Artists need cities because artists need audiences. Even if they don't live in cities artists depend on urban networks to spread and popularize their ideas. In the 1970s American cites were in decline, even New York, the cultural capitial of the nation, was hemorrhaging people, landlords burned their buildings, and the city seemed to be going to hell.
Urban planners speculated about a future without cities: a suburban future. In the heart of the once dense Bronx some blocks were raised to build single family suburban style housing. This was touted as the city's future. But, most of the time, all over the city, nothing was built at all. On the Lower East Side vacant brownstones with leaking roofs and missing walls became shooting galleries for heroin addicts. The city and state invested in highways, moving cars and building suburbs and they redlined the city. Fire service was reduced and LES, Harlem, East New York and the South Bronx burned. City leaders quietly waited for the population to fall, for the city to stabilize in to something smaller, less dense and less complex. But, something as massive and as ancient as New York cannot simply vaporize. It cannot dissipate, but rather it must implode, like a black hole, sucking everything and everyone in it down with it. Or so it seemed, at the time. We can watch a movie like Escape from New York today and laugh at the irony of the first few lines: "Manhattan Island in New York City has become a maximum security prison." But, this view of not just of New York, but all dense American cities was very real in the 70s and 80s.
Nearly, everyone with the financial means to leave, did. Except for the artists. Artists need cities. Cities are cultural amplifying devices. They are hot-beds and incubators of creative energy. The very quality that city leaders sought to diminish: density is an essential element of the usefulness of cities to artists. Not only did the artists stay, but they kept coming, from all over the world, drawn to the cultural capital, looking for a big break or inspiration. They willingly entered a crumbling and disorderly New York. In their artwork and in their lives one may see a reflection of those strange days when we almost gave up on the project of being a civilization.
This is why the work of musicians, artists in theatre, fashion, and film in New York city in the late 70s and early 80s is so fascinating. Their work took place in a time of heightened urban despair and dark currents run though the music, paintings, trends, fashion, and theatre of the times. Andy Warhol's most famous and creative period was in the 60s but he remained in the city through the 70s and in to the 80s when he died. This was the period of the "corporate Warhol" in his own word "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art." Warhol had always fashioned himself as an ironic "sell-out" but never was it more true. In the 80s the art scene became a "market" launching some into fame, like Jean-Michel Basquiat while leaving the majority on the dangerous margins of a tattered city.
Jean-Michel Basquiat brought a tiny hint of the energy of graffiti in to the world of "high art" --his work can be seen as a reflection of a decaying city that had at last stopped to examine the grim and often desperate writing on the walls. Real graffiti had no time for wallowing in misery. The scripts that covered trains and walls were infused with joy that acted like a tonic to brighten beak urban settings. Early Hip-Hop music served a similar purpose, it was fun and funny-- in defiant contrast to the poverty-stricken neighborhoods that produced it.
Likewise, the disco, and later the punk scenes focused on fun. Too often this was intertwined with drug abuse. The story of Gia Carangi, a teenaged girl who came to New York in 1978, became a supermodel, partied at the mudd club and CGBGs and, just as quickly fell in to heroin addition, to die of AIDS in 1986 embodied both the decadent and destructive currents of these times.
But the city did not implode. Our New York is more alive and less dangerous. There is something glamourous about that past, but I think this beauty can only be seen in retrospect, it was not real. What was real was the decaying housing stock, surging numbers of TB cases, A mysterious plague, AIDS, and a dysfunctional and dark city. The so-called glamour and mystique of the age comes from the fact that people continued to enter the city, even during this time to seek fame and fortune, and in doing so risked (and sometimes lost) their lives for art. This is what makes graffiti, as an example, so fascinating. Who in their right mind would risk being arrested just to create art?
In the dark days of the city the few remaining had to band together-- this created a kind of unified scene or cultural moment, today the activities of artists are diversified-- there are a thousand scenes and more artwork is produced without the surrounding pressure of a dying civilization. We like to credit the resurgence of the city to better police work, to a better economy, to immigration and our growing ethnic neighborhoods but a large share of credit is due to the artists who held on when everyone else was letting go.
Urban planners speculated about a future without cities: a suburban future. In the heart of the once dense Bronx some blocks were raised to build single family suburban style housing. This was touted as the city's future. But, most of the time, all over the city, nothing was built at all. On the Lower East Side vacant brownstones with leaking roofs and missing walls became shooting galleries for heroin addicts. The city and state invested in highways, moving cars and building suburbs and they redlined the city. Fire service was reduced and LES, Harlem, East New York and the South Bronx burned. City leaders quietly waited for the population to fall, for the city to stabilize in to something smaller, less dense and less complex. But, something as massive and as ancient as New York cannot simply vaporize. It cannot dissipate, but rather it must implode, like a black hole, sucking everything and everyone in it down with it. Or so it seemed, at the time. We can watch a movie like Escape from New York today and laugh at the irony of the first few lines: "Manhattan Island in New York City has become a maximum security prison." But, this view of not just of New York, but all dense American cities was very real in the 70s and 80s.
Nearly, everyone with the financial means to leave, did. Except for the artists. Artists need cities. Cities are cultural amplifying devices. They are hot-beds and incubators of creative energy. The very quality that city leaders sought to diminish: density is an essential element of the usefulness of cities to artists. Not only did the artists stay, but they kept coming, from all over the world, drawn to the cultural capital, looking for a big break or inspiration. They willingly entered a crumbling and disorderly New York. In their artwork and in their lives one may see a reflection of those strange days when we almost gave up on the project of being a civilization.
This is why the work of musicians, artists in theatre, fashion, and film in New York city in the late 70s and early 80s is so fascinating. Their work took place in a time of heightened urban despair and dark currents run though the music, paintings, trends, fashion, and theatre of the times. Andy Warhol's most famous and creative period was in the 60s but he remained in the city through the 70s and in to the 80s when he died. This was the period of the "corporate Warhol" in his own word "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art." Warhol had always fashioned himself as an ironic "sell-out" but never was it more true. In the 80s the art scene became a "market" launching some into fame, like Jean-Michel Basquiat while leaving the majority on the dangerous margins of a tattered city.
Jean-Michel Basquiat brought a tiny hint of the energy of graffiti in to the world of "high art" --his work can be seen as a reflection of a decaying city that had at last stopped to examine the grim and often desperate writing on the walls. Real graffiti had no time for wallowing in misery. The scripts that covered trains and walls were infused with joy that acted like a tonic to brighten beak urban settings. Early Hip-Hop music served a similar purpose, it was fun and funny-- in defiant contrast to the poverty-stricken neighborhoods that produced it.
Likewise, the disco, and later the punk scenes focused on fun. Too often this was intertwined with drug abuse. The story of Gia Carangi, a teenaged girl who came to New York in 1978, became a supermodel, partied at the mudd club and CGBGs and, just as quickly fell in to heroin addition, to die of AIDS in 1986 embodied both the decadent and destructive currents of these times.
But the city did not implode. Our New York is more alive and less dangerous. There is something glamourous about that past, but I think this beauty can only be seen in retrospect, it was not real. What was real was the decaying housing stock, surging numbers of TB cases, A mysterious plague, AIDS, and a dysfunctional and dark city. The so-called glamour and mystique of the age comes from the fact that people continued to enter the city, even during this time to seek fame and fortune, and in doing so risked (and sometimes lost) their lives for art. This is what makes graffiti, as an example, so fascinating. Who in their right mind would risk being arrested just to create art?
In the dark days of the city the few remaining had to band together-- this created a kind of unified scene or cultural moment, today the activities of artists are diversified-- there are a thousand scenes and more artwork is produced without the surrounding pressure of a dying civilization. We like to credit the resurgence of the city to better police work, to a better economy, to immigration and our growing ethnic neighborhoods but a large share of credit is due to the artists who held on when everyone else was letting go.
Examples of high urban density and low suburban density.
How do we choose to use the land?
High density, 21.2 units/ acre in San Francisco, CA
Low density 1.9 units/ acre in Delano, CA
How do we choose to use the land?
History is, of course, far more than books describe. Histories are carried by people in many ways, and they change over time. Our understanding of the past is continuously revised by our experience of the present. Hence, history is under constant revision and rarely in agreement with itself. When I say history, I do not mean "facts" I do not mean a mere list of occurrences, measurements of population, temperature, random photographs or observations. History exists in the present through the stories people tell about the past. The arcs of stories give history its shape and meaning. Without the story it would just be a collection of data. Because histories are shaped by that meaning-giving instrument, the story, they do not conform perfectly to facts, in some sense, they cannot conform to the facts.
But, the purpose of history is not to accurately reproduce some aspect of reality, but rather to accurately lend meaning to reality by translating it in to the kind of stories people use naturally in their thought processes to understand everything they encounter, including the evidence of the past. History is a story that requires a person to tell that story. History requires people to witness its passing. In a place with no people there is no history, beyond whatever we might deduce from layers of sediment and the stones.
The bulk of history emerges in places filled with people. Again, a history need not be momentous enough to take up space on the shelfs of a library to be a history. It need only be a story of real events worth recounting to someone, anyone. A story from life, a personal history, a company history, a universal history of human beings.
Most of the time, we make our history without even realizing it, but from time to time there are moments where we are aware of ourself and our place in the greater story of all people, and perhaps the planet and even universe. We might feel, suddenly, all of the intertwining histories that have led up to us, that are moving through us, as we make the choice that creates the future. In that kind of moment we simultaneously see our actions and the significance of our actions as a part of some greater story. This is a ephemeral and legendary moment.
In the city these moments are everywhere, we may watch the theatre of strangers in the street, or make our own stories for the crowd.
Standing on a roof at night one may see slices of many histories. On every roof and terrace there is life, people flicker by a narrow ally way, a young man smokes on the fire escape, in the street a man with a brief case drops it and a flurry of papers cover the street. Then a woman with a tiny dog tries to help, the young man is still smoking slowly watching the cars on the bridge in the distance, he looks up a waves, an ephemeral moment.
All of their histories became a part of our own history. And our history is theirs, observed, remembered, told in fragments, perhaps some flicker of the spirt of who we are remains in all this even after we are gone.
From: The Urban Naturalist
I never thought this essay really clicked. I've reworked it a bit. There is something in here, and I think it's worth including.
The pain meds make it impossible for me to do any math so I've stopped taking them in the morning so I can get a little done. Once I take them all I can do is write, surf the web and cook, but even the coking is a bit dangerous. I'm hoping that I'll wake up tomorrow and not feel any pain and just be done with it. I want to go running. I almost feel ready. It's probably a bad idea to run while medicated, right?
I can't wait for school to start, I'm not looking forward to the stress, but my mind feels so mushy and unfocused. Abstract algebra is going to be fun, I worked through the first two chapters of the book and it's the kind of structured topic that really gets me going. I'm still nervous about advanced complex variables, I merely survived the first term, I really must spend more time reviewing advanced calculus. That's my weak point.
Probability theory should be a lot of fun. Maybe I'll make a trip to the book store tomorrow, I'd love to pick up my books early and start digging in.
I can't wait for school to start, I'm not looking forward to the stress, but my mind feels so mushy and unfocused. Abstract algebra is going to be fun, I worked through the first two chapters of the book and it's the kind of structured topic that really gets me going. I'm still nervous about advanced complex variables, I merely survived the first term, I really must spend more time reviewing advanced calculus. That's my weak point.
Probability theory should be a lot of fun. Maybe I'll make a trip to the book store tomorrow, I'd love to pick up my books early and start digging in.
A lot of you agreed with some of the ideas in my last post. I don't think that will be the case with this one.
Civilization describes the way that humans live, when they have a surplus of food, and therefore labor. Civilization requires the development of cities, arts, cultural institutions, recreational and academic institutions under conditions of relative surplus and peace. Civilizations, like great cities have their own cultural memories, they last for centuries, even millennia. A civilization is stable, like the eye os a solar hurricane, it is a fixed constellation made of tremendous and often violent motion. The imprint and life-span of a civilization, like the imprint and life-span of a city, is much older than the bricks and stone from which it is constructed. These physical elements may be replaced many times. It is the abstract ideal that allows the civilization: a point of intersection, a focal point for human activity, a center for religion or culture to persist beyond human lives and beyond any of the objects that those people might create. Civilized society is defined by the development of cities. And cities are the icons, and incarnations of civilizations.
Civilization is dependent on the existence of cities not only for trade and centralization, but also for cultural development. To abandon cities is to abandon civilization. Hence the distrubuted, decentralized ideal of total suburbanization without cities cannot be called civilization. The idea that cities might be obsolote, because of improved information technology, or because of inexpensive energy, or for any of the other reasons that have been used to justify decentralization is a philosophy that necessarily abandons the project of civilization building. This is not a value judgment. A provincial, nodal mode of living may produce a lifestyle with many benefits. Mid-century planners seemed to strive to make such distributed living possible and, in many places, they have succeed.
In suburbs discontented from any urban center people live highly compartmentalized and isolated lives that are nonetheless dependent on global networks. But, this arrangement is not a civilization. Without an urban center there is no cultural focal point, and the diversity, difference of human experiences remains largely hidden. Suburban living cloaks differences in class and culture by providing each person exposure only to those people who belong to their own social order. Hence, one rarely becomes aware of differences in class, education or opportunity. Decentralization blocks cross-cultural and tans-class transmission of ideas and innovations. Order and unity must be maintained by the central transmission of cultural information-- leading to massive conformity within social and class groupings.
Without cities, there is no need for the civic virtues. These are the unwritten rules that maintain social order and that allow people from all walks of life to interact and live in dense vibrant places. The deterioration of our cities represents an attempt to end the most human of projects and to destroy the most human of environments. Cities have always been what people have created when the resources and collaborative spirt to support them was in place. To abandon and lay waste to cities is to give up some essential part of what it is to be civilized.
Civilization describes the way that humans live, when they have a surplus of food, and therefore labor. Civilization requires the development of cities, arts, cultural institutions, recreational and academic institutions under conditions of relative surplus and peace. Civilizations, like great cities have their own cultural memories, they last for centuries, even millennia. A civilization is stable, like the eye os a solar hurricane, it is a fixed constellation made of tremendous and often violent motion. The imprint and life-span of a civilization, like the imprint and life-span of a city, is much older than the bricks and stone from which it is constructed. These physical elements may be replaced many times. It is the abstract ideal that allows the civilization: a point of intersection, a focal point for human activity, a center for religion or culture to persist beyond human lives and beyond any of the objects that those people might create. Civilized society is defined by the development of cities. And cities are the icons, and incarnations of civilizations.
Civilization is dependent on the existence of cities not only for trade and centralization, but also for cultural development. To abandon cities is to abandon civilization. Hence the distrubuted, decentralized ideal of total suburbanization without cities cannot be called civilization. The idea that cities might be obsolote, because of improved information technology, or because of inexpensive energy, or for any of the other reasons that have been used to justify decentralization is a philosophy that necessarily abandons the project of civilization building. This is not a value judgment. A provincial, nodal mode of living may produce a lifestyle with many benefits. Mid-century planners seemed to strive to make such distributed living possible and, in many places, they have succeed.
In suburbs discontented from any urban center people live highly compartmentalized and isolated lives that are nonetheless dependent on global networks. But, this arrangement is not a civilization. Without an urban center there is no cultural focal point, and the diversity, difference of human experiences remains largely hidden. Suburban living cloaks differences in class and culture by providing each person exposure only to those people who belong to their own social order. Hence, one rarely becomes aware of differences in class, education or opportunity. Decentralization blocks cross-cultural and tans-class transmission of ideas and innovations. Order and unity must be maintained by the central transmission of cultural information-- leading to massive conformity within social and class groupings.
Without cities, there is no need for the civic virtues. These are the unwritten rules that maintain social order and that allow people from all walks of life to interact and live in dense vibrant places. The deterioration of our cities represents an attempt to end the most human of projects and to destroy the most human of environments. Cities have always been what people have created when the resources and collaborative spirt to support them was in place. To abandon and lay waste to cities is to give up some essential part of what it is to be civilized.
Housing subdivision near Union, Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. Image from the Wikipedia.
Image from an advertisement for LG washers and dryers published in "House Beautiful" magazine in 2007.
One of the advantages to urban living is the opportunity to own (and hence throw away) much less stuff. I'll take this rather iconic image from a recent advertisement for a washer and dryer as my illustration. The vast majority of city dwellers do not own their own washer and dryer. This isn't a function of wealth, as much as it is a function of space. There is simply no place to put the noisy and bulky machines in your typical apartment. People wash their clothes in shared facilities located in their building, or at a local Laundromat. Wealthy people send their clothes out to be cleaned, while most of us load up the cart and roll it down to the basement or around the corner to do the wash. In either case, the machines used in this process are used by 100s of people, they are built to last as long as possible, they are only replaced when they are broken. This clothes-washing arrangement is not possible in a suburban setting because the low density development makes it inefficient. Instead, each household buys and discards its own machine. This is just one example of how economies of scale work to make cities more environmentally friendly places than they at first appear to be on the surface. This kind of "green" living requires no laws, and no extra effort, it's simply a function of the spatial design. It's built-in. Likewise the tendency towards duplication and waste is built in to suburban neighborhoods. You can't blame people for buying their own washer and dryer, it's the only practical solution for that spatial arrangement.
To some of you, the imagery here must seem bit tired, right? Since the beginning of the suburban boom in the United States, social scientists have been critical of this type of housing development. Although, the topic is old, please keep in mind both of these images are relatively new. The advertisement looks like it could have come from the 50s, but it was published in the December 2007 issue of House Beautiful magazine. The housing development shown the photo was constructed during the last five years. This kind of development has never really slowed and today, more than ever, we have created environments for ourselves that make sharing hard. This is happening today.
The suburban plan really did wonders for the economy for years. Think of all of the products that were sold, the jobs that were created, and the growth that suburban redundancy helped ignite. At this late stage, it would seem that, even in suburbia, a large number of people have "one of everything" so now the advertising challenge seems to be to find ways to convince people to buy two. Or to convince people to throw out old products more quickly and buy new again, even when the old product has not worn out. It's really unfortunate that the economic healh of the United States is so closely tied to such a wasteful cycle. We need to find some other focal point for our economy. That focal point could be increasing the efficiency and long-term sustainability of cities so that they can accommodate larger populations.
And there is room for waste-cutting in the urban settings too nd we can simultaneously improve quality of life while making these adjustments. Dry cleaning uses harsh chemicals and shirts tend to be packed in excessive amounts of paper and plastic. Many old, industrial washing machines waste water and energy and could be replaced with more efficient models. But, the bigger point here is that planning can help people to share resources. Choices about where and how we live have big impacts on the environment because these choices dictate what kind of energy savings are and are not possible. And, we can take this beyond washing machines. What are some other examples of things that people tend to buy redundantly that could instead be shared? How do urban and suburban living arrangements hinder or help these attempts at cutting back?
Last: Transportation (Plane, Bus, Foot and Train)
Next: 17. Ephemeral but legendary histories
From: The Urban Naturalist
I was looking at a magazine and I saw this advertisement for a washing machine. Here is the first half of it:
Guess what the rest of ad says? (I was SHOCKED.) ( Read more... )
Guess what the rest of ad says? (I was SHOCKED.) ( Read more... )
I had to have my appendix removed. (But,I still have my bibliography! Ha! ha! Get it? ... oh, never mind...) At any rate, I'm just returning from a 2-day stay in the hospital. I'm doing well, and I should be back to normal in a week or so. But, if I'm slow to respond, or if I missed something in the past few days, blame it on my illness or the pain meds I'm taking ... or something. Cheers! It feels great not to be dead. I love the miracle of modern medicine. Woot!
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