The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Are trees really better than tower blocks?
Green is good? Modernists hate tradition? A radical architecture critic sweeps some old ideas off the drawing board
THE CITY OF TODAY IS A DYING THING by Des Fitzgerald 288pp, Faber, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£16.99, ebook £9.99
Des Fitzgerald has set himself an admirable challenge. He takes the prevailing consensus among urbanists – that “cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks” – and he dares to ask: “Is it true?”
What follows, in The City of Today Is a Dying Thing, is an amusing, sceptical and refreshing journey through the past and future of urban life. Fitzgerald, a sociologist at University College Cork, has an eye for the incongruous, and a talent for teasing out grander themes from unlikely settings – from a modernist church in a Cork suburb to the battles for trees in Sheffield, and from a rat maze modelled on the Hampton Court Palace labyrinth to the failed Marble Arch Mound.
Fitzgerald’s engagements with his surroundings are compelling; he compares Gaudí’s Sagrada Família to “a wreck dredged from the bottom of the ocean, swollen with water and time, cankerous with shells and buboes”. And this is one of the buildings he ostensibly likes. He has an entertaining cattiness throughout, whether damning Saudi Arabia’s linear city, The Line, as “a giant nightclub corridor”, or agreeing with Le Corbusier’s plans to raze the centre of Paris. Some asides are so diverting that you wish he’d followed them further: for instance, he relates how a 1607 English uprising against enclosures was led by a tinker named “Captain Pouch”.
But though Fitzgerald makes much of his transgressive questioning of the supposed benevolence of green cities, the true focus of his ire is conservatives and technocrats, who, albeit in different ways, both espouse a return to “natural” ways and forms. He points repeatedly to the underlying connections between traditionalists and futurists, and brings together representatives of each tendency: the King, as architecture critic, and Patrik Schumacher, the parametric (or algorithmic, geometric) architect. According to Fitzgerald, both “are driven by a shared desire not only for hierarchy, rationality and order, but for the reproduction of these elements in the built environment as they have been given to us in nature”. He contends that “it’s not style that matters… it’s ideology”. Here, Fitzgerald is at his most convincing. He exposes the false dichotomy of tradition versus modernism: either way, the plan is to make better people, with “better” equalling “more subservient”.
At the same time, skewering the fallacious moral superiority that’s often on display, he points out what’s really at work in critiques of apparently “unnatural” modernism, paraphrasing them thus: “You can like the Guggenheim, if you want – good for you. Just be aware that you’re wrong, immoral, maybe even a bit sick.” Such is his skill for an acerbic aside, you’d be forgiven for overlooking the wider malaise he finds in contemporary discourse. It’s there in the fads and buzzwords he jots down at each successive urbanist conference, as the speakers promise proposals for change but ultimately offer branding exercises and sometimes outright hogwash. But, much of the time, I willed Fitzgerald to go further in his critiques. His targets are acceptably orthodox ones – Roger Scruton, the aforementioned Schumacher, the town of Poundbury. Few sacred cows are actually slain.
This at least helps him to take radical ideas seriously, with curiosity rather than credulity, whether it’s “biomimetic design”, “forest bathing” or “natural capital”, and to allow the more absurd propositions – Jeff Bezos “retooling his Blue Origin aerospace company to advance a very real scheme to abandon the earth for a wooded simulacrum in outer space” – to discredit themselves. Yet Fitzgerald’s dismissal of public taste, as “a product of the fact that we inhabit a stifling, backwardlooking and rather stupid age”, feels paternalistic and unconvincing. Traditional architecture only seems to make people happy, he argues, because “they have been rigorously taught over time – to associate that style with what they are told elsewhere are good and positive attributes of society”. “If only they’d been taught differently!” goes the implication, revealing a distinct lack of trust in ordinary citizens.
Disappointment, in fact, blows through the book, as when Fitzgerald points out how biomimetic architecture (taking inspiration from nature) often just “ends up as a fancy office building that’s a bit curvy or kind of looks like a shell”. He’s accurate in sensing that so many green plans are at best palliative and at worst opportunistic. Yet he goes, rightly, beyond aesthetics and taste, and into the real drivers of urban change, pointing out that “the veneration of traditional architecture may well have been couched in a gentlemanly language of rights and expression and human nature, but the wrecking ball that came for tower blocks of the 1950s and 1960s was moved as much by the desire for profit, and a general indifference to human misery, as it was by any high-flown ideas about man’s timeless genius”. (And he explores what has been happening psychologically, via Freud, to make us reach for comfort blankets such as “the trees will save us”.)
Fitzgerald’s title, then, is both his book’s strength and its weakness. He expects you to take its assertion as a given, when it’s highly contestable; it says something of the narrowness of current discourse about architecture and urbanism that his views are seen as controversial at all. At the same time, the real problem with such a title is that it distracts from a compassionate and lively venture, a robust defence of the messiness of cities, and a noble corrective against those who insist on a managerial view of nature, urban spaces and human beings. The search for the cities of tomorrow, meanwhile, goes on.
Lovers of tradition and of the futuristic aren’t really enemies – they’re ‘driven by shared desires’
prime minister, who had already begun to loosen security at the border. Journalists stood ready to take pictures. The Picnic was a test: how would the Soviet Union respond? When Moscow did nothing, it accelerated the path to reform.
Longo covers the Picnic at ground level, evoking the dramatic events in vivid colour: “A brass band boomed across the field. Goulash cooked in giant pots over open flames; beer and wine were there for the taking. People danced around a bonfire… ‘For all our friends in Europe!’ Ferenc [Mészáros, one of the organisers] bellowed above the din. ‘The only chance of worldwide peace… is the demolition of barbed wires and cultural barriers.’”
Travelling in Germany and Hungary for four years, Longo conducted interviews with ordinary
East Germans who fled on August 19 1989, and he spoke to many of the key figures in Hungary involved in organising the Picnic. Anecdotes and impressions from these meetings are woven through the historical narrative, providing an insight into how deeply this history still matters today.
Németh, Hungary’s last communist leader, seemed “upset” when the author met him in 2019. A man of “integrity and equanimity”, Németh refused to attend the 30th anniversary of the Picnic because his panel was titled “Breakthrough and Collapse”. To Németh, neither term captured all the work he had put into enabling peaceful change in Hungary. In his view, there had been no “breakthrough”, as his government had allowed the opening of the borders, and there had been no accidental “collapse” of communism in Hungary, but a careful dismantling under his leadership.
Two other actors of 1989, however, did appear at the anniversary in 2019, both as leaders of countries in rapid transition: Angela Merkel and Viktor Orbán. Merkel was in Berlin when the Wall fell and immediately embarked on a steep political career that took her to the top of German politics. Orbán was a 26-year-old firebrand promising to “bury communism” in a 1989 speech at the rehabilitation and reburial of Imre Nagy, who had been executed for his leadership of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. At the anniversary of the Picnic, he spoke of national sovereignty, while Merkel talked about refugees. “Politics: always,” Longo concludes.
As a political scientist, Longo isn’t entirely immune to the politicisation of history himself, but he is refreshingly honest about that. Readers are treated to the author’s views on borders today. Orbán’s policies to reduce illegal migration into Europe in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis, for instance, are described as a “whiplash-inducing” turnaround: “Hungary: the place that demolished walls, was now building them up.”
While nuance is occasionally sacrificed on the altar of narrative effect, the chain of events in 1989 and its historical context are outlined with clarity and verve. The narrative is spiked with Longo’s commentary and anecdotes from his trips, making The Picnic a deeply personal account of a fascinating milestone of Cold War history.