Books
Cities of dreams
Published 28 February 2008
Fifty per cent of the world's population now lives in cities. By 2050 it will be 75 per cent, so considering the urban future is important. We need more than platitudes
Fretting about cities is as old as cities themselves. The literature of complaint, disgust and exhilarating misanthropy probably begins with Juvenal, whose inventory of Rome's foul shortcomings includes getting robbed, getting ripped off, getting trodden on, malodours, noise, traffic, disease, falling tiles, load-shedding carts, fire, sewage, dogs, immigrants, whores, drunks, other people, other people's food and so on. Revelling in the despicable and thirsting for the reviled is pretty much a tradition. Cities are mirrors of our manifold imperfections. Our greatest creations are our most flawed. In the eyes of, say, James Thomson or Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Joseph Roth, cities are irremediable and terminal - but they won't die, because there is always a new generation of the hopeful (or deluded) eager to devise novel means of repeating the old mistakes. Among the hopefuls are urbanists. Their maxim might be the late king's: "Something must be done." And that something should not be relishing seediness and celebrating sordor.
Urbanism, if it signifies anything other than what used to be called town planning, is an ill-defined pseudo-discipline that covers research into the economic, infrastructural and demographic ingredients of cities and supposedly draws upon such research in the creation of schemes to improve cities. Such schemes usually mean, in practice, building. Hence the construction industry's conversion to urbanism. There no longer exists such a thing as a builder. That man in the Day-Glo hard hat wolf-whistling is now an urban regenerator and the tempting cleft peeping from his waistband announces his urban regenerator's bum. The question, of course, is: What is he building, and where?
Urbanism is a response to what the climate scientist Paul Crutzen has declared to be the anthropocene era, that is, the past two centuries of industrialisation, during which man has crucially tilted the planet's balance not least through the creation of unprecedented concentrations of population. Fashions in urbanism have lurched vigorously: high or low density, cottage estates or deck-access flats, high streets or exurban malls, new towns or streets in the sky, local authority deportations or refurbishment, mixed use or zoned activities, the primacy of the car or of pedestrians . . . Each has at one time or another had its champions. Yet cities continue to expand irrespective of fashion. Cities are the random accumulations of antagonistic past crazes snuggling up to each other. Theoretical urbanism's effect on our cities has been marginal. Its ability to control their development is akin to meteorology's to stem a tsunami. Its acolytes can research and warn and advise and predict but are, ultimately, impotent against the might of corporate ownership, global markets and of governments in thrall both to those markets and to the whims of electorates. This happy compact leaves little space for the implementation of prescriptions that might, just might, encourage, say, civility.
Although it is the work of two editors and 30 "writers", and although it carries the Phaidon colophon, The Endless City is a doorstop that emits the unmistakable odour of vanity publishing, which is a form of onanism and thus usually solitary. The cost of this atypically collective stab at blindness and palm hair has been generously met by Deutsche Bank, which funds a "forum", the Alfred Herrhausen Society, named after the bank's sometime chairman who was murdered by the Red Army Faction in November 1989.
One cannot doubt that the forum and its managing director, Wolfgang Nowak, have good intentions. Such bodies are impressed by conferences and probably ignorant of the post-Shavian conjugation ". . . and those who can't even teach, confer". The Urban Age Project at the London School of Economics was granted the means to stage conferences in six "urban-age cities". Here is that gravy train's summation or spin-off. It must all have had a purposeful feel to it when it was proposed to Nowak by Richard Sennett, one of the rare contributors who is capable of parsing a sentence uncontaminated by the grossest jargon; he is also among the few who don't subscribe to the conventional, bien-pensant, old-fashioned "progressive" festival of received ideas and consensual platitudes of which the book is mostly composed.
The Endless Cliché would have been an apter title. Vibrant, driver (meaning catalyst), sustainable, multicultural, challenge, iconic, diversity, holistic, tipping point, knowledge economy, street life, world city: every page is strewn with these comforting locutions which demonstrate their authors' obeisance to today's shibboleths. Urbanism shares the properties of a cult. No matter which particular physical or ideological remedy it happens to be peddling, it is always with the faith that this remedy will succeed where the last one failed, that people can be improved by their surroundings, that such and such a conjunction of architectural form and public space will inhibit crime and antisocial behaviour. Such optimism is not so much touching as moronic. The real beneficiaries of the new cityscape of synthetic-modern "affordable" apartments, gesticulatory buildings, landmark bridges and lumps of "accessible" public sculpture are merely the begetters of such stuff (usually Libeskind, Calatrava, Foster, and so on) and the bodies that commission them, self-congratulatory regional development agencies that just adore "regeneration" because its effects are wholly unmeasurable.
The Endless City comprises investigations of New York, London, Shanghai, Johannesburg and Mexico City. Berlin is included, almost certainly as a sop to the sponsor, for Tokyo is excluded, according to the co-editor Deyan Sudjic, on the grounds that its "comparative ethnic uniformity has kept it from fully transforming itself into a true world city". While Berlin, the most hick of all capitals, has transformed itself? Really?
It goes without saying that the very epithet "world city" is meaningless. Sudjic's last book, The Edifice Complex, was an unforgiving study of the boorish vanity of patrons and the sycophantic cupidity of architects. Here he is wearing a different hat and his essays are, in comparison, emollient. He recognises the trap of proposing that remedies appropriate to one city are necessarily appropriate to another but then falls into it by suggesting that public space "is at the very heart of any definition of a city". This is unquestionably what urbanists and architects believe ought to be at the very heart . . . But in the case of London it simply isn't so. London is, perforce, a city of private spaces because, whatever its inhabitants might want - and there is little evidence that they want anything other than what they've got - it has very little public space that is more than functional. Its narrow pavements are discouraging to the flâneur. Its climate, whatever meteorologically insensible architects may think, is not suited to outdoor cafes. Sudjic goes on to allude to Bernard Rudofsky's great hymn to human resourcefulness, Architecture Without Architects, and suggests that attention should be paid to "urbanism without urbanists".
This is sound counsel. However, it ignores the blindingly obvious fact that attention is paid to such "vernacular" spaces by painters, photographers, novelists, film-makers, travel writers, documentarists, soi-disant psychogeographers - in fact, by everyone who represents or depicts or studies topographies with the exception of urbanists and architects. Urbanism, if one takes The Endless City as illustrative, is ingrown and self-referential. Urbanists repeatedly quote other urbanists. They really should get out more.
For instance, how often and in what circumstances has the Sorbonne professor Sophie Body-Gendrot visited the outer Parisian habitations à loyer modéré (subsidised housing schemes) whose problems - she typically refers to riots as "riots" - she ascribes to sensationalist reporting and to the desire of a "minority of mobilised young men . . . to express their pain, their anger and, most of all, to be seen on television"?
Has Ricky Burdett, a cultural commissar who teaches at the LSE, cheerleads for Ken Livingstone and is "chief adviser on architecture and urbanism to the London Olympic Delivery Authority", ever actually looked at this city on which he is helping to impose that grotesque white elephant? He seems not to know that the Thames becomes tidal less than five miles from Heathrow. He writes, incredibly, that central London house prices "could [my italics] lead to the creation of a 'ghettoised' city with pockets of rich and poor neighbourhoods, rather than the greater diversity and social mix that has served London so well for centuries".
He refers to immigrants "from Poland and other ex-Eastern European nations". Where, precisely, are those countries now? One can only assume that placemanship takes up a lot of time. Rudofsky wrote of "the tendency to ascribe to architects - or, for that matter, to all specialists - excessive insight into the problems of living when, in truth, most of them are concerned with business and prestige". There are some decent photos and pages of comparative statistics. And we should all be fascinated to learn that London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and something called Leeds-Sheffield form a single megalopolitan city region.
Jonathan Meades's latest series of films, "Magnetic North", will be broadcast on BBC2 in April
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