Britain’s Cities, Britain’s Future. Mike Emmerich. London Publishing Partnership. 2017.

Mike Emmerich, along with Sir Howard Bernstein and others, is one of the architects of the British ‘urban renaissance’ and contemporary Manchester-inspired devolution to city regions. We know this because he tells us on the second page of the ambitiously titled Britain’s Cities, Britain’s Future. This book is a little more circumspect than Emmerich’s previous writings on Manchester, which have claimed that ‘Greater Manchester has been broadly successful in managing the transition to a post-industrial knowledge intensive economy. It has been able to capitalise on the positive agglomeration effects emanating from its size, density and diversity to reinvent itself and unlock this growth potential.’ (Full disclosure: I have contributed to recent research that questions this claim). Now, Emmerich acknowledges that ‘most of the UK’s cities remain economically and politically weak’ (1), and offers only ‘guarded optimism’ about the future (4). Elsewhere, though, he proclaims an ‘urban renaissance’ (x) attributable to structural shifts toward a service, consumption-dominated economy that favours urban agglomerations, and to devolution and smart metropolitan policies, many of which he designed in Manchester.

There are two key elements to the argument presented in the book, which are used to support a set of policy proposals. The first concerns the economic development of UK cities. Emmerich attributes the nineteenth-century growth of British cities to a mixture of geography and climate that favoured textile production; the availability of cotton; surplus agricultural labour; the availability of capital (including from aristocratic sources); and technological innovation, often on small scale. He places special emphasis on the progressive role of the aristocracy and of the urban environment with its religious freedom and culture of self-improvement.

The roots of decline are deep, however, and are linked to the waning of staple industries in the face of international competition, which Emmerich attributes to failures in education and training and low levels of capital investment. Later, industrial cities failed to capture the opportunities associated with new waves of technological change that benefitted London and smaller cities. London provides an exemplar, according to Emmerich: it began its recovery long before the financial services boom of the 1990s as a result of large investments in infrastructure. The lesson for other cities is that scale and ‘major transformational’ projects are therefore required.

The second part of the analysis emphasises the political self-confidence of Victorian cities whose culture was one of Liberalism, non-conformism and scientific learning. John Bright and Richard Cobden are offered as personifications of the city; the working-class experience is largely undiscussed: ‘Manchester and other industrial cities were formed by business, with political governance catching up considerably later’ (73). Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), perhaps the most famous book about Manchester, also does not get a mention.
Image Credit: Manchester Town Hall (Stephen CC BY 2.0)

Emmerich notes that while public health problems stimulated the creation of local government, cities were slow to respond to this new opportunity, ceding their early autonomy to national government in ways that centralised power in London. Lacking strong institutions, British cities began their long decline. This failure is attributed to ‘British cultural snobbery’: an undefined and peculiar concept on which to rest decisive explanatory power.

Emmerich’s policy agenda for today’s cities is often sensible but not necessarily new or radical. These include developing transport infrastructure, raising skills and providing appropriate sites, all of which require more devolution. Many are easy to agree with but are difficult to evaluate because of a lack of detailed examples of success and failure. There is an interesting case study of policies aimed at attracting textile investment back to Manchester, but this seems at odds with the rest of Emmerich’s analysis of urban growth.

This is a smoothly written narrative, but much of the story is constructed around straw arguments. Emmerich states that:


‘geographers’ concern for distribution tends to come at the expense of a less convincing account of growth and how and where it can best be stimulated. Conversely, the economists have too little to say about the profound social consequences of their analysis, or the sustainability (or plausibility) of the implied growth model (49).

As an aphorism this works well, but as an insight into contemporary debates occurring in economic geography about local and regional development, it is inadequate. Later, ‘the cry comes from protectionists and the left that we must protect national champions with financial support’ (117). This does an injustice to the sophisticated case for industrial policy developed by Dani Rodrik and Mariana Mazzucato. Again: ‘it is just not possible for a city like Birmingham to import directly the lessons of Barcelona or Copenhagen’ (5). Is it seriously being suggested that there are no lessons to be learned from elsewhere? For instance, given Emmerich proposes more development on the greenbelt, can we learn nothing from how Copenhagen has managed this process?

The least convincing part of the book is the account of the decline of local government in the nineteenth century. Historians such as Jerry White have shown the brief heyday of local democracy occurred, in fact, from 1930-48 during which ‘whole spheres of public life were owned and managed locally that are now seen as entirely the province of national government or the private sector’. Oddly, Emmerich has nothing to say about this era.

Emmerich offers only passing comment on rising social inequality. But the growth of inequality is plausibly linked to the economic models that are proffered as solutions to the problems of urban growth – city-centre, consumption-led development. The clearest expression of this was the geography of the Brexit referendum in which some larger provincial cities typically voted Remain, while their metropolitan hinterlands voted Leave.

The citizen is another notable absence. Given the relationship between growing inequality and increasing political disenchantment, much more needs to be said here. Additional lacunae in a book about the future of British cities include the implications of an ageing population and the rising cost of social care which, alongside austerity, underpins the fiscal crisis of local government. The questions of climate change and the shift to a low carbon economy also lack attention.

The book is marked by a tendency to deal only with evidence that supports its arguments or to use little at all. For instance, Philip McCann’s important work on the UK regional problem is not addressed. Given McCann’s starkly different assessment of regional economic conditions, it would have been valuable to have Emmerich’s perspective. Similarly, when he briefly addresses local democracy, he dismisses concerns that ‘metro mayors’ offer an impoverished form of accountability. However, an explanation of the relative advantages and disadvantages of different models of urban governance in an era of declining local election turnouts would be most welcome.

Knowing remarks about Howard Bernstein (‘Mr or rather Sir Manchester’ [125]) give the reader the impression that they are intruding upon a self-referential debate among cognoscenti, adding an undertone of hubris to the book. As an insight into the thinking of a key protagonist in the UK urban policy scene, this book is useful. As a contribution to understanding the real challenges facing the UK’s cities, it is far less so.

The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice. Peter Sloterdijk. (Columbia University Press)

With The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice Peter Sloterdijk is, I suspect, trying to present something of an urtext for his particular type of philosophical ponderings. At only 95 pages long, one could be forgiven for thinking that this might be an accessible starting point to the German philosopher’s meditations on the way the world works. At the level of brevity you’d be right; the volume tackles a great deal of complex thought and a huge historical timeframe (c. 500 B.C. – present day) in an appealing short page range. Nevertheless, the writing remains quite esoteric and it takes a good 15 – 20 pages to really ‘get going’.

As is a common observation when it comes to Sloterdijk, the writing tends to fall into two main categories: that which deals with the concrete and the material, and that which attends to Heidegger. Throughout the volume the most enlightening work is focused on concrete examples, such as Chapter One’s consideration of the physical ‘Elsewhere’ of institutions of learning read alongside Socrates ‘practice’ of becoming absent (or ‘Elsewhere’) in moments of deep thought. When writing with a more Heideggerian focus the work becomes fairly impenetrable in both language and thought, and thus this work is less productive than the more materially grounded thinking found elsewhere in the volume (which, after the opening 20 pages, is fortunately in the majority).

Although the book is academically dense throughout (unnecessarily so in places) there are moments of genuine sardonic humour which help pull the reader in. Sloterdijk talks of ‘quasi-homeopathic philosophers’, ‘loser romanticism’ and the ‘non-chemical’ sedative quality of ‘what we now call “culture”’. My personal favourite however is his rhetorically asking if ‘homo theoreticus’ (the theorist) is really as honourable as they would have everyone believe or ‘is he actually a bastard trying to impress us with fake titles?’ Thus, once you key into the writer’s voice the volume opens up to make some potent and engaging arguments concerning the practice of intellectual thought and the need to consider contemplation as an embodied practice.

The central argument of the book is that the life of deep thought, the intellectual or properly philosophical life, is a life removed from life. This is to say that, as Solterdijk establishes in looking at Socrates, one can literally become lost in thought. Solterdijk takes us from Husserl back to Socrates and deploys a dynamic reading of Hannah Ardent (alongside Foucault) to elucidate a convincing argument on the ‘Elsewhare’ nature of ‘being-in-thought’ at both existential and spacio-physical levels. Thought and intellectual endeavour has always required both the physical space to facilitate philosophical ‘practices’ – Plato’s Academy, for example. But also, such ‘academic’ practices create an embodied ‘space’ within the thinker – Socrates’ ‘condition of “absences”’ which were regarded as ‘an inseparable attribute of the business of thinking’. So, to think might be seen as being dead to the world. Thus, for Sloterdijk the root of ‘the ancient European culture of rationality’ is in ‘the idea that the thinking person is a kind of dead person on holiday.’ (This deliberately hyperbolic tone continues throughout the book and while I found it initially off putting, once I attuned to the register it became part of the volumes charm and wit, as well as key to its (slightly polemical) argumentative strength.)

Later in the volume questions of the origins of ‘homo theoreticus’ and how one might train to become ‘fit for epoché’ (p.37) are raised. The work here is at its most vibrant when the dense historiographical and theoretical thinking on Plato and Aristotle is turned out to face the present day. For example, Solterdijk takes us through an ancient social shift from a focus on serving the polis to concern for oneself, to arrive at a cutting observation about contemporary thought (and academia):

Where citizens once used to debate, visiting professors now work on their dissertations; the whole world is a residential home for visiting scholars. The scholars guarantee personally that they are world citizens, certain that such phrases are always worth a grant, or will at least land them a consultancy contract at a royal court.

The fairly anti-academic stance raises its head again later when he comments that ‘pupils’ are those who ‘succumb’ to an ‘intellectual dependence’ for the sake of a deferred independence that may never actually come to pass. And Sloterdijk goes further to comment that the ‘practice [of] receptiveness’ that school pupils engage in might ‘immobilize’ their motor functions with ‘far-reaching consequences later’.

Throughout there is a sense that Sloterdijk doesn’t quite trust processes of philosophical or theoretical life which for better or worse function by shutting out the rest of the world. But it isn’t all doom and gloom. As the book develops it becomes apparent that the author is not reductively setting out a one-sided argument but is establishing a dialogic prose that attempts to matrix theoretical and philosophical life in all its complexity. While the ascetic nature of the bios theoretikós persists in the contemporary moment, Sloterdijk suggests that through the likes of Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu thinking has become more fully rooted in (or routed through) concrete materiality. Thus, we might figure a new mode of philosophical practice that is ‘neither merely active nor merely contemplative’.

For all its esotericism, I enjoyed this little book a great deal; it is insightful and informative about the nature and history of philosophical thought. Nevertheless there are some problems (that I suspect stem from the book’s starting point as a lecture) which are worth brief mention. While Sloterdijk suggests he will tell the reader ‘in advance what to expect, point by point’ the actual signposting to the broader argument of the work is in the main quite unclear. As such, its usefulness beyond its own pages takes some thinking through. There is also a great reliance on what we might term ‘insider knowledge’ (or at least quite a high level of assumed discourse) that I think limits the potential of the volume; and, to a certain degree insists that the reader go ‘Elsewhere’ in the reading of it. Overall though, the book raises a number of interesting political, theoretical and intellectual arguments around the practice of philosophy and its place in the world. So it’s worth the effort.

The Noblest Roman, by Jerry Kelly and Misha Beletsky; David R. Godine, $45.00, 128 pages.

Rise of the Centaur: A History of a Typeface

  

                                                                                                                                                 

Readers of our spring print issue may recall Allison Meier’s story on book designer and typographer Jerry Kelly, which touched briefly on his recently published chronicle of Centaur type, The Noblest Roman. Co-authored with Abbeville Press art director Misha Beletsky, the book explores Centaur’s origins well as the life of its creator, Bruce Rogers (1870-1957). Originally published by the Book Club of California in 2016, a trade edition appeared this week from David R. Godine, himself a letterpress printer-turned-publisher.

                                                                                                                                                                                           The Noblest Roman is itself physical proof of the enduring beauty and functionality of Centaur type and is set in three digital versions of the typeface; the main text is set in a revival of the original foundry Centaur, a new version is reserved for captions, and monotype Centaur sets off display text. An added treat is the tipped-in type specimen created with Monotype Centaur and Museum Centaur, newly cast from foundry mats that haven’t been employed in one hundred years. Printed in four colors via offset lithography by Kelly, the whole endeavor makes for an immensely readable and elegant production. Just on face value alone, it is a typophile’s delight.

                                                                                                                                                                                    

An interior shot of The Noblest Roman. Reproduced with permission from David R. Godine. 

The book traces Centaur’s origins to the year 1470, when French printer and type designer Nicolas Jenson perfected the proportions and spacing of his namesake type. Jenson’s type was hailed as “brilliant” and “more perfect in form than those of any previous printer.” Fast forward five hundred years to William Morris’ revival of Jenson’s type, and subsequently, to Roger’s perfection of the proportions to create the type employed regularly by institutions like Penguin Books and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kelly and Beletsky also tackle the near-mythical status of Rogers in the world of book design and how his mercurial personality has made credible biographical treatment challenging. The Noblest Roman draws on new research to create a nuanced portrait of this towering figure and includes sidebar biographies of fellow printers, designers, and punchcutters, rendering this a thorough history of typography and typographers of the twentieth century.

What made this style so groundbreaking in 1470 and so appealing in the
twentieth century? More sculptural than calligraphic, Centaur still appears lively without too much flair that might otherwise distract a reader, while slight irregularities in the ties, terminals, and crossbars keep the typeface from becoming monotonous inkblots splashed across the page. Centaur has gracefully made the leap to digital media as well, where it is regularly employed for its readability.

The Noblest Roman was recently awarded the Mercantile Library Prize in American Bibliography, a cash award announced every three years. Previous winners include the American Antiquarian Society, Joseph Felcone, and Andrea Krupp. This year the award is split between The Noblest Roman and The Mythical Indies and Columbus’ Apocalyptic Letter by Elizabeth Moore Willingham (Sussex Academic Press).

Though named after the title of the first book in which it appeared, Centaur is very much like its mythological namesake; a hybrid of styles that has undergone numerous incarnations, with sublime results. And though editors routinely discourage the use of absolutes, The Noblest Roman makes a most compelling case for this exquisite type.

The Noblest Roman, by Jerry Kelly and Misha Beletsky; David R. Godine, $45.00, 128 pages.