Sicinius: You [Plebeians] are at point to lose your liberties. Marcius would have all from you, Marcius, Whom late you have named for consul.

Menenius: Fie, fie, fie! This is the way to kindle, not quench.

First Senator: To unbuild the city and to lay all flat.

Sicinius: What is the city but the people?

Plebeians: True, The people are the city.

(Coriolanus Act 3 Scene 1)

What is happening to central or inner London ? What is a city? Alex Proud explored these questions recently in an article for the London based Telegraph newspaper. His article was entitled “’Cool’ London is dead, and the rich kids are to blame”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/10744997/Cool-London-is-dead-and-the-rich-kids-are-to-blame.html

He argued that the cool, creative class has been priced out of London, which means the capital is becoming more bland and boring by the minute. He forgot to mention that ordinary working class people are also being forced out of central London — what used to be called ‘the inner city’. If London is not of and for ordinary people, one might call them plebeians, then who is it for? Ontologically, what are cities. Who are cities for? Who should they be for? Shakespeare provided some fabulous insights into the nature of cities that we can draw on in considering these issues.

In his great play Coriolanus, where the action takes place almost exclusively in the city of Rome, William Shakespeare explores the question, what constitutes the city? A question which resonates as much today as it did in the turmoil of Elizabethan England. Today’s theorists of the city such as Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson argue there is merit in the understanding of city materiality not just as inert objects but as assemblages of social and technical relations. Henri Lefebvre with his ideas about urban space being constituted through social action would surely agree but would William Shakespeare share this interpretation? And where does this leave the people of the city?

Historically, our cities, both in the Global North, and the Global South hold in dynamic tension: safety, stability and predictability; counter-posed against surprise, capriciousness and a touch of edgy uncertainty. We tend to be ambivalent about these tensions. Ambivalence remains a major element shaping feelings about the city. Politicians, planners, architects, engineers and theorists have sought to govern, build, beautify, cure, clean, protect, control, profit from, understand and explain the city with greater or lesser degrees of success. Each of these endeavours has tended to be undertaken from one particular perspective; or it might be said, from different metaphysical and ideological points of view. I argue, following Amin and Thrift that in seeking to understand the city, theorists have tended to apply a methodological approach which foregrounds one ontological city element. Although the city is a dense, complex amalgam of phenomena it nevertheless needs to be disaggregated for the purposes of analytical investigation leading to some of the ’great’ city analyses: Ferdinand Tönnies (society/anomie), Camilo Sitte (architectural aesthetics), Engels (material city), Karl Marx (economy), Ebenezer Howard (garden-city), Max Weber (institutions), Charles Booth (social inequality), Georg Simmel (psyche/mind), Walter Benjamin (sensory pleasures), William DuBois (racial discrimination). Each analysis produced particular almost exclusively written representations of the city. These quite different analyses and solutions were rooted in European Enlightenment inspired modernist problematisations of city space and the apparently rational responses to them.

This is not to say that any of the ‘great’ analyses are simplistic or that they ignore totally other city ontologies but one can almost hear the authors defending their approach with the words, above all the city is. This formulation was used by Mumford who saw the city above all else a theatre of social action. In similar vein, one of the foremost city theorists of the 20th century argued famously, following Simmel that:

The city… is something more than a congeries of individual men and of social conveniences — streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones, etc.; something more, also, than a mere constellation of institutions and administrative devices — courts, hospitals, schools, police, and civil functionaries of various sorts. The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it… (Robert E Park 1984 emphasis added, in The City 1925)

Park’s contribution has triple importance. Firstly, his analysis goes beyond the existing materiality of the city to include key institutions and social processes. Secondly, he stresses the importance of historically transmitted cultures including customs and traditions. Thirdly, the people create the city but in turn the vital institutions and processes of the city impact on the people. So while Park on the one hand takes a pluralistic view of the city, on the other he privileges the city as a collective of intangible social attitudes and traditions, which are just as real as the material city.

In the 1970s the reality and importance of the immaterial, imagined city was captured compellingly in the soft city of Raban at the same time as Lefebvre was refining his production of space theories. Cities of the imagination have become a significant theme in recent literatures. Victor Burgin affirmed that the city is an actually existing physical environment, and a city in a novel, a film, a photograph, a city seen on television, a city in a comic strip, a city in a pie chart. It is argued persuasively by Steve Pile that the real and imagined city is a false dichotomy: rather it is the material and the imagined that are in mutual tension and both are ‘real’. Many of the representations discussed in the texts above measure, depict, interrogate and critique public urban space which in turn became a key trope of the city discourse.

Lewis Mumford’s ‘theatre of social action’ trope highlights the importance of the appropriation of material public space for social and political purposes. He warned that if the city loses its public performance of dramatic dialogue then civilisation itself is in peril. Richard Sennett explored similar territory lamenting the loss of the democratic role of public space due to the dual threats of the rise of the nuclear, insular family and the deadening, homogenising impacts of misguided state/capitalist dominated city planning. He argues that together with middle class fears of being in public space, these factors have served to pauperise the public realm creating overly controlled and too orderly public space denuded of the capacity to stimulate, inspire and challenge. Such fears are not new and go back at least to the bourgeois and governmental panics of the 19th century. Friedrich Engels reflected these fears in a tirade against the whole of the working class spilling out in an orgy of drunken debauchery onto the main thoroughfares, ‘respectable’ middle class space, every Saturday night. These kinds of anxieties were the focus of a British government investigation in1833. The committee of inquiry reasoned that no proper public space provision had been made for the working classes in the industrial cities such as Manchester to enjoy “healthy exercise” or “cheerful amusement” (Report of the Select Committee on Public Walks 1833). The unfortunate results were public disorder, turmoil and pandemonium on the streets. It is likely that the 1833 Report legitimated and formalised the idea of the civilising power of public space through the interaction of different social classes, in genteel public parks.

Therefore, social segregation — bad. For Alex proud if inner city London is taken over by white middle-class bankers it will become too predictable, too clean, too safe and above all, too boring — city tensions would have been resolved in ways which does not favour a vibrant, diverse London. We are confronted continually with scenes of working class unruly behaviour in our cities, including London, especially riots. So it seems there is something problematic if not outright dangerous when the (working class) people of the city gather in public space.

In Coriolanus it seems that the plebeians can be a nuisance but clearly cities cannot function without them. Henri Lefebvre understood the need for ordinary working class people to be able to appropriate urban public space. He understood city space as the dialectical interaction of the physical and social elements of cities. So he would probably dispute Sicinius’ and the Plebeians’ one dimensional view of the city implied by Shakespeare’s famous ontological epigram quoted above. This frequently quoted cogitation on the essence of the city is however, deceptive. Rome is revealed progressively as multilayered and complex. Shakespeare’s Rome is palpably a material city of streets, squares, the market-place, public buildings and the Capitol. Rome is a city of institutions and power structures: a city of tensions and problems. The Plebeians are tricked into making their assertion by Sicinius’ sly manipulative leading question but in so doing hope to assert their ‘right to the city’ in the context of city-wide famine and tumultuous political times. Coriolanus is doubly encoded being the name bestowed on the Play’s protagonist, Caius Marcius, after he captures the city of Corioli. It emerges that Coriolanus disagrees with the Plebeians, thinking them bestial and not worthy of Roman status — even though they may have been “calved i’ the porch o’ the Capitol” (Act 3 Scene 1) — believing the essence of the city to be the nobility and military hero-saviours such as himself. Above all then Shakespeare’s city is a complex of contested phenomena that inhere in dynamic tension: a tension that became the focus of intense scrutiny with the emergence of the modern industrial city. These tensions are being played out in the early 21st century London and other cities. Moving to the suburbs used to be how the middle classes escaped from unruly public space. If they are now ‘escaping’ back to the inner city, will the suburbs become the new spaces of boisterous, disorderly working class life? Hello, edgy Dulwich?