Men do not love
Rome because she is beautiful, Rome is beautiful because men have loved her.
—Leopold Kohr
La Habana is the only
city remaining to us.
We Latin Americans
have presided over the loss of our capital cities. Caracas has disappeared, as
has Mexico City, Bogotá, and Rio. Quito and Lima are no longer recognizable.
Even the vaunted Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile are under an assault that
will destroy them.
By loss, I mean their
eradication as civic entities by the elimination of the type of building which
defines urban spaces. Spaces that are useful, interesting and beautiful;
spaces that may even generate pride of citizenship..
Latin American
capitals exist as statistics, not as civic places. The vigorous codification
which guided them from the time of their foundation has not been able to
withstand the false progress of North American traffic engineering, nor the
many recent architectural fashions whose only constant has been a lack of
urban consciousness.
By contrast, there is
ample evidence that La Habana continues to be a great city. What surprises us
about the photographs we see of it today is not the lack of maintenance, not
even the excellence of its architecture, but the miracle that such a place
could still exist.
What are the contours
of this miracle? No doubt, economic lethargy has contributed. Poverty has been
the salvation of many a Caribbean port. It is why we still have Key West, New
Orleans, Charleston, Galveston, and Cartagena. The cycle of poverty did not
justify the demolition of the fine old buildings to build large ones. These
cities thus remained untouched until their rare qualities were recognized and
permanently secured.
But the economic
cycle does not completely explain the case of La Habana. After all, in 1959
Cuba was very affluent and its capital was already beginning to change.
Sert’s new master plan required widespread demolitions even within the
colonial sector of La Habana Vieja and recommended the complete reconstruction
of the Malecón with Miami Beach-type slabs. The little that was built in
those years still disfigures the city, like the scars of an incubated and
arrested illness. This same illness would run its course in other cities,
destroying Caracas and Bogotá in recent decades. Only because of the Cuban
Revolution was La Habana spared this fate.
On the verge of
postwar redevelopment, the city froze over time, in part due to that
characteristic of the communist system which prevents assigning speculative
value to urban land. Isolated from the free market, the use of land is
determined rationally, at least in theory, but in practice this system is
vulnerable to ideological distortion, with a high destructive potential. One
example is the demolition of certain ruins and the reconstruction of others in
East Berlin. Another is the neglect of British buildings in post-imperial
Jamaica.
However, this did not
happen in Cuba. The island’s architects assessed buildings in accordance
with their urban contribution, without dismissing those considered
“dispensable” because they were from Colonial or the Republican eras.
Their cultural patriotism endured the difficult circumstances of four decades.
For this steadfast vision, all Cubans are in their debt.
The years of the
Revolution have been a fortunate episode in the preservation of the city, but
it is evident a transition approaches. It is now the official policy of the
Cuban government to invite foreigners to invest, especially in the tourist
industry. Abundant capital flows from Canada, Spain, and Mexico, invested in
the construction of hotels on Cuba’s virgin beaches. These hotels are
mediocre, but by their distance, they do not spoil the city. However, another,
different, wave of investment can be predicted for the end of the North
American embargo. This one, filtered through the Cuban exiles in Miami, will
target La Habana, city of their dreams.
What could be wrong
with this? After all, Cuban exiles love Cuba passionately. They are not like
those who have invested for purely economic reasons, without an emotional
investment in the result. Would the exiles exploit their beautiful capital
city? Not one of them would want to, but perhaps they know no other way. For
in the long list of admirable achievements of the exile in Miami, urban
development cannot be included.
The failure comes
because the exiles have never learned to love Miami. Economically they
prevailed, and now they control its politics, but they have never made the
city their own. Their patriotic love belongs to the ancestral cities and
towns. Miami has not been their own community as much as a matrix of economic
activity. In the beginning, only crude and temporary development made sense.
The problem arose when the expected short exile was indefinitely extended, and
the terrible provisional practices became permanent, until the very ability to
build well was utterly forgotten.
Only thus can be
explained how the people who created the marvel that is La Habana could
create, without pause, such dismal places in Greater Miami as Kendall,
Westchester, and the embarrassment of Calle Ocho.
The exiles no longer
know how to build within a true city. The apprenticeship in Miami has been
categorically hostile to urbanism. Very little of their current practice can
be applied: not the typology of the buildings, nor the tectonic expression of
the architecture, nor the financing system, nor the “marketing” of the
“product.” None of this can operate within La Habana’s different
circumstances.
Who, then, will
protect the city? Can one expect that the same architects who knew how to
preserve it until now will remain impervious to new and seductive
rationalizations? One hopes so, but a tragic result is more likely, because
the urban code they administer, the one which served to preserve the city, was
not conceived to modulate the North American style of development. It does not
conceptualize, for example, a situation in which a downtown block can be more
valuable as surface parking than with its buildings intact. It does not
perceive that an open field, distant from everything except a highway, can be
worth more for a big-box retailer than one of the elegant locales of La Rampa.
The existing code
protects the city only from small changes initiated by individuals. It does
not respond to the methodology of the large development companies which prefer
to sweep away the urban fabric to accommodate the movement and parking of
vehicles. It does not respond to the socioeconomic devaluation of the city as
a result of the preference for open land.
We can still hope
that late in this savage century we can spare one last city. Let us hope that
the new Cuban people, more cosmopolitan than those who came before, can
recognize that La Habana is the last great Latin American city, the only one
which can still propose an urban ideal.
With a willingness
born of patriotism, with the prospect clearly seen, with timely warning, there
are things to be done. Let us first utterly discard Miami as a model. Let us
take for example those cities which have survived. Cities such as Portland,
Stockholm, and Paris. These have in common an elite planning department, well
paid and incorruptible, managing codes which ensure the urban compatibility of
all buildings. These cities are the heart of regions guided by master plans
which do not cede to peripheral development, directing economic investment
inwards.
Beautiful cities are
not held back for having maintained their urbanism. On the contrary, they are
known for their quality of life, which supports the economy by attracting
talent seeking an environment of excellence. That was the La Habana of our
memory and the one to be projected now.
Andres Duany is an
architect and town planner whose work focuses on the creation of community. He
was born in Cuba (1949) and studied architecture at Princeton and Yale. After
moving to Miami in 1974 he became a founding partner of Arquitectonica. He and
his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, founded their own practice in 1980, at the
time of their design of the town of Seaside. Duany teaches at the University
of Miami School of Architecture and teaches an annual summer planning course
at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.