Leaving the city (Has Sydney lost its Mojo?)
“I have always imagined that the city invented separateness. Why is it that those living in cities, the city dwellers, travel? To have a change of surroundings, they say. As soon as they leave, they are disoriented: a confession of their situation. ...The farmer is never really in foreign lands. He never feels the need to roam the earth because he lives there.”
Michel Serres [i]
For the first time in human history, more than half of the world's population now lives in cities, and for the first time too, our species' ecological "footprint" exceeds the Earth's resources. We are becoming distanced from natural environments and, at the same time, overwhelming them with pollutants, chemicals, and often destruction. The resultant eco-crises range from global warming, a world-wide loss of biodiversity at all levels (genetic, species, habitat, eco-system) to overproduction of chemical poisons, and all factors are multiplied by human over-population and over-consumption.
Lewis Mumford wanted "organic cities" over fifty years ago, worrying that they were growing out of kilter with the natural environment and processes, but he knew the task "involves the larger task of rebuilding our civilisation."[ii] Australian cities were established in fertile areas which has had a huge impact on habitats and species. The Adelaide site probably had South Australia’s richest biodiversity prior to settlement, but is now the most degraded. Sydney has only retained a small percentage of its original vegetation and in western Sydney half of the 900 native plant species are endangered. In the area around Brisbane only a small percentage of the original melaleuca forests and rainforest remain. Cities have vast ecological footprints; Tokyo alone, in terms of its use of resources, such as energy, arable land, pasture, forests, etc. requires over three times the land area of Japan. London’s ecological footprint is 120 times the area of the city itself.
Recent research suggests that cities pre-dated agriculture and little correlation has been found between technologies and the formation of cities. Jane Jacob links the early cities themselves to the development of agriculture. Writing evolved from archaic counting devices, after all, so much literature is a listing, a litany of praise. Cylindrical seals engraved with geometric and figurative images found at Uruk date from mid fourth millennium. The actual script lasted three thousand years, longest of any, and the texts entrusted to poetic form. Being a writer, I celebrate text blindly knowing I don’t know what’s missing through forms of memory grown on the body and joined to the body where it once stood. The golden age lay outside Alexandria’s 3rd C boundary, sound carries a hiss of white-water noise of wolves, beetles, bees, locusts and shepherds singing busy lives over the city walls to Theocritus. But for Aristotle the polis or city-state was comprised of both city and country, and at first farmers formed a large proportion of citizens.
The city and the country is a long standing dichotomy, but the sense of Feng Shui, the axis mundi, and surrounding temenos, sacred space, originally cleared, ploughed around, principles on which Canberra that most modern and banal of cities was designed has long gone.
In his poem ‘Walden’, Emerson wrote, “In cities high the careful crowds. Of woe-worn mortals darkling go . . .” City versus county debate was expressed in Australia through poetry in the Bulletin through the rivalry between two of Australia’s most famous writers, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. The poetic debate began with an anonymous poem, ‘The Voice from the Bush’ which had appeared in the literary pages of The Bulletin twenty years earlier. Paterson began with a poem in ballad form sentimentalising ‘the broken down man from the bush’ (from ‘A Voice from the Town’, Oct 1891). Lawson replied that the bush is, ‘land where gaunt and haggard women live alone and work like men’ (‘Up the Country’, July 1892); Paterson riposted with a poem asking if Lawson if the people he met their faces as sad as those in the city with ‘fallen women’ (‘Defence of the Bush’, July 1892).
Henry Lawson then made a personal attack on Paterson, accusing the solicitor (who was also a journalist, jockey, soldier and farmer) of hypocrisy, living comfortably in Sydney (‘The City Bushmen’). Paterson had the last word ‘he feels his flabby muscles with a feeling of regret’, the bushie is healthier psychically and physically (‘An Answer to Various Bards’, Oct 1892). Rural Australia is now suffering from dwindling economies in the small towns. Raymond Williams debunked Rousseau’s notion of rural life as simple, good, natural and undertakes literary revaluations, for example of the pastoral.[iii] Poverty, youth suicide and the young leaving for the coastal cities are making rural life hard and socially unsustainable.
In his essay ‘Charles Baudelaire’, Walter Benjamin says that in the consumerist city the flâneur “shares the situation of the commodity.” Not matching Walt Whitman’s appetite for Manhattan, where alone, he becomes part of the crowd, a tantalising potential of energy and eroticism. In the late twenties, the narrator in Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (Night Walker) knows every centimetre of an arondisment and elegises its history as a second modernisation is occurring and Boulevard Haussmann is being pushed through. Haussmann prepared the first accurate survey map while bulldozing much of medieval central Paris for offices and a full frontal view of Notre Dame and its pair of stolid towers. Paris was becoming the most analysed and dissected ever while becoming more complex and confusing.
In writings like "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) Georg Simmel influenced later sociologists and political thinkers. He argued that the division of labour and individual freedoms are the most developed in cities, but the individual has the problem of asserting their personality in such crowds. He was the first to draw attention to the increased speed and stimuli of urban life. From Adab, Isin, Kish, Kullab, to Lagash and beyond, cities have fed on noise, echoes, movement and expansion, they die if tamed to specialists in serial monologues, poor ingredients of a mob. Cities are now faster as nodes of technologisation, space/time compression (David Harvey) and the erosion of the here and now (Paul Virilio). Jane Jacobs argued this buzz is what cities are about, that simple city designs ignore the reality of cities, complex energies riven with subtle connections. It was a founding text of post modernism.[iv]
“When I first arrived, in the early 1980s, Sydney seemed to me the most vibrant and seductive town on the planet: wayward and eccentric, exuberantly unpretentious and energetically unpredictable; teeming with curiosity, dissent, pizazz and outright, outrageous, cheek. It felt, in other words, voraciously, ferociously, imaginative. Everywhere there seemed to be extraordinary people curating strange exhibitions, making bizarre and exotic jewellery, publishing subversive papers, directing grainy films or glorious, acerbic fringe theatre.” Elizabeth Farrelly[v]
Ten years later, Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton ask, “Does anyone remember the Trade Union Club? Sydney in the 1980s was a city characterised as a place of live music. Every pub seemed to have gigs and everyone was trying to make music. Not only music, but comedy and poetry and stuff at the weirdest edges of performance." (March 8, 2011).[vi] They suggest an arts precinct to get Sydney its mojo back. Ezra Pound like Plato thought you could socially engineer cities, unlike Plato he was not interested in technocrats or "the segregation of officials in Washington”; he said, “I want painters, sculptors, musical composers, architects, scholars in the art of verse."[vii] But cities are organic, they have lives of energy and excess and deaths of decay and misery, neither technology nor the arts alone can revive a city.
We live in a culture rich in violence, greed, waste, cynicism and lack of community. Often these traits are associated with cities, yet cities are fun, frenetic, energising and creative – I have enjoyed living in Sydney for 30 years but am relieved to have left, to live with fresh air, sunrise and sunset, trees, sea and wildlife. I was a member of the Trades Union Club, went to see bands, played snooker, drank - I remember free parking at night in the city centre, buzzing Alan Bond’s airships in a small Cessna over the massive Tall Ships fleet the bicentenary, was there for the Olympics, for the Sydney festivals when wonderful free entertainment was offered up on the steps of the Opera House, exploring the fish of Gordon’s Bay, the hole in the wall to St Patrick’s and North Head, home to kestrels, falcons and bandicoots, discovering the rock carvings of West Head and so much more.
Leonardi Bruni suggests attributes citizens (male) need for modern city life in his 1403 description of Florentines: ‘They are patient in labour, ready to meet danger, ambitious for glory, strong in counsel, industrious, generous, elegant, pleasant, affable, and above all, urbane.’[viii] Urbane is overrated, here in the country we have found people affable and generous and have made good friends quickly.
The last time I was walking down George Street I couldn't believe the noise, covered my ears, I was being assaulted, but cities have always been noisy According to Emily Cockayne (Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, Yale, 2007):
“This is the key difference I think between our modern times and times in the 17th and 18th centuries, the sound in the cities of pigs grunting and poking their filthy snouts into grain sacks and discarded entrails and grubbing through the stinking dung hills. They do make an incredible sound as well, they squeal, and often in quite a human way. Often when they were being slaughtered or in pain they would sound like humans in pain. We have street hawkers bawling their wares in such a way that they're not really sounds anymore, they're sort of strange noises, and people would work out what somebody was selling by their yell and by their scream, but often there was confusion . . . because it's just a mingling of all noises into a cacophony.”
[i] Michel Serres, Hermès III, 1974.
[ii] Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961.
[iii] Raymond Williams The Country and the City, Chatto & Windus, 1973
[iv] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House and Vintage Books, 1961.
[v] Elizabeth Farrelly, ‘Giving life to the Sydney of our dreams’, Sydney Morning Herald, Oct 2, 2001.
[vi] Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, ‘Sydney needs some of its old-time black magic back’, address to the City of Sydney council, March 8, 2011.
[vii] Ezra Pound, ‘America: Changes and Remedies’, 1913.
[viii] Leonardi Bruni, ‘Laudatio of the City of Florence’ (1403/4) in Perspectives on Western Art, Vol 2, Ed. L.H. Wren, Icon editions, 1986, p2.
It is “harmful to a city to superabound in delightful things, whether it be on account of its situation or from whatever other cause. However, in human intercourse it is best to have a moderate share of pleasure as a spice of life, so to speak, wherein man’s mind may find some recreation.” St Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine principum