The modern city is not only a place that you would want to see but it also changes the way you see. There are hidden aspects and glaring ones, noises that you no longer hear and ones that stand out in surprising ways. There’s alienation and inter-connectedness, separation and being together.
Birds fly straight into plate glass buildings and pedestrians get hit in blind corners; a cyclist is sandwiched at a junction between the kerb and a long vehicle, the vehicle makes a left turn and often, for the cyclist, goodbye. In a story by G. K. Chesterton, a mischief maker went unnoticed because he was dressed as a postman and in an urban community, nobody notices a postman carrying letters door to door.
The modern city that teaches you to see traffic lights and assorted street signs often makes you not see at all. It was Paris possibly that gave birth to the flaneur, a man about town who sees but does not want to be seen at all. Tables lined outside street cafes for coffee drinkers to ogle at passers by, street photography that takes in the walking crowd without their being conscious of the snapper behind the camera. We are flanuers and flaneuse but we only see things that we want to see.
Sometimes the city goes the extra length to make itself different from what it really is. The terrace house is said to be a plan of concealment of various blights, something that may be true if you walk along a street in West London where there is a house in a terrace that is not a house at all. Its windows are painted on and its front door, if it opens, will lead only to a drop into the beginning of the industrial era. This was a gap in between houses where the tunnel that was dug in the ground for the early underground railway opens up, for the water-powered engine to “let off steam”, an expression that we still use today to express a dissipation of bottled up anger. The Victorians disliked it and hid it from public view with that fake facade of a house.
I have been, these past months, engaged with a group that made it our business to go out and retrain our eyes and make others see things that they do not see in their everyday journey. This sometimes involved the John Donne approach of turning things on their heads to gather new meanings, sometimes the mere looking above eye level that we are accustomed to. But the message is that there is always something new everywhere in our city if only we’d look at things in a different way.
There is always the question, for instance, of why the poor are there in city areas. The most obvious answer is employment; the cynical though would pass it off as opportunism, where drug dealers and like-minded people prey. But sometimes we forget to look closely at activities around us — the street cleaners, the garbage collectors, the window cleaners, grave diggers and people generally who clean up the detritus that we throw away. And oh yes, they — these people — eat and sleep and have families and breed children too. There is no city in the world that can live without its low paid workers, the reservoir of the poor who do the work that no “self-respecting” urban people would do.
Look outside the vast, neatly planned romantic Paris, at the banlieux. That is the hidden Paris that tourists do not see, but as Nicholas Mirzoeff says in his book, How to See the World, that is also part of the history of Paris, the capital of the French Empire “that stretched from Africa to East Asia and the Caribbean”. The trouble with cities is that it often forgets itself in the grind of its daily business and solipsistic overtures. Perhaps if people who care about cities looked closely at the way urbanisation takes shape, their plans would be more inclusive, for both the rich and poor, housing for everyone, not just the top earners, respect for everybody — drivers, cyclists, pedestrians and how trees and garden squares can soothe the savage minds of everybody.
What is it that we want to say about our cities? What dirt do we want to sweep under the carpets of our neglect? What do we know about ourselves? Are planners themselves users of public amenities, modes of travel? If they have never stepped into a bus at 9 o’clock in the morning or lived in overcrowded and badly planned housing units or shopped where ordinary street-level people go, then it is high time that they do. If they have never got off their chauffeur-driven cars and walked on pavements under the blazing sun, then they have no business to call themselves citizens of the city. The first thing that urban dwellers should reclaim and relearn is the way of looking at things anew. Because cities alter the way we view and we can only ignore that to our detriment and the consequences will be too dear for us all.
Wan A Hulaimi is an NST columnist and can be reached at elsewhere@columnist.com