The Leyton Roar

This article originally appeared in Smoke: A London Peculiar #16 and is reproduced here with permission.

Someone is fighting a lonely war against noise on the Central Line. The shrill tone that announces that the doors are closing is too loud for them, or too high-pitched, or both. They scratch their complaint into the doors: Excessive Door Noise; Noisy Doors Cause Deafness; Too Loud. Always the same hand, the same terse concision. How long has this been going on – scratch-scratch-scratch attrition on one side, deafening psy-ops on the other?

Meanwhile, almost unnoticed, part of the Central Line has lost its voice. Perhaps the anonymous vigilante of quietude is pleased, but it’s really a cause for sadness: The Leyton Roar is gone.

At its furthest eastern reaches, between Epping and Debden, Central line trains roll through actual countryside – fields, cows, hedgerows. Heading west, towards London, the city composes itself out of fragments. Scattered semis link arms into terraces, playing fields shrink and evaporate, urban pressure closes in around you. At Leyton, the gathering density pushes the line underground.

As if to make it clear that Leyton is a threshold, there is an enormous, crowded Catholic cemetery next to the station. Graveyards are traditionally placed at a city’s edge, for hygienic reasons and to satisfy their demands for space. The approach to the tunnel mouth has none of the flamboyance of the cemetery, but there is a grave quality to it: the long downward slope is like the ramp leading into the tomb of an ancient civilisation. This sense of the monumental is reinforced by the rising filthy retaining walls, bruised pink like the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing or Delhi’s Red Fort, or the exhausted moquette of older Central Line seats. The portal itself is modest, stained with decades of abyssal grime.

This eastern entrance to the city used to be far more impressive, though, for it had an aural architecture too: The Leyton Roar. When a westbound train entered the tunnel, a powerful wave of air would blast through the carriage with a high-volume shriek, loud enough to silence any conversation and surprise the unsuspecting: people would be cut off mid-sentence, or roused from their newspapers. Even for city ears accustomed to tuning out announcements and the Tube’s general background thunder, this noise was impossible to miss. It was a signal, a portent, an apocalyptic howl that far exceeded the usual Underground cacophony. Like a triumphal arch or a gate, it announced that the train had entered the city. And now this landmark is gone. Now, there is simply a dull whoosh when the train slips into the tunnel. No one looks up, and conversations continue.

The sudden disappearance of The Roar unnerved me. Why had it gone? The trains were the same, the tunnel was the same – how could the sound of the journey change so dramatically? These changes are important. If such a noise made a sudden appearance in a routine journey, it would give pause for thought; its disappearance might be more subtle, but is no less significant.

I e-mailed the Transport for London press office. A month passed without reply. I e-mailed again. This time, there was a response, from Benedict Pennington, head of the London Underground press desk. “I believe the difference you will have noticed will be as a result of track and ballast replacement,” he wrote. “This involves removing all the rails and aggregate which the rails sit on, and replacing them with continuously welded rails, rather than blocks of jointed rails. This would alter the ride noise on board our trains.”

That wasn’t wholly satisfactory. The Roar hadn’t seemed to be a product of the ride noise of the trains. But if the removal of the aggregate meant there was now more space, then maybe the train would be less like a piston smashing against a wall of pressured air as it entered the tunnel, resulting in a quieter passage – maybe? “Track ballast replacement” – it was shaped like an explanation, and filled the hole where an explanation should be, but did not really explain anything.

Once a day I still listen out for The Leyton Roar, and listening for a sound that isn’t there breeds a kind of super-sensitivity – it’s as if there is now a negative space where The Roar once was, a new space of quiet carved out of the Tube thunder, in which creaks and sighs that would otherwise rush past unnoticed suddenly stick out; and that thickening in the ears, that perceptible increase of air pressure against internal membranes, that movement of blood in the darkness – a new roar.

Meanwhile, the scratch marks still appear on the doors: Noise Pollution; Inappropriate Door Noise. Somewhere out there, the Noise Vigilante is still at work.

C.O.W.F. in The Bookseller

The Bookseller has a story about the news:

HarperPress buys its lead literary title for 2012

HarperPress has pre-emptively bought the debut novel by Will Wiles, the senior editor of architecture and lifestyle magazine Icon. Publishing director Clare Smith has bought world rights, excluding North America, in all languages to Care of Wooden Floors from Antony Topping at Greene & Heaton. The book will be HarperPress' lead literary launch title in spring 2012.

The publisher said the book was about a friendship between two men who do not know each other very well and how a tiny oversight can trigger a chain of consequences.

Smith said: "Dark, funny and compelling, this novel takes your breath away with its extraordinarily distinctive writing. The voice is unexpected, constantly, but consistently conveys a universal human experience that pulls the reader right into the world of the narrator. The entire team fell passionately in love with the book. We could not be more delighted to be publishing Will."

Tara Hiatt, HarperCollins' head of international rights, will handle translation rights at Frankfurt.

Strangely, seeing the whole business reported as news like this makes it feel less real. But I'm seeing the unfolding reaction from the under-real environment of a Paris hotel room, after a 6am start and about 800 espressos. Anyway, between this and the outpouring of congratulations on Twitter and across my various email accounts, my cup runneth over.

ON EDIT: Here's the text of the press release from HarperPress:

Extraordinary New Voice for Harper Press

On the eve of the Frankfurt book fair, Harper Press is thrilled to announce the acquisition of a distinctive new literary talent. Clare Smith has acquired World rights, all languages, excluding N.America, to Care of Wooden Floors by debut author Will Wiles, in a pre-emptive bid.

Care of Wooden Floors is about how a tiny oversight can trip off a disastrous and farcical (fatal, even) chain of consequences. It's about a friendship between two men who don't know each other very well. It's about alienation and being alone in a foreign city. It's about the quest for perfection and the struggle against entropy. And it is, a little, about how to take care of wooden floors.

Will Wiles is senior editor of Icon, the monthly architecture and design magazine, and he lives in London.

'Dark, funny and compelling, this novel takes your breath away with its extraordinarily distinctive writing. The voice is unexpected, constantly, but consistently conveys a universal human experience that pulls the reader right into the world of the narrator. The entire team fell passionately in love with the book,' said Smith. 'We could not be more delighted to be publishing Will.'

Care of Wooden Floors will be published as the lead literary launch title for Harper Press in Spring 2012. Tara Hiatt, Head of International Rights at HarperCollins, will be handling translation rights. The agent is Antony Topping at Greene & Heaton.

"Care of Wooden Floors" to be Published by Harper Press in Spring 2012

I'm delighted to be able to announce that Harper Press, an imprint of publishing giant HarperCollins, has bought the rights to my novel, Care of Wooden Floors. Needless to say, I'm thrilled - in fact, I've been walking on sunshine, barely able to think of anything else, since I first heard of the offer early this week. The ink is barely dry on the third draft and it's sold. Publication is due in spring 2012 (although of course this may change).

Here's a description of the book, written before I had completed the first draft. The short version: a man is given his friend's beautiful minimalist flat to look after, with disastrous results. It's a small, strange tale of accidents, friendship, pathological neatness, death and wooden floors.

Updates will follow.

The Image Accumulator

This is part of Tim Maly's 50 Posts About Cyborgs, a collaboration between blogs celebrating 50 years of the term "cyborg". Here, I'll be talking about David Cronenberg's film Videodrome, and there'll be some description of sadomasochism. Consider yourselves warned. It's also an imperfect effort to bring together thoughts on a number of subjects, and as such has a slightly unfinished feel. For that, my apologies.

What is the secret of the Videodrome signal? Not its origins or its meaning, which are the objects of James Woods' quest in David Cronenberg's film Videodrome (1983). I mean the secret of its shiver. We get the shiver when Max Renn, played by Woods, is introduced to the signal by his colleague Harlan. The signal was sniffed out by the pirate satellite dish operated by Renn's cable network - Videodrome is a brutal sadomasochistic television programme apparently emitting from Malaysia. Nothing but torture and snuff, filmed in a studio with walls of wet clay. Wet clay - absorbs sound, and it can be electrified. How's that for a deviant architectural detail? You have to love Cronenberg. An illicit television programme, operating beyond the reach of any risk of penalty and specialising in savagery, is a sinister enough premise. And then he goes and throws in a baroque, left-field detail like walls of wet clay. It just emphasises the otherness of the signal - the fact that it is a product of thought processes that are not like ours. We think.

Videodrome.

And there's the shiver. An illicit television programme. Something we aren't meant to be seeing. But it's right there, on the spectrum, just waiting for an ear cocked in its direction. It's inherently fascinating. Broadcast television is a rigid, hierarchical, top-down, hermetic system, a trumpeting modern edifice. Underneath a veneer of raucous diversity, it's monolithic and monopolistic. Breaches in that monopoly are at once unnerving and exotic - such as the sinister surrealism of the Max Headroom signal intrusion incident (video).

Finding this hotline to depravity, Renn does what any sensible person would - he pirates the programme and puts it on his own channel. He also becomes obsessed by it, and discovers that not only is it not faked, it is also being broadcast from no further away than Pittsburgh. As Renn gets closer to the source of the signal, he suffers from terrifying hallucinations. His television warps, swells, pulses and erotically reaches out towards him; his abdomen splits into a maw like a VCR cassette slot; he learns that the signal has a direct physiological effect, causing brain tumours. It's a product of the military-industrial complex: weaponised television, designed to destroy the minds and bodies of undesirables.


Body horror is of course what Cronenberg is best known for. The director had previously shown the boundaries of the body collapsing (most memorably in 1975's Shivers) and mind control (in 1981's Scanners). But Videodrome is I think the first proper foray into cyborg transgression - the merging of flesh and technology, a catastrophic breakdown in the separation we take for granted.

Or do we take it for granted? It makes sense that the vector of this breakdown is a broadcast signal. We are, as a species, not entirely convinced that visual information has no power over us - photosensitive epilepsy is of course real, and Videodrome-like mind control has seeped into urban legends, always a good barometer of modern pathologies. (The arcade game Polybius is a particularly fine example of this line of mythmaking.) We feel sensitive to the non-visual electromagnetic spectrum around us, even where it doesn't affect us - witness the pseudoscientific health scares over mobile phones, phone masts, electricity pylons, "electrosmog". Television was the first electronic love-object, the focus of an extraordinarily widespread devotion. As a consumer item, it has consistently adopted different strategies to get closer to us - reproducing, breaking out of the living room and into different rooms in the house, and also attempting a more intimate connection. First it experimented with miniaturisation (portable TVs, pocket TVs, wearable TVs); now its preferred method is immersion, giant screens, clearer images and sound, refining the purity of the signal rather than its portability. The relationship of the 20th-century consumer to the television signal has always been a kind of romance - a ferociously close but off-balance, sadomasochistic romance. Renn is simply acting out the atavistic dream-journey of the 20th-century consumer - he is getting inside his television, letting it get inside him, finally breaching that air-gap and bathing in the electromagnetic spectrum. In an ecstatic climax within the film, when all the distinctions between reality, television programe and hallucination have disappeared, Renn finds himself inside the orange chamber with the wet clay walls. There, he whips a television; on the screen, Debbie Harry's lips moan and cry out approvingly.


Clear-eyed and unsentimental as always, JG Ballard was on top of this relationship. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), contains the shadow of Videodrome - it's filled with giant screens, with broadcasts, with violence as entertainment. While the discourse around social change was mostly fogged with petty conservatism, Ballard saw deeper psychological instincts and pathologies being acted out in our relationship with consumer goods.

In fact, too few things are bad for us, and one fears an indefinite future of pious bourgeois certitudes. It's curious that these puritans strike such a chord - there is a deep underlying unease about the rate of social change, but little apparent change is actually taking place. ... Real change is largely invisible, as befits this age of invisible technology - and people have embraced VCRs, fax machines, word processors without a thought, along with the new social habits that have sprung up around them.

-- JG Ballard, notes to "Death Games (a) Conceptual", The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballard, one feels, would have approved of Renn's self-destructive line of enquiry - his advice in The Atrocity Exhibition is that we should "immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim"; he thought there should be more sex and violence on television, seeing it as a powerful catalyst for social change. Videodrome is a thoroughly Ballardian film. And Renn really does immerse himself in himself - his tool for becoming one with the Videodrome signal is the Image Accumulator, a kind of helmet; in this helmet, reality, television and hallucination are the same non-judgemental flow of electrons.

The Image Accumulator.

The Image Accumulator is profoundly reminiscent of works by the German artist Walter Pichler. Attempting a critique of television, Pichler combined the device with prosthesis and architecture, fashioning "rooms" that are in fact helmets with integrated televisions. Pichler exposes the dependence in the relationship with television, its total demand on the user - the helmets are not convenient or liberating, they are blinding and immobilising. He gives us the cyborg endgame of devotion to television. But the astonishing thing about his helmets is that they manage to be appealing - they have the finished surface of consumer products, and despite ourselves we're curious about what's inside, how the experience works. The risk of course is obvious - it's not that we'll find these absurd contraptions uncomfortable and debilitating, that's a given; the risk is that we'll find the payoff worth it for final oneness with the signal, the warm umbilical with the machine, and that we'll come to forget we're wearing the helmet.

"Portable Living Room", Walter Pichler, 1967

"Small Room Prototype", Walter Pichler, 1967

Children of the Bunker

This is part of 50 Posts About Cyborgs.

The Mark 3 Travel Device.

The end of a thousand-year war. Two races locked in the embrace of murder-suicide. Technology in reverse. Attrition on a planetary scale: every living thing, every scrap of life-sustaining environment, must be destroyed to deny it to the enemy. The triumph of nihilism, genocide as business-as-usual. Few Doctor Who serials have even come in sight of the creative peak represented by Genesis of the Daleks, Terry Nation's 1975 story. Throughout its 47-year history, Doctor Who has continually shown a frustrating lack of economy with its own reserves of imagination, flinging away fascinating concepts after only the briefest examination and then eking out unoriginal stories far beyond their natural life. The series had a routine disregard for its own continuity even before the baroque absurdities of the post-2005 "New" series. Genesis of the Daleks is different. An extraordinarily powerful scenario is thoroughly explored, and the existing Dalek timeline is enriched and extended with what is essentially a super-prequel.

As the name suggests, Genesis is the beginning of the Daleks. What's striking about it is that it feels like an ending. The Doctor, played by Tom Baker, arrives on the planet Skaro at the tail end of a millennial war between the Thals and the Kaleds, two sets of humanoid aliens. The world is devastated by centuries of atomic and chemical warfare. The armies of the two races are reduced to ragged bands of skirmishers with mismatched, salvaged equipment, the detritus of a technological civilisation that has all but totally unravelled. The combatants are in regression, on the path back to the bow and arrow. The exhaustion is palpable.

Technology in retreat.

On arrival in this apocalypse, the Doctor is informed by a senior Time Lord that, in the distant future, the tyrannical cyborg race known as the Daleks has come to dominate the universe. This outcome must be prevented, so he has been sent back to the moment of the Daleks' creation to interfere with their development - either he must snuff them out at birth, or intervene to steer the race in a less belligerent direction. There have been too many times when the Daleks were thought to be defeated and came back stronger than ever, like a hospital superbug. The Doctor has been sent ad fontes to pre-empt a Dalek universe. Even the possibility of a Dalek universe is too great a risk to take.

This might sound like Dick Cheney's One Percent Doctrine, but a viewer familiar with the Daleks' later exploits is immediately on the Doctor's side. The Daleks are near-perfect villains, "gliding like priests, talking like Nazis, chimerical yet simple, and with that unpleasantly ambiguous relation to the ground beneath them" in Jenny Turner's beautiful description from 2006. They don't just talk like Nazis, they talk like the angriest, barking, spittle-hurling Schutzstaffel creep; they are Nazis reduced to their perfect essence, in a wheeled tin can. Tinned extract of Nazi. At the moment the Doctor arrives on Skaro, we already know a little of their origins - inside their armoured shell, the "real" Dalek is a degenerate mutant, just a ball of squealing, mucus-covered malignancy. If you had one under your foot, your instinct would be to stamp down, hard. They are bad news. Wipe them out before they do any harm? Sure.

But our trip to the nursery with a flamethrower can also be educational. What could cause that kind of debasement? What sort of florid developmental trauma could lead to that sort of galaxywide psychopathy? If this is the child, what are the parents like?

Trekking across the devastated surface of Skaro, the Doctor and his companions see, in the distance, the first sign that civilisation of some kind is still operating: a domed city. They encounter a network of trenches - manned by corpses - and the entrance to a bunker. They are surprised by a raiding party, captured, and led into this underground world: the Kaled headquarters.

Inside the Kaled bunker.

Terry Nation does not play down the parallels with the Nazis. Although the Kaleds are exhausted, near total defeat, down in the bunker they're still bleating on about huge offensives and Wunderwaffe that will bring about victory. Armies are confidently moved about a situation map, although from the depopulation we've seen on the surface it's clear they represent handfuls of soliders, if they exist at all. Peter Miles plays the security chief Nyder, an SS officer down to his Iron Cross, licking his lips over lines like "The Kaled race must be kept pure!". Great faith is placed in the charismatic chief scientist Davros, promiser of the Wunderwaffe, the man whose genius has kept the Kaled war machine going, and apparent source of the Kaleds' racial rhetoric.

Nyder. The parallels with the Nazis are not subtle.

This is the first appearance of Davros, a recurring character in later Doctor Who serials, inextricably tied up with the Daleks. We, the viewers, know that the wonder-weapon he is promising is the Dalek, and his appearance tells most of the story of this creation. Davros is crippled, confined to a transport device that resembles the lower half of a Dalek; he is blind, able to see only through an artificial eye mounted on his forehead; a single withered arm operates the switches on the chair that allow him to interact with the world around him. The Daleks are, it is immediately clear, simply elaborations of the cyborg technology that has kept their creator alive. He introduces the Daleks as the "Mark 3 Travel Device" - obviously he is sitting in the Mark 2. The Dalek is presented to the Kaleds as the only possible way to survive: it is designed to travel over the toxic surface of the planet, and will accommodate the "ultimate" form of the Kaled race - what the race will mutate into when the chemicals and radiation in the environment have completed their work. Davros has, for experimental purposes, hurried this process of mutation along on a few test subjects, and the results are not pretty. The Kaleds only have Davros' word that his test subjects are really the genetic destination of their race, but their chief scientist has brought them this far, and his own state (ruined, but alive and pugnacious) is a kind of guarantee - a sort of Hitlerian brinksmanship, which says "I'm prepared to go this far, to sacrifice this much, why aren't you?"

Davros: proto-Dalek.

The Kaleds are quite captivated by Davros, and impressed by the obvious potential of his creation to wreak victory, but they are not yet so far down the step-free path to Dalekhood. There are qualms, doubts, power struggles. Some of the scientists, quite understandably, don't much like the idea of ending up as one of Davros' future-slugs. It's not necessary to relay the entire plot here: there is much (too much) toing and froing across the wasteland between the Kaled dome and the Thal dome, many captures, escapes and recaptures, a lot of intrigue and moral calculus, some unintentionally comic encounters with giant polystyrene clams, and eventually the Daleks are unleashed and do what they do best: Ex-ter-min-ate, Ex-ter-min-ate. What's fascinating about Genesis is the way it explains so much about the psychology of the Daleks and how they ended up as such compelling villains, simultaneously terrifying and pathetic, "utterly evil and utterly childish" in Turner's phrase: "What is ‘Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!’ but the most notorious command of the 20th century, done as a comic turn?"

The Daleks confer with their creator.

The childish edge is key: the Daleks are erratic, hyperactive, prone to tantrums. Their debasement could also be seen as under-development. In Genesis, Davros orders chromosomal alterations to the mutant Kaled test subjects. A scientist objects that the change will mean significant defects: No compassion, no conscience. Not defects, says Davros, enhancements! Deficiency is passed off as improvement, just as a slimy residue is being passed off as the apogee of the Master Race. Alongside under-development, the Daleks' hysteria and insanity also has an edge of claustrophobic panic, almost a horror at its own situation, trapped in a metal shell. Their superiority compex is Napoleonic, based on inferiority.

The Kaled super-race.

So they are trapped - just like the Kaleds, just like the Thals, confined to their bunkers, unable to venture out onto the planet they're fighting over without gasmasks, radiation detectors, helmets and other technological enhancements. The bunker can be seen like a kind of super-Dalek, the dome of the head poking above the surface of the planet, while the remains of each race desperately operates the controls inside. The Daleks are the products of the psychosis of the bunker.

Going further back into the rear of the fortification, you meet once again the system of staggered nearby defenses, with its small firing slits—one along the entrance axis, the other on the flanks—with low visibility, through which the immediate surroundings can be seen, in a narrow space with a low ceiling. The crushing feeling felt during the exterior circuit around the work becomes acute here. The various volumes are too narrow for normal activity, for real corporal mobility; the whole structure weighs down on the visitor’s shoulders. Like a slightly undersized piece of clothing that hampers as much as it enclothes, the reinforced concrete and steel envelope is too tight under the arms and sets you in a semiparalysis fairly close to that of illness.

That's Paul Virilio describing a Nazi-built fortification on Europe's Atlantic Coast ("The Frightening Beauty of Bunkers", The Morning News 2 February 2009, an article distilling the ideas laid out in Virilio's classic Bunker Archaeology) - the kind of structure that the Third Reich put its faith in as its manpower dwindled and defeat started to press in on all sides. Internal volumes too narrow for corporal mobility, the structure weighing down on the shoulders, semiparalysis close to illness - it's inescapably Dalekoid. The Dalek vehicle, the "Mark 3 Travel Device", can be seen as a sort of mobile, personal bunker, complete with its own raging, raving Hitler inside, screaming and commanding. It even looks like a pillbox, with the slits at the top, the swivelling weapon, the domed top.

The Doctor does not destroy the Daleks in Genesis. They keep coming back, again and again - hardly a surprise, as they are in many ways a more powerful creation than the Doctor himself, a perfectly tied knot of 20th-century pathologies, one that is for the time being quite at home in our own century as well. They're a warning about desperation, about wonder-weapons, about giving away too much for victory. Genesis of the Daleks is full of destruction and evil, but it ends on a resoundingly humane note. The Doctor plants explosives in the Dalek nursery , among the specimen jars containing the Kaled mutants. But when given the live wires that will trigger the detonation, he can't bring himself to do it. It's a striking moment - the Kaled blobs are after all, helpless, no matter how bellicose they might be. The Doctor agonises, and chucks away his chance, endangering the whole universe just to prevent himself sinking to the Daleks' level.

Genocide anxiety.

Rather than destroy the Daleks, the Doctor settles for blowing up the entrance tunnel to the underground complex, setting back their progress a few centuries, hopefully enough to tilt the scale of history against them. The Daleks are left to trundle about the Kaled bunker on their own, shrieking and plotting. Even after they dig their way out, they will never, ever escape.

A Wild New Gig

Hunter S Thompson, 25 March, 1969:

Dear Jim [Silberman, Random House] ...

Are you ready for the death of print, books, and magazines? The whole weird future was laid on me tonight by a professor from UCLA Journalism school. The only missing link, he says, is a process for editing video-tape without computers ... and after that it's a whole new ballgame: No more Hollywood, no more book publishers, no more magazines ... I never paid much attention to Marshall McLuhan, if only because he's basically incoherent & needs about five editors. But the forecast I heard tonight is ominously clear, the underground backstairs line from UCLA ...

The real new journalism. He offered to turn me loose with a sound-sync video-tape machine the next time I get to L.A. No bigger than a typewriter, combining the roles of script-writer, director, editor, producer, and ... yes, even publisher. Tape-cassettes instead of book covers, video-tape receivers instead of magazines or newspapers. Jesus, it boggles the mind. The next time I get to NY I'd like to talk about it; this is a wild new gig. Are you into it? Why not ponder a tape/book experiment? To hell with the undiscovered editing process; that's inevitable anyway. Why not learn to use the tools before they're perfected? Do you have any screening rooms designed into that new building? Send word ...

Hunter

1969!

(This is extracted from Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist 1968-1976, the second volume of HST's collected letters. Which is absolutely golden stuff, a book well worth getting.)

Saint Jane

The Pelican edition of Death and Life, with cover by Germano Facetti.

A spectre is haunting urbanism - the spectre of Jane Jacobs. The American-Canadian writer and activist died in 2006, but she continues to exert influence over the urban debate, primarily via that dreary federacy of messianic dovecote enthusiasts, the "New Urbanists", who have taken her up as a kind of guiding prophet. Outside the ranks of the Kunstlers and Kriers, there is a great swath of architects, thinkers and writers on the city who have read Jacobs and hold her in high regard. With a touch of embarrassment, I should include myself in this latter category. Not being an architect, I was an auto-didact in urban theory. When I came across a Pelican edition of Jacobs' best-known book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in a second-hand bookshop almost a decade ago, I had never heard of her. But I loved the Germano Facetti cover design, the back sounded interesting enough, and the price was right, so I took it home.

At that point, my reading on urban theory had been scattershot, based entirely in what I found in 2nd-hand bookshops: Corbu, Lewis Mumford, Thomas Sharp, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, an odd band who had given me all sorts of interesting ideas and imagery, but nothing very coherent. What they had in common, more or less, was that I didn't really enjoy reading them all that much, and had mostly got through to the end in a spirit of patient self-improvement. I picked up Jacobs, expecting more of the same, and instead ploughed through it in a matter of days. If nothing else, she taught me that book-length urban theory could be hugely entertaining, and since then I have sought out books about the city with enthusiasm, as opposed to a worthy sense of I-really-should-know-more-about-this. (I haven't read The Economy of Cities which I understand unwisely broadens some of Jacobs' microcosmic conclusions, which is probably why its profile has declined in recent years while that of Death and Life has done little but improve.)

At the time, I lived in a basement flat in Pimlico. I worked from home. From the desk where I read and worked, I could see feet passing on the pavement outside. I could stroll out during the day and visit the market on Tachbrook street, which had a book stall. I knew the names of local shopkeepers. It was, when I had money, all very comfortable. Westminster council was on its never-ending crusade to fuck up everything with vast shiny office buildings. Jacobs had an obvious appeal in this context. Since then, I've learned a lot more, but much of what she says about the folly of monolithic single-use zoning and the importance of mixed activity on the street, still seems to me to be self-evident.

She has remained on my mind since, popping up from time to time in both expected and unexpected places. I recently read Joe Flood's account of New York's 1970s organisational meltdown, The Fires (review scheduled in Icon 088). Flood has a criticism of some form for nearly everyone in 1970s New York - except Jacobs, who floats, omniscient and benign, above the crumbling city. This kind of veneration obviously grates with some people. In an essay in The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz complains that the writers Sharon Zukin and Michael Sorkin are hopelessly in thrall to Jacobs in their recent accounts of NYC, and that Jacobs' description of the city was a mirage - if it ever existed, it was only for a split-second in the city's life.

Jacobs, Schwarz complains, presented a "transitional and unsustainable, if golden, moment" in the life of a certain neighbourhood as an ideal, and in doing so distorted our whole idea of the urban good life. This critique was picked up by Kosmograd: ever since Death and Life, urbanists have been attempting to conjure a steady-state Jacobs Moment in neighbourhoods globally, and always end up with a runaway reaction on their hands: gentrification. Working-class communities and affordable housing are swept away, and the district ends up as a "bo-ho theme park". Jacobs' "sentimental ... matronising" opinions have precious little to offer a world that is throwing up such terrifying urban environments as the FoxConn complex in Shenzhen.

When I first read Schwarz and Kosmograd's essays, my first instinct was to spring to Jacobs' defence. She was a lone voice raised in defence of a certain kind of community. That community was worth defending - the contemporary notion of what constituted a slum was a nonsense, a nonsense that was being used as a tool for massive and wholly un-progressive urban clearance and social engineering. This clearance was not the comprehensive redevelopment and state planning that took place in the UK - Moses-manner planning was an unlikely and grotesque, wholly corrupt, public-private aberration, one that sadly proved repeatable within the USA; imagine PFI joint ventures crossed with the LDDC and given untrammelled power, and you get a rough idea. At the time Jacobs wrote, gentrification and yuppification were inconceivable: New York would continue to experience the flight of the middle classes for 20 years after the publication of Death and Life. Industrial New York might not have been pleasant, but its destruction was a man-made disaster: the city deliberately dismantled its blue-collar manufacturing base in pursuit of white-collar employers, and almost killed itself in the process. (Flood details this insane policy in The Fires.) So Jacobs has nothing to offer the inhabitants of FoxConnopolis - she didn't have much to say about the Gaza Strip or Dubai, either, because she was writing about local issues in the 1960s. Jacobs could not be held responsible for what has been committed in her name by the New Urbanists and their insipid watercolour view of the city. Also, wasn't a lot of the disdain for Jane a distaste for her (American, rather twee) literary style? And the book has this great Germano Facetti cover. Don't you see?

In other words, Leave Britney Alone.

That was my first instinct, but thought better of it. For a start, I didn't particularly want to write an ode to Jacobs and place myself in the company of the Nurbanists. Secondly, it wasn't long after the ArcelorMittal Space Tangle controversy, and I didn't want to get into an argument with Kosmograd again, given that he's one of the most interesting and perceptive architecture bloggers in the UK, and I'm generally behind him 100%.

Anyway, the cult of Saint Jane is developing into a menace. It's worth mentioning that Death and Life is not really (or not wholly) an attack on modernism. Besides the Moses approach to planning, Jacobs is primarily arguing against decentralisation, "decentrists" such as Mumford, suburbanisation, Howard's "Garden City", monolithic zoning, and residential monoculture. Although the organic, dense, city seemed chaotic, Jacobs argued, it could be understood; it had hugely complex systems, and the systems worked. In suggesting this, she was making the case that the technocratic city-as-diagram planners in the Moses mold were not replacing a chaotic lack of system with a working system - they were replacing a working system with a dysfunctional system. Many of Jacobs' ideas (particularly to do with mixed uses) can and should be safely integrated into modernist planning. Indeed, they have been - compare the mixed housing and culture of the Barbican with the Lincoln Center, a Moses project that Jacobs complains about.

However, in deposing the Moses planning priesthood, Jacobs cut the vestments for a new priesthood. "You have misunderstood the city," she says, "and I understand it" - as Kosmograd says, this equation meant that by bearing the relics of Saint Jane, the Nurbanists can set themselves up as the only people who understand the city, and swaddle their agenda in authenticity and legitimacy. They claim to be the people who understand the city, who tend the guttering pilot light of "vibrancy" that keeps it alive.

They are wrong. I am not going to presume to have a deeper understanding of Jane Jacobs than the Nurbanists, and attempt to snatch the relics back - they are, frankly, welcome to them. We are never going to move forward if we get bogged down into a recondite dispute about "what she really meant". But Jacobs appealed to me because it chimed with what I saw in cities and what I liked about them - and the Nurbanists have no idea what this quality is. Their agenda for "neighbourhoods", "contextuality", "walkability", is fundamentally anti-urban. These qualities aren't necessarily bad in themselves - but combined in pursuit of the singular Nurbanist vision, they mean the vivisection of the city into un-urban cells. Taken to its conclusion, "walk-to-work" ideology means cottages clustered around the mill. While a short commute is desirable, in a neoliberal world this would severely limit social mobility and the overall broadening of horizons that is the best the city has to offer. If people wish to live within walking distance of their workplace, they of course should be able to. But basing a housing system on proximity to workplace is not progressive - or at least it is not as progressive as cheap, plentiful public transport and cheap, plentiful rented accommodation. The FoxxConn workers live in and around their workplace.

The Nurbanist vision of carving up the city in this way is as diagrammatic and retrograde as Moses' planning - and, similarly, it's an assault on the complexity of the city, the city's ability to generate its own fabulously complicated internal patterns that defy cursory inspection. The emphasis on little neighbourhoods, the stoop, local shops and walking distances, the "human scale" only tells part of the story of the city - after all, these things can be found in villages and small towns. All cities need sublimity, a touch of holy terror, a defiance of human scale that asserts connection to the greater urban whole. Elevated highways, crowds, tall buildings, interconnection and confusion - these things can be to some people dismaying and unpleasant, but the awe they strike is the overture of accepting the condition of living in a city. The Tube roundel is vaguely holy to Londoners - intensely reassuring - because it is a sign of connection with a system of vast complexity and importance. (The religious meaning of the Tube is a subject I keep meaning to write about at some point.) Nurbanism stems from a fear and hatred of the modern city as it is - a hatred that is ideological, that cannot and will not be shown that there are reasons to like the neon snarl of the cities we have, and their inner flows and surges. This is a terrible frame of mind for a group concerned with urban planning. Jacobs, at least, liked the city, and liked it for factors that cannot be found in small towns.

Death and Life is parochial and highly idiosyncratic, a product of particular times and specific circumstances; as its critics say, a poor basis for general policy. Jacobs herself, though, can't really be blamed for making broad recommendations on the basis of her own experiences and beliefs. The trouble is that there are not more Jane Jacobs, more voices in the urban debate, giving different views of city planning from their own experience. It is mysterious to me that Jonathan Raban's Soft City - a book written out of love for and interest in the city, hugely perceptive about how cities work, without policy recommendations, simply a plea for what is valuable about the city as a huge civilising machine - is not venerated in this country. Anna Minton's Ground Control is the only really outstanding contribution to the urban genre in recent years, although of course I have high hopes for Owen Hatherley's New Ruins when it comes out. The mutations of cities around us, from Shenzhen to London, certainly do need new narratives.