Will Selman, Mandorla Books, 301 pp., $35.00
Urban planners and land surveyors are natural enemies, or so it seems when we surveyors struggle to accommodate Byzantine zoning regulations and arbitrary planning department requests when seeking subdivision approval. But that’s not fair, is it? Presumably, planners and surveyors—and all the infrastructural elite, i.e., architects, civil engineers, sewer departments, etc.—are acting in good faith with the common goal of creating, recreating, and maintaining beautiful cities that support civilization and elevate the collective human soul.
Wait, what was that? Am I really introducing the concept of “soul”—and by extension spirit, religion, consciousness, God… all the difficult words—into a column intended as light entertainment for the rational, technologically adept readers of American Surveyor?
I am deliberately doing just that, for it is my belief that no designer or builder or caretaker of the built world can or should deny the fundamental role of the eternal ineffabilities when confronting the always shocking and sometimes violent upheavals that now daily affect cities. Nor should surveyors, or anyone, evade their duty to build and maintain urban infrastructure as anything other than sacred space that, ideally, shapes and elevates spirit and soul and facilitates Illumination and Return.
But that’s just me, a known polemicist with a penchant for drama, and I am perforce aware that asking AEC professionals to consider their daily work as a holy office is inflammatory at minimum, and possibly irresponsible and offensive. A better-reasoned and more eloquent case for these views is made by Will Selman, an urban planner with more than 30 years’ experience in private and public practice, in his excellent and (I think) important book Temenos: The Design and Experience of Urbanism as Spiritual Path.
In his preface and introduction, Selman posits that:
- Spiritual quest is fundamental to human existence.
- The built environment, and cities in particular, are fundamental to spiritual quest.
Concluding, basically, that “…the entirety of a city must be viewed as sacred space” and that we humans are “essentially spirits who are temporarily embodied physically, seeking to awaken into ever-increasing consciousness.”
Summarized so briefly it all sounds like a pile of artsy-fartsy woo-woo, and a bit clichéd to boot, but there are reasons to consider Temenos seriously. For one thing, we moderns can be sure—due to archeological work at Eridu, Egypt, Jerusalem, Göbekli Tepe, etc.—that spiritual principles and religious motivations have been from ancient times prime factors in the founding and organization of cities and we know from examples such as L’Enfant’s plan for Washington D.C. and the ongoing construction of la Sagrada Família (in Barcelona) that they continue as organizing principles in urban life today. Moreover, we know from modern experiments such as the Soviet implementation of Brutalism or the American abandonment of Art Deco architecture, that the design of urban space has (or is at least considered by authorities to have) a profound effect on the spiritual life of citizens. Really, we should not be debating the question of whether or not the spiritual life of civilizations really is entwined somehow with the built environment, so much as we should be acknowledging that such is the case and asking ourselves how can we design, build, and maintain cities to better facilitate spiritual quest?
Selman has done a lot of useful thinking on this matter, organized into a book of four parts. Let’s skip a stone over the top and see what he has to say.
Part 1—Urbanism As Incarnated Spirituality
Early in this section, Selman turns to architect and philosopher of space (and intellectual hero of your author) Christopher Alexander to define his brand of urbanism. Substituting ‘urbanism’ for ‘architecture’ (and assuming that readers understand that Alexander’s use of ‘life’ somewhat equates to spiritual quest) Selman quotes, “The purpose of all [urbanism], the purpose of its physical structure and organization, is to provide opportunities for life-giving situations… so that one experiences life as worth living.” Fair enough, and meaningful; I think I am a good enough student of Alexander to assure readers that Selman’s “symbolic urbanism” does indeed reflect the great man’s thought, and even extends it usefully into the design of civic space… noting, for example, that in the not-too-distant past it was architects (e.g. Vitruvius) who were viewed as the sole “shamans” of the city, whereas now that office is filled by a host of professionals, including land surveyors.
“We are the containers of soul, and we in turn create more objects for soul to inhabit,” Selman says, declaring the thesis of Temenos, and in Part I he begins to make his case by drawing on the teachings of Carl Jung, Alexander, Joseph Campbell, Australian indigenes, Christianity, Nikola Tesla, Empedocles, James Hillman, Louis Mumford et al, and also establishing what we might call a secular, rational foundation for symbolic urbanism by noting that evolution (of humans, civilizations, technology, etc.) seems always to trend toward systems of ever-increasing complexity and connectivity.
It’s all a rich stew of ‘ideas that are good to think with,’ providing much food for thought for philosophically inclined land surveyors.
Part 2—The Design of Place
Understandably, for an urban planner, Selman begins this section with an investigation of urban sprawl: its history, sources, “ingredients” and the challenges sprawl presents. This sets up the quite interesting chapter “How to Bake a City” in which Selman describes some remedies for sprawl emerging from the New Urbanism movement—e.g. “Variety of Housing Types,” “Central Square or Green,” “Rear Alleys and Greens,” “Outbuildings,” etc.—and the ways that these can be combined or implemented in cities to promote the elevation of spirit that he considers fundamental to civilization. And a concluding chapter usefully discusses the financial and sustainability aspects of this sort of urban planning.
In these chapters, Selman swerves from high-minded discussion of spiritual quest to a referenced and rational explication of practical matters concerning civic space. And so, Temenos becomes in part a reference manual in which I detect a deliberate callback to Alexander’s 1977 classic A Pattern Language, which identified “patterns” in the built environment occurring at scales ranging from individual rooms and buildings up to cities and regions. This is a sound authorial strategy… A Pattern Language is the best-selling and most influential architectural book of all time.
I appreciated Selman’s examination of ’sustainability’ and his attempt to gauge the value of sustainability in cities. Citing architects Steven Mouzon and Paolo Soleri (the legendary founder of Arizona’s village of bell casters, Arcosanti) he concludes that “a primary element of sustainability is lovability” and adds, “Unless we deeply love something—person or place—we won’t work to sustain its existence.” That lovability, of all things, should be considered so central to creating and sustaining living cities is a startling proposition… but I’m switched if I can come up with a single counterexample in my own professional experience.
Part 3—The Experience of Place
“Humans are largely irrational creatures,” Selman begins this section and just as Part 2 can be read as something like a textbook, in Part 3 Temenos becomes partly spiritual memoir… a genre of writing I value extravagantly.
Selman tells of his own spiritual questing, which took place in several of the world’s great cities including Paris, Brussels, and Washington D.C. and shaped his brand of urban planning. He introduces the word ‘flaneur’—“a passionate yet detached wandering observer of city life… a calm observer, bearing witness to the lives of fellow urban dwellers”—to describe his essential self, and in these lyrical passages he gives testimony of the varying civic adventures that convinced him that cities and gardens are the arenas in which Soul is forged. Put simply, Selman is no David Thoreau or John Muir, returning to untrammeled Nature in search of meaning.
Personal essays of spiritual quest are not for everyone, and I would not be shocked to learn that some of these chapters are skimmed, rather than intently read. But speaking for myself, it was good to learn more about the sources of a philosophy of space that I find to be both strangely bracing, and important.
Part 4—A Deeper Urbanism (& Afterword)
Selman delves deeply into his overarching theme of the city as sacred space for spiritual growth in Part 4, with bravura chapters exploring themes as disparate as mythical or imaginary cities (Atlantis, Cockaigne, Shangri-La, etc.), cities as ‘hives’ of the human species, cities as mandalas and as the arena where Jungian shadow work takes place, the chakras of urban space, Chinese cities laid out as baguas (a Feng Shui concept), the “patron goddess of Washington D.C.,” shamanism, Gaia, the European begijnhofs (communities of women formed in the Middle Ages and persisting to this day), cities as spiritual metaphor and cities in dreams… and so forth; it’s all a little far out, man, but also engrossing and—considered as arguments supporting his theses—exceptionally clear and logically assembled.
In his afterword, Selman concludes with a brief, pithy essay on the distinction between spirit and soul. This is a question fundamental to psychology, religion, mysticism, sociology—and certainly land surveying—and in this essay, as throughout Temenos, he writes with penetrating grace and lightness that illuminates important, albeit ineffable, aspects of the constructed world.
• • • •
If you find any of the above maundering intriguing, please find and listen to episode five of Everything is Somewhere the podcast, in which I interview Will Selman at length. We spoke about Freemasons and L’Enfant’s urban design of Washington D.C., Egyptian processional numbers, his experience as chain man on a survey crew, and much else besides. Interesting throughout, and Selman certainly provides a uniquely learned perspective on urban planning.
Angus Stocking is a former licensed land surveyor who has been writing about infrastructure since 2002 and is the host and producer of Everything is Somewhere, the podcast.