you're tasked with putting together a little leaflet (print run roughly 720,000) celebrating the successes of your city's recycling scheme and congratulating everyone for doing so well with it. you go to the picture library and choose a lovely skyline to illustrate the city you're addressing, and hand it over to your client, the city council.
the council signs it off, prints it and starts distributing it. not, by the looks of it, because your leaflet is a particularly great design, nor is the picture all that lovely for that matter, but because it seems to do the job. and what more do you want.
well... it would be nice, of course, if the picture you've used showed the right city. sadly though, it doesn't. you've mistaken birmingham, alabama, usa for birmingham, uk. it sounds ludicrous, i know.
until you look at the two birminghams:
i mean: can you tell the difference? of course you can, but: really? do you even know which is which? i didn't.
first is birmingham, uk and on reflection it looks a little greener and a little bluer. but that could just be the framing and the light. second is birmingham, alabama. which, let's face it, could so easily be birmingham, uk.
i've been to birmingham, uk, and far be it from me to cast any aspersions over britain's 'second' city. but it is ugly, there are hardly two or more ways about it. and it's not ugly because it's modern, it's ugly because it lacks any real aesthetic of any description.
even further be it from me to cast any aspersions on birmingham, alabama, a place i only know from song (it seems to have been rather more sung about than birmingham, uk, which to me suggests that if it isn't any more beautiful it has at least some character worth making a song, if not necessarily a dance, about, though for all i know there may well be a dance about it too).
so the problem with this leaflet lies not with the hapless designer who mistook one charmless 'skyline' for another. that genuinely is an easy mistake, i was not being facetious. nor is it with the councillors who signed off the job. the fact that the duly elected representatives of birmingham, uk, can't tell their own city from a place some four thousand miles away on a different continent: you can't hold it against them. if the place looks so bland that the only appropriate response to it is indifference, then really, so be it. and refreshingly, birmingham's city council seems to be taking just that attitude. there are no plans of pulping, recycling or reprinting the 'offending' leaflet, which indeed would be complete waste of money and resources. and in truth the leaflet probably hardly offends anyone at all. not even, apparently, the mayor of birmingham, alabama, who reportedly feels 'flattered' by the mix-up (he clearly hasn't been to birmingham, uk).
no the problem, to the extent that there is one - and i have a feeling that in fact there truly is one - lies with the city planners who have foisted upon the british midlands an urbanscape that is exactly as inspiring as a drive-thru burger joint, spelt without the o-gh. if anybody is to take responsibility - and i have a feeling that perhaps somebody ought to take responsibility - for the second largest city in a country awash with culture, heritage, design, architecture, engineering and conceptual genius looking as individual as a shopping mall, it most probably is the people who planned and built it, and those who allowed it to be planned and built.
and that has nothing to do with modernity. new york, shanghai, dubai - they are all inherently modern cities, modern certainly in the sense that they are forward looking, dynamic entities that are not tied to their past or revel in antiquity. yet they're all individual. they have a character that, even on a comparatively dull picture, comes across immediately as distinct. they have features.
you might say that birmingham, uk has features: that little tower there, for example, right in the middle. and the lego-shaped buildings around it. but half the cities in the world have those. not every city in the world has the gherkin. or the eiffel tower. or the burj. not every city has a st paul's or a st peter's and not every city has a leaning tower. not every city has canals and clearly not every city has a bird's nest stadium. the cities that do are those that have an identity, and pride themselves in it. cultivate it. the tower and the tower bridge, the millennium wheel: that kind of thing doesn't come about by accident. the centre pompidou. the guggenheim, the tate. you might say the birmingham bull ring, that doesn't come about by accident either.
and that's precisely my point.
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