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May 1, 2006
In the sidewalks and the silences, now
Few books have slayed me so completely upon first reading as Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Well, few sociology texts, at the least. Jacobs' genius was to take a a topic so mundane as "The Uses of Sidewalks" and to make it the most important thing in the world. A city, after all, is only held together by its sidewalks. They're where we dance. We barge and push and scream and shout and hate and look with disgusted eyes at the other people in our city, and they do the same to us. Jacobs, writing in 1962, saw something in that noise and smog -- she saw modern life. She argued with passion for dense population, for crowding (although not for slums), for the magic that happens when you push people in each other's faces.
A city, for Jacobs, was not in freeways and efficient transport - it was in workers in tiny bars at the end of shifts, or first thing in the morning, cracking eggs into their beers. She writes of the joy at a bagpiper showing up and spontaneously playing in her Greenwich Village neighborhood, of the clattering noise of the garbage cans as the collectors get them at six in the morning, of that New York din of insult and joy.
Jacobs died this week, leaving a footprint across the second half of the 20th century that few may be aware of outside of the circles of urban planning and sociology, but I think the ramifications of her book will echo in the avenues and alleyways of the world's great cities for longer than the fever dreams of Le Corbusier ever might (except for the poor people of BrasÃlia, I suppose).
Opening "The Uses of City Neighborhoods", Jacob says simply, with a hint of venom, that "neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine." A city is a city, she thinks, and wistful romance for the small town is not the most productive of sentiments.
She angerered Lewis Mumford, the grandaddy of 20th century urban history, a man who had an almost orgasmic committment to the emancipatory power of suburbia. Mumford's ideas of the 20th century city could not be more opposite to Jacobs'. One of my favourite pieces of cinematic ephemera, Mumford's 1930's documentary The City, is probably the best introduction to his point of view, borne in the fires of the depression, soot smeared on face, the machinery of the post-industrial revolution chewing workers to pieces.
There's a great scene at the end of "The City", where we see children who were condemned to child labour in the inner city, now pretty much free to swing and slide, under the watchful of eye of parents with time to love. I've often felt that the powers that plan in Perth stopped reading their theory at Mumford, right at the point where he exclaimed the virtue of suburbia. To give them credit, perhaps they read Engels writing about Manchester and had the bejesus scared out of them. Our city is riding an unprecedented economic boom, yet it feels like it's dying. It feels like there are hands around its throat, and it's too late to wriggle free.
To use a city's pub-life as a a barometer for its health may be a little simplistic, but I'd argue that it's a more realistic one than, say, house prices. Or at least, it's a bellwether that those investing in property would do well to pay heed to. This month we lost our last great pub in the inner city, the Hyde Park Hotel. It's been a few years since we lost the Grosvenor on the back of a noise complaint, and that was heartbreaking enough, but to see the last shitty sticky-carpeted band pub in the city finally cave in and open the doors to the Woolworths behemoth, something inside of me broke even harder.
Soon enough, the Hydey will close its doors, renovate, become either a bistro or a warehouse bottle shop (as its former owner, Paul Higgins, reckons), and I'll have yet another former drinking hole that I can no longer sink myself into. Already the bottle shop has raised its prices, changed its name and shortened its opening hours. This may seem like a small thing, but for those of us who live in Northbridge, Perth, Highgate and the like, we slightly crusty types who can't figure out how to keep the holes out of our jeans, we're feeling a little lost right now. The Brisbane? Gone. The Grosvenor? Gone. The Hydey? Going. The Northbridge? Jesus god - there's a renovation ripped straight out of the Sail and Anchor's "Removal of any trace of Soul from Long Established Drinking Institutions" guide. And if we want music? Well. Shit.
Whenever I visit a city like Melbourne or Montreal, those second-tier cities that aren't New York and have something in their make-up that's vaguely achievable, the thing that strikes me most strongly is the vibrancy of the inner city, and how much that is defined by the bars and the cafes. Even if your life isn't ruled by coffee, cigarettes and alcohol, you must appreciate how life and social circles swirl around the vices. In Melbourne, any kid with a door in an alleyway and the knowhow to hook a keg up to a tap (or to put a longneck in a fridge) can get a liquor license and start a pub. Some last months, some years, some days. But there are always new places, and always new life and new possibility. Though the traditional pubs have been ripped to shreds by the pokies, the city has really never been stronger.
In Perth, to keep a bottle shop open on a Sunday, it must be attached to a hotel. Licenses are impossible to come by. We're undergoing a review at the moment, and the Australian Hotels Association (read: the established pubs, the same ones that desperately want to introduce the same pokies that have made the fortunes and destroyed any hint of life in their pubs in the East) are campaigning vigourously against exactly the kind of change that would allow these types of establishments in Perth.
It was reading Jacobs that inspired me to think that a sense of creative community in Perth might be possible. The city's problems are deeper-seated than just in conservative licensing laws and a lack of good places to drink too much and pass out. But those are indicative symptoms. I learned what little I know of urban planning from disastrous runs as a mayor of Sim City, but even there the citizens taught me valuable lessons about sustainability, and the need to nurture a city at its heart. Jacobs knew that building a great city was about more than token installations of public art. She knew that empty gestures did not fill empty shopfronts. And she knew that above everything else, a city is its people. Design is people, she said.
I don't see the people in the sidewalks of Perth. I see only parking meters.Technorati Tags: jane jacobs, perth, urban planning
Posted by patrick at May 1, 2006 10:51 PM
Comments
that bagpipes bit at the top, paddy, reminded me of ringo telling the tale of the Four Lads, tired and giddy and happy after completing the recording of sgt. pepper's, sitting in an apartment in london, a fresh pressing of the said record in hand. they opened up the windows, dragged the speakers over & sat them on the ledge, and (this is early in the morning, keep in mind) blasting the motherfucking, earth-shattering album from their room. strangers on the street stared up, in awe--no-one outside of the beatles inner-sanctum had heard this yet, but they new who this was. this was the beatles. this was london.
m
Posted by: marty at May 2, 2006 12:12 PM
the hydey!? oh no! i am crushed, even from here. this is so so sad.
paddy, thank you for your ideas. they are wonderful.
Posted by: jackson at May 2, 2006 9:01 PM
your post here stirs up many things in me. first, a love of sociology. goddamn it is pleasurable reading. like tea in the afternoon, it just goes down well. it's amazing it's not read more. i think you can blame a lot of that on the church, if memory of sociology 101 serves correctly. secondly, you write with such heart, and this is lovely writing. and last, the hydey! let's have a few more drinks there before the last of the shitty perth pubs bites the dust. crusty mates too!
Posted by: linda at May 2, 2006 10:19 PM
And in off-campus student bars, Steve's has been emasculated in preparation for its yuppiefication. Only KK's remains, and it lacks the size for a true student bar.
Back to your main point, how does one go about changing the culture of a place?
Posted by: James at May 2, 2006 11:32 PM
I did hear whispers of the Hydey going going gone when I was in Perth last, but I didn't believe it. I am so sad in a selfish, my-drunken-memories-are-stuck-to-that-carpet kind of way.
So when I come home, the Hydey won't be there, but Howard still will be? That doesn't seem fair...
Posted by: catherine at May 3, 2006 4:19 PM
tell me WHEN!
will i be back in time (june) to give it one last rough and ready innuendo? to spill some beer/Guinness on its skirt and apologise by waking it with a sly grin the next day?
i have cranked my amp until it hurt, wailed walls of sound with the intent to arouse and gratify, watched bands and artists rise and fall there, given away travel ephemera, read poetry, cried, laughed, played my only ever solo acoustic spot, fell in love at exactly 9:33 on the 30th April, 2001 and my world has never been the same ... i have written about her, watched football at her, killed time before sets with my one and only real band at her, had crushes, been a crush, envied, loathed, eaten, sweated and felt alive and dead in that shite-y band room, or rocking the best alt-jukebox in perth (there was a time when my band's ep was in it; the only time we were ever in a pub jukebox anywhere), playing the 20c pool, dissing punks and goths and hippies, conversing with hookers, fucking drinking in all the human traffic in all its beautifugly diversity that is the ENTIRE fucking point of living in the inner-city. never even mind all the take-away booze the bottle-o provided for countless, priceless, irreplaceable good and bad times with you and yours and all the good and strange and gold people... ALL the freaky people make the beauty of the world. Amen, Franti.
if i had to nominate a single pub that i thought would last forever the way it has for decades, and that i thought articulated something stalwart about the perth live music world and it's distinct solidarity within isolation, it would have been the hydey.
but there's no sense grousin', is there? let's toast a good, dead soldier and get to plottin'...
who's opening her replacement?
r
Posted by: reuben at May 3, 2006 5:31 PM
once i was walking back from leederville w/ some books and i was busting.
really busting.
i see the hydey, & i dash in, knowing that i can't make the distance back to mine. okay. i kick the door open, enter the urine-stained hell-hole and let loose. MY GOD! unbuckling the fly was almost too much, and the gig up, but i negotiated it and as the intense stream made its course i yelled "CHRIST! CHRIST-Y FUCKING CHRIST... CHRIST!"
i was quite fucking relieved.
this GUFFAW comes from the toilet, & i turn seeing the door closed.
"Left that a little fucking late, didn't you mate?"
I laughed. "I certainly did my man."
& i buttoned my fly & left.
salubrious joint, the hydey. she'll be missed.
m
Posted by: marty at May 4, 2006 9:17 AM
great post. i'm about to leave perth for sydney so i'm looking forward to conducting this kind of analysis in my own mind as i peruse the streets of my new destination...
Posted by: yvette at May 5, 2006 1:45 PM
Jacobs isn't as anti-suburban as you suggest.
She actually begins "Death and life" with a plea that just as the principles of planning country towns should not be used to destroy cities, the principles of planning cities should not be used to destroy towns and suburbs.
Jacobs has very different ideas of what towns and suburbs are, compared to cities; and given her definition of a city as a vibrant creative meeting place where new new forms of work are created ("The Economy of Cities") you might find that Perth doesn't even count as a city by her standards, but instead is just a glorified town . . .
Posted by: Joel at May 30, 2006 10:05 PM
