The function of city centers

On a Friday afternoon I had an interview in Stuttgart. After that I had an hour to hang out in the city center, waiting for my train to come. After having leafed through the propaganda materials my potential future employer had handed me, I sat down in a park, a little bored and numbed by the pedestrian area that had started at central station and had taken me about half an hour to tire of. I overheard the last words of a phone conversation of a girl who sat close by and finished by telling her counterpart “ok, ich geh’ dann mal weitershoppen.”

The first area travelers find themselves in in a typical western city is a pedestrian area full with shops, department stores (now dying) and other commercial enterprise. Here’s the question: why is that? This question stuck me sitting in that park: why do city centers look the way they do? Why do they offer the functions they offer? Let’s put aside the fact that city centers are dying in many medium sized cities these days and are replaced by shopping malls and huge retail stores in the outskirts.

When I asked this question to my girlfriend later, I was met with incomprehension: “What do you mean – what else should there be?” When I set out to just mention a couple of things, she stopped paying attention.

City centers are pretty much the most important part of a city and the lifes of its inhabitants after individual homes. Literally, it is the center of public life, just as home is the center of private life. This is where tourists go, who want to get a “feel for the place”, the “atmosphere”. This is where many, many people go on sunny Saturdays in Munich. People go there to have a good time, to meet friends, enjoy life, see something interesting. That’s what you might expect to happen there. What we got is a shopping spree, that indeed by most going both real shopping as well as window-shopping is perceived to serve the goals mentioned. All these functions are surrounded, composed, defined and fulfilled by shops. Most of them look pretty much the same all over the planet.

Yes, you’re right. This has been so for a long time. But wait. Sometime, castles were the centers of cities. Protection was important, and selling your guild’s product (another center of your life) to the castle’s inhabitants was important. Even longer back, marketplaces served as political centers (if history books are to be believed, city centers were the centers of decision making among the “free men” of certain polis – notwithstanding some were freer than others). In other words: the working hypothesis is that what is important to a society or a city is at it’s center. The question is: is what is important going to change if you put something else at the center?

Imagine a city center was a big area filled with public spaces without specific functions, plain grass or asphalt spaces, pavillions of different sizes and purposes like sport studios, science labs where people could try out stuff, public computer rooms, poll machines where people could organize public “doodle” polls, a government “hotline” office, spaces for skaters or other sports, park areas to relax, pavillions with free musical instruments (against some deposit or a public insurance, whatever), libraries, cafes & restaurants, museums, all rather small so that you could cover each in an hour or so, free lecture halls where people could sit down and hold a seminar for others on all kinds of topics, or speaker’s corners. All human-sized, easy to get around on foot or if necessary by these cool electric vehicles that you can stand on to drive. I know, cities need to grow high, but that’s not what I mean, I mean spaces where people feel welcome, not disciplined by space and magnitude. What if there was material to do things with – tools, raw materials, ideas – floating around, without being pressed into purpose already, free space in the truest sense of the word?

Imagine, the purpose of life was not to be a consumer, someone who uses commodities as means “to express herself”, but life was about your relation to the world and the people, the community around you. Imagine that after your basic material needs were met, you could go to the city center and learn how to carve beautiful things out of wood (if you were talented – which the author certainly isn’t). If you would appreciate beautiful things that served their purpose for a long time, more than a season. If self-expression was artistic and thoughtful, independent of the jewels you wore – which you still could, of course!

What would happen if you suddenly had time to think, by which I certainly include time to do “nothing”? If suddenly the center was engaging more than your wallet?

I know, I’m an idiot. But … just think about it.

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