underclasses are mostly black and Latin today, and the rappers, graffitists, break dancers, B-boys, et al., who have done so much to animate contemporary culture, are drawn mainly from black and Latin youth. But imaginative middle-class WASPs at the turn of the century—like William Dean Howells, Hutchins Hapgood, Jane Addams—could learn similar lessons from Irish, Italians, Slavs, and Jews. All those under-classed people, crammed together in tenements, exploited at work, oppressed in all social relationships, still overflowed with life in their teeming and violent streets, because the public space of the streets was the only place where they could come to life at all. Out in the streets, they could walk in the sun—even in streets where the sun didn’t shine. One thing that has made American culture so creative in the twentieth century is that it has had the capacity to nourish itself on the life and energy that our underclasses have had to give. It would be an ominous sign for our future if we were to lose that capacity now.
THE NARROW OPEN SPACES
Late in the 1960s, a number of promoters and developers, the Rouse Corporation most prominent among them, recognized that the overwhelming suburbanization of American society was bound to generate a powerful undertow of mass nostalgia for city life. They understood that this emotion could be spectacularly profitable. The fruits of their insight have been a whole new generation of public spaces, lavishly funded (through various complex public-private mixes) and often beautifully designed, throughout America’s cities. Houston’s Galleria, San Francisco’s Ghiradelli Square, Boston’s Quincy Market, New York’s South Street Seaport are only a few, and more are emerging all the time. (There have been similar movements in Europe, most strikingly in London’s recycled Covent Garden.) These developments have preserved parts of our nineteenth-century cities that would otherwise surely have been destroyed, and they have interwoven modern with traditional architecture in ingenious and occasionally inspired ways. They have come to constitute the reigning model for the public spaces of the future.
Americans who care about city life should be grateful for these spaces, especially since they supplanted a model of urban development that had no appreciation of public space at all. But it is hard to spend any length of time in them without feeling that something is missing. In fact, this something is the underclass, along with all our other “social, sexual, and political deviants.” The human mix in these spaces is overwhelmingly white, affluent, and clean-cut. It isn’t just that hardly anybody black, Latin, or poor is here; there isn’t even anybody scruffy or ragged-looking around.
These plazas are a lot less racially and socially integrated than the busy streets around them. Although their designs are meant to suggest microcosms of the cities they are part of, they are really urban-theme parks, Disney Worlds-by-the-sea; except for the skyscrapers that form their backdrop, they could almost be in the middle of the Everglades. There isn’t much menace in the air, but neither is there much flash or flair; not much to embarrass people or make them want to run, but even less to hold their attention and make them think. These plazas are too diverse to be single-minded, yet far too shallow to open up the depths in anybody’s mind. It would be too strong an accusation, too suggestive of conscious intent, to call them closed-minded. Maybe the word should be absent-minded, in memory of all that is out of sight and out of mind.
There are many ironies in this situation. The heyday of public space in recent American history was the 1960s. All over the country, in those years, streets came to life. And not just streets, but public spaces of every kind—squares, parks, malls, terminals, even highways—all filled up with people who were gathering, agitating, arguing, proclaiming, marching, stopping traffic, dancing, singing, waving flags, taking off their clothes or putting on strange new clothes, expressing themselves and making reasonable and outrageous demands on everyone else in flamboyantly theatrical but intensely serious ways; sometimes even burning things down, or getting themselves killed. Our streets were never so vibrant, so colorful, so sexy—but at the same time, and for some of the same reasons, they were never so violent or scary. By and by, more and more people began to fall prey to the pressures, including many people who had worked for years to lift those pressures. And our years of urban self-assertion and rebellion were followed by an era of wholesale de-urbanization, demographic flight beyond the suburbs to remote rural areas (which of course became suburbs overnight), and great cities on the ropes.
The masses of people who moved far away from their cities may well have found the comfort and security they sought. But many of them seem to have felt a sense of emptiness amid the flowers and the freeways, and yearned for a world they had lost. These urban refugees and their children have been among the main markets courted by the entrepreneurs of the new public space. But although many of these new spaces are pretty places, suburbanites who come in search of something missing in their lives won’t find it here. This is because what they really miss is not urban forms in themselves, noble as many of these forms are, but rather a thickness and intensity of human feelings, a clash and interfusion of needs and desires and ideas. For it is this clashing and fusing of human energies—as Baudelaire said it, “their luminous explosion in space”—that fills a city’s forms with life.
GROWING UP IN PUBLIC
Let me now pull together many of the strands of this argument by sketching briefly what my own vision of an open-minded space would be. It would be open, above all, to encounters between people of different classes, races, ages, religions, ideologies, cultures, and stances toward life. It would be planned to attract all these different populations, to enable them to look each other in the face, to listen, maybe to talk. It would have to be exciting enough and accessible enough (by both mass transit and car) to attract them all, spacious enough to contain them all (so they wouldn’t be forced to fight each other for breathing space), with plenty of exit routes (in case encounters get too strained), and adequate police (in case there’s trouble) kept well in the background (so they don’t themselves become a source of trouble).
One way to develop this kind of mix will be through shopping facilities: for instance, getting another Alexander’s and a Bloomingdale’s to locate next door to each other. In order to maintain the mix, it will be essential to have some form of commercial rent control. Otherwise our space will be destroyed by its very success: Its attractiveness will drive rents up beyond the means of all but the classiest and most exclusive stores, and gentrification will transform a resource for the public into a reservation for the rich, as has happened in London and Paris, and is happening now in New York.
Our open-minded space must be especially open to politics. We will want to design spaces within the larger space for unlimited speech-making and assembling. (New York’s Union Square used to have this sort of subspace.) But we will want our public space to be sufficiently differentiated that people who don’t want to listen or join in will also have places to go. We will try to design acoustic enclaves, such as already exist in some places (for instance, Washington Square Park), which enable many kinds of discourse—speech, music, song—to go on simultaneously, without drowning each other out.
No doubt there would be all sorts of dissonance and conflict and trouble in this space, but that would be exactly what we’d be after. In a genuinely open space, all of a city’s loose ends can hang out, all of a society’s inner contradictions can express and unfold themselves. Just as, within the protected space of a psychoanalytic session, an individual can open himself to everything he has repressed—so, maybe, in a protective enclave of public space a whole society might begin to confront its collective repressions to call up the specters that haunt it and look them in the face.
I worry as I write this. Is this the way to sell public space to tired businessmen and harried civil servants? My estimate of “the costs of urbanity” seems to be running a lot higher than Walzer’s; some of the people out there will surely conclude that the expense of spirit is too much, say thanks but no thanks, and stay home with their VCRs. Others will note darkly the echoes of the 1960s in my thinking, and argue that they have already gone through the ’60s, and once was enough. I agree: I loved the ’60s, but by the parade’s end it was enough for me. I doubt
