This is the text of a defense i gave at a Balloon Debate organised by the Future Cities Project in which I defended my favourite depiction of the city in a work of art. 

Sitting within this beautiful beguiling and ever-so slightly self-important city, it’s very easy to be lulled into the assumption that London is the be all and end all. That it’s a work of art in itself, created for us and us alone. There’s an odd psychological self-reference that often happens with the lone artist and the city. Rem Koolhaas writes in Delirious NY that when Salvador Dali arrived in New York, he proclaimed it as a great monument it was to him. There is a kind of egoism about this love of the city. Watch out for it.

I’m not here to advocate for a book about London or New York but one for a city called Lakewood in Southern California. It’s called Holy Land by Don Waldie. It’s not without scale. Enormous acts of road building and engineering of water tables made it possible. Key to the early stages of the book  is a description of how the 17,500 houses that form the core of Lakewood was battered up by former GIs and incomers from the midWest in just 3 years. Many different plans, 7 different facade treatments, no two alike adjacent. 30,000 people turned up on the first viewing day. Ok the civic and administrative landscape of California today is fragmented, but Lakewood is a city, constituted as such standing on the flat-lands to the south of LA that were opened up by the aerospace industry in the great optimistic years after WWII.

Holy Land is a book about the poetry of planning, building and inhabiting a place: simply but with attachment purpose and intelligence. It is divided into 316 small poetic episodes, some as short as a line: “The grid is the plan above the earth. It is a compass of possibilities.” Longer sections describe the speculations of the Jewish developers who built the town; how the town like many,  first excluded blacks and hispanics but went on to open up and become the most ethnically diverse part of America; there are passages about how the city’s fluctuations in fate were tied to the Douglas aircraft factories and another about why the names listed on the Vietnam war memorial were so inaccurate: an episode that if it was written by Milan Kundera would be on literature syllabuses.

It is a brutally honest book too, in the unflinching way that Chekhov is honest, acknowledging the formality and conservatism of the place, as well as the solitude it can engender. But the book also burns with a quiet anger. Waldie when I went to Los Angeles was a charming host, who only once give a glimpse into the animus which had caused him to take up his pen and write about Lakewood. I asked him about the wider cultural attitude to the suburbs. He shifted in his chair and referred to Lewis Mumford that great champion of the urban with a grimace. Mumford was an arch- modernist who dismissed the suburbs of the 1950s as the product not of the desire to house huge swathes of demobilised troops but of “a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle.”

Waldie’s book is a slow and steady demolition of this patronising attitude. But what makes the book truly great is the way in which Waldie maps the history of Lakewood’s coming together as a town and the complex culture – frequently religious in nature – that exists within it.  He maps the town’s story too to the solitude of a bachelor contemplating his parents death, how it brings him closer to his God and how the simple poetry of life amongst his friends consoles him.

Like Richard Rogers more recently, Mumford championed the medieval city as the be all and end all of urban development: the kind of place where the less well off knew their place. Yet the people Waldie  depicts are in a profoundly new landscape, they’re pioneers, working out how to live there according to their own values and their sense of common purpose.  Waldie explains how and why Lakewood collectively chose to form their own city – looking after their own policing, fire services and other systems, rather than being absorbed into another.

“Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day to day living that wears you out,” wrote the US playwright Clifford Odets in an introduction to the collected plays of Chekhov in the 1950s just about when Lakewood was being inhabited. This book won’t just change how you think about a specific suburbs, it will also provide you with a pattern for how me might think and reappraise all suburban development.