Je suis Paris. Terror and Resilience in the City
On a perfectly fine, unusually warm Friday evening, the people of Paris and those who fulfilled for themselves a dream by visiting the French capital, went out to eat, and to try Cambodian food, listen to American Rock, see French-German soccer or just mill about in central Paris.
They did what anybody would associate with Paris until they were shot at with military style automatic weapons and a peaceful evening turned into a nightmare with the image of Paris shifting in the collective mind.
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| Friday night in Paris (Creative Commons) |
These everyday "flaneurs" were doing exactly what people do in cities, meeting, watching other people, eating out, watching sport or listening to music. Doing those peaceful things makes them vulnerable, but unlike the jungle, a good city offers the comfort of civility. The terrorism experts who flood the airwaves ever since the attacks rightly call these places "soft targets". The entire city of Paris is a soft target and so is any other large or small city that is worth a visit. The whole point of an exciting city that has a high quality of life is that it is soft, malleable, and open to the whims of those who live there or just mill about.
The flâneur, the purposeful male stroller, was a principal performer in the theater of daily life in Paris in mid-century, if we judge by his importance in writings of the era. A journalist, writer, or illustrator, he looked about with the acute eye of a detective, sizing up persons and events with a clinical detachment as though natural events could tell him their own stories, without his interference.(source)
For a city to provide a joyous and uplifting experience, it has to combine physical aspects such as well-planned and designed with organizational ones such as being well-managed, and, most importantly a certain behavior of the people. All those sharing public spaces have to engage in a certain code of civility that, while allowing a good range of deviation, forbids anything that risks the health, well-being or enjoyment of the others.
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| civility in Paris (photo ArchPlan Inc.) |
Ironically just when progress and technology make cities cleaner, healthier and physically more pleasant and when democratic governance allows urban enjoyment and entertainment for broader sections of the population than ever before in history, this consensus on what civility is, becomes more difficult to define.
In a crowded city where many cultures, generations, and people of all walks of life meet, conflicts and questions about the code of conduct have always been frequent. Historically the conflict was resolved by essentially imposing the code of the upper classes, allowing true urban pleasure for only a lucky few. The "flaneur" is a decidedly bourgeois figure whose required privilege was leisure.
Many would argue that enjoyment in and of the city is still a matter of privilege. This argument is supported by reference to urban ordinances which forbid begging, loitering, skateboarding and any number of other activities in various codes of exclusion.
On Times Square tempers recently flared about bare-chested women, In Baltimore's streets dirt bikes or drivers recklessly disobeying traffic signals are the cause of tension, drunkards urinating into corners or getting into fights have been a cause of chagrin through the ages.
In short, the orchestrated social dance that makes up life in a city is constantly in danger of tipping, unraveling or getting off balance, more so than the physical or organizational structure of the city. Methods that calibrate through exclusion make matters often worse. Still, only rarely does the orchestrated dance of urban life fall off the stage entirely.
Sudden disruption from natural disaster (Hurricane Sandy in Manhattan, earthquakes in San Francisco, the Great Fire of Chicago) affects the physicality, the governance and the behavior all at once. Natural disasters have reshaped many cities throughout history.
The disruption can also be the result of human action. Once again it can affect buildings and objects as the bombings of World War II that leveled English, German and Japanese cities certainly did. The New York's 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, the London bus and subway bombings, Baltimore's recent unrest or the most recent Paris attacks did that, too but their impact was less physical than psychological and emotional.
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| Baltimore unrest |
By mentioning these events in one sentence I do not want to equate them or even compare them, or say anything about causes or justification. Their common denominator is only that they brought usual urban life and the citizen consensus to a sudden stop through an extreme deviation from what would or could be expected and for which a city could, therefore be prepared. And each case left people in shock far beyond the affected city.
When people talk about resilience in this context, they usually refer to the emotional ability of bouncing back, addressing more the resilience of the people than that of structures. It is a human reflex to attribute special powers to those afflicted by disaster, a method of coping that manifests itself in descriptions, stories and examples how a
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| dancing in the street after the unrest (Baltimore Magazine) |
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| dancing in the street after the unrest (Baltimore Magazine) |
The recently popular discussion of resilience used in a similar way as the term sustainability refers to cities as an assembly of structures and systems which should be prepared for these types of disruptions, whether caused by natural disaster or man-made. Is this possible, can a city be fortified to withstand sudden and powerful calamities? Can cities become resilient and fortified in a comprehensive way without losing everything that makes cities exciting places to be? Sadly, this question has had to be asked too many times already, from Tel Aviv to Belfast and from Lagos to Baghdad
Certainly, better fire codes have prevented modern cities from burning down in the fashion of past centuries. Buildings have been fortified to withstand even strong earthquakes without irreparable damage and levees and canals erected after devastating floods have prevented repeats in cities like Amsterdam, Hamburg or Rotterdam. But can cities be fortified against human attacks like the ones in Paris, London, Jerusalem and New York?
If cities were truly constructed and prepared and to be resilient in that comprehensive way, would they still be the cities we would like to live in or spend money to visit? Just recalling the public fortress architecture that pervaded the US after the 1968 riots would imply an answer to such a question.
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| Towson Courthouse: Resilient? (Photo ArchPlan) |
Then there is the question of the systems, how they are run and by what governance. This is a far less physical dimension. How resilient are the procedures and systems we have in place to organize normal life and then life in the time of disaster? Will emergency responders be able to communicate even if they come from different departments or even different jurisdictions? Will there signal strength to communicate? Can the public be reached? Are our utility lifelines from electricity to water vulnerable soft targets that could cease to exist for us without a moments notice?
These questions all arose after the New York attacks with great urgency, and they also arose after the recent Baltimore uprising. The Baltimore police talked in a 10-code language that was different from the code used by the assisting suburban police forces dispatched here. Cell phone communication routinely comes crashing down in hours of concentrated demand because it is overwhelmed by thousands of calls bundled into just a few transmitters. Those kinds of break-downs do not even include the assumption of a targeted attack on the systems themselves or failure from natural calamity that could cause large-scale power outage or disruption of wireless or cable transmissions, bringing down with it the internet, a information tool we depend on so greatly today. Experts agree, that our largest vulnerability may lie just in this aspect of urban life and the ever larger dependencies we have developed without building the redundancy that is one of the hallmarks of physical resilience.
No doubt, there are a great many things in the roam of organization and communication that could and must be fortified. It wouldn't appear that such fortification would subtract much of the quality of life we associate with cities or much of everyday urban enjoyment.
The matter of resilience by design becomes quite different if fortification were sought by changing everyday behavior of urban citizens. If fear, suspicion, hate, prejudice, seclusion and negative expectations would replace assertiveness, trust, love, curiosity and optimism, the very attributes that are arguably the cornerstones of urbanity would be shattered. If that happened, "the terrorists would have won" is the common way of putting it. Xenophobia and turning away from others won't work in cities and metropolitan conglomerations without losing the very essence of their being.
The role of the city as a safe haven may have indeed been upended through the course of history, in the physical, in the organizational and in the emotional dimension.
Physically, beginning with providing shelter and protection through walls, turrets, and a militia positioned on the fortifications, a place where the unprotected rural populace would find refuge in a time of adversary as they did in medieval times, the city has now become a target per se that exposes its residents instead of sheltering them. Consequently the city has become a place from which to flee in adversity to seek shelter in rural hinterlands. That isn't entirely new; it has already been practiced in London or Dresden during the bombing raids of WW II.
Yet organizationally, cities are the places that gave birth to a spirit of democracy, that have found the most direct ways of engaging citizens and have been more nimble than any other organizational structure in adapting to technological and social change. That adaptability, too, is a form of resilience. Today cities provide emotional and physical comfort not from walls and parapets but through a community that shares space, knowledge and experience and navigates all of those roams in new ways.
That is why the safety and security discussion would miss the point entirely if it would dismiss cities as unsafe places for their "soft target" character without consideration of this larger stabilizing context and also without consideration of the destabilizing causes of unrest and disruption. The hostilities that brought peril to New York, London and Paris were in their origin quite ambiguous. They were neither simply transported into these cities from rural countries still living at some dawn of civilization, nor was the hostility simply bred in the slums of large western cities even though some of the 9/11 attackers had lived in Hamburg, Germany, some of the Paris attackers in Brussels, Belgium. The operators of those terrible attacks, indeed, had experienced western cities and been exposed to their attractions. Their minds, though had been poisoned from both sides, from the provincial radicalism originating in war torn, poor, anti-enlightenment countries and from the despair of disenfranchised ghettos in cities. Ghettos that instead of being light houses of knowledge, exchange, tolerance and diversity are prisons of poverty, discrimination and apartheid.
The modern failure of the security of the city, therefore, does not come from being by its nature a "soft target", but instead from allowing the isolated pockets of an “other city" to grow in spite of all prosperity. That other city is called Sandtown in Baltimore, the Bronx in New York, Molenbeek in Brussels, Clichy in Paris or Altona in Hamburg. Let's not get fooled, though, the "other city" isn't the result of immigration or cultural differences. It is, and has been through much of history, the result of the distribution of power that continues to exclude too many from participation. That, by the way, is not limited to urban areas. Poverty is pervasive in rural areas, but rarely so blatantly juxtaposed next to privilege, joy and progress as in cities.
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| les banlieues (Clichy) |
Urban centers and the agglomeration of knowledge and exchange remain the main drivers of progress and prosperity of entire societies, something that is very evident on a global scale as urban booster Richard Florida pointed out rightly in his analysis of global stability and instability. Overall cities have done more to instill stability than instability and still create far more prosperity than poverty.
"Je suis Paris", then, should mean that we double down on our efforts of making cities inviting, tolerant, open, diverse, inclusive and joyful marketplaces of ideas and knowledge instead of giving in to hate, fear and religious fanaticism which are the trifecta of inhumanity.
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