Sex & Space II space. gender. economy exhibition, productionstudio, lectures & filmprogram started at the Shedhalle Zurich 6. 9. - 6.10. 1996 and had been invited to Forum Stadtpark/steirischer herbst 10. - 26. 10. 1997 It isn't new for artists and art theorists to study architecture and city planning. On the contrary it has been a predominant issue ever since the dawn of the Modernism. It is striking however, that &endash; with the exception of the situationists &endash; art and architecture have been understood as universal classifications which are seen to relate to each other as far as formal vicinity or rigidity are concerned. In the nineteen eighties it was mainly the boom of new museum buildings, and the so-called "Kunst-am-Bau-Projekten" (art on the building), which dominated the discussion of art and architecture. These varieties of a representative co-operation have to be reassessed. In the process of post-Ford restructuring (deregulation and lean-management), new museums and theatre buildings have come with the transformation of society, making culture an important commodity which has helped to give cities a more attractive locational factor 1. Compared to the industrial age, cities increasingly serve as centres of knowledge, as well as information production and its dissemination. City managements compete internationally, and resort to lavish interventions in the city structure, in order to secure locational advantages on the global market. Cultural models are needed to justify these interventions. New museum buildings, and the new trendy bars and consumer areas that come with them, bring a better infrastructure for traffic and communication, along with "culturalisation" and "increase in value" of existing districts. 2 In the eighties, these strategies were mainly used to maximise profit in real estate speculation. It is interesting how apartments and flats in old buildings, which have been elegantly renovated, gain their prestige mainly from the existing cultural environment, i.e. from bohemian lifestyle, art and design. They gain in prestige, and they become more profitable in return. Under the pressure of the international free trade agreements, the city of the nineties has been looked at as a capitalist enterprise. A modern city management handles the locational advantages of their city, its qualities and infrastructure, like saleable goods and puts them on the market accordingly. The enterprise city no longer orientates itself to the needs of its inhabitants but to those of the tourist trade and the investors. Nowadays, city marketing increasingly includes open-air festivals and large, spectacular exhibitions. Within this context, art and architecture have become international economic and prestige factors of the nineties. Geniuses, Symbol Producers and Corporate Culture The American art critic Benjamin Buchloh pointed out in one of his last texts (Artforum, January 1997) that, at that time, a change of paradigm could be noted in the discourses on fashion, design, art and architecture. This altered the position of art, within the construction of a "corporate culture", to a producer of symbols, serving capitalist interests and ideologies. An example mentioned by Buchloh is the Madison Avenue branch of Calvin Klein in New York City, which was nobly described as "minimal art". Another is the architect Phillip Johnson, who calls himself a sculptor - according to the logic of the "creative" male art subject of Modernism &endash; and who placed his sculpture in front of his own building as an advertisement for a watch maker. An infinite number of such examples can be found in conjunction with the restructuring and rebuilding of Berlin, which emphasise Buchloh's theses: Neon tubes on building cranes by Gerhard Merz at Potsdamer Platz; the recourses to "minimal art" by Oswald Maria Ungers as pure formal statement; the façade sections and drafts by the architect Hans Kollhoffs (which are traded as works of art in the gallery Hetzler). Art and architecture, in a sociologically neutral and apolitical position, mean cultural transfer for capitalist interest, whether economic or politial, on a global market. The architects of the so-called "Schaustelle" in Berlin (pun made up by Schau = watch and Baustelle = building site), who, according to the city-marketing concept, are building the Berlin of the 21st century, describe their function, in a rarely seen consensus, mainly as a formal, aesthetic and artistic performance. The artist/architect uses the "sacrosanct" artistic expression of a building to further its acceptance and its market value. In the debate about the "architecture of Berlin" of the nineties, lines in history have been created, which re-interpret the perception of Modernism as well as German history on a more than symbolic level. The architectural theorist Vittorio M. Lampugnani for instance maintains that the Italian and German architecture of the fascist period should be evaluated in an aesthetic rather than a political way. The Berlin debates about the "Neue Einfachheit" (new simplicity) supports an understanding of Modernism, which is based on a tradition of thought that stems from the architectural reform of the first decade of this century. In this, it is not a continuity of social techniques and the overall power of architecture over economy which is derived from Modernism, but it is a new "national style" which is created in order to try to aesthetically eliminate the history of the First and Second World Wars, and above all the crimes of the Holocaust (Lampugnani: Arch+ 122,1994). 3 At this point a theory could be developed to assert that the self-positioning of the "artist/architect" is politically empty, and partly legitimises new city structures as well as ideological changes of paradigm of what we believed to be the concepts of culture and city. In the common discourse on architecture and planning those analyses of power relations and systems of representation are missing. This is the reason why it is still common place for a building creation - an aesthetically formal paradigm &endash; to be given a mandate for social moulding. This "agreed system", also stemming from Modernism, negotiates the functions and areas of responsibility of architects, planners, politicians and economists. City-planning authorities and building commissions use this common-place practice in order to decide about access and exclusion by hiding behind the apparent neutrality of aesthetic paradigms. Myths of Urbanity As early as 1973, the geographer and city sociologist David Harvey maintained in his book "Social Justice in the City" that if space and society are looked at as two separate categories, the assumed preconditions are wrong. Harvey, and later other city sociologists, saw the spatial order as a product of social actions, conventions, structures of thought, and power. Furthermore, he stated that the social status of a person is a factor in the consideration of spatial orders, urban structures, architecture, and the concept of public life and privacy. At the same time, the space created within this precondition serves as an environment where social values are lived and reflected. It isn't just the planner's drafts, political concepts and social practice that define the urban spaces, it is also characterised by popular representation, fiction and narratives. Metropolises particularly have been part of a complex creation of myths. Depending on the social context, cities have been given various names: megalopolis, metropolis, Moloch, or jungle. 4 These fiction and narratives describe the city as an imaginary object, marking its character through discourse and ideology. In this way an image or a representation of a city can be maintained for a long time, and it can, under its own preconditions, call a new urban project into existence. (Ronneberger 1995). 5 According to Roland Barthes, the "myths of urbanism" draft a picture of the social whole. He writes that the myth does not deny things. On the contrary its function is to talk about them. The myth makes things clean and innocent, it describes them as nature and eternity, and it makes them transparent, which is not explanatory but ascertaining. (Barthes 1964, p. 131). On the occasion of the project Sex & Space in the Shedhalle in 1996, and the "steirischen herbst" in 1997, the artists intended to look at the systems of representation of the "genderised" space and the related policy of segregation. When analysing the systems of representation of urban spaces, we wanted to study more than the appearance of an image, or production of a myth, we wanted to read spatial concepts as social power structures and the systems of spatial representation as the representation of social relationships. One focus of the artistic and theoretical approach was to investigate the commonly opposed pairs of public/private and male/female and find their pre-conditions in culture. During the analyses, we found that even left-wing city sociologists hardly considered the gender factor. As a result of this, there had been no investigation as to whether the traditional gender-specific segregation of work determines spatial order, or as to how people themselves are affected by the latter. Therefore, we focussed on the history of female socialisation, and how this has been influenced by the traditional spheres of male salary-biographies, i.e. their work, which is socially acceptable and has its designated place in public life. Meanwhile female reproduction work has neither a financial nor a symbolic place in the public space. 6 The visual and textual analyses of Sex & Space took place in the exhibition hall, where, during four weeks, we produced films and videos and had lectures and discussions. In this way, we used our own cultural work to investigate hierarchies of space and its potential to change, as well as to develop counter-arguments. Dangerous Girlfriends In the nineties, there has been a strong call for images of safety and cleanliness in European City centres. We have studied this fact in the framework of the Zurich part of this project. Along with the current privatisation, and stronger commercialisation of large urban areas, streets and public spaces are used as projection surfaces for fear and the fear of failure (although there is no proof of an increasing crime rate), which is related to specific "marginal groups". Public space has been increasingly regulated and controlled: Since the beginning of the nineties, the city policy of "cleaning the city centres", with an increased police presence, has lead to a repressive drawing-up of borders. Those people who cannot be integrated into the normative logic of a bourgeois life have been represented by the media as "pathological" or "criminal", and executive measures have dismissed them from the public "eye" of bourgeois life. 7 These fears, multiplied by the media, of the supposed creation of new slums, and of foreign infiltration in various districts of the city, have resulted in an increasing every-day racism as well as in a paranoid boom in private security services. 8 The public space has been treated for years as a space of female fear by female, as well as feminist, planners and architects, although women mainly suffer violence in private spaces (over 80%), i.e. mostly in marriage. Fear has been defined as women's fear of male violence. This has not only reiterated the concept of men being the culprits and women their victims, but also repeated the idea that the public space is a dangerous place, which should be avoided (by women), or which should be controlled (by socially competent women). 9 This isn't just a "question of feminist stance", in which the gender stereotypes are represented once more, but this concept is confirmed by the way public spaces are created and by the spatial consequences. 10 Examples of so-called good "solutions" to try and domesticate public places by using "order", "light" and "cleanliness", have claimed to be able to "prevent violence", but they create the stark opposite. It is the subtle colonisation of public space by the respectability of petit bourgeoisie that produces, not without good reason, aggression and vandalism. It wasn't my wish to nullify the approach of feminist planners, but this is a paradigm for the anti-urban, disciplinary models which infiltrate even emancipatory city discourse. In the nineties, the safety discussions about the public space resulted in "fear" maps where city quarters, in which "unpleasant subjects" were to be expected, were marked with a star. 11 The Swiss geographer Nicole Stolz confirmed my assumption that most of the fears expressed by the women she had asked during her survey, were produced by the media. She found that most places that were designated as "dangerous" by the women asked, had been previously described by the press as places connected with drug-addicts, youth, and the racist stereotype of "foreign" criminals. 12 On the occasion of our public talks with planners and architects we discussed and criticised western dominated feminist perspectives which became the ruling logic of popular phantasms of expulsion. 13 During the project, we tried to find out what possibilities existed for an artistic and theoretical break-down of these standpoints, and what political options there would be to proceed in a critical and representative way. We reassessed the concept of the problematic infringement of public space by violence and sexual harassment, with a feminist re-examination of urban space, breaking with stereotype role models, deconstructing the racist or sexist connotation of the "different", and defining the city as an artificial place in a positive way. The construction of the "different" is tightly linked with projections onto the public space. The classification of gender and race determines the perception and order of the public space in architecture and in city discourses, as well as in texts and other representations of urban space. Classe Dangereux Most of the city structures in which we live today emerged during the economic restructuring of the early 19th century. The industrialists placed their production sites near the financial centres, i.e. at the borders of the cities. In the opinion of the French city theorist Henri Lefebvre, the process of urbanisation is a central contradiction to capitalism. 14 Right at the beginning of industrialisation, the right to a dwelling place, of the working people migrating from the country side, was linked to "paid work" and "rent". To have a flat or, more precise, a place to sleep was the main pre-condition in order to find work. The living conditions of large groups of people were influenced by this interdependence of work, salary, and abode. This changed attitudes, family life, and therefore the gender situation. Nearly all observers described the process of "urbanisation" as a shocking experience. The stage for theses shocking experiences was the street. In 1844, Friedrich Engels for example wrote, in "The Situation of the English Working Class", that the crowd in the street was already repulsive, and that people were appalled by it. Those hundreds of thousands of all classes pushing and running past each other ... as if they had nothing to do with each other... He went on to emphasise the individuals' brutal indifference and their emotionless isolation in the pursuit of their private interests; adding that this was more disgusting and painful the more crammed together people were in a small space..." For Engels, urban life was a paradigm for the "alienation" of high capitalism, which he linked, among other things, to the social misery in the working class districts of London. The migration of workers from the country into the city resulted in settlements at the city peripheries which became slums due to low wages and high rents. These peripheral settlements enabled the people in the city centre to move about without meeting "misery". It was this topographic "misery" which made public health workers and reformers try to air, "clean" and destroy "these narrow alleyways and corners". From 1848 until Modernism, they wanted to do away with the "prolific (red) belt". The first large measures of city planning had socio-hygienic reasons. Besides gestures of charity, bourgeois life styles and attitudes were to be installed into the working class by introducing new health rules, a sense of affluence, and moral codes. Even Engel's descriptions of the metropolises of Paris and London contained conservative elements which complained about the loss of the agricultural identity in the greater family. "Human nature" and its original systems of relationships in the "family" were endangered by the city. Moreover, working class districts were blamed for being too constricted and the cause of "illnesses". City life itself was seen as "subversive" to social relationships (capitalism wasn't blamed though). The female role model, which was changing during industrialisation and urbanisation, played an important role in this anti-urban stance. 15 Unquestioningly, women were appointed a place in a home, as for the bourgeois social politicians this was a way to maintain the family as the smallest unit of the state. The male workers were afraid of a cut in wages (women's wages were half those of men), so for them this was a way to push women out of production work, thus avoiding the loss of their own traditional privileges. This model of society abolished female success, and introduced changes in dowry and inheritance law, making the man the provider for the woman, with the result that she was left without independent means. She was positioned inside the house, and as educator she mediated between state, school and institutions, and she guaranteed the preservation of the bio-political order. The man was positioned on the outside in "public" life, and guaranteed steadily increasing prosperity and profit. These "socio-political" measures created a connection between public and private life as well as between city and family. 16 It was only during the new women's movement of the nineteen seventies, when the private was required to be seen as political, that these problems were brought to the public conscience. 17 Although there were wide-reaching socio-political measures to reduce women to their reproductive role, it was the capitalist city that pushed women more and more into the public space, acting as workers and employees, as dancers, "femme nouveau" and prostitutes. The male observer, the bourgeois or stroller, according to his sexist logic, saw this as temptation. , However, it also meant danger and the dissolution of existing social relationships. Paris is a woman During the 19th century encounters in the street were described in literature as without differenciation; as encounters with the "masses" or "crowd". The "throng in the street" was perceived without difference of class, and the public city life was compared with the production process of "a big machine". In his "Zentralpark" (Central Park), Walter Benjamin demonstrated this change of perception, mainly by using the work of Baudelaire. The large city turns into an amalgam of kaleidoscopic, simultaneous experiences for the stroller. He surrenders to the street, "as to a women". This male voyeur (artist, flaneur) perceives difference only by sexualising the street; by perceiving only the passing woman or prostitute. In the city of the 19th century, the social and economic inequality of women resulted, mainly in the world of the female worker or maid, in prostitution. On the border between the bourgeois city centre and the proletarian suburbs, new districts of entertainment emerged and formed a ring of "vice". For those who were caught by the spell of the large city, the image of failure included venereal diseases, beside ending up in the gutter; i.e. becoming homeless. Female bodies were equated with sexual excesses or diseases. Bourgeois theorists branded the "lesbian" woman, and the woman who sells her body, as syphilitic; as "unclean". In his book "Rasse, Sexualität und Seuche" 1986 (Race, Sexuality and Disease), Sander L. Gilman described how these constructions of the "different" of the 19th century have common ground with racist attributions to Jews in fascist Germany. In the bourgeois novel of the19th century, woman &endash; above all proletarian women &endash; Jews, homosexuals and blacks were associated with the dangers and "diseases" of city life. 18 The transformation of social relations and identities lead to the description of the city as "dangerous", and a cause of moral decline. In the centre of that transformation, there are socio-political and reactionary discussions of the "different" in comparison with the so-called "normal". The focus of these sexist and racist attributions of the 19th century were the prostitute, the lesbian woman, the Jew and the black. In the 20th century, there is a smooth transition as this list is complemented by the stigmatised "junkies, the so-called "foreign criminals", the asylum seekers and the sex workers. Bourgeois theorists saw the city as an "artificial" order, compared to a "natural" one, and used it as a projection surface, justifying the taming of the "city jungle". As a result of this, the job of the city planer, as disciplinary authority, was invented. This new authority was installed in order to control this "chaos", separating public from private space, and the centre from the periphery by architectural means. The "anti"-city movement believed that it was mainly the dissolution of family structures, and the change of national identity and traditional sex roles, that threatened society, and not the growing city structures or the increasingly delicate hierarchy of exploitation. According to Jane Jacobs's "Tod und Leben grosser amerikanischer Städte" (The Life and Death of the Large American Cities), this anti-urban, paranoid view of the city; the fear of the street and of the "lurking danger of the large city", caused the modern planning mythology. Architectural reform, garden-city movements and current suburban settlements are brought about by the fears of the "decomposing" city life. This caused Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse, through the Charta of Athens, to reverberate till today, and resulted in the concept of the "Neue Einfachheit" (new simplicity) for the new capital of Berlin and for other European cities; concepts which equate city life with the mere act of consumption. We came to the conclusion that if urban spaces are influenced by social values, these values can also be re-interpreted in the context of gender theories. For Sex & Space we preferred to stick to those city images which could be attributed to infringements of a gender specific or racist nature, and we deconstructed those anti-urban myths together with people from the fields of architecture, art-history and politics. More information on the project can be found in the two "Sex&Space Fanzines", which can be ordered at the Shedhalle Zurich or on the Sex&Space Website: shedhalle@access.ch Author: Marion von Osten Translated from German: Gabriela Meier (Zurich) The following artists or theoricians participated at SEX &SPACE I and II: Fenja Abraham (CH), A-Clips(D), Martine Anderfuhren (CH), Architektur-studentInnen der TU Graz (A), Hatice Ayten (D), Susanne Bachmann (CH), Simone Batschelet (CH), Jochen Becker(D), Bettina Behr (A), Serap Berrakarasu / Gisela Tuchtenhagen (D), Pauline Boudry (CH), Büro der Frauenbeauftragten der Stadt Graz (A), Yvonne Doderer / Cora Schäfer (D), Ines Doujak/Gabriele Marth (A), Lukas Duwenhögger (D), Dominick Eichler (D), Julian Goethe (D), Frauenhaus Graz (A), Frauen Lobby Städtebau (CH), FrischmacherInnen (D), Edith Glanzer (A), Irmi Hanak (A), Andreas Hofer (CH),Innenstadt AG Zürich, Ina Ivanceanu (A). Lea Jaecklin (CH), Sylvia Kafehsy (A/CH), Anke Kempkes (D), Dorothea Kress (A/D), Brigitta Kuster (CH), Pia Lanzinger (D), Elisabeth Lechner (A), Susanne Lummerding (A), Rachel Mader (CH), Mascha Madörin (Basel), Ariane Müller (A), Irene Nierhaus (A), Marion von Osten (D), plattform / Ulrike Kremeier (D), Katja Reichard (D), Marie Ringler / Meike Schmidt-Gleim (A), Stefan Römer (D), Susanne Sauter (CH), Pia Siegrist (CH), Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek (D), Jo Schmeisser (A), Anni Staehlin (CH), Nicol Stolz (CH) Josef Strau (D), Gertrud Strempfl (A), Vor der Information (A), Irene Windisch (A), kunstverein W.A.S. (A), AlexandraWürz (A), Ina Wudtke (D), Sandra Zech (A), Barbara Zibell (D), Michael Zinganel (A) 1 Good examples are financial metropolises like London, Frankfurt and Zurich, but also art and theatre cities like Cologne and Hamburg 2 Saskia Sassen describes the importance of Global Cities with regard to their role as important switch-boards for deregulation and restructuring processes. The economic concentration of power in a few large cities in the world increases not only the well-paid service sector, of mostly white western men, but also a large informal sector (cleaning, supply services). This work is increasingly done by female migrants especially by women without passports. 3 On the occasion of the project Sex & Space, the artists Lukas Duwenhögger, Josef Strau and Michael Zinganel historically reassess the utopia of architects, and town and city planners of Modernism. In their lectures, they traced the question of which spatial and ideological conditions confirmed gender, class and race relations in Modernist building concepts, even though they claimed to be emancipated. Garden cities, co-operative settlements and one-kitchen houses are examples for building projects with a progressive land-price policy. They have remained simulated communities in which racist exclusions and entry regulations by nationality or classic (heterosexual) family structures (as the smallest national unit of the state) persist. 4 The architect and artist Susanne Bachmann from Zurich studied the representation of cities and women from a philosphical point of view. For example in Jean Luc Godard's film "Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle" the question was asked what role the images of women play in a portrayal of a city and which metaphors for femininity are used and in which context. 5 On the occasion of his lecture for the Munich Art Association in 1995 about the myth of the city of services, the city sociologist Klaus Ronneberger drew attention to the traditions of systems representation in urban society. 6 There were two events "Die aktuelle Wirtschaftswoche Zürich/Graz (The current economic week of Zurich and Graz) when, together with the economist Mascha Madörin, we discussed deregulation and the making economy more flexible with regard to the work biographies of women. According to advertising, there will be new work models (online service, part-time work, desk sharing), which will be made according to the so-called female biographies. This capitalist utopia, however, reiterates all sexist stereotypes of the woman as the actor in private space. 7 Access is not controlled by the new laws for asylum seekers or at the national borders. The borders change towards the interior. Compare: "Kein Mensch ist illegal" (no person is illegal): http://www.constrast.org/borders 8 Compare: Innenstadtaktionen (city centre actions), newspaper supplement, June 1996 9 Compare: Judith Butler's Analysis of a trial of a rapist in the USA in "Gender Trouble", suhrkamp 10 Brochures of FOPA, and of the "Frauenwerkstatt Wien" (Women's Workshop Vienna) 11 Plans with such "markings of dangerous spaces" were part of the competition documents for a city expansion in Mainz. They were thought of as "regulations for pro-female building". 12 Nicole Stolz, Frauenstadt, eine geographische Studie (Women's city, a geographic study), University Berne 1995 13 Compare: A.N.Y.P. Bemerkenswert planungsresistenter Alltag (the remarkable resistance to planning of every-day life) by Ariane Müller 14 Henri Lefebvre, „Die Revolution der Städte" (The Revolution of the Cities), 1972 15 At the beginning of the 19th century, women who worked in production often used to live on their own with their children, without men, in worker homes for women. In the patriarchal world view this was equated with a coarsening of morals. 16 The model of the Frankfurt kitchen (an architectural reform project for social apartment buildings in the twenties) by architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was the starting point for the work of Berlin artist Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek. Schütte-Lihotzky developed the first feminist design project, which was intended to take weight from the so-called housewife by reducing distances and introducing functional design. Realising this project, still did not prevent the women from the traditional duty of doing the house-work. The kitchen &endash; rationalised by methods of business management &endash; was a focus for public discussions, which resulted in a wave of technological fantasies. Technologies which are, to this day, produced by women at a low price and consumed by the same at a high one. (Compare: Cynthia Cockburn "Bringing Technology Home".) 17 The battles of the sufragettes and feminists in Europe and the USA took place in cities. It was in the cities rather than in the country side where they first got organised and founded communities. 18 There is a similar problematic amalgamation of sexual excess and disease as we find in today's discussions about AIDS.