Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Modernity is intimately tethered to the metropolis, yet throughout its history we have been plagued by doubts that the city might in fact be bad for us. The image of the industrial revolution — its smokestacks and slums, its smog and its stink — engendered the Romantic movement, which fetishised the natural sublime in contrast to dark satanic mills.
And somehow we got stuck in urban self-loathing. Think of the language of planning, which inscribes these prejudices: building control, the greenbelt, brownfield sites, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Cities are there to be controlled like diseases; “nature” to be preserved at all costs.
In the UK, we are further blighted by the 19th-century urban reformer Ebenezer Howard’s ideas about the “garden city” — the concept of allowing urbanity to coexist with nature. This has mostly been proved to be magical thinking: garden cities were doomed to be dormitory suburbs rather than real cities. The idea nevertheless still pervades British government planning and ideas about the ideal place to live.
In recent years, the contrast has become starker. Architects present images of buildings draped in greenery and planted with hundreds of trees as if they were new hanging gardens of Babylon rather than overscaled towers constructed with huge amounts of carbon-intensive concrete. Mayors present visions of pedestrianised cities with bucolic green highways and cycle lanes. A dab of green, it seems, is all that’s needed to correct the metropolis — though how this solves housing, infrastructure, inequality and the rest seems a little obscure.
In The City of Today is a Dying Thing, Des Fitzgerald, a professor of medical humanities and social sciences at University College Cork, comes to all this with a sceptic’s side-eye and an outsider’s resistance to platitudes and clichés. In the course of the book he meets tree-huggers, “forest-bathers” (who immerse themselves in the smells and sounds of the woods), neuroscientists and biophilic lobbyists trying to persuade us that we are being made ill by cities — and that if only we had more trees, things would be much better.
Some even argue that cities are making us mad. This last contention comes from neuroscientists from Aarhus to Palo Alto, who suggest that “natural” surroundings promote wellbeing while urban settings create stress. A “vegetation” index supposedly correlates having a healthy childhood with more green spaces; medical studies show how patients heal more quickly if they have a view of trees; and so on.
Yet, as Fitzgerald points out, this research is often based on small samples and often assumes a universal understanding of “nature”. Where planners see green landscapes, Fitzgerald sniffs out hints of fascism, Fordism, eugenics and exclusion.
The fetish for the countryside developed in Britain in the 19th century was in part a response to the realisation that much of the urban population was unfit for military service. As Fitzgerald points out, the garden cities of Canberra and parts of Cape Town — as well as Christchurch, even Tel Aviv — were colonial-settler projects designed to make certain parts of the population healthier, while excluding others.
Fitzgerald points out that the most enthusiastic early adopters of green cities were big corporations and those who ran them — particularly the 19th-century industrialist Lord Lever, whose Port Sunlight in Merseyside is often held up as an exemplar of green enlightenment but who was self-interestedly building a workforce. (He also built Leverville in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the brutally violent and extractive reign of Belgian King Leopold II.)
Genuine outrage at the destruction of street trees in British cities over recent years (Sheffield and Plymouth have both suffered from enthusiastic urban lumberjacking) illustrates how real the attachment to greenery can be. Fitzgerald visits residents avidly defending their avenues and beloved trees, and he is generous in his attempts to bathe in the forest and walk barefoot through the woods.
But this is a book by a writer who enjoys the messiness and serendipity of cities. In contrast to the quiet of his native Cork, Fitzgerald revels in the noise and complexity of London. He is far from biophobic, but sets out to question the flimsiness of contemporary culture’s reliance on greenery as a universal salve. Plentiful parks are fine, but they do not solve the housing crisis. Our obsession with the greenbelt has stymied real discussions on how to cope with urban expansion.
Counterintuitive, funny and provocative, The City of Today is a Dying Thing asks whether we take for granted the bland platitudes of the post-ecological age and disregard the incredible advances of modernity. When we look at proposals for cities in the desert draped in greenery, or London developments dappled with a few spindly trees, we could all use a little more of Fitzgerald’s scepticism.
The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow by Des Fitzgerald, Faber £18.99, 277 pages
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
