Chapter 1 : Urbanization Against Cities

Chapter One: Urbanization Against Cities

The title of this chapter has been deliberately worded to create a paradox in the reader’s mind. How, it may be fair to ask, can, we speak of urbanization against cities? The two words, “urbanity” and “city,” are usually taken to be synonyms. Indeed, as conventional wisdom would have it, a city is by definition an urban entity, and an urban entity, in turn, is certainly regarded as a city.

Yet I shall take great pains to show that they are in sharp contrast to each other—in fact, that they are bitter antagonists. My reasons for making such an unorthodox distinction between urbanization and citification are not intended to be semantic word juggling. The contradiction forms the very rationale for writing this book. “Urbanization against cities” is meant to focus as sharply as possible on a human and ecological crisis so deep-sfeated we are hardly aware of its existence, much less its grave impact on social freedom and personal autonomy. I refer to the historic decline of the city as an authentic arena of political life (that once lived in some balance with the natural world) and, perhaps no less significantly, the decline of the very notion of citizenship.

So sweeping a statement obviously requires some clarification at the outset of our discussion. According to most social theorists, the traditional “contradiction” created by the rise of urbanism has been the city’s ages-old “conflict” with the countryside. History, we are commonly told, is filled with innumerable examples of the city’s efforts to free itself from the trammels of agrarian parochialism. The city, it is emphasized, has always tried to assert its cosmopolitan culture and secular civic institutions over the narrow provincialism and constrictive kinship ties of the rural town and village. We take it for granted that from ancient to modern times the city and countryside have been at “war” with each other. Historically, this “war” is supposed to be embodied in the conflicting interests between the feudal lord and the urban merchant, the peasant food-cultivator and town-dwelling craftsperson, the landbased aristocrat and the citified capitalist, the farmer and the industrial worker.

That such conflicts have existed over the course of history and echo in modern society is true enough. We still retain ingrained visions of a cleansing and virtuous pastoral life that stands in moral contrast with the tainted and sinful world of the city. The contrast has been the subject of Biblical invectives, the theme of some of our most outstanding novels, and a centerpiece in the writings of many distinguished sociologists.

Taken as a whole, however, this Manichean drama can be a gross simplification of reality. It is certainly true that city and countryside have commonly viewed each other antagonistically in the past. And there have been long stretches of history when each tried to assert economic and political dominance over the other. But there have also been times when they existed in an almost exquisitely sensitive, creative, and ecological balance with each other. Some of the most admirable human adventures m culture, technics, and social freedom have occurred precisely in those periods when a complementary relationship between city and country, indeed between society and nature, successfully replaced the mutual rivalry for supremacy.

Today, it would seem that the city has finally achieved complete dominance over the countryside. Indeed, with the extension of suburbs into nearby open land on an unprecedented scale, the city seems to be literally engulfing the agrarian and natural worlds,

absorbing adjacent towns and villages into sprawling metropolitan entities—a form of social cannibalism that could easily serve for our very definition of urbanization. All talk of metropolitan Babylon and Rome to the contrary, we have no comparable parallels in the past to urbanization on our present-day scale. Worse, the city seems to be replacing rural culture and all its rich traditional forms with the mass media and technocratic values we tend to associate with “city life.” If all of this is true—as I frankly believe it is—I plan to introduce in this book a very discordant qualification. Contrary to most views on the subject, I plan to show that if we use words such as “city” and “country” meaningfully to describe this process of physical, cultural, and ecological urban cannibalism, the image of an all-devouring “city” that is engulfing a supine and helpless “country” is a sheer myth.

The truth is that the city and the country are under siege today—a siege that threatens humanity’s very place in the natural environment. Both are being subverted by urbanization, a process that threatens to destroy their identities and their vast wealth of tradition and variety. Urbanization is engulfing not only the countryside; it is also engulfing the city. It is devouring not only town and village life based on the values, culture, and institutions nourished by agrarian relationships. It is devouring city life based on the values, culture, and institutions nourished by civic relationships. City space with its human propinquity, distinctive neighborhoods, and humanly scaled politics—like rural space, with its closeness to nature, its high sense of mutual aid, and its strong family relationships—is being absorbed by urbanization, with its smothering traits of anonymity, homogenization, and institutional gigantism. Whether or not the urbanization of both the city and the country is desirable is an issue that I shall earnestly explore, But I cannot emphasize too strongly that even if we think in the old terms of city versus country and the unique political contrasts such a time-honored imagery has nurtured, the conflict between city and country has largely become obsolete, Urbanization threatens to replace both contestants in this seemingly historic antagonism. It threatens to absorb them into a faceless urban world in which the words “city” and “country” will essentially become social, cultural, and political archaisms.

Perhaps our greatest difficulty in understanding urbanization and its grave impact on social and personal life today stems from our tendency to link it with our very naive idea, of the city. We are often satisfied to call any urban entity a city if it is demographically congested, structurally sizable, and, most significantly, populated by individuals whose work no longer deals directly with food cultivation. Urbanization, like citification, seems to meet these criteria so completely that we commonly identify the two, and distinguish them more as a matter of degree than of kind. Thus, we tend to regard a sprawling metropolitan area merely as an oversize city, or it may be an agglomeration of closely packed “cities” that Americans call “urban belts” and the British call “conurbations.”

Granted that we are finding it increasingly difficult, on careful reflection, to regard urban belts and conurbations merely as cities. We uneasily sense that they are something more—if not something newer—than what previous generations called cities. What confuses us about such perplexing issues is that the people who live in such new urban entities are plainly engaged in city-type occupations and seem to follow citified lifeways. Increasingly removed from the natural world, metropolitan dwellers rarely, if ever, earn their livelihood as farmers, however fashionable urban and suburban gardening has become in recent years. They are employed in urban jobs, be they professional, managerial, service-oriented, craft-oriented, or the like. They five highly paced and culturally urbane lifeways-that lock into mechanically fixed time slots—notably, the “nine-to-five” pattern—rather than follow agrarian cycles guided by seasonal change and dawn-to-dusk personal rhythms. Urban environments are highly synthetic rather than natural. Food is normally bought rather than grown. Dwellings tend to be concentrated rather than dispersed. Personal life is not open to the considerable public scrutiny we find in small towns or rooted in the strong kinship systems we find in the country. Urban culture is produced, packaged, and marketed as a segment of the city dweller’s leisure time, not infused into the totality of daily life and hallowed by tradition as it is in the agrarian world. That country life is growing more and more like city life and losing its simplest natural attributes is a point that will become highly salient for the purposes of our discussion. For the present, what counts is,that the aforementioned distinction still exists’ in the image of what we call urbanization (conceived as citification) as distinguished from ruralization.

Superficial as these continuities and contrasts may be, they begin to dissolve completely when we start to explore history for richer, fuller standards of what we mean by the word cities. I use the plural, cities, advisedly: Despite certain similarities, the differences between cities of the past also have considerable importance. History presents us with a wide range of unique and distinctive cities—the earliest in Sumer centering around temples; later ones, such as Babylon, around palaces; the more dynamic Greek democracies around civic squares that fostered citizen interaction; medieval and more recent ones, around a variety of different marketplaces. However diversified cities may have been in the past, our language gives them considerable prestige. The term civilization has its origin in civitas—a Latin word occasionally used for city—and denotes the cultural sophistication the western world has traditionally imparted to some kind of urbanism. Most of our utopian visions, whether heavenly or earthly, take the form of a pity, a “New Jerusalem’’ to. speak in sacred terms, or an idealized version of the Hellenic “city-state” to use Secular language.

But here we abruptly encounter the limits of the term urbanization as a synonym for citification. Urbanization does not comfortably fit into an imagery of the city drawn from theocratic, monarchic, democratic, and economic communities peopled by craftsfolk and small merchants who were engaged in a natural economy. Our urban belts and conurbations are vast engines for operating huge corporate enterprises, industrial networks, distribution systems, and administrative mechanisms. Their facilities, like their towering buildings, stretch almost endlessly over the landscape until they begin to lack all definition and centrality. It is difficult to root them in a temple, palace, public square, or the small, intimate marketplace of craftsfolk and merchants. To say that they have any specific center that gives them civic identity is often so ill-fitting as to be absurd, even if one allows for centers that linger on from past eras when cities were still clearly delineable areas for human association.

What, then, do our premodern cities with their rich diversity of forms and functions have in common? We arrive at a basic characteristic of city life that is the result not only of human propinquity, structural size, occupations, and an urbane culture. What major cities of the past share—whatever their differences are largely moral, often spiritual, attributes with deep roots in a natural environment that sharply distinguish them from the physical attributes we associate with urbanization. Cities of the past from their very beginnings were ultimately what I would call communities of the heart”—moral associations that were nourished by a shared sense of ideological commitment and public concern. Civic ideology and concern centered around a strong belief in the good life for which the city provided the arena and catalytic agent. The good life by no means meant the affluent life, the life of personal pleasures and material security. More often than not, it meant a life of goodness, of virtue and probity. This sense of civic calling could assume a highly spiritual form such as we find in the Jews’ reverence for Jerusalem or a highly ethical form as in the Greeks’ admiration for Athens. Between these emotive and intellectual extremes, city dwellers of the past tended to form social compacts” that were guided not only by material and defensive considerations but by loyalties to their cities that were shaped by richly textured ideological commitments.

Love of one’s city, a deep and abiding sense of loyalty to its welfare, and an attempt to place these sentiments within a rich moral and ecological context, whether God-given or intellectual, clearly distinguishes the majority of cities of past eras from those of present ones. We have virtually no equivalent in the modern city of the Near Eastern sense of civic spirituality, the Greek feeling of political affiliation, the medieval endearment to communal fraternity, and the Renaissance love of urban pageantry that infused the otherwise disparate citizenry of the past. Such loyalties, with their moral underpinnings, may linger on in the residents of modern cities, but more as a fevered appetite for the material, cultural, and nervous stimulation of what we today designate as the good life than as a product of the ethical sturdiness, spiritual commitment, and sense of civic virtue that marked the citizenry of earlier eras. It also meant a love of the land, of place and natural setting that gave rise to a rich ecological sensibility and respect for the countryside.

To speak truthfully, our present-day relationship to the city usually takes the form of very pragmatic material requirements. A modern city, suburb, town, or, for that matter, a village is often evaluated in terms of the “municipal services” it offers to its residents. The traditional religious, cultural, ethical, and ecological features that once endeared citizens to their city, and its natural surroundings have dissolved into quantitative, often ethically neutral, criteria. The city is the first fund into which we make a series of social investments for the express purpose of receiving a number of distinctly material returns. We expect our persons and property to be protected, our shelters to be safeguarded, our garbage to be removed, our roads to be repaired, our environment to be physically and socially tidy—which is to say, spared from the invasion of “undesirable elements.”

Doubtless we want our cities to be culturally stimulating, economically viable, and attractive in reputation. But such attainments are not necessarily a function of the city as such. They often depend upon the results of personal enterprise, the presence of individual types who reside in it by virtue of birth or choice. For a city to claim a famous son—and, more recently, a famous daughter—does not necessarily reflect well upon the city’s reputation for producing gifted or renowned people but rather on the individual gifts of one or more of its residents. It does not provide us with evidence of the city’s cultural milieu but of a specific person’s gifts and biography that often involve a valiant effort to transcend a community’s oppressive environment. Such was the case, for example, with James Joyce’s relationship with Dublin, Oscar Wilde’s relationship with London, or Cezanne’s relationship with Paris.

Hence, urban “civilization” as we know it today is the erratic byproduct of a particular city, not its main and distinguishing consequence. Such a “civilization” emerges from the wayward activities of fairly privatized individuals or corporations rather than the innate traits of the municipality itself. A civic culture does not stem from the collective efforts of a unique and cohesive public, however unusual the city may be in terms of its regional location and its historic traditions. It stems from the personal activities of certain individuals wKo happen to occupy a residence within the city’s confines, staff its shops and offices, work its industries, and, of course, produce its artistic artifacts. Urban “civilization,” today, is not a characteristic civic phenomenon that emerges from a distinctive public and body politic; it is simply the exudate of free enterprise with its patina of “public service” and cultural charity. That mayors, corporate leaders, and philanthropists may vie with each other in celebrating the projects they initiate—projects that may range from concert halls and museums to airports and industrial parks—is simply evidence of the shallowness of what today is called “civic-mindedness.” Rarely do these projects, which in any case are seldom free of vulgarity, nourish the city as a collectivity and arena for public activity. Like iridescent bubbles that rise, glisten, and burst, they form the surface of the city’s often stagnant cultural life and social malaise.

In fact, like any marketplace, the modern city is the hectic center of a largely privatized interaction between anonymous buyers and sellers who are more involved in exchanging their wares than in forming socially and ethically meaningful associations. Cities today are typically measured more by their success as business enterprises than cultural foci. The ability of an urban entity to “balance its budget,” to operate “efficiently,” to “maximize” its service with minimal cost, all of these are regarded as the hallmark of municipal success. Corporate models form the ideal examples of urban models, and civic leaders take greater pride in their managerial skills than in their intellectual abilities.

This dominant entrepreneurial concept of the city has its precise counterpart in the dominant contemporary notion of citizenship. If we tend to view the city as our most immediate social “investment,” we expect the city to give us adequate material “returns.” We pay our taxes with a distinct expectation of the services they will buy. The greater the services for the money we pay, the more profitable it is to reside in a given city. Civic amenities are clearly measurable in terms of the number of schools, class sizes, parks, firehouses, transportation facilities, police, crime rates, parking spaces—indeed, in terms too numerous to inventory. When we “buy” into a residential area, we reconnoiter it primarily for these material and logistical amenities and secondarily, if at all, for the cultural stimulation and sense of community it provides.

Not surprisingly, the resident of most cities today tends to develop a very distinctive self-image. It is not the image of a citizen—a historically remarkable term that I have yet to describe—but that of a taxpayer. He or she does not have a sense of self appropriate to what we might call a public figure but rather that of a free-wheeling investor. Doubtless, taxpayers and investors often form many associations, but they ally with each other to advance or protect very specific interests. Like all sensible entrepreneurs who are involved in the business of residing in a city, they want a favorable return for what they pay, and, as the saying goes, “in numbers there is strength.” Accordingly, all common adages to the contrary, they can fight City Hall—presumably, the place where the corporate board meets—and, depending as much upon their wealth as upon their numbers, they may succeed.

But beyorid this economically secure interplay of conflicting interests and demands, the citizen qua taxpayer is not expected to get deeply involved in municipal affairs. Nor does the contemporary urban environment encourage him or her to do so. A “good citizen” is one who obeys the laws, pays taxes, votes ritualistically for preselected candidates, and “minds his or her own business.” This notion of appropriate civic behavior is no t merely a mutually shared, quietistic vision of modern-day citizenship; it is a political desideratum that, if violated, exposes—more active taxpayers to charges of “meddling” at best and “vigilantism” at worst. Both taxpayers and municipal officials prudently acknowledge that the people of a city should be properly represented by efficient, specialized, and professional surrogates of “the public.” Day-to-day power, however, resides’ precisely in the hands of these managerial surrogates, not in their “constituencies” who increasingly acquire the anonymity and’ facelessness that the word “constituency” denotes. Like the traditional liberal concept that government is best when it governs least, so the contemporary liberal Concept of citizenship seems to be that a “constituent” is best when he or she acts the least.

Such a concept of citizenship is fraught with grave psychological as well as political consequences. Individuals whose public lives barely transcend the social level of mere taxpayers tend to form very passive images of their personalities and of the natural environment around them. An increasingly disempowered citizen may well become a quietistic and highly retiring self. A major loss of social power tends to render a person less than human and thereby yields a loss of individuation itself. Such constituents live in a painfully contradictory world. On the one hand, society becomes an intensely problematic presence in their lives. The social realm is a potential source of war, of economic instability, of contending factions and ideologies that may reach directly into the most guarded niches of private life. These problems become particularly intimate when issues such as abortion, military conscription, sexual freedom, and earning capacity invade the individual’s domestic realm.

On the other hand, while such issues rage around the “constituent,” he or she is steadily divested of the power to act upon them. Indeed, the “constituent’s” intellectual equipment to form an assured opinion is eroded by an ever-deepening sense of personal incompetence and public detachment. A preoccupation with trivia—the problems of shopping, fashion, personal appearance, career advancement, and entertainment in a thoroughly boring milieu—replaces the more heroic stance of a socially and environmentally involved body politic. We thus encounter a twofold development: a world in which growing social power preempts concerns that were once largely within the purview of the individual and the community, and the steady erosion of personal power and the individual’s capacity for action. Within this paralyzing forcefield, the individual’s self-identity begins to suffer a crucial decline. Self-recognition dissolves steadily into a grim lack of selfhood. Inaction becomes the only form of action with the result that the “constituent” retreats into an inwardness that lacks the substance to render one individually functional.

A world in which personality itself resembles the tabula rasa of an aimless society and a meaningless way of personal fife would seem to raise more universal issues than the fate of the city and the citizen. But in many respects this universality expresses itself as a need for a larger perspective toward civic issues. The city is not only the individual’s first social “investment”; it is his or her most intimate social environment. Owing to its vital immediacy,

the city remains (as it has throughout history) the most direct arena in which the individual can act as a truly social being and from which he or she can attain the most immediate social solutions to the broader problems that beleaguer the privatized self. Insofar as the individual’s self-definition as an empowered person and citizen is even possible today, the civic terrain on all its levels must be regained by its constituents and reconstituted in new ways to render people socially operational. Civic reempowerment of the citizen thus becomes a personal issue as well as a social one. It Is equivalent to regaining one’s private selfhood as well as one’s public selfhood, one’s personality as well as one’s citizenship.

To attain such reempowerment and self-reconstitution has its presuppositions. So much of civic participation and civic-mindedness has been lost in this century, particularly its latter half, that we will have to probe deeply into the buried history of the city and of Citizenship for reference points by which to understand where we Stand in the swirl of urbanization that surrounds us.

We will want to know what the concepts of “city” and “citizenship” really mean—not simply as ideal definitions but as fecund ecological processes that reveal the growth of communities and the individuals who people them—indeed, that turn them into a genuine public sphere and a vital body politic. It is painfully characteristic of our present-day myopia that these very words, public Nphere and body politic, have simply dropped out of our social vocabulary. When we use them at all, we rarely seem to understand what they mean or at least meant to earlier civilizations in which we claim to have our civic and social roots. They have been supplanted by such terms as “electorate” and, of course, “taxpayers” and “constituents”—administrative terms that denature the concepts of politics and community by definition.

It also behooves us to examine the kind of institutions cities have created to foster citizenship and public empowerment. A romarkable number of conflicting institutional issues clustered around the city as it meandered its way through different historical forms: decentralization versus centralization, direct democracy versus representative republicanism, assemblies of the people versus councils of deputies, recall and rotation of public officials versus lengthy tenure in office and professional fixidity. popular management of social affairs versus bureaucratic control and manipulation. These issues have exploded repeatedly, from ancient times to the present, into bitter civic conflicts. They persist in our very midst under the rubric of “reform” movement to alter city charters and most recently as neighborhood movements to establish “grass-roots” democracy.

We will want to know how the high ideals of a free citizenry with a sense of place in a cherished natural environment were variously realized and lost, often to be regained for limited periods of time in the same area or in other parts of the world. We will have to ask how “communal liberty” (to use Benjamin Barber s phrase) has fared with the fortunes of the citizenry and how each interacted with the other, for neither the city’s forms of freedom nor the citizen can be isolated from each other without doing violence to the meaning of both. That urbanization eventually separated from citification to take on a life of its own and ravage the city and countryside, ecological as well as agricultural alike will be an abiding theme in all we shall have to explore. This separation begins with the massive institutional, technological, and social changes that eventually dispossessed the citizen of his or her place in the city’s decision-making processes. Urbanization, in effect, both presupposes and later promotes the reduction of the. citizen to a “taxpayer,” “constituent,” or part of an “electorate.” We shall see that urbanization yields not only a drastic colonization of the countryside but also of the city’s and the citizen s very self-identity. Like the modern market, which has invaded every sphere of personal life, we shall find that urbanization has swept before it all the civic as well as agrarian institutions that provided even a modicum of autonomy to the individual. Born of the city, urbanization has been its parent’s most effective assailant, not to speak of the agrarian world that it has almost completely undone.

It will be important to see the extent to which presumably nonurban institutions, often remotely tribal in origin and rooted in a more naturalistic society, became integral features of the democratic city in the form of popular assemblies, neighborhood councils, and the town meetings so redolent of an active municipalism and citizenship in our own day. Ironically, the same can be said for feudal, theocratic, and monarchical institutions, with the castle, temple, and palace as their centers. Indeed, we need go no further, if we choose, than the American and French revolutions to find that popular assemblies under different names have been the principal means by which ordinary people fought out the issues of justice and freedom with nobles, monarchs, and centralized nation-states. Each opposing camp has fought with the other for civic and ultimately social sovereignty. The current legalistic image of the city as a “creature” of the state is not an expression of contempt. It is an expression of fear, of careful deliberation in a purposive effort to subdue popular, democracy. That the term has been codified into laws, even in self-professed “democracies,” expresses a dread of a menacing civic or municipal incubus in every centralized social system, one that has always threatened to dismember centralized power as such and restore the control of society to a public that has been cruelly dispossessed of its very identity..

History is an all-important vehicle in our enterprise, the counterpart of evolution in an ecological approach. The “powers-that-be” live in a compulsive fear of remembrance, a fear of humanity’s social memory of past institutions, cultures, and the search for origins. An essential theme of George Orwell’s 1984 is the effort by a highly totalitarian state to eliminate the sense of contrast earlier lifeways imposed as a challenge to existing ones. Thinking itself had to be restructured to exclude this challenge by using words—Orwell’s famous “Newspeak”—that attenuated their previous wealth of meaning and the disquieting alternatives that the past posed to a fixed, eternalized, and ahistorical “now” or commitment to “nowness.” Previously, authority had rested on tradition, often in a highly distorted form; today, it rests oil conditioning, with no regard to a troubling past.

The purpose of Orwell’s “Newspeak” Was to change thinking by “the invention of new words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and insofar as possible of all meanings whatever,” Words such, as “free,” Orwell tells us, still existed in “Newspeak” but not “in its old sense of‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free,’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts and were therefore of necessity nameless.”{1} One could only use the word “free” in a strictly functional, amoral, and technical sense, such as in the statement “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” “Newspeak was designed not to extend but diminish the range of thought” by a process of abbreviation—by rendering concepts more functional than moral in nature and by dememorizing thought (if I may coin a phrase) that was designed to uproot the mind from a sense of continuity and contrast with a challenging past.

The Rise of Urbanization and Decline of Citizenship makes no compromises with an emphasis on “nowness” and the cybernetic language of electronic circuitry that is so fashionable today. The pages that follow are thoroughly infused with history and its moral meaning, and with language that is rich in secondary meanings. The reader will find no words like “feedback,” “input,” “output,” and “bottom lines,” which are currently used as substitutes for processual and thought-laden terms such as dialogue, origins, “explanations,” “judgments,” and “conclusions.” I have been at pains to emphasize my use of history and traditional language for a very distinct reason. This book deals with cities and citizenship—traditionally, the shared fate that confronts “town and country” in the modern era—and the impact of urbanization upon personality, freedom, and humanity’s sensitivity to nature. But it is also a book about morality and ethics. My concern with the way people commune—that is, actively associate with each other, not merely form communities—is an ethical concern of the highest priority in this work. I am concerned with the “social compacts” people form as ethical beings and the institutions they create to embody their ethical goals.

To a great extent, this is the Greek, more precisely, the Athenian, ideal of civicism, citizenship, and politics, an ideal, that has surfaced repeatedly throughout history. I believe this ideal forms a crucial challenge—despite its many limitations for the modern era. I propose to explore not only the ills of urbanization insofar as they have subverted town and country (including the natural environment), alike, but to explore the social and cultural conditions that gave rise to communities, citizens, and a politics whose high regard for personal activism has always made community the richest and most fulfilling expression of our humanity.