This book took me about three years to read, and I had to start over. While I didn’t exactly have expectations when I bought it, beyond whatever review I read that convinced me to purchase it, author Deyan Sudjic’s style was unexpected and unsettling. He writes in a passive voice, and he writes in rapid-fire stories. There’s little attempt to formalize a language for describing cities; he’s far more interested in the commonalities of stories across the world pertaining to cities, how they succeed, fail, wax and wane and wax.
As an example of his style, Chapter 1, What is a City, is on page 2 quoting Walt Whitman:
City of the sea! …
City of wharves and stores! city of tall façades of marble and iron!
Proud and passionate city! mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!Whitman’s first two lines are missing. They reflect an even more important measure of urbanity:
City of the world! (for all races are here;
All the lands of the earth make contributions here)
Clearly, we’re not discussing critical population densities. Sudjic explores historical and contemporary ideas concerning the differentiation of cities and other instances of gathered human habitations; metrics of success; patterns throughout history; etc. He establishes an almost stream-of-consciousness style which can disturb the fussy reader, thus my need to stop, wait, and restart from the beginning.
Chapter 2, How To Make A City, begins with a name: a refugee camp usually has no name, implying its hopefully transient nature; a city has a name, which may mean something, and a history; a slum is somewhere in between, a possibility with no guarantees. Sudjic uses the name as an instrument for exploring the various histories of cities, from St. Petersburg to Istanbul, Ankara to Soweto. The monuments erected in a city are explored, and then on to the resources available to a city, such as the people, river, sea, or ocean which helps define its commerce; political advantages, such as being a capitol city, are also discussed. Languages and immigrants and mixed people get their due. Streets, the various views of them by architects and inhabitants; Brasilia of Brazil comes in for a particularly vicious swat upside the head for its omission of street corners, salubrious for chance encounters vital to city life. And how streets contribute to successful navigation, or not, is also important.
Chapter 3, How To Change A City, traces how several cities have been changed by chance and by plan, concentrating on several. London comes in for an examination, due to its historical preeminence, followed by its fading in the latter half of the 20th century, and its regeneration as the political elites who sought to preserve the fading glory were undermined and thrown out in favor of commercial concerns.
By © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
The Government of Cities is Chapter 4, begins with Walt Disney and his desire to regulate how cities were run, which leads to Robert Moses, unofficial dictator planner of New York for many years, and onwards to Haussmann of Napoleon III’s era. It explores the various options used throughout history, how they impact the health of cities. He mentions even the artist Lorenzetti of Siena, whose mural The Allegory of Good And Bad Government is to the right (partial), symbolizing how government can affect the city for good or bad.
Chapter 5, The Idea of a City, begins with Charles Dickens and the Marxist Friedrich Engels, and their horror at the conditions to be found in London in the mid-1800s. Engels noticed that the wealthy no longer lived in the city, they were now suburbanites, at least in Manchester, while the working class stayed in the city. It marked a new way to imagine cities. Add in the epidemics which poisoned the imagination of architects, and Sudjic is tracing how cities change in response to the critiques of observers, the dangers of living so close together without benefit of effective medicines, and the imaginations of architects seeing, perhaps for the first time, how bad a city can become as its infrastructure is overwhelmed by unforeseen populations. From there he traces the evolution of cities to today’s corporate campuses in cities from Cupertino to Pune.
The final chapter is Crowds and Their Discontents, and covers how crowds can abruptly turn vicious, or be a force for good; how sheer numbers can ruin the monuments and attractions of a city.
Like Pompeii.
Image: True Brick Ovens.
There’s no real conclusion to this book, and none really seems needed. Just like a city, a conclusion is neither wanted nor needed; it just goes on and on, until it suffers catastrophe, with no one left to write about its last days.
