Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue

Conclusion

215 ConClusIon MileS orvell: Let’s now spend a few minutes with some final reflections on what may have emerged as we’ve thought about things during the last two days, which feels like about two weeks, mentally, and has been quite fascinating. The talks we’ve heard have been so very different, and yet I think we’ve all sensed, at times, the coalescence of lines of thought, with many cross-references appearing. Are there general themes that have emerged? Or any sense of surprise, or feeling something like “I didn’t realize that this was where we were going, but this is where we are.” MAlcolM Mccullough: I’ll start with low-hanging fruit. There’s been a lot of recognition of creative destruction, perhaps because here we sit amid a production of the Marshall Plan in a city, Munich, where dreadful things happened, and it is now quite wonderful. I mean, this seems to be one of the world’s great cities, so anything can happen, stuff changes. DAviD nye: Perhaps we could say that there’s been a lot of discussion of political power, the politics of urban form, but I’m not sure I can delineate that. I guess there is this sense in which there are many actors but that perhaps the voices of ordinary people are becoming a little more audible or having a little bit more impact than they did. I don’t know if everyone would agree with that, but it seems like that’s been kind of a subtheme in many papers. Jeffrey MeiKle: Another theme, and I used the word twice in my paper, is palimpsest. It’s come up so much that people were laughing when it was spoken earlier this morning. And I mean that in the sense of getting away from the kind of totalizing that I was talking about, recognizing that any city and system, any place, any space is layered CONCLUSION 216 over with various histories and various contending voices and various constructions, some in decay, some under construction, some falling apart. We have to recognize that layeredness. MABel wilSon: But I would also add—this is in reference to your presentation, Jeff—that what struck me is that almost all of the presentations had a historical dimension, but we also talked about the future reality, in reference to what you showed—the possibility of a city, like what could happen or how people have speculated on what could happen, the projective, the perspective, what can be imagined. And that could be a critical way to position it. What are the possibilities, given the messiness that we understand and how cities unfold? Understanding of course that what can be imagined can be unpredictable, that we can’t necessarily predict the future. orvell: David used a term at some point, and I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but you were groping toward the notion of “restoring balance” as something that you seemed to be thinking about in recurrent terms. Would that be fair to say? DAviD luBin: Yes. . . . Well, I feel like in my remarks, both in the group but also during our little coffee hours, I kept saying that I’m feeling a sense of oppression from hearing these wonderful talks, because it seemed like so many intractable problems. Every paper has identified serious critical problems with the urban environment and how it’s going. And then I feel like, we’re talking about having some sort of hopeful ending, but these sorts of pieces of hope that people are throwing out seemed to me kind of like, well, hogwash. [Laughter.] Tiny little things that don’t seem to be of the magnitude of the problems. You know, actually I’m very optimistic by nature, I love that statement that somebody was saying—what was it? AnDrew roSS: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Gramsci. luBin: Gramsci—and I think that is totally modern, that’s how I feel about this whole conference. I’m very pessimistic about all the things that have been put out there. It is messy. We never come up with utopian CONCLUSION 217 solutions, but we do find ways of improving terrible situations. You were just talking, Malcolm, about Germany. And the state of Germany now versus the state of Germany in 1933 . . . Mccullough: . . . or 1946. luBin: Or 1946. So, I...