Don’t just eat, just wait

Here is a story of how I failed to get any food by online ordering.

Just occasionally, I am inspired out of my indolence to join the internet world. This evening, for example, for some reason I thought it might be fun to have food delivered. There is a fish and chip shop down the road, and since I wasn’t supposed to be walking very far, this seemed a good opportunity to try online food delivery. A quick glance at the Just Eat site showed they offered food from the local chip shop.

Ordering was no problem; the food was due for delivery in around 45 minutes, at 19:25. Fifty minutes after the delivery time, there was still no food. I looked at the email from Just Eat confirming that the restaurant had received my order, and this is where things got more complicated.

The above message looks pretty straightforward. On my smartphone, however, the word “here” was not underlined and so did not appear to be a hyperlink. So I tried phoning the restaurant, and I was surprised that the number shown in the above message was actually Just Eat, not the restaurant. After being told twice by a recorded message that it might be faster to phone the restaurant (which is what I had done), I was told the Just Eat customer delivery phone number was not operational.

Clearly, the restaurant must have a phone number, so I found it by searching on Google and then phoned them. “I bet you are from Just Eat. We can’t get a driver!”, they said. “Best bet for you would be to cancel the order. It’ll be a long time before we can get a driver. There are two orders ahead of you.”

Given this helpful advice, I had to try again to contact Just Eat. This time, I tried phoning and when asked to select “customer” or “restaurant” I stated I was a restaurant rather than a customer waiting for an order. I’m good at lying. This time I was connected to Just Eat. The customer service representative was very helpful. She explained that some restaurants employed their own drivers; clearly, the restaurant I had picked was an example. These restaurants expected any delivery problems to be resolved by Just Eat, so they didn’t give their phone number on the Just Eat site. I cancelled the order, Just Eat refunded my money and gave me a £5 voucher off my next order.

I was left with lots of questions. My experience overall was as low as it is possible to get. At the same time as trying Just Eat, I could see their adverts appearing on the football broadcast I was watching. Clearly Just Eat are spending vast sums promoting their service – but some restaurants fail completely to communicate to Just Eat when something is not working, like no deliveries. Why was I not contacted about any delay? Why did the restaurant not tell Just Eat to stop taking orders? Why did the Just Eat site not give me the phone number of the restaurant? Why did Just Eat’s recorded message keep telling me to contact the restaurant directly when that it what I was trying to do? Why do Just Eat sign deals with restaurants that fail to deliver?

For my first experience of one of the big online food delivery services, both the delivery and the information provision failed totally. Like so many online services, Just Eat fixes the simple things – taking the order – while leaving the more complex operational aspects in other hands, such as actually delivering the food. They rub their hands with glee at the prospect of creating a monopoly, in this case food ordering, at which point they can charge what they like and ignore customer wishes. Come to think about it, attending to the needs of the customer seem pretty low down on their priorities even now. Rather than just eating, they were happy for me to just wait. I don’t think I’ll use the £5 voucher.

What one word means: neoliberalism

Google n-grams of neoliberalism, neo-liberalism

It’s so long since I read about economics that I quite missed the growth of the term “neoliberalism”; perhaps I was even more asleep than I thought. Actually, the term was only just becoming more widely used in the early 1990s. But when a term becomes so widespread it is given its own volume in the Oxford Very Short Introductions series, it has clearly become mainstream.The blurb for that volumes states confidently "In its heyday in the late 1990s, neoliberalism emerged as the world's dominant economic paradigm". But what does it actually mean? And who uses it? It looked about time for me to try to work out who is using the word and why.

If you are a lexicographer, you would start defining a word by looking at a corpus, a collection of documents and/or utterances. Hoping that your corpus is as large and hence as representative as possible, you will then look at all the examples of the word you are studying, and identify a number of meanings from that corpus. Given enough examples of the word usage, it should be possible to estimate the proportion of each meaning. Equally cleverly, you can track the use of the term over time. Out of curiosity, I looked in Google n-grams for uses of the term “neoliberalism” and its variants. Clearly this is a term that has become increasingly popular since around 1990.

This lexicographic methodology is what two PhD students did for the term “neoliberalism” (and variants such as the hyphenated and/or capitalised forms). In a 2009 article, “Neoliberalism: from New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan”, they looked at 148 social science articles published 1998-2004 and came up with some remarkable conclusions. First, they used their subject knowledge to identify that this one term was being used in different senses across those articles. They identified four main meanings, with the proportion of occurrences of each meaning in parentheses:

• A policy (72%) of reducing the role of the state in the economy
• A development model (39%) a set of economic theories
• An ideology (22%), a belief in how individuals and groups should behave
• A paradigm (14%), a set of assumptions about how an economy functions.

Of course, these meanings are not mutually exclusive, so the percentages do not sum to 100. Nonetheless, there is a striking variation in meaning. Secondly, they found in these articles that the term “neoliberalism” is used with both positive and negative connotations.

Thirdly, and most remarkably, they found that 69% of the articles they considered provided no definition of the term. Here is a challenge for anyone trying to understand natural language! It seems that in academic discourse, a very limited and formal register of English, following very strict rules about citing your sources and using no sarcasm or word play, variations in the meaning of key terms is widespread.

As a student of language, what conclusion would you draw from such a discovery? How can anyone ever learn a language when there is so much variation in meaning of key terms? Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that “neoliberalism” is a rather challenging word.  It seems to cover everything from Thatcherism and Reaganism to a general belief in “free” markets (and I found other articles that took the meanings a lot further). The number of books and articles that confidently use the term without defining it clearly expect the reader to identify whether they are using it positively or negatively from the context; or from the subject domain of the author or the journal in which the article was published.

The authors of the paper discovered more things about this term. It was almost never used self-referentially: nobody declares themselves to be a “neoliberal”. Secondly, and fascinatingly, they found that “neoliberalism” is used far more widely by political studies researchers than by economists. You could say this reveals one of the fascinating and maddening things about economists: many, perhaps most of the commentators about economics come from outside the field, yet still feel qualified to make judgements.

So next time you come across the term “neoliberalism”, ask yourself in what context the term is being used. Is the term defined, or do we have to infer what the connotations are for this context? Here is an example, taken at random, Ferdinand Mount in the TLS, September 6 2019: “Sassoon has little patience with those “neoliberals” who undervalue the role of the state in buttressing capitalism with the rule of law”. Clearly, Sassoon, the author of the book being reviewed, it using it to describe some thinkers negatively. But how do we infer which of the various meanings is in use in any one context? Natural language is quite a challenge - if you don't define your terms.

Postscript, 31 December 2019: As if to demonstrate the above points, the latest issue of the London Review of Books (dated 2 January 2020) has an extended discussion by Susan Pedersen of the term neoliberalism. It isn't defined; it is referred to, as if we all know what is meant by it, as a kind of shorthand for "our financialised, deregulated world". She describes "how the most common and human desires - for decent homes, better schools for our children, better healthcare for our parents, richer and happier lives - were used to help bring a solidaristic social order down under the rubric of "choice". So there is a kind of rather vague definition: the realignment of the state to provide choice instead of the existing social order. We know what she means - don't we?

On not being an expert

Gove: I think the people in this country have had enough of experts, with organizations from acronyms, saying … that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong. Because these people are the same ones who got consistently wrong what was happening.
Interviewer: This is proper Trump politics this, isn't it?
Gove: No it's actually a faith in the British people to make the right decision.
Interview with Faisal Islam on Sky News (3 June 2016)

Michael Gove’s infamous complaint about experts doesn’t really help my case.  With most of the topics I write about, or simply think about, I am not an expert. Even if you are the proud owner of a PhD, you are qualified to speak on perhaps 0.01% of the world’s knowledge. For the most part, you are a non-expert. Perhaps in Mr Gove’s eyes that qualifies me. Unlike Mr Gove, I don’t have any faith in “the British people” (whatever that vague collective may be, and I’m sure I wouldn’t like it if I investigated further what Gove meant by the phrase).

But perhaps, on reflection, Gove’s view has some justification. Let’s take my current reading – a review of a book about neoliberalism. Of all the things I do not know about, neoliberalism ranks pretty high. I even had to look the word up in Wikipedia to learn what it meant. How, then, can I suddenly be qualified to have an opinion on it, or to comment on it?

The answer is, I think, helpful for clarification of what Gove was saying. Economic policy is an area that affects us all. Whether a country should invest in public projects, whether it should aim to balance its budget, whether there should be a minimum wage, these are all questions of political economy, by which I mean economic questions that have a political dimension. These questions cannot be resolved simply by reference to economists. If a market is perfect, it does not mean that market is necessarily satisfactory by all (non-economic) criteria. If I can pay someone in a supermarket car park to wash my car for £10, a price I am prepared to pay and a price at which a supplier is prepared to provide this service, then we have a market in perfect equilibrium. But for all I know, the person washing the car may only be earning £1 out of that £10 I pay, and I don’t want to be a party to exploitation of cheap labour. So I agree there should be a minimum wage, so I know that whoever washes my car gets at least some kind of reasonable reward.

As Ha-Joon Chang states in his 23 Things They don’t tell you about Capitalism (2011) there is a case for everyone being involved in and understanding the thinking behind such things - specifically, neoliberalism:

Even though the 2008 crisis has made us seriously question the way in which our economies are run, most of us do not pursue such questions because we think that they are ones for the experts. Indeed they are – at one level. The precise answers do require knowledge on many technical issues, many of them so complicated that the experts themselves disagree on them. It is then natural that most of us simply do not have the time or the necessary training to learn all the technical details before we can pronounce our judgements on the effectiveness of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), the necessity of G20, the wisdom of bank nationalization or the appropriate levels of executive salaries … However, it is not necessary for us to understand all the technical details in order to understand what is going on in the world and exercise what I call an ‘active economic citizenship’ to demand the right courses of action from those in decision-making positions.

Chang claims we can all understand enough about something to be “active economic citizens”. In that sense, we can all be experts.

Perhaps, then, what Michael Gove meant, or what I would like him to have meant, is this. There are some issues that are so important that we all of us, as citizens, should be equipped to comment in some way about those issues. Whatever the letters after your name, or however grand your job title, your pronouncements on neoliberalism are likely be coloured by political assumptions. Even though the literary periodicals are full of reviews by experts about books by experts, there is a case, not just for us mere mortals to read about these topics, but have our own ideas. So next time I see a review of a book such as Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: the end of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard, 2018), I will read it, and share what I am learning as I learn more about it. By communicating what I have learned, and what makes sense to me, I am not invalidating experts. But I am both learning to understand, and learning to communicate with others who will disagree; in other words, being an active economic citizen. In that sense, the experts from organizations with acronyms are indeed not sufficient.

Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi)

Agnes Varda’s Vagabond (1985) was a deceptively simple film. Since the film starts with the death of the main character, the end is clear, but Varda’s achievement is to entrance the viewer throughout. The main character, a woman who lives without a home, as a drifter, remains remarkably impassive throughout. She appears to remain indifferent whether other people treat her callously or with friendship; but she is admirable for her will to survive. Only in the final few minutes does the end become increasingly likely.

The question, of course, is why does Mona reject all avenues offered to her? She is young, she has the world ahead of her, so why turn away repeatedly from all long-term involvement? Rejecting offers of crass casual sex from lorry drivers are not surprising, but why walk away from a family who have gone back to live on the land, and, when she says she wants to grow potatoes, offers her a space, and to plough that land for her? Instead, she sits in the caravan provided for her and seems to do nothing but smoke cigarettes.

When she takes a lover, she smokes all his month’s supply of dope in four days, and then gets impatient because he doesn’t have any more. When a researcher into tree diseases explains to her what is happening to the trees, she wilfully misunderstands and repeats a mangled version of the tale back to a man who has given her work. A Tunisian immigrant shares his food and accommodation with her, but she complains when his six colleagues return and don’t want her around. When a stranger buys her a sandwich in a café, she puts money into the jukebox, thereby showing everyone she doesn’t need someone else’s money (although she takes it just the same). It’s difficult to comprehend just what these responses mean.

No explanation is given for her wilful rejection of any kind of job or stability. Yet, interestingly, the people she meets (largely played by amateurs) repeatedly project on to her what they would like to see. People dream of her freedom; there is very little freedom from what we see of her in this film. Other people struggle with existing relationships, dealing with drunk partners, but the film never shows Mona revelling in such freedom. In that way, the film gains stature, as we realise how disturbing she is for all of us in fixed jobs and ways of life.

Even though the film compels because of its narrative – like a picaresque novel, it has hardly any plot development. One reason for continuing to watch is simply the quality of the camera work; Varda has a gift for identifying powerful shots and scenes. In contrast, The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I happened to see the night before, probably had ten times the budget but failed to show any visual imagination. It’s not surprising that Varda started life as a photographer; many of the shots in the film are startling in their immediacy. She manages to capture both beauty and ugliness – the beauty of a couple of moments of fleeting happiness for the main character, Mona, and the sheer ugliness of much of the despoiled French countryside where the film is set. We follow where her camera moves, because we are fascinated.

Varda is aware of the power of images and their conventional interpretation. As with most French films, there are bare breasts, but they do not transmit the usual message of eroticism. One unpleasant character starts out naked in the bath, and then reveals herself to be intolerant and brutal, in dismissing a woman in her employment simply because the woman’s boyfriend has been implicated in a theft. As a viewer, your expectations are confounded as the scene evolves.

If the film has a moral, it is perhaps that of compassion.  Mona gains some of the viewer’s sympathy but as fast as it is gained, she by her actions rejects a simple admiration. Some people she encounters are brutal and horrible to her; others respect her and do not make demands of her. She is almost a kind of blank canvas against which the world displays its good and bad qualities. Perhaps the film makes us look again at those on the margin, and to rethink our dismissal of people we do not want to know; but this film is no hymn to the outsider.

Last Supper at Pompeii

Who could fail to enjoy this exhibition, at the Ashmolean, Oxford, about the food and dining habits of the Romans, one of my favourite themes. I couldn’t imagine anything more pleasurable than to participate in one of those Roman meals every night, served, it would seem, by naked slaves. 

Farmer going to market, to provide food for all those banquets

Yet there is something curious about the exhibition title. The term “last supper” is used by the curator, Paul Roberts, to bring together two themes of the exhibition: the Roman tradition of fine dining, and pleasure in all things culinary, with the dramatic end to so many human lives with the eruption of Vesuvius in CE 79. Something doesn’t quite add up. The phrase “Last Supper” means most often in English a very Christian event, the Last Supper of Jesus and the disciples. Clearly there is no reference to that event, or to that tradition – in CE 79 Christianity had no significance in the Roman world. So why use the term? 

On reflection, I had my doubts about this exhibition, which, in an effort to show a theme, perhaps simplified things a little, and emphasised one angle at the expense of several others. The theme was: the Romans enjoyed dining, as their predecessors the Etruscans did. In the midst of dining, they were aware of death, which turned out to be highly relevant, because they all died in the eruption of Vesuvius. Later, many would-be Romans in England followed a similar elaborate style in their eating habits (although they didn’t die suddenly). Is that a theme? Kind of. The evidence for this theme is one highly displayed mosaic: a skeleton holding wine jugs. Artistically, it is about at the level of a schoolboy drawing in a playground. From the emphasis given to this rather trivial mosaic, it is clear that this exhibition favours themes over artistic quality. 

Mosaic, death holding wine jugs

Other doubts about the exhibition soon began to follow. Firstly, what exactly was the connection between the Etruscans and the Romans? They both liked all things Greek, and they both enjoyed dining, but was it the intention of this exhibition to suggest that the Romans got their taste for dining from the Etruscans? The clue this show provides is a few examples of Etruscan cinerary urns depict the dead person as if at a banquet – as at the banquet, so in the afterlife. Still, it is a bit simplistic – after all, Roman funeral sculpture doesn’t show people in a banquet (as far as I can recall). In other words, to demonstrate such a link would need a bit more evidence.

Then there are the few objects at the end of the exhibition, mostly of lower quality, showing things English. The intention is, I assume, to show that the English had similar dreams about fine dining as the Romans did. That isn’t surprising, even if the English had less money and so tended to make objects out of pewter rather than of silver. But the English items are something of an anti-climax, because the Pompeii objects are carefully orchestrated to culminate in a life-size effigy of a woman who died in the disaster. No sudden deaths for the English Romans (unless they choked on a dormouse).

A pewter dish from the Appleford hoard, not illustrated in the exhibition catalogue (or book)

Other gripes: the catalogue of the exhibition does not illustrate all the objects shown. This is a pain when one of the loveliest objects, a near life-size bronze sculpture of a male, is not illustrated in the catalogue (which is firmly called a “book”, not a catalogue, in the acknowledgements). The index to the “book” does not list the objects in the exhibition, although it does list the illustrations. The book contains a 24-page “catalogue of objects and organic samples” and will tell you which objects are “unpublished” – helpful for some people, but not for me – but not which objects are illustrated in the book. I can’t help feeling the book is telling you the less important things while leaving out the basic things.

When I buy a catalogue, I like it to show the things I saw – at least, the big-ticket items. Thus, there is a wonderful almost life-size bronze statue of Apollo in the exhibition, but Apollo is only found under “gods” in the index. Although there are seven pages of forewords and acknowledgements, there is no list of illustrations either. If you scroll through the entire book, you will find a detail of the Apollo statue illustrated (on page 143, to save anyone else the bother), but there is no way of identifying which of the 299 objects listed in the catalogue this statue might be. Unhelpfully, the illustrations include the museum catalogue number (so the museum at least knows which object it is, even if we don’t). The illustrations in the book don’t always include the dates of the object displayed. These dates can be found in the catalogue – if you can find the object. When the catalogue doesn’t illustrate the major objects and the illustrations aren’t keyed to the catalogue, you start to wonder. It’s a hotchpotch! This is an Ashmolean publication, and they have plenty of experience of producing exhibition catalogues, and even books.  

The statue of Apollo, in case you don't find it in the catalogue

The audio guide cost £3, and contained very little that was not already stated in the captions to the objects. More useful would have been some optional background information, such as extracts from the Satyricon, which is after all a description of a banquet much like the one depicted in this exhibition. Incidentally, it costs £1 (not refundable) to leave any items in the lockers. I don’t know of any other gallery that has a similar practice.

Finally, there is the whole “Last Supper” idea. Perhaps the dining habits of the Pompeiians become all the more poignant because we knew, as they did not, that it would all end suddenly and dramatically one day. But even though we, with hindsight, are fascinated both by the sudden end and the incredible evidence it offers us, this is not something that the Pompeiians ever thought of. If they had considered it, surely they wouldn’t have died so suddenly and dramatically on that fateful day. Was Paul Roberts, the curator, suggesting that the emphasis on fine dining and “carpe diem” was because all the inhabitants of Pompeii realised that every dinner could be their last? A bit like Russian roulette?

Two Norfolks

Five days in North Norfolk was enough to discover there is more than one Norfolk – more than one North Norfolk, to be precise. Of course there are beaches (Wells, Holkham), and seaside towns selling fish and chips and providing slot machines (Wells), but there is also a deeply rural Norfolk, more cut off than the coast from the present day.

Wells and Holkham were a surprise: they were full of families. Not just families with buckets and spades, inflatable dinghies, dogs (lots of dogs), but wealthy families on holiday. Children with long hair and fancy names like Giacomo. Hotels in Holkham and Wells charging £150 per room per night, with their restaurants crowded with children drawing and playing games while their parents ate their dinner. This was a surprise; I thought the family holiday like this in the UK had disappeared years ago. Not only is it surviving, but flourishing. The path to Holkham beach was, as you might expect, heavily populated from morning to nightfall.

But, to be honest, despite the wonders of Holkham and Houghton, this part of North Norfolk was, after a few days, slightly oppressive. You felt after a while that it didn’t really matter what food was being served, because the demand was so great. I'm not sure what the visitors came for, but it was accompanied by a lot of noise. 

Just a few miles away, in the area between Felbrigg Hall and Blickling, the atmosphere was fascinatingly different. We cycled just eight miles and encountered four churches. And what churches! Each of them illustrated a modest (Saxon or Norman) foundation, followed by, in some cases, a few years of fabulous wealth (14th or 15th centuries), then a long period of stasis, until the Victorians arrived to rebuild and redesign.  Fortunately, those Victorian rebuilders did not manage to obliterate all traces of genuine medieval atmosphere, and some of the churches retain a feel of true other-worldliness. The world they represent is totally different to the present day.

Take Ingworth church, for example. It is allocated just a few lines in Pevsner’s Buildings of England. It had a round tower, which collapsed in 1822. It has hardly any monuments. From the original narrow nave design, it was only enlarged to add one aisle, rather than aisles on each side, leaving it rather asymmetrical. But even the original nave was asymmetrical – the arch to the tower is not in the middle of the west wall (I’ve no idea why).

Yet it is a church of genuine creative genius. When the tower fell down, someone had the brilliant idea of turning the remains into a circular vestry, with a conical thatched roof, matching the thatch of the nave and chancel. Outside, some rather unique buttresses were added to hold the tower stump and the nave together. In a similar way of making a virtue of necessity, the flint and stone porch required repairing in the 16th century, and a cheap fix was used – brick. The result is a magical ensemble that displays the church magnificently from the road beside it.

Figure 1 Ingworth Church - exterior

When you encounter a church like this, you are struck by the presence of a civilization, disappeared, but still in some way present. There are a few houses in the village of Ingworth, but they don’t detract from the raw power of that church.

Then, as you begin to unwind and look at the churches in more detail, you start to see other glimpses of a medieval world. For all I know there may be references in private houses as well, but of course these are all but impossible to see on a brief visit.

Look, for example, at bench ends in the humblest churches. Thurgarton church is now redundant, although open to visit. It had a thatched roof, no electricity (just oil lamps), and no tower at all. The pews had all been cordoned off because the floor is in a dangerous condition. Yet the bench ends turn out to be full of fascinating (and hardly religious) individual carvings.

Figure 2 Thurgarton: bench ends

These churches were all tucked away in tiny villages (or sometimes, as at Wickmere, not near a village at all), surrounded by a stillness broken only by the occasional birdsong. Almost no cars or traffic to disturb this magical tranquillity. You almost felt a medieval heart beating.

Then, finally, to discover the ruined castle (more a fortified manor house) at Baconsthorpe. When we arrived, some families were having what looked like a birthday party there. The ruins were swarming with children climbing where they shouldn’t, playing games, eating ice creams, and generally making havoc. After a few minutes, they all disappeared in their cars, leaving the ruins as silent as they must have been for hundreds of years.

Figure 3 Baconsthorpe: the castle as picturesque ruin

Turns out that one factor behind Baconsthorpe's wealth, the fact that the owners were able to continue to build in the 16th century, was due to a wool processing factory that existed within the castle walls. But that is another story. 

Cities and Civilization: the book as doorstop

Cities in Civilization, by Peter Hall

Cities have a magic. Approaching a big city – London, Paris, or Berlin – by train slowly reveals the vast extent of a big city, the division into older and newer zones, and the sheer excitement of such a vast number of people co-existing.

But just as cities are vast, so to write about them threatens to get lost in the sheer scale of the exercise. The study of cities is such a vast topic that it threatens to become overwhelming. Why some cities are more successful than others, why cities have a golden age, why some cities appear to decline and die, will have many reasons, and few writers would dare venture to comment on such great themes.

Peter Hall (1932-2014) is not someone to shirk such a challenge. Cities in Civilization, over a thousand pages long, includes all the usual candidates for the most famous city in world history (Athens, Florence, Paris) but then adds a lot more besides. Hall’s theme is actually “how creativity comes about” – and Hall claims that creativity, and golden ages, take place in cities.

I admit here I haven’t read the book – only a few specific sections. But to be honest, I would look suspiciously at anyone who claims to have read it from cover to cover. I’m not against wide-ranging books, but this one seems to take the whole of human civilization as its theme – as, I suppose, the title Cities in Civilization would suggest. That makes it rather unwieldy. Perhaps Hall is just running out of book titles including the name “city”. He is already the author of The World Cities, Cities of Tomorrow, Good Cities, Better Lives. Hall’s obituary in The Guardian states he authored more than 50 books. I trust they are not all as wide-ranging as this one. I think the intention is that we, the readers, are so impressed by the scale and the range of the references that the argument is accepted without question.

Any book that includes Halliwell’s Film Guide in its bibliography, and has index references to Bill Gates, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bill Haley, is casting its net wide. Just how do you compile such a vast work of over 1,000 pages, with an index containing over 4,000 references? Well, you credit a lot of research assistants (including your wife as a research assisant for six years [p.viii]. And you inevitably base a lot of your ideas on secondary writing, or on commonly held assumptions (also known as hearsay). To be honest, it is difficult to marshall so many co-writers and such a vast topic. Hall’s book (it’s not the only book with this fault) suffers from what I would describe as over-inflation. It’s a bit like a concert by a virtuoso violinist, who is desperate to show how capable they are. Not only does Hall write over a thousand pages of text, but he references everything, as if citations make any argument sufficiently rigorous. I like citations, but I do object to gratuitious references. Out of curiosity, I looked up references to Joseph Schumpeter in the text; I wasn’t sure of his link to cities, but he did write about “creative destruction”. On page 295 Hall discusses Schumpeter’s concept of innovation, and his idea of business cycles. Hall states: “this is not the place to re-enter into detail into that controversy, which I have discussed at length elsewhere” (although Hall spends the next two pages explaining it). Quite correctly, Hall includes a citation to where he has discussed this point; but when you consult the citation, Hall lists twelve separate referenced titles, only two of which are by Hall himself. And none of those referenced titles include a page number! Where in the other ten books (many of them published before Hall was writing) has Hall discussed this point? Is this one rogue reference, or are they all equally vague?

I start to lose confidence in this book’s ability to track such wide references.  Is this a work of scholarship or is it, to use Hall’s disparaging comparison, merely “journalism”? To be fair, many of the notes include specific page references, but this is a kind of war of attrition on the reader – with over 50 pages of notes, along the lines of 3,000 citations in all. Few readers would dare question such an edifice; even Hall calls the notes “interminable” [p8].

In light of the above, I became rather more relaxed at commenting on Hall's mighty tome. 

The thesis

What is Hall arguing?  The argument seems quite clear from the organisation into five books. Book One looks at “cultural or artistic creativity”, and presents the usual suspects of the famous cities in world history: Athens, Florence, Paris 1870-1910, Weimar Berlin. Interestingly, Hall associates golden ages not just with the arts and culture but with technological innovation as well. “These two great modes of innovation, long since seen as separate and contraposed, ave become one” [p5]. Hall argues that the innovation he describes includes identifying ways in which humans can live in cities more efficiently. Of course, what “efficient” means has varied with civilizations.

Fundamentally, Hall takes issue with Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities. According to Hall, Mumford thought great cities were doomed: Megalopolis was destined to become Necropolis, strangled by its urban entrails. Instead, for Hall, cities can reinvent themselves.

Hall, incidentally, has no doubt of his own place compared with other writers – considerably beyond Lewis Mumford, who “lacked long-term direct everyday knowledge of the quality of life” in London, Paris and other European cities” [p6] (does Hall have less superficial knowledge of cities, despite having travelled thousands of miles every year?). But that is not enough to dismiss Mumford: “despite the evident breadth of his reading, Mumford was fundamentally a brilliant polemical journalist, not a scholar.” I’m sorry, but for me scholarship is using citations and references properly. And even then, for every ten scholars who can cite properly, there is only one who can argue convincingly. For me, “journalist” is not a term of condemnation, and Cities in Civilization veers close to journalism in many ways. 

Is there a magic formula for a great city? No. “I want to argue that no one kind of city, nor any one size of city, has a monopoly on creativity or the good life; but the biggest and most cosmopolitan cities … have throughout history been the places that ignited the sacred flame of the human intelligence and the human imagination.” So, bigger is certainly better. That’s odd, because the comparative population of cities in the golden ages described by Hall are:

London, 1600: 200,000

Florence, 1500: 50,000

Athens, 450 BC: 250,000

Manchester, 1800: 95,000

[all figures taken from Wikipedia]

Clearly, size did not then correlate with cultural prestige, although that may be more true today. Nonetheless, there are today over 100 cities in China with a population of over one million, and I would be very hesitant to make any judgement about  how many of them represented cultural centres.

Arguing over details

We can all agree on classical Athens and Renaissance Florence, but Paris 1870-1910? In the visual arts, yes, but you could argue that the best French writers (Flaubert, Baudelaire) predated 1870. Madame Bovary was published in 1856. I am not a slave to periodization, but I do object when dates are suggested that seem to have spurious precision. Hall’s case studies (seven in total) “treat the major high arts … as well as the broader intellectual life”. Nothing if not ambitious!

But to separate cities in this way is questionable. You could argue that Florence’s artistic success was as much economic as artistic – for artists to flourish required a steady stream of commissions from wealthy merchants. And in political terms, Florence was a disaster. Its system of rule by committee had disastrous results, with a constant risk of invasion. The switch to the Medici rule, you could argue, guaranteed Florence’s long-term decline into a cultural (and economic) backwater that it remains as today.

Book Two then looks at centres of technological and economic innovation: Manchester, Glasgow, Berlin (again), Detroit, Silicon Valley. These are “cities where people had to earn their living the hard way” [p9] (was that not true of the cities in Book One? You feel that Hall has over-reached himself, and for all his vast knowledge of urban planning, is stating broad generalisations that can easily be challenged.

Book Three considers Los Angeles and Memphis, and describes the popular art forms created by outsiders, in Hollywood, many of them first-generation immigrants. Here is a fascinating theme.

Book Four is about “urban innovation”, “the capacity of cities to solve their own problems”. For me, this book would address what I noticed after living in Turin and Milan, and then visiting Rome for the first time. Rome was (and is) an official capital, but did not appear to me to be a fully vibrant capital of living culture as were Turin and Milan. Rome appears to me to be a city that fails to solve its own problems, and has failed to solve them for some hundreds of years.

Finally, Book Five, ostensibly about twentieth-century city planning, dreams about “the union of art, technology and organization”.  Hall discusses how cities “achieve urban order in order to survive, to compete, to thrive”.

History is the history of great men

Hall’s book suffers from the “great man thesis” [it’s always a man]. Can we learn about the world by studying what the great men did? You would think such an approach discredited, at least since the sinister implications of Carlyle’s idea of heroes, yet business books continue to be published in their thousands suggesting that if we only study one great man (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Richard Arkwright) we can learn great things. As early as page 11 sees Hall drifting into the world of great people:

"There is one study that is centrally relevant: Howard Gardner, a psychologist, has analysed the lives of seven highly creative twentieth-century individuals: Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. He asks, “Where is creativity?”  

Is this relevant to cities or to civilization? A further problem with the “great men” approach is that the writing becomes superficial, based not just on secondary sources but on one or two writers only for each field. So we aren’t to trust Hall on all the details, only on “how their separate analyses and conclusions could fit into a general scheme”. That requires quite a bit of trust on the reader’s part.

I suspect I am being unkind to Peter Hall. He has authored some of the most famous books on urban planning in the last fifty years (see an interview in the The Guardian for some examples). But Cities in Civilization is not, I think the culmination of a career. Perhaps it is the kind of book a famous scholar dreams about writing at the end of their career; when they can relax and muse about such impossible-to-answer topics as your favourite city. But for most of us, a book a quarter of the size might have been better.