Losing All Sense of Direction in a City of Dreams

Hall, Sheffield
I pace nervously up and down the lounge of Manchester Airport, thinking of the words of Sir Peter Hall, who I have just met in the Marriott Hotel in Sheffield: “The ability to transport people into the heart of city communities is the main source of wealth and identity for those same people”. Is that my dream? To work for cities capable of putting its inhabitants, visitors, tourists, business people, university professors, taxi drivers and barmen ‘at the centre’. Though of course, ironically speaking, being at the centre is also the main issue in international politics, at least in the areas where democracy has temporarily taken hold. The centre is the solution for Germany and Italy, but what about Putin’s Russia? It is no coincidence that Germany and Italy are nations of cities and Russia is a range of open territories linked by great trade routes running from north to south and from east to west. I have just read Peter Hopkirk and learned that The Great Game of the nineteenth century was the play for supremacy of the areas that, two centuries on, Bush has decided to lay waste to, with the aim of shaking up international energy policies.

Adelphi is still a publisher of ideas, even more so now that it is out of fashion. I know that all visions are unilateral. I repeat this mantra to myself while an imperfect present and potential futures intertwine. I have been working in urban policy for seven years now, and I have to prove to myself that I know what I’m doing, and why and how I’m doing it. And the answer does not lie in evasion.

Writing about cities is easy, pleasant work – all you need to do is listen to the pensioners and the captains of industry, the politicians and the students, and pen a lengthy hexameter encapsulating a motto for an entire generation

Del Giudice, Venice
I take-off and look out over the Venetian lagoon, the fields, the campielli, the Po, the corridors towards south and east, and I recall that the first person who explained the role that a square plays in a city was my school mate Marco. We were putting on a production of La bottega del caffè, and while I was rereading the final scene, he went to the blackboard and drew the agorà of Athens with the theatre in the middle. The square, city and play were closely linked.

It took me at least twenty years to understand that those ideas were placed in our hearts by an Italian teacher with an exemplary name for someone in trade, a genie of the lamp who had us learning, almost by heart, the writings of Lewis Mumford. They were in the anthology by Lidia De Federicis, published by Loescher (Antologia 80, I think it was called), which also contained Brecht and Pavese.

Mumford, Las Vegas
But cities are not made to be looked down on from above. That would be too easy. Though all you need to do is travel to another continent, to understand that cities do not have the same origins and the same functions everywhere.

In his book The City in History Mumford admits that he deals with western cities because with his method it would take him another lifetime to explore Russian or eastern cities. Cities were made to be walked round, but the twentieth century strove to destroy this vision and bury these roots. It distracted the city, ripped it up and stretched it out to serve the car, both the production of cars and the circulation of cars: Turin and Las Vegas are offspring of the same entity. And commercial transformations also stem from the car: the desertification of city centres, the proliferation of McDonalds, and the excessive increase in road traffic in smaller towns, with the visual invasion that it brings. As well as the demand for parking space in residential neighbourhoods, and the transformation of petrol stations into busy, thriving shopping centres: save your tokens to buy energy or spend it on snacks.

Berger, Lisbon
I am unable to enter a city by motorbike, as John Berger has been doing for decades. From the French mountains above Geneva, all kitted out in the regulation boots and gloves, the purest intellectual in the western world undertakes regular migrations to the cities of the world: Paris, London, Warsaw. His tales of mountain life speak of a civilisation which no longer exists; while his city-bound ghosts, especially the mother which fills with memories his latest, magnificent book Here is Where We Meet, a consummate blend of lyricism, novel, essay and autobiography, speak of a civilisation which does not yet exist.

Berger helps me more than anyone else to explain my urban dreams, more than Tabucchi and Pessoa, even though their Lisbon is one of the most utopian and visionary cities that exists. That is how I see the city where the people I work for should live: a continuous progression of symbols, a constant succession of markets and bookstores, original little shops and newly renovated boutique hotels which still preserve an aura of the past.

Writing about cities is easy, pleasant work – all you need to do is listen to the pensioners and the captains of industry, the politicians and the students, and pen a lengthy hexameter encapsulating a motto for an entire generation.

The future of those working on creating a vision for the city is made of little pieces which can be difficult to stick together, which call for that special glue called pride. Without pride there can be no dreams, or at the very least it is difficult to get to sleep

A year ago, among the hills of the Langhe, Berger looked puzzled to hear us complaining about the changes that would take place before and after the Olympics: he could not tolerate the fact that an entire generation of youngsters could not see a future ahead of them. A generation which is enjoying the longest period of peace in the history of Europe, yet is unable to capitalise on its good fortune, while a few hundred kilometres away, up to ten years ago, entire cities were being destroyed in the name of ethnic identities. At his side, his daughter from his first wife provided further proof that our guest was a kind of rural deity, materialised to help us understand our city-bound plight. Where were we when war was raging through the cities of Bosnia, bridges were being bombed and entire libraries torched? And how can we help rebuild cities which no longer exist, or which do not yet exist?

Trigilia, Florence
Is it possible to transform a museum-like city into a lively, buzzing network of districts, or create museums which are the icing on the cake, or anchor ‘diversely inhabited’ areas with ropes and sheets strong enough to withstand the storm?

In the last year, travelling from Florence to Bilbao, from Bilbao to Cleveland, discussing metropolitan areas and districts, élites and new generations, politics and authorities, universities and research, pretty much starting from scratch every week, I began to wonder if this dream of giving cities a conscious vision of the future was an illusion or not.

In Italy there are no other examples of the work accomplished in Turin in the last ten years, except maybe La Spezia. But none of the population is ready to acknowledge this. We were hoping that Florence would give us a chance to draw some comparisons, between cities which are so diverse that they begin to look alike, having in common the fact that they are both former capitals of Italy, with opposing identities and images, but both needing to strike a new balance, not succumbing to image alone, but forging genuine, complex identities for themselves. But Florence has yet to light the touch paper for such a process. Both cities boast sociologists of uncommon intelligence. The strategic plans, which both appear to have, represent opportunities where outstanding people put their direct, farsighted approach into the service of the community.

And who should we find in charge of these two very similar projects, but Arnaldo Bagnasco and Carlo Trigilia. These two have known each other for years, the latter a student of the former, who in turn left Varazze for Florence, before coming to the city of the Agnelli family two decades ago, to put down roots and bring up his children. And one of these children is also dedicating his life’s work to the city, sure to make progress in a university career working on the permanent scrutiny of the television cathode in the service of the current administration. But while Bagnasco has not only brought up his children in Turin, but also given rise to the awareness that pulling together to work for a city is the most important investment for the medium-term future of an urban community, in Florence Trigilia has been spurned on his home ground. His vision of the world was too Cartesian and consequential for the professors of the university themselves. Now Trigilia has taken a sabbatical year, who knows where, buried among books to try and work out other opportunities for local development, no doubt disillusioned with his personal dream of making Florence an even better model than the city of the Savoys, blending quality tourism with a bent for enterprise, and instilling this into the new generation from Prato to Mugello, a generation too accustomed to wealth to dig into the family fortune and create new opportunities for investment.

Calatrava, Bilbao
But what really makes the difference, what is it that makes the dream of a city come true? Is Bilbao, that brilliant but denigrated example, a dream come true, or made true? And what about Pittsburgh? When I talk to the mayor of my home town about these two cities I see a sneaky smile, which I interpret as meaning that he is happy to be the mayor of Turin rather than Bilbao. Why so? Because Turin is a more beautiful city? A rich city, a welcoming city, with a new identity? Yet ten years from the opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao has not stopped dreaming, growing, changing. New houses are still being sold, the twin skyscrapers designed by Isozaki are almost ready while the Zubizuri bridge is starting to get grubby.

Cities were made to be walked round, but the twentieth century strove to destroy this vision and bury these roots

Calatrava, the architect behind this light, slanting bridge which looks like something a child would make with sticks in the sand, is a great organiser of the dreams of others, and deserves a parenthesis: his Opera house in Valencia has just been inaugurated, completing the large art and science district entirely designed by him. And the America’s Cup will see the city offering itself to the world. But the look of the museum alienates more traditional exhibits, and the Valencia region has to spend a few million Euro a year to maintain an architectural complex that wind and salt spray from the coast are turning yellow, like the teeth of a Cervantes-style ageing aristocrat fallen on hard times.

The Gehry museum is a different story, though some hasten to point out that it will soon be falling to pieces too, and that the planes that fly in the architect’s fans and lovers of contemporary art are not exactly chock-full. But what is the Guggenheim for? What dream does it represent? For travellers looking for new stimuli for their ineptitude, or for the population, who long for anything but climbing the league tables of their beleaguered cities, and spending decades under the fire of the welders piecing it together until the transformation is (perhaps) complete?

McEwan, London
There are dreamers almost everywhere it would seem, but who are only capable of dreaming up large-scale cities, cities to serve the city, with hot spots of wealth so wealthy that if the world went bankrupt, selling off a couple of their districts would bring in enough to save two continents.

Think about Chelsea, in London, the dream of a city that has made its metro into a symbol of its progress, with a mayor capable of making people pay to take their cars into the centre, a microcosm composed of a few hundred communities which are not at each others’ throats, but able to coexist side by side as if they had always done so. Londoners dream of freedom before wealth. But their second dream, no less important than the first, is to live in a city which responds to the needs of their families. A city where they can work and study, relax and enjoy themselves, look after their health and argue.

In Saturday McEwan describes this kind of London, the city par excellence, capable of containing and exalting its contradictions, rather than hiding them or combatting them as if they were a disease. When you see the offices of the London Development Agency, right by the tower and the bridge of latter day Londinium, where two hundred people work on the development of Greater London, you realise that here this is possible, and that the future envisaged is based on growth, rather than having growth as its aim.

Carrubba, Milan
But size alone is not enough, when it comes to dreams. Many years ago I visited the newly renovated offices of the Sole 24 Ore, and with reverential awe I met one of the men responsible for challenging the all-powerful publishing duo of Corriere della sera and La Repubblica: Salvatore Carrubba.

Sicilian-born, for Carrubba Milan represented a break from tradition, and corruption, a great opportunity to bring together people not yet sick of power, but with the drive for renewal. He became city councillor for Culture in the city dubbed the ‘economic driver of Italy’, but his potential and positive ambitions clashed with Milanese bureaucracy, which is slower and less efficient than that of many southern towns.

The problem that Milan suffers from is a national affliction, that crops up in patches, but clouds the waters of the city. The future of those working on creating a vision for the city is made of little pieces which can be difficult to stick together, which call for that special glue called pride: the very pride that Italy appears to lack. And without pride there can be no dreams, or at the very least it is difficult to get to sleep.

Bauman, Barcelona
With the binding glue of pride many cities can be built. This is something that Barcelona knows well, but it now looks like the situation is starting to get out of hand.

Mayor Maragall was a one-man show for his fellow citizens, playing football in the newly renovated squares, and using sport to take possession of the empty spaces, or unfinished areas, of a city in the process of being regenerated. As president of the Catalonia region, in a completely different time frame to that of fifteen years ago, he now urges for federalism as a necessary condition, causing something of a deadlock.

Now immigrants and emigrants are arriving in Spain too, and the population of old Europe is shuddering. There is “Trust and fear in the City”, a phobia of the melting pot, as the Polish scholar Zygmunt Bauman recounted one evening over a year ago at the Atrium in Turin, a centre dedicated to urban transformations. Walking with him from his hotel to piazza Solferino, now dominated by the Giugiaro-designed construction, I asked Bauman’s wife how he still had the energy to cover so many miles every year, just to understand the changes taking place. She answered that it was his dream to take his students in the university of Leeds a new idea every term, something to cultivate and germinate. A way of disseminating uncertainties to generate new hope.

Le Corbusier, Turin
After seven years spent working in the same place, seeing the city grow apace with my eldest daughter, who incidentally has the same age as my current job, I feel an overwhelming sensation of claustrophobia. The dream has become an obsession, and what I see is an area that has not yet reached maturity: only in the second decade of this strange twenty-first century will it begin to offer acceptable levels of quality and urban perfection. Another two generations will pass and we will grow old roaming around spreading ideas which cannot all take hold in an area which is already over-cultivated.

Dreams run faster than reality. “We live in the midst of a process and we are not able to distinguish or measure it”, wrote Le Corbusier. But now, unlike then, we are no longer in the “tumult of the conquest of industry”, and nowadays “the machines” are not “cared for like gods”. For people “set adrift” since 1943, the key to town planning is still an essential picklock.

The city I dream of is neither ethereal nor patrolled by security guards: it is a balance between social needs and widespread creativity. It is a city which has finally been told to “break free”, where the sons of soldiers are now conscientious, mature middle class citizens. Not a specialised city, but a special city, like the little canapés prepared by skilled hands, served up at the start of a celebratory Sunday lunch.