CityReads│Can Cities Make Us Better Citizens?

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Can Cities Make Us Better Citizens?

Should urbanism represent society as it is, or seek to change it?

Justin McGuirk, Can Cities Make Us Better Citizens?

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/can-cities-make-us-better-citizens

Picture source: Allen Lane

What is a city? The sociologist Richard Sennett once opted for a deceptively simple definition: a city, he wrote, is “a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet.” For Sennett, meeting strangers is a civic duty. He arrived at this belief in the course of a fifty-year career, and his latest book, “Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City,” distills into a single volume his thoughts on how urban design shapes the ways in which we relate to one another. The first part of the book looks at how urbanism – the professional practice of city-making – has evolved. Then the book explores how three big issues are affected by this fault line between the lived and the built. In the third part, it will discuss what a city could be like, were it more open. Consistent, throughout, is the notion of the city as a place where we tolerate those who are different. Immigrant? Stockbroker? Both? Who cares? The anonymity of the metropolis makes one indifferent to difference. As the German adage has it, stadtluft macht frei. City air makes you free.

Can the way one designs a park or shapes a city block make us better citizens? Can ethics shape the design the city? City means two different things- one a physical place, the other a mentality compiled from perceptions, behaviors and belief. The French language first came to sort out this distinction by using two different words: ville and cite. The built environment is one thing, how people dwell in it is another. This duality is a comparison between the city as built form (“ville”) and as lived experience (“cité”)—the “building” and “dwelling” of his title.

Built form has social consequences, and not always the ones that the city planner intended. When Baron Haussmann carved his broad boulevards through the medieval tangle of Paris, in the eighteen-fifties and sixties, one of his aims was to make it easier for the military to suppress an insurrectionary working class with horse-drawn cannon. But he could not have predicted the boulevards’ effect on a flourishing bourgeoisie. They hurried things along, but they also contributed to a more detached street life, in which citizens engaged not with one another but with the vitrines of department stores.

“Building and Dwelling” is his twentieth book, but it feels haunted by the spirit of a much earlier work. In 1977, he published “The Fall of Public Man,” his influential study of the ways in which public life has declined since the ancien régime. The argument was that citizens in eighteenth-century Paris or London were far more likely to exchange opinions with strangers, even those of wildly different social class, than in the bourgeois nineteenth century, when they became more private and self-absorbed.  

More than forty years later, Sennett is as passionate as ever about the richness and complexity of public life, by which he means urban life. In “Building and Dwelling,” he rejects the comforts of clearly defined communities, of anything that smacks too strongly of “we.” That means gated communities as much as “projects” for the poor. It also extends to the offices of tech giants like Google, which supply everything a neighborhood has to offer without employees needing to leave the building. Each of these is, for Sennett, a ghetto. 

Instead, Sennett argues for a city that embraces difference, a place of porous membranes and spatial invitations. He calls this ideal “the open city.” “Ethically, an open city would of course tolerate differences and promote equality,” he writes, “but would more specifically free people from the straitjacket of the fixed and the familiar, creating a terrain in which they could experiment and expand their experience.” In other words, the city should not mirror the closed systems and monopolistic instincts of a company like Apple. Yet all too often, it does. 

The cities we live in today are closed in ways that mirror what has happened in the tech realm. In the immense urban explosion today in the Global South, large finance and construction firms are standardizing the ville. Across the planet, gated communities are the fastest growing form of development. “Global cities,” like London and New York, are shaped by flows of international capital that neither their citizens nor their polities can influence. In China, state-led development on an unprecedented scale has resulted in alienating, repetitive landscapes. Meanwhile, in the ballooning cities of the global South, urban migrants build vast slum zones that are physically and psychologically divorced from the centers they service. Exclusion is the order of the day.

Is the answer to give more power to the urban planners? Not quite. If the sweeping historical passages of the book tell us anything, it’s that even the most well-meaning planners rarely get it right. Sennett’s “Great Generation” of the eighteen-fifties—Haussmann; Ildefons Cerdà, who gave Barcelona its distinctive cornerless blocks; and Frederick Law Olmsted, who gave us Central Park—all failed to predict the social outcomes of their grand plans. And twentieth-century shapers of the ville, in his eyes, were even more aloof from the cité. The book’s bête noire is Le Corbusier, whose Plan Voisin would have demolished Paris’s Marais with a field of identical cruciform towers set in parkland. Efficiency at the expense of a lively street life is anathema to Sennett.

More power, then, to the citizens? Yes and no. Sennett takes issue with his friend Jane Jacobs, who defended Greenwich Village against the highway lust of Robert Moses. Saint Jane’s charming vision of slow, incremental growth, led by citizens, might be fine for a neighborhood, but not for a city—not if you want public transport or a sewer system. In one of their amiable arguments, Jacobs, no doubt impatient with Sennett’s prevaricating, put him on the spot: “So what would you do?”

Sennett’s answer to Jacobs’s question, then, involves creating spaces of encounter and friction, particularly at the border between one neighborhood and another. He is deprecating about his own forays into planning and treats his failures as salutary. Why, for instance, did he and his colleagues locate a market in the center of Spanish Harlem, instead of along Ninety-sixth Street, the border with the well-heeled Upper East Side? The site might have become a porous membrane, a gateway “between different racial and economic communities.”

 “Building and Dwelling” is Sennett’s attempt to answer that question. And it has an almost Taoist attachment to harmony and balance. Give architects and planners too much control and the cité suffers; too much faith in the citizen and the ville withers. The open city of Sennett’s imagination is one that requires us to embrace difference, even if we do not identify with it. The urbanist should be a partner to the urbanite, not a servant- both critical of how people live and self-critical about what he or she builds. If this relation between cité  and ville can be forged, then the city can open.

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