Resolving the Varro Paradox

Place allows both moving and lingering

Newsome takes care to strip away 21st-century presumptions from his analysis of movement. However, this way of looking at movement would be aided through a few qualitative aspects. For instance, he does not distinguish between movement on foot and movement on vehicles or animals, nor does he distinguish between slow and fast movement. Such distinctions would make Varro and Cicero (and Newsome) seem less paradoxical. This grows more palpable through his account of a farcical dispute about regional transportation set two suburbs against each in what a local paper called, “La guerre des sens interdit,” or ”the war of one-way streets.” The mayors of two towns (communes) located between Paris and more remote suburbs each re-designated high-volume arterials into one-way thoroughfares in order to inconvenience commuters who were moving through. Both mayors were concerned about the cost of conveying these commuters through their communes while they were failing to accrue economic benefits from such traffic.[1]¹ Newsome summarizes below:[2]²

The volume of traffic in either commune is not related is to the ‘attractors’ of the commune itself, but is simply a result of their position within a wider network of movement. However, because the route is a regional commuter route on which vehicles move at speed, that traffic does not bring with it the associated benefits of the large-scale movement of people and transport. In other words, while directly within the ‘natural movement’ between Paris and the north, these areas receive no benefit from the ‘movement economy’, whereby movement and economic enterprise reinforce one another through multiplier effects: movement brings people (and money), local space exploits that movement by developing movement-seeking land uses (shops, petrol stations), these in turn attract more movement, and so more movement-seeking land use patterns are consolidated (see below). This positions movement and traffic as a driver of urban development, rather than simply something that passes through existing space. However, the principle of the movement economy includes an apparent paradox that it requires movement to stop.

Here, Newsome acknowledges rapid movement, but does not see its connection to resolving what I have chosen to call the “Varro Paradox.” These rapid conveyances, motorized vehicles, allow people to live great distances from their jobs and other destinations. There are three factors at play. First, their speed undermines their stopping. Second, automobiles consume great amounts of space, and this is true when they are at rest, that is, when they are parked. Outsized spatial requirements are what Roman vehicles and automobiles have in common. The carts themselves were smaller than most automobiles, but there is a need to account for the footprint of the motive power: oxen, mules, or horses. Last, and perhaps most importantly, the driver is ill-equipped to perceive a reason to stop. Our brains do not adequately process visual information when our bodies are moving at speed. In our own age, sometimes colossal signs with well-known logos draw us into their driveways. Learning new information and applying it to a decision to stop is always unwieldy. So drivers respond to known brands corresponding to a logo obviating a need to even read verbiage on a sign.[3]³ There is also a rather obvious aspect of this last point: a driver fails to perceive many potential reasons to stop because he is otherwise occupied. To summarize, speed undermines stopping, the great storage requirements of vehicles inhibit stopping, and driving inhibits our ability to perceive a reason for stopping. Commuters are not just moving through the suburbs of Paris, they are doing so at great speed, thus it is not likely that many of them will stop to spend their money. While the difference in speed between automobiles and the fastest ancient conveyances make the two scenarios mostly incongruent, pedestrians still maintain an advantage in agility over any kind of vehicle from any era.

Varro’s ideas about movement and place favor pedestrianism. This is a consequence of his theory even if he did not himself imagine it. Pedestrians are agile: they are able to start, change direction, and stop at will. There are two reasons for this. First, humans are wired to do these things without effort. Second, walking does not require a heavy piece of personal property needing to be stowed and secured. A Roman driving any vehicle shared a problem with any of us who are driving an automobile: he needed to stow and secure his vehicle and his animals. There is no reason to think this was a seamless activity.[4]⁴ The second point speaks to rapid transportation, but not so much to ancient drivers in urban environments. Speed inhibits the ability to process visual information. Our brains are wired for 3.5 miles per hour.[5]⁵ At faster speeds, our capacity diminishes to perceive points of interest: sometimes we fail to know what we are missing. Traveling at great speed, we are less likely to to process the environment well enough to identify a desire to access a place. A conveyance traveling at high-speed takes distance to stop, and it is easy to travel well beyond the new destination. In rich urban environments, a pedestrian gains a great advantage in access through the greater ability to assess options, reformulate a destination, and change direction or stop. Third, another point related to place and slow movement is the engagement of all senses. We can find our way to any destination through verbal directions, or by returning to a place from memory. Favro writes, “For the Romans, the most enduring recollections resulted from the stimulation of as many senses as possible. Movement through a physical environment was one of the most powerful ways to learn and to remember.”[6]⁶ 

Pedestrian agility allows a seamless transition from moving through and moving to. Even all manners of modern “urban planning” attempting to facilitate vehicle access cannot bring driving to parity with pedestrian agility. This is the power of the modern shop window. A pedestrian can stop immediately for something that catches her eye through the window.  If her throat is parched, she can stop for a drink. The change in decision from moving through to moving to can be realized instantaneously. This is the key to solving the Varro Paradox. Not all traffic should be treated the same. If you are looking for place, you need to find pedestrian traffic. Vehicular traffic is not strongly correlated with place, and rapid vehicular traffic is weakly correlated with place.

What is the thesis to unify Varro’s ruminations on place, Cicero’s search for the locus celeberrimus, and the desire for two suburbs to be something more than a traffic sewer for commuters? Newsome writes, “Hartnett’s study of nuisances implies that the maximization of the economic opportunities afforded by passing traffic was not the main guiding principle of the Roman street. If it were, then nuisances would be counterintuitive.” (Newsome, “Making Movement Meaningful,” 42. He is alluding to Hartnett, “The Power of Nuisances.”) I believe this is a wrong lesson. Hartnett’s examples of “nuisances,” or impediments to the free-flow of traffic, demonstrate that urban traffic efficiency was not a primary value in ancient Rome. Newsome seems to be equating traffic efficiency with “the maximization of the economic opportunities afforded by passing traffic.” Almost all opportunities for social and economic activities require stopping. Passing traffic is conducive to economic opportunity in a broad sense, but a transaction cannot occur unless somebody stops. Newsome’s own example of the RD 909 is a testimony to how traffic efficiency can undermine economic opportunity. The high-speed RD 909 conveys throngs of automobiles every day, but only a few of them are stopping. So passing traffic is not a good in itself. Using Newsome’s own language in describing the ideas of Varro, a place is where there is movement to and movement through. We desire that a significant amount of the traffic will come to a stop. Therefore, we should be attempting to understand the propensity of passing traffic to stop. At higher speeds, the propensity to stop decreases. In Hartnett’s language, slowing down traffic is a nuisance. However, to nuisance applies to the throughput of traffic, not to economic opportunity. Returning to the Roman world, where most of the traffic manifested in the form of pedestrians, these nuisances in the streets did not prevent them from moving, it merely slowed them down. Nuisances in Rome certainly did not prevent people from using the streets, and they did not prevent people from stopping in them. All of this demonstrates that we should not equate traffic efficiency with economic opportunity.

High-value real estate is ultimately predicated on the expectation that people will stop at a property. A location next to a freeway with hundreds of thousands of vehicles is not necessarily a good retail property. The investor should not pay rents based on the amount of traffic; he should pay based on the number of people stopping at the property. When a right-of-way functions more as a conduit, there is a lower propensity of each traveler to stop. On the other hand, with super-high traffic volumes, a property could be valuable even when only small percentages of people stop. It depends on how small those percentages are. So we might conclude that high traffic volumes are good for business, but only with the understanding that various forms of traffic should not be treated equally. High-speed traffic is bad for business. Low-speed traffic is better. Furthermore, considering different ways of travelling at low-speed, nothing beats walking for the ability to stop.

I have chosen to consult Varro and Cicero about the concept of place since we nowadays frequently invoke it while leaving it poorly defined. Of course the smart-alecky and squishy definition harkened from Gertrude Stein is, “there is no there there.” Her now famous utterance was a reference to Oakland, leading me to question what about the city or a part thereof made her think there was no there-ness there. Mike Davis classifies the subdivisions of the Antelope Valley—a high-desert, isolated plain northeast of Los Angeles—as a no-place. He uses the word eutopic, which he says means, “literally no-place,” yet, in fact, the Greek eu + topos literally means “good place.”[7]⁷ Cecelia Feldman Weiss describes two definitions which are more specific. First, she characterizes the definition of place by Yi-Fu Tuan as, “that which arises from the cessation of action,” thus place, “grows out of the suspension of movement.” She offers her own definition of place as, “active engagement with the world.”[8]⁸  Varro’s fecundity about place is the incorporation of the roles of movement and the cessation of movement. However, I am tempted to revise Varro, Tuan, and Weiss, mainly by replacing the terms “motion” and “movement” with “mobility.” I will also argue that “mobility” is a better fit with the so-called “spatial turn.” If we substitute “mobility” for “movement” in a sentence by Tuan, we get, “if we think of space as that which allows [mobility], then place is pause; each pause in [mobility] makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.” Yet, as Newsome points out, this looks like Tuan has made places into destinations. Varro, thinking like a Roman, relates places both to movement and the cessation of movement; and the concept of place still works when we substitute “mobility” for “movement.”

The Forum is defined by its urban armature,[9]⁹ just as a typical modern piazza, plaza, place, or platz. Perhaps the building interiors are better understood as destinations, even while their exteriors define the space of the Forum, and in the same manner forming its boundaries as a place. The space of the Forum itself is both where people linger and pass through, which is in these respects no different from ancient streets. Varro delineates vici, a word for narrow, urbans streets, in terms of rows of buildings.[10]¹⁰ The Forum and the streets of Rome are both similar in respect of being bound by the armature of their surrounding buildings. The Forum shares three important features of a Roman street, and I take this to imply that the Forum was a street. By contrast, following Newsome and Macauley-Lewis, the imperial fora of Rome were three-sided, walled properties with inner-facing colonnade and controlled access. The Forum Julium, Forum of Augustus, Forum Traiani, and the Forum Domitiani are all examples of this closed design, which either blocked through traffic, or at least discouraged it, creating a genus of fora functioning as superblock destinations.

Drawing from Varro, Cicero, and various secondary sources above, here is a brainstormed list of ideas about place:

·        Places are public locations which facilitate moving through and lingering, safely and comfortably;

·        Slow mobility, especially walking, is most compatible with places;

·        Too much fast mobility inhibits or even destroys existing places, or prevents them from emerging in the first place;

·        Buildings form the urban armature of places;

·        Building exteriors shelter places; design is dictated by local climate;

·        Building interiors provide refuge from the public realm, while remaining in proximity to it;

·        Places provide a rich street network;

·        A place provides a central public area for some neighborhood(s) in proximity to it; and

·        Neighborhoods do not exist without place.

·        Places can be organic and planned, but are usually of mixture of the two;

·        A place can be described in part, but not only in topological terms;

·        Place is in part socially constructed;

·        We can evaluate a place in terms of how well it serves the needs of individuals, neighborhoods, and regions; and

·        A place is best understood in terms of the sum of human activity within in a location, where the topology of that location is defined by the quality and quantity of human activity.

1. Newsome, “Making Movement Meaningful,” in Ray Laurence and David J. Newsome, eds., Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 30–35.

2. Newsome, “Making Movement Meaningful,” 35.

3. I have taken this argument of the idea of drivers responding to logos and name brands from an essay I read about ten or fifteen years ago from a compilation I purchased from a bargain bin. I don’t recall the author’s name, but the theme and the title were something to the effect of “Seeing America at 45 Miles Per Hour.” I cannot find the book and I never took any notes.

4. Jon Boyd, “Streets and Sidewalks of Pompeii,” unpublished.

5. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2000), Chapter 2. Solnit gives examples of introspection, like the Sophists, Rousseau, and Kierkegaard on their contemplative walks. I am thinking of an enhanced ability to process urban environments for practical decision-making.

6. Diane Favro, The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6.

7. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 2006, 2nd Ed.), 4–6.

8. Cecilia Feldman Weiss, “Performativity of Place: Movement and Water in Second Century A.D. Ephesus.” In TRAC 2009: Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Michigan and Southampton 2009. Edited by A. Moore, et al. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 67. Citation taken from Newsome, “Making Movement Meaningful,” 20, fn. 62.

9. William L. MacDonald, Architecture of the Roman Empire: An Urban Reappraisal (Volume II), 3.

10. Varro, De Lingua Latina 5.145.1.