With the plane the cities began to have the same slender relation to human needs that museums do. They became corridors of showcases echoing the departing forms of industrial assembly lines.

– Understanding Media, 1964

Centralism depends on margins that are accessible by road and wheel. Maritime power does not assume this center-margin structure, and neither do desert and steppe cultures. Today with jet and electricity, urban centralism and specialism reverse into decentralism and interplay of social functions in ever more nonspecialist forms.

-Understanding Media, 1964

The suburban or satellite city created by the decentralizing power of that private “space bubble,” the automobile, now must yield to “instant” mobile cities such as the Woodstock and Mariposa festivals or the “disposable” cities we associate with World’s Fairs since 1851. Airports and trailer parks are faint intimations of the return of nomadic communities. … In the information age of the “magnetic” city” all “hardware” city forms are obsolescent and tend toward the status of tourist attractions and museums.

– Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, 1972, McLuhan and Nevitt

Against the collective will, the Covid-19 pandemic is upsetting everybody’s plans and subjecting the body politic to a number of unexpected blows. Some of these blows have the effect of slowing things down while others speed them up unexpectedly. In a way it is unfortunate that Professor McLuhan is not around to sort things out in his particular way. He had the requisite curiosity and was quite ruthless in his determination not to be pushed around. Early on he figured out that the best way of dealing with inevitable and disagreeable change is to get to know it better than it knew itself. This way one could roll with the punches instead of simply taking it on the chin. Reporter Derek Thompson is merely one recent commentator among many who finds himself in the position of taking it on the chin in an article entitled “A Lot of Americans Are About to Lose Their Homes” that appeared in the July 15, 2020 issue of The Atlantic:

The COVID-19 pandemic is a historical accelerant. It has compressed 10 years of online-shopping growth into a few months, bankrupted chains that were in steady decline, hastened Democratic gains in the Sun Belt, sped up an urban exodus from America’s most expensive cities, and persuaded my grandmother to finally use Instacart. All of this was bound to happen eventually. The coronavirus just mashed its big fat thumb on the fast-forward button.

Professor McLuhan passed away in 1980. Since then his reputation has largely flourished and he is widely regarded as a guru of some sort, amiable enough but idiosyncratic. However, in one respect he is regarded as being dead wrong, namely in his prediction that the city in its hardware form was finished. In what follows we would like to address this claim in the context of a pandemic that is delivering any number of telling blows and forcing us to reconsider not only our priorities but the kind of community we find ourselves in.

Facts on the Ground

What bothers many students on their first exposure to McLuhan’s communications and technology strategy is where he gets his facts from. The answer here is that he does not get them from bean-counting and empirically toting up results. Again, and again, he downplays the compiling and classifying mind as indifferent to, and unaware of, what the human mind is capable of by making lively associations. For this tendency he is often criticized as irrational, although he would say this is the only way to explore large-scale and on-going processes of an environmental nature. Initially it seems that all the metropolitan areas of North America have prospered mightily since McLuhan first pronounced the end of the city in Understanding Media in 1966. In what has to be an irony of history his hometown Toronto has more than doubled in size from 1980 to 2020 (3M-6M), while the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) has become one of the fastest growing urban hubs in North America. How can he say the city is finished?

A couple of points here. In another logic-defying claim the professor says that he never makes predictions, but waits until a core pattern has emerged in multi-sided processes. Given that the human mind is programmed to make sense by imposing familiar forms on unfamiliar inputs, it should come as no surprise that the most earnest and careful explanation is subject to tired and commonplace explanations. To come to terms with the (shockingly) new, it is necessary to bypass the usual filters and hit on associations that make better contact with what is happening. As the professor would have it, the old high-pressure metropolis is now laced together by instant information and wears a different suit of clothes. And it turns out it now cuts a very poor figure indeed. Too focused and immobile to be in touch with the demands of the moment, the aggressive and accumulating urban form no longer serves as a magnet for human aspiration and sensibility. Instead it is a structural ghost that only succeeds in hanging around out of inertia and nostalgia. He would add that as we get more comfortable with the world of simultaneous interaction, this truth will only become more evident.

Looking at the McLuhan oeuvre as a whole, it is notable that his claim of urban obsolescence only becomes a constant theme with the publication of Understanding Media in 1964. It is absent from the 1962 Gutenberg Galaxy. Although both works are foundational and share the belief that electricity decentralizes (and decentralizes inevitably) the Gutenberg Galaxy is riveted to the theme that nationalism is a fateful consequence of the printing press. No commentator before or since has come close to advancing a reason as to why western-style nationalism did not, or could not, arise before the 15th and 16th Renaissance centuries. In fairness, the author of the Gutenberg Galaxy should be forgiven for staying with his then outrageous explanation that the ‘printed’ experience is the key to unlocking this historical puzzle. Understanding Media, written a couple of years after the Gutenberg Galaxy, is expressly meant to be a complementary study. With its larger purview — the influence of the full array of media on human sensibility — McLuhan could comfortably focus on what instant electricity does to the specialized skills that flourish in the traditional western city. Specifically, they die an instant death when the urb orbs, to use the Joycean phrase.

The pandemic thumbs its nose at the specialist city

It seems that Covid-19 has a real knack for exposing the fault lines of the bricks-and-mortar city. Forced out of their streamlined cocoon, a number of accepted urban practices now appear to be not that beneficial after all. In a recent NY Times article that appeared on July 21, 2020, economic reporter Eduardo Porter wonders “Will Superstar Cities Survive the Coronavirus?” By superstar, he has in mind not only bigness as he notes that “The New York metropolitan area generates more economic output than Australia or Spain,” but also its unique feel. Porter suggests that America will lose “not only bars, museums and theaters, but also their dense networks of innovative businesses and highly skilled workers, jumping among employers, bumping into one another, sharing ideas, powering innovation and lifting productivity.” What prompts his suspicions is the deeply ambiguous idea of a “socially distanced downtown”. Anyone familiar with an electrically configured existence knows that this is a contradiction in terms. Once simultaneity kicks from all sides at all times, there is no need for distancing of any kind. Except perhaps for nostalgic purposes.

Under the “charge of the light brigade” which has been thrust upon us, we can now look back at the old urban form and see it as a bit of an antique built around go-getter individuals and specialized skills, but not in accord with a wider array of human needs and aspirations. As Rowan Martin observes in the July 11, 2020 issue of the Observer “Wasteful, damaging and outmoded: is it time to stop building skyscrapers? …it’s a bit of mystery why towers are thought desirable: you typically progress from a windy and inhospitable plaza to a soulless lobby, to a long lift ride, to another lobby, to a flat that has to be fortified and sealed against strong winds, to a balcony (if you’re lucky) with a similarly embattled relationship to nature.”

A hundred years ago, this sentiment would have been summarily dismissed as backward and unprogressive. Now it has become a frequent mournful refrain. A similar report entitled “Office towers face tall order to be as productive as before the pandemic” that appeared in the National Post on July 07, 2020 belatedly notes our thoughtless reliance on the elevator,  “the time it will take to populate a tall building to full occupancy with limited elevator capacity ranges between 90 minutes to four hours … [which] could leave lobbies looking like the long queues at theme parks, as visitors wait for their favourite rides.” Surely this is not a revelation. The same article goes on to say that “a typical skyscraper will have at least double the carbon footprint of a 10-storey building of the same floor area”, leaving the reader to wonder whether environmental insensitivity is baked into the “superstar” city’s DNA?

The reason hardware cities are on their deathbed has to do with the culture itself changing its mind. A century ago it was a different story. Then there was enthusiasm for exerting one’s control over Mother Nature and the material world in general. Then there was simple enjoyment in plunking down a 40-story edifice no matter where, and corresponding pleasure in living and working in such a unit. Today, with instant information as the de facto replacement environment, the feeling is different. Everybody now has the urge to make use of all their faculties and play things by ear as it were. This is done by bidding goodbye to the single-purpose everythings that make the city what it is, such things as cars, planes, wheels, tracks, pavement, elevators, HVAC, etc. In a restless and discontinuous world, the idea of command and control is totally passé, giving way to the compulsion to get back to the garden, however unrealistic. McLuhan had the wit to perceive this reset back in the 1960’s, if not earlier, and merely noted that the traditional urban form was past its best-before date. For sixty years he has been ridiculed for this outrageous assertion. If nothing else, the current pandemic is well on its way to definitively substantiating his claim.

Patrick O'Neill

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