Cities and Ambition: the case of London

A friend linked me to Paul Graham's 2008 essay, Cities and Ambition. Its thesis:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.

What about The City of this blog - my city, London? What is the quintessential London ambition, what is this city’s message?

Graham is a little opaque. He calls London a city that cares about “hipness” or ‘knowing what’s what’. “So maybe,” he writes, “it has simply replaced the component of social class that consisted of being ‘au fait’. That could explain why hipness seems particularly admired in London: it’s version 2 of the traditional English delight in obscure codes that only insiders understand.” True enough - though it’s definitely not cool to call it ‘hip’, and ‘cool’ is pretty over too. Fashion? Being on trend? ‘Chic’ and ‘style’ are more Paris; London is about the ineffable it that is all the more it by remaining unspecified.

Graham also detects the ghost of a message that one should be more aristocratic, as too in Paris, New York and Boston. (Class itself is of course ‘version 1’ of the “obscure codes” Graham believes we Britishers love.) It would be easy to write off such a statement as a USian stereotype of this country, but there’s a certain truth to it - how many super-social creative venture-starting party kids are doing so funded by a nice little inheritance and a recognisable surname?

The modern London aristocratic is about being that multi-faceted word, ‘smart’. Smart as in well-presented, knowing the codes of double cuffs and just how much you can bend the rules with your haircut. Smart as in well-educated (always paid for, through fees or catchment area house prices), and appearing informed and intelligent in a manner with some autonomy from the question of whether or not you actually are. And smart in the Tatler sense: the politically acceptable word for posh.

Yet ‘being smart’ or ‘having it’ - these are good things to do in London, but could we say they’re this city’s message? I don’t think so - I don’t think London has one message, not in any soundbiteable sense.

It is of course very white to talk about a city having one message: newsflash, Graham’s (or my) middle class white sensibilities can hardly speak for the many and various dreams and desires of a hamlet in Surrey, let alone those of a metropolis. The process by which a city gains an ‘image’, however - that amalgam of representations of history and population and economy and cultural production - that sociocultural process is pretty white- and middle-class dominated. And we’re certainly talking about image here, rather than a genuine belief that the average person in LA really is more celeb-oriented than one in NY. A city’s ambition is instead the beliefs we don’t think we hold but believe those around us do.

So, problematic as the idea is, perhaps we can talk about New York and Los Angeles and Boston/Cambridge having images. Why? Because the US is big enough, with enough big and distinct cities, for like-minded people to cluster. You want a tech job you go to the tech city; you want a sunny eco lifestyle you go to the sunny right-on city. It is at least conceptually possible. Britain? If you want an interesting job, you probably have to move to London: it’s the only city big enough to offer a substantial choice of employers and industries.

I’m a social researcher. In London I could work for a think tank, or government departments or quangos or NGOs, or I could work in public sector market research or in a strategy-oriented consultancy. In Southampton I’d have to work for the Office of National Statistics, or leave. My friend’s a theatre reviewer. Here she can go to see comedy, or musicals, or big West End actors doing Shakespeare or serious Polish avant garde things they prefer to call ‘bodywork’. There’s a dozen gigs a night needing reviewing, and a hundred newspapers or magazines to review them for. Try starting that career in Manchester...

One probably could, of course. It’s not that the rest of the country is a cultural wasteland, it’s just that London believes it is - and that’s what the London-centric national media tells us all. In this culture London gains a monopoly on imaginative possibility - it’s the place you go if you want to make something happen in your life. Even if you’re not quite sure what that something is yet, you can probably do it there. Paul Graham says that New Yorkers want money, Washingtonites proximity to political power, and Berkleyites to live better. Does London have such a clear ambition? Probably not. Instead, the city is just an urban glamour, a dream, an illusion of possibility.

But that is why London is interesting: it could be anything.

Following up my recent post on New York's High Line elevated urban park, it turns out that the shiny hotel overlooking it is inhabited by flashers. Exhibitionists cannot resist displaying themselves in the floor-to-ceiling windows to the busy park below - and, the Standard being quite a fashionable hotel, it seems to attract quite an attractive class of naked person, see pictures here in the Daily Mail.



This is exactly what I mean by the sexualised city: these practices of display and the gaze, and the importance of physical bodies in inhabiting urban space. Fuck any western preoccupation with subjectivity being some mental state!

The High Line park, NYC

City Project is just back from another great city: New York. The High Line park was opened in June, a much-publicised urban oasis on the site of a former rail line running up the West side from Gansevoort St to 20th. The regeneration had been kickstarted by the 2000 photoseries from Joel Sternfeld, showing the park abandoned, recolonised by nature, a beguiling secret space raised up above the city's awareness. It was beautiful. Now, designed within an inch of its life by James Corner Field operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, could the High Line retain any of this magic? My lover was not sure, and wrote to me about this... Then I went to see for myself.

He wrote:

I've just been up to the old elevated train line that was converted into a park. Near sunset, a rosy evening, lots of people on the streets, drifting out of gallery openings between 20th and 25th.

A park like that could have been a wild place, stolen from the city, but it was as sterile as an architect's drawing. Signs said "Keep it wild, keep to the path" - as if you can call anything wild when it grows in a sprinkler-irrigated patch of gravel that's not so much cultivated as curated.

At one point along the path the viaduct crossed the corner of a low building's roof. Broken chairs, old TV sets, statues with their heads replaced, hand-painted signs, hinted that the roof had once been a gateway to this place - what was now a public park had been someone's secret playground. I'm not sure the city's richer for the change.

Even landscape architects couldn't rob the place of all its character, though. There were views over the glass and steel of Chelsea, but more impressive were the points where the path passed through or under buildings. There was one that I found particularly striking - a high modernist grid of green glass and grey tiles, perched on tapering legs. As you know I'm not a fan of the international style, but there was something about the evening light on that smooth green surface that I found oddly moving. It seemed to call back half-formed memories from my early childhood - the wind on the sea, and something else I couldn't bring to the surface. On the way back to the subway all the greens and turquoises were peculiarly vivid. I bought a notebook to write this down for you before it faded.

You should go there when you're over, one early evening when the galleries are open - maybe write about it for the City Project.



My response:

I liked it. I'm not sure I have a defensible reason for liking the park as a concept, but certainly the planting was excellent. Fashionably loose, dominated by grasses and big drifts of colour without structure - all annuals that will die down in the winter, no shrubs - it reminded me strongly of another Chelsea: the Chelsea Flower Show, highlight of the British garden design calendar. The late summer prairie planting contrasted against the austere running lines of the concrete pathway and slick benches; the ecological design selecting the silver foliage and meadow plants that can handle the exposure and shallow soil and extremes of climate; the repetition of design elements and a limited number of different plant types - this is all very now, very chic. It's innovative to see this style escape the private garden for the public park, a space so long the domain of regemented beds of pansies and busy lizzies.

Its naturalness is to be sure a faux-naturalness, an aesthetic covertly overtly created - but the idea of the secret derelict nature reserve that was there before is surely too fantastical to be true (I never saw it, did you?) so what else can the High Line be now but fictive? The concept of a park on stilts, while a happy (hard-fought-for) accident, seems more like a borrowing from the Far East - Hong Kong, or Tokyo, where you don't walk consistently at ground level anywhere. It is designed for such an international audience (perhaps urban studies-educated visitors such as myself most of all!) rather than the utility of any local residents - park utility as in such civil functions as public gathering, grass and trees for those without gardens, space jogging and team sports and whiling away afternoons. No: instead it is surely a space in which to promenade one's small overpampered lapdog to attract another lapdog/metropolitan owner combo of appropriate sexuality; a purpose-designed space for showing off and dating? How utterly NY!

Of course, it's not exactly a free public space or much of an opening for civil society. Has any park been such since the cruisers were kicked out of Russell Square and Tessa Jowell tried to deny Hyde Park to the war marchers? The normative nature of parkspace (no camping no barbeques no music get your public assembly licenced plz) is just a little more visible on the High Line, its very shape in its elongation forbidding any crowd gathering, its entrances so easily sealed off. Perhaps the private garden style design is telling here. This loose, natural planting is meticulously tended by gardeners wearing chic pastiche Chinese peasant hats as they labour on their knees in the relentless unshaded sunshine. It's very picturesque, even labour becoming an elegant spectacle. Do you think they have health insurance?

The High Line is absolutely a bastardisation of what was there before - but the whole of Chelsea is the self-same thing, a district playing at very high-end faux dilapidation with its warehouse art galleries and stripped-down designer clothes stores; it has got the park it deserves and maybe that is excellent site-appropriate design. We're in the wrong part of town to design a park for the poor, darling.

An ambiguous defence, I know. I instinctually liked it, and yet it is unquestionably a problematic space. But oh, such dilemmas are the meat of urban experience...

New York, New York

Twelve days ago I went to New York for the first time. I didn't visit for the sake of the city at all - hell, I wish it didn't exist - oh, let's just say it separates me from someone, someone who's pretending for the moment that the City isn't the one true place to be. Nevertheless, this is enough of a someone that I would consider leaving my beloved City for his - so while I was there (and because I lack the money, and because I'm an anthropologist not a lousy tourist!) I was thinking about how NY operates as a place to live. A few comments on its urban space and architecture, to begin with:

The Bowery was one of the streets I liked the most, even as gentrification starts to go too far. (The less said about the hotel these days the better.) It let me take a satisfyingly evocative (cliched) photo, and still seemed to carry a few ghosts.



The Bowery hosts the New Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the very few bits of proper, committed new architecture I found in the city. (I didn't go even as north as Midtown, though, so I accept I may have missed a bit! Then again, no-one was trying to convince me that the Upper East Side was a happening place to see...) The rainbow 'Hell Yes' on its side didn't exactly 'fit' as such, but the building had a scale and a rhythm that worked well. I liked its texture, I liked its balanced imbalance, and it proided a fitting space for its gallery purpose.



One of the other rare bits of serious new architecture I saw in NY was Tschumi's Blue Building on the Lower East Side - I failed to get a decent picture, but thankfully the New York Times did. Apparently, "its contorted form has a hypnotic appeal that is firmly rooted in the gritty disorder of its surroundings." No no no! It's just a bog-standard tower block that happens to be wonky. It's a monolith of glass and steel that doesn't speak to any grittiness or disorder; it seeks to be a singular landmark rather than dispersed or multiple; it's blocky, aggressive, still fucking phallic. This longer review is more astute when it observes that the asymmetric form is all about maximising the square footage, i.e. capital-with-a-capital-C. If I gave a shit about the Lower East Side, perhaps I'd cry.

Oddly enough for America, New York's best buildings were its old ones, with their fragile rusty balconies and sense of speaking in harmony with their neighbours. I was surprised to find that the city had a facility for elegant decay, something I associate strongly with Mediterranean cities and perhaps Latin America. Paint peeled, graffiti layered on top of posters, the sidewalk fallen apart fit to break a leg... Unexpected, but quite beautiful in its anti-statist way. Sea air helps, too, I suppose. I'd thought Coney Island might have this quality but instead it was sadder than that, surrounded by housing estates and derelict land, an illustration of New York's segregation and deelopment rows. Shame. (Fucking enormous seagulls, too.)



Further commentary in another post regarding the 'suburbanisation' of New York and other suggestions as to why I didn't feel it was somewhere that worked very well. But as a teaser, I like this comment by Rocco Landesman, a Broadway producer:

But I think there has been a delibidinization of our city, I really do. ...In terms of public planning there’s been a kind of prudishness, a kind of social and political correctness that’s gone on.

Sex and the City, now there you go - and now that's such a topic for this blog, too!
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