leo Hollis says cities are good for us. But Indian cities are so messy that to entertain the genius of the metropolis is to overcome our habitual discontent, writes Jagan Shah
Cities Are Good for You
Author: leo Hollis
Publisher: Bloomsbury, Rs 650
From a reader driven to despair by the overwhelming chaos of urban India, this book might elicit an unusual yearning. The story of Indian cities has been so distorted by their failures, that to entertain the notion that the Indian city can indeed be the cradle of civilisation is to overcome our habitual disgruntlement and concede the author’s basic contention: That “the city could be our ark rather than our coffin”. The book is, therefore, an evangelising text; it pleads for good faith, divests us of our blasé neglect of this prized invention, the metropolis, and exhorts us to collectively reclaim its powers. The author teases us to choose between two diametrically opposed visions of the city, symbolically named Hobbes-town and locke-ville, recalling those famous thinkers who promoted, respectively, the authoritarian rule of the omnipresent state and the free-willing actions of a socially connected being.
An idle browse through the author’s endnotes will testify to the impeccable credentials of his sources and references. As if it were created in the image of the city that he admires, his text accommodates Plato as well as Fukuyama, Engels as well as De Soto, le Corbusier as well as George Simmel, in addition to a dazzling array of other writers who have treated the city as a home for man. These different takes might suggest that there is nothing more that combines the chapters of this book than the author’s idiosyncrasy, making him behave like a bricoleur, a collector of parts, than one who offers a fresh view of the urban reality. However, we can argue that he is both, a reporter and a thinker, and quite commendably. His able journalism pays fitting tribute to the metropolis: A place that can be loved and hated in equal measure, a place to which we have a right and yet it can deny us access, which gives life just as easily as it brings ruin.
The disarming proposition in the title is backed by a stark commitment to a single visionary, Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and life of Great American Cities, first published in 1966, provided a new paradigm for appreciating the genius of the metropolis. Jacobs famously challenged the modern tendency towards totalitarian planning, the God’s eye perspective that deludes politicians, bureaucrats and city planners alike with a false impression of power. Jacobs countered this delusional politics with a humanist and democratic stance: It is the people, those anonymous, perambulating, toiling, congregating, consuming and creative individuals and communities that are the city. They activate relationships, build communities, green our neighbourhoods and teem our streets, parks and playgrounds. The genius of the metropolis is the collective creative genius of its inhabitants. “We are social animals and, as a result, the city is the most natural place for us to be.” Holiss finds that “the city is not a problem but a solution”, and the emerging new technologies, far from alienating us, are making us more social.
Holiss forays into the space of the city only to return time and again to reflect on what he discovers. Behavioural and political sciences inform his argument for the people-centric city, as much as mathematics, probability and systems theory. The study of anthills and beehives fascinates him as much as the application of ‘the travelling salesman problem’, the ‘shared space’ experiment, and the ‘broken windows theory’, all examples of how the theoretical engagement with the city, as an organism, informs the practical solutions to urban problems. It is in this back and forth between the abstract and the real, between “the ballet of the streets” and the scientific analysis of their patterns and flows, situations and events, where the genius of the author’s writing is truly exhibited.
But to what avail, one might ask after reading this bookIJ Is there hope for these crowded, rapidly growing organisms on Earth, which consume so much of the planet’s resources as to even alter its most primordial rhythms and compositions, thereby threatening the sustainability of the man-made worldIJ
To articulate an answer, Holiss returns to 555 Hudson Street, to that quiet and very ordinary neighbourhood in New York where Jane Jacobs lived with her family and took on the challenge of the metropolis. It is New York where his story begins, and New York where it ends. Somewhere between the newly built High-line Park on the West Side of lower Manhattan and Jacobs’s neighbourhood on Hudson Street, the author recovers his muse.
This is a good read for those who would like to know why the world loves Dharavi so much, when Indians think it is urban blight. In his meander through archaeology, philosophy, political science, mathematics, logic, popular culture, encounters with game-changers, conversations with activists and ruminations on the future of the world, Holiss touches upon some basic truths. In getting cars off the streets and reclaiming urban spaces and communal gardens, in smarter management of mega-regions and the ‘creative destruction’ of decrepit precincts, the author finds the restoration of the force that energises metropolitan life: The relationship of trust between the public and the Government.
Whether it is the design of housing estates, the operation of community kitchens and ‘smart’ cities or the handling of land fills and bus systems, the basic and common principle that makes cities as diverse as New York, lagos, Copenhagen, Curitiba and Mumbai work, is this trust. Best described through the poetic line — “if the city is not good for all, it is not good at all” — trust is at the heart of urban society. This is the genius of the metropolis, a way of life that mankind has invented in order to protect a basic instinct.
The reviewer is director, National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi