#192: Babylon Sisters
Many of the most grating aspects of life in densely populated cities involve violations of personal space. They are frequently subtle. I could probably list a hundred variants that happen on the street, on the subway, at the gym, in restaurants, and on and on. The opportunities to get in someone else’s way are almost unlimited; every journey through public space is an endless stream of near-collisions and narrowly-avoided confrontations, which we barely even notice, punctuated by the occasional collision or confrontation. Existing in such an environment requires a highly refined and nuanced sense of one’s physical relationship to the immediate human environment, a complex set of rules and norms, measured in inches, that develop over time to align with everyone else’s. As with almost anything, the failures of this intricate system are much more vivid than the successful outcomes—the thousands of people who glide past us every day are subliminal, filtered from our attention ever more thoroughly as we acclimate to the city’s constant crowdedness, lest we collapse under the sensory overload. The moments of navigational failure may get our attention but it’s worth appreciating the much more frequent successes. We did it!
The best cities, or at least the most exciting ones, are barely controlled chaos, just-in-time human supply chains always on the brink of a catastrophic meltdown, full of people who thrive in such a charged state. In Delirious New York, architect Rem Koolhaas praised what he called Manhattanism and the “culture of congestion,” while Jane Jacobs pleasantly celebrated the “sidewalk ballet” of the 1960s West Village—but surely even she would have given you a little shove if you stopped in front of her on the subway stairs to check your phone. If all of this is an acquired taste, we can always learn to love it more. And if we can’t, we are in good company. There are plenty of alternatives. One of modernism’s chief legacies is decongestion, achieved by spreading cities outward (suburbanization) and upward (skyscrapers), both of which required infrastructure that only became available in the past century. Roads may be choked with traffic but we strangely never describe them as “crowded,” because in a sense they never are: The mechanics of driving enforces excessive space between bodies and vehicles, trading maximum speed for throughput. However bad the traffic gets, the people are still spread thinly.
In addition to physically spreading people out, we also alleviate crowdedness with engineering—rationalizing the spaces that people occupy. The definitive architectural form of the 21st century is junkspace, another term Koolhaas coined, in his 2001 essay about the subject: the continuous, air-conditioned consumer interior that characterizes malls, airports, casinos, hospitals, and universities around the world. “Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends,” Koolhaas writes. And yet, aside from airports, junkspace largely transcends the sensation of crowdedness. Junkspace is endless, modular, and above all, engineered. It is the opposite of the culture of congestion that Koolhaas praised in its Manhattan form. As junkspace fills with people, it simply expands, seamlessly and fluidly (but, as Joshua McWhirter describes, it does not contract so easily). As the consummate late capitalist form, junkspace can simulate and reproduce congestion when there is demand for that: Concerts, festivals, sporting events, and amusement parks are where we go to access crowdedness in a decongested infrastructural landscape. This is probably also why New York itself feels like an unreal place to many Americans. Although the internet is now the primary transmission vector for culture, cities remain the physical nodes that the culture is routed through. As the digital universe expands exponentially, the physical world remains rigid, and the mismatch between the abundance of one and the scarcity of the other feels increasingly urgent at every scale. New York has a housing crisis and a restaurant reservation crisis, and many similar crises in between. Every day, there are more bits per atom—more noise per unit of signal. The world is as crowded as ever, even when the people are spread out, but we only notice when we get stuck at the bottlenecks.
This week, for Business Insider, I interviewed musician Holly Herndon about her experiments with AI and the opportunities and risks that the technology presents to artists. Check it out here (it is paywalled, FYI).
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Reads:
Jonathan Nunn on the Sohofication of urban centers. “Too much good taste can be fatal to a city.” (Nunn is the editor of the excellent food and culture Substack, Vittles).
Liz Pelly, the best writer about the subject of streaming music, on the fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music. “I’m experiencing so much music, but am I really listening to any of it?”
Dean Kissick on Nathan Fielder’s HBO show The Rehearsal. “As art and pop have grown closer to life, becoming more literal, more grounded in reality, the popular narratives for making sense of life have grown far more outlandish.”