In Our Time - The City in the 20th Century

Episode Date: November 12, 1998

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the artistic, cultural and innovative developments of the city in the 20th century and is joined by two practitioners of the geographer’s art; Professor Doreen Massey, who was awarded the Vautrin Lud International Geography prize - the geographer’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and Sir Peter Hall, whose books include The World Cities and Cities Tomorrow. They take a twentieth century perspective on the development of the city. How have cities changed since 1900, and what is their future? How has the 20th century been the century of the city?With Sir Peter Hall, Professor of Planning at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College, London, Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Academia Europea; Doreen Massey, Professor of Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University and recipient of the Vautrin Lud International Geography Prize and the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, this week we take a 20th century perspective on the development of cities and all that they represent in our culture. This week's also Architecture Week, according to the RIBA and the Arts Council,

so we tip our hat to that as well. I'm joined by Sir Peter Hall, Professor of Planning at the Bar School of Architecture and Planning, University of Orange, London. He's the author of editor of nearly 30 books, including The World Cities and Cities Tomorrow. His book, Cities in Civilisation, is published this week. Doreen Massey has been Professor of Geography at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University since 1982. In 1994, she was awarded the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society,

and last month, the Votra Ludd International Geography Prize, often described as the Geographer's equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Peter Hall, you write about creativity in cities. Now, can you first of all define what you mean by that? Well, anything that produces something interesting and new, it could be art, it could be philosophy, but it can also be technology that leads to the creation of new industries. It can also be the kind of creativity that solves problems in cities

from something as mundane as fixing a water supply or building sewers to building metro underground systems. and more generally developing new systems of social welfare. All these I count as creative in one way or another, and all of them tend to have happened, especially in cities. You've written a book of almost 1,200 pages proving this point, so it seems rather mean-minded to quibble at the outset, but let's get my quibble over with.

Is it only cities? You seem to imply that only in cities can cultural flowering and real intense cultural development take place, and yet one of the biggest movements, The romantic movement began about 200 years ago outside cities, determinedly not in cities, in the countryside, in nature, whether it was painters, writers, poets, philosophers and so on. Absolutely true. I mean, cities have no monopoly on creativity.

Creative people bubble up anywhere, and they can bubble up in the countryside, and indeed some of them can migrate to the countryside. But I suspect that fewer of them would have been creative for long if they hadn't come back into cities. I'm always rather amused at a place I used to live Bedford Park in London where there's a plaque up, a blue plaque to WB. Yeats. Now, he, I think, must have written the Lake Islandis Free and quite a lot of his other early poems there, doubtless recollecting on moments he'd spent in Ireland.

But his real creative work was done in London as part of a circle of similar creative people. Okay, let's try to get a grip on this city. What is it about a city which causes this... creative art burst to happen? Is it just that lots of people get to know each other? It's just that there's a bit of money around? Is there anything that defines it, and particularly now in the

20th century? Because your opening answer was very wide from sort of sewers to poetry, fine, doesn't get us anywhere really. I mean, what is it that defines cities in the sort of way that you wanted to think about them? Well, let's go to the kind of creativity that you would probably

think most important than I would actually, and most people would, which is sort of artistic creativity. Now, there are a number of studies in the book. And one of the surprising things was the role of outsiders, or you can call them outsiders become almost insiders, but not quite. The Metics in ancient Athens, who weren't citizens, but were allowed kind of on sufferance,

but actually proved to provide most of the creative people in ancient Athens, or the Jews in late 19th century Vienna, who most of the really interesting creative work, in that time, came from a Jewish population, quite secure in many ways, as Stefan Sveig describes, but always slightly outside the system looking in and feeling they didn't quite belong and so forced to define their role in relation to what they saw as a sort of collapsing empire with collapsing values. It's something to do with that. So you think that you put that as the key thing, would you?

One key thing. One key thing, because you miss science out completely there. And, of course, the wonderful point about science is that they have their own portable cities called laboratories, which they can take with them anywhere, can't they really? They can do, and of course much science occurs in, well, it tended to occur until very recently, in university cities. Only at the end of the 19th century, very interestingly, did you get big industrial laboratories. I described that tendency, especially in the Berlin chapter in part two of the book.

Now, those industrial labs could be. portable. Very interestingly, although this is a story I don't tell in the book, Thomas Edison originally put his lab just outside New York over in New Jersey, but it was lifted up around 1900s to Schenectady and up in New York State, basically because General Electric has the company wanted to avoid the unions. But there is really a case there. If you do take a lab out like that and place it in the boondocks, does it remain truly creative for a long time? I doubt that. Doreen Massey, what's your view of this main wellsprings of cultural creativity and cities?

Well, you're obviously right, I think, that there's no monopoly on invention held by cities. On the other hand, I do think there's something specific about cities which produces an environment where creativity and innovation can particularly take hold. What would you focus on? I would focus on the fact that cities are meeting places. Cities are places where people come together, and in particular, there are places where lots of different kinds of people come together. Now, that can produce the violence and the social antagonisms and all the problems of cities,

but on the other hand, it has within it the potential, I think, for the generation of something new. I'm a strong believer in the idea that new things often come out of, the almost happenstance coming together of different stories, of differences, and attempts to cross those things. And there are some wonderful examples in Peter's book. I mean, thinking of the early story of Manchester, Lancashire and Cotton, some of the crucial elements in that story of the rise of Manchester were things like the arrival of the Protestant refugees with the cotton.

The fact that what gave Manchester, I think you say, the really crucial lead over its rival areas like the Midlands, was the fact that it was at this moment, this point of geographical juxtaposition between textiles and engineering. So it was the fact of difference. It was the fact of meeting across. difference, the possibilities inherent in hybridity, the construction of hybridity, which gave the possibility of further creativity. And you can see this probably most easily in the cultural

sphere. I mean, Mexicans in Los Angeles aren't exactly the same as Mexican, they're not simply Americanized either. They have produced something new. You know, Asians in Birmingham have produced Balti food. There's a million examples of crossover cultures which are precisely brought about by that mixing. The mixing doesn't only take place in cities, but Cities are, I think, one of the crucial crucibles of that kind of cultural coming together. At this moment, I'm rather reminded of that exchange between Sam Golden and George Bernard Shaw. When Golden wanted Bernad Shaw to write for Hollywood and eventually Shaw rode back to him and said, we can't because you're only interested in culture and I'm only interested in money.

It seems to me you're being extremely high-minded about cities, talking about people coming together. Well, they're coming together in millions of squatters in San Paulo and Mexico and strangers coming in like brilliant. Jewish settlements here. There's the same that art goes where the money is. Is money not a factor in the creation of cities? How are we talking about that money and everything that wealth brings

in terms of leisure and time and space and commissioning and so and so forth? Is that? Oh, hugely. In but one, I put a lot of stress on money. There has to be a surplus to create the kind of high art you get in ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence or indeed Shakespearean London. There has to be a surplus somewhere and it either comes through rich private individuals

like the princes in Florence or the merchant venturers in 16th century London or it has to come through a communal conduit such as happened very powerfully in Florence. But then you have to have something to react against too just having official money is a lousy way of trying to generate. But still trying to nail it before we're moving to the 20th century

and more firmly appeared. Is money a sine qua non? I mean there is that phrase art goes where money is. Do you think there's truth in that? I think by and large it is true, unfortunately. Why is it unfortunate? Well, because one would like to think that starving artists who haven't much money can make it. Artists tend to starve in rich cities, hoping they'll get on the band. Well, they actually do. I mean, one of the stories in the book is Picasso and his

circle in Paris around 19004 or so now if there was any group of starving artists that was it but they were all drawn to Paris because they knew this was the world's centre of art and they were all kicking against the established forms

and so they went there in an indirect way because that was where the money was but it was where the power was can we talk about the 20th century specific enough as much of the kind of the rest of the program do you think there been significant changes in the character of cities

in the last 100 years in this century. And you think that Peter's book is taking that into account? Yes, I mean, clearly they have. And I think Peter's book focuses very much on the, would it be fair to say, the more planning-oriented and technological side. There have been huge changes in cities around the world, and we perhaps could come back to that point,

that this is a book very much about Western cities, and we need to broaden it out. But in Western cities, there has been over the second half of this century a huge change in the ethnic mix, for instance, in some of the major cities of the world. And that has produced a very different atmosphere around cities, very different questions to be addressed, very different challenges to democracy.

Perhaps if I could pick up this point about the westernness of your book, because it's called cities in civilization. It's actually a book which deals only with cities in Europe and in the United States, and you do have a paragraph saying that. And I have no problem with that. You've ever read to write a book on Western cities in Western civilization. It might just be fairer to call it that. But I think what's interesting in relation to Melvin's question

is that when you broaden the vision and look at cities across the planet, then the questions change, and they change very much as a product of what's been happening in this century. Could you be in element? Yeah, I mean, as we come up to the turn of the millennium, for the first time ever in human history, half of the people in the world will be living in mega cities, cities of over a few million people.

And most of those cities will be in the third world, I think only two of the cities which you mention in the book, and that's not a criticism because that's not your focus, but only two of the cities in the book will actually rank in the top ten cities in the world in terms of size. That's what New York and Tokyo. The rest will be cities like Sao Paulo, Bombay, Mexico City. And the problems facing those cities are very different. They pose very different questions from the problems of innovation, I think,

and artistic creativity that Peter is quite correctly dealing with in the context of Western cities. Just to go back to the point you were making, 60% of people in Asian cities at the turn of this millennium will be living in squatter settlements. Do you think that those cities are going to be in a position for the cultural take-off so vividly described in so many cities over the last 2,000 years,

Western cities by Peter in his book? Well, that's the point I'm trying to make that I don't think that argument that Peter's making is irrelevant and some of those cities are incredibly vital in artistic terms. I know Mexico City well, and the artistic life in Mexico City is tremendous. From grassroots stuff around graffiti

right through to high art and photography and the inheritance of surrealism. It's wonderful. But that is not enough to deal with the problems of those cities. I've just come back from Mexico City and the poverty there is extraordinary. People lack basic running water. They lack electricity.

Those are the issues that have to be addressed and the flourishing of either art or industrial innovation in itself isn't enough. Do you think what Dorian said and the idea of the mass cities being outside the mass big cities being outside, as it were, the Euro-American matrix. Do you think that is going to change the place of cities in terms of what they can produce? No, I don't. I think it's just going to work out in an interestingly different way. First of all, if you take art,

I mean, the outstanding characteristic of the 20th century, surely, is the rise of popular art of all kinds, people's art, including, for instance, people. people's music. And I only have one chapter on that in the whole book, which is Memphis, Tennessee, around 1950. Now, that happened to be an example where the two poorest groups in the United States created their own music, on the one hand blues, leading to rhythm and blues, and finally to rock and roll, and the other country music. And these two streams came together in Memphis and in the person of Elvis Presley. Now, here was an example of very poor people creating their own art with no real no real motion it was going to become the dominant music of the world. And it actually happened with

the age of technology. And I think the same thing's going to happen. In Brazil, for instance, incredibly explosive mixed culture. A lot's coming out of there already. Very exciting stuff. The other point is that cities somehow always do solve their problems. Now, it's difficult to believe this. It must be said if you tour Mexico City or San Paulo. I mean, the horror of these mega cities is beyond all imagination. But nevertheless, interesting stuff is occurring. All people in our urban trade now say that probably the most innovative single city in the world is Curitiba in Brazil. An amazing city where the mayor, a guy called Jamie Leone, actually transform this city. He said, we've no money to build metro systems. So let's build a super bus system for one-tenth of the cost.

people come from all over the world to see the public transport in this city they have actually proved a beacon for the world and this was not a poor city but certainly not a rich city Are you suggesting that there comes a stage in the affairs of a city where it has almost an organic life

which makes it more like successful cities of the past than just a sprawl of people coming together? Yes very definitely yes We can't see this But you also suggest in your book it seems to me towards the end that there are two different sorts of cities. One is a telisprall city the word use, which is cities

where people are basically living let's say at home or they're not congregating. And the other is a sort of Silicon Valley idea which you include, and the Dockland's idea which almost include a separate cities which I would take issue with us whether there are cities or not. So could you develop that and let Doreen come in? Well let's take the Silicon Valley example

because I do specifically write a chapter about it in the book. Silicon Valley East kind of interesting because it's a city? Yes, I think it is a city in a funny kind of sense. Well, what sort of funny kind of sense? It's a valley, isn't it? It's 40 kilometres long and 10 kilometres wide. And it didn't start in a city. It started in the orchards, right?

Yes, yes. But there was... Started in the field. That's right. Which goes against both of our arguments. But you can have new cities. It was a new city. And it really was a city that essentially developed around a university and what their university spun off and what the spin-off spun off by an incredible process. Very like Lancashire, actually, in the 1780s, except there wasn't a university there. And what it's created is a certain kind of urban civilization.

What this civilization is, is laboratories and meeting places and homes and more meeting places. And there is an urban life there, except that we might not recognize it as a typical urban life. It's based on the car. It's based on going to these various watering holes. It's also very important, I think, based on the existence of San Francisco is a very urban place in the middle of it all, because you have to consider it as part of the San Francisco Bay Area, an area as big as London. What I'm trying to say is, what are you drawing out of Silicon Valley, and then we can switch to Docklands if you want? Are these the city, and the Telisprall city in the States that you describe?

Are these cities of the future? Are this a new mutation? No, I think it's actually a past form, because the parallel with Lancashire is absolutely astonishing. The word is networking. It's the word everyone uses about Silicon Valley and people, geographers in particular, say this is the new industrial form, intense networking, people learning from each other, people asking other people to do things

in terms of technical achievement and they coming back and saying, yes, but now I need you to do this for me and the whole thing fizzies and produces chains of innovation. But Lancashire did that. Absolutely, absolutely. That doesn't mean to say it's an old form. I think probably the question's assuming something which isn't necessarily the case,

that there is one form to which cities attending. I think we tend, especially in the West, to tell a story of cities, which kind of makes some genuflection towards a few prehistoric places, and then starts with Athens. And we gradually move, as it happens, westwards, and end up in Los Angeles

where we see the future. I don't think you can tell the story of cities in that linear way. London isn't behind Los Angeles. It's different from Los Angeles. It's got different trajectory. Calcutta isn't behind London. It's a different place.

Obviously there are things which we develop in common. There are westernisations and modernisations that cities in common have. But I think to see one future form as the future for all cities is wrong. But does the word just lose any sense of true meaning? Yes, I mean because cities are places with big things at the centre of them, aren't they? No. Well, they tend to be. Right, no, they have tended to be.

From his Athens, even to Los Angeles, big public buildings at the centres, whether these are stadia, cathedral, public meeting places, football, whatever they are. That's to think very physically. And there is a centre for the... Well, it's part of thinking about the city. I mean, people think I'm going to go to Rome and I'll see St. Peter's.

Well, let me give you an alternative definition then. Cities are much more intense, large geographical concentrations of social interaction. Well, that's what's happening now. That's why I think it's different. Yes, but it's also true. You could define the old cities like that, too. The difference is my definition would include the old and the new. But it's useful to be as fine as one possibly can about these.

definitions, the fact is that where'd you go in Silicon Valley, if you want to say, right, I'm in the middle of it. I know where the middle is... Why do you want to go to the middle? Just have a sense of a city. I think that's a question of your geographical imagination. I mean, I'm not particularly, I have to say I agree with you personally that I like cities with the centre, and I love London, and I find myself disoriented quite frequently in Los Angeles, though I like Los Angeles, too. But the fact that I like it doesn't mean to say that that's the only way you can define a city. No, I think the point about... I'm not for a moment saying the only way to define a city.

I'm trying to find out from you two who know a lot where the cities are changing and how they're changing now. And it seems to me that Silicon Valley is a very different place from Athens, Rome, London and even Los Angeles. Absolutely, it is. But is that what happening in the future? I'd just like to know. But you want one thing to be happening in the future. Well, I think what we're saying is... Different things will be happening.

It's not one future. Which different things? Just a second. Which different things? Well, Silicon Valley is one possible future for a city. What is the future of Calcutta? It surely isn't Silicon Valley. That's a huge constellation of people, which we have to think about the future of in completely different terms,

about simply where people are going to live, how they're going to live. There is no question that there's a centre, there's no question that it's a massive and intense concentration of people. When I spoke earlier about a geographical concentration of social interactions, I was trying to get at something very abstract, yeah, very general, yeah, but precisely because you were asking for a definition that included within its possibilities, Florence, Silicon Valley and Calcutta. Okay, at that level, I think that's an adequate definition. Below that level, I think cities can take loads and loads of different forms,

and there isn't one form for the future. Silicon Valley is made possible by the technologies of now. It is a possible future form in a way that perhaps it wasn't a possible form in the 19th century, but I don't think every city is going to be like that. I think the point is that I agree totally with Doreen. I know someone should agree on programs like this, but essentially, Cities are about people meeting, people talking, people having ideas that fizz.

And they can do this in different ways, but they must be at least some of the time face-to-face. That's absolutely what cities are about. But given that fact, they can do this in all kinds of different places, some of the magnificent, like ancient Athens or Renaissance Florence, some of them absolute dumps. If you went to Lancashire in 1780 You seem obsessed with Lancashire, Peter. Well, I happen to come from there. We're both from there.

Well, I actually come from London, but I'm just outing your bias. I could go to Yorkshire. I could go to Yorkshire, too. Same story. But essentially, you've got a series of cities that weren't up to much physically, but tremendous amount happening there. Similarly, that's exactly what's happened in Silicon Valley over the last 40 years.

And now I'll give you the final example. The Pearl River Delta, an area that not many people recognize as a city, it is just destined to be probably the biggest mega city in the world. It's got 30 million people. It includes Hong Kong, Guangzhou and a number of other places, which is growing like crazy and why, networking again, across a border between Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China. How would you define, Peter, a successful city?

Given what you just said about Lankishan And we know what the conditions are like in Guangzhou A successful city is a place that is fizzing intellectually in some way And where people feel it is And they feel good because it's doing that You've written about, you use the phrase the death of distance And I would align that with the increased globalisation Which, Tony Goodman, there's a lot of people writing about more and more

How are these going to affect the city? What do you mean by the death of distance, first of all? Well, first of all, I should give the credit where credit's due the phrase, it's a marvelous phrase, comes from Francis Cairncross of the economist who's written a book about it. The death of distance is simply the fact that with increasingly sophisticated telecommunications

and increasingly cheap, almost free telecommunications, it becomes irrelevant almost where you are, if you pick up at the phone or still more, if you are on email or the web, you often don't know where people actually are, and it doesn't matter because the whole surface becomes flat in terms of access and cost. But the fact is that this is okay for one form of interaction, what you can call preliminary routine interaction.

You get quite a long way with this. But all the evidence suggests that the more of that kind of interaction you have, the more you need the other sort, the face-to-face. And there's an astonishing diagram in a book written by two geographers, Steve Graham and Steve Marvin, on Telek. communications in the city. And it shows the graph for the growth of telecommunications traffic and the growth of people traffic moving around in France over about 150 years. And they go absolutely parallel. And any set of curves like that, you could find we're moving parallel. The more people pick up the

phone, the more they use email, the more they'll want to get on airplanes and fly and meet each other. Doreen Massey. Which, of course, doesn't mean that geography becomes unimportant. I mean, as you say in the book, I mean, it isn't the case, in fact, that it doesn't matter where you are because only a certain number of places in the world have access to these fast forms of communication, whether it be aeroplane, fast train or the superhighway. And so what happens as a result is that the inequality in the geography of the distribution of these fast means of communication means that there's a concentration and a clustering of activities around them.

So that's one thing that happens. So the more the nodes of high technology get concentrated, the more people will cluster around those areas. And another, I mean, beautiful example that occurs a number of times in Peter's book is that the fact of the ease of crossing distance means that firms can decentralise their back office functions, their routine functions. In other words, the very fact of the ease of crossing distance means you can take more precise advantage of geographical differences. You can search out the cheapest labour, the least unionised labour, and put it there,

because the fact that it's now a thousand miles from your head office doesn't matter because you can still control it. Can I finally and briskly just turn to one thing which we've missed altogether? Do you think that there is, again, you'll say many of it, I'd like to ask this question. Given that cities are becoming more important, as you said, this is the great century of the city for the first time in our history. More people are living in cities than not living in cities. Cities are getting bigger.

Do you think there is one form of politics inside the city, which is likely to work better than another? Peter Hall, first of all. Very tricky one. I believe that what is happening is a tremendous process of democratisation and decentralisation in cities. This is very clear. But you would say on surface it might look the opposite, wasn't it? To make the thing work, you need greater centralisation and autocracy.

But I think if you go to the cities Doreen is describing in the developing world, the fact is that the problems there are so great that unless you get the people in the squatter settlements to organise their own lives and improve. their own conditions with aid. They can't do it by themselves. But they need that sweat equity as the phrase goes. They need to do a lot themselves

and they need to organise themselves. City government, city hall isn't going to do it, not for a city of 30 million people. And the World Bank isn't going to do it from Washington, D.C. Although it might have to supply some of the money. But the actual money has to channel down into those settlements.

Laurie Mansour. I think precisely because of their mixity, their size, their complexity. Cities are huge challenges to democracy. But when I asked Peter earlier what would be a successful city, I think I would include amongst my criteria democratic organisation. Democracy is slow, democracy is complicated. The story Peter tells about Docklands gives a very good account of where democracy can produce such confusion that it brought a process virtually to a standstill. On the other hand, the point about democracy is that it is facing up to the fact that there are tensions, that there are conflicting

interests, and ignoring those is to deny democracy. Democracy precisely is facing up to that complexity. And a decent city for me, a successful city would have education, it would have a healthy public sphere, it would have democracy and equality. Well, thank you very much, Peter Hall, is a huge tome. Cities in Civilisation is just out, and to Dorian Messi. Congratulations again on that gong. Next week, my guest will be Dan Robinson and Stephen Rose, and we'll be discussing development in our knowledge of the brain this century. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukh, forward slash radio 4.