Did you ever notice the absence of grit, the overt cleanup, or the disappearance of ambiguous, interstitial spaces in the contemporary city? Each chapter of René Boer’s Smooth City. Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives (Valiz, 2023) starts with an eerily relatable narrative of slick, seamless urbanism, before unpicking what the critic and curator sees as an ever-increasing push for ‘perfection’, efficiency and control — as found in this extract from his book.
A dull afternoon in August. A black, electric Uber car silently slides through Reestraat in central Amsterdam. It stops in front of a brightly lit clothing store with one mint-coloured item on display. Somebody gets out of the back door of the cab, steps onto the well-kept pavement, and directly disappears into the store’s well-thoughtthrough atmosphere of pastel colours, minimalist tunes, and subtle scents. Next door, two tourists with metallic trolley cases leave their Airbnb apartment while they observe an electric Gorillas delivery bike whizzing by on the street’s ‘shared space’. Both the pavement and the street are made of the same high-quality natural stones and dark bricks, on which stores have expanded with large, square flower pots with olive trees and shiny barriers with black velvet ropes between them. A person who looks like everyone else in the street walks by while interacting with a smartwatch, selecting a song to be played on a set of noise-cancelling headphones. Reestraat, lined with two rows of well-renovated or even completely reconstructed historical buildings, is an urban environment that appears as a cosy and harmonious interior, where everything has been brought to perfection.
While observing contemporary urban life in Reestraat, a narrow street in Amsterdam’s UNESCO-accredited canal zone and one of the many streets connecting the famous Prinsengracht and Keizersgracht, it takes serious effort to imagine things that could be expected from a scene in the city but here are nowhere to be found. For sure, nobody is killing joy or disrupting calm. There is not a single person who doesn’t fit in the perfect picture or who doesn’t synchronize with the street’s specific daily rhythm. Nobody seems to belong to a group that is usually not present. Nothing transgresses, nothing smells. There are no signs of commonality or potential ways of doing things differently. A bit of faded graffiti on a wall is, above all, a reminder of how little graffiti or other forms of unregulated expression can still be found here. A neatly folded stack of cardboard discarded by one of the shops at most emphasizes the general absence of dirt. Looking around, it is clear that the entire street is either part of a carefully edited past or a well-protected consumerist present. There is almost nothing that doesn’t have a specific purpose, or hasn’t been incorporated into the street’s hermetic, homogenous aesthetics. There is not a single forgotten building, empty plot, or little gap. In Reestraat, everything is complete, with almost no space to breathe.
In cities around the world, this particular urban condition, characterized by ever-increasing ‘perfection’, efficiency, and control and the active eradication of everything that stands in its way, is spreading rapidly.
Reestraat is everywhere. In cities around the world, this particular urban condition, characterized by ever-increasing ‘perfection’, efficiency, and control and the active eradication of everything that stands in its way, is spreading rapidly. It exists at once as newly built developments and carefully restored historical urban areas, and occurs to varying degrees. It often starts in city centres and steadily spreads through different — also more residential — parts of town, but also takes the form of an archipelago of interconnected (and sometimes even fenced-off) islands of ‘perfection’. In any case, its rise and dominance constitute a landmark shift in urban history. For most of the twentieth century, urban centres were often in poor physical shape, hampered by economic difficulty, and the site of myriad conflicts and struggles. Over the last few decades, however, swathes of many cities have been brought up to a tip-top condition, powered by well-oiled economic forces and the successful repression and erasure of both conflict and critical alternatives. This process has drastically changed cities around the world in a relatively short period of time and its enormous, and in many ways problematic, impact on people’s individual lives and the quality of urban life in general has not yet been properly addressed.
As the example of Reestraat makes clear, Amsterdam has also been radically transformed by these developments. The small capital city of the Netherlands is where I grew up, became part of various urban social movements over time, and developed my practice. Witnessing Amsterdam’s transformation over the last two to three decades or so, experiencing how it undermined its urbanity, and in particular dealing with how it directly harmed our alternative urbanisms has led me to research the mechanisms and consequences of this urban condition. Over time, I started to refer to it as the ‘smooth city’, given the lack of a clear term describing these developments. By introducing this notion I hope to bring its many aspects together in a coherent framework and to create a focal point for a more effective critique. While the outward appearance of the smooth city might at first come across as a calm, wonderful, harmless world, the research soon made me realize that the process of ‘smoothening’ can reach such extremes that the vital elements of what makes a city a city are being threatened, if not actively eliminated. The smooth city often negatively impacts the democratic nature and emancipatory potential of cities, excludes people in violent ways, and leaves almost no space for anything that is out of tune with its sterile objectives.
The smooth city often negatively impacts the democratic nature and emancipatory potential of cities, excludes people in violent ways, and leaves almost no space for anything that is out of tune with its sterile objectives.
Clearly, the rise of the smooth city globally is an urgent problem. The city has, over time, become one of the most important habitats of humankind, not only in terms of scale but in particular because it has often provided space for exchanging ideas, bridging cultures, providing shelter, transforming lives, testing new forms of togetherness, and pushing the boundaries of the imaginable. The smooth city puts all these and other important functions under serious pressure, while gradually eroding their vitality, if not their existence. In some cases, there are question marks over whether a full-blown smooth city is actually still a city at all. Its rise has led to a steady evaporation of urbanity and even started to affect the popular understanding and representation of cities. By now, ‘urban’ no longer means raw, dystopian, or conflictive but ‘perfect’, shiny, and happy. At the moment, the ongoing optimization of the urban landscape is still often understood and portrayed as the sudden ‘success’ of the city and is still widely celebrated. Publications like Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier1 are already a decade old, but positivist perspectives are still dominating urban discourse. It is important however, to shed a different light on this so-called ‘success’ of the city, examine its ‘smoothness’ in detail, and bring its downsides to the forefront of the debate on the future of the city.
That said, problematizing the smooth city always comes with the concept’s inevitable paradox. While it is important to examine the current obsession with ‘perfection’ and its negative impact on the city, the fact that ultimately everyone needs a clean, safe, and efficient urban environment to live a decent human life can’t be ignored, either. At first glance, it might seem like everyone needs a smooth city, at least to some extent, yet researching the smooth city has made it very clear that many people do not have access to the ‘smoothness’ intensifying in many places, do not benefit from it in the way a few others do, and are excluded by the normative conceptions of ‘order’ and ‘safety’ that are being applied. The smooth city often fails to provide for everyone, while its proliferation threatens the very existence of urbanity. This is something I have experienced many times being involved in movements trying to carve out spaces for queer culture or for self-organized refugee housing in the city, which mobilized a wide range of individuals and collectives collaborating on these alternative urbanisms for which there was clearly a considerable need. However, the city of Amsterdam pushed, over and over again, for the consolidation of smoothness at the expense of its most marginalized inhabitants and their need for space to come together, to be themselves, and to find ways to live their lives.
The smooth city often fails to provide for everyone, while its proliferation threatens the very existence of urbanity.
At the same time, being part of the temporary existence of these alternative spaces has often been empowering, as I experienced how these interventions were not only constrained to themselves but resonated through the city. Suddenly, different kinds of people started to confidently manifest themselves on the nearby streets, people in need started to become aware of a place to find networks of solidarity and everyone in the city was reminded that things can be done differently. The presence of these spaces showed me how through concerted political action it is possible to create a horizon beyond the smooth city. It led me to theorize the strategies to work towards this horizon, which, following various other urban thinkers, I started to refer to as ‘porosity’. The pushback all these alternative spaces and their networks were soon or later subjected to was also a strong reminder of how ruthless the obsession with ‘perfection’, order, and control by those in power and by those whose interests they represent can be. It also shed light on how little research has been done on the ultimate ambition behind this obsession, as well as its origins, the mechanisms being deployed to consolidate this ambition, and the crises of the urban it is creating.
It has been insightful to sharpen my conceptualization of the smooth city with existing concepts which are closely related but not the same. Gentrification , for example, is now the focus of much debate and describes the socio-economic process of displacement of a social class with limited financial means by a wealthier one. These dynamics are often part of the smooth city, but ‘smoothification’ is, as the case of Reestraat shows, sometimes only partially about the displacement of former inhabitants and much more about the rapid proliferation of ‘perfection’, order, and control in all aspects of urban life.
The relation between the smooth city and gentrification, as well as many other concepts, is discussed at length in the following chapters, and done so to clarify where they overlap and differ. Many of these concepts describe specific aspects of how the smooth city is defined and I hope the smooth city can function as some kind of umbrella term to bring many of these concrete topics together. This will hopefully allow for a more precise and effective critique with regard to current developments. Another concept that briefly needs discussion here to avoid confusion for readers is the notion of ‘smooth space’ that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed in their seminal work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.2 They describe smooth space as a kind of free, nomadic, heterogenous space, without much of a fabric of control. It is referred to as smooth as it manifests itself as open, multidirectional, and stretching through and beyond any kind of obstacle. Clearly, this is the opposite of how the notion of the smooth city is defined, in which smooth refers to the visual, material, and functional characteristics which actually appear as smooth in the context of strictly regulated space. Deleuze and Guattari also introduce the notion of ‘striated space’, which is described as regulated, sedentary, and homogenous and occurs when it is, for example, directly controlled by a certain authority. In this sense, striated space, and not their understanding of smooth space, is conceptually closer to the smooth city.
Despite their specific understanding of ‘smooth’, I decided to still use the term in the notion of the smooth city as it most accurately reflects the essence of this urban condition. The Cambridge Dictionary describes this adjective as: ‘Having a surface or consisting of a substance that is perfectly regular and has no holes (…)’, which aptly resonates with an urban environment that has been given a perfectly polished outer skin in which everything looks and feels the same and nothing stands out. For smooth qualifying an action, this dictionary spells it out as: ‘Happening without any sudden changes, interruption, or difficulty’. Again, a fitting description of how events seemingly unfold in the smooth city, without (apparent) friction or conflict. Interestingly, in English and in common translations of smooth in German (glatt), French (lisse), or Spanish (suave), the term carries a fitting connotation of insincerity, or in the words of the Cambridge Dictionary: ‘Very polite, confident, and able to persuade people, but in a way that is not sincere’. As a verb, ‘to smooth’ is about ‘removing difficulties’ or ‘making something perfectly flat or regular’. Indeed, the smooth city smooths out anything that doesn’t fit its ultimate ‘perfection’, often without showing it ever did. The term can also be broadly applied, acknowledges design researcher Colin Keays: ‘Smooth implies a texture. As a term often used to describe technological interfaces, the word is then perfectly fitting as a descriptor of an urban environment which increasingly values efficiency and outward appearance, to form an apparently seamless user experience’.3
This publication seeks to provide a critical analysis of the present based on Amsterdam and many other cities around the world, while offering a clear vision for a non-smooth future.
In the Smooth City book, all these ideas are related to specific urban constellations though different times — such as de Wallen, also known as Amsterdam's Red Light District, where a large part of the book has been written. Even today, de Wallen remains a complex urban constellation, and incessant attempts at its sanitization tell us a lot about the sometimes messy process behind the making of the smooth city, while also reminding us what a radically different city Amsterdam was until not too long ago. I have clear childhood memories of the many old buildings in the city that were abandoned, left to rot, and supported by tree trunks to prevent them from falling down as nobody would bother repairing such places. These are important thought-images for contextualizing the smooth city, and understanding the fact that smoothening is a process which generally departs from a non-smooth condition. That said, conversations on the smooth city tend to quickly descend into a romanticization of the past. This publication seeks instead to provide a critical analysis of the present based on Amsterdam and many other cities around the world, while offering a clear vision for a non-smooth future. The smoothening of cities also impacts differently on different bodies. I am well aware that as a queer but also white, male, and cis person, I only have limited experience of how smoothening can affect the presence of one’s body in the city. In no way will I argue that the mechanisms of the smooth city I describe impact people in the same way, and while I have done my best to provide a complete picture I already assume I am still missing large parts of how smoothening affects people’s lives, not just in Amsterdam but also elsewhere. I still hope that the notion of the ‘smooth city’ will prove a valuable addition to the current urban debate, and a helpful tool for many to criticize contemporary urban developments. I also acknowledge that a critique of the ‘perfection’, efficiency, and decadence of the smooth city might be read as a privileged romanticization of poverty and decay, but I do think the problems with the proliferation of smoothness are too important to simply abandon the discussion altogether. Today, as the smoothening of Amsterdam continues at a rapid pace, I understand how important its alternative spaces were for me while growing up as a queer boy. It is the queerness of these spaces that has provided me with important insights into how we might transcend the smooth city everywhere.
Bio
René Boer works as a critic, curator and organizer in and beyond the fields of architecture, design, heritage and the arts. In his practice he articulates new perspectives on spatial conditions and facilitates fertile ground for imagining and materialising alternatives. He is a founding partner of Loom - practice for cultural transformation, part of the transnational platform Failed Architecture and affiliated with various urban social movements as well as art, architecture and design schools in Amsterdam and beyond. In 2023, he published 'Smooth City' with Valiz Publishers.
Notes
1 Edward Glaeser, 2012.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 1987, pp. 474–500.
3 Colin Keays, 2019, p. 4.
