"Perhaps city criticism should be recognized as distinct and necessary"
October 24, 2019 10:17 AM Subscribe
"Given how long we’ve relied on the work of critics on film, music, food, and much else besides, as well as the ever-increasing relevance of cities in our lives, it’s time we recognised city criticism as its own distinct category of writing. But what is city criticism — or rather, what isn’t it?" 'A way of learning from everything': the rise of the city critic.
Books, videos, commentary, and criticism by or about some of the writers and critics mentioned in the article:
Reyner Banham
Books, videos, commentary, and criticism by or about some of the writers and critics mentioned in the article:
Reyner Banham
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four EcologiesWalter Benjamin
Reading L.A.: A Reyner Banham classic turns 40
A 'radical alternative': how one man changed the perception of Los Angeles
The Arcades ProjectAlex Bozikovic
Walter Benjamin’s Afterlife
House Divided: How the Missing Middle Will Solve Toronto's Affordability CrisisJane Jacobs
Toronto Architecture: A City Guide
The Death and Life of Great American CitiesKarrie Jacobs
Dark Age Ahead
The 1979 CBC Massey Lectures, "Canadian Cities and Sovereignty Association"
Rereading: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City
Citizen Jane: The Battle for the City (Trailer)
The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call HomeOwen Hatherly
Talk: “The City Beautiful All Over Again”
The High Line at 10
The Smart City That Wasn't
Maurice Cox's Detroit
Palaces for the People: How to Build a More Equal and United Society by Eric Klinenberg – review: Why libraries, parks and other endangered public spaces are essential to good city livingAda Louise Huxtable
Radical suburbs: Owen Hatherley on the secret history of Moscow's mass housing experiment
Capital punishment: can Minsk move beyond its post-Soviet architectural malaise?
Concrete clickbait: next time you share a spomenik photo, think about what it means (previously on Metafilter)
Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013): Ada Louise Huxtable made history as the first full-time architecture critic at a US newspaper when she joined the New York Times, and was later awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1970Shawn Micalleff
The Ada Louise Huxtable Archive: “Buildings have to stand up” said the critic, whose rich archive has now been catalogued by the Getty Research Institute
What the Critic Sees: Ada Louise Huxtable and Her Legacy
Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of GreatnessJan Morris
Goethe-Institut Toronto presents: "Walking Bauhaus" Tour with Shawn Micallef
The Cities Podcast: Ep 101 - Strolling with Shawn Micallef
Suburbs are not a wasteland: Shawn Micallef at TEDxToronto
Authors at Harbourfront: Jan Morris (transcript)Lewis Mumford
The Culture of Cities (full text at archive.org)Ian Nairn
'Nairn's London' by Ian Nairn (1966)Nikil Saval
Ian Nairn and the Art of Seeing a City
Why Ian Nairn, outspoken critic of postwar modernism, is as relevant as ever
From London to Lancashire: First transmitted in 1972, Ian Nairn takes a journey to the industrial North and finds plenty to comment about in a landscape of surprises (BBC iPlayer, region-restricted to the UK)
Cubed: A Secret History of the American WorkplaceIain Sinclair
Afterlives of the Bauhaus: Nikil Saval looks at what happened to the teachers and students of the Bauhaus after the closing of the school’s doors.
The Impeccably Understated Modernism of I. M. Pei
Utopia, Abandoned: The Italian town Ivrea was once a model for workers’ rights and progressive design. Now, it’s both a cautionary tale and evidence of a grand experiment in making labor humane. (NYT, paywalled)
How Bauhaus Redefined What Design Could Do for Society: A century after its founding, the German school of art and architecture remains one of the most transcendent — and frustrating — movements of the Modernist age. (NYT, paywalled)
The Last London: True Fictions from and Unreal CityAlissa Walker
Stewart Lee talks to Iain Sinclair about 'The Last London'
Iain Sinclair - Living with Buildings walking with ghosts
London Overground - Iain Sinclair - full documentary
What's Happening on the Ground? - Alissa Walker at SAS 2018E.B. White
The real reason there aren’t more kids in cities: It’s not easy to raise a family in a big U.S. city—but it’s not any easier anywhere else in this country
Every bus in this country deserves its own lane: Free the buses!
Beyond Peak Juice Bar: Reimagining neighborhood
Here is New York (full text at archive.org)
I think Jane Jacobs still looms large in the discussion of cities because she was the first, and she was also an incredible writer and thinker. She deserves a massive amount of credit for that. At the same time, city criticism should change as cities change.
For example, a lot of Jane Jacobs' criticism could be summed up as "a good neighborhood should be more like the West Village", but that was written at a time when mere mortals could afford to live in a place like the West Village. These days, places like that increasingly have become luxury commodities. If we want more neighborhoods like the West Village, we either have to create them, or else change our whole concept of neighborhoods entirely.
Likewise, I've heard a lot of people using Jacobsean preservationist language to oppose any kind of meaningful development at all. But she was writing that at a time when Robert Moses was plowing through whole neighborhoods in the Bronx, and our best and brightest were knocking down masterpieces like Old Penn Station. The thing she was struggling against was real, but now we're dealing with a whole set of problems that weren't nearly as prominent in her day. In our large coastal cities (and their nearest suburbs), we literally don't have enough places to put people.
posted by panama joe at 1:57 PM on October 24, 2019 [4 favorites]
For example, a lot of Jane Jacobs' criticism could be summed up as "a good neighborhood should be more like the West Village", but that was written at a time when mere mortals could afford to live in a place like the West Village. These days, places like that increasingly have become luxury commodities. If we want more neighborhoods like the West Village, we either have to create them, or else change our whole concept of neighborhoods entirely.
Likewise, I've heard a lot of people using Jacobsean preservationist language to oppose any kind of meaningful development at all. But she was writing that at a time when Robert Moses was plowing through whole neighborhoods in the Bronx, and our best and brightest were knocking down masterpieces like Old Penn Station. The thing she was struggling against was real, but now we're dealing with a whole set of problems that weren't nearly as prominent in her day. In our large coastal cities (and their nearest suburbs), we literally don't have enough places to put people.
posted by panama joe at 1:57 PM on October 24, 2019 [4 favorites]
Moving to the city with the greatest disparity between low critic score and high resident score on RottenTomatoes.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 5:24 PM on October 24, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 5:24 PM on October 24, 2019 [1 favorite]
Philadelphia's Inga Saffron is pretty great. Her writing is actively making the city a better place than it would be without her. She covered the war in then-Yugoslavia, and said in a TED talk that after seeing people destroy cities she wanted to understand how people build them. Here's an older but good profile of her in Philly Magazine. And some more articles.
posted by sepviva at 8:13 PM on October 24, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by sepviva at 8:13 PM on October 24, 2019 [1 favorite]
Flagged as fantastic--thanks so much for putting this post together, mandolin conspiracy! This whole field was a central focus of my academic/intellectual life back in the 70s/80s, growing directly out of reading Nairn's London and Jane Jacobs in my youth, but I've lost touch with it in recent years, so it's wonderful to have this list of works. Thanks again!
posted by Kat Allison at 9:13 AM on October 25, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Kat Allison at 9:13 AM on October 25, 2019 [1 favorite]
So many PeopleSpace links in one one place, thanks very much mandolin conspiracy. I never seem to design urban space much - here there's a marked disinterest in having real living landscapes as a real part of the urban space, which seems a big part of the point IMO.
posted by unearthed at 10:44 PM on October 25, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by unearthed at 10:44 PM on October 25, 2019 [2 favorites]
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We could also use a second really great city critic so that Jane Jacobs isn't the only one quoted whether the neighborhood is attempting to block a freeway or prevent apartments from being built.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:38 PM on October 24, 2019 [1 favorite]