CityReads | How Amateurs Have Changed Urban Theory and Practice?

Andy Merrifield 城读 2022-07-13

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How Amateurs Have Changed Urban Theory and Practice?

The Amateur is a revolutionary manifesto of independent thinking.

Andy Merrifield, The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love, London: Verso, 2017.

Source:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2765-the-amateur

A staggering array of professional and expert bodies dominates our social, economic and political life. It seems that there are only two types of people: professionals (including wannabe professionals) and losers.

In his book published in 2017, Amateurs: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love, independent scholar Andy Merrifield draws on his own experiences to focus on the nemesis of professionals: amateurs. Merrifield is an urban theorist who uses Marxism to study the city and is an expert in Lefebvre studies. Merrifield's research is solid, and his writing is full of energy and wisdom that professional academics lack, written in beautiful language, full of thoughtfulness, which I really like. (CityReads | What Can Marxists Tell us about Cities? CityReads │ The Urban Question Debate ). Merrifield was born into a working-class British family, disliked the current professional system, and practices what he preaches by quitting the academic system to become an independent scholar.

In the mainstream story, amateurs are toffs, half-arsed dabblers, irrelevant for the needs of hi-tech, hyper-specialist 21st-century capitalism. Andy Merrifield tells another: here amateurs (a word derived from the Latin "to love") are non-alienated citizens; enthusiasts, who counter the mechanical expertise and technical formalism of modern society; passionate obsessives standing up for values that need defending. Merrifield, an urban theorist who writes with a brio and wit often missing in professional academics, offers an idiosyncratic canon: Dostoevsky, Hannah Arendt, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Marshall Berman, Guy Debord, Ivan Illich, Franz Kafka, Jane Jacobs, Karl Marx, Edward Said et al. In different ways and in different contexts, these thinkers all de-professionalized reality, in their lives and in their writings. They challenged box tickers, bean counters and rule followers, taking bold and courageous stances in the affirmation of independent thought. They voiced condemnation at the same time as they upheld certain passions and virtues about life. They can help us rediscover the pleasures of doing what we love.

It's a stirring book whose critique of contemporary work culture will be instantly recognizable. It also doubles as a moving memoir of a working-class intellectual. Do not be fooled by the title of this book "The Amateur" and its sweet cover with arty paint splotches. This is nothing short of a revolutionary manifesto of independent thinking.

Professional vs. amateur

In the accepted wisdom, we think of amateurs as people who dabble, who do things as a hobby rather than as a living, at weekends, in their spare time. They may be really good at something, "experts" in their own right – at gardening, amateur dramatics, car mechanics – but it’s still amusement, something unimportant. Professionals, by contrast, are those who apply themselves in important, instrumental ways. They’re there to be listened to, taken seriously.

It's not that all experts are necessarily wrong; it's more the mantle of power experts now assume, the degree to which they seem to rule unquestioned and supreme.

I want to present an alternative category, the nemesis to the professional expert: the amateur. Here the amateur is both a real and an imagined category – somebody who does exist today, but also someone who ought to exist. The amateur is a normative construct, a person who's lying latent in society, waiting to flourish. They're someone with an alternative sensibility, unwilling to fall for the expert scam, not feeling the need to sell themselves to the highest bidder. They’re dedicated to doing things successfully and well yet without any great reward, sometimes without any reward at all.

In The Amateur, I want to try to invent another reality, examine what amateurism means today and what it might mean. I shall do so by critiquing professionalism, staking out the fault lines that exist between amateurs and professionals, working through these fault lines thematically, shifting between personal identity and work relations, knowledge production and political power, technocratic representation and popular participation, urban studies and militant activism.

Amateur and Dostoevsky's Underground Man

Ever since my late teens, when I first read Dostoevsky, I’ve identified with the Underground Man. At first it may have been because we were both frustrated clerks, ill-suited to what we were doing, or what we were supposed to be doing. He’d been a clerk for a while, in the Russian civil service; I was serving my time, in the late 1970s, as a wages clerk at the dock board in Liverpool, beholden to professional managers, to professional ways. We hit it off despite our epochal differences, despite our age gap and different tongues. Like him, I was rude and enjoyed being rude. It was all I could do for not taking bribes, for not wanting in. Later I was adrift, often between jobs – between tiresome, pointless office tasks, managed by professionals. Most people thought I was lucky to have any job at all, but I hated it. I was a self-avowed Underground Man.

Dostoevsky remains vital to me, and to this book, because he helps construct the amateur spirit. He affirms the idiosyncrasies of the outsider, the person who doesn't easily fit into established norms and desires. Dostoevsky wrenches apart two different paradigms for living: the career path versus the life journey. The Underground Man's old school chums have opted for the former, a trajectory not of risky fulfilment but of safe routine, not of defiance but of compliance. They’ve chosen a route towards preordained success, dominated by personal ambition and respect for authority, a desire to be authority. Theirs is a closed and closeted world; the Underground Man’s vision is more open-ended, more uncertain, more adventurous in its self-affirmation and self-expression, full of existential suffering yet "more alive".

Three Amateurs Who Changed Urban Theory and Practice: Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Henri Lefebvre

Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson both wrote bestselling books within a year of one another: Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Silent Spring (1962). As "housewives" with no institutional affiliation, Jacobs, a trained journalist, and Carson, a qualified marine biologist, were frequently dismissed in equal measure as rank amateurs with a poor handle on their subjects, not like professional planners and scientists. Time magazine laid into Carson for her "emotion-fanning words"; she was "unfair and one-sided", they said, "hysterically overemphatic". Jacobs and Carson were at home, saw things close up, were responsible for the school run and the daily shopping. Carson, when she wasn't writing or campaigning, looked after her mother and cared for her adopted son, despite having terminal breast cancer.

Like many other more unsung amateurs, Jacobs and Carson stood up to professionals, held their passionate ground and altered the course of history in small yet significant ways. Jacobs helped inspire community activism, a central plank of radicalism that defined "the Sixties"; Carson was the godmother of a grassroots environmental movement that really took off in the 1970s. Both called into question the principle of "scientific" progress that underpinned post-war American culture and now underpins twenty-first-century culture everywhere.

Jane Jacobs

The kind of street Jacobs affirms is the busy street that harbors many uses, that melds with a housing stock that folk of modest means can afford. Jacobs eyes the city with a richer texturing, seeing things that planners and professionals refused to see, couldn't see: from the bottom upwards, from the standpoint of the ordinary, from the standpoint of a woman. Planners sought order for the sake of simplification, hacking into the old city, razing vast tracts, demolishing and renewing, breaking things up by zoning things out; but Jacobs marveled at the "organized complexity" of disorder, the hurly-burly that made people want to come to the city and linger.

She wrote about cities lovingly and compellingly, even while fiercely dismissing the professionals who stood in her way, who somehow towered over her. With Death and Life of Great American Cities, ordinary people were handed a powerful field manual to counter professional pronouncements about urban development. With its catalogue of workaday folk on old street blocks, Jacobs offered a vision of the city that let common citizens recognize themselves as city makers, not simply city users, and see their real place in urban life, perhaps for the first time. Professionals must follow, must respond to amateurs – not the other way around. "The citizen should be the ultimate expert", argues Jacobs.

Jacobs's genius was showing how amateurs could band together to create a popular power few could have imagined beforehand, herself included. As an outsider, Jacobs unexpectedly defeated the powerful master builder on the question of what the city should be built for and by whom, writing a turning point in the history of urban thought.

If hers was the kind of city I wanted to live in, hers was a method of studying cities I also wanted to follow. It was low-budget, no-thrills, qualitative and subjective, earthy and commonsensical – amateurish, we might say – based on somewhere nearby. The experience of the city isn't reducible to a counting game, to statistics and population densities, to something read off the census or "officially" mapped.

By the time we entered the 1990s, the dominant paradigm had shifted away from the public towards the private, away from urban managerialism towards urban corporatism. The large-scale razing and renewal that Jacobs railed against is no longer a danger. If anything, the threat is subtler: professional urbanists and developers, architects and designers now speak Jacobs's own language. They give their projects a "Janewash", a veneer of community involving street fiestas, creative classes and bohemian spaces, high densities and walkabilities. The trouble is that a lot of this sneaks in under the banner of free-market economics whose outcomes are soaring rents, gentrification and displacement.

The economies of the world's biggest metropolises are increasingly predicated on extractive activity, which, through the normal operation of their land and housing markets, decant non-profit-maximising activities, together with less solvent people, to some other part of town, usually way out on the periphery. Privatisation and market rationality in urban life have become orthodoxies that cut across political parties as well as national boundaries, engineered and endorsed seemingly everywhere by assorted real-estate professionals, architects, business chiefs, start-up CEOs and government officials.

Rachel Carson

Carson's and Jacobs's amateur politics revolved around activities we might label "reproductive" rather than productive; they were home-baked rather than work-based. Each saw how the reproduction of the countryside and the reproduction of urban life were endangered, threatened by similar professional forces engaged in the same, depersonalized, professional business of destruction. In Carson’s case, it was the pharmaceutical companies with their DDT pesticides, killing birds and insects, polluting rivers. Toxic DDT was spraying the Vietcong in the South- East Asian bush; in rural America, too, Carson said, it was a lethal agent dowsing forests and farmland.

One of Carson's most enduring metaphors is "The Other Road". "We stand now", she said, "where two roads diverge. They are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster." The other fork of the road – the one "less traveled by" – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth."The choice is ours to make", she says. But in helping us make that choice, "we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals: we should look about and see what other course is open to us."

Carson's, like Jacobs's, was a one-woman campaign that soon became part of a larger collective movement of awareness and revolt. This gathered momentum throughout the 1960s, concerning itself not only with the all-too-comfy ties between professional scientists and the chemical business, but also with the threat of nuclear war and radiation contamination, animal welfare, the dumping of hazardous wastes in the oceans – one of Carson's earlier books was The Sea Around Us – and what Carson called "the right to know", publicly announcing a marked distrust of those specialists on the commercial payroll. Carson was stressing the interconnectedness of the human and natural world, the relationship of an undersea to an oversea. She questioned the whole attitude of industrial society towards the natural world. Her "fable of tomorrow" is our world today.

Henri Lefebvre

Forever the great democrat, Lefebvre, born in 1901, was likewise something of an amateur. He drank wine with Surrealist poets in the 1930s, fought with the Resistance in the 1940s, drove a cab in Paris in the 1950s, and taught sociology and philosophy at various French universities in the 1960s, when he befriended Debord and the Situationists. He was one of the intellectual godfathers of the 1968 generation. He authored sixty-odd books, introduced a whole body of Hegelian Marxism into France, and wrote prolifically about urbanism, everyday life, literature and space. Lefebvre didn't even get his first steady academic job until 1966, at the age of sixty-five! By 1973 he'd "retired", only to embark on a world tour, writing and speaking, trying to understand an urbanization of the future in Asia and Latin America, and in Los Angeles, a city that both fascinated and appalled him.

Lefebvre was a man of the margins, of the periphery. "I've tried my hand in many different domains", he admitted in the 1970s. "In this sense, I'm a non-specialist, and maintain, with a lot of pride and not without difficulty, this qualification. I say not without difficulty because many times during conferences and colloquiums, in the capacity of an academic, I find myself confronted by people who ask me: 'In what field are you a specialist?' I respond, 'In nothing, monsieur'. These lofty souls usually then turn their backs on me."

Lefebvre's "right to the city" is an ideal conceived from the periphery. It aims to empower outsiders to get inside. Sometimes, even, to get inside themselves. It might seem a fuzzy sort of human right. But actually, it is very concrete. It means the right to live out the city as one's own, to live for the city, to be happy (or unhappy) there. The right to affordable housing, a decent school for the kids, accessible services, reliable public transport. The right to have your urban horizon as wide or as narrow as you want; an allegiance to the neighborhood, to your street and building, but also to what lies beyond.

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