Freedom in cities

I will be discussing the question of the 'Identity of Cities' at an international conference in Moscow, on 29-31 October 2008. My provocation paper, on the question of freedom in cities, is below...

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For free cities

In the late nineteenth century, impressionist paintings captured the whirl of city life: the umbrellas jostling in a street; the crowds chattering and blurring into one another in a theatre or café. In these paintings, we see the allure of cities. Cities are social life concentrated. In the countryside, you can meet only a few people, and only in predictable combinations. In a city, you are free to associate with whomever you like, and the possibilities for new forms of collaboration are almost endless.

Social relationships in the city have a variety and energy that you do not see in other forms of community. There is a possibility to be surprised and educated by the people you will meet, and the things you will see. There is also freedom for the individual to experiment, to choose their own milieu, and to choose the friends and relationships that suit them.

European cities still have this allure, which is why people still move there in their millions - and why cities produce energetic artistic and urban cultural scenes. But there are problems too.

First, there is the question of whether cities are losing some of their soul. Many claim that Paris, New York, Berlin or London are not what they were: that there is no intellectual or political scene to rival the Parisian Left Bank or the London Bloomsbury group, and that Berlin is slowing down and losing its experimental edge. Are European cities now quieter, more conservative places? Have they lost some of their distinctiveness, their cultural and intellectual draw? Indeed, do they even have scenes in the way that Paris had a scene in the early twentieth century, or New York had a scene in the 1960s? Are people too concerned with commutes and office jobs: if so, does it matter?

Secondly, though, we can highlight a growing anti-urban attitude in social policy and political thought. In social policy and theory, now, there is a great deal of anxiety about city life. All the features of urban life that excited the impressionists – the freedom and variety of urban social relationships, the close proximity of millions of people - all these are now viewed as potentially risky and negative.

The presentation of the city is not as a place of freedom and variety, but as a place of pollution, crime, terrorism and racism. The dominant strain of policy thinking on cities is one of management: to manage the multiplicity of encounters between people, to rein in and control the way people use urban space. The result is that, although people still choose cities, social policy is unable to affirm or explain their choice. If you read the official documents, cities are dangerous, unhealthy places; you would be much better off living in a farmyard or a hut in the woods.

Community conflict

The multiplicity of social encounter in cities is seen as a cause for concern. All those different people from different cultures, living near one another, is seen as potentially explosive. Policy documents warn about the need to ‘manage community conflicts’, and councils organise multicultural art fairs to introduce the different communities to one another and encourage ‘dialogue’. When a new ethnic group arrives – as with Eastern Europeans with the expansion of the EU – everybody holds their breath, waiting for the explosion.

But the explosion never came. Eastern Europeans slipped seamlessly into London’s bars and building sites, with little event. This should be no surprise. Cities have always brought together strangers from very different cultures and backgrounds. As the sociologist Richard Sennett argues, it is in the countryside that people want to know who your father is and where you come from. Urban civility involves a distance, and treating everybody as equals: in the emerging coffee shops of modern cities, it became rude to inquire about somebody’s origins. You dealt with them squarely as a fellow citizen. Of course there are always conflicts, but cities are arguably the most tolerant places on earth.

The hyperregulation of public space

We are also seeing the growth of regulations in public space. The freedom and unpredictability of city life is seen as a source of risk, to be managed and closed down.

Free urban spaces are being strangled with a swathe of regulations and instructions, alerting you to the supposed dangers in your path, and telling you how you should behave. Safety signs are proliferating in parks and streets: these warn you to mind the gap, or please wash your hands, or to please use the escalators safely. The assumption is that the city is a risky terrain, to be navigated only with extreme caution.

The result is that you are chaperoned around the streets, following the safety cones here, and the warning sign there. The city is covered with instructions to alert you, and to instruct you how to proceed on your way. This new generation of safety signs are rarely an indication of real risks – and more part of a new regulatory dynamic, managing people’s movements through urban space.

We have also seen the growth of laws that prohibit particular activities in particular areas of the city. In London, for example, there are regulations saying that one may not demonstrate or take photographs near the houses of parliament. In Brighton, in the south of England, there are ‘leafleting zones’, where you cannot hand out leaflets unless they have been submitted for council approval. Across the UK, there are ‘no drinking zones’, where it is illegal to drink in public, or where police can confiscate your cans of beer. There are also ‘dispersal zones’, where police have powers to disperse groups of people.

Increasingly, urban space is defined from above, based on what you may not do in that space. This growing regulation limits people’s ability to set their own rules, to use space creatively and in unusual combinations.

The spectre of terror and crime

Finally, there is an anti-urban policy thinking focused on terrorism and crime. Cities are now indissolubly linked to terrorism. Cities are both places that breed terrorists (key terrorists were bred not in Afghan mountains, but in European cities); and cities are also places that invite terrorism. The existence of millions of people, tied together through complex infrastructures, is seen as in itself a terror risk. After the terror attacks of 9/11, some commentators argued that it was the architecture of the modern city that made us vulnerable to terrorism.

As a result, anti-terrorist measures are being stamped into the urban architecture and urban experience. In London’s British Library readers’ bags are searched at the entrance, due to what they call ‘ongoing security concerns’. The House of Commons in Westminster is protected with concrete blocks, apparently designed to prevent terrorists from crashing an explosive-laden van into its side. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted how more urban architecture is starting to resemble a fortress, with buildings putting up defences against their surroundings.

This securitisation of city life goes back a long way, with the 1980s fear of crime, and isolation of richer communities from poor. As Mike Davis observed in City of Quartz, his 1990 book about Los Angeles: ‘The carefully manicured lawns of Los Angeles's Westside sprout forests of ominous little signs warning: "Armed Response!" Even richer neighborhoods in the canyons and hillsides isolated themselves behind walls guarded by gun-toting private police and state-of-the-art electronic surveillance. Downtown, a publicly-subsidized "urban renaissance" has raised the nation's largest corporate citadel, segregated from the poor neighborhoods around it by a monumental architectural glacis...’.

It is not just in terms of architecture that cities start to resemble fortresses. There are now closed circuit TV (CCTV) cameras on many street corners, and private security guards from clubs, offices and shops dominate the streets outside their patch. The model for your fellow urban citizen is becoming the criminal, the terrorist - the sinister infiltrator of urban space. Who is behind you?; who is looking at your bag?

New urban cultural movements

The result of these new policy measures is to deaden the freedom of urban space – and to introduce more of an element of fear, and of restraint, into city life. But perhaps we are also starting to see a reaction to this, in a new wave of urban cultural movements.

In the past few years there has been a growth of curious new urban practices. These include: flash mobs (where strangers meet at a specified place and time, and perform a random bizarre activity); book crossing (where people leave their favourite books in railway stations or park benches); guerrilla gardeners (who plant plants in spare bits of city soil). Then there is parkour: the French-grown hobby where people climb and leap over urban architecture, breaking all the rules about how you should move around the space, using walls and railings freely according to individual imagination and creativity.

These new urban cultural movements may be a bit odd. But they notably celebrate the urban experience: they celebrate random interactions between strangers; they celebrate the fact that different people can be brought together in streets, for a variety of ends; they celebrate the freedom and possibility of using urban space in ways of your own choosing. These movements suggest that there is still an appetite for the whirl of city life.

Rejuvenating the city

Of course, there is urban crime, racism, terrorism, and community conflict – and officials need to manage and deal with such problems. However, we should also not forget to affirm the good parts of city life. There is a popular appetite for the freedom and possibilities of urban existence.

Cities offer ample opportunity for collaboration and experimentation, and for people from different backgrounds to work together for new ends. It would be good if social policy could cut back on hypermanagement of public space – and give cities some more space to come to life.