Memories of Cities: Trips and Manifestoes

MEMORIES OF CITIES: Trips and Manifestoes. By Jonathan Charley, x and 213 pp.; ills., bibliog., index. Farnham, U.K., and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2013. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781409431374. Here is a lively volume by a widely read and wonderfully inquisitive scholar whose architectural sensibility seems to me to be remarkably, I could say admirably, close to that of the cultural-social urban geographer. If in some places the liveliness and enthusiasm of the style stumbles into some bumpy patches, well, that's what's likely to happen if you wish to be venturesome. It's also likely to happen if you put together a volume that is a bit of a collage, in part composed of talks and papers given over the period 2007 to 2010, along with items custom-written for this book. Charley was able to irritate me from time to time, but when I had finished the book I was aware of having been instructed by somebody who was truly engaged and who wanted to teach me. I also sensed someone who shares my general lack of affection for, in his words, "dry, leaden and at any rate for me, impenetrable theory and history" (p. xii). He juggled theory, but not overmuch, to my taste; he employed a strong sense of history, aptly, to my taste; he revealed a catholic appreciation for literary writing, much to my taste; and he has a tremendous sense of the visual, of the symbols and meanings in the urban landscape, immensely to my taste. Yes, I enjoyed this book greatly. Charley highly esteems imagination, the urge to innovation: "Successful social revolutions are automatically spatial revolutions that create new pre-conditions for the production of architecture" (p. 14). The melding of the work of architects, geographers, and urban planners can indeed be the product (and the hoped-for producer) of societal advance, as when "the [U.K.] architectural community after the Second World War had seen itself as a handmaiden of progressive social change with nearly half the profession working for the public sector" (p. 149). Charley is fully aware of the opposing tendency, for the architect to embrace employment as "capitalism's decorator" (p. 4)--now there's a striking term!--and decries the way the world seems to have shifted into its contemporary, neoliberal phase. Some of his strongest writing is where he speaks of Glasgow, clearly the city he knows best of all those that feature in this book. Glasgow's the city where he lives, and his observations of it are solid: see, for example, his vignette dated 24 August 2004 (p. 89). Likewise the chapter in which it is set, a compare-and-contrast tour de force of Marseille and Glasgow, I found tremendously thought provoking, set up by an excellent first paragraph. I would love to be walked around Glasgow by him--and in return take him on trams A or C in Strasbourg from one end of the line to the other. He would be a stimulating companion. Charley can also take excellent photographs. With some monstrous demolition machine in the foreground as counterpoint, here is the County Court in Glasgow (Figure 2.1). Grandeur, authority, the craving of the new bourgeois of the 19th century whose "... conceit that they were somehow the legitimate heirs to a democratic tradition that could be traced back to classical antiquity" (p. 21). He reserves his most scathing judgment for the 1883 Palais de Justice in Brussels; he is deeply offended by its gross and hypocritical pretension to virtue while at the same moment in time, King Leopold's forces were wreaking bloody havoc in the Congo. Charley is not, however, some unidimensional moral crusader against principalities and powers. In these same pages, he considers St. George's Hall in Liverpool. He is fully aware of the city's recent profitable past from slavery, of its contemporaneous workhouses and prisons, of the epidemics among the exploited laboring poor, but the quality of his photograph of the building, and the accompanying sentences, reveals his unstinting appreciation of it as a excellent work of architectural art. …