The Seduction of Place: The City in the 21st Century

Joseph Rykwert

294pp, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 20

This is a necessary book. At a time when the future of cities is being discussed worldwide, Joseph
Rykwert offers us an overview of the subject from its tentative beginnings in the Middle East some
10,000 years ago to the extraordinary experience of Mexico City today, with its population of 20m and
rising. Has the city been a force for good or bad? When do measures of creative chaos in the life and
form of cities tip over into conditions of alienation and dystopia? And what can we do to make our cities
happy and healthy places to live in when they are shaped in part by economic forces largely beyond our
control?

These are important questions. But before any answers, it must be said that the title of Rykwert's
beautifully written book is a bit of a lie. This celebrated architectural historian is really telling us the
intriguing story of how our cities - including London, Paris, Berlin, Mexico, Canberra, Brasilia and the
author's beloved New York - got to be the way they are today. Rykwert is at his best when guiding us
effortlessly through the past 10,000 years of city-making and at his happiest revisiting the individual
buildings he cares most about.

As to how we can best influence positive change in our cities, instead of looking for strictly 21st-century
solutions he takes us back to ancient Greece where the city was perfected - or so those of us at the tail
end of long generations of classically educated Romantics still like to believe. The Greeks, says Rykwert,
used the word "polis" to describe both the city and a favourite dice and board game rather like
backgammon that depended on the interplay of chance and rule. Chance and rule: this is how they
played games and designed cities. It remains, he says, perhaps the ideal way of making humane cities
2,500 years on from the completion of the Parthenon.

The city has not been shaped, Rykwert believes, by the kind of relentless impersonal forces of which
Marx wrote; instead it is a "willed artefact . . . a human construct in which many conscious and
unconscious factors played their part. It appeared to have some of the interplay of the conscious and
unconscious that we find in dreams". Like dreams, the form of cities is malleable, and as a happy
consequence we can do something to change them for our own ends.

Cities, says Rykwert in a revealing history-is-about-chaps moment, "are the aggregate products of the
choices that were made by individuals". They do not develop organically - "they are too consciously
manipulated" for that - but "develop quite unnaturally by jumps, by fits and starts". This "abrupt and
uneven jigsaw of conscious and unconscious workings is exactly what I have always found both
fascinating and perplexing". You and me both, professor.

So when did the city go off the rails in so many people's minds and experience? What happened to the
golden age of fifth-century Athens? Rykwert, an unashamed city-lover, reminds us that the city has
always been under attack by critics who have seen it as a symbol of humankind's fall from grace. Here is
Andrew Marvell, quoting from Genesis: "And Cain . . . builded a city; & called the name of the city, after
the name of his son, Enoch" (Gen 4:17). What the poet wishes to say is that the first city was built by a
murderer as a shelter for sinful humanity driven out of the garden of Eden.

Not a promising start, then. As for the Greeks, not all of them were in love with the "polis"; it was
mocked by Aristophanes, while Horace, Martial and Juvenal all laid into Rome. Rykwert might have
quoted Julius Caesar here, too: the great soldier and controversial republican dictator com plained
loudly in letters about the noise that continued throughout the Roman night and kept him awake. As for
the early Christians, their ideal city was, of course, the heavenly or New Jerusalem described in gridded
detail by St John in the Apocalypse. Intriguingly, Rykwert goes on to show how idealistic Christian sects the Shakers, for example - were to build earthly settlements and buildings along St John's divine lines.
The heavenly city could, in an unsatisfactory temporal way, be recreated in outline on earth.
Earthly cities, full of people making things and money, dancing, eating, singing and making love, can
never be as squeaky clean as the New Jerusalem. A healthy, happy city will always be a bit messy,
abounding with energy, passion and creativity and the disorder these qualities bring in their Dionysian
wake. Rykwert is not against disordered cities, but against those that have lost their soul. No ideal
resolution is possible, he argues, in big cities, partly because we all have different visions of what a city
might be - the Shoreditch artist's idea will be as different from the Mayfair property developer's as the
child sewing dresses in a Calcutta sweatshop will be from a Hollywood starlet shopping for the latest sixfigure frocks on Fifth Avenue.

There may be no solution, says Rykwert, but by learning from history we can begin to understand the
rules of the city-making game. We can see what to do and what not to do; what will make us happy and
what will make us sad. What seems to have made so many of us sad at one time or another is the
industrial city on overdrive and the subsequent dumb attempts - postmodern architecture with all its
trite, whimsical conceits, for example - to tidy it up as it moves into a post-industrial phase. Rykwert
spins through the creation of the industrial city and the ills spawned in its wake. But he is never so bald
as to suggest, like some latter-day Aristophanes, Martial or Marvell, that all was wrong with the
industrial city. It gave Rykwert himself his favourite "polis", New York. Without Bessemer and his

invention of steel smelting or Otis and the first safe passenger lift, the charismatic Manhattan skyline
would never have lifted off.

What Rykwert shows to devastating effect is the degree to which architects paid little heed to the plight
of the inexorably expanding 19th-century city. They toyed with the design of public buildings,
compounded grand urban planning theories (some quite mad), but only rarely considered the dystopian
plight of the masses somehow surviving among rows of shabby buildings not fit to be called
architecture, awash with sewage and ravaged by disease. "From this filthy sewer flows gold," wrote the
social observer Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835; he was describing Manchester, workshop of the world.

A linear city that would have stretched from Madrid to St Petersburg, a gallery of railways set on arches
around central London, garden cities, cities of towers: all these get their turn under Rykwert's
microscope. When the professor gets to the 21st-century city, however, you can see him beginning to
throw up his hands. We now live in a world of theme parks, of ersatz urban experiences, cyberspace and
SimCity (city making reduced to a digitised game in which money rules). We have the city as all-butredundant tourist attraction (Venice) and the instant new cities of southern China (Shenzhen, for
example) as parodies of their old western counterparts. In a "the world is too much with us/getting and
spending we lay waste our powers" moment, Rykwert turns to Wordsworth for solace. Faced with such
inanities, he finds comfort in these lines:

The eye - it cannot choose but see;

We cannot bid the ear be still;

Our bodies feel, wher'er they be,

Against or with our will.

In other words, as sensual, sentient beings, we react viscerally against these dystopian visions, from
SimCity to Shenzhen. And, in Rykwert's case, retreat to the glorious bustle of Manhattan. Here the city,
for all the attempts to denigrate or undermine it by crude planning, mean building or escapist criticism,
"remains unbeaten . . . though under constant siege [New York] has maintained its astonishing and
contrary vitality". The greatest game of "polis" ever played, he might have said. You may well take issue
with Rykwert and question whether New York is indeed the Athens of our day; but few authors can take
you on such a convincing, rigorous and enjoyable journey from the fall of Adam and Eve to an electricaided sunset over Manhattan. Rykwert's city game is well worth playing.