The art of loving cities

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAK

  After the recent bombings in London, several political scientists and international experts have maintained that, unlike those in the past, the terrorists of today are killing without an agenda. There is, however, one specific item on present-day terrorists lists that constitutes a perennial agenda for them: Obliterating the heart of urban life and urban culture. “A city isn t just a place to live, to shop, to go out and have kids play. It s a place that implicates how one derives one s ethics, how one develops a sense of justice, how one learns to talk with and learn from people who are unlike oneself, which is how a human being becomes human," said Richard Sennett in "The Civitas of Seeing.” It is precisely this that contemporary terrorism intends to wipe out.

  As such, the modern-day terrorist is the exact opposite of the early modern flaneur, the casual man of leisure as defined by Baudelaire and further explained and extolled by Walter Benjamin, the two great thinkers of modernism. Both the flaneur and the terrorist are the product of modern times, yet they stand at opposite ends with respect to their approach to cities and city life. Let s take a closer look at how the flaneur and the terrorist walk with and within the crowds.

  The flaneur is someone who truly, passionately and almost instinctively loves the crowds. Just like the bird cannot do without the air, or a fish without water, Baudelaire had argued a flaneur cannot possibly live without the crowds. Strolling the streets is a must for the flaneur, being out there in the heart of the city, in the public places, the city plazas, crowded buses, subways, where the pulse of the city throbs wildly, loudly. It s there that the flaneur feels at home -- outside his house. Within the crowds he encounters individuality, within the public and the general he observes the private and the personal, within constant anonymity he meets his true self.

  The terrorist does the exact opposite. He looks at the people and sees only a block, a mass. He recognizes no individual distinctions, no details and no hues among the pile of bodies. Human beings are only numbers for him and nothing more than that. Whereas the flaneur is enamored with the crowds and the streets and public places, the terrorist hates them and uses them as armor to hide behind until he decides to take action to attack. Just like he fails to recognize the human beings inside the crowds, the terrorist also fails to recognize those other constitutive elements that are so crucial for city life: historical monuments. All the buildings, statues or artifacts from the past are nothing but stones in his eyes, stones to raze to the ground. Contemporary terrorism perceives urban life as a malady, and cosmopolitan urbanites as its enemies.

  Democracy, civil society, new social movements, the expansion of the public sphere so as to include the marginal and the marginalized and art are all possible with and within the urban space. If we lose the cosmopolitan urban space and people and out of fear drift more and more into the homogenous, sterile suburbia, we will be losing our creativity and diversity. It is in the city, it is precisely therein that resides the key to myriad social and individual changes. London, Delhi, New York, Berlin and Tokyo… As Istanbulites our heart goes out to Londoners. We are all under attack, and it is our awareness of the tremendous significance of the urban space that is being tested right now.