Meatpaper
zero
Meatropolis
by Nicholas de Monchaux
MARCH, 2007
THIS ARTICLE ABOUT MEAT IN THE CITY will
start between the most superficial of resemblances; on the
left, a diagram of cuts of meat, of the type often exhibited
at state fairs and in (vanishing) butcher’s shops. On
the right, a diagram of Manhattan neighborhoods, of the type
exhibited in guidebooks for tourists or (proliferating) apartment
brokers’ offices.
These are two very different things that merely look the same,
aren’t they?
An initial objection to any other similarity
between these similarly shaped things would be (for the cow
especially) a crucial one. While the carcass, first designated
and then carved into round, flank, brisket and rump, is dead,
the city today seems very much alive.
Just as we need arbitrary designations
to govern the path of a knife, or palate, around and through
the body of the cow, so we need neighborhoods to negotiate
the dense tissue of the city.
And, traditionally, it
is the language of living, not dead flesh, that has dominated
urban talk. Adrian Forty, among others, has charted the way
in which the language of 19th-century biology came to dominate
the architectural and urban conversations of the next century.
Organs were important—the “lungs” of
parks and beaches, the “brain” of a financial district,
the “heart” of a commercial core—but even
more so the “circulation” that kept them alive,
bathed them in (presumably) life-giving commerce and flow.
And so the vascularly inclined architects and planners of the
early 20th century came to propose, and then construct, such
a rationally circulating body. As articulated by Robert Moses,
one of the century’s most infamous urban architects,
the principle was simple: “Cities are created by and
for traffic.”1
In his half century as head
of New York’s
Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Moses oversaw the creation
of more than 24 highways, 13 in the fabric of New York City
itself. In Chapter 36 of his epic biography The Power Broker:
Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Caro points out
how—unlike
the highway builders of old, or the planners of entirely new
planned cities—Moses was one of the first in the 20th
century to propose constructing highways through dense, living
urban tissue.
From the language of the living organism, however,
we here move to the language of meat. In a speech quoted by
Caro, the great builder opines:
You can draw any kind of picture
you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the
wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia,
but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to
hack your way with a meat ax.2
Moses’ assertion
that the “city is made by and
for traffic” came from discussions surrounding the Lower
Manhattan Expressway, an eight-lane highway along Canal Street
which would have resulted in the demolition of what is now
SoHo and the West Village. His successful opponent in this
endeavor was the neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs, whose 1961
Death and Life of Great American Cities used the language of
the butcher to debate the then-unquestioned worth of urban
highways. The exclusive pursuit of alleviating traffic congestion,
and the resulting creation of enormous elevated highways, not
only “carved” but “cleaved” the city,
preventing it from “sustaining life.”3
Caro’s
1974 biography echoes Jacobs’ language;
in 1970, for example, Moses is “carving four more lanes
of expressway” out of Queens.4 Yet Moses’ “meat
ax,” Caro points out, cut not just into the physical
fabric of the city—as in the legion of utility lines,
subway tunnels, rivers, and most of all neighborhoods altered
or relocated to build urban expressways—but even more
into its institutional and social meat. Moses’ projects
depended on his “carving out within the state and city
governments … a unique, independent niche,”5 removing
himself from democratic accountability just as surely as he
grasped the handle of power.
Here we return to a vision of the
city proposed by Jacobs in 1961: not just a physical body,
but a complex web of social, economic and physical relationships.
In the final chapter of Death and Life, “The Kind of
Problem a City Is,” Jacobs
quotes the 1958 report of the Rockefeller Foundation, a call
to the natural sciences to see beyond a mechanistic model of
the living world, and to see bodies, organisms, and ecosystems
as examples of “organized complexity.”
So back
to meat and Manhattan. To return to our illustrations, both
images represent a system of commonly understood distinctions,
rendered in order to negotiate the body of a complex system:
the city, the (bovine) body. Just as we need arbitrary designations
to govern the path of a knife, or palate, around and through
the body of the cow, so we need neighborhoods to negotiate
the dense tissue of the city. And just as cuts of beef change
to suit custom and fashion (who remembers the silverside, striploin,
or clod?), so do neighborhood boundaries and designations.
An alley named for Dashiell Hammett in San Francisco’s
Tenderloin, whose Maltese Falcon was set in and around the
neighborhood, now lies inside tony Nob Hill. Manhattan’s
own Tenderloin, once the area between 23rd and 57th street
and 5th and 7th avenues, lost its name after its mostly black
population moved to Harlem in the early 20th century.
But while
a new fashion in meat cutting doesn’t actually change
the cow, urban neighborhoods exist in constant interplay with
the city’s living
flesh. The negotiable boundaries of neighborhoods are necessary
divisions for the city’s self-reflection, even self-organization,
but they connect as well as divide.
It is fashionable today
to talk about this interconnectedness of the city, the nexus
of physical, social, and natural systems. “Green” is
the term most often applied, and it is a hue that speaks, fascinatingly,
not to meat, but to salad. To see ourselves as part of a connected
web is trauma enough, it would seem; far easier to see such
a web in the lacy fingers of branches and roots, or a vinagretted
friseé, than in the lacy veins
of meat.
Yet the green, interdependent city is also, perforce,
the red. When journalist Upton Sinclair began his expose of
slum life in 1905, he sought out the meat packing industry
of Chicago as his urban subject. The fact that the book inspired
the regulation of meat, with the Pure Food and Drug Act of
1906, and not urban work life, was rued by Sinclair in his
own meat metaphor: “I aimed at the
public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”6
The
infrastructure of animal consumption is marbled through urban
development today as in the 19th century. It continues to shape
Manhattan itself. What is most remarkable about the fashionable
renovation of New York’s Highline
into a “green” park for people is that it will
be a human takeover of an infrastructure previously designed
for animals, to connect the Hudson railway tunnels of 34th
street with the meat-packing plants now constituting the city’s
latest fashionable district. Yet as strollers and sunbathers
displace cow and cattle-car, one wonders if our association
of interdependence with the part of our diet most unlike ourselves—the
vegetable—reflects
an unease, or an unwillingness, to reflect the natural connections,
and complications, of that part of our diet with the largest
ecological hoofprint of all. The most arbitrary line in both
illustrations might be the outline separating organism from
ecology. In this light, our two maps, Meat and Manhattan, are
not so different after all. 
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1 “… A city without traffic
is a ghost town” Robert Moses Public Works: A Dangerous
Trade (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970) p. 308
2 Robert Caro The Power Broker: Robert Moses
and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974) p. 849
3 Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great
American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961). See for instance p. 264 “…city-carving
borders” and 265 “facilities that cleave cities
with borders”
4 Caro, 950
5 Caro, 631
6 In his 1920 book on American journalism, Sinclair reiterated
this quote and went on to explain “I realized with
some bitterness that I had been made into a ‘celebrity,’ not
because the public cared anything about the sufferings of
these [Chicago] workers, but simply because the public did
not want to eat tubercular beef.” The Brass Check:
A Study of American Journalism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003) p. 47
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Nicholas de Monchaux focuses
his design practice and research on the intersection of
organizational thinking and the built environment. His
interdisciplinary design work and writings on cities, networks,
and objects have been the subject of numerous articles,
invited lectures, and symposia. Currently an assistant
professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, he is the author
of the forthcoming Spacesuit: 21 Essays on Technology,
Complexity, and Design (Princeton Architectural Press).
This article originally appeared in Meatpaper Issue Zero.
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