Introduction

A well-known medieval adage has it that “city air makes people free.” Although the freedom afforded by medieval cities generally meant emancipation from serfdom, the same adage might have been repeated from slightly different viewpoints throughout the history of urban life. Cities embody the most important traditions of civilization. Owing to the size of their marketplaces and the close living quarters they render possible, cities collect those energizing Force? of social life that country life tends to dissipate over wide expanses of land and scattered populations. Seasonal renewals of nature that send hunters and food gatherers on migrations and reclothe the works of the peasant are replaced in cities by a more palpable heritage. From a cultural standpoint, the land, years ago, was regarded as fugitive, the city as permanent; the land as natural, the city as social. While this dichotomy may be greatly exaggerated, it is certainty true that the full’d!moot of individuality and intellect was the historic privilege of the urban dweller or of individuals influenced by urban life. Indeed, some kind of urban community is not only the environment of humanity! it is its destiny. Only in a complete urban environment can there be complete people; only in a rational urban situation can the human spirit advance its most vital cultural and social traditions.

What, then, is a complete urban environment?

This work will try to answer the question partly by means of a historical account of the limits of earlier cities in order to establish some standards by which urban development can be judged? partly, too, by means of a criticism of many contemporary urban characteristics, the removal of which are necessary For the emergence of a new land of human community. A historical discussion of the city seems all the more necessary because mere urban accretion these days is often a popular justification for the superiority of one city over another. The size of urban populations, the number of square miles a city occupies, the facilities it has to support these dimensions — all are treated as virtues that find their culmination in the modern city. This approach tells us that during the past century or two, cities, like the output of machines, have expanded tremendously. Cities now approximate territories rather than communities. The most vital characteristics of urban life, as these have been understood over thousands of years, generally remain unknown or unnoticed, reposing in the writings of a few urban specialists and critics. There seems lo be little widespread understanding that the quantitative changes to which I have alluded have decisively worsened the quality of urban life, supplying modern Cities with characteristics that are radically different from the best traits and traditions of urbanism.

Just as there is a point beyond which a village becomes a city, so there is a point beyond which a city negates itself, churning up a human condition that is more atomizing — and culturally or socially more desiccated — than anything attributed to rural life. Although we think of cities as autonomous entities that have a life and history of their own, they are no different from other arenas of social activity; as Marx observed, they develop with the material conditions which shape society as a whole. In time, one body of material conditions is exhausted, often leading to another that may rehabilitate a given site for city life on an entirely different social basis. The newer city may even inherit the name of the older one, but by no means, can they be regarded as the same cities. Renaissance and modern Rome differ as fundamentally from each other as ancient and medieval Rome. They express entirely different economic, social, and cultural conditions, although they share the same name and occupy the same locale.

Modern cities occupy a unique position in urban history — a fact that I Feel is not dearly understood by those who dwell in them. On the one hand, the immense development of industry over the past century has created a remarkable opportunity for bringing land and city into a rational and ecological synthesis. The two could be blended into an artistic unity that would open a new vision of the human and natural experience. On the Other hand, the modern city — particularly the metropolis — develops the historic limits of city life as such, bringing the antagonism between land and city to a breaking point. Given its grotesquely distorted form, it is questionable whether the city is any longer the proper arena for social and cultural development. Thus, by exhausting the one-sidedness of city life based on a vast and malleable industry, the metropolis, by its own inner logic, tends to raise the issue of developing all that is desirable in urbanity into a qualitatively new human community.

The development of a rational and ecological human community is, in fact, becoming a necessity. For if in Marx’s view the “whole economical history of society is summed up” in the development of the antithesis between town and country, it is fair to add that the destiny of the modern city may well summarize the future of humanity. [1] Either the limits imposed on the city by modern social life will be overcome, or Forms of city life may arise that are congruent with the barbarism in store for humanity if people of this age should fail to resolve their social problems. The evidence for this tendency can be seen not only in the metropolis, choking with an alienated and atomized aggregate of human beings, but in the “well-policed” totalitarian city composed of starved black ghettoes and privileged white enclaves — a city that would be a cemetery of freedom, culture, and the human spirit.