On Maintenance in Urban Places

KENT STATE DESIGN RE/BUILD HOUSE Cleveland, ohio (Helen Liggett) 24 On MAINTENANCE in URBAN PLACES William T. Willoughby if a better type of civilization is ever to be developed, one of the very corners of the scheme must be understanding of and reverence for labor. reverence for labor is the basis of art, for art is the labor that is fully worthy of reverence.—W. r. lethaby1 Today’s usage of the term ‘Legacy City’ defines urban places by the loss of their former stature; but many who use the term seem to forget that cities happen over long periods of time. A city is a tenacious tracing, always changing and always becoming. Urban places structure human interactions and collect memories. Many cities promote their newness and growth over and above any of the other characteristics that demonstrate resiliency in urban places. Real estate developers, city leaders, and architectural journalists would have us believe that, besides a few exceptions, cities must be new and growing, otherwise they are not worth discussing at all. But what happens when growth coexists with decline, scattering alongside gathering, aging while renewing simultaneously? Urban places are produced collectively over multiple generations. Unlike a mortal person, a city never leaves its legacy behind. Its geographic presence is maintained through our continued labor. Maintenance is the caretaker and life-preserver of cities. ‘Maintaining’ as a word, means to practice an action habitually. It reached the English lexicon through the Old French term, maintainir, which combined two Latin terms: manu, or ‘hand,’ and tenere, meaning ‘to hold.’ The full word suggests a holding in which the hand participates. Synonyms include tenure, or ‘to possess for a time,’ and tenant, which means ‘to occupy a property for a time.’ So the word maintenance refers to notions like hand, holding, possession, and time. Maintenance determines the continued presence of bodies, traditions, and places in time. Maintenance implies that we preserve and sustain life. Yet for all its positive social benefits, society points its members away from maintenance work. We are conditioned to avoid its patterned drudgery. However, maintenance workers are not spectators to ruin; they act to retain and improve. Neglect tells the story of lost agency. What happens when dereliction, demolition, and replacement give way to repair, maintenance, and recovery? Maintenance means observing changes, scrutinizing decay, and acting out—planning, protecting, and organizing so as to retain and resist. Maintenance workers participate directly and emphatically in the life of the city or its landscapes. Maintenance means active participation. We enact our environment continually— we participate with urban places when we care for them.2 25 THE CITY IN THE ACT Maintenance has to do with survival, with continuity over time. You can create something in a second. but whether it’s a person, a system, or a city, in order to keep it, you have to keep it going. i think that one thing we must do is value and learn from those who provide this service. —Mierle laderman-Ukeles3 Is a city a thing or an action? Time and space are bound together just as cities are bound to the events they contain. Knowledge and memory are only partial annexations of reality, never complete and impossible to connect fully. A city is a collective memory seen through the roving and partisan lens of subjectivity, that ever widens and always changes. City implies the people living there. The city is not just a work of art made for the tourist to view. Together, we make the city and our physical actions impart its making. Ethos, before it ever meant the pattern of a person’s behavior, once meant an accustomed place, suggestive of protection against inclemency and the ravages of time.4 The ethos of an urban place determines how well it withstands the delusory effects of erosion and economics. For a city, economics is fate. So how a city maintains its buildings through economic cycles reveals the resilience of its character.5 Maintenance corrects against civic decline, allowing places to endure and remain purposeful through change. Maintenance affords continuity while simultaneously infusing that same continuity with subtle and sometimes unexpectedly abrupt differences. As Heraclitus has been interpreted as saying, “Time is a child building a sand castle by the sea.”6 Maintenance is one of those key and infusing actions that merge time, life, and building into a totalizing experience. A city’s maintenance workers are the conservators of tomorrow. MAINTENANCE & THE URBAN PALIMPSEST thus the union between the past and the future exists in the very idea of the city that it flows through in the same way that memory flows through the life of a person; and always, in order to be realized, this idea must not only shape but be shaped by reality. this shaping is a permanent aspect of a city’s unique artifacts, monuments, and the idea we have of it.—aldo rossi7 The palimpsest of urban change can be seen in the spaces of abandonment. Maintenance points to where places retain their economic value. The lack of maintenance points to blight. Most people can recognize instantly the shades of neglect in a place not properly maintained. A city is like a corpse in arrested decay; and those who maintain buildings are like funeral directors who give the semblance of life to the dead. We inhabit our body like we inhabit a city. With precise physiognomy, the city reflects our vitality back at us or it mirrors our sorrowful sense of loss. The effects of vacancy, absence, and neglect have captivated a portion of the touring public with a trend called “ruin porn.” Photographer Andrew Moore’s 2010 exhibition catalog Detroit Disassembled is beautifully catastrophic, but it reinforces the tendency to turn neglect into spectacle and for us to gawk at decay. 26 Maintenance opposes ruin porn’s derelict voyeurism. The connection between ruin and maintenance is that both are by-products of becoming: decline and revival are enmeshed in the city’s character over the long term. Maintenance forms an enduring bond between people and their place, which must be complex, reciprocal, and active—otherwise it will collapse into economic blight. Property owners, urbanists, and architects cannot be spectators and must recognize the collateral importance of inhabitation and maintenance. Charles Olson, speaking about geography and poetry wrote, “. . . any humanism is as well place as it is the person…”8 The city is a refined product of culture whose guise is ever changing. So long as people inhabit them, cities will collect stories, produce history, and continue on as complex acts of becoming. Maintenance leads to the urban palimpsest. THE ECONOMICS OF FORGETTING the durability of the human artifice is not absolute; the use we make of it, even though we do not consume it, uses it up. the life process which permeates our whole being invades it, too, and if we do not use the things of the world, they also eventually decay, return to the over-all natural process from which they were drawn and against which they were erected. …What usage wears out is durability.—Hannah arendt 9 Maintenance upends the effects of time and wear. Maintenance restores material through bodily actions, returning capital and equity with labor. But for economics to function today it requires consumption, obsolescence, and the amortization of property. Continued consumption requires fluidity, product development, replacement, and disposal of the things that society discards. What occurs when the newly purchased becomes obsolete and antiquated? In other words, it would appear that maintenance is the enemy of consumption and progress. . . or is it? Today’s economy is always moving, always on the hunt, advertising everywhere, and deluding us into forgetting to maintain our place. Yet maintenance is connected to the resilience of urban places. Maintenance is paid out upon a particular place, and contributes to the continued integrity of that place. Inclement weather, fickle shifts in the economy, technological change, and the expectations of capitalism in urban settings all lead to the abandonment of old patterns of consumerism. Civic decline is a physical forgetting. But when we maintain, we allow memory to persist. When we forget, a vacancy occurs in our material reality. The remedy to the cost of deferred maintenance is either added maintenance or abandonment. Once forgetting begins, memory becomes irrecoverable. Wear, corrosion, chemical changes, patina, and weathering disintegrate urban places. Like a mental forgetting, materials lose their composure. Because of these inevitable changes, maintenance offers new potential to a place’s past. Deferred maintenance is just another word for ruination while in use. But the restored and the maintained expresses continuity and hope. A city is a large artwork left out to weather without any protection but its own variegated skin. The labor of maintenance, incremental replacement, or outright restoration is part of a pattern of preservation in urban places. There is a powerful connection between the economics of conservation and the cultural necessity of memory. 27 THE MAINTENANCE OF MEMORY as there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking account of time and one of the forms that it assumes, forgetting—forgetting, the force of which i was beginning to feel and which is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving past which is in perpetual contradiction with it.—Marcel Proust10 Memory is not only in the mind—we outboard it into things. It is constitutive and connecting; it provides a future to the past. When we remember, we really reconstruct the past, or reconstitute it into a possible future. In other words, maintenance implies a lower order of preservation that retains an urban place in an ordinary and vernacular vein. Maintenance does not preserve things in amber or freeze a civic structure to any particular time period. Instead, varied acts of restoring, repairing, mothballing, and demolishing alter an urban place in order to retain its usefulness today. Memory is made resolute when human action comes in contact with matter. The person, as a perceiving being implicated in time’s unfolding, is the center point of memory. So maintenance is the reinforcement of select and sometimes arbitrary memories. For a society to recollect itself into the future, its places must be maintained. To forego maintenance, or to just demolish and rebuild, is to invite oblivion. The fate of maintenance is the fate of the future. The memories that guide conscious action lead to the acts that maintain things. Those actions perpetuate memory inside both the thing and the person. The past persists in time except that any remembered past defers to (and differs from) its original place in time. The act of maintenance reconstitutes memory. Maintenance arrests, alters, and implies a world in constant friction with the effects of time. So we have the city as it stands today, our remembrance of the city as it was, and the perpetual alteration of the city through its maintenance. Maintenance doesn’t oppose construction; it is counterpart and progeny to construction. Maintenance could be considered the opposite of vandalism. Maintenance and vandalism occur in similar, dilapidated contexts, at the cusp of decay, or in moments of decline. Maintenance is venerate and preventative; vandalism is deliberate and destructive. Both maintenance and vandalism express feelings aimed oppositely—one to sustain, another to defame. A city may be vandalized and neglected, but it never ends in legacy. Its legacy is ongoing and incomplete. Like any art composed of matter, intellect, will, and work, a city emerges as a presence in time. Without continued care and attention, it will wither to ruin. Over the course of its life, a city requires many people of varying abilities cooperating in its creation and retention. As always remembered, urban places are peopled participations in time. 28 NOTES 1 W. R. Lethaby, “The Foundation in Labor,” from Form in Civilization: Collected papers Art and Labor (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1957); 179. 2 Themes for this article were first explored in an essay I contributed to the 2013 ARCC Architectural Research Conference, held at University of North Carolina-Charlotte, March 27-30, 2013. The essay is titled, “Maintenance Art, Architecture, and the Visibility of Time,” and can be found online at the ARCC Conference Repository <https://www.arcc-journal.org/index.php/repository/article/view/143>; last accessed, 9/6/2014. 3 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Flow City,” in an interview with Anne Doran; Grand Street, No. 57: Dirt (Summer, 1996); 210. 4 Charles Olson, “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]” from The Maximus Poems (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983); 185. Olson was filmed in March 1966 reciting the poem. 5 Guy Davenport, “The Dawn in Erewhon,” Tatlin! (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974); 204. 6 I am applying the Heraclitian fragment, “Character is fate,” to urban places. ‘Ethos’ is translated by both Guy Davenport and Charles Kahn as ‘character.’ See Guy Davenport, Herakleitos and Diogenes (San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1979); 9 and 22. Also, see Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987); 81, 260-261. 7 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982); 131. 8 Charles Olson, Letters for Origin: 1950-1956 (New York, NY: Paragon House, 1989); 127. 9 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958); 136-137. 10 Marcel Proust, “The Fugitive,” from Remembrance of Things Past, Volume III (New York, NY: Random House, 1981); 568. 29