First published in the UK in 2013 by
Leaping Hare Press
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East Sussex BN7 2NS, UK
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Text copyright © Adam Ford 2013
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Print ISBN: 978-1-908005-77-5
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78240-031-8
Mobi ISBN: 978-1-78240-032-5
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Leaping Hare Press
Creative Director PETER BRIDGEWATER
Publisher SUSAN KELLY
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Colour Origination by Ivy Press Reprographics
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
Urban Gardens, Allotments, Bees & Chickens
CHAPTER TWO
A Wealth of Urban Culture
CHAPTER THREE
Urban Problems
CHAPTER FOUR
Recreation & Walking in the City
CHAPTER FIVE
Vistas, Cemeteries & Observatories
CHAPTER SIX
The Changing City: Past & Future
Bibliography & Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
The growth of great cities is currently unstoppable; they spread outwards on the surface of the planet like patches of lichen on a rock, visible from space even at night, as glowing constellations of light. Are they the future? Or are they just too big to survive? Will they burn out, in a conflagration of social discontent and riot, corruption, crime or plague, ultimately unsustainable and doomed to self-destruct from the start? We may be living on the cusp of the biggest humanitarian disaster to befall the world. Or perhaps we are not…
The practice of mindfulness was a way of life for the Buddha and his disciples, and it continues to be followed today. It might seem strange at first to associate this peaceful practice with the noise and bustle of urban living – but that is exactly where it comes into its own.
T HE BUDDHA FIRST TAUGHT MINDFULNESS two and a half thousand years ago in northern India, where new cities were growing fast, founded on an expanding iron industry. The Buddha’s gospel was intended for a new generation of individuals created by city life, who wanted to let go of the trappings of organized religion (complex rituals dominated by the powerful priesthood of the caste system), to find their own way.
The practice of mindfulness is a way of living, a way of knowing oneself and the world. It involves taking stock regularly of the way things are, living consciously, becoming more aware and realistic about life. It is more than just taking time to ‘stand and stare’, although that is an important element. Mindfulness means taking time to meditate, setting aside moments of the day to become awake to one’s physical body, emotional feelings and thoughts, discovering a renewed poise and calm. Classically, it begins with focusing on the simple activity of breathing, as life-giving air flows in and out of the lungs. To do this we need to find a comfortable private place to sit, back upright, shoulders open (but nothing forced) and let the breathing come naturally. Those of us who live in a town or city will then use this technique to go further and explore through meditation the urban environment that lies at our own doorstep. We look out imaginatively at the streets and the people with compassion and kindness, optimism and realistic hope. We are glad to be here. We resolve to take ownership of our situation and find the very best in it.
Living in an urban environment will mean something different to each of us. Dense clusters of population vary extensively in character and size from the small compact town, traditionally providing a market place for local farmers, to the vast sprawling metropolis of the modern industrialized world. Some larger towns tend these days to be referred to loosely as cities, although strictly a city is a large town that has been given the title of city by charter, especially when it contains a cathedral. In The Art of Urban Living, I will offer some thoughts on how to enjoy the challenges and opportunities we face when living in these exciting places.
I lived in London for thirty years and have only recently moved down to Sussex, a county in the south east of England – not because I have given up on the city, but because I got married and my wife Ros is based there for work. Three of my children still live in London, and so, what with visiting them, friends and my favourite galleries, I still feel that the city is home. Living in Lewes in Sussex, just an hour from the centre of the capital, has given me an opportunity to reflect on all that I have enjoyed about living an urban life, and to bring this together with my experiences of time spent in other great cities of the world – New York and San Francisco; Paris and Prague; Sydney and Perth in Australia; Buenos Aires and Asunción in South America. All these places, and more, have strengthened my conviction that cities can bring out the very best in people, and are great places just to be – and to live the good life.
Cities have been around for a mere blink of the eye of evolutionary time. They are a recent development in human history, first appearing after the end of the last Ice Age and having a pivotal role in the emergence of civilization. The rise of agriculture, ten thousand years ago, accompanied and spurred on the growth of settled communities; with a surplus of food, new opportunities offered themselves and new trades and skills were created. It was the beginning of a process of liberation for mankind.
With the first cities we begin to see the growth of commerce and counting, and the market place becomes the focus of a new world order, a social hub for the exchange of ideas as well as for trade. Culture begins to flourish in art and music; and writing is invented. Modern man is on his way.
Like a new form of plant life, cities began very small, smaller even than a twenty-first century village; they were no more than clusters of a few dwellings drawn together for protection, perhaps against the wind and the cold, or by the discovery that cooperation when planting and harvesting crops is better than the isolation of ploughing a lonely furrow. And when the harvest was good, the community needed protection from another threat – the marauding neighbour, living by theft rather than hard work, and jealous of the stored surplus of food. Efficiency in agriculture, it seems, was the godparent of both the cooperating city community and of the protective city walls. From these small beginnings the city grew organically to become that almost unrecognizable descendent, heaving with humanity – the teeming, vehicle-polluted, skyscraper-dominated metropolis of today.
A Slow Process
The historical line of descent from small cluster of houses, through village and town, to the modern city of the twenty-first century was rarely continuous. Many places became uninhabited and fell into ruin. But they left their mark. Skara Brae, situated on the Bay o’Skaill on Mainland Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland, is a beautiful example. In 1850, a great Atlantic storm swept away thousands of tons of shoreline and uncovered this wonderfully preserved Neolithic village of eight dwellings; for forty centuries it had been lost beneath a great sand dune. Each stone-walled house has a square room with a central fire, a sleeping place to each side, stone shelves for storage and, in the corner, a simple pestle and mortar for grinding corn. Life there must have been cosy – the houses are clustered tightly together with narrow slab-covered alleyways between. Earliest signs of habitation at Skara Brae date back over five thousand years. The visitor is bound to marvel at the neatly constructed walls and wonder who it was that placed and fitted the stones with such care.
We have urban communities to thank for the development of culture and civilization. Museum collections and art galleries, well-proportioned town squares and ancient architecture are not add-on extras for tourists, but have always been part of the essence of city life, their roots lying far back in history.
T HE GROWTH OF GREAT LIBRARIES and the patronage of the arts developed alongside the creation of beautiful buildings, elegant façades and ornamental gardens. We can only guess at what the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, must have been like; we can only speculate on the rich content of the great library of Alexandria, sadly destroyed in a dark period of prejudice. But any tourist can stroll, today, through the medieval streets of Prague or Carcassonne, or marvel at the classical features of the elegant rock architecture of Petra in Jordan, the ‘rose-red city half as old as time’, and reflect on past times, noticing what is different, but also how some things never change.
Continuous Occupation
Very few towns or cities can claim continuous occupation over a period of many millennia. One of the few, claimed by some to be the oldest continuously inhabited city on Earth, is the town of Jbeil, with a population of 40,000 people, just 40 km (25 miles) north of Beirut in Lebanon. This attractive tourist resort, with its small Mediterranean harbour and sunny beaches, is the ancient town of Byblos. Evidence of occupation covers nine thousand years, stretching back to the seventh millennium BC. The combination of a natural harbour and surrounding land of rich fertile soil has guaranteed the town’s survival, and its original name highlights something important – the inextricable link we find between urban living and the development of culture. The early Greek word for papyrus (one of the town’s chief exports), on which some of the earliest examples of writing can be found, was ‘byblos’, from which the town took its name and from which we derive, in English, the word Bible, and in French ‘bibliothèque’ – a library of books, some would argue, containing and representing the very essence of culture.
We are able to identify with layer upon layer of history by living in a city, to connect with generations of our forebears, enjoying the rich cultural threads that link us – art and architecture, museum, library and garden. We share with them the things they valued and we benefit enormously.
The city, often walled and protected, remained for several thousand years home for a small minority of people. The majority of mankind lived rural lives, mostly as subsistence farmers. It was the Industrial Revolution, starting in the mid-1700s, that changed all that, and it was London that grew to be the first megacity, its population rocketing from one to ten million in just a hundred years. And yet, according to The Urban Age Project (a joint collaboration between the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society), even as late as 1900 only 10 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities. But the twentieth century saw a quantum explosion of urban life, so that by 2007 the number had reached 50 per cent – and the projections are startling. It is estimated that by the year 2050, as many as 75 per cent of us will live in cities. Human beings will truly have become an urban species, whether we like it or not.
Public opinion has always been mixed about cities; whether they are a good or a bad thing. They evoke strong feelings, dividing people, almost tribally, into ‘country folk’ and ‘town folk’; ‘us’ and ‘them’. For every rural migrant who dreams of city streets ‘paved with gold’, there is someone else who steers well clear of the urban scene, imagining all the horror of an ‘overcrowded nightmare’.
When I was a vicar in an old mill town in West Yorkshire, it always amused me to hear the opinions of local people about those who lived in London. There was distinct disdain in many voices when the topic came up. Anyone who opted to live in London ‘must be mad’.
Once a year, just before Christmas, a group of wives in the parish would book a coach to take them down to the metropolis for a day’s shopping. The lights of Oxford Street and the teeming stores were the perennial attraction. But then they would drop in to one or two of the more expensive shops in the West End ‘for a laugh at the prices’.
They returned home late, sometimes merry and singing, convinced that anyone who actually lived in London had to be out of their mind. ‘I hate all that noise – it never stops!’, ‘The traffic is horrendous – and the fumes! – enough to kill you!’ And: ‘If you ask directions, no one seems to speak English – they are all foreigners down there!’ And so the stories would go on: memories rehashed amid laughter and relief to be home.
The Melting Pot
It has always been thus. One of the oldest stories in the world, of the Tower of Babel, records the fears and prejudices of tent-dwelling nomads in Mesopotamia when confronted by a brick-built city with narrow paved streets, houses several storeys high and an impressive ziggurat tower reaching to the skies. Everyone in the market place seemed to be foreigners, speaking different tongues. The nomads, in their fear, interpreted this to be a curse. A wrathful God must have punished the community for trying to build their way up to heaven with their great tower; and he had caused them to speak different languages so that they would not be able to understand one another. The nomads judged wrongly. They could not comprehend that a city contains a rich mixture of peoples coming together to trade, or that great architecture raises the spirits.
The different languages, and different ways, the mix of religions and colour, the ‘foreigners everywhere’, are what makes a modern city vibrant – something to be celebrated, not deplored. Just think of the foods one can sample on a trip downtown: Indian, Chinese or Mexican;Turkish, Iranian or Japanese, or traditional English fish and chips, a favourite of mine!
A Matter of Opinion
The question for us, living today, is how to view the city, and we may well be ambivalent in our opinions. Is it a concrete jungle, a place of pollution and pressure, sleazy theatre of the exhausting rat race, and to be avoided at all costs? Perhaps we dream of living at the end of a lane in the country, or somewhere with trees and open fields, or on a remote island with only half a dozen neighbours.
Alternatively, could the modern city be seen as a potential urban utopia – a place rich with possibilities for enlarging the human spirit?
So, which is it? Concrete jungle or city of dreams? Hellhole or heaven?
I take, in this book, an unashamedly positive view of the city and the wealth of opportunities available to the urban dweller in the twenty-first century. I reflect mindfully on all it has to offer and look for evidence that the good life can be lived here. We need to be alert to what is happening in the world; to listen, for example, when a traveller describes Shanghai as a vibrant metropolis full of creative energy, a city looking to a future full of hope and promise. We should not be surprised when we hear someone saying how much they love living in their city, as I once was when an interviewee on the radio expressed the conviction, ‘I feel very alive when I am in Detroit.’ On reflection, I realized that was exactly my own experience when I was teaching for a time on the Upper East Side in New York. Manhattan was invigorating, life enhancing, and I felt as though I was living in more than just a city; I was living in a great idea.
‘If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.’
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)
AMERICAN AUTHOR & JOURNALIST
WHAT STOPS US?
Simple laziness and a lack of imagination are often our greatest enemies. We get into a rut doing the daily chores and forget to take stock of our situation. We procrastinate and tell ourselves that there will be time later to get organized. All those chains of habit become a dull weight on our days. It’s easy for life’s small routines to take up our time and leave us forgetting that there is a city, waiting, beyond the door.
There are deeper factors too. We may have lost belief in our own ability to find new pleasures; to stop, look up and enjoy life. Or we may have lost faith in the city as a great human enterprise, only seeing the worst in it. Practising mindfulness and becoming more aware of who and where we are can overcome these difficulties. While reflecting on our own life and the lives of those around us, we can begin to ask the question, ‘How can I make good of this opportunity; how can I begin to savour life in the city?’
Unquestionably, the modern city has problems – problems of overcrowding, of crime and terrorism, unemployment and pollution. Transport systems are strained to breaking point and the delivery of clean water or the handling of sewage, in many parts of the world, become a major challenge, exacerbating the problems of poor health.
T HE PROBLEMS DO NOT END THERE