The new soft city
August 10th, 2008 by Hugh Kennedy
As I was reading in this weekend’s Financial Times, we are now at the 34th anniversary of Jonathan Raban’s urban classic The Soft City, which describes the local and universal ability of people to make large cities their own. Raban focused on London, which was a fabulous mix of races, cultures, traditions, and very low rents. These days, of course, it has become what Jane Smiley has decried as a monoculture: a playground of the very wealthy, most of them looking, sounding, thinking, and spending in the same generic ways. Living in London in the mid-80s, I think I experienced some of the tail end of those soft city possibilities. Returning a few years ago, the soft edges were either gone or highly privatized.
What I found partricularly interesting in Raban’s article was its close, which he wrote from his current home in Seattle based on observing his 16-year-old daughter on Facebook. As he notes, “Her time is spent in an elective community of exactly the kind I once sought in the big city….That freedom to experiment with personae, to play out fantasies of self, once the unique gift of the metropolis, is available on everyone’s laptop, as they masquerade anonymously behind screen name and avatars.”
After all the dystopian rants I’ve been reading of late about the dangers and downers of socializing and learning online, Raban’s refreshing take is that the Web “meets, in virutal form, almost all the conditions of a true soft city, and does so on a global scale, as cosmoplitan as any provincial isolate could dream of.”
That’s exactly the spirit we use the Web in these days: a means to connect, to inform and better our lives and make the best of the being both local and, with the click of a mouse, virtually universal.
