LOOKING AT EIGHT CITIES
A building creates looks; clusters of buildings rather more so. Hunting is glancing, so is being out on the street. Our eyes move perhaps thirty times when we cross a road, hundreds when we go to a bus station to buy a ticket and find out where to board. Cities increased the density of looking. So what is a city? They are the most complex planned systems we have made, within which unplanned systems operate. They are millennia-old inorganic and organic patterns (like Davros in Doctor Who) which vary greatly according to latitude, geography and political system. What, however, are their essentials and constraints? To find out, let’s consider eight remarkable cities: Babylon, Rome, Baghdad, Esfahan, Yokohama, Metropolis, Astana and Pripyat. Each is from a different period in history. Together they reveal aspects of the monumental, clustered, disorientating, collective, voyeuristic, anonymous, dazzling, religious, imagined, futurist and destroyed looking that urban life affords.
BABYLON
Imagine, first, that it is the year 570 BCE. We are at the north end of the vast alluvial plane of the Tigris-Euphrates Delta, fifty-nine miles southwest of present-day Iraq. We have been travelling south all day, in scorching heat. We begin to climb a 200-metre-long limestone-paved road, the beginning of the Processional Way of perhaps the greatest city on earth, a city state that would be imagined long after its fall. The sun is in our eyes but we can see, ahead of us, backlit, a monumental, fortifying structure that seems to block our path. To our right, stretching to the ancient Euphrates River, are hanging gardens, stacked like a theatrical ziggurat, and lined with bitumen and lead to prevent the moisture and roots of the massive fruit trees that adorn them from breaking down into the layer below. They are one of the wonders of the world.
We pass a line of 120 ceramic lions, then step into the shade of the fortification and see this.
The Gate of Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, built five years earlier (this is it rebuilt, half size, using many of its original tiles, in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin). The gate is covered with lapis lazuli moulded brick tiles and edged with gold trims, the colour combination that we looked at in Chapter 1. As we walk towards it we have to crane our necks to see its top and then, looking downwards again, come eye to eye with one of the lions.
Its face sits proud from the monumental wall. We enter and discover a tumult, imagined here by the movie director D.W. Griffith in his film Intolerance.
We are in Babylon. The city state dwarfs us. We do not know where to look. Griffith wanted us to be overwhelmed by this film set of Babylon, as we have been by the real city. This is epic looking. Gateways and figures are magnified. Merchants, citizens, slaves and pilgrims jostle. They have places to go in this vast city, which contains thousands of routes and journeys. Ladies in red dresses walk under parasols carried by servant girls. Shadows are coloured from the reflections of the tiles, like those in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. We walk for almost a kilometre, then turn right into the temple of Marduk, the protector god of Babylon. According to the king who oversaw its construction, he ‘covered its wall with sparkling gold, I caused it to shine like the sun’. We see this burnish, but as we walk into the evening, and as the air cools, we also see a designed city, a secular city, social hierarchies like those glimpsed by the Indian man people-watching at the Kolkata crossroads, libraries of learning, canals along which sailing boats laden with spices cast shadows within flickering reflections, and structures that speak of political power. In Christian mythology, Babylon was a symbol of prostitution and decadence, and its famous Tower of Babel came to mean verbal confusion. There should be an equivalent word for visual confusion – ‘vabel’, perhaps? Babylon was a Mecca of vabel.
Such an experience, such cluster living, was addictive. That is the first element of city looking: it is cluster looking, vabel looking. In the ancient world, the logical result of settled living was a distillation of such living. More and more people moved in together, if ‘in’ means behind the protective walls of citadels.
ROME
Instead of our day on the Processional Way in Babylon in 570 BCE, if we found ourselves climbing the steps of the Flavian Amphitheatre in Rome exactly 650 years later, we would be about to see this.
The Colosseum. There are no photographs of its original spectacle, of course, but Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator, designed by Arthur Max, researched it carefully and imagined it well, picturing it as another epic space, lit by shards of light. On taking our seats in it, it would be no surprise if we felt vertigo. The largest amphitheatre ever built, on misty days the far side of its vast ellipse is invisible from its near side. Weather happens within it. It held 50,000 people, a town in a building. And it was paid for, in part, by selling the treasures of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem that the Romans had looted a decade earlier.
What this image makes clear is that the Colosseum was a seeing space. It was curved, and had no internal walls or columns such as those in the Mezquita, so that everyone could see. Such places are sometimes called auditoria, but the Colosseum’s primary purpose was looking rather than listening. It was a videodrome, a place for voyeurs. Fifty thousand pairs of eyes all looked inwards. People flocked there, the rich at the bottom, the poorer further up the structure, to indulge in collective looking, and to do something transgressive and even repulsive: to see animals killed, nine thousand of them in the Colosseum’s inaugural games. There was groupthink in this, and a kind of visual hysteria, a blood lust which introduces into our story unedifying looking. It is often said that Christians were fed to lions in this building. There is not conclusive proof that this happened a lot, but what did happen here is enough to note that looking, like other aspects of human life, can be a weakness as well as a strength. That is the second aspect of city looking – its oppressiveness. The cluster judges.
BAGHDAD
When to choose not to look, and what if we do not make that choice? The desire to look, as we will see later, can damage the person who experiences it.
Six hundred and eighty years after the opening of the Colosseum, a city was founded that would outdo Babylon or Rome. Northeast of the former and on the Tigris River, its basic plan was remarkably like that of the Colosseum – a perfect circle, a radically innovative city design.
And, like the Colosseum, Baghdad too was a videodrome. Under the CE 786–809 aegis of its greatest patron, Caliph Harun al-Rashid, it became the place in the world that most aimed to dazzle the eye. Funded by vast tax revenues from the Abbasid Empire and trade from its key position on the Silk Road, it had banking and legal systems, but also pageantry and ostentation. Henna and rosewater were sold in its bazaars. The lavish mansions of its wealthy citizens housed Chinese porcelain. Thousands of gondoliers ferried the well-off along the great Tigris River and the city’s canals: Venetian journeys of flickering and double-bounced light. ‘My story is of such a marvel,’ claims one character in One Thousand and One Nights, the great story cycle set here, ‘that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.’ The same could be said of Baghdad.
In the era of Harun, Baghdad was a city that not only looked inwards at itself, but outwards to the world. Scholars gathered there, and amongst the greatest was the polyglot medic