THE FALL AND RISE OF PUBLIC SPACE

...But it may be easier to represent social purposes in spatial terms where there are social and not merely aggregated individual purposes in question...

...And there is an apparent infinity of space and resources...

...On the other hand, if they built separate houses and gardens, they risked a repetitive and uniform scaling-down of more generous prototypes of private space...

...The Precapitalist Origins of Public Space IT WAS LEWIS MUMFORD, in The City in History, who pointed out that most of the memorable features of the city are precapitalist in their origin...

...While one cannot hold out much hope for trade unionism in more dispersed workplaces, one can see the basis for a community politics, in which full employment, good social services, and the use of the community's resources for social as well as private purposes would be objectives held in common...

...The car now seems to be winning its battle to destroy the city as a form of life...

...The renewal of municipal socialism in Britain may mean that this now has some political reflection...

...Most people cannot live in Manhattan or its like, or even visit it very often, and the undue adulation of the marvels of such centers is a symptom of an unduly stratified, mercenary, and centralized cultural marketplace...

...The "precinct-planning" that Jacobs attacks has produced squares and vistas as well as bureaucratic monoliths...

...This sketch is drawn mainly from a particular English experience...

...Some Virtues of Single-Mindedness MICHAEL WALZER'S ADVOCACY of "open-mindedness" is appealing—the motorway cafe and the airport lounge are few people's favorite places...

...In some public housing projects, such as England's Alton Estate at Roehampton, with a variety of building types and a beautiful parkland site, architectural success was achieved...

...The garden-city ideal has been patronized by urbanists such as Jane Jacobs: "His [Ebenezer Howard's] aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own...

...The application of profitmaking criteria to building produced the overcrowding and lack of amenities of 19th-century cities...

...These unified forms of design, even of quite small buildings where attractiveness lies in the whole ensemble, retain an aura that is out of the ordinary and continue to draw tourists from near and far...

...If we like cities, market exchange has its indispensable place in them, and to this extent Jacobs's (over)reaction to planning has had a good influence...

...Some Hopeful Prospects RECENT DEVELOPMENTS in the use of public space in Britain suggest the continuing vitality of social values and the power of a precapitalist heritage to shape contemporary self-definitions...

...The precondition for these identifiable traditions and languages of public building seems to be the existence of coherent social groups that share some common culture and wish to see their social identity reflected in their physical environment...

...By definition, access to it is defined by the exclusion of others...

...Britain enjoys a much higher standard of housing than its per capita income would lead one to expect...

...Sometimes the resulting styles seemed to speak more of masses than of people...

...486 In practice, the everyday experience of many capitalist cities is given a more dense and meaningful social texture than this, in at least two ways...

...Specific occupational traditions—for example in marine building, in the design of mills of various kinds during the earlier years of the industrial revolution, or in the architecture of canal- and railway-building—have also developed distinctive styles, perhaps because their long-lasting and more guildlike qualities gave rise to a sense of tradition and appropriate form...

...The yachting marina, the local airport from which individuals can fly small planes, or the bowling alley are places for weekend activities that generate particular social communities...

...But the dominant trend of thinking is now toward identifying strong focuses for development (which can also attract industry, commerce, higher rent levels, and so on) rather than merely indiscriminate rebuilding...

...We should favor a 493 culture as well as a politics of decentralization, and have some confidence that ordinary-sized towns need not be places where one would only live if one had "no plans of one's own...

...It is most unlikely that such a diversity of services could ever be provided by municipal or state trading companies, however enlightened...

...More generally, today's property owners devote their main aesthetic efforts to internal design and to the outward appearance of their own properties, not to shared spaces, and they do so with a view to resale value...

...When the designers of public housing after World War II attempted to find a social and public rhetoric for it, they often sacrificed the individuality and diversity that people wanted from their dwellings...

...Raymond Williams's The Country and the City described this evolving reaction to the modern city in literature...

...The towns of 50,000 to 500,000 citizens—not the isolated homestead or the village or the metropolis—seem the most promising building blocks for this...

...We should respect the intentions and achievements of this first generation of socialist urban planners, constrained as they unavoidably were by the practical limits of welfare reform...

...The point of all these institutions is that they embody and derive from an idea of social values, connected with status and its display, or with sacred values held in common by corporate bodies, and not merely from concepts of personal or familial self-cultivation...

...Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities is essentially a polemic on behalf of the artisanal and petty-capitalist users of city space, against the power of big corporations and government planners who imposed monolithic, one-dimensional patterns of land use on the city...

...The art market, or the celebrity of stars, or even the high visibility of elite intellectual or academic coteries express versions of capitalist competitiveness that a more egalitarian society would mitigate through a richer particularism and sense of place...

...there is less of a precapitalist heritage...

...My argument attaches more importance to the existence of social space than to whether it is open-minded or not, though, to be sure, too much single-mindedness destroys any sense of sociability...

...The buildings in which many of these activities take place are also designed to celebrate corporate values...

...The large-scale development of public housing in Britain also gave rise to a domestication of modern architecture and compromise with vernacular house-and-garden styles, as well as some of the excesses of towerblock development...

...Together with the buildings that fill them they serve to encode public values of some kind, and to engender feelings of awe, admiration, or merely enjoyment (of a panorama, visual diversity, architectural form...

...The medieval squares and market buildings in many European towns are the creation of corporate institutions and trading or manufacturing guilds, not of individualist capitalism...

...These focused on material conditions—what we now describe as social welfare—and also on the possibilities of making commodities then largely confined to the middle class more widely available...

...The rejection of tradition thus conjoined with more democratic purposes for architecture...

...This has provided some good "open-minded space" (in market squares, town parks, and on riversides, for example), and has met some of the objectives of diversity and density of use...

...Who owns the land, and who has a say in how it is to be disposed, is the crucial question in regard to urban development and planning...

...Nor does the absence of such interventions now usually produce good inner-city environments in the U.S...

...But a pluralist culture will have to provide access to basic goods and opportunities for all, if its competitions and conflicts are to be tolerable...

...These developments seem to increase the availability and quality of public space and also, in many cases, its "open-mindedness...

...Understanding the possible benefits of differentiation may enable us to develop a more inclusive pluralism, as a response to the pressures of "inundation" that Walzer describes...

...Rather than politics leading to an improvement in our public space, it may be that improvement in our public space itself points the way to a possible improvement in our politics...

...The migration to modest-sized towns, closer to the countryside, often with lively schools and other public amenities (the communal sports center has been a thriving area of new municipal enterprise in Britain) may be the reflection of a widespread popular wish to live in a knowable community—a less materialist vision than the reigning ideology of mass consumption and competition might suggest...

...But one should recall that most of the factors Walzer cites—communications technologies, the ideology of individualism, the factor of profit, and the forces of social inundation— have been effecting change in urban forms for nearly two centuries...

...Functionalism in building and design was an attempt to apply the potential of science and technology to everyday needs, standardized and measured in order to achieve the benefits of large-scale production...

...It produced a culture of privacy, of interior personal space and, in one limited social extension of an otherwise individualistic conception, of familial domesticity...

...For the peasantry and the working class, for the most part, the distinction was absent for a different reason, since physical labor until modern times swallowed up nearly all of their time and space...

...Some precapitalist communities had this capability...

...The Bauhaus in the Weimar Republic was the most influential proponent of this new approach, and comparable approaches became part of the aesthetic orthodoxy of social democracy...

...What we need are multiple hierarchies, not "single-minded" ones, and these can only be sustained by local and regional diversity...

...But even here we should note that the impulse to "build in style" transcends merely financial motivations, and arises from the desire to establish a corporation's status rather than merely profit...

...Dickens's achievement stands out as a last brilliant attempt to display all the comings and goings of the modern city in terms of intelligible social meanings...

...If major groups are excluded from the sphere of common values and goods, then the peace and stability of the whole system will ultimately be threatened...

...Buildings are an important part of the public world...

...The "atriums" of some new Manhattan skyscrapers (often built partly in response to the pressures of city planners) are places that people seem to find interesting, both in themselves and for the opportunity they provide to be with other people...

...Clearly, there are disastrous urban-renewal schemes that this correctly characterizes...

...To most reformers of the latter part of the 19th century and the early part of this one, the city was the social problem, offering neither comfort nor health, nor sufficient private or public space to any but a tiny minority...

...This plan was designed to allow the parcelization of blocks among separate owners and developers...

...The modern movement confronted a contrast between great technological and material potential and the reality of urban squalor...

...It found expression in the Protestant conception of the unmediated relation between the individual believer and God...

...One cannot discount the huge improvements in housing standards brought about by government regulation, public home-building programs, tax subsidies to owner-occupiers, and rising standards of living...

...It allowed for infinite flexibility and change but also precluded the larger differentiations and scale of design that characterize most memorable cities...

...Alan Colquohoun has pointed out (in his Essays in Architectural Criticism) that houses were often, in ancient cities, merely the areas in between the interesting public buildings, just as private life was the space not taken up by a more important public life...

...An important prerequisite is a greater differentiation of this urban space, in place of the featureless, mixed-use urban and industrial sprawl that still characterizes much of it...

...Walzer's sketch of the process of destruction of open-minded public space relates mostly to the recent development of cities, and we might be inclined to conclude from it that within living memory such welcoming public space was part of the experience of most citizens...

...Perhaps an artisan tradition has also been indirectly influential in engineering and industrial design, as individuals from working-class origins have moved into positions where they could shape the productive process...

...developed mainly under private auspices, not through the agency of the state or municipality...

...In England, a powerful memory of preindustrial rural and small-town culture and a "preindustrial" commitment to the idea of an integrated community produced the distinctive planners' utopia of the garden city, and its later derivatives in the postwar "new and expanded town" schemes...

...The Green Belt concept has been one means of inducing this change of strategy...

...Otherwise the market, with its speculation in scarce commodities, turns "culture" into a "positional good...

...The point is that we should not discount the attempts of individualism's radical opponents to give an alternative meaning to the physical environment, offering another valuable heritage...

...The utilitarian purposes of public housing, and the application of modern techniques of manufacture to household objects, naturally became the central concerns of progressiveminded designers...

...Powerful social institutions were the precondition for this generous and elaborately articulated public space...

...Many of the best settings for market exchange, however, have required governmental action to make the space available...

...Some people choose to go to seminars or even to political meetings for their main delight, and presumably value the fairly singleminded purposes that they pursue there...

...so have some modern communities, through their public authorities...

...The influence of large landowners and of urban guilds in some small towns or larger villages was also important in imposing this more social or conventional use of space...

...Life in the country house and at court consisted of activities devoted to social display and "conspicuous consumption," the pursuit of games and pastimes initially related to training for war and subsequently merely mimicking it, and to courtship and the pursuit of interfamilial alliances through marriage...

...The architecture of churches and monasteries is also the creation of corporate institutions...

...The gridiron pattern provided the most minimal public framework of access, transit, and common services, and allowed the market to be the main regulator of land use...

...Certainly it seems reasonable to suggest, as Walzer does, that members of an affluent society will sooner or later ask themselves, How can we do something for our place, instead of for my place...

...Just as "open-minded space" depends on a shared social identity and the political powers that can give it expression, so a shared cultural space requires communal identities to nurture it...

...Another example of the occasionally more social character of bourgeois urban design is the New England town, where a sense of religious and political community (expressed in the central importance of churches and public buildings) gave a unity to urban forms that later capitalist developments in America mostly did not retain...

...The basic census indices of density of occupation (rooms per person) and provision of major amenities (bathrooms, hot water, and so on) show the success of housing policies...

...so do some private or semiprivate institutions, such as universities and even some enlightened corporations...

...This relatively hopeful perspective on public space and its political significance is based chiefly on English experience, and one can well see that the view from New Jersey might currently appear more as Michael Walzer describes it...

...space of individualism, where nothing is held or known in common and where, therefore, there is little scope for interaction or meaning...

...In the U.S.A...

...The many deliberate decisions by public and private agencies to preserve and adapt the old structures of Britain's cities and villages seem to reflect such understanding...

...The distinction between space and time for work and for leisure was developed by the bourgeoisie, not the aristocracy, since the former lived characteristically by disciplined work and the latter on rents...

...There is the risk in Walzer's concept of "open-mindedness" of a celebration of the impersonal stripped-down quality of the public...

...It also makes use of old town centers and their more varied building stock, with all their advantages: a range of rent levels, flexibility of land use, and diversity of atmosphere...

...They are more than empty spaces for private activity (though they are this, too...

...This emphasis on the sphere of circulation and distribution is far from what such artsandcrafts socialists as Morris had in mind when they envisaged socialism above all as the transformation of production and work...

...The vision of what to do with the resources of affluence is still widely lacking...

...It is contrary to observation to think that people usually seek to avoid crowds...

...q 494...

...Traditionalist idioms in architecture, through the Beaux Arts movement, were also often deployed in grandiose and pretentious ways to decorate the facades of capitalist society, while doing nothing for its real material problems...

...The specialization of shops, cafés, places of entertainment, and distinctive "quarters" is a consequence of the private development of urban space, available to those who can pay for it, and to a lesser extent to the window-gazers who enjoy by watching...

...But while many of their visible institutions have been political in nature, there is also a domain of popular working-class culture, often developed in interaction with the market economy, which has evolved particular and traditional styles of dress, interior furnishings, entertainments, and their accompanying cultures of physical space...

...A sure way of finding the kinds of public spaces from which people gain pleasure is to see where they most like to go...

...Such spaces are usually the most strongly emphasized in every city (in their scale, vista, and prominence) and provide the most frequented visiting sites for tourists...

...The development of bourgeois culture involved a shift toward private space, in the basic functions of meals (the private dining room instead of the hall), movement (the private coach instead of the equestrian cavalcade), and business (the private office instead of the public supplication...

...This also leads to a focus on individuals as opposed to corporate communities...

...Mumford suggests that the aristocratic and courtly ideals of gracious hospitality and physical and mental cultivation became transmuted into the commercial hospitality of grand hotels, where access to a high style of entertainment is available for money instead of by invitation...

...From Public to Private Space CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT depended upon an ideology of individualism...

...But for this to happen, we need a richer discussion of places and their possibilities...

...I shall argue, first, that our most influential conceptions of social space, still preserved in buildings and city plans, are precapitalist in origin...

...Where "public space" formerly had been a social space, belonging to collectivities of various kinds and representing in physical terms distinctive values and identities, it became reduced under capitalism to a nonspace, a mere thoroughfare through which individuals moved in pursuit of their private purposes...

...Bird sanctuaries are fairly specialized sorts of places, at least for their human visitors (perhaps the attraction is the openminded space accorded to the birds), but their creation, and that of fishing areas, mountain trails, and coastal paths, is surely to be welcomed...

...Working-class communities usually have had less opportunity to give physical or architectural expression to their collective differences with capitalism, for obvious material reasons...

...It seems that the public enjoyment of buildings today to a great extent depends on the preservation and rehabilitation of the surviving artifacts of a more social and less purely individualistic culture...

...Modern architecture in the U.S...

...Against this expanded definition of private interest, the concept of the public sphere diminished into the idea of a merely lawful polity regulating the interactions of possessive individuals...

...The life of the aristocracy and the absolutist courts was, as Norbert Elias has pointed out in The Civilizing Process, characteristically lived in public...

...Improvements in transportation led to the cities' expansion, and to the process of suburbanization as it became possible to seek solitude and proximity to the countryside while retaining access to the city for daily work...

...The chaos of sensations, described in Georg Simmel's essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, to which the "blase attitude" of indifference (coolness, we now say) is the city-dweller's selfprotective response, erodes the sense of being in a social relationship to others...

...One has to think of the environment of the whole metropolis, not merely of its most dynamic and cosmopolitan central quarters, in deciding one's attitude to the city...

...The preindustrial village also seems sometimes to have given rise to a sociable form of building and design, around a square, green, or village street...

...The development of city and country parks, the provision of public access to and the protection of parts of the coastline, a small number of planned urban developments, and the regional planning of the Tennessee Valley Authority are perhaps the most important outcomes in a setting much more dominated than in Europe by business priorities...

...This pattern has facilitated the development of houses and workplaces within the same towns (though usually separately zoned), and has reduced the necessity for lengthy commuting journeys...

...Historically, cities of 100,000 people seem to have sustained rich cultures, whose leading practitioners have been able to interact with people from other cities without losing their sense of local identity...

...There have been periods when the urban bourgeoisie was sufficiently committed to its collective self-assertion as a class, against rival aristocratic or monarchical regimes, to be capable of a similarly unified demarcation of 488 public space...

...Such buildings existed as public resources of the community and as its symbolic representations...

...They are precapitalist in spirit...

...commodities are what they buy in the shops with their income from labor...

...Nor is this in England merely a process of creeping suburbanization, repeating the earlier growth of London and other large cities...

...Houses and apartments are where people live when they are not working...

...There were problems in making a beautiful and expressive environment out of an over490 whelming priority for functional housing...

...In smaller towns it seems possible to achieve this without the corresponding big-city penumbra of huge surrounding slums, urban blight, and sprawling suburbs, which have been too large a price to pay for a lively downtown...

...Kevin Lynch—in his The Image of the City and What Time Is This Place?-describes the human need for spatial orientation, for a sense of physical location, so that our surroundings mark some relationship with our own past and that of our community...

...This was articulated in a theory of economic man, in which individuals served the common good merely by the pursuit of their own interests...

...As a place to have a grown-up dinner, 492 McDonald's leaves something to be desired, but for a children's supper it seems to be seen even by the most sophisticated children as perfection...

...We should remember that much of the life of modern cities depends on the vitality of this sector of small trading...

...No one expected to sell a medieval church or a market hall...

...The pedestrianized town square, the thriving street market, and the cleaned-up river with its fishing people, which all result partly from public decision, may show us that a sense of community is already here, if we know how to recognize and speak to it...

...they impose a preference for single-use and functionally specialized space over the more mixed and open forms that (sometimes) previously existed...

...The processes of "urban succession" took place as individuals of different ethnic and occupational groups sought to improve their location, and new entrants replaced them in disadvantaged areas...

...I will here suggest that qualitative and aesthetic issues like this one may have an exemplary relevance for politics in late-capitalist societies, and may help us to revitalize the agenda of the left...

...In the United States, the ideology of town planning had some comparable successes through the progressive movement and later the New Deal...

...The dignified character of such "public buildings," following various classical traditions of design, is of a piece with their social character...

...But it also goes somewhat against the grain of one irresistible and even benign 20thcentury development—increasing diversity of life-style...

...It is this destruction of the quality of "public space" in the capitalist city, and its chronic overcrowding, squalor, and pollution that gave rise to the antiurbanism of many modern planners...

...People's identity and sense of the world is expressed and reflected in the buildings they know, just as it is by their language or clothes...

...Perhaps in other societies, with more revolutionary traditions, such as France, the spatial meaning of the major landmarks of the capital city is somewhat more politicized...

...Michel Foucault has written about the development of the modern asylum, prison, and hospital as the individualization and segregation of formerly social spheres, seeing this as part of capitalist rationalization...

...Perhaps this difference in perspective derives from my own primary location in England, and more broadly in Europe, where precapitalist architectural and spatial forms have retained a more pervasive role...

...Both presuppose a capitalist—or planned capitalist— productive system, in the same way as did the other major institutions of the welfare state...

...In some instances an intervening form of restricted "public life"—that of the regiment or the "public school" (the British adjective is interesting from this point of view) —is the seedbed for the development of modern forms of public culture, as, for instance, character-building sports and the gentleman's club...

...Parks, gateways, embankments, town squares, streets designed for ceremonial purposes rather than merely for transit, cathedrals and other religious buildings, market halls, museums, monuments, art centers have this "public" character...

...In contrast to the capitalist pattern of fully alienable land, both precapitalist and later social democratic forms of ownership have sought to exercise greater constraint on what could be built where, with 489 varying results...

...The internal facilities of London's South Bank arts complex, for example, do not compensate for its windy open spaces and lack of cafés and shops outside...

...To this idea of social coherence, boundary, and meaning the spirit of capitalism has been generally antithetical...

...A limited variety of building types and sizes on the basis of a common vernacular style has given rise to many settlements that are both harmonious and diverse...

...each piece of land was conceived as a separate entity to be developed independently of every other...

...Formal parks, originally developed as extensions of palaces and great country houses, became democratized as green spaces of cities...

...Some limited steps have been taken in a similar direction within the older industrial areas of many British cities, though these are now overshadowed by high levels of industrial dereliction, unemployment, and poverty...

...But modernist architectural and planning theory needs to be characterized in a longer historical perspective, so that we can understand the present situation and its possibilities...

...Public time and space, for the lower classes, seems to have been lived in the outdoors, on holidays and festivals...

...We should want public spaces that make all these things possible, but they can't always be all that open-minded, without threatening their purpose...

...The evidence is certainly that such communities have been freely chosen...

...It was impossible to build on the necessary huge scale and within the severe cost constraints with always admirable aesthetic results...

...I want to situate our understanding of space and its uses in a longer historical perspective, and to examine the antagonism that has long existed between capitalism and the whole idea of public or, as I prefer to say, social space...

...Given a commitment to basic equality of citizenship, and to the strengthening of territorial units that can contain individuals in some meaningful community, other differences of life-style may become less frightening...

...By his emphasis on the variety of human uses of "open-minded public space," rather than on the representation of public meanings in architectural form, Walzer leaves out an important dimension of such places...

...Nor need they always be public...

...The lower land values in smalltown developments, compared with those in the centers of cities, and the greater fiscal resources of expanding towns, which lack the social burdens of older areas, may have given public authorities a stronger hand in these developments...

...Like other elaborated uses of land for expressive purposes, it required some form of corporate or social land ownership, in which maximizing returns is not the only criterion for deciding land use...

...But the communities, social networks, and cultures that might support a renaissance of social space and its design are hardly in common supply...

...second, that the partial failure of the "modern movement" and of the radical utopian ideas associated with it is due to the extent to which socialist alternatives to the 19thcentury industrial city were unavoidably conceived of as compromises with or ameliorations of capitalism, and not as an alternative to it...

...The epoch of monarchical absolutism has also had a powerful influence on our conception of modern cities, in its surviving buildings and city plans, and in the transmutation of its types of display and monumentality into more republican and democratic ceremonial forms...

...The development of many fine private houses designed by leading architects has been another principal channel of modernism in the United States, appropriately theorized by Frank Lloyd Wright in his anti-urban advocacy of the free-standing individual homestead...

...In London several of them are still called Royal Parks...

...The texturing of social space requires collectivities capable of public preference and selfexpression...

...Inferiors, who were often present though disregarded in aristocratic households, became excluded from the everyday life of the bourgeoisie...

...A Defense of Urban Planning WALZER CITES THE ATTITUDES Of planners as part of the contemporary problem...

...It has become fashionable to blame "planners" for the continuing problems of slum estates and unsuitable apartment blocks, while forgetting that it was the consequences of the market that 491 made these planned interventions necessary in the first place...

...The development of old towns enables some of the benefits of the precapitalist urban environment to be combined with more modern amenities and scale...

...Capitalism has produced its modernist monument in the Manhattan skyline, appropriately the product of an aggregation of many separate corporate decisions rather than of a coordinated plan...

...It is important to note that many of the better, recent developments in the life of British and American cities—the renewal of old market, warehouse, and other varied-use areas, for example—have only been possible because of the significant role given to small traders and entrepreneurs...

...The growth of tourism, both local and distant, has reflected and amplified this increased use of "old space...

...The self-assertion of Victorian municipalities, with their public squares and town halls, and the creation of London's residential squares are examples...

...and third, that the spatial forms of late- or perhaps postcapitalism show a more promising evolution than Walzer suggests...

...If we assess the pattern of urban development over a relatively long-range period, it seems to me that in Britain anyway recent developments, in the main, have been beneficial...

...Other kinds of cultivation—the private library, the concert, for example—also became democratized and available either by sale or right of local citizenship...

...The Metropolis Isn't Everything WE SHOULD EXPECT MORE of small- and mediumsized towns, and not merely compare them disparagingly with the greater cosmopolitan excitements of Manhattan and similar metropolises...

...Capitalist Conceptions of Space I WANT TO SUGGEST THAT CAPITALISM PROMOTES a view of space as an alienable and private commodity...

...The agendas of pressing concerns for architects and planners were understandably related to those of the mass movements and organizations on which progressive hopes were based...

...Architecture provides a crucial framing for such public places and is often one of the main attractions in them...

...The places tourists like to go are another index, tourists being ourselves as well as other people...

...Perhaps the most consistently capitalist urban pattern is the gridiron street plan common in American cities (which, of course, mostly lack a precapitalist history...

...Functions that were formerly undertaken in public become individualized and segregated...

...Both arise from a culture of winners and losers...

...One is through the more benign operations of the market, which is after all supposed to encourage diversity...

...The more radical solution to the problem of a selfdefeating leapfrog into a suburbanized countryside has been the development of free-standing towns, derived in part from the garden-city and new-town concepts, but in most cases built around preexisting urban centers...

...The growing specialization of holiday resorts and amenities, with the development of activity holidays, educational holidays (with participants housed in college dormitories), music and poetry festivals, camping sites, archaeological excavations, canal restoration, and so on, enlarge the available modes for exploring oneself and one's surroundings...

...Public sporting events, such as the hunt, the horse show and the race meeting, evolved from their country-house origins, retaining in each case a pronounced aristocratic flavor...

...The shift away from "comprehensive development" to a philosophy of rehabilitation and piecemeal renewal has been important in improving the urban environment...

...We need only compare the semipublic world of the Marshalsea, a debtors' prison, in Dickens's Little Dorrit with the modern prison cell block to see what this means...

...Baroque squares, monumental palaces and facades, planned vistas, ceremonial streets have 487 been transposed from the absolutist era of prerevolutionary France and imperial Vienna to a later bourgeois period in Europe, and to the monumental republicanism of Washington, D.C...

...The multiplication of suburban housing tracts and small-town communities is not much to the taste of cosmopolitan urbanists, but as Herbert Gans pointed out in Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life, such communities seem well suited to people at certain stages of their lives (notably families with children at home) and meet the aspirations typical of many low- and middle-income families...

...One attraction of the shopping mall—however functional and one-dimensional its purpose and however excessive the role of shopping in capitalist societies—is that it provides a sense of place, as well as a convenient solution to the problem of parking the car...

...The larger cities' reduced density of population does, however, make it more feasible to develop some of their unused resources—disused docks, canals, old industrial buildings, attractive terrace housing, residential squares—and this has been happening on some scale...

...But in fact the garden city came nearer to a workable conception of an alternative working and living environment than any other utopian scheme of the present day, and was unusual in thinking beyond the idea of the housing project to the scale of a whole community...

...The view from Greenwich Village or areas like it is a somewhat privileged and special one...

...Yet the sense of community and locality has resonance here, too, and the attempts that are being made to restore old city centers will be emulated elsewhere...

...We can now see these developments as aspects of the amelioration and humanization of capitalism, rather than its transcendence...

...Most cities have some authentically "public" space—more than the areas in-between private uses of various kinds...

...Perhaps the tropism that draws the best toward the bright lights is the obverse of the flight from social inundation by "failures," which Walzer describes as part of the current pathology of the city...

...The celebration of domesticity, with the sexual division of roles that followed from it, is another aspect of the growth of private rather than public space...

...The enclosed university, in its characteristic English forms and in its later development into the more open campus, is a derivative of monastic ideals and similarly depends on social conceptions of architecture and space...

...These developments also indicate a new determination to limit the damage the car can do to our way of life, while not neglecting its convenience...