According to the Dutch architect Reinier de Graaf, the people – planners, utopian environmentalists, sociologists, quango soldiers, free-range urbanists, demographic strategists, “place makers”, soi-disant visionaries, soothsayers and, of course, architects – who attend portentously entitled, quasi-academic conferences on, say, The Final Favela, The Shapes of Sprawl to Come or Agglomerative Control Theory are “united through the frank admission that we do not have a clue”.
Cluelessness has done nothing to inhibit a thriving cottage industry publishing countless tracts and manifestos wrought in the deadening locutions of conference-speak. Urbanist shall speak unto urbanist. And only unto urbanist, because any passing civvy or “lay person” can only improbably be bothered to decipher what’s being said. The ideal of the open city is described in closed terms that unwittingly emphasise the gulf between those who confer and the overwhelming majority who don’t, between those who build or, more likely, try to influence what is built, and those who dwell – whether as passive patients or as engaged participants.
Despite a few uncomfortable instances of “outside the box”, “world class city” and “tipping point” (which pace Richard Sennett is hardly “everyday language” save among the lexically deprived), Building and Dwelling is pretty much jargon free, quite an achievement given the milieu the author evidently frequents. It is, too, far from clueless.
But anyone seeking the key, the clue, to the mysteries of ever shifting urban populations and how to manage them must look elsewhere. This ineptly edited but constantly stimulating book is a lateish-life appraisal of what Sennett has read, written and, most vitally, witnessed on the street or in the marketplace in the tradition of the sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed flâneur taking in every sensation.
He goes against the doxa. For instance: those shifting populations are not necessarily increasing. He notes that in remitting money home, many “modern migrants treat the places in which they alight as five- or 10-year work sites rather than destinations into which they integrate for good”. “Home” signifies, inter alia, Morocco or Turkey and the remittance villas built accretively over those five or 10 years. They will typically be sited outside cities that, for many underprivileged people, are open prisons to flee from. In an atypical chapter Sennett considers another sort of flight from the city: Martin Heidegger’s, to his Black Forest hut, a place to escape, among others, the Jewish colleagues he betrayed.
He proposes the existence of a dialectical tension between ville and cité. The former, broadly, is the physical actuality of the place, the latter the life that is led in that place – neighbourly or hostile, inclined to sloth or to energy, exhilarating or debilitating. The possibilities are many. How ville and cité respond to each other is his recurrent motif. Is it possible to engineer a ville that will condition, maybe improve, the lives led in it? Human history glistens with ideal places, none more perfect than those that remained staunchly on the page or, even better, in a bedsit visionary’s backbrain.
Once these places are built the goal of urbanistic determinism becomes more distant, not least because urban theorists – the Chicago School, Lewis Mumford et al – are, unlike the people who inhabit their now three-dimensional wheezes, strangely unconcerned with what their dreams should actually look like. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances: Ebenezer Howard, the least Wildean of men, was a lucky plodder. In his numbingly dull manifesto Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, which would lead to the foundation of Letchworth, the first garden city, there is no mention of architecture, of buildings’ scale or style. However, the construction of what George Bernard Shaw called “the Heaven near Hitchin” coincided with the apogee of Arts and Crafts. So, by happy chance, Letchworth contains the largest concentration of houses in that peculiarly English, potently luddite idiom.
“Superficiality is no vice,” Jane Jacobs said when defending the empty yet meaningful rituals of everyday corner shop courtesy that all parties know is a sham. The author, in 1961, of The Death and Life of Great American Cities is everywhere in Sennett’s book, a ghost but a far from passive ghost. She is even to be found with the author in a photo taken at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, circa 1963. The third member of their party has collapsed against the bar. Drink? Battered by words?
Jacobs was the doyenne of agitprop urbanists, a fierce opponent of big tech comprehensive development and especially of the boorish but necessary Robert Moses’s megalomaniacal infrastructural projects in New York, notably the Lower Manhattan Expressway.
Yet it has to be said that New York’s magnificence owes vastly more to Moses than it does to Jacobs. She undoubtedly articulated the attitude of a certain bien pensant liberal public towards mid-20th century planners’ willing sacrifice of cities to the car. Her work was reactive. She favoured small-scale remedies, ad hocism, the nubbly texture of “difficult” neigbourhoods. Her perception of such places’ potential for renewal has bizarrely brought her into line with planners and urbanists of a very different mettle. There is a rule, or ought to be, that states whatever is built or renovated or rescued, whatever cracker-barrel philosophy is applied to the disposition of streets and parks, there will occur reactions and repercussions that are unforeseeable or, as likely, idly unforeseen by the people responsible (Baron Haussmann, Frederick Olmsted, Ildefons Cerdà etc). These reactions will be embraced by the next generation and will be accepted as orthodoxies.
It didn’t take a generation. The sociologist Ruth Glass, four years older than Jacobs, coined the term gentrification in 1964. She read the entrails correctly: a three-room flat in St Stephen’s Gardens in London, one of Rachman’s Notting Hill slums, is currently for sale for just short of £2m; like the ville, the individual house is mutable according to the life led in it and the money thrown at it. Sennett advises that “the ethical way to build in cities accepts the primacy of adaptation”, while Glass observed that the majority of late Georgian and Victorian houses and “ouvrier cottages” being transformed in the 60s, in that area and in Islington, were so insalubrious that building societies would not lend against them. Thus they were bought by people with family capital who didn’t require loans. Arty, rather than artistic, people – who when they grew up begat trustafarians who begat further trustafarians; a new urban upper-middle class was created.
This process was analysed and formalised by Jacobs’s populist successor Richard Florida, who has cut a swath through urbanism and left a trail of free trade quinoa and class clearances. This tireless self-publicist enchants slow learners with his precious gift of stating the blindingly obvious yet making it seem original. Sennett is unimpressed by his highly unoriginal aperçu that city quarters where “creatives” settle will invariably become attractive to heavy money. “Creatives” in this context is a grossly flattering epithet for brainstormtroops, multiplatform contortionists, important synergy gurus nuking an outmoded logo from the face of a polo shirt. What it does not signify are actual makers, writers and artists, who in London increasingly have the choice of being forced out to zones 5 or 6 or leaving the metropolis altogether, an ever more enticing prospect given the curious instance of the ville becoming inimical to the cité because swaths of it are underpopulated hence largely deserted, thus dangerous. There is more security in density than in isolated gated “communities”.
• Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £21.25 (RRP £25) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99..
