The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction

Cities originally came about as projects for the future: People moved from
the country into the city in order to escape the ancient forces of nature and
to build a new future that they could shape and control themselves. The entire
course of human history until the present has been defined by this movement
from the country into the city—a dynamic to which history in fact owes its
direction. Although life in the country has repeatedly been stylized as the
golden era of harmony and “natural” contentment, such embellished memo-
ries of a life spent in nature have never restrained people from continuing on
their chosen historical path. In this respect, the city per se possesses an intrin-
sically utopian dimension by virtue of being situated outside the natural order.
The city is located in the ou-topos. City walls once delineated the place where
a city was built, clearly designating its utopian—ou-topian—character. Indeed,
the more utopian a city was signaled to be, the harder it was made to reach
and enter this city, be it the Tibetan city of Lhasa, the celestial city of Jeru-
salem, or Shambala in India. Traditionally cities isolated themselves from the
rest of the world in order to make their own way into the future. So, a genuine
city is not only utopian, it is also antitourist: it dissociates itself from space
as it moves through time.
The struggle with nature, of course, did not cease inside the city either.
At the beginning of his Discourse on Method, Descartes already observed that
since historically evolved cities were not entirely immune to the irrationality
of the natural order they would in fact need to be completely demolished if
a new, rational, and consummate city were to be erected on the vacated site.1
Later on, Le Corbusier called for the demolition of Paris to make way for a
new rational city to be built in its place. Hence the utopian dream of the
total rationality, transparency, and controllability of an urban environment
unleashed a historical dynamism that is manifested in the perpetual transfor-
mation of all realms of urban life: the quest for utopia forces the city into
a permanent process of surpassing and destroying itself—which is why the
city has become the natural venue for revolutions, upheavals, constant new
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beginnings, fleeting fashions, and incessantly changing lifestyles. Built as a

haven of security the city soon became the stage for criminality, instability,
destruction, anarchy, and terrorism. Accordingly the city presents itself as a
blend of utopia and dystopia, whereby modernity undoubtedly cherishes and
applauds its dystopian rather than its utopian aspects—urban decadence,
danger, and haunting eeriness. This city of eternal ephemerality has frequently
been depicted in literature and staged in the cinema: this is the city we know,
for instance, from Blade Runner or Terminator I and II, where permission is
constantly being given for everything to be blown up or razed to the ground,
simply because people are tirelessly engaged in the endeavor to clear a space
for what is expected to happen next, for future developments. And over and
over again the arrival of the future is impeded and delayed because the remains
of the city’s previously built fabric can never be fully removed, making it
forever impossible to complete the current preparation phase. If indeed any-
thing of any permanence exists in our cities, it is ultimately only to be found
in such incessant preparations for the building of something that promises to
last a long time; it is in the perpetual postponement of a final solution, the
never-ending adjustments, the eternal repairs, and the constantly piecemeal
adaptation to new constraints.
In modern times, however, this utopian impulse, the quest for an ideal
city, has grown progressively weaker and gradually been supplanted by the
fascination of tourism. Today, when we cease to be satisfied with the life that
is offered to us in our own city, we no longer strive to change, revolutionize,
or rebuild it; instead, we simply move to another city—for a short period or
forever—in search of what we miss in our home city. Mobility between
cities—in all shades of tourism and migration—has radically altered our
relationship to the city as well as the cities themselves. Globalization and
mobility have fundamentally called the utopian character of the city into
question by reinscribing the urban ou-topos into the topography of globalized
space. It is no coincidence that in his reflections on this globalized world
McLuhan coined the term “global village”—as opposed to global city. For
the tourist and the migrant alike, it is the countryside in which the city stands
that has once more become the key issue.
It was primarily the first phase of modern tourism—which I will now
term romantic tourism—that spawned a distinctly antiutopian attitude
toward the city. Romantic tourism in its nineteenth-century guise cast a
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certain paralysis over the city that had come to be commonly viewed as an
aggregate of tourist attractions. The romantic tourist is not in search of uni-
versal utopian models but of cultural differences and local identities. His gaze
is not utopian but conservative—directed not at the future but at past prov-
enance. Romantic tourism is a machine designed to transform temporariness
into permanence, fleetingness into timelessness, ephemerality into monumen-
tality. When a tourist passes through a city, the place is exposed to his gaze
as something that lacks history, that is eternal, amounting to a sum of edifices
that have always been there and will always remain as they are at the very
moment of his arrival, for the tourist is unable to keep track of a city’s histori-
cal transformation or to perceive the utopian impulse propelling the city into
the future. So it can be said that romantic tourism abolishes utopia precisely
by bringing us to see it as fulfilled. The touristic gaze romanticizes, monu-
mentalizes, and eternalizes everything that comes within its range. In turn,
the city adapts to this materialized utopia, to the medusan gaze of the roman-
tic tourist.
A city’s monuments, after all, have not always been standing there
simply waiting for tourists to see them; instead, it was tourism that created
these monuments. It is tourism that monumentalizes a city: the gaze of the
passing tourist transforms the relentlessly fluid, incessantly changing urban
life into a monumental image of eternity. The growing volume of tourism
also speeds up the process of monumentalization.
We are now witnesses to a sheer explosion of eternity or, to put it more
succinctly, of eternalization in our cities. It is no longer only such famed
monuments as the Eiffel Tower or Cologne Cathedral that seem to cry out
for preservation, but in fact anything that sparks a sense of familiarity in
us—after all, that’s how things always used to be and that’s how they will
stay. Even when you go, for example, to New York and visit the South Bronx
and see drug dealers shooting each other (or at least looking as if they are
about to shoot each other), such scenes are imbued with the dignified aura
of monumentality. The first thing that strikes you is, yes, that’s how things
always used to be here and that’s how they will stay—all these colorful types,
the picturesque city ruins and danger looming at every corner. At a later date,
you might read in the papers that this district is due to be “gentrified,”
and your reaction would be one of shock and sadness, similar to what you
would feel on hearing that Cologne Cathedral or the Eiffel Tower were to be

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demolished to make way for a department store. You think, here is a slice of
authentic, unique, and different life that is going to be destroyed, and once
again everything is about to be flattened and rendered banal; what was once
monumental and eternal is soon to be irrevocably lost. But such mourning
would be premature. For on your next visit to the now gentrified area, you
say: how marvelously insipid, ugly, and banal everything is here—it clearly
must have always been as insipid as this, and will always remain so. With this
the area is instantly remonumentalized—because on one’s travels everyday-
ness and banality are always experienced as being equally monumental as that
which is aesthetically exceptional. Rather than being guided by some intrinsic
quality pertaining to a monument, our sense of monumentality is derived
from the relentless process of monumentalization, demonumentalization, and
remonumentalization that is unleashed by the romantic tourist’s gaze.
Incidentally, it was Kant—in his theory of the sublime in Critique of
Judgment—who first philosophically assessed the figure of the globally roaming
tourist in search of aesthetic experiences. He describes the romantic tourist
as someone who perceives even his own demise as a possible travel destination
and possesses the capacity to experience it as a sublime event. As examples of
mathematical sublimity Kant cites mountains or oceans, phenomena that
appear to dwarf normal human proportions. As instances of dynamic sublim-
ity he offers colossal natural events such as storms, volcanic eruptions, and
other catastrophes whose overpowering force directly threatens our lives. Yet
as destinations visited by the romantic tourist, these threats are not in them-
selves sublime—just as urban monuments are not intrinsically monumental.
According to Kant sublimity lies not in “anything in nature” but in the
“capacity we have within us” to judge and enjoy without fear the very things
that threaten us.2 Hence the subject of Kant’s infinite ideas of reason is the
tourist who repeatedly embarks on journeys in search of the extraordinary of
enormity and danger in order to confirm his own superiority and sublimity
in regard to nature. But in another section of this treatise Kant also points
out that, for instance, the inhabitants of the Alps, who have spent their entire
lives in the mountains, by no means regard them as sublime, and “without
hesitation” consider “all worshipers of icy peaks to be fools.”3 Indeed, in
Kant’s age the romantic tourist’s gaze still differed radically from that of
the mountain dweller. With his globalized gaze the tourist views the
figure of the Swiss peasant, for instance, as a feature of the landscape—and
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thereby this figure does not disturb him. To the Swiss peasant kept busy by
and taking care of his immediate surroundings the romantic tourist is simply
a fool, an idiot he is unable to take seriously. But in the meantime, as we well
know, this situation has again completely changed. Even though the inhabit-
ants of any particular region might still regard internationally roaming tourists
as fools, nonetheless they increasingly sense the need—no doubt for economic
reasons—to assimilate the globalized gaze pointed at them and to adjust their
own way of life to the aesthetic predilections of their visitors, the travelers
and tourists. And besides, mountain dwellers have now also started to travel
and are becoming tourists too.
The times in which we live are thus an era of postromantic, that is,
comfortable and total, tourism, marking a new phase in the history of the
relations between the urban ou-topos and the world’s topography. This new
phase is in fact not hard to characterize: rather than the individual romantic
tourist, it is instead all manner of people, things, signs, and images drawn
from all kinds of local cultures that are now leaving their places of origin and
undertaking journeys around the world. The rigid distinction between roman-
tic world travelers and a locally based, sedentary population is rapidly being
erased. Cities are no longer waiting for the arrival of the tourist—they too
are starting to join global circulation, to reproduce themselves on a world
scale and to expand in all directions. As they do so, their movement and
proliferation are happening at a much faster pace than the individual romantic
tourist was ever capable of. This fact prompts the widespread outcry that all
cities now increasingly resemble one another and are beginning to homoge-
nize, with the result that when a tourist arrives in a new city he ends up seeing
the same things he encountered in all the other cities. This experience of
similarity among all contemporary cities often misleads the observer to assume
that the globalization process is erasing local cultural idiosyncrasies, identities,
and differences. The truth is not that these distinctions have disappeared, but
that they in turn have also embarked on a journey, started to reproduce
themselves and to expand.
For quite a while now we have been able to enjoy the delights of
Chinese cooking not only in China, but also in New York, Paris, and Dort-
mund. On speculating in which cultural surroundings Chinese food tastes
best, the answer is not necessarily “China.” If we go to China today and fail
to experience Chinese cities as being exotic, this is by no means simply because

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these places have been strongly shaped by international modern architecture

of Western origin, but also because much of what one witnesses there as
“authentically Chinese” has long been familiar to visitors from America or
Europe, where such Chinese attributes can be found in any town or city. So,
far from becoming extinct, local features have in fact become global. The
differences between various cities have turned into inner-city differences.
The result is a global world city that has replaced the global village. This
world city operates like a reproductive machine that relatively swiftly multi-
plies any local attribute of one particular city in all other cities around the
world. Thus, in the course of time, quite dissimilar cities begin to resemble
one another, without any particular city serving as a prototypical model for
all the others. As soon as a new strain of rap music emerges in some borough
of New York it promptly begins to influence the music scene of other
cities—just as each new sect in India multiplies and spreads its ashrams
throughout the entire world.
But above all, it is today’s artists and intellectuals who are spending
most of their time in transit—rushing from one exhibition to the next, from
one project to another, from one lecture to the next, or from one local cultural
context to another. All active participants in today’s cultural world are now
expected to offer their productive output to a global audience, to be prepared
to be constantly on the move from one venue to the next, and to present
their work with equal persuasion—regardless of where they are. A life spent
in transit like this is bound up with equal degrees of hope and fear. On the
one hand, artists are now given the possibility of evading the pressure of pre-
vailing local tastes in a relatively painless way. Thanks to modern means of
communication they can seek out like-minded associates from all over the
world instead of having to adjust to the tastes and cultural orientation of their
immediate surroundings. This, incidentally, also explains the somewhat depo-
liticized condition of contemporary art that is so frequently deplored. In
former times artists compensated for the lack of response to their work among
people of their own culture by projecting their aspirations largely on the
future, dreaming of political changes that would one day spawn a more
appreciative viewer of their work. Today the utopian impulse has shifted
direction—acknowledgment is no longer sought in time, but in space: Glo-
balization has replaced the future as the site of utopia. So, rather than practic-
ing avant-garde politics based on the future, we now embrace the politics of
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travel, migration, and nomadic life, paradoxically rekindling the utopian

dimension that had ostensibly died out in the era of romantic tourism.
This means that as travelers we are now observers, not so much of
various local settings as of our fellow travelers, all caught up in a permanent
global journey that has become identical with life in the world city. Moreover,
present-day urban architecture has now begun to move faster than its viewers.
This architecture is almost always already there before the tourists arrive. In
the race between tourists and architecture it is now the tourist who loses.
Although the tourist is annoyed to encounter the same architecture every-
where he goes, he is also amazed to see how successful a certain type of
architecture has proved to be in a wide range of disparate cultural settings.
We are now prepared to be attracted and persuaded particularly by artistic
strategies capable of producing art that achieves the same degree of success
regardless of the cultural context and conditions in which it is viewed. What
fascinates us nowadays is precisely not locally defined differences and cultural
identities but artistic forms that persistently manage to assert their own spe-
cific identity and integrity wherever they are presented. Since we have all
become tourists capable only of observing other tourists, what especially
impresses us about all things, customs, and practices is their capacity for
reproduction, dissemination, self-preservation, and survival under the most
diverse local conditions.
With this, the strategies of postromantic, total tourism are now sup-
planting the old strategies of utopia and enlightenment. Redundant architec-
tural and artistic styles, political prejudices, religious myths, and traditional
customs are no longer meant to be transcended in the name of universality
but to be touristically reproduced and globally disseminated. Today’s world
city is homogenous without being universal. It was formerly believed that
attaining the universality of ideas and creativity depended on the individual
transcending his own local traditions in the name of universal validity. Con-
sequently, the utopia hailed by the radical avant-garde was reductive: one was
first expected to aspire to a pure, elemental form stripped of all historical and
local traits in order to claim its universal and global validity. This too was
how classical modernist art proceeded—first reduce something to its essence,
then spread it around the world. Today’s art and architecture, by contrast,
are globally disseminated without even first bothering with any such reduc-
tion to some universally valid essence. The possibilities of global networking,

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mobility, reproduction, and distribution have rendered traditional calls for

the universality of form or content utterly obsolete. Nowadays any cultural
phenomenon can proliferate without being required to make claims for its
own universality. Universal thinking is being supplanted by the universal
media dissemination of any kind of local ideas whatsoever. The universality
of artistic form is being displaced by the global reproduction of any kind of
local form whatsoever. As a result, while today’s viewers are constantly con-
fronted with the same urban surroundings, it is impossible to say whether the
character of these surroundings is in any sense “universal.” In the postmod-
ernist period, all architecture following in the footsteps of Bauhaus was criti-
cized for being monotonous and reductive—as architecture that first leveled
and then erased all local identities. But today the whole plethora of local styles
is spreading at the same global pace as the international style once did on
its own.
Thus as a consequence of total tourism we are now witnessing the
emergence of a homogeneity bereft of all universality, an utterly new and
up-to-date development. Accordingly, in the context of total tourism we once
more encounter a utopia, but one that differs radically from the static, immo-
bile utopia of the city that demarcates itself from the remaining topography
and is segregated from the rest of the country. Thus we now all live in a world
city where living and traveling have become synonymous, where there is no
longer any perceptible difference between the city’s residents and its visitors.
The utopia of an eternal universal order has been replaced by the utopia of
constant global mobility. In turn, the dystopian dimension of this utopia has
also changed—terrorist cells and designer drugs now proliferate in cities all
around the world at the same pace as, say, Prada boutiques.
Interestingly, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century several
radical utopians in the Russian avant-garde put forward plans for future cities
where all apartments and houses would be, first, uniform in design and,
second, mobile. In an astonishing manner their designs made the touristic
journey synonymous with its destination. In a similar vein the poet Velimir
Khlebnikov proposed that all inhabitants of Russia be lodged inside glass cells
mounted on wheels, allowing them to travel freely everywhere and to see
everything, but without in any way obstructing their visibility to others. With
this, the tourist and the city dweller become identical—and all the tourist
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is capable of seeing is other tourists. Incidentally, Kazimir Malevich took

Khlebnikov’s project one step further when he suggested placing every single
person inside an individual cosmic vessel to keep him constantly floating in
space and to allow him to fly from one planet to the next. His proposal would
irrevocably turn the human subject into an eternal tourist on a never-ending
journey whereby—insulated within his very own, yet always identical cell—he
would become a monument in himself. We encounter an analogous vision
in the popular TV series Star Trek, where the spaceship Enterprise has become
a constantly moving, utopian, monumental space that never alters throughout
all this series’ countless episodes, even though—or precisely because—it is
always moving at the speed of light. In this instance, utopia pursues the
strategy of transcending the antagonism between immobility and traveling;
between sedentary and nomadic life, between comfort and danger, between
the city and the countryside—as the creation of a total space in which the
topography of the Earth’s surface becomes identical with the ou-topos of the
eternal city.
In a striking fashion, such a utopian transcendence of nature was already
being considered in the period of German Romanticism. Evidence of this can
be found in a passage in Ästetik des Hässlichen (The aesthetics of the ugly)
(1853) written by the Hegel disciple, Karl Rosenkranz:

Take, for example, our Earth which, in order to be beautiful as a body, would need
to be a perfect sphere. But it is not. It is flattened at both poles and swollen
around the equator, besides which the elevations of its surface are extremely
uneven. From a purely stereometric point of view, the profile of the Earth’s crust
reveals to us the most haphazard confusion of elevations and depressions with all
manner of incalculable contours. Hence, where the surface of the Moon with its
disarray of heights and depths is concerned, we are equally unable to state
whether it is beautiful, etc.4

At the time this was written humankind was technologically still far removed
from the possibility of space travel. Here, altogether in the spirit of an avant-
garde utopia or a sci-fi movie, the agent of global aesthetic contemplation is
nonetheless depicted as an alien that has just arrived from outer space and
then, observing from a comfortable distance, formed an aesthetic judgment

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of our galaxy’s appearance. Of course, this alien is imputed to have distinctly

classical tastes, which is why it fails to consider our planet and its immediate
surroundings as especially beautiful. But regardless of the alien’s final aesthetic
judgment, one thing is clear: this is a first manifestation of the gaze of the
consummate urban dweller who, constantly in motion in the ou-topos of black
cosmic space, peers down at the topography of our world from a touristic,
aesthetic distance.