Joyce's Dublin: the richness and diversity of urban life

What is the importance of Joyce’s Dublin? Primarily, it grows out of a dissatisfaction with the accounts of cities by architects, planners, even anthropologists and sociologists. Joyce’s Dublin captures the manner in which a city “cities”, if I can use it as a verb. In part, this is a result of how architects have thought of the city since Vitruvius, where his tragic set – which is for the nobles and is characterised by beauty, coherence, richness of meaning, high land values and sophisticated culture – is contrasted with his comic set, which is mainly for artisans and merchants. Between the Renaissance and the twentieth century, the attributes of Vitruvius' Tragic Set were reduced to the protocols of form-and-space. It is very difficult to reconcile these protocols with the richness and diversity of urban life; and the Dublin of Ulysses offers a substantial corrective. It is ultimately an ethical question.

Dublin, at that time, was a city with the highest death rate in Europe – there were many urban poor, and it was common for up to nine people to be living in a room. Joyce sets the novel in the equivalent of the comic set: he avoids all the institutional centres. He recognises that people are not all well behaved, that they are vexed, that they are as likely to be evil or to misunderstand as they are to be kind or generous.

“Dear dirty Dublin” conforms to this adherence to the comic set. The novel takes place within the deep metabolism of the lower middle class background of the city.

The most celebrated urban institutional centre that is inhabited is the library, and we realise how much of urban life is built out of this background and how people make up one another’s background. For example, Bloom, a Hungarian Jew and immigrant to Ireland, who converted first to Protestantism and then twice to Catholicism, is compared to Ulysses. This makes the immigrant the equivalent of the hero of Classical culture and Dublin a re-enactment of the Mediterranean origins of European urban culture.

What urban planners and architects tend to do is see the city as defective and in need of improvement. Characteristically, it ends up with wonderful rendez-vous with people at four o’clock in the afternoon, obeying all the circulation patterns and everything working smoothly. They very rarely indulge the world that one sees in novels, films or other visual arts because that’s full of conflict. It’s full of partial understandings, as anthropologists have been discussing since the 1980s. How to adapt their techniques to a proper understanding of the city is a long-standing project in architecture, in schools and in planning.

The current idea or motif is that something like big data or artificial intelligence might be able to help. And I’m sure it would help – there are people who think that live updating, such as was organised in Rio for the Olympic Games, would be a way of managing the city. By contrast, the idea that cities are emergent, that they develop themselves, that they are rooted in typicalities that give order to the city and that one is part of everyone else’s background, has been very difficult for architects and planners to manage. The urgency of improving the city has taken over from the need to properly understand it. In general, one person’s vision of goodness is more evil than the evil that already exists.

The question of urban depth is against the gross generalisation of space and form, which means that everything concrete has to be supplied. It’s much more of a bottom-up approach to understanding the richness of urban life, incorporating its supposed difficulties, its indebtedness to deep metabolisms – of construction, but even more of how it survives and thrives. It is a way of understanding the city that is spatial; that is to say, it’s got a topographic dimension as well as what we might call an existential dimension (how one inhabits reality), for which the city is our best example of a depth structure that is in turn dependent on deeper structures.