News

The title of Mark Kingwell's latest book, Concrete Reveries, is at once an elegant encapsulation of this remarkable essay and a neatly tailored metaphor for the defining paradox of the city: a complex (and man-made) invention capable of rendering durable the inevitably fleeting nature of human consciousness.

Kingwell, a philosopher and critic who teaches at the University of Toronto, begins this "series of incomplete sketches" with a riff on the appealingly plastic nature of concrete, a construction material enjoying (along with that other great agent of urban modernism, Robert Moses) something of a revival after a long stint in the critical doghouse. "It is a material people love to hate, for reasons lodged often in conventional disregard and a prejudice for more 'natural' materials such a wood or finished stone," Kingwell writes. "Mostly though, it is because we have not been given an opportunity to see concrete properly."

• Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, by Mark Kingwell, Viking Canada, 276 pages, $34

So it is with cities, Kingwell goes on to argue, as he tees up his raison d'être, which is to tease out a "phenomenology of cities" that seeks to reconcile the blind spots in thinking between three major academic disciplines: philosophy, architecture and politics (i.e. economics). This isn't just an exercise in academic bridge-building. Kingwell contends that our failure to incorporate fully realized notions of consciousness and justice into our architecture and public spaces explains the scourge of placelessness in a global urban landscape that's home to more than half of the world's population. He deems these places "identi-kit" or "generic cities," and points, somewhat glumly, to Shanghai's soulless high-rise hustle as evidence of a looming atopia.

It is an unmoored urban form. "Consciousness shapes cities," he reminds us, and then cities shape consciousness, yet we haven't prized apart this chicken-and-egg problem by probing the dynamics of how market economics and contemporary architecture increasingly ignore our need for a sense of place as an antidote to an all-encompassing sameness.

It's important to situate Kingwell in this debate: Though many other urban writers (James Kunstler, Mike Davis, Richard Florida) have tackled this deficit in various ways, Kingwell brings a philosopher's methodology to the task.

Indeed, the core of Concrete Reveries is an eloquent and original proof that frequently loops back to a first-principles discussion of many of the elements he requires for his case: the "embodied" essence of human consciousness, the threshold relationships between insides and outsides, and the failings of rationalist assumptions underpinning free-market economics.

Concrete Reveries serves as a provocative counterpoint to the work of Richard Florida, who has just published his third volume on how "creative class" cities are playing a determinative role in the economic and cultural well-being of nations (reviewed in Books, March 15). Florida has made it his mission to debunk the "flat-world" thesis advanced by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. His well-known case for lively, diverse and tolerant cities is essentially functionalist: Urban spaces and populations, creatively configured, are put to service in delivering social winners in a global economy dominated by megacities.

Florida has set the pace for a great deal of urban writing and policy-making in recent years, yet Kingwell, interestingly enough, makes no reference to him. Rather, Kingwell's vision of the city remains grounded in the ancient Greek ideal of public spaces that are meant to foster political engagement, reflection and the pursuit of a just society. (His icons are the essayist Walter Benjamin and architect-critics Aldo Rossi and Rem Koolhaas.)

And where Florida generally steers clear of critical debates about architecture and public space (beyond acknowledging the deadening impact of soulless suburbia), Kingwell's project is to unpack the aesthetic experience of urban space (both interior and exterior) as a means of locating, and then orienting, human consciousness.

It's an ambitious undertaking. And the difficulty with the argument is that it's ... well, difficult. Kingwell admits as much and promises early on to gear the writing toward a lay, albeit highly attentive, reader. He mostly delivers, but text contains its fair share of pointy academic objects (Exhibit A: a passing reference early on to a "familiar deleuzoguattarian" phrase) which can be more than a little off-putting.

Overall, the book doesn't suffer from its author's determination not to dumb down his argument for a general audience. Kingwell is one of Canada's few public intellectuals, and his erudite commentary has always drawn from an astonishingly wide range of influences - everything's here, from the Simpsons and sidewalks to geometry and metaphysics.

Indeed, I would liken the experience of reading Kingwell's text to losing oneself in a new city, with all the serendipitous pleasure, as well as the occasional anxiety, associated with such wanderings - an intellectual flâneur, so to speak.

Substantively, there's much to agree with, especially Kingwell's knack for decoding why we are so often unmoved by the high-concept public buildings and oversold spaces that are meant to uplift the 21st-century urbanite. (Elsewhere, he once noted the creepy "concentration camp vibe" of Toronto's Distillery District, a spot-on assessment.)

Yet his critique, in my view, fails to account fully for two related variables in the formation of urban space: time and the quintessentially human craving for community. There's much to loathe about the deadening corporate monumentalism of so much contemporary development, but it's also true that we don't know how the story ends. Kingwell, early on, alights on this point, noting the fact that cities are forever in the process of becoming something else, a something that can't be deduced solely on the basis of what we know them to be at this time.

True enough. What is certain, however, is that human consciousness will always act as an agent on built form,

sometimes destructively, but other times constructively and subtly, forever reshaping it to suit our needs regardless of what the original architect (or planner or despot) may have intended.

Ultimately, Kingwell urges us to resist the seductions of iconic architecture and search instead for public spaces that recognize how human consciousness is, by definition, tethered to the here and now. In the roiling, irreconcilable debate about what constitutes a livable city, Kingwell convincingly reminds us not to forget about philosophy.

Toronto journalist John Lorinc's next book, Cities: A Groundworks Guide, will be published in October.