3:AM Magazine

By Karl Whitney

Michael Sorkin, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Reaktion Books, 2009

Michael Sorkin has written an engaging, leisurely book that surveys issues of urban design and planning in New York. In addition to running his own architecture practice, he is professor of Architecture in New York’s City University. His background in the theory and practice of architecture and urban design thoroughly informs this work. Apart from anything else, it is a valuable introduction to New York’s urban history – and to urbanism in general.

Ostensibly an account of Sorkin’s daily journey from his apartment in Greenwich Village to his studio in TriBeCa, each chapter focuses on a section of his walk to work, beginning with the stairs, the stoop of his rent-controlled apartment building, and the block he lives on. His personal experience of each space is described, before he widens his focus to take in wider issues of ownership, public space and gentrification of run-down, usually working-class areas of the city – the ‘slum-clearance’ so beloved of urban visionaries such as Le Corbusier and Robert Moses. He moves from microcosmic detail to macrocosmic overview with ease, and the book is a pleasure to read.

In describing his itinerary across the city, Sorkin is stepping into the well-worn shoes of generations of illustrious urban wanderers. The walk through urban space has long been seen as a viable critique of the city: from Baudelaire, through Walter Benjamin and the Surrealists, to the Situationist dérive. And Sorkin clearly wishes to channel the critical possibilities of these urban perambulations, which were, in the case of the Situationists, construed as an avant-gardist riposte to the frankly anti-pedestrian, automobile-centric functionalism of modern urbanism.

Although the Situationists emerge briefly from Sorkin’s account as explorers of the political potential of the subjective mapping of urban space, the real hero of his narrative is Jane Jacobs, the urban reformer who, on a grassroots level, challenged the municipal master plans of Robert Moses in the 1950s and 1960s. Jacobs, with her emphasis on walkable neighbourhoods and a de-prioritisation of the visual in urban planning, finds a strong adherent in Sorkin.

Jacobs’ advocacy of areas of high population density has come to seem ever more persuasive in an era when rising fuel prices highlight the unsustainable nature of suburban sprawl. In this context, the ability to walk to work is desirable on a number of levels: environmentally, and from a quality of life perspective. Yet, largely because of the seemingly irreversible history of problematic planning legislation, walking to work has become a luxury few can share.

Overall, however, Sorkin largely succeeds in linking his own everyday experience of urban space with larger political issues at work in the vast metropolis. For example, his struggles with his landlord, while often played for laughs, come to embody the wider concerns of a tenant-owner relationship.

But, this is also where something of a problem emerges in the book: its admirable efforts to connect the personal experience of the city with bigger issues are somewhat constrained by the writer’s focus on a specific location (Lower Manhattan), and a specific person’s experience of that space. In being able to walk to work, and in being able to live in Greenwich Village at a comparatively reasonable rent, Sorkin is highly unusual. The part doesn’t quite stand for the whole. The poor have been largely cleared from the island, and, as Sorkin points out, fewer middle-class than ever before can afford to live there.

The process of gentrification is viewed as particularly insidious, and Sorkin documents the continual rent rises which force small businesses out in favour of higher-end stores. Gentrification encourages a mania for building-conversion and for the branding of neighbourhoods. Sorkin experiences both first-hand: firstly, when the building in which he rents his offices is converted by the landlord into condominiums, he is forced to move out. Secondly, when he has moved his offices to a new area, he discusses the desperate efforts of developers to rebrand the neighbourhood into something comparable to ‘SoHo’ or ‘TriBeCa’.

At the same time, in its focus on the kind of urban activism typified by Jacobs, the book is highly nostalgic: it traces the flooding of Manhattan Island with capital, but, in response to this influx, can only offer retreads of the arguments from what now seems a golden era of urban contestation, when heroes and villains were so clearly delineated. The present-day New York, at least in this account, appears to offer fewer opportunities for this kind of engagement.

The concentration on Manhattan – and, even then, on a specific corner of the island – is, for this reason, problematic. Even in the present day, capital doesn’t obliterate the contested border between urban viewpoints, but merely moves it to the periphery. Some investigation of this aspect of New York’s borderland would have been welcome, but, admittedly, that would have made it a distinctly different book.

Ultimately, though, it must be stressed that what this book does, it does extremely well, and it’s carried along not just by its charming concept, but also by its chatty voice and its deep erudition. Its numerous digressions are central to the story the author wants to tell. Sorkin’s colourful descriptions of the urban characters he meets on his journey exist alongside his precise accounts of the city’s history: where else, apart from perhaps the street itself, would you find these divergent strands rubbing past one another?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karl Whitney is a journalist, researcher and 3:AM editor based in Dublin, Ireland. He has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Belfast Telegraph.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, July 3rd, 2009.