It survived beside a new system of fixed prices and formal rules that Michel de Montaigne hailed as a liberation from favour and

It survived beside a new system of fixed prices and formal rules that Michel de Montaigne hailed as a liberation from favour and gratitude: “One must live by law and authority, not by reward and grace.”Yet rewards and graces endured; they still do. Just think of the endless hassle engendered on documents from restaurant bills to tax returns by the penumbra of tips, perks and bonuses that surrounds the cold laws of market exchange. On his travels in Italy, even Montaigne accepted wine, books and dinners. Meanwhile, The Gift – as a smart hardback for a mere tenner – would make a great present for any history buffs or Francophiles you know They will, I’m sure, be much obliged to you.. In 1967, the US Atomic Energy Commission suggested that by the year 2000 “housewives will probably have a robot maid shaped like a box, with one large eye on top, several long arms and hands and long narrow pads on each side for moving about”. But in what sort of town or city would these creatures would ply their whirring skills? In mysterious replica burgs, perhaps, like the ultimately murderous hometowns of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles – hallucinations of perfect pasts scented with apple pie and glinting with finely-honed carving knives.

Perhaps robot maids will eventually appear in the ultra-secure, Truman Show precincts of Celebration, the town in Florida created by the Disney Corporation as a model of comfortingly “traditional” architecture which feather-beds the present by pastiching a past that never existed. In 1967, the US Atomic Energy Commission suggested that by the year 2000 “housewives will probably have a robot maid shaped like a box, with one large eye on top, several long arms and hands and long narrow pads on each side for moving about”. But in what sort of town or city would these creatures would ply their whirring skills? In mysterious replica burgs, perhaps, like the ultimately murderous hometowns of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles – hallucinations of perfect pasts scented with apple pie and glinting with finely-honed carving knives. Perhaps robot maids will eventually appear in the ultra-secure, Truman Show precincts of Celebration, the town in Florida created by the Disney Corporation as a model of comfortingly “traditional” architecture which feather-beds the present by pastiching a past that never existed.
The future of towns and cities has become a fashionable subject among the academically informed and the culturally disaffected.

Lord Rogers wants more of us to experience green spaces and piazzas; the trip-hop singer Tricky postulates hellish meltdowns in dark places fractalised by chemicals and dense machine music. Whatever the matrix of our perceptions, we often love or hate (or are ambivalent about) places without knowing precisely why. The detail evades us because there is too much to take in cogently; our responses may hinge on superficial symptoms. It’s hard to imagine future developments when the present is a blur and the past seems irrelevant because of the sheer speed of change.The magnetism of planning processes, corporate desires and local needs produce strange force-fields. People, cars, streets, houses, factories and drainage systems are the iron filings in urban experiments that date back many centuries: Le Corbusier’s “human body” layout for Chandigarh in India; Sir Thomas More’s 16th-century utopian capital, Amaurote, which was “almost four-square”; the rigidly zoned layout of Brasilia.None of the scores of city solutions has produced a template that can be applied for the general good. Systematic approaches break down, the city centre cannot hold. Who’s in charge here? Somebody else.Why, then, is Joseph Rykwert so optimistic about the future of the city? And why, in The Seduction of Place, does this highly respected American professor of architecture suggest that it is crucial to accept the chaos of cities? The short answer is that he prefers the realities of chaos to the pernicious idea of the city as a producer of spaces – as if spaces were commodities – which is a “very subtle way of denying responsibility for its fabric”.He regards pollution and traffic as eternal verities – just as they were in 19th-century London, when the drains, and the dung and piss of horses, constituted the daily aromatherapy.

As for city planning, he quotes Abbé Laugier who said “It will need regularity and fantasy, associations and oppositions, random incidents to introduce variety, great regularity in the detail, and confusion, clash and ferment in the whole.”Against such shifting sands, Rykwert’s key concerns are socio-political as much as architectural. He fears the alienating effect of towns and cities whose key propellant – “an underlying belief in the liberal concept of the free-floating value of money and the ultimately benevolent ‘natural’ work of industrial developers” – has not changed for two centuries.Can architecture make a difference? Not if it’s “classically” postmodern, according to Rykwert, who deplores vacuous ornamentation. Neither can it succeed if it fails to deliver “legible” functional forms to buildings; and certainly not unless new buildings are tied to the specific needs of particular localities via detailed consultations.One of the great achievements of The Seduction of Place is that it is free of declamation. Rykwert treats his chimerical subject matter with a delightfully wide-ranging scholarship. This most gentle of urban pathologists certainly possesses a stiletto, but it is applied with precision and modesty.Some of his conclusions are provocative – for example, that style and ornament are dangerous if they mask the processes of social structure and their context; and that planning and architecture suffers because people are prepared to be against things, but rarely for things.

Ultimately, we get what we allow: our cities arise from a “residual participatory democracy” in which voters have become the passive customers of corporations.Will we continue to live in the urban equivalents of Tracey Emin’s bed, or increasingly crave the gated surrealities of communities such as Celebration? “It is not intoxication or grandiloquence we need now,” says Rykwert, “but sobriety and effective action, therefore make little plans, say I – and lots of them.”Meanwhile, like Tricky, we are used to chemicals and machine white noise; and like Abbé Laugier, we accept confusion, clash and ferment. But do we care what happens next? At the very least, The Seduction of Place sets an agenda that brings compassion, and an involvement founded on “humane discipline”, to a singularly important debate.. When Sofia, a lap dancer, wakes up in the middle of the night to find a man at the end of her bed, the last thing she thinks is that it may be the Angel Gabriel. The central conceit of Stella Duffy’s latest novel, however, is that the new Messiah is to be born to this most unlikely of mothers. Although, as in the traditional story, there is no earthly father involved in the conception, this is definitely not a virgin birth. When Sofia, a lap dancer, wakes up in the middle of the night to find a man at the end of her bed, the last thing she thinks is that it may be the Angel Gabriel.