Saint Augustine wrote The City of God in a state of sorrowful contemplation of a succession of earthly cities. A modern ecologist looking at the effects of megalopolis could hardly have more cause for despair than Augustine staring at the mark of Cain on every city in history. Babylon, Troy, Athens, Rome, Syracuse had all fallen; Carthage itself was sacked on the morning of Augustine’s death. There was a good reason for Cain, the first murderer, to found the first city. Ancient cities were, before all else, fortifications against hostile strangers; their architecture, like that of Bixby Hill, began not with the life of the community inside the walls but with defence against the marauders outside. So slaughter, pestilence, siege, sacking, plunder, and burning – to use Augustine’s own words – were the city’s inevitable fate. If, by some accident, the city survived sacking by foreigners, there were many precedents for the citizens to occasion their own ruin by shiftless self-indulgence. Byzantium failed to maintain its huge population (at its height, it had 500,000 inhabitants). There are desolate accounts of sheep grazing within the city walls, nibbling among the stumps of deserted dwellings. The medieval city, under constant threat of under-population, feared paganism and homosexuality for practical as well as moral reasons. The Christian cult of the family was the cornerstone of the expanding and prosperous city.
The economics of city life have always enabled an entertainment industry to take root in a large town. The citizen has more money and more leisure than his country cousin, more opportunities to spoil himself at the circus, the theatre, the whore-house. Augustine, grimly observing these antics, addressed himself to the crowd as they swarmed into the ‘scenic games, exhibitions of folly and licence’:
O infatuated man, what is this blindness, or rather madness, which possesses you? How is it that while, as we hear, even the eastern nations are bewailing your ruin, and while powerful states in the most remote parts of the earth are mourning your fall as a public calamity, ye yourselves should be crowding to the theatres, should be pouring into them and filling them, and, in short, be playing a madder part now than ever before? This was the foul plague-spot, this the wreck of virtue and honour that Scipio sought to preserve you from when he prohibited the construction of theatres; this was his reason for desiring that you might still have an enemy to fear, seeing as he did how easily prosperity would corrupt and destroy you. He did not consider that republic flourishing whose walls stand, but whose morals are in ruins.
It is the very success of the city as an economic unit which causes its downfall as a spiritual republic, and that paradox is the hardest of all truths for Augustine to bear. The city of man ought to be a harmonious reflection of the city of God; in actuality, it is vulgar, lazy and corrupt, a place so brutish that it lacks even the dignity of the Satanic. Better the besieged city than the corpulent city, better poverty than wealth; for whatever nourishes the city chokes it too.
This is a diatribe that has gone soft with repeated use. William Cobbett saw London as ‘the great Wen’ and demanded that it be ‘dismantled’ in order that civilisation might have a second chance. William Booth wrote of it as ‘The Slough of Despond’; for Jack London it was ‘the abyss’, for George Gissing, ‘the nether world’. Behind all of these dystopian metaphors lies an anguished charge of disappointment, a sense of what the city might have been, if only . . . The theatres, strip-joints, brothels, slums, traffic jams are not simply bad in themselves; they are reminders that once we dreamed of something so much greater, a paradise on earth, and it has come to this. The man nearest in spirit to Saint Augustine today, Lewis Mumford, has devoted most of his life to a tireless explication of where we went wrong, how we might set it right. His histories, plans, critiques never falter from that vision of human perfectibility. In the idea of the new town, pioneered by Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, the real city was entirely abandoned to the corrupted troglodytes and all hope vested in what Howard called ‘the garden cities of tomorrow’. They are with us today: Crawley and Welwyn, and they are hardly any nearer to Paradise than Wardour Street and Shaftesbury Avenue.
But Mumford, Geddes and Howard, though perhaps inspired by a measure of the same moral feeling as Saint Augustine, broke with him in one major and calamitous respect. They shifted the emphasis from the inner to the outer man, from the spiritual to the technical; Augustine’s Vision of the twin cities of God and Man was wonderfully and delicately balanced; his writing exhibits a constant wonder at the sheer inventive fecundity of human civilisation, from the divine gift of reason to such obscure talents as that of the man who could fart in time to music. The tragedy of the secular city, as far as Augustine was concerned, was its failure to embody the good in man, its inherent susceptibility to the cruelty and violence of Cain. It was in the spirit of man, the capacity for good in the individual consciousness, that the salvation of the human city lay. But for Geddes and Mumford, the answer was to be found in techniques; and they coined a quasi-evolutionist vocabulary for technology . . . ‘eotechnic’, ‘paleotechnic’, ‘neotechnic’. Individual reason and love had failed the city, so they resorted to a home-made stew of science, sociology, and bureaucratic administration. It was called, innocuously enough, town-planning; and it sought to revive the old dream of an ideal city, a Jerusalem The Golden, by means of faith, not in man himself, but in his structures.
They had some inauspicious precedents. Thomas Campanella was a Hermetic theologian and fashionable magus who was flung into prison and tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. In jail Campanella dreamed of a City of the Sun, whose nobility and enlightenment would shame the corrupt and fallen civics of Rome, Naples (where he spent his sentence), and Madrid. His Civitas Solis (1623) is lifeless: a representation of worthy hopes which is sadly innocent of imagination. But its broad outline is interesting, and both its aspirations and its failures of vision are not unconnected, I think, with those of much twentieth-century town-planning.
Campanella starts with architecture, and to begin with he shows us a city without people, or, at least, with only the wispiest of sketch-figures, of the kind that architects like to put (merely as indications of relative scale) walking outside projected factories and town halls. It consists of seven concentric fortified circles, named after the planets, and four streets following the points of the compass. At the centre is the Temple of Knowledge and Metaphysics, an awesome and uncomfortable place which sounds darkly like the Royal Festival Hall. Each of the seven city walls is painted with representations of various aspects of human knowledge – maths, geometry, botany, physics, folklore, geology, medicine, engineering, and so on – so that living in the city would be like inhabiting a symmetrical three-dimensional encyclopedia. Like the timid sculptures and murals which the Greater London Council dots about its prizewinning housing estates, these educational decorations were supposed to keep you in a continuous state of uplift and learning. It does not sound very joyful.
When Campanella eventually reaches the laws and customs of the citizens, he sketches the life of a puritanical, ecologically sound kibbutz. The community is run by observing the laws of nature and share and share alike. Prohibition is effective; speakeasies wouldn’t have occurred to Campanella. Work means either agriculture or cottage craft-industries like weaving, ornament-making, and carpentry. Gold and silver have no special value beyond their intrinsic prettiness. Women wear make-up and high-heeled shoes on pain of death.
It all has a drearily familiar ring to it. We need to be reminded that rural nostalgia is not by any means a post-nineteenth-century phenomenon. The trade economy of the city, with its merchants and entrepreneurs, its delegations of labour and responsibility, has always been treated by those who dislike cities as an unnatural practice, a perversion of the ‘natural’ life of an agricultural economy. An ‘ideal city’ would live to the simple, seasonal rhythms of a rural village. But, as Jane Jacobs showed brilliantly in The Economy of Cities (1969), the myth of agricultural primacy has no foundation in either archaeology or economics. Cities do not necessarily grow ou
t of the excess production of their pre-existing rural hinterlands; as often as not, it is the city which enables the spread of farming on its outskirts. Yet the myth has been used repeatedly to browbeat the city, and it is wielded with no more prescience by Lewis Mumford than it was by Campanella.
The City of the Sun, like so many ideal cities, wasn’t a city at all. It lacked an urban social and economic structure, just as it lacked a genuinely urban architecture. The only thing which distinguished it from a village was its dogged high-mindedness, its air of being at two removes from real life. It was an anti-city; a reflection perhaps, of Campanella’s resentment of cities as they were, as well as of a romantic innocence about the life of the country which he sought to use as a salve for the diseases of urban society. He was not so far from the architects and renewers of today, who love green space, rapid exit routes, convenience shopping areas which cut down on in-city movement and street life. They achieve a terrible parody of rural simplicity by bulldozing down the old, intricate structures and replacing them with massive slabs of pale concrete. Somewhere at the bottom of every planner’s mind must be a dream like Campanella’s: a dream of glass and grass and concrete, where a handful of watercolour humans, tapering from the shoulders down, flit their spidery way through an architecture so simple and gigantic that they cannot corrupt it.
So Le Corbusier laid down his fourteen cardinal principles in La Ville Radieuse (1935):
The Plan: totalitarian
The death of the street
Classification of simple speeds and complex speeds
Arrangements made to come to an agreement on imminent LAWS of machine civilisation, laws which can halt the menace of modern times
The mobilisation of the soil, in both cities and rural areas
Housing considered as an extension of the public services
The green city
The civilisation of the road replacing the civilisation of the railway
Landscaping the countryside
The radiant city
The radiant country
The twilight of money
The essential joys, satisfaction of psycho-physiological needs, collective participation, and individual liberty
The renaissance of the human body
This document deserves a close scrutiny, for it enshrines some of the most hallowed modern principles on which planners in London and New York are still acting to change our lives. It is both as conservative and as thinly idealistic as Campanella’s totalitarian plan, as if the only thing which divided the twentieth century from the seventeenth was the invention of the motor car. Again the myth of agricultural primacy is presented as axiomatic: La Ville Radieuse is founded on ‘the release of the soil’ – courgettes and petits pois sprouting greenly between tower-blocks. There is the same undercurrent of hatred for the money economy of the city. The ‘essential joys’ are named and listed in such a way as to make us instantly wish not to have them. ‘Les temps modernes’ are linked to ‘la menace’ as surely as winter follows autumn, and architectural dictatorship, those grimly capitalised LAWS, must be immediately granted by society if the menace is to be fought off. As happens so often in the manifestoes of modernism what looks, at first sight, a brave and energetic release from slavery of old habits of thought reveals itself to be in fact a shrilly puritanical backlash.
Corbusier clearly thought that the people were getting away with something, and must be stopped. His second principle, ‘la mort de la rue’, is the most radical and frightening of all. Take away the street, and one cuts out the heart of cities as they are actually used and lived in. Corbusier wanted a city of high-rise tower-blocks, and it is in that proposal that his profound conservatism is most evident. One can see why by looking at the very fair stab at a Radiant City which was made by Southampton City Council in the late nineteen-fifties and early ’sixties.
Four miles to the west of Southampton city centre, they built a housing estate called Millbrook, a vast, cheap storage unit for nearly 20,000 people. Laid out on a sloping plain, it has fifty acres of grassland at its centre, a great, useless, balding greenspace of sickly turf and purely symbolic value. What one sees first are the tower-blocks, twenty-four storeys high, of pre-stressed concrete and glass, known, I am told, as ‘slab block/scissors-type’, should anyone order more. The roads are service roads; they loop purposelessly around the estate in broad curves that conform to no contours. There is no street life on them: an occasional pram pushed by a windblown mother, a motorbiking yobbo or two, a dismal row of parked Ford Anglias, an ice cream van playing ‘Greensleeves’ at half-tempo, a mongrel snapping at its tail. The acres of greensward sweep monotonously between the blocks, patrolled by gangs of sub-teenage youths and the occasional indecent-exposure freak. Church halls have been allocated by proportional representation, and a mathematical genius has worked out diametrical sites for the shopping plazas, with vandalised launderettes and ‘Joyce: Ladies Hairdresser’ offering cheap perms to pensioners on Thursdays.
A few years ago, I interviewed fifty of the tower-block residents. Most of them had been uprooted from slum areas in the city centre, from the rows of terraces and back-to-backs where social life happens on the street and in the corner shop. In Millbrook they had cramped lifts (out of order as often as not) and concrete staircases instead of the street, and they were poor substitutes. Most of the people I spoke to complained of theft and vandalism: you could never leave your shopping with the pram, never hang clothes in the communal drying areas. A surprising number did not know any of their neighbours. The thin walls, and the ‘scissors design’ which makes every bedroom back on to a corridor, meant that people’s most frequent contact with their neighbours was having their sleep disturbed by next door’s brawling children. The petty larceny of stolen milk, and, worse, milk-money, bred an incipient paranoia about the malevolent habits of the people across the corridor.
Here social worlds were shrinking: often the most common contact with someone outside the flat was the weekly visit to or from a mother or father in the city centre. Church groups in Millbrook hardly begin to dent the neurotic privacy behind which so many of the place’s inhabitants have taken to hiding. The stay-at-home mother in a tower-block flat can be as alone as an astronaut marooned in space: indeed, the sociological space in which she moves is almost as uncharted.
The densely interwoven street-life of the traditional city (or the life of the Italian piazza, really the living-room of the apartments around the square) has always been feared by the middle classes: who knows what unpleasant radical ideas might not be brewed up in those hugger-mugger enclaves of the proletariat? Tower-block planning, by driving people into disconnected private cells, reliably insures against mass insurrections. Bad neighbours make for a certain kind of social security; Millbrook breeds vandals, but not revolutionaries.
The Sun City and Radiant City – really the same place – are both expressions of apprehension, disgust, and despair, and we should not fall for the assumption that utopias are usually the work of optimists. Far more often they are thinly-veiled cries of rage and disappointment. Millbrook is, of course, something less – an expression of funk, piety, and the exercise of a deficient imagination. Were one to read the place as a novel, one might say that the author had read and copied all the fashionable books without understanding them, and had produced a typical minor work in which all the passions and prejudices of the current masterpieces were unconsciously and artlessly reflected. It is full of heartless innocence, a terrible place to live precisely because none of its effects are truly willed.
But it does piously reflect the moral extremes, the melodrama, which has so afflicted modern town-planning. A city is a very bad place which one might convert into a very good place, a dangerous place to be made safe, a black place to be coloured green. The answer to the terraced, two-up, two-down house is a grey skyscraper with its head lost in the clouds; to the crowded street, a stretch of unbroken grass big enough to fight a war on; to the corner grocer’
s, a yawning shopping plaza. Behind all these strategies lie a savage contempt for the city and an arrogant desire to refashion human society into almost any shape other than the one we have at present.
The planners have grasped a single truth. They have recognised that in the city they are dealing with some hugely enlarged frame for human behaviour in which moral extremes are likely to be the norm. The city, they sense, is the province of rogues and angels, and a style of building, or a traffic scheme, might tip it conclusively in one or the other direction. More to the point, it is a place where individuals are so little known that they can be conveniently transmuted into moral ciphers. A man who designs a farm has to know a little about the farmer – whether he has cows, or pigs, or grain. He has to know the pattern of his day, his movements from one building to another. He has to understand the living requirements of different species of animals. But a man who designs a city can make up his people as arbitrarily as a novelist in identical batches of thousands at a time. And if he works in the service of the state or the local authority, he tends to create his characters in the images of insensible oafs, inspired by indifference, softened by chronic inactivity. His architecture is supposed to anaesthetise or ameliorate these glibly imagined moral characteristics. If people stick cautiously to the edges of the shopping plaza and never use the paved space provided at the centre, or if they prefer a bus ride and a real city supermarket to the overpriced minimarket he has allocated them, then they are at fault – they have not learned to live in a city that ought, for them, to be ideal.
Soft City Page 3
