=

DOWN TOWNForces At Work in the Narrative City

alex tatusian© 2011

For Elaine Freedgood

My mother, an architect, used to talk about the way people experience the grid in Manhattan. A well-traveled urbanite, she had developed an acute design awareness for cities, though the conversation always sounded to me like it was something about how cities affect us, objectifying humans and animating streets. She deeply believes the grid beautiful, mathematical, and most importantly practical, even humanizing. But the thing that brought the grid to life for her, to my astonishment, was Broadway—the pompous mall of discount stores and musical theater.

Those things simply did not concern my mother. It’s like a painter’s stroke, she would say. Look at a map. Watch Broadway slash through the grid, upsetting regularity for miles, reminding us of what was there (it used to be a Native American trail). Every time the grid intersects Broadway, something kind of funny happens. Whatever it is, we come upon a different pocket of adventure and spontaneity every time; no longer can we choose just North, South, East, or West, and thus each of Broadway’s disturbances look distinctly different.

This is just an example of what we can call the “narrative forces” at work in the city, elements of its structure that can be said to discreetly affect our versions of ourselves, or our story, when we live in a city. The urban environment carries immense power over our perceptions of who we are, where we are, and how we ought to act at any given moment. Down Town catalogues several of the ways in which the city activates our sensory perception to engender a specific experience or association, and our ability to submit to or push back against those narrative forces.

Edmund Bacon, a designer who helped rejuvenate Philadelphia in the 1960s, writes: “In many kinds of human relationships it is the function of the active person to establish the creative force and also to develop receptivity to it.”1 This is certainly the heart of a designer’s role in architecture and urban planning, but perhaps one can say the same of a successful life in the city—one that resists the generalizing force of a crowded group of people (Saint Augustine called a community a group of people united by a common object), but promotes receptivity of other people at the same time.

1 Bacon, Edmund. Design of Cities. New York: The Viking Press, 1967. (23)

To begin examining the narrative inflictions of the city, it will help to begin broadly with an architectural rationale, Bacon’s in this case, though of course, there are plenty. “One of the prime purposes of architecture,” he writes, “is to heighten the drama of living,”1 which he believes can be accomplished by manipulating just mass and space. Bad design—by which I mean hulking façades, neglect of economic resource use, or lacking functionality—seems to employ only mass, and tends to inelegantly consider space. Therefore, this study will concern itself largely with space; masses and interiors are also privileged in access and thus in narrative effect.

The basic level of architectural meaning we can derive is purely formal. As anyone can tell, elements of building exteriors can have simple or profound resonances with people on the street. Bacon in particular notes the way in which buildings meet the sky and the ground, the recession and depth of edifices in our perceptive field, seemingly ascending structures, seemingly descending structures, and concave/convex perspective . All of these can say something to us in a momentary, adventurous sense. “Hold on! This is a steep street.”

1 Ibid, 19.

“The curve of these buildings is really drawing me in.” At a fundamental level of urban design, we see a cohesive picture geometrically, one that can inspire basic emotional feedback and allow quicker judgment during travel.

Though cities grow in different ways at different rates, another more sinister quality lurks under the surface of city planning. Sidewalks, streets, alleys, etc. not only guide us but, in combination with the flow of transportation, thrust us in a certain direction. Gradations of streets, too, come with different physical properties and thus, different qualitative implications. An alley seems dangerous; a boulevard means leisurely walking, long vistas, and aesthetic pleasure. Neighborhoods visually apprehend us, and as we traverse them, they speak to the socioeconomic backgrounds of their inhabitants, their interests, and their relation to proximate neighborhoods; choosing to spend time in certain neighborhoods is an act of positive identification, subtle but willful. “[T]hrough the cumulative effect of various kinds of association with the different parts of the city, its citizens may build up loyalty to it,”2 Bacon writes and therein connects the microcosmic identification to the

2 Ibid, 17.

whole. Architectural and edificial aesthetics offer a consuming, experiential presence that most fine arts cannot—where Woolf can at best illustrate Septimus’ psychosis in Regent’s Park, going there spatially involves us in the things Septimus cannot digest: the luscious fountain, the drooping willows, the loud expatriates.

One might even hear Big Ben.

On a third level, we see buildings in color, rhythm, and scale. Progress through color, noted by many critics to be a prime failing of urban planning, directly affects our mood (orange and its warm brethren typically inspire desire, where blue and cooler tones promote distance) and our level of apprehension; but movement through these spaces is key to understanding their influence. New York’s West Village can carry an aura of history and peace through repeated brick tones and rectangular colonial windows; we may feel at once in an older place (perhaps in a calmer state of mind). However, the rising and falling of theaters and high-rises, in combination with changing, incoherent light sources, can make Times Square feel powerfully discomforting, even unquiet in a deeply existential sense. As we walk through a

city, the angular perspective of building form and dimension change rapidly, and it is no mistake that our perspectives on ourselves are wont to change with them. The associations we make with a place are not acccidents purely due to human interaction there.

But our ground-level story has yet another dimension. I mentioned apprehension earlier, as architecture, not unlike narrative plotting in literature, connects places “so as to produce in the participator a definite space experience in relation to previous and anticipated space experiences.”1 Aesthetic “fullfilment” could of course mean any number of things to any number of people, but that fact lies at the heart of the city’s ability to influence our narratives individually. As examples, Bacon offers the freestanding Islamic arches surrounding certain holy sites in Jerusalem, which frame “the act of our entering into this space.”2 No structural purpose exists; but then any freestanding structure with a hole in it seems to have this monumental, figurative quality, which points us adverbially and spiritually—into or toward with metaphysical gravity. The Washington Square Arch, for instance, connects our small public space with a single gesture to Central Park, the largest in New York. We see the vista stretch fifty-some blocks and think, “I see across the city. So much is apprehensible. All of it is mine to traverse.” Space and time, as in physics, become one. That is perhaps the height of urban planning on the ground.

1 Ibid, 21. 2 Ibid, 17.

1

1

2

3 4

Now we need to consider the greater city.

How do the frenetic movements of our environment deeply impact our notions of ourselves, or perhaps more importantly, of us, in a larger sense? The things we come to value from the daily experience of urban life must connect somehow to the things we come to value of each other, the way we motivate ourselves, and the experience we seek out. We might find an answer in the “central organizing principle,”1 a Baconian term arising from his critique of Vällingby, a smaller city outside Stockholm, after it underwent serious urban renewal. The experience of Vällingby simply does not compare to its perfection as a model, he conjectures “because the design was conceived primarily in terms of the model and not from the viewpoint of the pedestrian who was to walk about in the town itself when it was built.” The thing that allows us a viable mental map of a city, and one in which we feel satisfactorily a part of something whole, is this central organizing principle. A hub of some kind, a resplendent cathedral, a tall building, a monument—these are the organizers that connect our impressions of different parts of a city. The high-end coffee-roasters, burrito dives, and thrift

1 Ibid, 29.

shops of San Francisco’s Mission District enchant partly because they wrap around Dolores Park, from which one can see so much of the city and the neighborhood. Community, perhaps, is important, here, but orientation is key. Orientation gives scale to our memories and subplots in the city—“That happened over there, but this happened here. And over there, we . . .”, etc. It is our sense of belonging and, at times, alienation.

* * *

At this point, it may help to collide some definitions of architecture to rearrange the discussion. As we consider the city narratives at work on us all, rather than individually, George Bataille’s less physical approach can be useful: “Architecture represents a religion that it brings alive, a political power that it manifests, an event that it commemorates, etc. Architecture, before any other qualifications, is identical to the space of representation; it always represents something other than itself.”2 We can now approach the urban environment suspiciously, as Bataille positions aesthetics as the physical iteration of, in a word, ideologies. Bringing Bacon

2 Hollier, Dennis. Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. (31-32)

into the fray, his description of dominant and subdominant themes in urban planning3—that is, the relation of all piazzas and campos in Venice to the Piazza San Marco (the most prominent), or all the church towers and spires to the Campanile (the tallest)—finally fractures the seemingly inert relationship between objects and people.

From Bataille, we learn that structures’ physical capabilities also have emotional capabilities built into them, and by proxy, the domination extends to us. We subsume an area’s multifaceted implications. A patriotic statue reminds us not only of our country, but that we ought to be patriots. An austere Greek courthouse soberly reminds us to be whatever “just” is. Exactly as Foucault writes of modern punishment’s aversion to corporeality, urban design intends “to supervise the individual, to neutralize his dangerous state of mind, to alter his criminal tendencies, and to continue even this change has been achieved.”4 This last charge can easily be read in windows, for even at home, we can be reminded of the city’s supervising forms.

3 Bacon, 87.4 Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. (18)

We love our cities.

We rarely leave them once we come to know them. The effect of urban form and ideology is that of Foucault’s “strategic positions,” with regard to domination, “an effect [that] is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated . . . [I]t exerts pressure on them, just as they themselves, in their struggle to resist it, resist the grip it has on them.”1 We seek, in other words, to live our lives, but of course, live the life of “urbanites”. This is not to generalize; no two lives anywhere in the world are exactly the same, however, something—attempted later in the study—is universally, ideologically upheld by the physical punishments of our urbanism.

But what is punished? If architectural mass inflicts upon space, then the punishment itself is upon space. Urban planning punishes free movement, and freedom, in a strange sense. Why is it that we have to move through a city the way we do? Can we relegate the historically complicated forms of our environment to simple organization—that we need something to get us from one place to another?

1 Foucault, 26-27.

The city does not exist solely to facilitate our lives or the narrative we want to live out; we are fundamentally indebted to it and its semiotic movement—we are at every moment characters in its narrative, and especially in the case of some mechanical or service labor, more like a structuralist object. (Can the man who conducts the metropolitan train be said to be separate from the train? Do we treat him as such?) Something formless hangs there that all city-dwellers work toward, regardless of consciousness.

As the Russian Formalists would assert, a story underlies the strange, wayward plotting of our collectivity. We may foreground sustenance, that of ourselves or our families, as a primary motivation for capitalizing off labor and the convenience of urban opportunity. But of course, this is not our story—this is the rural story, where one can truly live purely to breathe, harvest, and sustain. I do not invoke that setting reductively; as Thoreaus have shown, other more potent, reflective, and often spiritual narratives can surface away from the city, but the bizarre, unspoken collective industry we know cannot. What boils in a city appears to be progress—whose or what toward remains outside the scope of this study—but regardless of our

personal motives, change, growth, and a vague sense of ascension surround us.

Civil rights. Technology. News. The construction, conservation, and demolition of buildings.

Especially in a city like New York (although, what city is like New York?), progress moves not forward, but up. And up and up and up, almost exhaustingly up. This is the ideal novel: one without an ending. This is the 1920s’ Art Deco futurism. This is the Chrysler Building, whose spire, no matter where I am in the city, always feels uptown.

Why punish space? While the history of cities halts any attempt to speak broadly, it may help to consider the most recent historicized landmark of American urban planning: urban renewal. The Housing Act of 1949 stated plainly that it intended to provide a decent house and suitable living environment for everyone, but the results of urban renewal in the long run were mixed. The government helped build low-income housing, but also demolished older housing as a result, moving poorer families and ethnicities out of urban centers1. The message, perpetuated by widespread gentrification, is that the downtown (by which, I mean city-center) story is primarily that of richer, more Caucasian lives. Which is, of course, historically nonsense.

Returning to the city as Foucault’s punisher, we are reminded by Discipline and Punish that a legal sentence “bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for possible normalization”2. The city planners’ reorganization

1 Kleniewski, Nancy. “From Industrial to Corporate City: The Role of Urban Renewal,” from Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy, 2nd Edition. William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers, eds. Oxford: Oxford University press, 1984. (216)2 Foucault, 21.

of space not only prescribes use of that space, but in the aforementioned cyclical sense, engenders a certain kind of person’s narrative in said space. As we struggle to recall the “diverse” nature of our cities, we remember that urban environments stretch space, away from certain people and toward others. Rounder characters. Flatter characters.

And we participate.

I level against that notion Los Angeles. Some call it the most racially diverse county in America3, and it is a palpable diversity, one that causes its inhabitants to regularly interact with minorities outside of the service industry. Its democratization comes at the price of the European foot metropolis we so deeply love; one ride on a freeway encapsulates that L.A. narrative—depending on the speed limit, we float or hurtle, often alone, through the flat series of smaller cities that built noir (that noir built?). Frederick Jameson, discussing Raymond Chandler, has affixed Los Angeles’ diversity precisely to space: “a spreading out horizontally, a flowing

3 By some data, including racial dispersion in total, as opposed to per unit of area, it is true, though this is hardly uncontroversial. Regardless of statistics, I have other implications, argued further.

apart of the elements of the social structure.”4 Of course, this makes sense; one does not need to be a sociologist to see that the division of Los Angeles County (the “city” we often refer to in fact encompasses many small cities) into townships, essentially, diminishes the radical gaps of wealth and race seen in the rest of the United States, simply by eliminating a single, central inner-city or downtown. Instead, each area has its own gaps, and outside of extremely homogenous cities like Beverly Hills or Compton, the gaps genuinely feel smaller.

To an extent, my reading of Los Angeles has to yield reduction and anomaly. The question for the typical city then becomes: where do we recover our narrative, if much of the city has grown privileged and space is inflicted upon by the city’s own story?

I offer public space.

Public space can be seen as an attempt to resolve the public and private anxieties of the city. It is the one place outside of home one can go without restricted intentionality. There is no one thing one

4 Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. (129)

ought to “do” in a park or a courtyard or a square; besides greenery, benches, a statue or fountain—there is only space. At first glance, the idiom directs attention to its first word, but really the space is itself the key to its publicity. Public space allows us to submit to the narrative space of the city with none of its narrativizing predispositions. We become free in it: improvisational and liberated, classless, yet distinctly a part of something.

Following the history of urban pathology, Anthony Vidler catalogues the expansion of cities as understood through the language of disease and pandemic. Most explicitly, he dissects the history of agoraphobia, “a very new and modern ailment,”5 as it was called in the late 18th century, and the phobia becomes an extremely lucid medium through which to view our domination by the city. Literally, it was characterized as such: “One naturally feels very cozy in small, old plazas, and only in our memory do they loom gigantic, because in our imagination the magnitude of the artistic effect takes the place of actual size.”6 Metaphorically, agoraphobia can stand in for the cyclical dominance that the city has ensured in us. We forget that it belongs to everyone,

5 Vidler, 28.6 Ibid.

not to us. The aesthetic appreciation spoken for by architecture has the power to enrich space for all passers-by and ought not simply reinforce the narrative of comfortable and complacent living. Our fear, as it were, of space (even the urbanite’s fear of the rural), is a fear of freedom and an embrace of thoughtlessness in constructing our own narratives, even a perpetuation of our societal gaps.

Like Foucault’s panoptic view of punishment in the penal system7, the city’s publicness has ascended to an abstraction. Increasingly, public uses of space like protests and independent film shoots require vast layers of permitting. But we ought to deeply reconsider who space is for. Though the answer seems obvious—it’s space; who owns space? Space is not bounded, and therefore, free. It has “not only confounded the geometers, but it has demonstrated its disruptive power in the face of the most defended of institutions, reducing, so to speak, the Benthamite panopticon, constructed according to the laws of classical optics, to a formless heap of rubble.”8 Public space is modernist universality, if not the place to experience and propagate it (Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses, for instance, populate

7 Foucault, 9.8 Vidler, 132.

public space with characters unwilling to submit to the narrative of their city).

Our use of—and encouragement of the demarcation of—public space is the only practical method we have of overcoming mindless urbanism.