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New Urbanism's perverse version of Stanislavsky's method (practiced by Rubert Duvall in "The Apostle"). (Photo by Van Redin, Courtesy October Films) |
| Can New Urbanism learn from Modernism's mistakes? Recently I went to see Robert Duvall's film The Apostle, and was struck by its uncanny authenticity. The acting--by a variety of professional actors and everyday people--is so natural as to recede to invisibility. And the settings, directly sampled from Texas suburban and Louisiana bayou landscapes, blend into the narrative with a Shakespearean connectedness as particular as that of the island in The Tempest. There's a moment when the issue of authenticity surfaces explicitly in the film. After the charismatic Duvall character has begun preaching over the radio, someone remarks admiringly that white listeners assume he's black. For a while, the film seems to affect a familiar Hollywood attitude, crediting blacks with a special humanity, generalizing them as people of exemplary feeling and ennobling suffering. The Duvall character is able to move so easily among them, the film seems to say, because he is black at his core. But ultimately, I think, it communicates genuine sympathy. Black and white characters, fired by shared phantasms of faith, live together in real harmony, blind to their differences. Compare this with the Blues Brothers films, their white stars--Belushi, Aykroyd, and Goodman--likewise on a "mission from God." This pose is just a rip-off: These are clearly white people trying to be cool by acting black. There's no mistaking the contempt. Overpaid white musical mediocrities affirm their celebrity by frenziedly trying to suck vibe from great black musicians, from Aretha Franklin to Muddy Waters. Of exploitation, there is no truer version. This may seem a long preamble, but it all came into focus for me after debating a representative of the so-called "New Urbanism" at a recent conference. New Urbanism has emerged over the past 10 years as the leading discourse in urban design and planning in this country, and its apostles are building developments all over the map. The best known are two projects in Florida, the resort community of Seaside on the panhandle coast, and the much-hyped Celebration near Disney World in Orlando. Like The Apostle or The Blues Brothers, their visual and conceptual authority hinges on questions of authenticity. There's something disquieting about these places, not unlike the antics of the Blues Brothers. New Urbanism grew out of an attempt to join two tendencies in contemporary architecture--neotraditionalism and environmentalism--and the two have always coexisted uneasily. Reflecting this division, New Urbanism has East and West Coast strains, the one (represented by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and other disciples of the ridiculous Leon Krier and the hapless Prince Charles) invested in the forms of traditional town planning and the other (represented by Peter Calthorpe, Dan Solomon, and Doug Kelbaugh) more interested in mass transit, open space, and pedestrianism. To be sure, both approaches have something to commend them, and New Urbanists have produced some decent work. Denser patterns of settlement instead of suburban sprawl, nonpolluting public transportation, and the revival of the life and culture of the street are all subjects of urgent importance to any conscientious urbanist. The problem is the dull homogeneity of most New Urbanist architecture and the big-brother ambience of places like Celebration. Ironically, New Urbanism reproduces many of the worst aspects of the Modernism it seeks to replace. It developed in reaction to the planning practices of Modernism, the isolated towers, the brutal urban renewal, the monoculture of the car. Undergirding modernity was the fantasy of a universal architecture girdling the globe, doing its bit to produce the socialist "new man." New Urbanism promotes another style of universality that is similarly overreliant on visual cues to produce social effects. The endlessness of the little clapboard houses, twee front yards, and manicured town greens is asphyxiating. Most practitioners of this style of urbanism stop short of the millennial claims of someone like Leon Krier--who considers traditional architecture the manufactory of healthy yeomen--but the uniformity of their production, the polemic of stylistic superiority, and the creepy corporatist lifestyles are scary indeed. Like Modernism, New Urbanism overestimates architecture's power to influence behavior. The idea is that replicating the forms of the New England town green will move citizens in the direction of the good, democratic conduct that presumably arose from such arrangements in the past. (Never mind the witches being tortured just out of frame.) But in the same way that Disneyland's miniaturized, ersatz nostalgia relies on a huge apparatus of manipulation and control, New Urbanist towns are underpinned by a labyrinth of restrictive convenants, building regulations, homeowners association codes of behavior, and engineered demographic sterility. Restrictions range from bans on children and stipulated house colors to limits on what can be grown in the front yard, as well as other exclusions that cannot be placed so explicitly in writing. Robert A.M. Stern, Celebration's planner, elevates such rigid controls to the status of democratic principle; quoted in a recent New York Times Magazine article, he makes the Orwellian claim, "Regimentation can release you." The reality, though, reminds me of the great Patrick McGoohan TV series, The Prisoner. Behind the delightful facades of that glorious folly, Portmeirion, lay a sinister apparatus of imprisonment. While compaction is a key antidote to the soul-deadening, landscape-ravaging pattern of traditional suburban development, the New Urbanist version reflects an even more sinister development in American culture, the enclaving of communities against the threat of genuine plurality, a new style of apartheid. At present, more than 30 million Americans live in gated communities, sealed against marauders real and imagined. What masquerades as freedom of choice is a new urbanism of exclusion, and no amount of forced cooperation can conceal this. Not long ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Charleston, South Carolina, for the first time. I was knocked out by the charm and intimacy of its streets, the beauty of its buildings, the graceful situation of the town on the water. It's a wonderful place, and offers many lessons about the scale, texture, and order of the good city. New Urbanists often refer to places like Charleston as touchstones for their own plans, which have a small-town sensibility: New Urbanism is largely anti-metropolitan, a fantasy of a perfect order that never was. Despite the rhetoric, though, there's nothing authentic about what they propose. Charleston offers a cautionary tale about the limits of such grafted authenticity. To begin with, it's crucial to recognize that Charleston was historically produced, something New Urbanists--despite their constant invocation of the authority of history--tend to ignore. Whatever the pleasant social dynamic of its inhabitants, then or now, this was a town built by slavery, a waterside retreat for cotton and rice planters down from Tara for the season. Charleston recalls this still in a pattern of residential segregation that almost completely excludes African Americans from the historic core of the city. Charleston also embodies the primary physical problem of most American cities. Of a population of over a million, fewer than 50,000 actually live in the old town. The remainder are dispersed over a huge territory in an ooze of sprawl. While endless ink has been spilled in praise of Charleston's pathbreaking efforts to keep its historic architecture intact, little notice is taken of its out-of-control periphery. The New Urbanist solution--presumably a galaxy of theme-park emulations of old Charleston--might be better than sprawl, but it compromises the enormous potential for diversity that our pluralistic society holds. My own hostility to New Urbanism isn't absolute. I certainly agree that the suburbs need to become more urban if we are going to preserve the truly rural. Ironically, Charleston has the distinction of being the only American city constructed behind a permanent medieval-style city wall--America's original gated community. While this bulwark was built to defend the city against angry Indians and Spanish colonists down the coast, cities today require another kind of wall, one directed inward instead of out. The countryside needs protecting from the city, not the other way round. If I take exception to New Urbanism, it's for a failure of social ecology, not for its modest efforts to come to terms with the car. Harboring a single species (the white middle class) in a habitat of dulling uniformity, New Urbanism seeks the stability of the predictable, a Prozac halcyon in which nothing can go wrong. Nature--and democracy--prefer more dynamic forms of stability, compounded from order and disorder both. It's just this useful disorder, this sense of contention and flux, that New Urbanism dreads. Dull as the suburbs but lacking their vivid underlying pathology, New Urbanism is becoming the acceptable face of sprawl. Robert Duvall is one of our greatest method actors. (Stanislavsky's "method," an emotional technique for inventing a character by drawing on personal experience, represents a departure from the more intellectual, traditional techniques practiced by actors like Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud; Brando is its most distinguished exponent.) The promise of the method is that an actor becomes the character. Much of the promise of New Urbanism is tied up in a perverse version of this claim. The notion is that by re-creating an array of tics and forms, a new city will not merely look like the old one, but will behave that way too. There's a fundamental flaw in this reasoning, though--the old chestnut of form conducing behavior. Like Disneyland--a "city" based purely on the value of entertainment--New Urbanism asks us to believe that a shell of a city really is a city, that appearances are enough. But cities are for real; democratic culture cannot flourish in a theme park. And the Blues Brothers aren't black. |
Keywords:
New Urbanism, authenticity, film