STUDIO
activate! fitness urbanism and its misfits
The gym is eating the city. Fitness is replacing publicness.
These were notions—less observation than sensations—that we shared, across three cities ringing the Baltic Sea. Tallinn, Helsinki, Stockholm. The creeping feeling that an activity and aesthetic called “fitness” was taking over had started well before the pandemic—before social distancing introduced new patterns of alfresco socialization and before friends began to admit to power-walking in parks in “full Lycra” with fluorescent BPA-free plastic bottles filled with white wine in a desperate attempt to covertly catch up with friends during “full lockdown.” Varying degrees of restrictions have applied in the three cities over the course of 2020; the gyms, saunas, swimming pools, sports fields, ice rinks, velodromes, yoga studios, stadiums, pitches, dojos, tennis courts, racquet halls, bowling alleys, and other exercise facilities were closed to wildly different degrees, but on the whole this interior fitness landscape was definitely more closed than usual. The year of hand sanitizer had taken effect, and fitness as a program was given a special status as both a right and a duty of urban populations, at the same time that it was evicted from the artificially lit interior “junkspace” in which it was usually allocated. As a result, functionally clad bodies were being pushed out onto the streets of their cities en masse and the outdoor gyms and multi-sport courts that had become so popular amongst landscape architects in recent years were retrieved from superfluity and given the workout they always wanted. It was happening: the gym was eating the city. But what did this mean for the city, and for life in the city, when life was taken as a biopolitical concern, a matter of lives led and of life itself?
Studio 3 of the Masters of Urban Studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) comprised of a weekly half-day conversation, wherein theory and design-led investigation was mobilized in an attempt to come to grips with what was going on through acts of theorization and mediation (the two components of the work). Those conversations took as their point of application not the city itself but the subject, which was treated both at the scale of the individual and collective—a subjectification through activation (Deniz), confession (Lisa), competition (Zahan), and maintenance (Mattieu), and at the scale of the population—a “modulation” operating through infrastructural means, which saw water (Ahmad) and energy (Ege) positioned as battlegrounds for authoritarian or extra-state regimes.
What emerged was an understanding of fitness that overtly or incidentally left the figure of the athleisure-clad, namaste-muttering urban (and suburban) middle-classes behind. This would be a more difficult conversation, the course participants insisted, that would force us to confront questions of power, faith, ideology, planning policy, and colonial violence. The 16 conversations that composed the trajectory and content of the studio form a backdrop to the 6 works that are published through this website. In addition to these, there were three additional themes that we as teachers continually returned to, in part following research interests of our own: these were concepts to think with, theory-tools with sharp edges and potential explanatory force.
1. fit landscapes
The first of the three can be located in a critique of urbanism’s intellectual heritage, the history of which can be told as a history of making analogies between natural evolution and urban change, centred around the notion that cities are complex and self-organizing. Urban planners and architects have used these analogies both to justify the need for rational planning and to argue against it. The case of ecological urbanism illustrates this point clearly. In the postwar decades, the landscape architect Ian McHarg defined design as a process of making people, cities and institutions “fit.” He believed that we can objectively distinguish progressive (evolving) from retrogressive processes, and that this relates to what he calls environmental fitness and, drawing on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolutionary adaptation, argued that “architecture should be called fitting”. “There is a requirement,” McHarg addressed architects “to adapt that environment and/or yourself in order to accomplish fitting.” Yet the attempt to place urbanism on scientific footing by appealing to the authority of natural evolution is misguided: the banner of science is mobilized to normalize certain rather than other ideas about fitness.
What or who is thus construed as “misfit”? This is the question that for example informs Christopher Alexander’s influential Notes on The Synthesis of Forms. Identifying a ‘good fit’ was next to impossible, but he believed that “it is the easiest thing in the world to name the specific kinds of misfit which prevent good fit.” For Alexander, the task of designers was to eliminate forms badly “fitted” to their contexts. Today, “fitness” continues to be invoked in relation to landscape and territory, which, like their occupants, through regimes of resilience are supposed to arrive at the ever-elusive state of wellbeing. Fitness has returned as a measure by which good cities can be designed, proliferating as policy directives for enhancing urban space through recreation and human powered activities, not only a quality demanded of architecture or its subjects, but of the urban environment itself.
The impact of the physical fitness industry on cities has caught the attention of pundits such as Richard Florida, who, with his love of hyperbole, described it as “the urban fitness revolution”. While Florida focused predominantly on the economic geography of gyms and fitness studios, that impact can be parsed in relation to the trend of remaking open spaces for physical fitness. Thus, in an interview about the Underline project in Miami, a conversion of a strip of land under an elevated railway into a linear park, the architect James Corner explained that, compared to the widely known High Line, the Underline is “about health and fitness, cycling, basketball, running and rollerblading” and “encourag[ing] people to spend time outdoors.” What are the premises for making these goals of central importance to urbanism?
2. fit bodies
The subject of urban fitness is thus oddly both all body, and completely disembodied, and “the body” formed a second key concept tool. Cities are “kept in shape” by way of design proposal and policies that are all too often predicated by abstract imaginaries of publics composed of classless and genderless human subjects. “Young and smart and raised by wolves,” the entrepreneurial protagonists of global capitalism are celebrated for their seamless integration within networked flows of capital, things, and other people, but beyond their “fitness” lies what Josef Vogl describes as a “longing to to leave the ponderous heaviness of the material world, where physical conditions of ownership prevail”—this is a form of capitalist subject, and a form of capitalism that “dreams of its own oblivion.” In the face of this, critical theory offers us a cold shower in the reminder of the finite nature of our biological life: as Boris Groys argues, “Every critical theory creates a state of urgency—even a state of emergency. Theory tells us that we are merely mortal, material organisms—and that we have little time at our disposal. We have little time at our disposal. Rather, we must act, here and now.”
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“The body has been and continues to be used like a machine. We are to produce and we are to perform,” the Swedish artist Fathia Mohidin explained of her recently opened exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, which features a series of sculptural reinterpretations of fitness equipment in cast concrete (Fig, 1). The weight of the chosen material stills the incessant performance that such objects usually elicit. In this lies an unambiguous critique. The more work we are prepared to do in the simulation of manual labor that is a “workout,” the more work we are prepared to do in other workplaces, Mohidin argues. Who we are working (out) for thus becomes a pressing concern, reminding us that we cannot think “fitness” without considering labor.
Fig 1. Fathia Mohidin, Roll Deep (2020) and Chop Chop Corporal (2020), shown in “Ida Idaida, Fathia Mohidin: Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation Grant Recipients 2020,” December 2, 2020–January 10, 2021, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm. Photograph: Jean-Baptiste Béranger.
Where once the welfare state claimed some direct responsibility over the reproduction of the labouring body at the scale of the population, neoliberal healthcare reforms are increasingly directed towards modalities of well-being. As Melinda Cooper notes, from the late 1970s onwards, public health interventions increasingly shifted from traditional medical and surgical care towards preventative measures targeting personal behaviour and unhealthy lifestyles. Concerns of health were posed as moral hazards that the welfare state unfairly shifted costs from the risk prone to the risk averse. Yet as personal responsibility over our own fitness is increasingly normalized, so too does the social calculus between the deserving and the undeserving. When health becomes a matter of individual concern, the systemic and structural conditions of our daily lives appear increasingly beyond the grasp of our political imaginaries. As we continue to be trapped in the throes of a global viral pandemic, we are all too painfully reminded that health is also a matter of collective concern.
3. fit economies
The imperative to be fit has sparked the remarkable growth of the fitness and lifestyle industry. Technology companies such as Strava and Peloton promise to unlock new peaks of athletic performance through analytics and optimized training regimens, while a burgeoning generation of fitness influencers build massive followings with the reach of social media platforms. Fitness is not only a means of maintaining our labouring bodies, but intrinsic to the appreciation of our human capital. Yet as Michel Feher describes, the outcome of the neoliberal project was not the resurrection of the entrepreneurial spirit, but a society of perpetual rating and audit. The ascendancy of finance and the securitization of the economy has subjected individuals, corporations and governments to the discipline of financial markets. Factors such as productivity and profitability become secondary to the cultivation of value in the eyes of the shareholder, sparking a speculative economy that chases returns on liquid assets rather than fixed capital.
While the fitness of our bodies and our economies are continuously subject to the rating of financial markets, this shift may also open up new avenues of social contestation. Feher argues that we “ought to adopt the notion of human capital…much as the workers’ movement adopted the figure of the free worker, and allow it to express aspirations and demands that its neoliberal promoters had neither intended nor foreseen.” As wages stagnate, living costs rise, and we are pushed into ever more precarious forms of existence, the imperative to be fit, to exist as a healthy, performing body reminds us that maybe after all, it’s not what you earn, it’s what you’re worth.
In this way, through tools of trade such as prescriptions, formulas and checklists that vacillate between the overly technical and the hopelessly general, the link between active lifestyles and “good” urban design has gained currency in the name of increased productivity, wellbeing, and the neoliberal critique of the welfare state.
conclusion
The notion of fitness seems to problematize but also reproduce a set of binary oppositions such as human/non-human, urban/nature, production/reproduction, ecology/economy, subject/environment. Drawing on Marxist, queer and other critical theories, this studio course asked how “fitness” produces value and subjectivity in the contemporary city. Exploring how it’s wielded across colloquial and scientific registers, we examined the urgency of making cities “fit for purpose” in the context of financial capitalism, race and gender inequalities and the ecological question. How have urbanists—considered as members of a transnational expert community—contributed to this state of affairs? Are urbanists fit for contemporary political context, or are they becoming misfits? What can we hope for and do to make things otherwise?
references
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, 59 (1992): 3–7.
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Ian McHarg, ​To Heal the Earth. Selected Writings of Ian McHarg​ (Island Press, 1998), 181. Originally published as “Architecture in an Ecological View of the World,“ ​AIA Journa​l 54, 5 (1970), 47–51.
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Christopher Alexander, ​Notes on the Synthesis of Form​ (Harvard University Press, 1973), 23.
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Richard Florida, “The Urban Fitness Revolution,” Bloomberg, January 2, 2018. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-02/the-geography-of-the-urban-fitness-boom
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In Kim Megson, “Interview: James Corner,” Cladmag 2 (2017). https://www.cladglobal.com/architecture-design-features?codeid=31801
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Josef Vogl, The Specter of Capital (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2015), 3, 4.
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Boris Groys, In The Flow (London: Verso, 2016), 28-29.
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“Unga konstnärer om kroppar och maskiner,” Sydsvenskan (December 2, 2020), https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2020-12-05/unga-konstnarer-om-kroppar-och-maskiner.
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Melinda Cooper, Family values: between neoliberalism and the new social conservatism (Zone Books, New York, 2017), 177.
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Michel Feher, ‘Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital’, in Public Culture 21, no 1 (2009), p