Professor Rosemary Wakeman

Caitlin Morrissey

Rosemary, thank you for taking some time to speak with us today. Let’s dive in with the first question, which is about your perspectives on The DNA of Cities. So when Greg and I talk about The DNA of Cities in our work, we use it as a metaphor and a starting point for understanding the uniqueness of cities and also for understanding the way that cities shape us as human beings. And we try to use it to understand the genetic codes of cities or the traits of cities and how they are acquired and how they evolve. But what might The DNA of Cities mean to you from your perspective?

Rosemary Wakeman

So thank you very much for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be with you. So I will look at this question of The DNA of Cities from the point of view of an historian, which I am. And so when I think about what makes cities distinct, what are their particularities of place and of culture, I will immediately go to their history and the evolution of cities over time.

And that’s a very complicated and very rich question because I think the great historian Fernand Braudel has given us a way of structuring time into the long durée, the evolution of a place over a very long period of time, and then kind of a middle time and then a petite durée of events that take place. So I think that the evolution of cities throughout their history, both in terms of the length, the longest understanding to the shortest, speaks an enormous amount to how they are, how they have developed as distinct places.

I do think that temporality is not necessarily smooth. There are moments of disjuncture that can frame how a city moves forward, moments when time is experienced as a break or time that’s experienced as speeding up or slowing down. So all of those, I think, make up the history of places and provide a cartography, I guess I would call it, of their particularity and of their distinctiveness. I really want to speak to this in terms of what The DNA of Cities means to me from that longer understanding of history.

I think it also creates forms of attachment, and there’s many ways to think about this, right? There’s a spatiality and a built environment that people become attached to over time. And there’s a real sort of poetics in this of attachment to bridges. For example, I think of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, you know, there are many, many examples of this. But I also think it’s about events that take place as well that are inscribed in collective memory. And collective memory and historic memory is very different than individual memory, right? It’s about collective memorialisation. Who controls that memory, who controls that history, speaks a great deal to the expression of the particularity of place.

So that historical narrative and how it’s developed also, I think is a very rich topic and very political in many places, quite obviously. So it’s from these deep roots that you get statues, you get memorialisation in the built environment, you get place making. It’s also inscribed that distinctiveness is described in routes through the city, for example, particular signposts and ways of going through and walking through places that are associated with the past and associated with the particularity of place. So I think there’s many levels on which this is experienced.

And the last thing I want to say before we go on to the next question is that I see this as very, very different from the heritage industry, which is often what people imagine when they think about The DNA of Cities. So the heritage industry tends to homogenise a place. The heritage industry looks for the same things in a wide variety of places. So I think collective memory and memorialisation and capturing the sense of a deep-rooted attachment to the distinctiveness of cities is quite different.

Caitlin Morrissey

What a wonderful opening answer, Rosemary. Thank you so much. Does taking a global historical perspective reveal to us the way that cities evolve? And what can it help us to understand about how cities shape people and human experiences? Picking up on what you just said there, both individually and under a collective or group level?

Rosemary Wakeman

Yeah, well, I just finished a book on London, Bombay and Shanghai which was absolutely fascinating to do. So what that revealed to me and my interest in doing a book of that kind about three different places is the relationship between urban places. So we can look for the DNA of Cities and the particularity of place not just within the city itself, but the relationships it has across the world, right? So the distinctiveness of place is created from the flow of people, from trade, from commodities, from relationships. Those experiences of a global point of view and the way that cities interact with the world at large makes up their DNA, their distinctiveness as much as something rooted within the city itself, right? So that is what I attempted to capture in this book. And also what I learned from it as well is the depth of this. It’s certainly about the trade in goods, but it’s also about migratory patterns and how each migratory wave, you know, the complexity of ethnicity, of race, of comings and goings on between people, how much that makes up the distinctiveness of these cities. And I could say global cities, but almost every place on the globe is a global city at this point. So it’s not just about coastal or port cities or great capitals. It’s about the global connectivity that is part of the DNA, the mitochondria, I could almost say, of every place, right? And that is about culture, it’s about ethnicity, it’s about language.

But I also want to say it’s also about conflict. So not every memory, not every experience in the city is a good one. To a real sense, the particularity of place is also about the memories of collective trauma, of social conflict, of racial conflict, about how that is rediscovered, how it’s reimagined over time, the process of remembering, of forgetting and remembering those more traumatic experiences. And that also is related to these global processes that I’m talking about, the influences that come from across the globe.

The last thing I would say about the global connectivity is that most cities are associated with cosmopolitanism, you know. You go to a city and you expect to change, right? You expect cities to transform you as an individual. And this is classic about modern cities as well as postmodern cities. You go to cities, you’re introduced to people you never knew, to ideas you never expected, to experiences you never thought you’d have, and that changes you as a result. So that cosmopolitanism is also a part of this global fabric of place. You know, I think looking at the global level is very much what you discover in this rather than looking at individual places per se.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you. It reminds me of a conversation that has come up a couple of times in these big interviews that we’ve had about the concept of The DNA of Cities, which is that when you start to think at the global level, you can begin to identify perhaps the DNA of urbanisation, about the process itself, which sort of relates to some of what you’re saying.

I wanted to ask, just as a quick follow up, about what prompted you to choose London, Bombay and Shanghai as your case studies for this work?

Rosemary Wakeman

Right, well, before I get to that, can just say to react to your mentioning this question of the processes of urbanisation is that once you start looking globally, then the processes of urbanisation become much more complicated, right? They become much more complex. So we can’t necessarily rely on western or European or American processes of urban development as a model for what takes place globally. Globally, that doesn’t work very well. So for scholars who are in Europe, in the United States, the discovery of different forms of urban development elsewhere in the world, in Africa, for example, or in Asia, has been hugely transformative in terms of the way we understand urban processes.

So why I chose these three cities? So obviously, to a certain degree it’s about the 1920s and the 1930s which is the height of the British Empire. But at the same time, it’s a moment when the processes of decolonisation are beginning to take place. And so I wanted to certainly look at London, but also because I was following the trail of this mega-millionaire, Victor Sassoon, right? I don’t want to say he was the Donald Trump of his era, but he certainly is at that level of wealth. So Sassoon inhabited these three cities, right? So he was the thread between them. And that essentially was why I chose them because I was interested in these processes of economic globalisation in particular.

But I have to say I discovered both Mumbai or Bombay and Shanghai when I was working on New Towns, that was my original sort of finding of both of these enormously wonderful cities. So that’s the background on that book, which was a joy to do. It really was. It was lovely.

Caitlin Morrissey

Well, we can’t wait to read it, Rosemary. And so I think you began to already talk about when you’re thinking through the individuality of place or cities that your starting point is the temporality, the long history of cities, perhaps the medium, and then the petite durée. But are there other starting points that you have for exploring the individuality of cities that you may add to that?

Rosemary Wakeman

Well, you know, one question I have for all of you actually, and I thought it would be an interesting discussion, is the idea of authenticity. So in looking at the late 20th Century, which is my own area of expertise, the question of the heritage industry and of authenticity is a really important one. This quest for the authentic place, right, the authentic expression of an urban culture. And so that question comes up a lot in looking at this late 20th Century history and also among my students and colleagues who are working on these issues. And so I guess I would say that I have questions about this idea of authenticity because I see the distinctiveness of cities as an ongoing, very fluid development, it’s transformative. And so I’m not sure how one can look at a particular moment of time and say, ‘yes, this is authentic.’ Or you can look at a particular place, architecture, whatever it might be, and say, ‘okay, yes, this is authentic.’ I’m not sure what that means. And I think to a certain degree, it’s a response to globalisation. And it’s response to the idea of heritage as well. So I think those are questions to explore.

And so I wanted to raise another place that I look for the DNA of Cities. And that is in the work of Michel Foucault who spoke to this issue of the heterotopias of place. These very problematic, contradictory, kind of worlds within worlds, paradoxical. And they can be everything from cemeteries to red-light districts to informal settlements. So many places have these now. It can be intellectual subversive places and bookstores and cafés, these other places, that are heterotopic, I guess. And so I guess if I was looking at the DNA of Cities, those are places that I would look, right? Not to the standard kinds of places but the other places, the non-standard, which many cities have. And those are the explorations that I think really begin to move us toward rethinking this idea of authenticity, which I find is just slightly problematic.

Caitlin Morrissey

It’s something that has come up a lot in these conversations about The DNA of Cities. But also something that you just said there reminds me of many of the conversations we have in individual cities, which is that every conversation is so partial. Every conversation about the DNA, for example, of São Paulo or Manchester, where I am now, is deeply rooted in the worldviews of the individual who we’re talking to. So there are so many lives lived in cities. And when you apply that to this notion of authenticity, well, authenticity means something so different for the person that you’re talking to, the place that you’re talking about. So I think that in our work, that’s why we are so provisional when it comes to this concept of The DNA of Cities because we see it more as a conversation where we’re opening up and pulling apart notions of things like authenticity or identity or uniqueness or even the DNA and really putting it back together. Having a conversation is sort of the way that we go forward. But I suppose it doesn’t produce certainty about the theory or the notions of authenticity or the DNA itself of any city. It’s very much fluid, evolving, not static, incredibly dynamic. And in a way, that’s what we’re trying to embrace all the way through this work.

Rosemary Wakeman

Yeah and it’s absolutely wonderful. And there, I think, in looking at the individual expression of identity and authenticity and distinctiveness, literature and film can be hugely important, sort of biographical, autobiographical, or even poetry, film itself that really reach into the emotional expression of place and of urban identity. And there’s so many wonderful examples of that, right? That’s why I raised the issue of signposts of way finding through cities because oftentimes that’s how individuals really express it in the everyday, you know, their walks to work, their walks home, their family relations at the level of neighbourhood. Those are the expressions of The DNA of Cities, their favourite grocery store, the relationships they have with their neighbours.

I don’t want to overstate Jane Jacobs because I think we have gone much further than her original ideas. But Kevin Lynch, right, you know, is another expression of this. There are many theorists who work on this. But I also see that and the depth of that as quite different from collective memory, which is much more politicised. The framework is really quite different. The control over collective memory, how it’s memorialised, those are at a different level. And there’s also attachments, individual attachments as well as social attachments to those collective memories as well, right? For example, in New York and in other places, the political conflicts over the statues of Christopher Columbus, right, would be a really good example of that kind of rich, public narrative about collective memory would be-- you can find in a number of places. So I think that there’s two levels that intersect, right? And that people form attachments as an individual in their place, in their neighbourhood, but also as particular ethnicities, social classes, as urban dwellers at large and their association with the collective memory of place, of trauma, of celebration, of holidays, you know. So that intersection is important.

Greg Clark

And Rosemary, if I may, mean, one of the things we found very helpful is the whole idea of epigenetics and the notion, of course, of collective genetic altering experiences that people living in the same place or in the same conditions may have. So the individualising notion of a DNA of a person or a place is also complemented by this collective epigenetic experience, I think is quite interesting. Caitlin and I are obviously not geneticists, we’re learning about this, but it’s very interesting.

Rosemary Wakeman

Actually, if I can just interrupt and say that this idea of epigenetics, if I can say so, the COVID epidemic is really a tremendous expression of that, right? Because literally, literally, we were all physically bound by this epidemic, right? And so it was understood and expressed, experienced both as an individual and collectively at the level of neighbourhood, at the level of city, and we were all kind of stuck together both physically as well in terms of literally our genetics, right? So that would be a wonderful place to look for exactly that idea.

Caitlin Morrissey

Completely agree. The final question that I have for you Rosemary was to ask if you’d be willing to tell us about a city or cities that are meaningful to you and your work and what makes them meaningful to you or your work?

Rosemary Wakeman

That’s a really tough question. I saw that question you gave me and I wanted to avoid it because it’s too hard to make a choice. But I can say that-- I guess I want to say first of all that for me my challenge is to be a global person. And so I love the idea of going to many different places and experiencing them as best I can. Not as a tourist, but as someone who’s hunting down exactly the kinds of DNA and the expression of individual place that you’re looking for.

But the place that I most associate with and have tried to capture is Paris, where I spend a great deal of time and I’ve done a book on where I was literally trying to understand this place during the 1950s. And in doing that research, I had the opportunity to interview a huge number of people who lived there, a youth in the 1950s who are older now, but that was such an extraordinary experience, right? You know, writing the book was wonderful. But actually speaking to these people and hearing about their attachment to place, I absorbed that, right? And so here you had a foreigner, an American, coming to a foreign city and literally finding that kind of attachment in the narrative expression that other people gave me with such generosity. So I can say that that is one.

And then secondly, San Francisco I want to mention as well because the other part of The DNA of Cities that we haven’t talked about is literally the ecological physical environment, right? So we have attachments to infrastructure and architecture into the built environment, and people do that very readily these days. But San Francisco is a place that your attachments are to the water, to the hills, to the physical geography of place. You almost look beyond the built environment to find what this peninsula, this thumb sticking out of the water actually feels like, the fog, the coastal air, the breezes. So that to me is also another form of attachment that I really do think is an expression of urban identity. So I’ll stick with those two. There are many more, but I’ll stick with those two.

Greg Clark

You’re making us both smile, Rosemary. I’ve spent many mornings welcoming the fog and then knowing that by 11:00 a.m. or 12:00 noon it will have gone, and then this bright day will occur and the same thing happens day after day after day and the relationship with the climate when you live in San Francisco is just an extraordinary kind of visceral thing, isn’t it, so I relate to what you’re describing.

Rosemary Wakeman

Yes, it is. It’s really quite extraordinary. And it’s both individual and collective, right? I mean, there’s a real sense of having gone through these climate patterns, these feelings of place that are associated so much with the water, with the seagulls that show up every morning. It’s almost radical in the way you imagine sort of urban living. So thank you. I’m glad you’ve had that experience. It’s wonderful.

Greg Clark

Wonderful. And I also want to say I really appreciate the comments you’ve been making about emotions of attachment and detachment and all of the nuanced remarks that you’ve been making about the idea of authenticity and whether that leads us to some kind of singular notion of authenticity or whether it allows us to adopt much more pluralistic and perhaps contradictory notions of authenticity. I found what you said really, really important and I’m very grateful for that

In your experience of researching all of this, what really stands out for you as the difference between cities versus nations? Are there different concepts and ideas at play here that you think it’s important to underline?

Rosemary Wakeman

Yeah, I do. I think there’s a medium scale in between those two places as well. But I will say that, especially in the second half of the 20th Century and into the 21st Century, the difference between urban and rural is shifting and changing quite radically. It’s heavily political as well. So I think that relationship between the city and nation is in the process of transformation and what that means, right? So urban life writ large is something very different from national life. And I think that the differences between them right now are very difficult to negotiate politically. So I think that’s something worth looking at seriously by academics and by scholars.

However, I also think there’s a medium and that is the metropolitan region. In fact, I’m always a little nervous about using the term city these days because that might be an historical narrative that we need to be aware of and need to move beyond because most people now live in large scale metropolitan regions, even medium-sized cities are no longer cities in the traditional way we imagine them. They’re about regions, urban regions. And those urban regions sometimes go beyond national borders. In many places in Southeast Asia, for example, or in Africa or in other places or even in the states of the United States, they go beyond borders. So how to negotiate those territorial geopolitics, I guess I’ll say, and those national boundaries with the reality of large-scale urban regions, I think is a very important question. And do we as individuals or even collectively, do we form attachments to urban regions? I don’t know the answer to that. Is there a DNA of urban regions that we can point to, form attachments to? I’m not sure what the answer to that is. I think it’s particularly implicated in the question of climate change when in fact we have to begin to look at how climate change and the climate crisis is impacting cities from a regional point of view, right? Where are the flood plains? Where are dry areas that might be open to regular fires? You know, what happens during storms? Those are all regional issues. You know, are we going to form attachments to metropolitan areas as we’re forced to mitigate climate change? Do we form other attachments? I think those are big questions for scholars going forward.

I love the idea of cities. I live in Midtown Manhattan, you know, I’m a city person but I’m aware that this is not the only experience. People live in multi-ethnic suburbs in New Jersey that are very, very different from my experience. And what is my relationship to them, right? What do we have in common as collective identity? So I think that those are very important questions for the scholars you interview as well as for all of us. That was a long answer to your question.

Greg Clark

Thank you very much. That was a very good answer and I really appreciate your train of thought there as well. I want to ask you another question. I’ve got three or four questions. So the next one is really picking up on what you were saying when you were talking about your new book on London, Mumbai and Shanghai, which as Caitlin said, I can’t wait to read and looking forward to that. And one of the things you said very importantly is that you do discover as a historian the networks or groups of cities start to have some features in common and whether that’s the movement of people or trade or ideas or products or whether it’s positions in a value chain. And some of those, of course, can be conditioned by colonial platforms and enterprises they could be conditioned by other things. And I suppose I’m then asking you the question when you look as a historian at the cities of the ancient world and the Mesopotamian network of cities through the Roman Empire and into the British Empire and all the others. What is it then that appears to you to be the thing that conditions whether or not those cities start to exhibit some similar characteristics or not? Given that they’re part of a network effect, what makes that network stronger or weaker in terms of the conditions in the cities as you see it?

Rosemary Wakeman

Well, empire certainly, that you’ve pointed to, one very important connective tissue, right? So you have a geopolitics, a political framing around, from the longest point of view, around laws, for example, around regulation, around control of populations, around urban planning. You know, ancient Roman cities tend to all look the same, right? Imperial Chinese cities look the same physically, they’re planned the same way. So there’s a reiteration of a model that is derived from Empire that would be one place to look for the relationships between place.

Then secondly would be trade routes, I think, would be very important. And along those trade routes, of course, are also not just goods, but people. And so the connective tissue of trade routes for particular places would be another place to look. And here I think there are a number of scales. There is a scale of Empire. Think about the Roman roads as a connective tissue between places, right? Of the ancient Roman roads that are still in use in Europe, you know, to a real extent. But also there’s more localised connective tissue of trade like a local trade, local markets, local migratory patterns of temporary work, of familial relations that go back and forth between places. So I think that there are a number of scales at which we can look at the relationship between cities and how they begin to take on similar characteristics, right. So that’s another one.

I also think that there’s-- intellectual is perhaps the wrong word here, but cultural patterns that also become modelled across globally or across areas of the world. I’m thinking, for example, in the case of the three cities that I’ve just studied, London and Bombay and Shanghai, each of them become landscapes or cityscapes of Art Deco architecture because it was an expression of global capitalism to a real extent. So here you had a built environment and a visual architecture. It really is about display and spectacle. Art Deco is really very spectacular. That was shared across these three cities because they shared trade, they shared commerce, they shared global capitalism of this era. So they start to look alike. Their physical environment, their cityscape, their built environment begins to-- they have a shared experience of art deco. So that’s kind of a cultural relationship that I can see. So those are some ideas. I think there are more, but those are where I would look initially.

Greg Clark

Very helpful, Rosemary, and thank you so much for setting that out. Two more questions from me. One concerning one of your specialist topics, which is New Towns. And it’s really to say, of course, that we’re living in a time when, as human population continues to grow, although perhaps not as far as we originally thought some time ago. But latest UN data, 10 billion people by 2080 and probably 85% of them living in cities, even if we totally populate all the cities that we’ve got, we’re still going to need to build more city and to build new city. What have you learned from your study of new cities and new towns about this idea of how do you acquire, as it were, a DNA from scratch or what is it that gives a new town or a new city an edge in terms of its ability to attract, memorialise, associate, conviviate, create a space in which people really want to be?

Rosemary Wakeman

So thank you for that. New Towns, yes. I never imagined when I wrote this book that it would be so important, but this topic comes up again and again. So I agree with you completely. For the future, not only do we have millions of people living in cities, but of course we have extraordinary number of people on the move, right? So migration of millions of people will also force us to deal in one way or the next of how people-- what their habitation will be like, right? And what can we do to facilitate and to respond to the numbers of people, but also the number migrating now for a wide variety of reasons.

And I want to say that we have a choice here. We can either expand the cities we have, we can build new cities, or we can put people in camps, right? And so we have to make choices about how to handle that. And so new towns are one option that already, for example, many countries are beginning to apply. Jakarta, the New Jakarta, for example, is a really good expression of a city that is suffering from sea level rise and the response is to create an entirely new city. But there are other examples as well. New towns and new cities like this are planned. They’re planned by public powers and by large scale private corporations that pour enormous amounts of money into these places. So they are treasure troves for real estate development. And there you have it. Those are the realities.

But how do people form attachments to these places is another question. And I think that requires time. And it requires the institution of some sort of a democratic or community decision-making process. In other words, often new towns and new cities are done by large-scale public powers, the state and by large-scale corporations who have authority over them. And I think that that authority has to be divested to the community in order for them to begin to find some form of associations. And from there, they can begin to set out the kind of memorialisation, the kinds of collective meaningfulness in holidays, in the way that they treat statues. There’s all kinds of forms of memorialisation and attachment that in place making, I guess I’ll say that, that communities can do to start this process, to jumpstart this process. And so you see that happening in a place like Milton Keynes, for example, outside London, which has been very successful at creating that kind of place making and meaningful identity to Milton Keynes.

So I think it’s about democratic, it’s about divestment of control to communities so that they can begin to set out their own terms for identity making and for place making. I hope that’s an answer. I mean, there are many ways that planners can do this, right? Or communities can do this. They have to decide that themselves, right? But at least they have to have a form of democratic empowerment in order to do it.

Greg Clark

It’s a fabulous answer, Rosemary, and you may well know that the Milton Keynes project has just taken on an extra impetus because the current British government has decided to really back this idea of an Oxford to Cambridge arc, where Milton Keynes is actually in the middle of this arc as being a new kind of strategic pan-regional territory for the UK. We’ll come back to that on another day.

I want to ask you my final question, which is to say, you know, at various times in history, the end of the city has been prophesied in one way or another. And we’ve had particular versions of it recently, as you will know very well, both with the pandemic and then also with the rise of digital platforms and digital space. There’s a tendency, particularly for certain kinds of scientists to constantly predict the ends of cities and the end of urbanisation. But is there something in the history of cities and of urbanisation that allows us to be confident that cities have the power to regenerate urban life again and again? Or should we be looking forward to the day when we don’t have cities anymore?

Rosemary Wakeman

Well, I think that my quest to understand metropolitan regions to a certain degree is an answer to that. Do we have cities or do we have kind of homogenised urban regions of some kind in which people function in a very privatised setting, right, in their home and their apartment and they’re all attached to their computer in one way or the next? So that’s kind of one dystopian future as I see it.

But in general, would say that cities do have the capacity for transformation. Not every place, I must say, that some cities do, and some towns do die for a number of reasons. But the vast majority have the capacity for transformation because I think we are social beings in the end analysis and that we crave each other’s company. Even when we don’t get along, we crave each other’s company, and we crave the association in collective life and the kind of absorption of new ideas, new people, new places that cities represent. Even the most curmudgeon of us, I think, follow that trajectory over the long term. There’s enough of us who feel that way that we must form attachments to each other. And so the city is where you do that, right? It’s the place, it’s the expression.

And I also think that cities give voice to people individually and collectively. And so they gather as a collective for a wide variety of reasons to protest, to govern, to take part in daily life, to associate with families. And so all of those protect cities from dissolving into just simply, you know, non-places that we are all related through social media. So I see the continuation of small-scale bookstores, cafés, public parks, all the interest in gardening in the city, all these ways of coming up with new ideas about urban life as an expression of that, an expression of that future, that they’re all about association in social life.

Caitlin Morrissey

Well, Rosemary, I suppose my final question is whether there’s anything else that you would like to say that we haven’t elicited from you through the questions that we’ve already asked?

Rosemary Wakeman

No, I think this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for inviting me to take part in it. And I wish you well with your project. I think that the future of cities is very much, at this point, wound around climate change and how we deal with this existential threat that we have to find ways to not just survive, but to thrive.

And so there’s an opportunity here to really rethink and to imagine cities in a different kind of way. And that is not to give up on our history because I would never do that. You know, I mean, these places are deeply rooted in the past. But they’re also capable of tremendous transformative qualities. So climate change is our next great challenge. And to reimagine the places of cities and collective life and the idea of distinctiveness and particularity from that point of view. And so that’s where I have hope. I really have hope because this gives it-- I see this as an opportunity to move into a better future, right? So I would say that. I’ll end on that kind of a hopeful feeling. I’m teaching a class this semester on the city and climate change, and I’m so thrilled at how young people are engaged with imagining urban life in the future in response. And so I’m living off of their ideas at this moment.

Caitlin Morrissey

Well, we share that optimism with you and what a beautiful place to end.

Rosemary Wakeman

Thank you very much as well. It’s been a wonderful conversation.