Preface

This essay attempts to provide a meaningful perspective on the development of the city. It begins with a remote era when the land dominated the town and traces urban evolution in the present, when great metropolitan entities dominate the countryside. In the course of dealing with this historic development and its consequences for us, the book examines certain traditions of urbanism That have been virtually forgotten today. My purpose is to provide the reader with an idea of what the city was once like at its best, to recover high standards of urbanism all the more to question the present lack of standards in judging the modern metropolis and the society that fosters its growth.

This book is radically critical; it offers no recipes for urban revitalization within the framework of the present social order, nor does it make those esthetically tender concessions to design projects that even radical urbanists offer as substitutes for meaningful social relations. If the modern metropolis is viewed against the larger background of urban history, it will be seem as the complete negation of city life as it was Conceived during the more civilized eras, of the past. My purpose is to strengthen such a comparison, and to emphasize as strongly as I can that the roots of the urban crisis today lie not merely in poor designing, bad logistics, neglected neighborhoods, and inadequate material support, but in the social system which has created these problems in the first place — and produced the modern metropolis. This book tries to show that the city must be viewed not only as a special arena for human sociation called “urban” — one that has changed in character From one historical period to another — but also as the product of distinct social relations and modes of social development. Accordingly, to rescue urban life today would require a fundamental change in society, not just a new urban design. Important as design may be, it is a function of social life itself; and since modern society is basically irrational, it should not surprise us that the city reflects and oven exaggerates the social irrationalities of our time.

To draw sharp contrasts between the degraded standards of contemporary urbanism and the high standards achieved by earlier cities seams especially important today if only to rescue the latter from oblivion. We are slowly losing a humanistic conception of the very meaning of the word “city.” Paradoxically, we live in a world marked by rampant urbanization — but one that lacks real cities. As the once clearly demarcated cities inherited from the past are devoured by the expanding metropolis, the city begins to lose its definition and specificity, as well as its function as an authentic arena for community and solidarity. The city disappears in the great urban belts which spread across the laud Even the countryside is transformed into urban parkland or a complex, of highly industrialized agricultural factories. Contemporary city planning, insofar as it hypostatizes the design or logistical aspects of urbanism at the expense of its human and communitarian goals, becomes truly atavistic. If the priests of the ancient monumental cities were city planners who imposed a cosmological design on urbanized areas to glorify the power of deified monarchies, the modern city planners have become priests whose urban designs are crassly institutional and utilitarian. Both are architects of the mythic in that they subserve the city — its human scale and its communitarian dimension — to suprahuman and nonhuman ends.

In the pages that follow, details and side developments of urban history have been deliberately sacrificed for brevity and clarity of presentation. Far too many works on the development of the city overwhelm the reader with a dense undergrowth of factual material and esthetic opinion, with the result that the reader loses all perspective of the essential trends in urban history and the making of the modern metropolis. This book tries to maintain a clear focus throughout and deals with what I regard as vital aspects of the relationship between town and country, the emergence of the modern city, and the social and civic deterioration which reaches into the very marrow of modern urbanism.

The first two chapters, “Land and City” and “The Rise of the Bourgeois City,” as well as the “Introduction” and the opening pages of “The Limits of the Bourgeois City” were written in the late 1950s and published in abbreviated form in May 1960 in the Anglo-American quarterly Contemporary Issues. Those chapters had an underground circulation among friends who continually urged me to publish them in full. They appear here in complete form for the first time. The analysis they contain of the relationship between town and country parallels in so many ways Mars’s more fragmentary discussion of the same subject in the new-famous Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie that I was more than pleasantly surprised to note the similarities when Mars’s work appeared in Hobsbawm’s Marx on Pre-Capitalist Formations. Yet Mars’s work was unavailable to me when I wrote these chapters; indeed, the Grundrisse was generally unknown at that time, at least in the English-speaking world. The fragmentary Hobsbawm edition was not published until 1964, more than six years after The Limits of the City had been written and more than four years after it appeared in its Contemporary Issues version,. Accordingly, readers who find Marx’s work on the relationship of the town to the countryside in the Grundrisse as valuable as I do will probably benefit greatly from a close reading of The Limits of the City. I’ve left these opening chapters untouched except for very minor stylistic changes. In the remainder of this book — which is to say, most of it — the material is entirely new and carries the analysis of the city into our own times.

Today, my own social views are more committed to a libertarian perspective than they were in the 1950s. These views arc developed in considerable detail in my Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Ramparts Books, 1971) and are undergoing still further development in a work ! expect to complete shortly, The Ecology of Freedom. Despite this shift in perspective, however, I would be the last to deny the influence Marx has had on my thinking and I would willingly regard this volume as an elaboration of the views he so brilliantly developed in the Grundrisse. I suspect that the opening chapters of The Limits of the City will be of particular interest to readers who are concerned with Marxist studies. For my part, I would call The Limits of the City a dialectical work that deals with cities or the past acid present as phases or moments of a larger urban process, a process in which the potentialities of the urban development are internally unfolded, enriched, and reach their ultimate negation in the modern metropolis. The main purpose of this book is to enable the reader to see this process — the internal connections between different periods of urban history — and to recognize that urbanism must be viewed as a development that places us in a unique position to go beyond the city as such and produce a new type of community, one that combines the best features of urban and rural life in a harmonized future society. The concluding pages of The Limits of the City hint at what such a community might be. For a more detailed discussion, I must refer the reader to “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” and my forthcoming The Ecology of Freedom. But this little volume clearly stands on its own ground. Indeed, it provides the necessary overall perspective and many of the criteria which make the concept of a harmonized community meaningful.

March 1973

Murray Bookchin
Social Ecology Studies Program
Goddard College
Plainfield, Vermont

Center for New Studies
Ramapo College
Mahwah, N.J.