Cities

Some years ago I was working in Milan, designing an HR dashboard for a bank.  It was late summer and over breakfast my Italian client complained about how cold it was.  That day, I had to fly to Stockholm for a meeting.  Exchanging pleasantries at dinner in the evening, my Swedish colleague remarked how warm the day had been.  I obsessively check the weather when I’m travelling and had noted that the temperature in both cities was 15C.

How we apprehend the world is determined by our prejudices and expectations.  In Invisible Cities, a series of imaginary conversations between Kublai Khan and his emissary Marco Polo, Italo Calvino shows how approaching the same city from different angles produces different perceptions.  The camel herder arriving through a desert sees Despina, a city located by the sea, as a gateway to the freedom of the ocean; the sailor reaching the safety of Despina’s harbour perceives the conurbation as a source of the bounty of the earth gathered from distant lands.

A city's own dwellers have varying experiences of the city they inhabit.  A busy street can be a vexatious traffic jam to the motorist, a hazardous muddle to the cyclist and a noxious cloud of pollution to the walker.  A dilapidated street market is simultaneously a nutritional lifeline to the impoverished, a cultural icon to the historian and, to the investor, a development opportunity.

The perception of dramatic events is also influenced by the preconceptions and perspectives of its onlookers.  This variability was used to such dramatic effect in Kurosawa's 1970 film Rashomon that the title has become a byword for unreliable witness.  Internet consumers rely on others' views as curated by social media.  Yet books lauded on Amazon and restaurants pilloried on TripAdvisor are filtered through reviewers' own perceptions and benchmarked according to their standards; they do not represent absolute truths and may not even accord with the preferences of those seeking guidance.

Urban flaneurs observe different features depending on their interests.  One is absorbed in shop windows, another is fascinated by church architecture.  The aspect presented directly by the city to each person is not their only input; each is also impacted by the refraction of others’ experience, generating a meta level of information.  The wealthy landlord is assailed by the pleas of the homeless he has displaced, crouching on street corners.  So each person’s kaleidoscope of experiences combine to form a unique experiential city autograph.  In the face of such subjectivity, how can a city be truly captured or definitively described? Kant distinguishes between the appearance of things, which comprise our experience: the phenomena; and the things themselves, which comprise reality: the noumena.  Measurements are objective and form indisputable reality: a city is so many kilometres wide and so many metres above sea level: the noumena.  Yet that same city would be experienced as paltry to a visitor from a Chinese megapolis but gigantic to a villager: the phenomena.

The most frequent reaction from participants during walks I lead in suburban London is: 'I've lived in this area for decades, but never knew this was just around the corner!'  Architects and urban planners might despair if they realised how little their efforts are appreciated - or maybe they are grateful to be able to inflict their enormities blithely on a largely indifferent populace.  But citizens’ lack of appreciation might have consequences.  In his fantastical novel The Phantom Tollbooth, a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress for children, Norton Juster describes a city named Reality, whose inhabitants became so distracted by their obsession of getting from one place to another as quickly as possible that they no longer took any notice of their surroundings:

“No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear.  Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible.  There was nothing to see at all.”

Phyllis, one of the cities described in Invisible Cities, suffers a similar fate:

"But it so happens that, instead, you must stay in Phyllis and spend the rest of your days there. Soon the city fades before your eyes, the rose windows are expunged, the statues on the corbels, the domes."

Walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities, Roger Deakin remarks in Waterlog.  These slow methods, largely unburdened by technology and regulation, remain the most effective ways to be anchored to the environment, enabling us to be watchful and observant, and chime with Cyril Connolly’s advice that no city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning. 

Double planetoid, Escher, 1949.

Two regular tetrahedrons, piercing each other, float through space as a planetoid. The light coloured one is inhabited by humanoid creatures who have completely transformed their region into a complex of houses, bridges and roads.  The darker tetrahedron has remained in its natural state with rocks, vegetation and weird beasts.  The two bodies fit together to make a whole but they have no knowledge of each other.

© David Thompson 2016