Postmodern Urbanism and Russian roulette

Further proof that lots of ideas can be made better by sticking "postmodern" in front of them: Nan Ellin's Postmodern Urbanism. You can probably expect several posts on it in the next few weeks, but here's one.

When I tried to sell the Yale Political Union's most cassava-loving Leftist on the idea that urban localism can be just as "human scale" as either agrarianism or pre-agrarianism, he made the point that "being a consumer in the city is like playing Russian roulette" in that you have no idea where the things you're buying come from or under what conditions they were produced, so all you can do is pull the trigger and hope no proletarians get hurt. To satisfy his concern, city dwellers would either need to have a closer relationship to the production that allows the city to exist, or we would need some other means of making sure that rural production stays human scale, non-oppressive, etc. (I can't speak for him, but I imagine these "other means" look like leaving it to the market, putting our trust in cultural institutions like churches and families, state intervention, or some combination of the three.)

Nan Ellin picks up on the same problem, quoting David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity:

Harvey has observed that "it is now possible to experience the world's geography vicariously, as a simulacrum," in a way which conceals "almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour processes that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their production."

Anyone who says that structures should only be built with local materials is taking Harvey's caution too literally, but the idea that architecture can function as a symbolic connection between city/consumption and non-city/production — mitigating the "Russian roulette" problem — is fascinating. Urban and agrarian localisms aren't exactly equivalent, but an alliance between the two is an attractive prospect that depends upon resolving disagreements between the two, of which the Harvey snag is one.