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Cities and Urban Corners

TEXT Manuel de Solà-Morales A wide range of façades and people are found on corners, which produces
“Cities, corners” Exhibition innovation and stimulation. The “Cities, Corners” exhibition will show how the
Organiser idea of corner extends beyond the purely geometric to become a vitalising
principle and a genuine metaphor for the city.

“A city is composed of different classes of people;

similar people cannot bring a city into existence.”

Aristotle (Polítics)

hen I was asked to organise an exhibition on cities, I

W straight away thought that there was no point in putting

on yet another commonplace show of urban “problems”
–infrastructure, housing, the suburbs, renewal, etc. Nor did I want a
technocratic approach, speaking, for example, of flows, mutations,
reflections or margins. Rather, I would present cities by means of
something quite concrete, material and tangible, something that
placed more value on the senses than abstraction, much more on the
political than the mechanical. Then I thought of the figurative inter-
est of corners and of the status of corners as a paradigm of urban,
architectural, civic and cultural diversity.
Cultural diversity is a fact of city life. In the contemporary world in
which over 80% of the population lives in towns and cities (and the rest
will not be long in joining them, as the only way to guarantee their eco-
nomic and social progress), cities are fantastic machines making it pos-
sible to transform solitude into exchange and ignorance into progress.
In order to present cultural diversity, therefore, there is no need to Carlos Bosch

conjure up a mosaic of exoticisms, but simply to present cities as

the place of mixing and exchange, a plural and contradictory place
par excellence, far removed from the over-simplistic or systematic
reductionism we so often engage in.
This exhibition will present cities as crossroads of culture, commu-
nication and exchange, of construction and territory. In keeping
with the “cultural diversity” axis of the Forum, the exhibition aims
to present cities in their physical specificity, in spite of the fact that
they are both a cause and consequence of economic globalisation.
It wants to present them as geographical, social and economic
crossroads while at the same time highlighting the angularity with
which architecture materialises them.
Nowadays we sometimes see cities as areas of flows and abstract,
purely dynamic relations, without any significant substance or
position, as a pure phenomenon of mutation, movement,
ephemeral borders almost independent of their physical support
and political life. But this technocratic illusion ignores the fact that,
at the same time, and precisely because they take shape as collective
spaces, cities are the place where there is the greatest opportunity
for difference, acceptance, justice and passion.
For more than a century, squares and streets have been the models of
public spaces in relation to which a more desirable urban space has
been debated, planned and compared. Underlying this is the hypothe-
sis of peaceful civility and institutional urbanity. The square as a cen-
tral celebrative and symbolic space, and the street full of shops or
where people can go for a stroll, are images that conjure up an idea of
a civis offering identity, trade and organisation.
But the city, which is certainly a complex system in continual trans-
formation and also, sometimes, a unanimous, participatory, more or
less sponsored, concentration, is the place of difference and friction, of
forced or fortuitous agreement, of permanent tension and conflict.
The intersection of people, constructions, movements and energies is
the city’s reason and strength. Corners are the original model for it.
Street corners express the nature of the city as a meeting place, a place of
superposition and conflict. Cities are brought into existence by the

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Seen from the sky, all cities are more or less

irregular arrangements of blocks and streets.
But as we see them on the ground, as used
and remembered by each city’s inhabitants,
they are sequences of crossings and corners,
meaningful points and symbols of the city’s
variety and extension.
Above, a bird’s-eye view of El Eixample in
Barcelona, with the spaces created by the four
chamfers, which is the most characteristic
image of the layout designed by Ildefons Cerdà.
Right, Ciutat Meridiana in Barcelona,
an example of the outskirts of a city.
On the facing page, La Plaça dels Àngels,
between the former convent of Els Àngels and
the Barcelona Contemporary Art Museum. The
square as a symbolic space is one of the
elements of a civis characterised by identity,
trade and organisation.
On the previous page, the Olympic Village area
and part of Torre Mapfre.
Dani Codina

THE B.MM MONOGRAPHS NUMBER 4


“In every urban form, the way the streets cross each other is the
fundamental feature which we retain as our picture of the city. The urban
fabric is usually a flexible, dynamic organisation of space so that activities
and people can intermingle with each other.”
multiplication of corners and, as a whole, by grids of crossroads. In the
global network of flows and relations, the big cities are the crossroads
where these are condensed and linked together.
The diversity of façades and people found on corners gives rise to
innovation and stimulation. The corner, therefore, is a metaphor for
the city, in that it constitutes a project stemming from diversity. In
that it is not the idea of order that makes the city, but the idea of dif-
ference, of conflict, of consensus, the corner is its elementary and
exemplary component. Difference plus coincidence is the definition
of corner. It is also the definition of city.
In every urban form, the way the streets cross each other forming
crossroads and corners is the fundamental feature which we retain
as the picture of the city. The urban fabric, after all, needs to be a
flexible, dynamic organisation of space so that activities and people
can intermingle with each other there. The crossroads with two
points of reference provides a greater wealth of opportunity, which
is that little bit extra required to produce meaning. Just as the first
economic surplus was at the origin of culture and civilisation, so the
superposition of the virtual axes at a material point makes the cor-
ner the origin and the ferment generating urban diversity.
Through the Eixample district of Barcelona we are well aware of the
importance of corners. The space created by the four chamfers –a
magnified version of the traditional crossroads with its square cor-
ners– is the most characteristic image of the layout designed by
Cerdà. The major part played by the turns, the categorical presence
of the shops and balconies along the 20 metres of oblique façade,
make up an urban fabric marked by the repeated rhythm of the
rhomboidal chamfers. As much as, if not more than, an arrangement
of blocks and streets, the Cerdà Plan has made a city of corners.
Seen from the sky, all cities are more or less irregular arrangements of
blocks and streets. But as we see them on the ground, as used and
remembered by each city’s inhabitants, they are sequences of crossings
and corners, meaningful points and symbols of the of the city’s variety
and extension. And this applies as much to the big cities as to the
smaller towns, to both the densely and the sparsely built-up areas, to
the junctions of the major avenues and to the crossroads of rural path-
ways. The chamfered corners of a district such as the Eixample, the
corner shop or the café or the tobacconist’s on the corner in any local
neighbourhood, the singular and publicity-seeking building, or the
suburban interchange station, concentrate the activity and the image
of an entire area and thus become a place of social exchange –corners.
But constructing a corner is also a matter of reaching agreement
between two fronts that have to coincide. Their meeting can take
place in an exemplary or an unfortunate fashion –or perhaps it will
not take place at all– but the construction of a corner is always a wor-
thy exercise. And this applies to architectural construction as much as
to any other constructive trade. “A problem with the corner” the car-
133
Gasull
penters used to say, drawing attention to the fact that the difficulties
in assembling a door, a table or a window arise when it comes to get-
ting the angle joint right. The architecture of corners is an example of
matching differing façades and also of the merit of turning this agree-
ment into a permanent, symbolic object. Perhaps that is why nowa-
days we are rather inclined to miss them.
The “Paradise on the Other Corner” that Vargas Llosa predicted will
perhaps lead to the “Man on Pink Corner” of whom Borges spoke.
And we would understand why Morton White spoke of “street-cor-
ner society” and why Baudrillard philosophised about corners as
places of imagination and feeling. Also Italo Calvino has written
that cities do not explain their past, but contain it, like the lines on
a person’s hand, on their street corners.
If we were only to see the contemporary city as a virtual field of flows
and systems, of visible economic relations and hidden social relations,
we would miss out corners. The boring outlying areas with their
houses strung out in rows, the suburbs with their segregated and soli-
tary blocks of flats, the downtown areas deserted at night and at week-
ends, the technology parks –and the leisure, shopping and business
centres– autistic and remote, do not have corners.
In the neo-liberal city, where open territory and compact construc-
tion unevenly share domination between them, the functional
authority of networks and services would not be sufficient – there is
also a need for the strategic and symbolic presence of corners, the
social architecture of the territory. The big young Asian and African
metropolises, already marked as the product of globalisation with
their acres upon acres of poor dwellings, cannot transform them-
selves according to conventional urban layouts, but they can, by con-
trast, with suitable intervention, become singular points of accent and
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reference. They have motorways running through them and they have
clusters of skyscrapers in the centre, but they do not have corners.
This exhibition will show how this idea extends beyond the architec-
tural and the geometric and how, in cities of the most varied forms,
we can recognise, on different scales, the idea of the corner as a vital-
ising principle. It will display, with spectacular and direct materials,
the evidence of this fact through the cities of today. It will show scale
models, films, drawings and photographs to bring the corners alive. It
will also show how, on a global scale, in the geography of urbanisation
right across the world, cities are –due to their image and their func-
tion– corners of the networks of global interdependence. The biggest
emerging metropolises are huge global corners where migrations and
activities, transport and capital flow and cross each other. The pre-
sentation of some of the main examples of such cities (in South Asia,
Latin America and countries where the dominant culture is Islamic)
continues the reflection on urbanisation’s position as a crossroads.
It is a matter of interpreting how the continuously growing mega-
cities draw their strength and character precisely from this position
as global crossroads.
It is, therefore, a horizontal and geographical perspective on the world’s
current urban condition which, also incorporating the permanent
aspects of urban history, is aimed at getting people to think about the
virtues of intersection, even promiscuity, as goals of any city project.
Some of the exhibition’s main messages will be:
1) In spite of the large number of problems that accumulate in them,
cities are the permanent establishment that humanity has provided
itself with in order to help it to progress. In the globalised world,
cities are the main receptacle of cultural diversity.
2) Cities themselves are made up of exchanges in their origin and
grow by accumulating more exchanges. Exchanges of people, of
goods, of flows. Voluntary and involuntary exchanges. Personal,
social and economic exchanges. And political exchanges.
THE B.MM MONOGRAPHS NUMBER 4
Cities grow by accumulating exchanges
– personal, social, economic and political
exchanges; exchanges of people and goods.
In the photo, Hong Kong.
Christian Maury
3) At certain times the social spaces of the city concentrate these
exchanges. Road junctions, street crossings, interchanges materialise
the flows.
4) Corners are the visible forms that architecture gives to this net-
work of intersections: a difficult and worthy exercise representing the
complexity and richness of urbanity. Without good architecture,
there can be no city.
5) The idea of corner is a universal idea. In all cultures, the passage
from tribal to social organisation adopts the corner and the grid as a
principle of settlement. The cities that have been founded have
always repeated, from antiquity to the present day, the principle of a
network of corners.
6) The speeded-up metropolises of the third world –like the suburbs,
rich or poor, of the first world– are territories without corners, with-
out physical or social intersection. They are, however, the places with
the greatest potential and future demand.
7) The tendencies towards the segregation of functions, towards the
creation of themed territories, towards the autonomy of the residential
ghettoes (both rich and poor), must be offset with the aid of new ter-
ritorial corners supporting the free and contradictory interaction of
people and interests. Indifference and difference make for an open city.
8) On a larger scale, the urbanised world is also a network of corners
in which the major metropolises stand out as corners of the global
system of flows and exchanges. The big cities are crossed by trans-
ports, migrations, business.
9) But the corners of capital are not those of the people. Nor those
of movement, or those of communication.
10) Urbanity –cultural diversity– is not a matter of agglomeration
or dispersion. It is a matter of interdependence. A matter of the den-
sity of crossroads, of more and more corners.
These are the slogans. What counts, however, is what we shall see
next summer in the metal box of the Forum Convention Centre.