No Rest for the Wicked

Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (eds), Restless Cities, London, Verso, 2010; 344pp, 12.99 [pounds sterling] paperback; Susan S. Fainstein, The Just City, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2010; 232pp, 18.50 [pounds sterling] hardback It seemed like a good idea at the time: rather than review the collection Restless Cities on its own, I would twin it with something harder-headed--a careful, sober study of the politics of urban development. Restless Cities, I surmised, would be a witty, clever, and well-written set of essays in cultural criticism, devoted to anatomizing and celebrating the fluidity of urban life. It would mix political comment and cultural scholarship with shrewd, first-person observation of and reflection on everyday urban experience. It's a well-established genre by now and while I fully appreciate its virtues, I was beginning to wonder whether we needed further reminding that cities, particularly huge metropolitan ones, are sites of 'endless making and unmaking'. Maybe it was time to focus on something a little less exciting: how cities limit us with soul-destroying routines, with terrible housing and terrible jobs, with the experience and the scene of massive and enduring inequality. Things didn't quite work out as I had planned. Not because Restless Cities didn't turn out to be, in fact, just as witty, intelligent and well written as I'd expected. It's a thoughtful book, covering a wide range of urban experience with considerable flair and insight. Nor is it because it contained perhaps the most eloquent essay ever written on the subject of coffee and baked goods ('The donut I ordered that day was a ring donut and it was an amazing donut': that threw me, I'll admit, though that may be because I live in Toronto, a city intent on turning itself into one giant bakery). No, the problem was that halfway through Susan Fainstein's The Just City--an admirable and also well-written study of the injustices that have attended postwar urban planning and development--I realised that Restless Cities was more hard-headed than the book I had chosen as its foil, which tends to go soft round the edges. Fainstein's explicit aim is to examine the degree to which considerations of justice have entered into planning and development practice in New York, London and Amsterdam. She discovers--to no one's surprise, I assume--that they haven't had much impact at all (although a great deal more in Amsterdam than in New York or London): planning is driven by the profits that accrue to developers and the desire to provide the wealthy urban middle class with places to live and places to spend. But Fainstein is no angel of history: she finds silver linings even in progress's worst hurricane. Speaking of the conversion of New York's Battery Park district into posh housing and posh shops (with planning directed by a wholly unaccountable board) Fainstein claims it was 'not a clear-cut example of an unjust policy: it did not displace people, it generated substantial tax revenues by attracting major firms, and it provided ample public spaces that were open to the general public' (p100). By contrast, the ruminations on waiting, imaging, lodging, driving, gardening, the use of phone boxes and so on in Restless Cities (the chapter titles are, in fact, a series of verbs in tidy alphabetical order: 'Archiving', 'Bombing', 'Commuting' ... 'Waiting', 'Zigzagging') are haunted by the immovability, the unjustifiable givenness of the structures around them. 'Waiting', for instance, written by Michael Sayeau, begins with a discussion of the British Airport Authority's cynical manipulation of those waiting for flights at Heathrow's Terminal 3, where the dearth of seats and the placement of departure boards far away from what seats there are ensures that waiting passengers spend their 'free' time in profitable shopping rather than fruitless sitting. From this everyday observation Sayeau extemporizes on waiting as a 'barometer of political atmospherics', in which queues for buses, food and the NHS show us how the powers-that-be demonstrate their mastery by making us wait for the delivery of the stuff we need. …

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