I’ve been doing a fair bit of work on Königsberg and Kaliningrad recently. I was interested in what Kant had to say about Königsberg.

Kant didn’t travel further than 75 miles from Königsberg despite lecturing on geography and anthropology more than any other subjects at the local university. He didn’t see his lack of travel experience as a barrier:

Travel belongs to the means of broadening the range of anthropology, even if it is only the reading of travel books. But if one wants to know what to look for abroad, in order to broaden the range of anthropology, first one must have acquired knowledge of human beings at home, through social intercourse with one’s townsmen or countrymen.

This sentence, in the Preface to Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is footnoted:

A large city such as Königsberg on the river Pregel, which is the center of a kingdom, in which the provincial councils of the government are located, which has a university (for cultivation of the sciences) and which has also the right location for maritime commerce — a city which, by way of rivers, has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighboring and distant lands of different languages and customs, can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening one’s knowledge of human beings as well as of the world, where this knowledge can be acquired without traveling.

Aside from an apparent lack of reflection on how he has rationalised his immobility whilst spending many years teaching anthropology and geography, Kant makes quite a specific, special claim about cities like Königsberg. For if Königsberg is a place for a grounding in the study of anthropology, meeting as it does some quite specific criteria, then other places – most other places – are not suited to this grounding. Königsberg not only draws a cosmopolitan humanity to it for study, it also projects that cosmopolitanism out through the works of anthropologists of Königsberg.

(The photo is by juan50300)

So, when the Rough Guide repeats the ‘city of villages’ theme about London, it not only does so because it is a way to explain the infrastructure of the city (which is does, though not very well) and to provide a useful narrative in which to place a disparate set of sights (which I suppose it does), but it also feeds back into what London perceives about itself and does with itself (takes care of the Tube and markets different areas, like Camden, distinctly – which you might think is obvious but which was a strategy which alluded London’s planners for a long time). I’m not suggesting that Rough Guide, Lonely Planet and so on dictate city planning, but with their huge market of tourists they are certainly participants in a dialogue about how cities work and are developed.

South Bank Graffiti - James Nash (aka Cirrus)

Cities these days are developed and planned by ‘partnerships’ of developers, local authorities, residents and business groups, architects, and other interest groups. There are no longer, if there ever really were, city fathers who commission municipal works on a grand scale. Instead there is a Byzantine network of – brace yourself for this term – stakeholders who seek consensus about how an area should work. Since none of these stakeholders has an overriding veto on decisions (well local authorities and the Government actually do, but it is practised within the constraints of the partnership model), consensus tends to come together around concepts which have been seen to work before: a technocratic approach prevails. Consequently urban planning fashions can be seen across many cities across the globe. A newly regenerated urban centre these days is likely to require a modern art gallery (not necessarily filled with art, but more importantly a building which can be described as ‘iconic’), outdoor cafes (from Athens to Oslo) and a pedestrian-friendly layout. Nothing wrong with any of these things particularly, but a lot of European historic city centres are beginning to look very similar (even down to tolerated graffiti), and that’s before we mention international retail branding. I think that the guidebook depictions of these cities are the end-product of these partnership decisions in some ways.

Looking at the end of the Rough Guide to London which is form 1997 there is a rather interesting expression of hope for the city, laid out in terms of planning, development and building:

…the Royal Opera House is undergoing a major refurbishment, as is the British Museum, and there’s to be a new Tate Gallery on the South Bank, which is itself due to be radically redesigned. And to top it all, a god-forsaken slice of Greenwich has been chosen as the centre of the country’s Millennium Celebrations. The other good news is that if, as looks likely, the Tories fall from power, London seems at least set to regain a properly elected governing body. It has to be hoped that it is given the power to reverse the last two decades’ decline.

That dates it quite neatly and is a piece of text to contemplate in the light of the very different backdrop to the current General Election.

* A quote from Sidney Mintz