Traffic jams in the comfortably winding streets of Old Ljubljana, the asphalt-glittering crowds and boisterously revealing shop windows from Cerruti to Nama, the shy coquettishness of alleys with thinned tree-lines along Ashkerceva Street, the friction between the bounty of consumer goods during fairs and the parallel worlds of the diplomatic salons and the muttering refuge of taverns and bars, the clamoring squares and the scrimmage in front of the elevators of powdery supermarkets like Metalka and Maximarket, the victory of kitsch in the villas of the nouveau riche and the spreading molasses of government palaces that gives no thought to the historical necessity of concentration that cultural institutions, including museums, should have in the city center; the huge advertising posters ceaselessly congratulating themselves on the triumph of a post-industrial capital, and ambiguous efforts of the social margin to create lifestyles from the pressure of predictable banality in which both, a cheerful relaxation and an open public space of the conflict, demand the right to be treated as an existential innovation – Ljubljana knows the swarming of explicitly urban identities.
However, everything is still very thin, verily just born in the spasms of economic, social, and political transition. And this is where opportunity lies. The identity crisis that Ljubljana is experiencing because it is the capital of an independent country for the first time and simultaneously the focus of Slovenian national effort, means not only the disintegration of its previously valid identity and forms of self-perception but also, taken etymologically, a turning point. The opportunity for Ljubljana to qualify as an open city whose air liberates, which only works if a city is open like a parachute, to therefore become a city of self-confidence internally and hospitable externally, this opportunity will be probably more clear precisely at the cusp of something that shines with the sobriety of dawn, as Walter Benjamin once poeticized the authentic impulse of a work of art. To realize the potentials that originate from this milestone period, we, ethnic Slovenians who live largely in Ljubljana as a modern national habitus, still collectively lack those manifold layers of cultural capital that has the power, with a series of regenerating exchanges of universal civility and the reciprocal effects of the local “habits of the heart,” to produce a stock of refined styles of collective life. This is art that is worth pursuing. It is worth pursuing precisely at the time when any ambition beyond furthering one’s self-interest is denounced as the last refuge of sentimental mind. On this basis we could achieve a certain level of relativization of our own deep-seated attitudes; that is to say, we would be able to translate what is the menacing threat of “other” and thus soften it into what is merely “different.”
The rhetoric of pedestrians?
That is what a cosmopolis does. Such translating approaches between diverse traditions and existences have, of course, more to do with the specific “forma mentis” and not so much with the shortsighted speed of possibly even quite well intentioned officials who are removing the monuments of the bygone period and in the greed for changes on the newly renamed streets. To be sure, it is easy to simply hire a phalanx of architects to attempt benignly drowning Ljubljana in the generic splendour of tinted glass in the enduring international style which boasts throughout the post-Communist world with its skyscraper strongholds of the “movers and shakers” and the political clientele that doesn’t care about the community when it does not enable, protect, and strengthen their special interests. These changes are easier to accomplish than to attempt a transformation of urban mentality that cannot be accelerated by elementary political will power.
But it is possible – I surmise – to provide the conditions for the change of mentality so it can more easily develop in directions that will release Ljubljana from the traps of the pale uniformity that is commercializing the suburbs with shopping centers and touristically anesthetizing the city core by marketing “the national heritage.” It is possible to provide a recognizable basis for the forms of celebration that would be shared by those visual, architectural, and – through osmosis – not least the spiritual elements of the urban fabric that in Ljubljana’s case is truly organically constructed on a “human scale.” Ljubljana, which was aptly created for the development of the “rhetoric of pedestrians” (Michael Certau) and individual imaginary scenarios of exploratory strolls along the invisible beams along to the fundamental “castle-river-park” axis already emphasized by Plecnik between the two World Wars; Ljubljana, which stretches uniquely between the boundaries of natural topographical emphasis on one side and the condensed bustle of the crowds on the other; Ljubljana, where the anonymous “lonely crowd” of the cosmopolis has not yet overwhelmed the perversely unsafe forms of public intimacy among the citizens of this small city; Ljubljana, deftly described by writer Jush Kozak as a “city at the crossroads of winds,” persistently, although at first glance perhaps less noticeably, accepts in its folds foreigners and travelers, temporary and permanent guests, immigrants and refugees, trying to shake off exclusivist dependency on the Slovenian ethnic identity so that its urban face can rightfully appear; Ljubljana, which is impossible to love without seeing in her an inspiration of distaste, this Ljubljana, like so many post-communist cities, would do right to invest more funds, critical attention, and insightful effort into education programs. This does not mean only investing where investments are necessary, that is, in urban planning solutions to the savage carnival of the ruinous automobilization of the city that will soon make “a human scale” just a hollow phrase in tourist brochures whereas a quite horrifying fact will naturally have to be suppressed: that parking lots occupy considerably more space than children’s playgrounds. If my birthplace really wants to remain the archetype of a city in which life has existential meaning and does not just provide channels of functional communication, Ljubljana must take care that its citizens are better aware, on the one hand, of the long, if uneasy tradition of creating a collective alliance with all those citizens who regardless of their ethnic origins recognize the vernacular language of the Ljubljana facades and their longing for freedom, and on the other are equally aware of its essential heterogeneous nature and perpetual reflection of the “same” in the “other.”
In an ideal-case scenario, such an awareness would prevent Ljubljana from being deserted on Sundays as if struck by an epidemic. In truth, it is an epidemic, an epidemic of oblivion in which the fact is vaporized that one’s personal identification with the city demands an obligation which, in its ultimate consequence, is properly called metaphysical. But I only recognize myself authentically in the metaphysical identity only if this identity rubs against others, if it keeps mutating, cross-fertilising and penetrating the mutual tension of differences. The mental boundaries of the developed urban space are porous and thus require the mixing, osmosis and simmering of many idioms, personalities, and visions that carry with them the memory of the “shock of difference.”
Shocks are creative. The metropolitan experience knows this well since the urban polis is inclusive while the national tradition is exclusive in its character. The Slovenian tradition of living in urban settlements is still more national than metropolitan. If a metropolis is a kind of public gathering place, a drafty space, a home of transients and evanescent identities, it can only be so because it constantly includes and processes people, groups, languages, and cultures that are different. However, Slovenians still lack – let us take an arbitrary example – even a slightly more ambitious novel let alone more subtle lyrical visions about the treasury of conflicts between the migratory pain and hopes for a better reality as they are embodied in the “southern” community of Fuћine on the capital city’s outskirts, thus called because of its being populated by immigrant workers from the southern republics of the former Yugoslavia.
If the city therefore offers important although admittedly confused elements of identity to every individual who lives here voluntarily, then being a Ljubljana-dweller means more than just being invested in the site of castle and river, bedroom suburb and encompassing moor, which is unavoidable; however, being “a Ljubljanite” also means having a heart and head imbued with the feeling that for a full-fledged urban existence it is not enough to just passively live side by side but rather that we must actively develop generous forms of collective life: not to just passively tolerate different linguistic, ethnic, and religious characteristics but to attempt to prepare ourselves to comprehend that there are no cities without heterogeneous and plural impulses, no authentic places without discovering the “otherness” in the bosom of what we mistakenly think we understand as the “same.” We Ljubljanites are only very slowly becoming accustomed to this pluralization of ethnic identities and personal worldviews.
Along today’s Ljubljanica River, the bleary but stubborn shoots of new weeping willows spring forth from the stumps of felled, presumably disease-infested old willows. Instead of washerwomen, prudent students of computer science, excitable artists, idle strollers, ambitious stockbrokers, and unemployed philosophers now hail one another from river bank to river bank or, rather, from the bars of some of the “hottest” city meeting places. However, the hope that this is a process of cosmopolitization that has less to do with the size of the population than with a close connection to the broad horizons of the soul that are worth cultivating even in children, gradually springs in the heart of every sensitive individual who suspects that for the archetype of a city it is necessary to constantly seek a balance between conservative loyalty to a place and the liberal pluralism of differences. Such a hope might occur, for example, to a stroller who, at least in summer when the city is most beguiling, manages to hear in passing those youths sitting around the tables of Mosquito Bar at the junction of Gruber Canal and the Ljubljanica River as they deal with the most important things in the world, where the balance offers itself, stretching from the limited horizon of the lips prepared for a kiss to the endless landscapes of freedom in daydreaming: they comment on the proper taste of marijuana and the nature of the cosmos.