{"id":4884,"date":"2019-10-17T03:18:40","date_gmt":"2019-10-17T10:18:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4884"},"modified":"2019-10-17T03:18:40","modified_gmt":"2019-10-17T10:18:40","slug":"guardian-cities-the-rise-of-the-city-critic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4884","title":{"rendered":"Guardian Cities: the Rise of the City Critic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u201cOn any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy,\u201d wrote EB White in his 1949 essay, Here Is New York<\/a>. White sizes up both the positive and negative potential of the teeming Manhattan with the familiarity of a native and the heightened awareness of a visitor. A longtime contributor to the New Yorker magazine, White also wrote the classic children\u2019s book Charlotte\u2019s Web and co-wrote the influential writing guide The Elements of Style. In Here Is New York, he takes that versatility further, giving us a new way of seeing the city in an early example of what we might today call city criticism.<\/p>

Given how long we\u2019ve relied on the work of critics on film, music, food, and much else besides, as well as the ever-increasing relevance of cities in our lives, it\u2019s time we recognised city criticism as its own distinct category of writing. But what is city criticism \u2014 or rather, what isn\u2019t it? Despite dealing with the built environment, it isn\u2019t architecture criticism, not in the sense of treating structures like sculptures, indulging in a \u201ccollective obsession with idiosyncratic starchitect buildings,\u201d writes Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic. Architecture matters in city criticism only to the extent that it explores \u201cwhat\u2019s designed and built in the context of a broader narrative,\u201d writes Curbed urbanism editor Alissa Walker. \u201cWhat\u2019s happening in the surrounding community, what political efforts hindered progress, and, conceding all those externalities, can the project still best serve the audience that it is intended to serve?\u201d<\/p>

To Walker, city criticism isn\u2019t about buildings, but about people: a city critic must be \u201csomeone who\u2019s going to all the public meetings and listening to what all the elected officials say, [but also] out in the city itself, riding buses, hanging out at coffee shops, talking to people about how that policy affects them.\u201d Yet city criticism isn\u2019t reportage. Like movie or restaurant reviewers, city critics write from their own perspectives, in distinctive voices enriched by knowledge and experience, but wearing their erudition lightly. City critics understand that places reveal themselves through details encountered by chance, glimpsed and overheard. <\/a>
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Read the whole thing at the Guardian<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cOn any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy,\u201d wrote EB White in his 1949 essay, Here Is New York. White sizes up both the positive and negative potential of the teeming Manhattan with the familiarity of a native and the heightened awareness of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4884"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4886,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4884\/revisions\/4886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}