The world (and books): Lynch

Just a few remarks on Kevin Lynch's Wasting Away (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books 1990).

”Complete chaos is never pleasurable” – perhaps this sentence (which occurs in the same author's The Image of the City) is true. To be sure, I know many people who like getting lost, and anyone who’s ever run madly around the city while intoxicated knows how wonderful chaos can feel. Chaos is, I think, closely related to waste – to the decay of conceived order, the slipping of things into incomprehensibility and meaninglessness. Yet, despite the earlier sentence, this is a book - posthumously published almost three decades later - by a man who now clearly appreciates waste, who feels comforted by it, and even loves it.

Let me get to the point. This book is interesting to me for two reasons. Firstly, it contributes to articulating the idea of a freedom very different from the freedom which we usually associate with the public sphere (the freedom of citizens acting in concert in order to influence their polity) and it does so with the help of the notion of waste. Secondly, it is explicit in locating this freedom in relation to space. Freedom and space come together in the discussion of places related to waste. Waste offers a kind of relief or freedom, but this relief or freedom can only be found in certain places or in relation to certain objects.

What kind of freedom is it? Let me offer a few quotes (accompanied by a few commentaries):

[L]iving among ruins has its delights... It can be a wilderness more wild than any natural one, an alluring mix of freedom and danger. (p23f)

Many waste places have these ruinous attractions: release from control, free play for action and fantasy, rich and varied sensations. Thus children are attracted to vacant lots, scrub woods, back alleys, and unused hillsides. (p25)

For instance, in a tale by Anais Nin, children play in an abandoned subway, ”a city beneath the city”, a thrilling and dangerous space forbidden to them by the parents, where they bring mats and candles and lead a secret life (p25).

Shabby, ordinary places escape the weight of power, the intent to impress; they are liberated zones. (p27)

Fire is such beautiful decay! (p27)

We are fascinated to see a building torn down. (p2)

’Trashing’ is an undeniable joy. It is a process of making things submit to us... Vandalism... is driven by this same pleasure. It is show of power by the powerless. (p32)

Here I recall what the Situationists wrote on the Watts Riots in Los Angeles 1965: "People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities".

Yet graveyards were once the parks of the city, places of quiet escape and social recreation. In a few cases, they remain so today. The vast cemeteries surrounding Cairo were used on holidays by everyone. Now they are squatter settlements. Our own park-building movement began with such landscaped burial grounds as the Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachussets, and the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. (p112)

Here I recall what the artists and activists in Miyashita Park told me about the origin of many Japanese parks in religious grounds, places that often functioned as shelters for the destitute, the sick and the discriminated.

Wilderness will develop in almost any untended land. The site of an old railroad station in the heart of West Berlin, once the largest passenger station in Europe, is now a rich landscape of ruined walls, tracks, and bridges, overgrown by thickets and wildflower meadows. The site, bombed out in World War II, contains examples of one-third of all the flora of the region, including rare and endangered species. (p112)

We are freed from control in waste places. We let down our guard, give up, relax in shabby comfort, do as we please. (p154)

An ugly, polluted, yet tolerant place...these urban remnants are also freer places, where one is momentarily relieved of the pressures of status, power, explicit purpose, and strict control. (p113f)

Wastes are traditionally dumped at the edges of settlement – in areas where the powerless live, where land claims are weak, and where controls are soft. (p115)

Examples of the latter included islands off the city harbor or in rivers. City lands where the poor and marginal lived also often became places where one located dumps, almshouses, lunatic asylums, jails and concentration camps. The moats of medieval cities were used for dumping garbage and today Las Vegas is surrounded by a ring of debris (p114f).

Wastelands are the havens of rebellious, marginal, illegal people. Swamps were the hideouts of the southern slaves and the refuge of the Cajuns. Mountains harbored the Cuban guerrillas, and the displaced intellectuals of China. The cold, wet, northern margins of European Russia were people by Old Believers, in flight from the Tatars and religious heresy. Wastelands are places of despair, but they also shield relicts, and the first weak forms of some new thing, a new religion, a new politics. They are places for dreams, for antisocial acts, for exploration and growth. (p153)

Wastelands, then, are seldom empty. They are the grounds of homeless, playing children, child runaways, junkmen, gypsies, rag pickers, criminals and many others. ”The labeling of something as waste must always ask: waste for whom?” (p148). Waste can be useful - what it's lacking is not necessarily use-value, but exchange value on the capitalist market. Dereliction, Lynch points out, is always in relation to the market.”If it pays, it isn’t derelict. If it doesn’t pay, due to some human devilment, and once did pay, then it is derelict” (p98). The use of waste is often inofficial. Waste moves in shady areas, ambiguous in relation to law and property rights. Abandonment is usually "a gradual process, a slow relinquishment of concern and rights. But the law wants clarity: either you own something, or you don’t” (p149).

Throughout the book, Lynch empahsizes the use-value of waste and waste places and their importance for children’s play, for the survival of other species, or for adaptability to future uses. They are places where children, but also grown-ups can find adventure and freedom from control (these are aspects that have also been emphasized by Tim Edensor and Martin Roth in their discussions on industrial and other ruins) and where many grousp in society find shelter and material support (for a recent and informative report on the life of squatters and scavengers in London, see Katherine Hibbert's book Free: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society). The taste of freedom in these places is quite distinct from the freedom offered by public space or the public sphere, and more akin to that of no-man’s-land, the dead zones, terrain vague or the akichi.

But has this freedom any political significance? It is easy to let oneself be deceived. There is a proximity to the ideological in Lynch’s book – to the aesthetics of ruins and of waste, to the delight in labyrinthine bazaars and endless Oriental cities, to the phantasmagoric intoxication – which attracted Walter Benjamin so much and which he tried to salvage by a tactile getting used to the debris, rags, commodities and novelties of the Parisian passageways – of the capitalist emporias. But there is also a soberness and carefulness in his formulations which prevents excesses and lets the reader make his or her own judgments. There is also, I feel, an underlying intact sense of care for the city as a human habitat, which strikes me as very different from the rather detached and cold-hearted aesthetic enjoyment of waste which I find in some literary works. I’m thinking, for example, of the aesthetization of waste in Don Delillo’s Underworld, were waste and the processes that surround it take on an almost religious aura.

Three thousand acres of mountained garbage, contoured and road-graded, with bulldozers pushing waves of refuse onto the active face. Brian felt invigorated, looking at this scene. Barges unloading, sweeper boats poking through the kills to pick up stray waste. He saw a maintenance crew working on drainpipes high on the angled setbacks that were designed to control the runoff of rainwater. Other figures in masks and butylene suits were gathered at the base of the structure to inspect isolated material for toxic content. It was science fiction and prehistory, garbage arriving twenty-four hours a day, hundreds of workers, vehicles with metal rollers compacting the trash, bucket augers digging vents for methane gas, the gulls diving and crying, a line of snouted brycks sucking in loose litter.

He imagined he was watching the construction of the Greate Pyramid at Giza - only this was twenty-five times bigger...” (Delillo 1997:184)

Here waste has turned into an alienated second nature, a world that has lost its humanity, in the face of which human beings can do nothing but resign or stare in dazed, shell-shocked fascination. Something similar can be said about much of the waste in cyberpunk fiction.

To Lynch, waste and waste places are natural in a quite different sense. Georg Simmel - in a manner that foreshadows Benjamin's idea of "natural history" - points to the peculiar balance between nature and history in ruins, pointing out that ruins are places where things grow, where nature takes over from man and turns what was once historical or man-made into part of nature again. Or, as Michael Roth puts it with reference to Simmel: “As things fall apart, out of their remains emerge new forms of growth. These are signs both of human decay and of reintegration into the natural world” (Roth 1997:2). Such a nature isn’t a reified, cold ”second nature” so much as first nature itself, albeit it returns in the guise of manmade products. It is natural, yet still a comparatively hospitable home to human beings - to squatters, homeless, children, artists and many others. It is not wholly historical and under the control of enlightened citizens, like the ideal public sphere, but neither is it an oppressive monolith. It is a nature in which history – the capability of people to act and change things – can grow.

The political significance of places like these resides in the fact that it is linked to an attitude of living with waste, without rejection. In a precarious world in which each one of us risks turning into the next piece of discarded, unwanted junk, this vision feels like paradise. That junk is not the other, but we ourselves.

References

DeLillo, Don (1997) Underworld, New York: Scribner.

Edensor, Tim (2007) “Social Practices, Sensual Excess and Aesthetic Transgression”, pp 234-252, in Karen A. Franck & Quentin Stevens (eds) Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, London & New York: Routledge.

Hibbert, Katherine (2010) Free: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society, Ebury Press.

Lynch, Kevin (1990) Wasting Away, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Roth, Michael S. (1997) “Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed”, pp 1-23, in Michael S. Roth et al. Irresistible Decay, Los Angeles: the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities.

Simmel, Georg (1959 [1911]) ”The Ruin”, pp 259-266, in Kurt H. Wolff (ed) Georg Simmel, 1858-1918: A Collection of Essays, Columbus: The Ohilo State University Press.

I’ve just read Kevin Lynch’s classic treatise The Image of the City (first published in 1960). I won’t write anything here about the five elements in the city image that are quoted so often: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Instead I will discuss the peculiar way the book has of making the city into a work of visual art.

Lynch’s emphasis is clearly on cities as aesthetic objects. Moral or political concerns are bracketed: the form of the city is focused; as for people they figure either as part of this form or as audience – an audience which, one feels, is primarily that of a spectator moving around in the city, rather than an inhabitant living or working there.

Furthermore, the aesthetics is of a peculiar kind: ”This book will consider the visual quality of the American city [and especially] one particular vusal quality: the apparent clarity or ’legibility’ of the cityscape” (Lynch 1960:2). By legibility he means the ease with which parts of the city can be recognized and people orient themselves through sensory cues from the environment, for instance by identifying districts, landmarks or pathways. Clarity or legibiliy, he argues, are vital for creating the impression of beauty, offering emotional security and spiritual well-being, and thus heightening the ”depth and intensity of human experience” (ibid 5).

Here already, one feels Lynch is taking a bit too much for granted. How about the beauty of labyrinths, for instance – the beauty of passageways in which to get lost? How about the brutality of clarity?

And why this emphasis on the visual quality? Remember Henri Lefebvre, who affirms all senses except the visual in appreciating the city and for whom the visual is linked to the ”space of representation” of urban planners and social engineers, to an official space imposed from above on the lived or perceived space of everyday users and inhabitants.

To the extent that Lynch urges us to privilege the visual perspective, isn’t he in fact urging us to be content, as users, to adopt the perspective of the planner, identifying with the master? To be sure, Lynch admits that ”there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment”, but he hastens to add that this can be so only under two conditions: that there is no ”danger of losing basic form or orientation, of never coming out” and that the labyrinth or mystery ”must in itself have some form that can be explored and in time be apprehended”. ”Complete chaos”, he adds, ”is never pleasurable” (ibid 5f). Admittedly, he agrees that planners shouldn’t fill in all details. What is needed is not a ”final but an open-ended order” in which the ”observer himself should play an active role... and have a creative part” (ibid 6). Clearly, however, he thinks that the main, defining features of the city image should be provided by city planning.

Maybe he is right that complete chaos is not pleasurable, but he makes it sound as if such chaos would result unless planners didn’t exist to guarantee overall visual legibility. But is that really true? Does our fear of chaos really mean that we must rely on city planners creating such legibility for us? Surely, order can also be created from below. We all find our favorite paths, neighbors tell us where to find things we are looking for, and in unfamiliar surroundings kind strangers often help us find our way. The question is: ”legibility” for whom and provided by whom? What ”legibility” tells a homeless person where to find shelter for the night?

I look forward to reading his last work, Wasting Away, which promises to be a very different work.

Lynch, Kevin (1960) The Image of the City, Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: The MIT Press.