Strictly A to B

T. S. Eliot once wrote that heading down into the London Underground was like going down into ‘a world of perpetual solitude’. A bit harsh, yet most of us were annoyed that we couldn’t endure just that on Monday. Instead, the one day tube strike forced us to reappraise our daily commute as we mulled over the next fastest route that would get us from A to B, from home to work and back again with the least hindrance as possible.

T. S. Eliot once wrote that heading down into the London Underground was like going down into ‘a world of perpetual solitude’. A bit harsh, yet most of us were annoyed that we couldn’t endure just that on Monday. Instead, the one day tube strike forced us to reappraise our daily commute as we mulled over the next fastest route that would get us from A to B, from home to work and back again with the least hindrance as possible.

How much does this have to do with our mindset (“I want to get to where I want to as fast as I can and with the least inconvenient interaction as possible”) and how much does it actually have to do with the way our urban environments are designed? We’re often told it’s the former; a conscious decision that even Ghandi attempted to warn us off: “there’s more to life than increasing its speed” (coincidentally, it’s one of the Art on the Underground quotes). But, with a bit of deeper insight, it’s possible to see that urban planning actually has a substantial impact in propagating this kind of rat race.

And, as Richard Sennett points out in Flesh and Stone, rather than being an accidental by-product of design it has in fact been a deliberate decision made throughout urban planning for centuries. Since the Enlightenment and the anatomical discoveries of William Harvey that occurred around that time, urban planners have sought to replicate the movement of blood around the body and apply it to city and town planning:

"Harvey’s revolution helped change the expectations and plans people made for the urban environment. Harvey’s findings about the circulation of blood and respiration led to new ideas about public health, and in the eighteenth century Enlightened planners applied these ideas to the city. Planners sought to make the city a place in which people could move and breathe freely, a city of flowing arteries and veins through which people streamed like healthy blood corpuscles." (Flesh and Stone, p256)

The metaphor might seem fairly stretched here, but the basic insight of the argument is that the Enlightenment planner, Sennett says, made continuous movement a priority. The reasons for this are bound to be numerous and not simply just an attempt to ease the movement of goods and individuals for the sake of commerce. In fact, there was an inherent dislike of crowd forming – both from a public health point of view as well as for reasons of security and public order. For instance, when the plans for Washington D.C. were in their first stages there was a conscious effort to prevent the “clotting” of crowds on the streets, while in Paris many roads were formed so that they were only suitable for individuals to walk or ride in single-file, rather than in crowds of people. [quote]

But why does any of this matter? It matters because the answers to familiar questions around cohesion, solidarity, community, neighbourliness and, of course, the Big Society are all dependent on what happens between A and B. If we don’t interact with one another in public spaces how can we expect to form the kind of ‘bridging capital’ – those bonds between different, unfamiliar groups of people – that is necessary for society to be a cohesive whole. As Sennett writes, “Moving around freely diminishes sensory awareness, arousal by places or the people in those places…This was the premonition expressed at the end of The Merchant of Venice: to move freely you can’t feel too much.”

Obviously A and B don’t have to mean work and home; they could just as easily mean home and football training, work and pub, football training and pub etc. But we aren’t as likely to interact with people from different backgrounds in these places. The restaurants/pubs/shops/groups we choose to go to are haunts familiar to people we might not necessarily know, but they are certainly people like us.

Yes, it’s hard to break free from many of these designs, in part because they’re a permanent legacy of centuries-old plans which can’t really be altered. And obviously, contemporary urban planning in the newest cities hasn’t been decided with the circulation metaphor consciously in mind, but it is something that has had a continuing presence, lingering through tradition. We still design to get people from A to B and find it frustrating when people feel the need to hang around in the places we don’t want them to e.g. the ‘kids on street corners’ mantra. To take just one example, Oxford have even gone to the point of making their benches so uncomfortable as to prevent people staying on them for too long.

So, the question to ask is how can we expect to form the Big Society that Cameron eulogised about yesterday if even our urban spaces are still being designed with a distrust of a collective body of people?