Do we analyse the city as it is, or as it ought to be? From Ebenezer Howard to Le Corbusier, through the remarkable post-1945 generation of architect-planners, urbanists sought not merely to understand the city, but also to perfect it. Their interventions depended upon a conception of the city as discrete, knowable and amenable to manipulation. The countermovement followed, focusing less on the possible city than the actually existing one. Patrick Geddes, Reyner Banham and the trio behind Learning from Las Vegas (1972) – Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour – represent this tradition, which has been chronicled by Daniel Horowitz in his book Consuming Pleasures (2012).
Though gesturing towards both camps, Richard J. Williams sides with the latter. ‘Why do cities look the way they do?’, his new book asks. The answer, he argues, is not design but process. No architect or planner would design the route to his favourite Asian market in Leicester, with its ‘bizarre amalgam of things’: a few Victorian fragments, some Swedish-inflected low-rise, a twenty-storey tower and a roaring flyover (p. xii). A scholar of the ultimate planned city of Brasília, Williams recognizes that most cities – and most parts of cities – resemble Leicester more than Letchworth. Each chapter of Why Cities Look the Way They Do focuses on a separate process: tourism, money, power, sex, work, war, and culture. Your experience of Venice, he notes, results less from a communion with the early modern world than from the commotion of contemporary tourism; you so long for bohemian Soho that a museum is refurbished – complete with ‘carefully chipped paintwork’ – to look suitably late-industrial (p. 166). Tourism and culture, in these examples, have remade familiar urban spaces, and the book teems with many more examples. ‘[T]he cities that we see are a combination of things’, Williams concludes, ‘most of which are not designed’ (p. 175). He wants readers not to judge cities against idealized aesthetic standards, but rather to see them for what they are – a first step, he suggests, towards making cities better.
Williams is a scholar not of socio-economic forces, but rather of visual culture. Though a study of the processes that shape cities, there is little here on race, ‘work’ but not much labour, ‘money’ but not economies. To bring the book's insight (about processes) into alignment with its author's expertise (visual culture), he emphasizes the ways that processes shape the city's representation. As in Williams’ prior work, such as his revelatory readings of plans and sketches throughout The Anxious City (2004), the chapters most succeed when wringing meanings out of popular and visual culture – from Lost in Translation to Sunset Boulevard to Donald Duck. He is outstanding on Seinfeld, for how its version of New York depicted a heteronormative global city – despite conceding, with a wink, that he has only watched the masturbation episode ‘a hundred or so times’ (p. 77). Williams is, in short, a lot of fun: a playful, genial writer, bursting with ideas. And though his touch is light, his subjects often are not. The book discusses a dazzling range of scholars, writers and theorists – from Freud to the Frankfurt School to Foucault, from Banham to Benjamin to Baudrillard.
Persuaded by Williams’ argument, let me add a process of my own, suggested by that opening stroll through Leicester: accretion. Buildings have architects and cities have planners, but time mocks any notion of design. Glancing out my window, my eyes run east up Houston Street – widened under New York's mid-century planner, Robert Moses. To the south, the spacious lofts of SoHo betray their manufacturing origins, even as their luxurious roof gardens include the odd outdoor boxing studio, while their shops sell lamps approaching four figures – suggesting why their windows remain boarded-up, still sheltering from the recent uprisings. North of Houston grows NYU's newest building (‘Mordor’, my colleague calls it), and through its hollow shell I discern a half-dozen water towers. Wooden technologies, post-industrial spaces and mid-century urban renewal thus stand amid the jackfruits of Bloombergian wealth, evidence of urban uprisings, and a high-rise future that, for now, remains on hold. This author-less vista is totally incoherent, yet obviously New York. I have looked out this window every day for years, but I have only come to see it this way – truthfully, to see it all – after reading Williams’ book. Rather than a designed cityscape, I see processes all around me – the ultimate tribute to this witty, perceptive and transformative new book.
