This superb article on public space and cities by Will Hutton appeared in the  Guardian on Sunday, June 16. I’ve reprinted it here in full.

Hutton explains why cities are starting to look the way they do by pointing to various financial behaviours. Worth reading the whole thing. I’m not sure about the title; the public needs to arrange to reclaim public space, not politely ask for it back. Let’s hope we don’t have to resort to the Istanbul method when our public space is threatened with demolition, and livable streets are turned into sterile highrise alleys full of corporate chains that obliterate small business, diversity, justice and pleasure. Vancouver is heading faster down than this road than most cities are. We have fewer controls in place than New York or London, and yet they have far greater size to buffer themselves from the real estate development onslaught. That’s how we’ve become the 2nd most unaffordable city in the world relative to median income. Our current city and provincial governments are more complicit in this than any before them, by an order of magnitude.

The article below deals with London, but its arguments are even more relevant here.

Canary Wharf is a daring development: more bankers now work in its offices than in the City of London. It has, with the Olympic Park, pulled London’s centre of gravity decisively eastwards. It is a tribute to modernity and boldness alike. But very few people I know like working there.

You surface from the gloriously expansive tube station to be dwarfed by a cluster of skyscrapers and inhumanly high towers, which strangely don’t seem to have any pride in themselves like those in New York. The shops in the underground shopping walkways gleam and glimmer and are full of tempting merchandise. It is all as it must have been in the architect’s drawings; it has taken me a long time to understand why I don’t feel drawn to any of it .

The reason, it became clearer on a recent visit, is that Canary Wharf possesses so little public space. Nothing is held in common. It is a “non-place”, whose lack of heart is brutally exposed at weekends and at night, when it empties. Privatisation and the values of the transactional, anonymised market have been taken too far. It is a dystopian present foretelling a more dystopian future.

Commercial developers behind the likes of Canary Wharf – the pioneer of vast, privately controlled spaces since emulated in the shopping centres of Liverpool One and Bristol’s Cabot Circus – want to reduce public space as much as they can. They want to be free to configure where we walk, what we visit and who has access because thus they can maximise sales per square foot of shopping and rents.

Public space costs money twice over: it has to be paid for by taxes (and we know many corporations do their utmost to avoid tax) and public space represents lost revenue. In a world in which everything has to be consecrated to “wealth generation”, providing a critical mass of public space that can be used for multiple public and social uses has been a burden too far in almost all recent large-scale urban regeneration projects throughout the country.

It is a crisis of the public realm – linked by a golden thread to the G8 meeting in Northern Ireland this weekend. Governments for the first time – prompted, to his credit, by David Cameron – are to agree to swap information about who is behind the fictional companies that populate the world’s tax havens. It is a tremulous assertion of the public interest against the tax-evading super-rich, but the tiny nature of the step and the lack of agreement to go further is part of the same mindset that concedes property developers should shape our country with only token genuflections to the need for public space. In this conception, “wealth generation” is a wholly private affair and “wealth generators” must have what they want whether on tax rules or planning regulations.

But to win the argument, there has to be an accompanying passion to revive the idea of publicness and challenge the super-rich head-on that the private world that they are creating is utterly barren. Non-places such as Canary Wharf in which to work, gated communities in which to live, and segregated private schools in which to educate their children – none is good to society in the round. Wealth generation with no sense of publicness is only wealth generation in name.

Anna Minton, in her wonderfully crusading book Ground Control, inveighs against the privatisation of public space and the whittling down of any voice that seeks to assert how our towns and cities should be lived in. Local government’s power has been gutted by virtually eliminating its capacity to raise local taxes, and doubly gutted by the persistent reduction within planning law of any concept that land or space should be held in common for public or social purpose. Minton’s particular bete noire is the obscure 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act, which allows for economic wellbeing alone justifying compulsory purchase.

She warmly endorses the ideas of the Danish urbanist Jan Gehl. In his Cities for People, Gehl insists that the key to enjoyable city living is the chance to interact and that everything – in particular where you can walk – should help the pleasures of accidental encounters with others. That in turn needs public space – squares and pavements that are free for everyone rather than policed by private security guards. And it needs well-resourced, engaged municipal authorities, backed by planning law, to argue on level terms with private developers that such space is an imperative for a development to go ahead.

A virtue of capitalism is that it allows scope for insurgents with new ideas to challenge incumbents, but today’s privately owned mega shopping malls are organised physically so that incumbents have all the advantages. Only they can afford the rents and we shoppers are corralled into using them because there is no possibility of chancing upon the new and unexpected.

One of the delights of Brighton’s Lanes or Oxford’s covered market is the possibility of escaping the tyranny of the shopping chains. You can go there just to hang out, shop, eat, browse or go for a stroll – and in this environment there is a chance to encounter the new shop, pub or restaurant. The insurgent is on level terms with the incumbent. Minton quotes many European architects who despair at our impoverished, weak municipal authorities unable to deliver such a social and public ethos compared with those in Europe: the Swiss, hardly tribunes of the left, have a strong civic tradition and fabulous livable cities. Why can’t we?

Maybe we are at a turning point. It is still too easy for businessmen and bankers to climb on to a public platform and complain that the burden of regulation and taxation is what holds them back – and which is too uncritically heard across the political spectrum. Yet the UK has one of the lowest corporation taxes in the G8, lowest labour market regulations in the EU and weakest planning system in the OECD. It has got us nowhere.

But now a Tory prime minister is trying to close down tax avoidance – and revive our high streets, another casualty of the privatisation of our public space. It is time to do this more wholeheartedly. Britain can do better than be a land fit for the owners of Westfield and Canary Wharf. It can be a place we want to live in; where we go to the city because we want to go to the city – not just to shop. The Victorians built great parks and civic spaces with great pride, openly revolting against the depredations of free market capitalism. They also paid their taxes. Time for us to follow suit.

Very good talk on men and feminism by Jackson Katz at a TEDx on women. He needs to slow down and take a breath, but in general this is fantastic.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Police officers carried off an Occupy D.C. demonstrator in Washington, October 2011.

I’m reprinting this article here because I think it’s worth reading and I don’t think it should be behind the NYT paywall. The fact that it’s become uncool to stand up to power irritates me intensely. Anyone who thinks standing up to these lunatics is uncool has drunk the kool-aid. It’s also a sort of US-style libertarianism that has drifted north. Sure, the parties are all a mess, but that’s not to say they’re all the same, which is reductio ad absurdam. Let’s get Stephen Harper out of power before he does any more damage.

OPINION
Whither Moral Courage?
By SALMAN RUSHDIE
Published: April 27, 2013, New York Times

We find it easier, in these confused times, to admire physical bravery than moral courage — the courage of the life of the mind, or of public figures. A man in a cowboy hat vaults a fence to help Boston bomb victims while others flee the scene: we salute his bravery, as we do that of servicemen returning from the battlefront, or men and women struggling to overcome debilitating illnesses or injuries.

It’s harder for us to see politicians, with the exception of Nelson Mandela and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as courageous these days. Perhaps we have seen too much, grown too cynical about the inevitable compromises of power. There are no Gandhis, no Lincolns anymore. One man’s hero (Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro) is another’s villain. We no longer easily agree on what it means to be good, or principled, or brave. When political leaders do take courageous steps — as France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, then president, did in Libya by intervening militarily to support the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — there are as many who doubt as approve. Political courage, nowadays, is almost always ambiguous.

Even more strangely, we have become suspicious of those who take a stand against the abuses of power or dogma.

It was not always so. The writers and intellectuals who opposed Communism, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the rest, were widely esteemed for their stand. The poet Osip Mandelstam was much admired for his “Stalin Epigram” of 1933, in which he described the fearsome leader in fearless terms — “the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip” — not least because the poem led to his arrest and eventual death in a Soviet labor camp.

As recently as 1989, the image of a man carrying two shopping bags and defying the tanks of Tiananmen Square became, almost at once, a global symbol of courage.

Then, it seems, things changed. The “Tank Man” has been largely forgotten in China, while the pro-democracy protesters, including those who died in the massacre of June 3 and 4, have been successfully redescribed by the Chinese authorities as counterrevolutionaries. The battle for redescription continues, obscuring or at least confusing our understanding of how “courageous” people should be judged. This is how the Chinese authorities are treating their best known critics: the use of “subversion” charges against Liu Xiaobo, and of alleged tax crimes against Ai Weiwei, is a deliberate attempt to blind people to their courage, and paint them, instead, as criminals.

Such is the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church that the jailed members of the Pussy Riot collective are widely perceived, inside Russia, as immoral troublemakers because they staged their famous protest on church property. Their point — that the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church is too close to President Vladimir V. Putin for comfort — has been lost on their many detractors, and their act is not seen as brave, but improper.

Two years ago in Pakistan, the former governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, defended a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, wrongly sentenced to death under the country’s draconian blasphemy law; for this he was murdered by one of his own security guards. The guard, Mumtaz Qadri, was widely praised and showered with rose petals when he appeared in court. The dead Mr. Taseer was widely criticized, and public opinion turned against him. His courage was obliterated by religious passions. The murderer was called a hero.

In February 2012, a Saudi poet and journalist, Hamza Kashgari, published three tweets about the Prophet Muhammad:

“On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.” “On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.” “On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”

He claimed afterward that he was “demanding his right” to freedom of expression and thought. He found little public support, was condemned as an apostate, and there were many calls for his execution. He remains in jail.

The writers and intellectuals of the French Enlightenment also challenged the religious orthodoxy of their time, and so created the modern concept of free thought. We think of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and the rest as intellectual heroes. Sadly, very few people in the Muslim world would say the same of Hamza Kashgari.

THIS new idea — that writers, scholars and artists who stand against orthodoxy or bigotry are to blame for upsetting people — is spreading fast, even to countries like India that once prided themselves on their freedoms.

In recent years, the grand old man of Indian painting, Maqbool Fida Husain, was hounded into exile in Dubai and London, where he died, because he painted the Hindu goddess Saraswati in the nude (even though the most cursory examination of ancient Hindu sculptures of Saraswati shows that while she is often adorned with jewels and ornaments, she is equally often undressed).

Rohinton Mistry’s celebrated novel “Such a Long Journey” was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content. The scholar Ashis Nandy was attacked for expressing unorthodox views on lower-caste corruption. And in all these cases the official view — with which many commentators and a substantial slice of public opinion seemed to agree — was, essentially, that the artists and scholars had brought the trouble on themselves. Those who might, in other eras, have been celebrated for their originality and independence of mind, are increasingly being told, “Sit down, you’re rocking the boat.”

America isn’t immune from this trend. The young activists of the Occupy movement have been much maligned (though, after their highly effective relief work in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, those criticisms have become a little muted). Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, “anti-American,” and in Mr. Said’s case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian “terrorism.” (One may disagree with Mr. Chomsky’s critiques of America but it ought still to be possible to recognize the courage it takes to stand up and bellow them into the face of American power. One may not be pro-Palestinian, but one should be able to see that Mr. Said stood up against Yasir Arafat as eloquently as he criticized the United States.)

It’s a vexing time for those of us who believe in the right of artists, intellectuals and ordinary, affronted citizens to push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world. There’s nothing to be done but to go on restating the importance of this kind of courage, and to try to make sure that these oppressed individuals — Ai Weiwei, the members of Pussy Riot, Hamza Kashgari — are seen for what they are: men and women standing on the front line of liberty. How to do this? Sign the petitions against their treatment, join the protests. Speak up. Every little bit counts.

Tower of Babel, 1563 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Bruegel painted a series of three pictures of the Tower of Babel; one, on ivory, is lost.

‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ (Genesis 11:4).

“The workers in the painting have built the arches perpendicular to the slanted ground, thereby making them unstable and a few arches can already be seen crumbling. The foundation and bottom layers of the tower had not been completed before the higher layers were constructed.”

“Bruegel’s depiction of the architecture of the tower, with its numerous arches and other examples of Roman engineering, is deliberately reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum, which Christians of the time saw as both a symbol of hubris and persecution…

“The parallel of Rome and Babylon had a particular significance for Bruegel’s contemporaries: Rome was the Eternal City, intended by the Caesars to last for ever, and its decay and ruin were taken to symbolize the vanity and transience of earthly efforts.“

….

“It is a fact that the story of the Tower of Babel was interpreted as an example of pride punished, and that is no doubt what Bruegel intended his painting to illustrate. Moreover, the hectic activity of the engineers, masons and workmen points to a second moral—the futility of much human endeavour… Bruegel’s knowledge of building procedures and techniques is considerable and correct in detail.”

See also The End of the Age of Tall Buildings.

It is hard not to view this frozen waterfall as an artwork, but it only functions as art inadvertently. Its effect is quietly visceral, though, a response I don’t have to art often enough. The last resident in this building in China, holding out against expropriation by developers, makes a DIY drip system for preventing his pipes from freezing after owners shut off the heating system.  Via io9 via here.

“Refusing to leave his abandoned apartment building in Jilin City, China, Wen Hsu feared that the uninsulated pipes running through his building would freeze during the winter. His solution? Just leave the tap running.

Wen has lived in this building for 35 years and he’s the last remaining resident. He decided to stay put even after real estate investors bought all the apartments in the block in preparation for a new mall.

Worried that his water supply would be cut off by the frigid temperatures, he left the warm water running and diverted it down the side of the building — and this is the result.

Wen says that the developers have offered him too small an amount to be able to buy another apartment, so he’s refusing to sell his home.

The incident has drawn attention to his case in the Chinese media and officials are now asking the developers to settle the matter so that the project can move on.”

Voice from my childhood, though when I hear Ed Asner’s voice I hear him as Lou Grant from the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Mary Richards: Mr. Grant, I just can’t thank you enough.
Lou Grant: You may have a point there.