The Granite Garden

...Resolving these problems is only partly a technological issue, for such solutions bring their own problems in turn --for example, the con- flict between transportation needs (the automobile) and pollution...

...It comes as a jolt, then, to con- front the decline and vulnerability of modern urban settlements...

...The odd thing is not that the questions are in a sense absurd, for Or- well is dead thirty-four years and it is impossible to extrapolate from a man's writings what he would say about-evenlts after his death --but that most Orwell critics admit straight off that the ques- tions are absurd --and yet still feet drawn to ask them...

...Another is the contamination of air, water, soil, and plants by hazardous chemicals and others of unknown toxicity...

...It is interesting to note that a 1969 Commonweal reviewer of CEJL, while conceding that guesses about Orwell's political positions in the sixties were" interesting if futile specula- tions," also could not resist asking what Orwell's attitude would be toward the church "in the post-Vatican II and posto Humanae Vitae period...

...Observers voiced similar questions about Orwell's possible positions through the fifties and sixties, on the Suez crisis and the Viet- nam War, for example...

...Rosemary Booth Wheat . . . / City of the Big Shoul- ders...

...George Santayana, quoted in Paterson, Book Three, William Carlos Williams T HE CITY has been variously char- acterized, but in its contemporary guise at least it has often been perceived as majestic, virile, all but invulnerable...

...The author is a landscape architect and environmental planner who teaches in the Department of Landscape Architec- ture at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University...

...Books: EARTH, AIR, LIFE, WATER-- CITIES Cities, for Oliver, were not a part of nature...

...And indeed, what about 1984...

...About the pro-life movement...

...What would he say about the church in light of present-day ecumenical efforts...

...One central and urgent problem she poses is that of the decaying urban infra- structure in the United States...

...Graphic illus- trations also abound...

...Much of this book appears to have grown out of first-hand experience solving urban problems...

...The Granite Garden is a guidebook to the interdepend- ence of this environmental quartet, with explanations both of how natural pro- cesses have been violated and how they could be harnessed, with great positive good for cities...

...Sewage, water supply, and storm drainage sys- tems demand refurbishing or reconstruc- tion within the next decade...

...With the arrival of 1984, neoconserva- tives like Norman Podhoretz and socialists like Irving Howe raised the question as to "where Orwell would stand today" on current political ques- tions ranging from the nuclear freeze to the comparative merits of Soviet and American foreign policies...

...Anne Spirn's solution calls for acknowledging the elemental forces which underlie urban settlements and which have since ancient times been rec- ognized as fundamental --processes of earth, air, and water, to which she has added a fourth, "life," in place of the Traditional element, fire...

...And doubtless he would be surprised (and most disquieted) to find his one-time "enemy" claiming that the road to Wigan Pier was also the path to Rome...

...About liberation theology...

...Numerous poets have limned this vital- ity, from Wordsworth's portrayal of regal London at the start of the industrial era ("This City now doth like a garment wear / The beauty of the morning") to Hart Crane's exulting in the urban trans- formations of twentieth-century America ("Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny's belt, / Leaps from Far Rockaway to Gol- den Gate") and Carl Sandburg's sonor- ous Chicago litany ("Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of THE GRANITE GARDEN URBAN NATURE ANB HUMAN DESIGN Anne Whiston Splrn Basic Books, $25.95, 400 pp...

...He could hardly feel, he could hardly admit when it was pointed out to him, that cities are a second body for the human mind, a second organism, more ra- tional, permanent, and decorative than the animal organism of flesh and bone: a work of natural yet moral art, where the soul sets up her trophies of action and instru- ments of pleasure...

...This disregard has doubtless made it more possible even for groups to' which Orwell was openly antagonistic, like Catholics, to interpret his occasional religious pronouncements as reconcil-able with their own central preoccupa- tions...

...The author stresses the primary impor- tance of applying knowledge about how Commonweal: 470...

...friends (like humanist Brenda Salkeld) who identified themselves by such names, Orwell never bothered formally to align himself with these groups or to call himself by these or any other secta- rian labels...

...It is this as- pect of the urban scene --the city as fragile human construct --that Anne Whiston Spirn depicts in her book, The Granite Garden, aptly subtitled, "Urban Nature and Human Design...

...This much can be said today about George Orwell and Catho- licism: surely he would find it more difficult than in the 1930s and 40s to locate the church on the right side of the political spectrum...

...Briefly, the author's approach is to estab- lish a problem, construct a framework for its analysis, and work to its resolution, drawing numerous examples fi'om vari- ous cities and time periods...

...Furthermore, even if technology brought all of the solu- tions, a perfectly designed urban envi- ronment carries the threat of a "boring sameness," which could strip a city of danger and also of character...