London: The Strength of a Soft City - Q-News July 2006, Issue 367

Some argue that one year after the London bombings and the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, and in the midst of the trial of the Uxbridge 8 and the fallout from the misconceived Forest Gate arrests, London has been spoiled. That its precious tolerance and openness, the balance between the citizen and the forces of the law, has been smashed both by the assault of medievalist murderers and heavy-handed authoritarians. Nonsense, says Caspar Melville.

Not because all is fine, or because the bombers and the knee-jerk responses from government and police haven’t had very negative consequences, they have. But because London - the symbolic “world in one city” - was never the smooth, ordered, happy multicultural metropolis it is occasionally painted in marketing materials for Olympic bids. As Jonathan Raban pointed out back in the 1970s, in his classic study of the Soft City, London has always been “like a maniac’s scrapbook filled with colourful entries which have no relation to each other, no determining rational or economic scheme.” If the residents are united by anything it is only “a common drive to find an identity, a route, in an environment which is perceived as invincibly impersonal and alien.”

While this might sound like a negative assessment, in fact Raban, for all his witty diagnosis of the alienation of the city, was not despondent. He could see that the city, unlike the small town or village, was plastic, malleable, it can be moulded to our image. Raban goes on to talk of the “continual creative play of urban living”: “the city as we imagine it” he concludes, the “soft city” of “illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is real.” I’ve always felt these words a kind of hymn to London, and all cities, though now it’s a bit chilling to think about Raban’s “soft city”, in the light of the bombs, and the narrative that identifies the problem as precisely one of softness - the city is soft as in weak, vulnerable and we, broadminded Brits, are a ‘soft touch’ for terror.

Must the soft city harden up? I look for signs of change in myself. I went through the same pattern as most, I think, after the bombings. Fear - quickly denied or sublimated, or disavowed through jokes (never mind Al Qaeda, we were under attack by bloody Northerners). Desire to stay in or move away. Anger that a bunch of idiots could threaten and paralyse my city so effectively, followed by a gradual return to something like normality. And about the prospect (certainty, some say) of future bombs and more terror legislation and raids and security measures, and concrete barriers; a great ambivalence.

Of course I do not want to be blown up and I feel it is my civic duty to support efforts to prevent this. But every day I pass the memorial of Jean Charles de Menezes outside Stockwell tube on the way to work (it’s now the size of a garden shed, adorned with pictures and notes and remembrances, always with fresh flowers). He was shot on the tube I used to get to school every day, perhaps sitting in a seat - the one next to the plexiglass so you only have one person crowding you - that I used to sit on. Settling down, glad to get a seat, opening his Metro. He wanted to be protected from terrorists too, but not by being shot. But thinking about de Menezes on the tube rapidly brings to mind the 59 others sitting in their London transport seats, blown apart two weeks and a day earlier, and I’m forced to recall that those who shot de Menezes were convinced that they were preventing the deaths of many more.

Then I listened to Mohammed Abdul Kahar tell what happened to him. Awoken by the sound of his younger brother screaming, Abdul Kahar came out into the hall, saw armed men he assumed were robbers who would kill them all, was shot, then pulled down the stairs by his heels, head banging on each step. He asked in desperation about the fate of his brother, his family and was told repeatedly to shut the fuck up. I think I can sense the adrenaline and the fear which had supercharged the raiding police, expecting terrorists and chemical weapons, convinced their intelligence was sound. I can understand the need to follow leads, especially when the consequences of not doing to would be so terrible. I don’t think this means that every Muslim now has to live in fear of a raid, or the police, I don’t think the raid was in itself racism. But when Kahar said, since he was innocent, that he knew that the only reason this had happened to him was because of how he looked, that he was brown skinned and bearded, I knew this was also true. And when he asked Tony Blair to think about how he might feel if this had happened to his son - who, Kahar pointed out, was the same age as him - then answered himself by saying that it would never have happened to him, I knew this was true too. He wanted to be protected from terrorism too.

Listening to this on the radio brought home the simple fact that without the distractions of the crop and beard, Mohammed Abdul Kahar was clearly and obviously a Londoner, like millions of others. Like me. Not, as Raban reminds us, that this means we were colleagues, friends, brothers or members of the same community. Only like me insofar as we shared the same difficulty: trying to carve out an identity, a route, in the face of the impersonal and alien city. Until now of course. Because, after all this and two weeks in custody, the city is now a whole lot more impersonal and alien for him than it is for me. And let’s face it: that was true before too - I am a white middle class bloke on a bike and he is a Muslim guy with a beard and two jobs. As has ever been, the fundamental negative democracy that is inherent in having to face the same tedious obstacles - traffic, weather, noise, pollution - is distorted by the unfair distribution of privilege and approbation - by wealth and racism.

And strangely enough terrorism, like the weather and train cancellations and anonymous sales calls, and totally unlike racism or money, is indiscriminate. It may have after-effects which divide - this is its aim - but because it is a random blunt instrument it affects us all the same, and the necessity of facing it can provide yet more common ground - or at least a common background - against which Londoners project their identities.

Terrorists hate cities. Those enraptured by the ‘blood and sand’ narratives of purity and ancient right, find cities like London appalling, frightening and obscene. After all miscegenation, the juxtaposition of creeds and faiths and faithlessness, the sacred and profane, is what a city is. The more mix the better the city. Which is why the best cites - New York, Madrid, London - are attacked. You can see why anyone wedded to certainty and literalism would hate the city - which is always a place of uncertainty and dislocation. A place which hammers home the fact that every view is partial, every total theory ridiculous, every experience different. My London is not yours. Everyone builds their own city everyday. London is produced daily in a million different ill-fitting fragments.

Plurality and diversity is the heart of the city, and the stupidest mistake, the one that would kill the city, would be to blame diversity for the bombs. The perpetrators of the 7 July bombings may have looked like products of cultural diversity, but they were its enemies too. Nothing lays bare the functioning multiculturalism of London more clearly than the heartrending geo-biographies of the victims: the 56 dead included several Poles, an Italian, a Vietnamese Australian, a Turk, a young women called Islam, Black Londoners of African and Caribbean descent, a Scouse brand manager, a Welsh musician, a young French Tunisian, an Afghan refugee, a Montserratian policeman living in London because he was scared of the volcano, an Israeli, an Irish lad, an Indian Hindu alongside a Richard, Philip, Colin, Giles and a Jessica, Samantha and Elizabeth. Diversity was the context and the target of the attack every bit as much as the cause. What a victory for the medievalist jihadis if we did away with the cultural plurality which is what they despise the most.

Openness, what Raban calls “soft” and Walter Benjamin “porous”, implies vulnerability - it’s the price we pay for our privilege. But it is also - like flexibility as opposed to rigidity - a great strength. This openness resides not in the infrastructure, the buildings or the great parks, the museums, the office blocks. Nor in the strategies of government, police or the London Assembly, but in the tactics of the people who use it, who make the city by traversing it. Though we know that it is very likely that at this moment someone is plotting to kill us, we treat terrorism, like so much about the city, with disdain. You put up with it and carry on. You let the World Cup matter more than the possibility of being blown to smithereens. You put your faith in the decency of most people - a decency that cuts across all barriers of race, class and faith and is so often movingly magnified by horrible events - and in the operation of the laws of probability. It may not be a consistent philosophical position, but it’s the kind of survival instinct and street knowledge that we Londoners live by.