PUBLIC SPACE: PLEASURES & COSTS OF URBANITY

...The movie is single-minded compared to the theater...

...Berman's list can be extended: housing, business, manufacture, government, culture, recreation— each has its proper place, cut off from all the others...

...There is bound to be growing pressure from people with time and money on their hands for interesting things to do as well as for (or even instead of) domestic enhancements: holidays, travel, evenings out, "social congregations" of different sorts, places to see and be seen...

...The second is open-minded space, designed for a variety of uses, including unforeseen and unforeseeable uses, and used by citizens who do different things and are prepared to tolerate, even take an interest in, things they don't do...

...4) The ideological critique of open-minded space has been paralleled by a social inundation: crowding, overuse, conflict...

...Increasingly, we conceive of well-being exclu472 sively in terms of the self...

...The most revealing example of this resistance is their invocation of the laws against trespass to exclude political activity— leafletting, say, on their "property...

...Single-minded space is sometimes wonderfully convenient...

...rich here, poor there...

...The square or piazza is the epitome of openmindedness...

...Entering space of this sort we are characteristically in a hurry...

...But the reiteration of single-mindedness at one public site after another seems to me something that civilized societies should avoid...

...The experience is less engaging, I think, when we are homebound, but it is also less trouble, less time-consuming, physically and mentally easier...

...Open-minded space is equated with urban disorder, the uncertainties of street life, the chaos of the petty-bourgeois economy...

...So we avoid urbanity, move between the instrumental and the intimate, give up those areas of public life where civility is necessary but increasingly difficult...

...I DON'T MEAN TO EQUATE open-minded/singleminded with good/bad...

...Paul and Percival Goodman's Communitas (cloth 1947, paper 1960) and Jane Jacobs's Life and Death of Great American Cities (1961) were much noticed and talked about when they were published and republished, but the talk faltered after only a few years...

...The ideal is door-to-door: private airplane, helicopter, limousine...

...Zoned business and residential areas are single-minded, as is the modern dormitory suburb...

...2) New technologies also enhance the value of the home—not only labor-saving devices that make housework easier but also, and probably more important, the new communications media...

...we don't always want to notice or be noticed by other people...

...Not true, of course: people still go out to concerts, movies, ball games, church services, and I shall want to ask why they do...

...They are often bought out by national chains whose local managers are not trained for a similar enjoyment...

...This is the crucial setting for urbanity: without the square, write the Goodmans, "there is no city...

...q 475...

...Once, perhaps, it was in the interest of women to raise the walls 474 high around the home, and to emphasize the coziness and comfort of domesticity, for they were largely excluded from public activities outside...

...The real alternative to open-minded space is private space, and it is the (genuine) appeal of private space that shapes the contemporary city...

...Here public space is surrounded by a mix of public and private buildings: government offices, museums, lecture and concert halls, churches, shops, cafes, residences...

...But single-mindedness is, at least, transitional and instrumental: we aim only to be in and out and have no high hopes of conversation or engagement along the way...

...The home, the crucial setting for privacy, is neither singleminded nor open-minded...

...When Rayner Banham's exuberant defense of Los Angeles appeared in 1971, there was no equal exuberance displayed in defense of other cities and alternative urban styles...

...Lovers of urbanity celebrate the city's chaotic mix, but it is wise to notice that many of the most celebrated examples of urban space "belong" to quite specific groups of people...

...People will continue to want to rub shoulders even if they are leery of actual encounters...

...I am not sure what the appropriate comparison is here...

...We need to distinguish between two kinds of public space...

...Radical intellectuals live in cities, think of themselves as city people, imagine the good society as a large and splendid city...

...But the accommodation involves a loss of diversity and unexpectedness, of a certain sort of educational loitering...

...Think of the waiting rooms of the great 19th-century train stations and then of the way we wait now: the experience has been stripped of all grace and expectation, except for the dim hope that the train will be on time...

...The exhibition center, like most centers, is single-minded (one exhibit at a time) compared to the old urban fairground...

...These sorts of institutions and arrangements accommodate people under economic pressure, people in a hurry, and that is certainly a good thing to do...

...universities are segregated cities of the young...

...What has made all this possible is an interesting combination of entrepreneurial activity, local politics, planning and antiplanning—a market/political process that liberals and leftists committed to the city would do well to study...

...The central city (as it once was) and also the "quarter" or neighborhood with its own stores and shops and small factories constitute open-minded space...

...But the success of the feminist movement, if it is successful, ought to lead to a new demand for space outside the home...

...The university campus is another model of 471 open-mindedness, with its own squares and courtyards, its varied activities, its in-close housing...

...It is probably better that a cultural palace be located near a church, a government office building, a good café, an apartment house, and so on, than that it be adjacent to another palace—better at least for the residents of the city...

...The point of single-mindedness is career discipline at one end of our lives and home-boundedness at the other...

...It would be foolish to deny that the planners and architects have responded, sometimes, to real, not ideological, disorders...

...If there is to be room for conversation and for hanging around, it must be, so to speak, room with amenities...

...It's not only that space serves certain purposes known in advance by its users, but also that its design and character stimulate (or repress) certain qualities of attention, interest, forbearance, and receptivity...

...What is hard is to suggest how it might be abated or reversed...

...Economic mobilization and the slow advance of democracy (at least, of democratic manners and a superficial "equality of condition") bring more and more people into available public space...

...Singlemindedness serves intimacy, because it moves us quickly through the public, nonintimate, and unpredictable world...

...it is too much of a strain on intimacy when intimacy is all there is...

...Perhaps the best word for private space is Richard Sennett's "intimate...

...There is more difference, more tension and potential conflict, than people want to cope with...

...streets and parks are someone's "turf," cafes and bars are most interesting when they are taken over by particular groups of writers, actors, journalists, and so on...

...III I t's not difficult to describe the process by which this happens or to explain its reasons...

...The new urban malls are a nice example of the adaptation of the "center" to a genuine urbanity— though they have mostly been successful only on dramatic sites, like the Boston or Baltimore waterfronts...

...The truth is that open-minded space depends upon police, street-cleaners, waiters, conductors, gardeners, supervisors of all sorts, whose wages it doesn't pay...

...5) What we might think of as the mass consumption of open-minded space strains and sometimes overwhelms its financial base...

...Their flight carries them through singleminded space, which is subject to a similar deterioration and can come to feel equally dangerous...

...But they also spend a lot of time "attending" these events, not together but one by one, as a locational series (separately, in their own living rooms) rather than a social congregation...

...Open-mindedness requires public subsidy...

...Certain sorts of single-minded space can meet this pressure—in their different ways, for example, shopping centers and cultural centers...

...the department store or supermarket is single-minded compared to the row of specialty shops—because the row is on the street, and the street is open-minded space...

...But enterprises of this sort don't seem profit-maximizing, and may require entrepreneurs who themselves enjoy the public life they facilitate...

...Open-minded space, by contrast, competes with intimacy because it provides an alternative pattern of activity and encounter...

...The more privileged we are, the more quickly we move from place to place, the less time we spend in public...

...The government center, medical center, cultural center, shopping center are all singleminded...

...They don't want the extra costs of policing such activity, but they also don't want the attention of shoppers diverted from their primary mission...

...The real test is to make such arrangements work in more ordinary neighborhoods—or, in the absence of the mall, to rehabilitate the street...

...Materialism and morality alike lead to the enhanced valuation of intimate space, the setting for private comfort and also for personal or mutual exploration...

...Years ago, Percival Goodman argued in Dissent against the construction of Lincoln Center...

...The first is single-minded space, designed by planners or entrepreneurs who have only one thing in mind, and used by similarly single-minded citizens...

...The unpredictability of open-mindedness becomes threatening...

...so far as the shopper is concerned, this is not a place for conversation or play but only for getting and spending...

...the forum, the square, the courtyard are all open-minded...

...So, too, though less gloriously, are the deurbanized wastelands we have created, even in the midst of the city itself...

...Singlemindedness is designed to serve and facilitate privacy...

...Technology advances, fashions change, the affluent depart...

...Any of these activities, passive though they are, would once have carried us out of intimate space into many different sorts of public space, single-minded and open-minded in different degrees, lobbies and halls and stadiums and parks, and led to encounters (at least, visual encounters) with other people doing similar or different things...

...Insofar as this sort of possession ceases to be possible, or ceases to be secure, the space deteriorates...

...I can't specify the effects of that reiteration, for the character of city life today has other, though related, causes—among them the causes, which I will come to, of single-mindedness itself...

...We can sit, safe and secure, in our living rooms or family rooms and listen to music, watch the news, see movies, plays, or vaudeville shows, tune in a political debate or a revivalist preacher or a "talk" show (where famous people, whom we cannot hope to meet, do the talking, and we are free to kibitz), watch national and international athletic competitions—with a better view of the action than the actual spectators have...

...Public space, by contrast, requires what Sennett calls impersonality and role-playing: civility rather than sincerity...

...We must kill the street," Le Corbusier said, and that is the effect, not yet achieved, of his "radiant city" as of Frank Lloyd Wright's "living city," both of them really anti-cities, organized to serve the private car and the solitary individual...

...neighborhoods are often ethnically homogeneous (like one of Jane Jacobs's favorite neighborhoods, the Italian North End of Boston...

...Civil rights and Vietnam, race and war overwhelmed our speculations about urbanity and its physical requirements...

...If openminded space is good for the people called "yuppies," then it is probably good for the rest of us...

...In the night school and the commuter school this sort of space doesn't exist, and education is a more single-minded experience...

...My examples ought to be obvious to anyone who has moved around in cities...

...the motel or motor inn is singleminded, the urban hotel, with its public rooms, bars, restaurants, shops, and its ready access to the surrounding streets, is open-minded...

...The more appropriate homogeneity for a democratic city is the residential district, shaped over the years by ethnicity or interest...

...the housing project is singleminded, the urban block is open-minded...

...Less housework might mean more time to "go out," but the new media make possible a kind of engagement-with-the-world at home: we don't need to go out at all...

...Perhaps," as the Goodmans say, "there are no longer real occasions for social congregation...

...There is no obvious entrepreneurial interest in reproducing the civility of the old street and square (or, say, the spaciousness and dignity of the old waiting room)—except, perhaps, as luxury goods, like the first-class bar in a 747...

...We try to accommodate ourselves to the supermarket model, where service personnel are reduced to a minimum...

...Some of these have single, some have multiple uses, but joined together they give to the space they enclose and create a vital and receptive quality...

...Open-mindedness implies a tolerance for diver473 sity, but in the past this has most commonly been a diversity of function and only within limits a diversity of people...

...We need to talk about this again, and though I have no special expertise, I will try to begin, drawing freely on the Goodmans and Jane Jacobs and also on more recent books by Richard Sennett and Marshall Berman—but on my own experience, too...

...the moral realization lies in self-understanding and meaningful relationships...

...space for peaceful coexistence and impersonal encounter...

...Liberalism breeds an expansive desire for comfort and closeness, useful commodities and loving persons, while an older republicanism, historically associated with open-minded space, provides us only with monuments and fellow citizens...

...Singleminded space, without value of its own, tends to run down...

...Certainly, Lincoln Center is very convenient for cultural commuters from New Jersey...

...It is space for politics, religion, commerce, sport...

...Jane Jacobs has described how a successful street is self-policing...

...How long has it been since Dissent carried an article on city planning...

...Without it, as the Goodmans say, "our city crowds are doomed to be lonely crowds, bored crowds, humanly uncultured crowds...

...Thinking about government centers, medical centers, and housing projects might have deepened our understanding of the welfare state and its discontents...

...the process is overdetermined...

...There is no substitute for the spontaneous social conflux whose atoms unite, precisely, as citizens of the city...

...But settings of this sort are most successful if they open out on alternative spaces or slowly come to accommodate alternative uses...

...All these belong, no doubt, to the urban mix, but if they are too prominent within it, ordinary men and women will flee as soon as they can into private and controlled worlds...

...But why should there be crowds at all...

...the green belt is single-minded, the city park or playground is open-minded...

...And, increasingly, when they do go out, they travel in their cars, small pieces of intimate space, hurtling along the singleminded highway...

...Affluence breeds a similar demand: how often can one redecorate the living room...

...But this can't be, and obviously isn't, the whole story...

...Socialist and republican politics alike require public spaces in which a common life can be enacted—and such spaces are available only in cities...

...one more often hurries to a movie and home again...

...Thinking about freeways, shopping malls, and suburban homes might have led us to anticipate Reaganite politics...

...All this is to be banished...

...But that reduction is deadly for open-minded space: one can't strike up a conversation at the check-out counter or "hang around" in a parking lot...

...Architects and planners write about singlepurpose and multi-purpose space, but I want to emphasize "mindedness...

...Correspondence and television courses provide no space at all...

...The material realization of well-being lies in the personal or domestic accumulation of goods...

...ultimately the space is taken over by those to whom society denies the comforts of intimacy, the vagabonds and homeless...

...The shopping center is a place to shop, nothing more, and its owners characteristically resist all attempts to use it in other ways...

...barriers of grass and concrete in betweeen...

...At home you can say to someone you love or hope to love: Sit down, sit down, and tell me everything, in the cafe we tell one another censored stories, artful stories...

...Market provision is also possible, as in the case of the cafe (though the cafe is dependent on the sidewalk) or the row of shops...

...The left had, or thought it had, more urgent issues...

...This can take the form of direct provision (squares, parks, sidewalks) or of maintenance and control...

...The buildings planned for the Center, he suggested, should be scattered across the city, strengthening its different parts...

...work here, homes there...

...In the square itself, people meet, walk, talk, buy and sell, argue about politics, eat lunch, sit over coffee, wait for something to happen...

...this is less obvious but the point is worth making: theatrical time and space, the intermission, the bar, the lobby, the theater "district" with its restaurants—all this encourages a longer and more varied "evening out" than going to the movies...

...We can take the contemporary shopping center, sitting on a highway outside the city, close to the suburbs, as the epitome of singlemindedness (the urban mall, when it is continuous with the surrounding streets, is less so: I will come back to this later...

...The ideal shopper doesn't take up parking space except when actually shopping...

...It would not be a great achievement to provide urbanity only as a luxury good, and chiefly for a homogeneous but transient population of upwardly mobile young professionals...

...it has no value in itself, and no one ever thought that it did (even the romance of the highway is largely the romance of the private car...

...Indeed, there are too many reasons...

...3) Shaped by culture and technology—here the car has been more important than the new communications media—the concepts that have guided city planning and urban redevelopment in the 20th century have been largely single-minded in tendency...

...Public space is degraded, first because it is taken to be merely instrumental, then because even the instrument is avoided by those who are able to do so...

...Otherwise, they need decentering, for the sake of diversity...

...An unsuccessful street, by contrast, always seems inadequately policed, dangerous, a place to avoid...

...They are different people, with different purposes, educated by the space they share to a civil deportment...

...But are there enough of the rest of us, living in more or less stable neighborhoods, eager for the pleasures and ready to pay the costs of urbanity...

...Cities, indeed, need centers, but only insofar as these accommodate diverse kinds of enterprises and activities...

...The same is true for parks, playgrounds, waiting rooms, lobbies...

...These people have to be paid out of tax money, and there is less and less willingness to pay enough of them...

...Buying is all...

...What isn't yet clear is the extent to which success, where it has occurred, depends upon exclusion, in this case by price (especially from the in-close housing that has sprung up around the new malls...

...That is just the point...

...IV An overabundance of reasons—cultural, technological, ideological, social, and economic —and all of them seem to point in the same direction: toward single-mindedness on the one hand and intimacy on the other...

...The two probably exist on a continuum, but for the sake of clarity I will draw the line sharply between them...

...Its character expresses and also conditions our public life, civic culture, everyday discourse...

...1) The first reason is cultural and has to do with the success (or perhaps the development beyond the point of success) of liberal individualism— which is not merely a creed but a state of mind, a certain characterological formation...

...And lots of people do come, creating, at least at certain fixed times, a nice liveliness...

...Curiously, the city figured more significantly in the social criticism of the 1950s and early '60s than in the activist politics that came later...

...we don't always feel capable of civility...

...Not single-minded, because it is designed to accommodate a variety of activities: cooking, eating, sleeping, loving, quarreling, talking, working, playing, raising children...

...Without regular and confident users, they become settings for social, sexual, and political deviance: derelicts, criminals, "hippies," political and religious sectarians, adolescent gangs...

...And not open-minded, because the actual encounters and activities that take place are tightly controlled by the small circle of participants...

...Ideally, the shopper is in and out, or wanders from store to store only in order to stimulate the urge to buy—and does buy in the end...

...Other examples: the fast-food restaurant is single-minded, the cafe or pub or cafeteria, where people are encouraged to linger, is openminded...

...And, what may be more important, they bring increasingly diverse kinds of people, from different classes and ethnic groups, into the same public space...

...At certain times in our lives, at certain times in everyday life, we are and have every right to be single-minded, and we require space that fits our mood or enterprise...

...it is hardly necessary to register the (alarming) fact that one is in Manhattan...

...We act differently in different sorts of space—in part, to be sure, because of what we are doing there, but also because of what others are doing, because of what it means to be "there," and because of the look and feel of the space itself...

...The highway—Le Corbusier's "machine for traffic"—is single-minded, the city street is open-minded...

...In fact, of course, they unite in all sorts of other ways, and for reasons that have nothing to do with citizenship —commerce, worship, pleasure, love...

...Home is and ought to be predictable...

...the airplane is single-minded, the long-distance train or ship is open-minded: one can write a novel about what happens on trains and ships, but not about what happens on planes...

...These days it competes less and less successfully...

...The forum and the piazza were places first of all for male citizens...

...In any case, success points strongly to the appeal of open-minded space, with its easy access to many different sorts of activity, the sense it conveys of things to do and time to waste, and the security generated by consistent use over the span of day and night...

...for cities are, like novels and movies, necessarily subject to lay criticism...

...Modernist architecture and planning," writes Marshall Berman in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, "created a modernized version of pastoral: a spatially and socially segmented world—people here, traffic there...

...Yet thinking about public space and its uses might have helped us, say, to think about racial integration...

...The reigning maxim is one site/one purpose: hence the "center" and the "project...

...I suppose there are counterarguments...

...Life at home requires, if only for contrast, an extramural life...

...When we enter this sort of 470 space, we are characteristically prepared to loiter...

...Public space is space we share with strangers, people who aren't our relatives, friends, or work associates...

...But open-minded space has in the past been a breeding ground for mutual respect, political solidarity, civil discourse, and it makes sense to suggest that without it all these will be put at risk...

...Under contemporary conditions, it appears that commerce favors single-mindedness, which is easier to invest in and capitalize on, and which represents a more profitable use of increasingly high-priced land...

...Nothing so simple: we need not be against airplanes or highways or even fast-food restaurants...

...Sometimes it requires planning—if only to undo the effects of previous plans...

...Alternative uses and possibilities are uneconomic, rather like political speeches in a shopping center (agitation is only appropriate at the government center where taxpayers foot the bill...

...It's a setting for reticence and wit, not for confession...