Twenty Minutes in Manhattan / Michael Sorkin

Reaktion Books, London. 2009. US$27 / GBP 16.95

This is New York kvetching at its best. Michael Sorkin, an architect who lives in the City (i.e. Manhattan), walks twenty minutes every day from his 5th floor, rent controlled apartment to his studio. In this book, he describes what he sees in the landscape around him and his opinions, usually strongly held, about the way the city has taken shape.

Growing up in the carefully manicured Garden City of Singapore (which gets a few mentions in this book, as does our dear "Uncle Harry"), I am quite a naif about how 'real' cities come into being, grow, and are shaped by multifarious forces. The book was a crash course for me on the ins and outs of concepts like rent control, landlord-tenant relations, fire regulations, building codes, and city zoning, things which are not immediately obvious to someone who's lived in a landscape dominated by highly similar high-rise public housing.

Sorkin is keen on the work of Jane Jacobs, and he mentions her influential work The Death and Life of a Great American City several times. He is quite clear about who he doesn't like: rapacious developers, Robert Moses, the Modernists (especially Le Corbusier - "Corb"), Donald Trump.... This dose of crankiness can be quite excessive - I didn't think a whole chapter on the weasel-ways of his landlord was entirely necessary - and it sometimes strikes me as being simply reactionary. Beneath all the complaining, though, what Sorkin fundamentally argues for is a vision of the city (and urban life in general) as being scaled to the human being. He argues for walking over automobiles, lively streets over condos for the jet-set, equitable housing over gentrification, and for architectures that are designed for their climate and environment, rather than being hermetically sealed glass-and-steel towers. At first glance this book is about architecture and urban design, but it's really about society and the human being as a social being. In this context, his long rant about the landlord makes sense: it's really about social altruism, its fragility, and its ease of frustration; as a guide to the tragedy of the commons it is particularly eloquent.

I must admit that I was quite underwhelmed when I visited the great city myself - how could anyone love such an icky, dingy place? Compared to the great shiny cities like Shanghai or Dubai that are being built with amazing speed all over the developing world, New York could do with a facelift and some tidying up. But the point that Sorkin makes is that the 'tidying up' that well-intentioned (or corruptedly profiteering) city planners and developers push for will eventually end up killing the soul of the city, destroying its naturally-formed communities, and homogenizing it into a world where human relations matter less and less. And maybe it is worth having the streets a bit dingy and the walls a bit crusty if we can defer that bland, soulless future for some time yet.