On Richard Sennett
Richard Sennett is an easy man to critique. If you don’t comprehend anything else of his writing (and you’d be forgiven for not doing so), you’re sure to notice the omniscient tone he uses in helpfully explaining the city to us, assigning value, like to “drugged degradation,” to everything he comes across. At times he seems to fall victim to the same flawed mode of understanding the world that he critiques, in which modern capitalism aestheticizes the view into a spectacle, and leads to “social exclusion in the name of visual pleasure.” When he’s not aestheticizing addicts, he’s romanticizing migrants. The features and inhabitants of the city can start to come across as amenities for his consumption, as he frames his interlocutors in terms of how their perception benefits him. To quote Tocqueville, he touches but doesn’t feel anything he comes across. And yet, isn’t this merely the flipside of indifference that he goes on to elucidate towards the end of his essay? Sennett notes that there might actually be a freedom contained within this visual relationship to the city, and it is not restricted to him.
Difference and indifference; similar words that refer to very different concepts. Difference is inevitable. After all, Sennett claims that is more or less the point of cities (a bit prescriptive but we’ll let it slide). What we have more control over is how we approach it. If we feel positively towards it, he suggests, we have essentially two options: to affirm diversity, and to allow for indifference. The former, I am tempted to agree, is a laudable instinct, but one that experience has shown that often falls short of full realization. Furthermore, it is indicative of Sennett’s concept of the closed system, by which planners, obsessed with “purity of form,” seek to impose rigid order on a system. It’s a fantasy, but one that has taken root amongst modern subjects regardless of discipline. In a sense aestheticization is essentially the point; we are seeking to create a spectacle out of the city, but one in which we intellectually engage. Nothing in Sennett’s prescription, as I understand it, forbids deeper involvement if it appeals. But, he ultimately finds freedom, and especially for our most vulnerable and newest neighbors, in the anonymity that comes from indifference. It is the right to be forgotten, or to escape the analyzing, categorizing spotlight that Foucault has understood as an expression and application of power unto the powerless.
Somewhat confusingly, he comes to agree with Arendt’s optimism regarding the density of crowds and the freedom of anonymity it provides, but says nothing of his prior admonition of her ignorance toward the crowd’s violence. His choice of immigrants as his noble subject is interesting and timely; I wonder if crowds will remain such safe spaces for them.
It’s not surprising that many cities’ curb management strategies are synonymous with parking strategies. Peter Norton writes about how streets acquired alternate meanings in the 20th century that had (and have) primarily to do with the movement and storage of cars. I suppose it’s the latter that is a bit harder to reconcile - how did a consensus form that public space should be used for storage, and how did it metastasize to the point that virtually all curb space in all cities is still devoted to parking? On second thought, though, is this so different from historical usages and meanings of the street? Norton’s thesis is not just that streets used to have different meanings, but that they used to have a diversity of meanings, the multiplicity of which we are perhaps unprepared today to comprehend. So, it’s quite possible that storage of various things was once commonplace on streets, just like moving vehicles of various kinds, vending, and stickball-playing children could all be found rubbing elbows. I think a lot about the decision to permit overnight parking on city streets that was formalized in 1954, both because the prior state is virtually inconceivable to those of us familiar with the curb of today, and because it strikes me as a portentous moment of which the consequences have proven drastic and incontrovertible. There really was and has been no going back, and I myself am guilty of perceiving any deviation on any street as radical, just like advocates of driving and parking would have us believe. I think we can all agree that parking along the curb is common, but at some point it became normal, too; in a sense, it really is radical for a city to produce a curb management report that acknowledges other uses, even if few American cities have made substantial progress towards implementation. As Norton would say, the production of these reports represents the first step in moving back toward a position of interpretative flexibility, in which it is once again acceptable or conceivable to discuss the meaning of something that until recently had been fixed.
Few of these reports, it was noted, acknowledged dynamic or temporal uses of the curb. Sidewalks, too, are expected to be dynamic, but encounter problems in that they are managed by planners who privilege stability and predictability. And yet, we want sidewalks to be not just infrastructure but places that facilitate encounters with new, interesting and different people and things. Sidewalks and other pedestrian places have always done this on their own, without planning, but the public realm is now so crowded with competing interests that planners have no choice but to step in and make choices. There will be tradeoffs. On Grand Street, sidewalks are narrow and assume the burden of storing trash and street assets so that ~6 lanes can lie side-by-side in the road bed. Grand Street is radical in that its curb is entirely dedicated to a bike lane, and then a floating parking lane (on the north side), and then a shared moving lane. In this way, sidewalk planning is dependent on planning for the rest of the street, and the curb emerges as the biggest point of friction between competing uses. Interior, protected bike lanes are universally acknowledged as the standard for safe cycling infrastructure, but on a shopping street, the curb is uniquely essential for loading. Our recommendation for Grand Street will need to acknowledge the tradeoffs, and it’s likely that curbside parking will assume a less-privileged position than it typically does in our and other cities.
I feel like I could write multiple pieces on this reading, each dealing with a different strategy for “vivify[ing] and mak[ing] coherent our image of time.” But I suppose my primary question, before engaging with Lynch’s strategies, has to do with the value or purpose of such a pursuit: how can we qualify the benefit to the public of such an endeavor? Does it gratify the individual to gain such perception? Does it improve society when many individuals are so enlightened?
I found myself thinking over and over again about how radical many of his ideas are; for example, designing a building to wreck easily or spectacularly. For one, aesthetic experience is marginalized in public policy because economical thinking is the only mode of analysis that is regarded as worthwhile. It is deemed “unserious.” How did this come to be? A rationalism that disregards emotion and feeling cannot function to create a healthy society, I propose. Second, while it may be conceivable that an architect could design a building with adaptation, expansion, or even evolution in mind, to design a building for its own destruction violates a central tenet of humanism that has spread beyond our bodies and into our conception of our creations, namely, that we are eternal. More so, we conceive of ourselves as masters of time and as existing outside of it, just as we are masters of our environments and often forget our animal nature. Cities exist in and as a part of nature, and thus are susceptible to the forces of decay, all the more so when we pursue a rigidity and purity of form that denies this essential truth.
Much of what Lynch advocates for agrees with Sennett’s open systems approach, in which ambiguity and uncertainty is to be embraced, if not sought. Lynch makes clear that his approach utilizes an interpretation of history, any of which is bound to err and change from time to time. His approach to the aesthetic of time is at odds with our present mode of preservation, in which preserved sites are presented in denial of the era in which they presently exist, as well any since or even immediately surrounding their initial composition or construction. They are odd sorts of museum pieces that in their preservation speak little to the lives of their creators or to our own. We seek to impart a fantastical sense of control over them, and thus write a history that is ignorant of its essential nature: that it might be augmented, or even rewritten as social attitudes change.
Our obsession with some conception of a solitary, factual past, I think, originates from a modern sense of dissatisfaction with our present. We refuse to let old things change because they have become emblematic of an escapist, irrational approach to the past that represents a prelapsarian antidote to our reality. We cannot let these material symbols come to represent something different from our preferred memories, be they real or imagined. We substitute terms of art for this perspective, urging our neighbors to band together in defense of neighborhood character. No one, likely, is immune from feelings of cathexis toward their preferred urban agglomerations, especially when they tell a story that they like to hear. But at some point, Lynch’s aesthetic of time, that includes destruction, modification, and alteration in which the whole becomes more evocative than its separate old and new parts, became anethema to the discourse surrounding urban artifacts and old buildings. At the same time, art on the scale of the city, which reminded me of the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, came to be seen as frivolous, at least if it could not be incorporated into some effort at local branding. In that sense, the public benefit of promoting a novel aesthetic of time may be to lessen the hold on the past, the tightness of which makes deviation from the status quo on a host of issues near impossible. It would benefit all parties, but I fear there are deeper, more systemic changes that would need to occur first if we are to ask the public to embrace change.