what forms a city?

You can, Or you can try to, look at what has driven a city into its present shape: like a face much of what has happened can be read in the surface.

 In New York it seems that it was nearly always money, there is little there that does not serve, or was not designed to serve, some nakedly commercial purpose. Take out the works of 19^th Century philanthropy: the parks, the Public Library, the grand post office building and a few other edifices and everything is retail, industry and logistics, shops, docks, little factories and gleaming towers of finance. The rest is rabbit hutch housing, though gilded and spacious hutches in many cases. Every where there is advertising and a blur of signs directing you to shops. In Times Square all of this has reached demented levels: it is an awful place and I can’t see how it was ever anything else, though it’s all corporate now rather than sordid and corrupt in the more obvious ways. It seems to scream through a thousand flashing screens that this is it: this is what capitalism can be; this is how desperately gaudy a billion dollars can be made to look. This is what all of that endless shouting about money and individualism was for, and it is utterly worthless as far as I could see, though there were plenty of gaping fans of shiny there at all times who clearly felt otherwise. If this is the apogee of the free market I’ll take Albania: it’s like being trapped inside a vast fruit machine with the contrast and volume controls permanently stuck on FUCK YOU.

 Moscow too has a recent overlay of this LCD Babylon chic: in some places it is almost as bad as NY, but they have only had 20 years to cheapen the universe and so most of the city remains what it was.

 The notion that America has no history is nonsense: Henry Hudson sailed up there in 1609 and they have been building ever since, that makes it older than St Petersburg. But even so there is not much evidence of anything before the mid 19^th century to be seen there, and most of it is 20^th. It is grand and there are beautiful buildings, but it’s hard to turn a corner and so find yourself wandering down a lane dotted with ancient churches and mansions. It would have been knocked down to make room for delis and hardware shops.

And then there is the socialism stuff. For nigh on 70 years these Russkies just gave up on commerce and city planning became a subset of Utopia construction instead of a money making exercise. This led to some foul errors, as the needs of homo sovieticus were decided by pale old men in the Kremlin, but they spotted that parks and courtyards were good. They were, moreover, consciously thinking about impressive vistas and striking images of post capitalist urbanism. They missed half of the time, and when they were under pressure they just made hollow concrete boxes by the thousand and crammed people in, yet even there the design for life ethos led to greenery and space among the towers full of misery.

And then finally Moscow was a capital city: St Pete’s got the 18^th and 19^th century sub classical pomposity that you can see all over Europe, or in Washington for that matter. But for much of the 20^th century architects here were tasked with expressing an expansive and noble image of ...what? Power maybe. In New York I felt the absence of all that capitol city bravado: the triumphal arches, and sweeping avenues full of statues and trees, the squares de la Admiral Smith and Commandante Jones, the Place de la some shit that happened 400 years ago. Russia’s is a culture of Monuments, if no longer a monumental culture. The Victorian English were the same: fat queens and portly gentlemen in weird hats adorn the English urban landscape. In New York there is much less of that, which is neither good nor bad, it just is.

 A city is better when it takes account of the quality of life of its denizens. The most impressive things in Manhattan were the results of noble striving on the part of bewhiskered 19^th century do gooders: Central park is just wonderful. Put one of those every 10 blocks and you’d have something really wonderful. But making money came before that and most of the good stuff only happened when 50 000 Irish or German immigrants started burning stuff: beauty as a concession to fears of the mob is no less beautiful, there’s just less of it.

 If I had to take a stab at what I like best I’d probably plump for London: it has the energy of the Moneyopolis school of city making, plus the Imperial grandeur that says “We were born to rule vast dominions” and alongside this the parks and airy spaces that the proles can walk in when they are done defending your commercial rape of Brownskin lands with their bayonets and comedy accents. The mix is about right, though a long way from perfect for sure.

Take out the money and you have Paris or Vienna: beautiful but slow, take out the empire stuff and you have New York, put ideologues in charge and you get Moscow.