a different city, to which they have more convenient access by private car on the motorway network than by public transport., 4

An extremely high mobility results from the restructuring of labour and residential markets on a metropolitan scale. In environmental terms, the more serious risk deals with the rising consumption of energy, water, and other resources: the new residential forms, often offered in packages that include community and private gardens and swimming pools, exacerbate problems of supply and pollution that, in turn, create distributional problems in the access to resources and in the financing of environmental policies.

Second, besides the evident environmental risks aforementioned, other cultural and social risks also concern the minimal urban complexity and the lack of urban diversity which characterise these residential areas: a problem that affects the realm of urban design and of the public space. The urban form resulting from such a dispersed urbanisation is characterised by its extreme simplicity, it is a new type of city, in which the formulas of intervention developed in compact central areas are surely no longer valid. This is a public space that cannot be laid out on the basis of attributes rooted in the morphological features of the 19th century city: the street, the plaza, the park and the market. What the semi-detached landscapes represent is nothing other than a new kind of urban habitat, one that calls for a rethinking of the meaning of the Mediterranean city, because it may well be that it too, as we have conceived of it in the past, has ceased to exist.

But the simplicity of the urban matrix and the use of urban space go hand in hand with a simplicity that also characterises the social structure of these new neighbourhoods. They are inhabited by the same typology of urban population: households made up of couples and families with common trends in reference to their professional skills, consumption habits and urban behaviour. This lack of social diversity represents a very significant change regarding one of the main attributes that has historically characterised the traditional Mediterranean compact city. This is not a superficial issue: considering the city in social terms, the lack of human diversity means, at the very end, the lack of urban diversity and, consequently, the simplification of the city understood as a complex system of relations.

These semi-detached urban environments represent, at the very end, a city inhabited by "equals", a city where the presence of the "difference" decreases progressively. Residential spaces produced as images for consumption more than as places to be inhabited, or more properly, it is because they are offered as images to be consumed that they are finally inhabited; a residential landscape designed and consumed, as will be discussed now more in detail, as a commodity.

5. "Lock living": safer, protected, watched…commodified
In her book "Loft living" [Zukin, 1989] discussed decades ago the former processes of urban gentrification in New York as directly associated with urban renovation and the change in urban lifestyles summarized by the new consumption patterns of urban middle classes. The commodification process taking place in the Mediterranean sprawlscapes also refers both to the residential space and the inhabitants’ lifestyles and can be clearly illustrated considering one important element characterising urban semi-detached environments: the increasing development of security conditions and safety devices associated with urban design. In terms of consumption and social identification, the appearance of a "Lock lifestyle" can be suggested.

The new detached and semi-detached neighbourhoods in Mediterranean cities do not include walls separating them from the non-urban surroundings but they are designed offering security devices and safety conditions. "Bunkers" and refuges complementing houses and gardens represent the most extreme case, meanwhile security systems and surveillance devices are the more successful products provided by private security companies. In the case of Spain, the most well known domestic security product consist in a standard residence alarm "kit" composed of three single elements: the volumetric detector, the alarm itself and the control keyword to activate the system with a numeric code. Besides this simple alarm system, the other more sophisticated product which is offered by security companies is so-called "security surveillance". That is to say, putting the spaces of the house considered more unsafe and vulnerable under surveillance with CCTV systems., 5

90% of the demand for these security systems and devices is coming from private households that are located in detached and semi-detached neighbourhoods in the city outskirts., 6 "Protected by…" and "Connected 24 hours" are common highlights in the brochures of these new low-density housing promotions that are offered with "security box" and security alarm pre-installation. Brand-new residential areas, where unwelcoming adverts in doors and entrances, aggressive dogs in private gardens and fenced alarms in windows compose the domestic landscape created by private security.

"Lock lifestyle" refers to this obsession for protection and the creation of security landscapes, but this necessity of safety and control probably has much more to do with the willingness for consumption than with a real anxiety for protection. This is to say that in "Lock living" environments, security design has become a commodity and, in this sense, a new sign of socio-economic status. Following Andrew [Kirby, 2002], this can explain why the walls bordering new "gated communities" in USA are again reproduced inside the urban space separating not only community neighbourhoods but also even the individual houses. Private spaces become, in this way, "differentiated" from the rest in terms of how valuable the (protected) property is.

In "Lock living" urban worlds, living "protected-defended-watched-under surveillance" becomes a sign of economic success, individual appurtenance and social acceptance. In consequence, design for protection-defence-surveillance is now an important element for guaranteeing and increasing urban value in both public and residential spaces. In other words, the safer and more protected an urban area is designed, the more the users or inhabitants would perceive it to be valuable.

Considering this, it is not difficult to explain the appearance of new "self-choice-surveillance" services, a new type of urban service that is paid for by the users, the same as electricity or gas supply, consisting in the possibility of being "under surveillance" within the urban space.

In Great Britain, for instance, in communities such as Winchester, "self-choice-surveillance" is offered as any other urban service: the inhabitants can ask to be "watched" by the CCTV circuits located in streets, commercial plazas and roundabouts by phoning and informing the company offering this new service about the itinerary that will be taken during the day. Surveillance cameras and CCTV integrated circuits, in these urban contexts, are not devices for protection and safety as much as commodities that differentiates users from non-users, safer from non-safe inhabitants, citizens from non-citizens.

As was said before, semi-detached urban environments in Mediterranean cities represent a kind of territory that has been "equalized": residential and public spaces where urban and social "difference" is no longer considered as an added urban value. Mediterranean cities have been conceived, and they are still considered, as a reservoir of urban diversity because of the archetypal image of density, urban complexity and social diversity. However, the increasing development of semi-detached urban sprawl shows a very different urban scenario: an urban landscape designed and produced as a commodity. A process of commodification that, as has been previously discussed, not only affects the built space but also the type of lifestyle and urban life.

Living between "equals", semi-detached, dressed up to smile.


References
Ingersoll, 1999. R. Ingersoll, Sprawlscape: il paesagio come redenzione. In: A. de Rossi, Editor, Durbiano, Giovanni; Governa, Francesca; Reinerio, Luca; Robiglio, Matteo. Linee nel paesaggio. Esplorazioni nei territori della trasformazione, UTET Università, Torino (1999).

Indovina, 1991. F. Indovina, La citta fine millenio. , Franco Angeli, Milano (1991).

Kirby, 2002. Kirby, A (2002) From Berlin wall to garden wall: boundary formation around the home. 98th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles.

Muñoz, 2002. F. Muñoz, The Multiplied city. Metropolis of territoriants. In: F. Musco, Editor, City, Architecture, Landscape, Instituto Universitario di Arquitettura di Venezia (IUAV)-SdS, Venezia (2002), pp. 75–109.

Nel.lo, 2002. O. Nel.lo, Catalunya, ciudad de ciudades. , Milenio, Lleida (2002).

Relph, 1987. E. Relph, The Modern Urban Landscape. , The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore (1987).

Soja, 2000. E. Soja, Post-metropolis. Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. , Blackwell, London (2000).

Sutcliffe, 1992. A. Sutcliffe, La ciudad en el cine. Historia Urbana 1 (1992), pp. 7–24.

Zukin, 1989. S. Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. , Rutgers University Press, New York (1989).

Zukin, 1998a. Zukin, S (1998a) ‘Politics and aesthetics of public space: the American model’. In Real City, Ideal City. Meaning and Function in the Modern Urban Space, Centre for Contemporary Culture Barcelona, Barcelona.

Zukin, 1998b. S. Zukin, Urban lifestyles: Diversity and standardisation in spaces of consumption. Urban Studies 35 5/6 (1998b), pp. 825–840.


Corresponding author. Tel.: +34-581-34-29.


1 The freeway Torino-Piacenza (north of Italy) and the new residential spaces along the freeway C-58 (north of Barcelona, Spain) are two good examples.

2 The Metropolitan Region of Barcelona represents a population of 4.2 million people; that is some 70% of the total population of Catalunya living in less than 10% of the territory.

3 As an example, urban land use in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona has grown at a very fast pace over the last century, but very intensively during the last two decades. In 1880, for instance, of the 323,000 hectares of the region, only 1763 were urbanised. This figure rose to 21,482 hectares in 1972 and to 45,000 hectares in 1992. In other words, the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona has consumed more land since 1975 than during the whole previous century with an average consumption of land rising to 1000 hectares per year, which equals to 3 hectares per day.

4 In the case of the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona, in 1990, the 35.6% of the population worked in a different place where they lived. Ten years later, in 2000, people inhabiting and working in different places represent 47.6% of metropolitan population.

5 Private security companies in Spain have increased their global profit 45% from 1996–2001: from around 1000 million $ in 1996 to 1562 million $ in 2001. The estimated growth for 2002 will represent an increased profit of 1800 million $. The sales of the "standard security kit", which costs around $300–360 per year plus a tax of around $20 monthly paid, increased 45% in the last year alone. The cost of the "security surveillance" systems are much higher, rising to $115,000 per year. These CCTV systems increased 10% in the last year and they are normally provided associated with private policy. In fact, private policy employees increased to 100,000 by the end of 2002. This means double the number of workers counted in 1996. In 2003, with this rhythm of growth maintained, private policing will have overtaken the 120,000 employees working in public police forces controlled by the national government.

6 The cost of these new detached and semi-detached houses rises in Spain to around $270,000–325,000, a price that makes them affordable to high-income families and to those middle-class households able to dedicate an important part of their yearly income to pay the mortgage expenses. In the case of Barcelona, the proportion of the average family annual income dedicated to housing expenses, the payment of mortgage costs basically, rose to 54% in 2001.



Cities
Volume 20, Issue 6 , December 2003, Pages 381-385
Part Special Issue: Cities of Spain