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DNF report: The Living City
I picked up "The Living City" by Des Fitzgerald at the bookstore a few weeks ago because it sounded interesting - the book's core premise is that trying to make cities "greener" (in the sense of more trees, more connection to nature, more intentional planning of green spaces within urban spaces, etc) is antithetical to the purpose of a city. So I wanted to see what he had to say about that.
The answer is: very little. This is essentially a book-length manifesto about how the entire concept of a green city is rooted in early-20th-century racism and fascism. There are some interesting ideas in here, but for a book whose entire premise is that trying to change cities into something else is wrong, bad, and also fascist, there's a surprising lack of actual positivity about cities as they currently exist. He just doesn't like the concept of planned cities, and especially city planning with the intent of introducing more nature into cities, based on the idea that green spaces are a more natural human environment. But he rarely brings up existing cities except to talk about how much he hates them, specifically. Paris? Awful. Copenhagen? Worst city he's ever been in. New York? Soulless grid. There's one chapter that opens with several pages dissing on Melbourne, Australia, for wanting to preserve its self-image as "a genteel outpost of European colonialism" because the residents are upset about all their trees dying in a drought. He doesn't seem to hate London as a whole (I GUESS) but mostly talks about it in the context of "fuck these specific neighborhoods in particular."
In case you're thinking this is because he'd rather be in the country - definitely not! He also hates the country. The worst thing about making cities greener is that it makes them more like the country. He refers to the part of Ireland he grew up in as "a bog" which he was glad to escape. The country is also terrible and the last thing cities want to do is be more like the country.
The truly baffling thing about this book is that it contains exactly zero content about the main thing I picked it up for: to find out what alternative he's proposing. Trees and other green spaces have obvious benefits that even he makes a nod to every now and then (cooling things down, trapping water, supporting wildlife, beneficial effects on the mental health of their residents, etc), plus most people who live in cities like them, and I was wondering what he was going to propose as an alternative, and he just - doesn't! What I knew from reading the blurb on the back of the book - that he feels cities are meant to be chaotic, grimy, full of machines and people but lacking in plants - is exactly as much as I know after reading 2/3 of the book. I guess I was expecting a paean to how cities in their modern chaos are flawed but great, and instead I got a book about how cities are almost uniformly terrible, but planned, green cities and the country are even worse, and also planting trees is a fascist tool to pacify the working class.
I didn't really DNF on purpose, so much as I put it down because I was reading other things and just never picked it back up again because the more time that went by without dealing with this guy's relentless negativity, the less I wanted to go back to it. So I guess it's a DNF.
The answer is: very little. This is essentially a book-length manifesto about how the entire concept of a green city is rooted in early-20th-century racism and fascism. There are some interesting ideas in here, but for a book whose entire premise is that trying to change cities into something else is wrong, bad, and also fascist, there's a surprising lack of actual positivity about cities as they currently exist. He just doesn't like the concept of planned cities, and especially city planning with the intent of introducing more nature into cities, based on the idea that green spaces are a more natural human environment. But he rarely brings up existing cities except to talk about how much he hates them, specifically. Paris? Awful. Copenhagen? Worst city he's ever been in. New York? Soulless grid. There's one chapter that opens with several pages dissing on Melbourne, Australia, for wanting to preserve its self-image as "a genteel outpost of European colonialism" because the residents are upset about all their trees dying in a drought. He doesn't seem to hate London as a whole (I GUESS) but mostly talks about it in the context of "fuck these specific neighborhoods in particular."
In case you're thinking this is because he'd rather be in the country - definitely not! He also hates the country. The worst thing about making cities greener is that it makes them more like the country. He refers to the part of Ireland he grew up in as "a bog" which he was glad to escape. The country is also terrible and the last thing cities want to do is be more like the country.
The truly baffling thing about this book is that it contains exactly zero content about the main thing I picked it up for: to find out what alternative he's proposing. Trees and other green spaces have obvious benefits that even he makes a nod to every now and then (cooling things down, trapping water, supporting wildlife, beneficial effects on the mental health of their residents, etc), plus most people who live in cities like them, and I was wondering what he was going to propose as an alternative, and he just - doesn't! What I knew from reading the blurb on the back of the book - that he feels cities are meant to be chaotic, grimy, full of machines and people but lacking in plants - is exactly as much as I know after reading 2/3 of the book. I guess I was expecting a paean to how cities in their modern chaos are flawed but great, and instead I got a book about how cities are almost uniformly terrible, but planned, green cities and the country are even worse, and also planting trees is a fascist tool to pacify the working class.
I didn't really DNF on purpose, so much as I put it down because I was reading other things and just never picked it back up again because the more time that went by without dealing with this guy's relentless negativity, the less I wanted to go back to it. So I guess it's a DNF.
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Another victim of Big Tree. 😔
but at least if the author LIKED grimy treeless cities full of machines, there would be been some positivity in there somewhere?
See, that's what I was expecting! I think I would have liked this book a lot better if it was at least PARTLY about how much he loves the vibrant, messy nature of modern cities. But he doesn't actually seem to love anything! I couldn't help laughing when I got to the part of the book where he describes Copenhagen - COPENHAGEN!! - as the worst city he's ever been in. (I've never been to it, but I think I can say with an extremely high level of confidence that Denmark is probably not the nadir of urban existence.) Dude, I'm pretty sure the problem is you.
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Signed,
An urban resident who loves her nearby parks
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His original title seems to have been The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow, although from
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I found an interview with him because I was so curious about how he actually felt about cities and if he has a thesis that is not a generalization of his personal experience, he does not seem easily able to convey it:
"I've always been suspicious that you scratch a kind of wellness person and you'll get this very reactionary politics underneath [. . .] We have this really romantic idea that trees and forests are calming and good and serene for people. And we should just remind ourselves that for most of human history that was not the case. Until about the start of the 1800s, the forest was a space of fear and terror and the unknown. I mean, there's a reason that fairy tales are set in the forest.
"And today, not everyone feels comfortable or welcome outside the city. You need to be embodied in a particular kind of way to feel that sense of security.
"So there's that. And then I just refuse this very anti-modern idea that the city is necessarily, or always, or probably, a kind of bad experience for people. I spent the first few years of my life in the center of Ireland, in a county called Westmeath, which is a completely featureless, derelict bog. And I have this strong memory—you know, like a memory that's so strong that it's probably not true—of when my wife and I moved to London in our early 20s. Sometimes when you fly into London, if you get lucky they take a route that takes you right over the city. So you get the full panorama. And I remember having this sense of serenity—there is something about that unrolling mass of anonymity, of possibility, that for me was genuinely having a calming effect."
Cool! My dude, I am glad the teeming anonymity of London was calming and liberating for you! I am even a person whose natural environment is proximal to cities and my ground-level bedroom that opens directly onto a driveway has been screwing my health over for three years and if I don't get to the sea on a regular basis, I lose my mind! Which it seems he would file under my having a significant mental health problem which he is willing to concede exposure to nature may help in certain people and I side-eye that relegation about as much as his invocation of the preindustrial wildwood in the twenty-first century. He seems at the end of the interview to be calling out the concept of the green city as greenwashing—a distraction from the things that really harm the inhabitants of cities—and that could be interesting if he dug into it, but your reactions do not suggest that he does.
[edit] To be less down on a guy I have not personally read, I feel he could have written a genuinely interesting memoir about the experience of fleeing the country for the city only to find to his bemusement shading into horror that everyone in the city seems to want to make it like the country, but instead he made it a prescriptivist argument.
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It's just a very shallow book about a deep subject - at least the parts of it I read - and I think this interview drives that home, too, because he's so unable to separate his personal opinions from his political points, or articulate his argument coherently.
I feel he could have written a genuinely interesting memoir about the experience of fleeing the country for the city only to find to his bemusement shading into horror that everyone in the city seems to want to make it like the country,
That would have been a much better book!
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Finally, a policy position we can all disagree with together! Meant by WHO, even? What an absolutely bizarre use of his time to write this book.
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(I will concede that he makes a reasonable point now and then, but it's lost in the general blizzard of hating on every single thing that people find nice, and apparently going to green city conferences around the world being a wet blanket at the attendees. If there ever was a person who needed to touch grass, it is this guy.)
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*screm, throws against wall aaaa*
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In case you're thinking this is because he'd rather be in the country - definitely not! He also hates the country.
literal lol
i would hate meeting this guy just based on this review alone
they will pry my green trees from my cold dead hands
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There are other authors who write about stuff we can do, given that cities and suburban landscapes continue to exist, like Tallamy's Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard.
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Is he perhaps fourteen? I can imagine a fourteen-year-old writing this after his parents made him come out for a walk around the park when he wanted to be playing Fortnite, because clearly that proves that parks are fascist evil.
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See, I was gonna complain about how the (working class) western suburbs of Melbourne have higher temperatures and lower quality of life due to the relative lack of trees. But I guess I too am a shill for Big Tree.
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What an absolutely bonkers take to not even have anything meaningful to say in support of!!
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Yeesh.