MUCH HAS BEEN MADE OF THE NEED TO LOOK BEYOND BUILT form and architecture when talking of the city. The need to focus on people who use built forms and the need to focus on the ‘soul’ of a building have become well-enshrined objectives in the best of architectural practices. So much so that they generate much cynicism, or alternatively, allow reactionary architectural statements to be made all the time.

From green architecture to nomadic shelters, every dimension of the architectural realm is being explored, theorized, critiqued, and remixed. It looks like as if architectural professions have reached a level of knowledge and practice never attained before, thanks in part to technological educational advances. How come then that, as Rem Koolhaas observes, “although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection a farce, a low-grade purgatory … Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement…”1 There is indeed a deep disconnect between the intelligence embedded in architectural artifacts and the silliness of the cities we are developing for ourselves.

What if the problem does not lie in the body or soul of the architectural object? What if the uses and abuses of architecture are themselves only symptoms of a deeper conceptual malaise? Does the over-arching concept of the city itself, within which most architectural moments are located – need to be critically interrogated? Would we be able to move to an understanding of urban architecture in a less embattled way? 

There is something solid and quantifiable to the idea of the city that allows architectural narratives to dominate our idea of urbanism, and through it, all contemporary life. The idea of the city starts from the fiction of evolutionary growth – from the tribal to the civilized man, from the unsettled and light to the rooted and heavy, making the notions of scale, monumentalism, and density, some sort of in-built genetic conceptual pools that dictate the way human civilization evolves. It’s as if they contribute as much to the escalation of urban intensity as does the impulse of urbanization itself. Every civilizational moment that feels it has arrived has its own peculiar notion of evolutionary movement from the tribal primitive to the urban sophisticated.

According to the dialectical conception of history, the urban is superior to the natural in evolutionary terms, or at least, it represents an advanced expression of nature’s evolution. The imagined opposition between the natural environment and the city confers a heroic status on the architect, whose practice seems to consist of extricating tomorrow’s civilization from today’s material conditions.

In today’s endlessly sprawling, densifying cities, ‘savage nature’, that we once believed we had successfully contained, comes to haunt us in all kinds of ways. The new frontier, really speaking, is that which exists ‘within’. The urban wilderness of US inner city ghettoes or Asian slums clashes with urban planners’ and policy makers’ aspirations of controlling space and modernizing.

Grandiose architectural gestures are doomed attempts at defying the city’s anarchic expansion. All around the globe, clones of Mies van der Rohe’s glass and steel Seagram Building in New York, rise above the ground, forcing the chaotic city “to look at itself reflected… in the neutral mirror that breaks the city web”.2 The dramatic moment when pure architectural form finally stands and confronts the urban mess around is on some kind of repeat mode around the world, as if planners and architects have not been able to get over its illusory thrill. However, to put it in slang, the mess always wins.

New York, for instance, once again became the city of the future on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers disintegrated back into the city web, releasing a billion tiny glass and steel particles that reflected, for an instant, the ultimate failure of the Modernist project. The debacle was quickly draped up, like an artwork by Christo. A “Work in Progress” sign was left in front of Ground Zero and our brains were plugged right back onto the sedative media stream, fed with the rhetoric of civilization and dreams of grandeur.

In our growth-obsessed civilization, destruction is nothing more than an opportunity for construction. The new Freedom Tower was selected and designed with great speed. The Freedom Tower will have an asymmetric shape, which seems to be more in vogue these days. That’s about the only change to expect. Otherwise, the repeat button has been furiously pressed as expected as if to contain the surrounding urban chaos threatening to spillover into Ground Zero.

Yet, for all their bigness, aesthetic purity, and ‘land-marking’ power, monuments have never made a city. The telling urban moment lies, in fact, in the surrounding mess they are meant to resolve. To see that, we need to put our architect, urbanist, and activist defenses down and experience the city from within. As if it were a giant art installation we could get lost in.

Let’s imagine a city. Not any particular city but rather a mix of cities; a messy collage of Mumbai, Goa, Tokyo, Barcelona, Mexico City, New York, and a few others. An endlessly sprawling global village looking like Cedric Price’s “Scrambled egg city”, where everything is distributed evenly in “small granules or pavilions across the landscape in a continuous network”3.

In typical Postmodern fashion, this city is composed of disparate architectural elements: an art-deco hotel, a tourist resort, an electronic billboard, a neon sign, a delirious cathedral, mass housing, sun-breaking office towers, and so on. These archetypes majestically come together to produce the skyline of our imaginary city. Spreading over and under, within and between, even spilling outside, the “continuous network” is everywhere. Formless more than informal, it is the glue tying urban elements together. This is what we could call the ‘Bazaar City’ – the city in its raw form.

It is the history of ‘ground level urbanism’ that we want to evoke here. It is a simple way of getting out of the body/soul discourse of architecture that dominates our reading of cities today. How exactly did we arrive at this observation? What is the connection between urbanism, the bazaar, and the need to see cities beyond the issue of architecture in any dominant form? How does the bazaar reveal the folly of mistaking architecture for urbanism? And how does the bazaar help us understand this by never really dismissing the architectural moment? How do we keep architecture in its rightful place – body, soul, and whatever? And why does architecture not quite represent the energy that really creates a city?

While history reveals that tribal and peasant-driven markets were the real sites where diverse identities were expressed and exchanged along with goods and artisanal skills as part of larger networks of exchange across the globe, contemporary accounts of urban history only focus on the eventual manifestation of these exchanges in the form of power centres. The bustling markets and habitats within or outside forts and palaces that nourished kingdoms and were the primary generators of wealth have slowly faded from our imagination. Only the shells have remained in the form of ‘glorious’ memories and markers. They have offered the blueprints to imagine the highest forms of civilizational aspiration through a partial, retrofitted version of the past.

These power-centres, the capital nodes of kingdoms and empires, were dense with people and physical structures, from which the earliest urban spaces emerged. The flow of wealth, goods, people, and culture, across the vast spaces beyond these centres, following trade routes over land and sea, may never have produced robust structural expressions. However, in reality, they were full of intense urban moments. If we transcend the idea of urbanism as a kind of physical manifestation (or even as density in terms of the scale of population aggregates) and see it in those moments of interaction, of movement, in weekly or seasonal bazaars and flea-markets, that feed the political and economic nerve centres, we see a different notion of urbanism starting to unfold. Then, it does not matter if twenty people set up shop at the edge of a forest or two thousand on the outskirts of a kingdom. It is this moment that contemporary urban life yearns for. It is this simple moment that is regenerated in billion-dollar cities with heavy and expensive architectural legacies. Contemporary cities yearn for the thrill of the bazaar, but instead of creating appropriate contexts where its natural energies can be expressed, they produce translations that lose out on subtleties. The most dominant urban spaces today – the shopping malls – reduce the idea of the bazaar to its barest function – shopping.

Universal and ubiquitous, the bazaar, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, is “obviously an abstraction of certain structural characteristics” – it is an organizational principle based on the instinctual human propensity to trade and exchange. It is “a meeting point of several communities”. The bazaar is necessarily “unenclosed, exposed, and the interstitial outside.”4

No wonder the bazaar is making a comeback in post-industrial cities: farmers’ markets, music festivals, and the like, are appealing to an increasingly cosmopolitan and bohemian generation that constructs its identity in a way similar to our construction of the imaginary city in this essay – with bits and pieces from here and there. The remix and collage culture that drives today’s ‘creative economy’ relies on spaces of exchange where the new can be made out of the old.

The eagerness to reinvent one’s own ‘cultural self’ is nowhere as apparent as in urban Japan, where several segments of young people are rejecting their parents’ values, which include, among others, a respect for patriarchal order. The bazaar, for such radical denizens, becomes an outer space of socialization where another world is possible.

The makeshift bazaar aesthetic is making a comeback in Tokyo’s fashionable neighborhoods, as exemplified by the Bombay Bazaar in Daikanyama in Tokyo. This restaurant is part of a new group of venues that have adopted a slummy-looking vernacular architecture as a fashion statement. There is no signboard announcing the place, just an old table with empty Coke bottles, a few metal sheets on the walls, and a ‘handicapped’ sign. You would not be able to find it unless someone took you there. Its interior is nicely bohemian with heteroclite second-hand furniture chosen with taste. You see a dreadlocked woman eating curry rice in the corner, a French couple drinking lassi served by a cute hippieish waitress. In the same building, there is a store that sells casual-chic cloth. Further down, a store selling an Italian brand tries hard to look ‘ghetto’, and another store, 20 metres away, called, Bonjour Records, with a deliberately low-key façade and a richly furnished interior, is packed with collectors’ records. Tokyo’s low-rise high-density urban profile and small-scale architectural structures allow all kinds of independent shops, small-time retail outlets, food joints, and bars, to flourish.

There is a fascinating continuum from the streets of Tokyo’s Daikanyama or Shimokitazawa to Ingo’s Saturday Night Flea market in Goa. There is a wild juxtaposition of visual elements in a place like the Ingo’s Flea Market in Goa, where a diverse set of ‘global people’ engage in trading trinkets, weed-smoking pipes, high-end and low-brow cuisines, wines and local intoxicants, art, fashionable clothes, and shoes, from hundreds of small stalls made of bamboo and cloth. This spectacle frames the ‘bazaar moment’, simultaneously evoking ancient tribal traditions and futuristic global cosmopolitan fantasies.