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Robert Harris, renewing the Dreyfus affair, captures the excellent stench of the 1895 sewer in Paris. The rough miasma of a dense city also “enters” one’s mouth, he writes, “to taste everything in corruption.”
He didn’t ruin his talent. That year, on Rue Laffitte, Paul Cézanne was given his first solo exhibition. Throughout the Senate, the Lumière brothers, the clearest case of nominative determinism, screened the first short film. 50 seconds, to the collected patterns. Free rodentia’s Paris was also Sarah Bernhardten’s Paris.
There is nothing in logic to suggest that a smoother and more orderly city would not be fizzed with such a creative force. So why is it so hard to imagine?
Even before the pandemic, with the smell of “nature is healing,” cities were almost reaching the countryside. The planned reform of the Elysées Fields is simply a self-enemy “garden” In the village village scheme. An architect friend is working on the greening of the Thames embankment from Chelsea to Blackfriars from time to time. I encourage almost all of these good works. But I also wonder if the creative uses of an environment I’m testing are becoming affordable.
It is precisely determined by the strained and stressed humanity that creates genius. The view received is that density allows for collaboration. Cézanne was from Provence, her gallerist from Reunion: where else would they cross at random? Another theory is that constant tensions and dangers force us to work in a higher mental tone. Whatever the mechanism of transmission between the harsh environment and the inner magic, it is clear enough that it exists. History throws out too many sad but fundamental cities, pretty but banal, to discard. As a result, beyond a certain point, a more livable place will not be so exciting.
At this point, it is appropriate to determine that cities exist for the benefit of those who live there, not in favor of the avant-garde. If it were that simple. As the main testing ground for the ideas of our species – including food and business – cities create great externalities of the kindest kind. Morning coffee, the freedom to sleep with whatever you want: a lot of things are better now, being urban pioneers, because behavior spread elsewhere. There is a useful case for executing those that most creatively distort cities, even to the detriment of their livability.
What a good return that word has made since the pandemic. There is probably no city more livable than Vienna. (The Economist Intelligence Unit, he agreed, crowned other comparisons in Auckland and the Pacific this month.) But who thinks the future will fit into that box of chocolates? He has worked hard enough to reverse the population decline since the days of Klimt and Freud. The world without Vienna and its elegant kind would be rough. But the world that makes Vienna a benchmark would be rough. The thing about livability is that a city can die from there.
Never feel at ease in your environment. Washington is green, tidy but too understandable because of the chaos. Los Angeles is my favorite place in the US (a nation with a tiring habit of making sense of cities), precisely because of its stimulating entropy.
Certainly this argument is exhausted. It’s not as if the least populated cities (Caracas and Douala, apparently) are the most creative. At one time a kind of London or New York whirlwind kept leather pines, as if the Ramones had deserved all the stabbings. Leave me out of there. It’s all about balance. It is like the optimal level of stress in the environment and is not zero. I trust no one less with mystics who return to nature with the future of cities and with anti-crowd technology choose Live in Palo Alton) zeitgeist dominate.
The post-pandemic city, they are right, could have been better. They misunderstand why. Hope people who love space, clean air and respect for the child will go outside. What remains will be a smaller-sized urban population with a younger and more adventurous profile. There would be no gain in habitability. But he should have a creative mind. Beneficiaries, as always, will not stop at the city limits.
Send an email to Janan janan.ganesh@ft.com
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