Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (48 page)

Right from the start, Howard made it clear that his vision rested on progressive land reform. Although his initial ‘magnet’ would be built on private property, further land was to be compulsorily purchased as the movement grew, and ceded to local control. In this way, a sort of incremental land enclosure in reverse would take place, gradually restoring the British landscape to something like its medieval form.

Although he had a Cobbett-like loathing of the choked-up metropolises of his day, Howard nevertheless recognised their social and cultural benefits. He argued that with his ‘cluster of cities’, which included a slightly larger Central City with a population of 58,000, the benefits of urban life – such as, for instance, the ability to put together a decent orchestra – need not be sacrificed:

We should have a cluster of cities … each inhabitant of the whole group, though in one sense living in a town of small size, would be in reality living in, and would enjoy all the advantages of, a great and most beautiful city; and yet all the fresh delights of the country – field, hedgerow, and woodland – not prim parks and gardens merely – would be within a very few minutes’ walk or ride.
³³

With its open-minded practicality,
Garden Cities of To-morrow
is a utopia for all seasons; a utopians’ utopia that reads like a back catalogue of the entire genre. Howard’s ‘magnet’ design is pure New Jerusalem, its limited population size Platonic. The plea for land reform is common to every utopian from More to Marx, the blending of urban and rural life likewise. Howard’s network of compact, self-governing city-states is borrowed from More, Owen and Morris, as is his political structure, a federation of local democracies. Other classic utopian themes include closeness to nature (More, Fourier, Owen), the enjoyment
of work (More, Fourier, Morris), shared labour and communal dining halls (St Benedict, More, Fourier, Owen, Morris …). One could go on.

Work on the first garden city began at Letchworth in 1903, to designs by the Arts and Crafts architects Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. But although Letchworth gave architectural expression to Howard’s concept, the land reform and social ambition that were its real basis failed to materialise. Despite its initial backers, Letchworth was underfunded from the start, struggling to attract investors and residents alike. The directors soon expelled Howard from the board, and reneged on the intended transfer of funds to the municipality, while the residents, instead of bonding with one another and cooking communal meals, kept mostly to themselves and commuted to a nearby corset factory for work.
³⁴
Far from realising Howard’s vision, Letchworth simply confirmed what More and Marx had always known. When it comes to building communities, there is no perfect formula; no instant ‘good city mix’ that works just by adding people.

Even as Parker and Unwin perfected their fancy brickwork details at Letchworth, the motor age was about to make their Arts and Crafts hamlets seem terminally old-fashioned. Just as the railways had liberated cities from geography, cars and aeroplanes now signalled the arrival of modernism, offering seemingly limitless possibilities for human inhabitation. Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine of 1922 epitomised the new vision. All soaring skyscrapers and linear apartment buildings snaking through leafy parkland, it was, like virtually every utopia before it, an attempt to reconcile city and country.
³⁵
What was new was the kind of city and country Le Corbusier had in mind.

Like the
maison citrohan
, his prototypical machine for living in, Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine was geared towards placing man within an abstract idea of nature. Sunlight and air, openness and greenery were all necessary to modern man’s well-being; involvement with the ‘other’ nature (soil, earth, farmland) was not. Like Howard’s Garden City, Le Corbusier’s ‘contemporary’ one was filled with public parks and recreational spaces, made possible by tall buildings that released the ground plane (‘crystal towers that soar higher than any pinnacle on earth’), and a segregated circulation system.
³⁶
Despite advocating communal allotments in his outer ‘Garden City’ zone in concession to the needs of its humbler occupants, Le Corbusier’s citizens of the future were far more likely to wield a tennis racket than a pitchfork. Although he later modified his plans in the Ville Radieuse of 1935 – even going so far as to include rural collectives, Fermes Radieuses, between his linear strips of city – it was Le Corbusier’s earlier urban vision, with its relentless combination of tower blocks and inedible greenery, that stuck.

It is easy now to question how such a clinical cityscape could possibly have been imagined to work; how it could have engendered a sense of community, locality or identity – to say nothing of how it might have been fed. But at the time, nobody thought to ask. Le Corbusier was a new breed of utopian: one equally capable of dreaming up fantasy cities, selling them, designing and building them. He was an architect – and, like almost every contemporary member of his profession, convinced that he had the vision and the means to save the world through design. He was the kind of person in whom the utopian tendency finally fused with reality.

In Europe, where the availability of land was always an issue, Le Corbusier’s ‘crystal towers’ seemed to offer at least some kind of spatial trade-off. But for the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright,
unlimited freedom of movement suggested a rather different opportunity: that of restoring man to his ‘natural horizontality’.
³⁷
Wright, who like Le Corbusier was an uncontested genius when it came to designing individual buildings, spent the last 30 years of his life refining plans for his ‘Broadacre City’, best summarised as a proposal to scrap North American urban civilisation and replace it with a coast-to-coast patchwork of family smallholdings, each with its own spacious ‘Usonian’ house (‘Usonia’ was Wright’s preferred term for his horizontal paradise).
³⁸
Wright saw a return to the land as the means by which Usonian man, ‘the bravest and the best’, would rediscover his true nature. ‘Of all the underlying forces working toward emancipation of the city dweller,’ he wrote, ‘most important is the gradual reawakening of the primitive instincts of the agrarian.’
³⁸

First published as
The Disappearing City
in 1932, the fully fledged project emerged as
The Living City
in 1958, complete with a meticulous 12-foot-square scale model showing how four square miles of the project might look. The patchwork of one-acre plots was to be connected by a network of hedge-lined highways that would be noiseless and odourless, since all the traffic would be electric. Although Usonians were expected to grow at least some of their food, their efforts would be supplemented by specialist farmers, who would take food ‘fresh every hour’ to roadside markets: vast pyramidal structures that were to serve as the city’s economic, social and cultural hubs. Like every good activist utopian, Wright was convinced the time for his vision was nigh: ‘The whole swollen commercial enterprise we call the City proceeds to stall its own engine,’ he wrote. ‘The day of reckoning is not so far away.’
⁴⁰
Then the Broadacre carpet would be ready to roll out, restoring man to the land, his ‘true line of human freedom on earth’:

… everywhere in America this warm upsurging of life is our heritage: a nation truly free to use its own great woods, hills, fields, meadows, streams, mountains and wind-blown sweeps of the vast plains all brought into the service of men and women in the name of mankind … This – to me – is the proper service to be rendered by the architects of our country …
⁴¹

By Locke out of Jefferson with a hefty dash of Thoreau,
The Living City
reads like an Outward Bound manual one moment, a pitch for the job of jobs the next. What it never reads like, however, is a project that anticipated the planet running out of gas:

… imagine man-units so arranged and integrated that every citizen may choose any form of production, distribution, self-improvement, enjoyment, with the radius of, say, ten to forty minutes of his own home – all now available to him by means of private car or plane, helicopter or some other form of fast public conveyance …
⁴²

Like all utopian visionaries, Corbusier and Wright were very good at seeing what was wrong with the world, and much less good at fixing it. They could see that urban civilisation posed some very big questions. What they could not see was that big questions don’t always have big answers. Sometimes the questions themselves need to be broken down, or asked in a different way.

If all utopian projects are doomed to fail and all ‘activist’ utopians deluded, why bother to look at utopia at all? The reason is that utopianism represents the nearest thing we have to a history of cross-disciplinary thought on the subject of human dwelling. Thinking in disciplines is what the Enlightenment taught us to do, and very useful it is too, up to a point. But two centuries of disciplined thought have given us architecture, planning, sociology, politics, economics, anthropology, geography, ecology and traffic engineering, each capable of operating in a virtual vacuum. What they have not given us is a way of thinking about dwelling holistically. Utopianism is at least an attempt to do that. You could say it brought us ‘integrated urbanism’ centuries before anyone at Arup came up with the term.

Taken on their own, activist utopias tend to come across as cranky, fanciful or flawed. Taken together, they reveal remarkable consistency. Their goals are often identical: bringing man close to nature, fusing
town and country, the sharing of labour, a strong sense of community. The same is true of their dislikes: large conurbations, globalisation, the concentration of wealth, mindless serfdom. Teased out of their historical context, utopian themes start to read like a universal wish list for human happiness; dystopian ones like a description of modern post-industrial society. So why, if there is such a clear body of thought pointing towards the kind of life that might bring human happiness, have we gone so firmly in the opposite direction?

The problem lies in the nature of utopia itself. Utopia might be a ‘good place’, but it is also ‘no place’, because the real world can never be perfect. The mistake comes when we try to build a perfect world – when utopia stops being a philosophical ruse and becomes a practical mantra. That way lies delusion; the belief that the complexities of human existence can be manipulated as effectively as, say, cars at a roundabout. ‘Social engineering’ is one of the most unfortunate legacies of socialist utopianism. It has clouded our thinking about cities for 200 years, and despite the many lessons of modernism, it remains endemic to the discipline of urban planning. But cities, as numerous sink estates and windswept public plazas testify, don’t work like that. One cannot capture the buzz of the Barcelona Ramblas by reproducing its proportions, nor knit communities together by giving people a piece of communal grass to sit on. Such gestures
can
work – but only as part of a deeper understanding of the social situation. In isolation, they are little better than urban phrenology.

By failing so consistently, utopianism teaches us some vital lessons. It warns us of the dangers of myopia, megalomania, monoculture. It shows us what can and cannot be achieved through design. It demonstrates the importance of scale, history, zeitgeist. It shows us that we can neither control the world, nor escape it. Most of all, it reminds us of our own limitations. Even when we try to change the world, we remain part of it. Ironically, its greatest lesson is the need to keep things real. We can’t live in utopia, that much is clear. But once we accept that, we are in a much better position to address head-on the problem of dwelling. Perhaps the greatest barrier we face is the sheer scale and complexity of the problem. Urbanisation, capitalism, geopolitics, peak oil, hunger, global warming – faced with a list like that, where on earth
does one start? It might strike us that there is something that does connect them all, not in an all-encompassing,
Gesamtkunstwerk
sort of way, but in a complex, messy one. That something is food. As a means of addressing the way we live, food shares with utopia the quality of being cross-disciplinary. But its great advantage is that it is grounded in reality. As we have seen in this book, food resists being contained and controlled. It embodies all the mess, chaos and dirt of the world, as well as its orderliness. Its rituals are specific in time and place and highly codified; yet food itself is inexorable, inevitable, universal. Most importantly of all, food is
necessary
, and so is very good at showing us what really matters.