I’ve been thinking about prepositions. You know, those
little words that shouldn’t terminate sentences but do. They come in pairs—in/out,
above/below, on/under, before/after—and they seem fond of clarity. You’re
either with us or against us. There was before and now there’s after; there’s
nothing in between.
Stay in. Don’t go out. Work on the computer. These little words tell us so much about ourselves
and where we are, physically and metaphorically. It’s in their very name—to pre-position,
to place before. Prepositions fix our place in time and space, and therefore
our relations to others. For such small words, and ones we use so reflexively,
they carry a heavy burden of conveying conditions of belonging or alienation,
otherness or inclusion, at-homeness or displacement.
I live in the
city. I work in a different city, but whether I am at home or at work, I am in the city. To move from one city to
the other, I would go out, into the public realm of sidewalks and transit. That
was before. Now, like everyone, I’m inside, #staying at home, in this city. I
have never felt more aware of in. I
am in my home, but at work, online. On line. On-line. Online. In the New Jersey vernacular of my youth,
“on line” meant the condition of waiting in a linear arrangement with other
people, a condition others might call being in line, or in a queue. Now it
means something else, with no connection anymore to being somewhere, on a line
connecting two points. Now we are networked. You can be on a line, but you are in a network.
Quality of life in the city, which is dense by definition,
depends on clear thresholds between the pockets of public and private places
that define urbanity. They are so clear they have names: gate, stoop, porch, vestibule,
lobby, bay window…But that suite of relationships collapses online. The thresholds
have vanished. We sit in our private spaces, looking through a glowing
rectangle at the private spaces of others, at rooms we would never be invited
into, hearing sounds from off-stage—barking dogs, clanking dishes—we shouldn’t
hear. Private and public spaces—our private and public selves—are inside out while still inside, like a Klein bottle.
I shouldn’t be in my students’ rooms and they shouldn’t be
in mine. That’s why we have schools, libraries, museums, cafes, theaters,
clubs, markets, plazas, playing fields, street corners: so I can meet you in a
place that belongs to neither of us; so we can make room for strangers; so we
can meet in a place big enough to hold a lot of us; so we can determine
what comes
in and what stays out. The magic of the city is its capacity to offer all those
places, and everything in between. Lewis Mumford described the city as both a
magnet and a container: it attracts us with promises, so many promises, and
then holds us--because it just keeps promising and we can’t quit it.
One of my thesis students said yesterday that this virus is
the “enemy of urban design.” She wants to design a community place, for the
human network, one like Italo Calvino’s city of Ersilia, entangled in strings
of different colors to signify “a relationship of blood, of trade, authority,
agency.” Calvino says that these strings represent the “relationships that
sustain the city’s life,” and the citizens of Ersilia are constantly abandoning
and rebuilding them. One of the intriguing aspects of this strange new world is
that we are finding new ways to connect those strings, because we deeply need
them. So when it’s time to leave the in,
and venture out into the city again, we can put those strings back in place, more
substantial and with better knots.
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