Will Selman, Mandorla Books, 301 pages, $35.00
Urban planners and surveyors are natural enemies, or so it seems, as we surveyors grapple with byzantine zoning regulations and arbitrary planning authority requirements when approving subdivisions. But that’s not fair, is it? Presumably planners and surveyors – and the entire infrastructure elite, i.e. architects, civil engineers, sewerage departments, etc. – act in good faith with a shared goal of creating, restoring, and maintaining beautiful cities that support civilization and uplift the collective human soul.
Wait, what was that? Am I really introducing the concept of “soul” – and by extension, spirit, religion, consciousness, God… all those difficult words – into a column that is intended as light entertainment for the rational, tech-savvy readers of American surveyor?
I do this deliberately, because I believe that no planner, builder or manager of the built world can or should deny the fundamental role of the eternal ineffables in addressing the ever-shocking and sometimes violent upheavals that affect cities today on a daily basis. Nor should surveyors or anyone else shirk their duty to build and maintain urban infrastructure as anything other than a sacred space that, ideally, shapes and elevates mind and soul, enabling enlightenment and return.
But that’s just me, a noted polemicist with a penchant for the dramatic, and I am aware that it is at least inflammatory and possibly irresponsible and offensive to ask AEC professionals to view their daily work as a sacred office. A better reasoned and more eloquent plea for these views is made by Will Selman, an urban planner with more than 30 years of experience in private and public practice, in his excellent and (in my opinion) important book Temenos: Designing and experiencing urbanism as a spiritual path.
In his foreword and introduction, Selman states:
- The spiritual search is fundamental to human existence.
- The built environment, and cities in particular, are fundamental to the spiritual quest.
He essentially concludes that “the entire city must be considered a sacred place” and that we humans “are essentially spirits, temporarily embodied in physical form, striving to awaken to ever-increasing consciousness.”
In short, it all sounds like a bunch of elaborate hocus-pocus and a bit clichéd, but there are reasons why Temenos seriously. For one thing, we moderns can be sure – based on archaeological work in Eridu, Egypt, Jerusalem, Göbekli Tepe, etc. – that spiritual principles and religious motivations have been major factors in the founding and organization of cities since ancient times, and we know from examples such as L’Enfant’s plan for Washington DC and the ongoing construction of the Sagrada Familia (in Barcelona) that they continue to exist as organizing principles of urban life to this day. Moreover, we know from modern experiments such as the Soviet implementation of brutalism or the American departure from Art Deco architecture that the design of urban space has a profound influence on the intellectual life of citizens (or at least is seen that way by the authorities). Actually, we should not debate the question of whether the intellectual life of civilizations really is somehow intertwined with the built environment, so much so that we should acknowledge that this is the case and ask ourselves How can we design, build and maintain cities to better facilitate the spiritual quest??
Selman has many useful reflections on this topic, summarized in a four-part book. Let’s go a step further and see what he has to say.
Part 1 – Urbanism as embodied spirituality
At the beginning of this section, Selman turns to architect and spatial philosopher (and your author’s intellectual hero) Christopher Alexander to define his brand of urbanism. Substituting “urbanism” for “architecture” (and assuming readers understand that Alexander’s use of “life” is in some way synonymous with spiritual quest), Selman quotes: “The purpose of all (urbanism), the purpose of its physical structure and organization, is to create opportunities for life-giving situations… so that one experiences life as worth living.” Good, and significant; I think I’m a good enough student of Alexander to assure readers that Selman’s “symbolic urbanism” does indeed reflect the great man’s thoughts and even usefully extends them to the design of public space… noting, for example, that in the not-too-distant past architects (e.g., Vitruvius) were considered the sole “shamans” of the city, whereas today that office is filled by a variety of professionals, including surveyors.
“We are the containers of the soul, and we in turn create other objects that the soul can inhabit,” says Selman, putting forward the thesis that Temenosand in Part I he begins to support his arguments by drawing on the teachings of Carl Jung, Alexander, Joseph Campbell, Australian Aborigines, Christianity, Nikola Tesla, Empedocles, James Hillman, and Louis Mumford. et aland we also create a secular, rational basis for symbolic urbanism by recognizing that evolution (of humans, civilizations, technology, etc.) always seems to tend toward ever more complex and interconnected systems.
The whole thing is a rich stew of “thought-provoking ideas” and offers much food for thought for philosophically inclined surveyors.
Part 2 – The design of the place
For an urban planner, it is understandable that Selman begins this section with an examination of sprawl: its history, sources, “ingredients,” and the challenges that sprawl poses. This sets the stage for the rather interesting chapter “How to Build a City,” in which Selman describes some anti-sprawl remedies that emerged from the New Urbanism movement—e.g., “diversity of housing forms,” ”central square or green space,” “back alleys and green spaces,” “outbuildings,” etc.—and the ways in which these can be combined or implemented in cities to promote the spiritual uplift he considers fundamental to civilization. And a concluding chapter usefully discusses the financial and sustainability aspects of this type of urban planning.
In these chapters, Selman departs from the high-minded discussion of the spiritual quest and moves to a referenced and rational explanation of practical questions of public space. And so Temenos becomes partly a reference work, in which I recognize a conscious allusion to Alexander’s classic from 1977 A pattern languageidentified the “patterns” in the built environment that occur at scales from individual rooms and buildings to cities and regions. This is a good authoring strategy… A pattern language is the best-selling and most influential architecture book of all time.
I appreciate Selman’s exploration of “sustainability” and his attempt to assess the value of sustainability in cities. Citing architects Steven Mouzon and Paolo Soleri (the legendary founder of the bell-founding village of Arcosanti in Arizona), he concludes that “a fundamental element of sustainability is Kindnessand adds, “If we don’t love something—a person or a place—deeply, we won’t work to sustain its existence.” That loveliness should be considered so central to the creation and maintenance of vibrant cities is an astonishing claim… but I am at a loss to think of a single counterexample from my own professional experience.
Part 3 – Experiencing the place
“Man is a largely irrational being,” Selman begins this section, and just as Part 2 can be read as a kind of textbook, Temenos becomes partly a spiritual memoir… a genre of writing that I value very much.
Selman tells of his own spiritual quest, which he experienced in several of the world’s largest cities, including Paris, Brussels and Washington DC, and which shaped his approach to urban planning. He introduces the word “Flaneur“—”a passionate but detached wandering observer of city life… a quiet observer bearing witness to the lives of his fellow citizens”—to describe his true self, and in these lyrical passages he bears witness to the various civic adventures that convinced him that cities and gardens are the arenas in which the soul is forged. Simply put, Selman is no David Thoreau or John Muir, returning to pristine nature in search of meaning.
Personal essays on spiritual questing are not for everyone, and I wouldn’t be shocked to find myself skimming some of these chapters rather than reading them carefully. But for me personally, it was good to learn more about the sources of a philosophy of space that I find strangely stimulating and important.
Part 4 – A deeper urbanism (& epilogue)
Selman delves deeply into his overarching theme of the city as a sacred place for spiritual growth in Part 4, with brilliant chapters covering such diverse topics as mythical or imaginary cities (Atlantis, the Land of Cockaigne, Shangri-La, etc.), cities as “hives” of the human species, cities as mandalas and as arenas in which Jungian shadow work takes place, the chakras of urban space, Chinese cities laid out as Bagua (A Feng Shui concept), the “patron goddess of Washington DC”, shamanism, Gaia, the European Beguinage (Women’s communities that emerged in the Middle Ages and still exist today), cities as spiritual metaphors and cities in dreams… and so on; it’s all a bit off the wall, man, but also captivating and – considered as arguments for his theses – extraordinarily clear and logical.
In his afterword, Selman concludes with a short, succinct essay on the distinction between mind and soul. This is a fundamental question for psychology, religion, mysticism, sociology – and certainly for surveying – and in this essay, as in the whole of Temenoshe writes with a piercing grace and lightness that illuminates important, if unspeakable, aspects of the constructed world.
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If you find the above rambling interesting, please listen to the fifth episode of Everything is somewhere the podcast where I interview Will Selman in depth. We talked about Freemasons and L’Enfant’s city planning for Washington DC, Egyptian processional numbers, his experience as a chain man on a surveying crew, and much more. Interesting throughout, and Selman certainly offers a uniquely educated perspective on city planning.
Angus Stocking is a former chartered surveyor who has been writing about infrastructure since 2002 and is the host and producer of the podcast Everything is Somewhere.
