Your city is a Shein haul

I lived in Manchester from 2021 to 2023 while studying for my master’s degree. A city famed for its industrial past, its red brick warehouses and cast iron details so convincing they’re regularly used to stand in for New York on screen, for a fraction of the cost.

While I was living there, I started to notice something. The city was changing.

I looked out of my new-build apartment window, and all I could see were more new-build apartments. Manchester is often held up as a success story, a city responding to the UK’s housing crisis, with cranes constantly on the skyline and development everywhere. But I couldn’t help wondering: in this rush to keep up with demand, what was being lost? Was Manchester losing its cool?

Because this wasn’t just happening in Manchester. Travelling between cities, I kept getting the same feeling. You arrive somewhere new, you look up, and you could quite literally be anywhere. Melbourne. Hong Kong. New York. London. Berlin. Different continents, different cultures, and yet somehow almost interchangeable. Glass towers. New developments. A skyline with no postcode.

The homogenisation of cities has been building for decades. But it increasingly feels less like organic convergence and more like everyone copying the same template. A copy of a copy of a copy, each generation slightly more drained of the original’s meaning than the last.

Okay urbanism, give us nothing!

Apartment buildings in Seoul (image: Otto Song)

In 1994, the architect and theorist (stick with me) Rem Koolhaas published an essay that reads less like criticism and more like a provocation dragged up as a diagnosis. Lashes and all. He called it The Generic City.

His argument, stripped back: the historic city, with its layers of meaning and carefully preserved identity, is exhausted. It can’t grow anymore. It’s trapped by what it used to be. The Generic City, by contrast, has freed itself from all that. It doesn’t try to be Paris. It doesn’t try to be anywhere. It’s optimised for the present. Endlessly replicable. Infinitely scalable.

Koolhaas wasn’t writing this as a lament. He was writing it almost as a shrug. Maybe even a dare. And here’s what’s genuinely unsettling: he’s not entirely wrong.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with Koolhaas. The intelligence is undeniable and there are buildings of his I find genuinely thrilling. But I’ve never quite been able to call myself a superfan, and I think this essay is part of the reason why. There’s something in his worldview that is almost allergic to tenderness. He is very good at describing what cities do. He is considerably less interested in what they feel like to actually live inside. The Generic City essay is diagnostic in the way a very clever doctor is diagnostic. Accurate, precise, and somehow unable to tell you terrible news with any sort of empathy.

Because the thing about place is that it isn’t rational. You don’t love a city because it functions well. If that were true we’d all be obsessed with the Milton Keynes super roundabout and nobody wants that.

Director Jacques Tati understood this. And in 1967, he did something about it.

He built an entire fake modernist Paris on the outskirts of the real one. Steel and glass, identical corridors, rooms you couldn’t tell apart, a city that had smoothed itself into a single unbroken surface. He called the set Tativille. The film was Playtime. It nearly bankrupted him. I feel like we would have similar financial literacy.

Still from Playtime by Jacques Tati

It is one of the funniest and most quietly devastating films ever made. There’s a sequence where you can see four identical rooms in four identical glass buildings simultaneously, each one occupied by a different person living an indistinguishable life. It’s played for laughs. It’s also a horror film.

What’s remarkable isn’t just that it’s accurate. It’s that Tati made it in 1967. He wasn’t satirising the future. He was already living in it. The Generic City arrived decades before Koolhaas named it, and one French comedian with a very large budget saw it coming before almost anyone else. He just couldn’t stop it. He was skint, I guess.

To understand how we actually got here, you have to go back to two buildings.

New York, 1958. The Seagram Building, the jewel in the International Style’s crown. Designed by Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, it rises thirty-eight floors above Park Avenue in bronze and amber glass. Think of it as architecture’s Schiaparelli moment. Mies was obsessive. The bronze mullions running up the facade are purely decorative, a way of expressing the steel frame beneath rather than hiding it. The plaza he insisted upon was almost unheard of for a commercial building in Manhattan. Even the whisky amber tint of the glass was deliberate, considered, specific. Every decision was load bearing, intellectually if not structurally.

It is a building with a complete and coherent thesis. Even if I don’t like modernism I suppose I have to respect the commitment. Less is a bore, Mies, but alas less is at least an argument. So I’ll shut up.

And then it got copied. And copied. And copied again.

The Seagram Building (image: Mathis)

Except what got copied wasn’t the thesis. It was the silhouette. Strip away the obsessive detail, the material quality, the spatial generosity, and you’re left with a box. A box that is very easy to build, very cheap to replicate, and very profitable to sell.

This is where capitalism joins the party wearing architecture’s clothes. We should have known it wasn’t an architect. They don’t party.

But here’s the thing. This wasn’t only a capitalist failure.

The Narkomfin Building in Moscow, completed in 1932 by Moisei Ginzburg, is the Comme des Garçons of social housing. In Russian Constructivist style, a predecessor to even that of Bauhaus modernism (the Beyonce of white box designers), it had communal kitchens, shared laundries, collective spaces, a building that would literally restructure daily life, nudging its residents toward a new Soviet way of living through architecture alone. Radical, idealistic, genuinely beautiful, and absolutely certain of what it was trying to say.

The Narkomfin Building (image: Wikipedia)

It also got copied. And again, what got copied wasn’t the ideology or the spatial argument. It was the form. The long horizontal block, the strip windows, the flat roof. Feed that through a Stalinist housing programme at industrial scale and you get the prefabricated slab blocks that spread across Eastern Europe for the next forty years.

Schiaparelli duped by Shein. Comme des Garçons duped by Temu. Two completely opposed ideological visions, both stripped of their original conviction, both reproduced at volume until the meaning was entirely gone. Both ending up, somehow, in the same place.

Ideology: gone. Aesthetics: also gone. Generic glass box: present.

The Generic City didn’t arrive from nowhere. It was built twice, by opposite sides of the twentieth century, across two completely contradictory political ideologies, using the same shortcut.

The problem, ultimately, is scale without thought.

Mies spent years obsessing over the Seagram Building. Ginzburg spent years developing the spatial logic of Narkomfin. What made both buildings extraordinary was the obsessive consideration behind them, the sense that every decision had been interrogated, that the architecture was a response to something real.

Global development doesn’t work like that. It can’t. When you are building at the speed and volume that modern cities demand, when you are meeting housing targets and satisfying investors and delivering units to market, you are not making considered spatial responses. You are placing an order.

And so the glass tower goes up. And the waterfront regeneration. And the mixed-use development with its artisan market and its Zizzi or Nando’s and its apartments starting from an eye-watering number. Not as a response to place, but as a product. Dropped into the landscape of a city the way a Shein haul arrives at your door: fast, cheap, and with no particular interest in whether it actually fits.

Koolhaas called this liberation. I remain unconvinced. Liberation into what, exactly? An architectural rendition of everyone wearing the same jeans and a nice top combo.

Because what gets lost isn’t just aesthetic variety, though that matters too. What gets lost is the implicit argument a city makes about itself when it’s built with genuine consideration, opposing and converging views and ideologies, where different people are at the design helm. The argument that says: we thought about who lives here. We thought about what this place is. We thought about what it should feel like to walk down this street. A city that looks like everywhere has stopped making that argument.

Which means this isn’t really a story about boring architecture. It’s a missing persons report.

Somewhere between the Seagram Building and the ten thousand glass towers that followed, the idea that a city should have something to say went missing, and instead we got the Pepsi Texaco Amazon Prime residences, superstores, and stadiums.

The question is whether anyone ever actually wanted something different. And if they did, where those ideas went.

Reece Davey trained as an architect, and works as a content creator. Find out more at House of D’Vey. This article was first published on the House of D’Vey Substack.