Carnival, and A Piazza in the town
by Paul and Percival Goodman (an excerpt from Communitas)
Vintage Press © 1947, 1960
Editor's Note: In their 1947 book Communitas, still studied by urban planners today, Paul and Percival Goodman imagine and flesh out in great detail three different models for urban centers. Each model emphasizes different types of qualities that might make up a humane and civilized urban environment, all of them are alternatives to the “town and regional plans in which we [Americans] have been living so unsatisfactorily…Critics have shown with pretty plain evidence that we spend our money for follies, that our leisure does not revive us, that our conditions of work are [inhumane]…our mass arts are beneath contempt, our prosperity breeds insecurity, our system of distribution has become huckstering and our sytem of production discourages enterprise and sabotages invention.” This in 1947.
Here are two excerpts, from two of the three models. In these, the authors allow themselves to fantasize a little bit. In the first, a city based on efficiency in everything, they envision how balance is restored through an annual celebration of pure excess. In the second, they succinctly show the role of a city square in creating a sense of close-knit community and interdependence where real community is the highest priority.
Carnival in the “City of Efficient Consumption”
But now comes what is proper to great cities; a season of carnival, when the boundaries are overridden between zone and zone, and the social order is loosed to the equalities and inequalities of nature. "A holiday," said Freud, "is a permitted, rather than a proscribed, excess; it is the solemn violation of a prohibition."
Yet it is not necessary to imagine any astonishing antics and ceremonies of carnival; for as society becomes more extensively and intensively organized in its means of livelihood, any simple gesture occurring in the ways of life is already astounding, just as in Imperial Germany to walk across the grass was a revolutionary act. By day-to-day acquiescence and cooperation, people put on the habit of some society or other, whether a society of consuming goods or some other makes no difference, so long as there are real satisfactions. Meantime, submerged impulses of excess and destruction gather force and periodically explode in wild public holidays or gigantic wars. (There is also occasional private collapse.)
The carnival, to describe it systematically, would be simply the negation of all the schedules and careful zoning that are full of satisfaction in their affirmation. No one can resist a thrill when a blizzard piles up in the streets and the traffic stops dead. The rumor of a hurricane brings out our child souls and much community spirit.
Describing the Saturnalia of the Roman Empire, an old writer gives the following particulars: "During its continuance, the utmost liberty prevailed: all was mirth and festivity; friends made presents to each other; schools were closed; the Senate did not sit; no war was proclaimed, no criminal executed; slaves were permitted to jest with their masters, and were even waited on at table by them. This last circumstance was probably founded on the original equality between master and slave, the latter having been, in the early times of Rome, usually a captive taken in the war or an insolvent debtor, and consequently originally the equal of his master. . . According to some, the Saturnalia was emblematic of the freedom enjoyed in the golden age, when Saturn ruled over Italy."
During the carnival in the city of efficient consumption a peculiar incident sometimes occurs. At one of the automatic cafeterias in the center where, on the insertion of a coin, coffee and cream pour from twin faucets and neatly fill a cup to the brim, this machine breaks down--all nature conspiring in the season of joy--and the coffee and cream keep flowing and do not stop, superabounding, overflowing the cup, splashing onto the floor; many cups can be filled from the same source. (This is not so absurd, it happened to our mother once in Minneapolis.)
Then gathers a crowd and a cheer goes up as they indulge in inefficient consumption. Installment debts are forgiven. And with the pressure of installment-payments removed, people swing to the opposite extreme and don't work at all: they fail to provide even for the day's necessities and begin to eat up the capital investment. They consume the reserve piled up on the market. The economy apparently ceases to expand (but its shelves are merely being cleared for new fashions).
In the factories, basketball courts are rigged up, emblematic of the sit-down strikes that occurred in America in 1935.
The people are not really idle, but only economically so. They are feverishly preparing and launching immense floats: works of imperishable form--there is a classic tradition of the forms--but made of the most perishable materials possible, papier mache, soap, ice. These floats, after parading through the streets, are destroyed without residue: the paper is pushed into bonfires, toasts a moment, and leaps up in a puff of flame, through which the deathless form seems to shine one last moment after its matter has vanished. The soap is deluged by hoses and dissolves in lather and iridescent bubbles; and the forms of ice are left to melt slowly away in the brilliant darts of the sun.
At home people engage in rudimentary domestic industry and in the imitation of self-sufficient family economy. It is customary for each family to engage in a little agriculture in the closet and grow mushrooms, the fungus impudicus that springs up in the night like the phallus. Women devote themselves to the home-manufacture of a kind of spaghetti or noodles, and from all the windows in the residential neighborhoods can be seen, hanging from poles and drying in the sun, such fringes of spaghetti or noodles. Wood fires are lit from sticks of furniture going out of fashion, and meals are prepared of noodles or spaghetti with mushroom sauce.
It is during this week that there is the highest hope of engendrering children, not to have to rely exclusively on the immigration of the tribes from beyond the forest.
From the forest invade mummers in the guise of wolves and bears. These wolves and bears (students from the junior colleges) prowl and dance among the monuments of urbanism. They sniff along the superhighways by moonlight, and they browse among the deserted rows of seats in cinemas, where candy is left for them to eat. By their antics, they express astonishment at these places.
Thus finally, can be observed the dread sight that poets, ancient and modern, have seen in visions: of wolves prowling by moonlight in the deserted streets of cities. So now—when the coffee and cream have soured among the legs of the tables, and the shelves are bare; when only the smoke is arising from the pyres and the bubbles have collapsed, and there are puddles where stood the statues of ice; and when the city folk are asleep, gorged with their meal and with love; the streets are deserted; now by moonlight come these wolves, rapidly up the wrong side of the streets and prowling in empty theaters (where perhaps the picture that the operator neglected to turn off is still flickering on the screen, to no audience).
Next day, however, when the carnival is over and the rubbish is efficiently cleared away by the post-carnival squad, it can be seen that our city has suffered no loss. The shelves have been cleared for the springtime fashion; debtors have been given new heart to borrow again; and plenty of worn-out chattels have been cleaned out of the closets and burnt.
A Piazza in the “New Community”
With us at present in America, a man who is fortunate enough to have useful and important work to do that is called for and socially accepted, work that has initiative and exercises his best energies—such a man (he is one in a thousand among us) is likely to work not only very hard but too hard; he finds himself, as if compulsively, always going back to his meaningful job, as if the leisurely pursuits of society were not attractive. But we would hope that where every man has such work, where society is organized only to guarantee that he has, that people will have a more good-humored and easygoing attitude. Not desiring to get away from their work to a leisure that amounts to very little (for where there is no man's work there is no man's play), people will be leisurely about their work—it is all, one way or another, making use of the time.
Now, the new community has closed squares like those described by Camillo Sitte. Such squares are the definition of a city. Squares are not avenues of motor or pedestrian traffic, but are places where people remain. Place of work and home are close at hand, but in the city square is what is still more interesting—the other people.
The easygoing leisure of piazzas is a long simple interim, just as easygoing people nowadays are often happiest on train trips or driving to work, the time in-between. Conscience is clear because a task will begin at a set time (not soon). The workers of the new community give themselves long lunchtimes indeed. For, supposing ten men are needed on a machine or a line for four hours' work: they arrange to start sometime in midafternoon, and where do they find each other, to begin, but in the piazza.
On one side of the piazza opens the factory; another entrance is a small library, provided with ashtrays. As in all other squares, there is a clock with bells; it's a reminder, not a tyrant.
The leisure of piazzas is made of repetitive small pleasures like feeding pigeons and watching a fountain. These are ways of being with other people and striking up conversation. It is essential to have outdoor and indoor tables with drinks and small food.
There is the noise of hammering, and the explosions of tuning a motor, from small shops a little way off. But if its' a quieter square, there may be musicians. Colored linen and silk are blowing on a line—not flags but washing! For everything is mixed up here. At the same time, there is something of the formality of a college campus.
Another face of the piazza is an apartment house, where an urban family is making a meal. They go about this as follows. The ground floor of the building is not only a restaurant but a foodstore; the farmers deliver their produce here. The family cooks upstairs, phones down for their uncooked meat, vegetables, salad and fixings, and those are delivered by dumbwaiter, cleaned and peeled—the potatoes peeled and spinach washed by maching. They dress and season the roast to taste and send it back with the message “Medium rare about 18:45.” The husband observes, unfortunately for the twentieth time, that when he was a student in Paris a baker on the corner used to roast their chickens in his oven. Simpler folk who live in smaller row houses up the block consider this procedure a lot of foolishness; they just shop for their food, prepare it themselves, cook it and eat it. But they don't have factory jobs: they run a lathe in the basement.
The main exit from the square is almost cut off by a monument with an inscription. But we cannot dechipher the future inscription. The square seems enclosed.
In the famous piazzas described and measured in all their asymmetry by Camillo Sitte, the principal building, the building that gives its name to the place, as the Piazza San Marco or the Piazza dei Signori, is a church, town hall or guild hall. What are such principal buildings in the square we are describing? We don't know.
The windmill and the water tower here, that work the fountain and make the pool, were put up gratuitously simply because such an ingenious machine is beautiful.
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