The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century. . - Review of books: of Cities And Citizenship - book review

Between the utopian thinkers of the early 19th century and the modernist believers in the tabula rasa came an interlude dominated by those who thought piecemeal solutions possible. These responses to the industrial city might occupy the social realm, offering relief through workers' housing with its promise of improved sanitation and welfare (discussed in "House and Home"), or they might occupy the esthetic realm, offering salvation through various period styles, each of which was seen as having salutary moral effects on those who beheld them (covered in "Style, Type, and Urban Fabric"). Yet such partial solutions failed to provide a permanent answer to the perceived disorder of the modern urban realm, and so 20th-century architects and planners would return to those ideals first laid out by utopian thinkers, urging that we abandon the corrupt city and create our communal life anew.

Rykwert turns to this modernist romance with the blank slate (perhaps the opposite pole of the author's ideal of the "seduction of place"), beginning with a brief history of the planned suburb and, in particular, of the "garden city," Englishman Ebenezer Howard's turn-of-the-century ideal of the reconciliation of town and countryside. Howard's influence on the nascent discipline of city planning was remarkable, and Rykwert suggests that the success of modest early experiments led the next generation of urban designers to undertake more ambitious schemes. Initially contemplated in the years prior to the First World War, and actually realized in its aftermath, grandiose new provincial and national capitals--such as Canberra and New Delhi--were laid out to assert the omnipresent power of the British Empire, a program which ironically was undertaken just at the moment of that Empire's eclipse. Following the Second World War, developing nations also embraced such representational projects, commissioning prominent architects to design capitals which might signify a hard-won modernity: Le Corbusier's Chandigarh, Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, and the lesser-known example of Islamabad, designed by the firm of Constantin Doxiadis. While Rykwert reminds us of the failures of these bold attempts to reinvent the city in one great leap forward--their blind faith in architecture's social powers, their inhuman scale, their inattention to the basic needs of the great mass of the poor--he concludes the chapter with a reflection on more recent, often New Urbanist designs here in America. Like Marx, Rykwert argues that history occurs first as tragedy, then repeats itself as farce. In the plan of Columbia, Md., or that ideal fantasy of small-town life, Disney Corporation's Celebration, Fla., he finds two manufactured places where the noble but doomed modernist dream of the tabula rasa is reduced to the scale of suburban life.

Little in this story is new; architectural historians will recognize references to much recent scholarship on modern city planning, from the work of Francoise Choay to that of Richard Sennett, but what Rykwert does here is give that scholarship a polemic edge. For his history of the past 150 years of urban design is meant as an extended critique of where we find ourselves today. To return to terms Rykwert first introduced in The Idea of a Town, one might say that planners have replaced the primacy of the "model" with that of the "diagram." Models and diagrams are two contrasting means of spatial representation, of thinking the city. The model is "the conceptual prototype of the town that its inhabitants construct mentally," which is "intended to anchor our views to a specific place: a particular home, a particular town." The diagram is its opposite, not a proto- or archetype like the model but an abstraction of certain urban features, whereby the functional elements of the city--"transportation networks, infrastructure, etc."--alone come to stand in for the whole, which is in this way divorced from its concrete particularity. In the ancient town, Rykwert argued, the model was primary, but today we live in diagrammed cities, or to use the most current terminology, our cities have become "nodes" in communication networks, mere way stations for flows of energy, information, capital and labor.