The author Megan McAfferty once said:
‘New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous.’
That could have been said of any city.
Our literature suggests that urban life is grubby or abject in some way. Blake famously wrote of industry corrupting the earth. The grime and menace of Dickens’ London in Oliver Twist is recalled by photographs of the slums that ooze from Sao Paolo, Mumbai or some nameless Chinese metropolis. The Waste Land tells of comfortable people commanded by the ‘dead sound on the final stroke of nine’, captives of unreal cities. Those who could afford it fled to the suburbs and their doings, and more particularly their hypocrisy, were subjects for writers such as Updike and Ayckbourn.
But cities are being reappraised. Some time ago, Germaine Greer criticised the British ‘obsession with their houses’. The proud urbanite denounced suburbia as an environmental catastrophe, where cars are the most visible form of a needless and endless consumption. The identikit houses, the Englishman’s Castle, are eyesores that are expensive to heat and need constant attention. What, Greer asked in that insistent tone of hers, was wrong with an elegant, well insulated and spacious flat on the 90th floor of an apartment block?
Greer is gaining support. In the latest issue of the Literary Review, Bryan Appleyard reviews a book, Triumph Of The City, by Edward L. Glaeser, a Harvard economist with what sounds like a flair for prose. Glaeser argues that the future lies in cities that are Green and productive, an accompaniment for country that is green and pleasant. Suburbia should be right out or reclaimed. Appleyard writes:
‘In America, it is the suburbs that have proved to be the real disaster. Glaeser is repentant on this subject himself. He moved to the suburbs when he had children. His entirely legitimate excuse is that the government made him (and millions like him) do it. By undertaxing petrol, subsidising mortgages and imposing tight planning restrictions on inner cities that drove up prices, it made flight to the ‘burbs more or less inevitable for the middle classes.
This is a disaster because nothing is more inefficient than a ‘burb. Suburbs wreck the countryside and consume far more of everything than cities. Houses are costlier to heat and cool than flats, and suburbanites drive thousands more miles per year than city dwellers. Moreover, suburbanites mingle less and lose the face-to-face contact that makes being an urbanite so much more creative.
This leads to the strongest and newest argument in favour of cities – they are good for the environment. This overturns the conventional wisdom learned from Thoreau and the Romantics because humans being close to nature is bad for nature. To live in the country or the suburbs is to have a vastly larger carbon footprint than any urbanite. Every aspect of your life will involve more consumption.
Glaeser illustrates the conflict between pastoral environmentalists and the new urban greens with an account of the contrast between Prince Charles and Ken Livingstone. The Prince dreams of the simple life in which people live in villages of stone cottages, eat organic food and knit their own cardigans. Unfortunately, they also drive miles to supermarkets and commute to the cities while burning heating oil, one of the most carbon-releasing fuels. Red Ken, in contrast, favoured high-rise buildings, congestion charging and a general commitment to the delights and efficiencies of urban density. Ken gets Glaeser’s vote.’
Population trends and economic development have always influenced novels, and it will be interesting to see what is produced if the city reclaims the suburbs. A sense of belonging or identity perhaps? To complete Megan McAfferty’s quote:
“But there is one thing about it – once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.”
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