To save our cities, we must let them breathe
Evolution is vital if a city is to enjoy lasting success; but, as Andreas Whittam Smith says, the endless construction of new skyscrapers is not necessarily evidence of positive change
On holiday some years ago, walking up Third Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York, I suddenly told myself that I really do love big cities. It felt like an epiphany moment, a realisation of something that had been implicit for a long time. After all, I had lived in London all my adult life without ever wishing to leave. I am proud of the place.
As a matter of fact, nobody would claim that Third Avenue is an attractive street. It is full of traffic. It has small shops at street level and very ordinary offices above. This is where a distinction that the French used to make between the ville and the cité comes in. This old usage indicated that the built environment, the ville, was one thing; how people dwell in it, the cité, was another.
It wasn’t that the people I passed that day in Third Avenue were having sparkling conversations with each other – quite the reverse. In the big city, unlike the small country town, passers-by rarely acknowledge each other. They are not expecting to say “hello”. Louis Wirth, an American sociologist, wrote that a city is a “motley mixture of peoples and cultures, of highly differentiated modes of life between which there often is only the faintest communication, the greatest indifference and the broadest toleration and occasionally bitter strife”.
So, what is it that makes a successful city?
