Gabriel Moyer-Perez

Prof. Vyjayanthi Rao

Reading the City II

2/1/2023

Reading Response to

The Urban Condition: A Challenge to Social Science

The declarative jargon of Ash Amin’s essay disheartened me from his initial sentence. My
struggle to resist dismissing the stream of statistics, abstractions and proclamations as palaver from one
ivory tower or another crescendoed through to the abrupt, resigned summation that even if there
“might be a more realistic option… it is also the option that will be ignored, as the strong and the
powerful colonize the city, brushing aside advocates.” (207) Refusing to believe that this was the extent
of an obviously well researched position I was pleasantly relieved to find an excellent interview
conducted by Tatiana Thieme, professor at UCL, with Amin in 2016.1 The interviewee seemed a
different, altogether more cogent, pragmatic and frankly experienced person than the essayist. I found
myself nodding along, in complete agreement, struggling to find a true critique with which to provoke
this assignment. Even the concluding riff in response to a puffball of a question, “do you have a favorite
city…” was illuminating and sent me off down a further rabbit hole towards Walter Benjamin’s beautiful
essay “Naples” written with Asja Lacis in 19252. After pulling away from the sensorial immersion that
Benjamin’s art creates, I found myself with two reflections that in some way encompassed my brief
sojourn through, as a good friend of mine once quipped in response to a missionary’s query about his
denomination, the religion of urbanism.

My first thought was simply: why does Amin’s essay bore me, his interview inspire me, and Benjamin’s
story allow me to feel like I’ve found a window into a long lost world? Perhaps in some way it relates to
Amin’s main insight, that the city works best as an unfathomably networked machine that hums along
maintaining the critical infrastructure that permits the plurality of society to most efficiently express
itself. Amin’s obviously relaxed manner in the interview, anecdotal without being digressive, allows him
to express himself in a way that combines the most necessary data with illustrative examples. His
explanation is itself a plurality of narrative forms brought together in a flexible, responsive conversation.
These are all qualities that he credits to the resilient city needed if our urban existence is to survive the
self-inflicted challenges of the Anthropocene. I would posit that it is the very informality in dialogue that
permits for a more informed picture to emerge, in which the whole of Amin’s story can be brought to
bear in service of his position on the study of the city. As the reader I have many more access points to
his work and can infer from anecdotes the history behind his argument and, inversely, through his
theory better situate his personal observations. As it becomes impossible to constrain the concatenated
complexities of the city in any singular theory or even incisively emotive picaresque such as Benjamin’s

1
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/projects/urban-futures-resilient-urban-economies/ash-amin-cities/
2
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/session_8/benjamin.pdf
tour through a now bygone Naples, it is critical that we touch the complimenting notes of theory, data,
and personal experience weaving them into a comprehensive analysis that is intrinsically resilient in the
face of a mitotic public commons. To perhaps metaphorically illustrate my feeling, can we perhaps
better talk our way through our cities at a bar or in the park rather than via a lecture?

Continuing this thought led towards imagining the empirical implications. As Amin summarizes in the
2016 interview,

If we get the city right, I think we could tackle a lot of contemporary world problems,
we really could, and it’s not inconceivable that we can get the city right, through new
forms of urban imagination and organization. If we could get the infrastructural problem
in cities right, if we could make sure that the city is a place of social wellbeing and not
just social hardship and disenchantment, if we could invest in spare and slack capacity, if
we could make sure that the city is a place of universal welfare, the dividends could be
immense. Am I optimistic? No, I’m not. Do I think this is necessary? Yes, I do. Otherwise,
the whole world – now so tied to the fortunes of the city, will be at risk. The need to
reimagine urban planning is urgent.

While, when confronted by the speed and scale of the sprawling urbanization machine that encircles our
globe it seems impossibly optimistic to imagine a commensurate planning potency, I would venture,
almost just for the sake of argument, that this species of informed informality could assist in Amin’s
desired reappraisal of the field of urban, maybe even urbane, studies. As any politician knows, cities as
large as New York (according to Amin’s cited studies the ne plus ultra of influential poles) respond more
rapidly to narrative than to anything else. Even infrastructure as obviously essential as the subway is
critically subject to the assessment and interpretation of daily news cycles and the resulting social
sensibility (citations depicting sensation of safety vs crime rates on subway or other examples are
beyond the remit of this reading response). Yet both large society-wide, and hyper targeted narratives
are increasingly subject to manipulation informed by non-human compiled data. Today gossip, the most
informal of human networks, can be, and is frequently, algorithmically created. This power, while
morally ambiguous and consequently frightening, strikes me as one of the most potent planning tools
that exists, perhaps critical for moving the unruly beasts that cities have always been and continue to
develop into. Can we plan cities through tools such as Twitter, Whatsapp or other less coopted
mediums? Likely it is really a question of if we will be able to control and repurpose how the modes of
discourse on these platforms have already influenced the design and use of our shared and private living
spaces. I am primarily interested in the scalable and informal nature of these highly problematic existing
social experiments and believe that any planning possibilities would require their conversion into less
constrained creative outlets.

Our supercities are in the process of bringing us out of the age of the national monomyth, perhaps our
urban stories could become, like good science fiction, a mix between informed conjecture and
compelling narrative journey.