Introduction

The city has been a favorite target of hostility from biblical times onward—and it is no less so today. Viewed as a festering source of moral depravity by many people, it has been variously assailed as an ugly blight on a seemingly pristine natural landscape, as the sinful embodiment of a human nature that is aggressive, domineering, or even as “male” in its “rape” of a caring Mother Earth and “her” gentle aboriginal folk and animal offspring. I will leave the metaphoric, often terribly fuzzy ruminations of this genre of anti-city sentiment aside. A far stronger case can be made for an anti-city sentiment that regards modern, generally sprawling and formless urban agglomerations as sources of anomie, fear, self-interest, and a host of environmental problems. Urbanization, as I call this ever-encroaching and ever-growing phenomenon that we so often facilely identify with cities as such, can indeed be as toxic to the human spirit as it can be to a region’s natural integrity.

But what, then, is a city? And are the people trapped in modern-day urban agglomerations really citizens?

Urbanization Without Cities raises these questions in a reflective and hopeful way. Far from joining the chorus of city-denouncers, I wish to explore the enormous value of cities—and towns—as remarkable human creations. In responding to the above questions, I have tried to examine from a historical viewpoint the origins of cities, their role in shaping humanity as a highly unique and creative species, and the promise they offer as arenas for a new political and social dispensation. I have tried to examine how the city evolved, what forms it assumed over time, how it functioned as more than a mere market or center of production, and how citizens of a city interacted with one another to produce a form of what the great Roman thinker Cicero called “second nature”—that is, a humanly made “nature”—that existed in balance with the “first nature” we usually call the natural environment. Hence the citizens of a city are of no less concern to me than the city itself, for the city at its best ultimately became an ethical union of people, a moral as well as a socioeconomic community—not simply a dense collection of structures designed merely to provide goods and services for its anonymous residents.

What I wish to do is to redeem the city, to explore it hot as a corrosive phenomenon but as a uniquely human, ethical, and ecological community whose members often lived in balance with nature and created institutional forms that sharpened human self-awareness, fostered rationality, created a secularized culture, enhanced individuality, and established institutional forms of freedom. My repeated references to the agrarian world can easily be regarded as references to the natural world as well. My emphasis on civic participation can be taken as the social counterpart of biological mutualism; citizenship, as the social counterpart of biotic involvement in shaping the forms of natural ecocommunities; and civic history, as the social counterpart of natural history. In using the word counterpart here, however, I do not mean that civic participation, citizenship, and civic history are reducible to natural mutualism, ecocommunities, and biological evolution; they differ in far too many ways to be congruent. But this is a philosophical question I have dealt with in a broad discussion of first and second nature in my The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990). Suffice it to say here that my goal in this book has been to redefine the city and the citizen in the language of social ecology. It is my hope that thoughtful people today will attempt to understand what the city and citizenship used to be in order to better understand what they could be in a free, rational, and ecological society.

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The usual kinds of answers given to the question of what constitutes a city are often spatial and demographic in character, viewing the the city as an area occupied by a closely interlocked, densely populated human community. This definition, cast in largely quantitative terms, has been advanced for a long time. In fact, it is the popular criterion for the prestige enjoyed by some cities over other ones, and of cities generally over towns and villages. Tradition has it that the larger a city is, the better it is culturally and economically, by comparison with smaller communities. It is worth noting that years ago, American census-takers regarded communities of five thousand people or more as urban and those with smaller populations as rural. More recent criteria of what constitutes a city have changed only quantitatively. The word city, in fact, has turned into something of a social euphemism, the product of a time long past. Today, statisticians and many urbanologists favor the use of such categories as the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA)-sprawling, densely occupied regions that ordinarily embrace milllions of people. In reality, cities are being supplanted by areas so immense in size that they are losing their contours, specificity, and uniqueness. Many urban agglomerations today have larger populations than many countries had a century ago and are in many respects hardly different from small nation-states.

My own definition of a city cannot be reduced to a single proposition. Like rationality, science, and technology, which I regard as defined by their own histories, I view the city as the history of the city. That is to say, I view the city as the cumulative development—or dialectic—of certain important social potentialities and of their phases of development, traditions, culture, and community features. Least of all do I see citification—a processual noun for the city in history—as a mere “system of space,” to use Henri Lefebvre’s phrase, in which the geometrical term space becomes a quasi-mystical category for social, economic, and cultural relationships-relation- ships that I feel should be explored quite directly, without the convoluted “decoding” that enters into the work of certain postmodernists and neo-Marxists today. Neither from simple propositional definitions nor from somewhat mystical postmodernist gymnastics would I have any way of knowing how cities and their village, temple, and town progenitors came into being, how they developed, or what they ought to be if their potentialities were to be fulfilled in a free and rational society.

Defining the early city, I maintain, begins with the recognition of the city as a creative breach with humanity’s essentially biological heritage, indeed the “metamorphosis” of that heritage into a new social form of evolution. The city was initially the arena par excellence for the transformation of human relationships from associations based on biological facts, such as kinship, to distinctly social facts, such as residential propinquity; for the emergence of increasingly secular forms of institutionalization; for often rapidly innovative cultural relations; and for universalizing economic activities that had been previously associated with age, gender, and ethnic divisions. In short, the city was the historic arena in which—and as a result of which—biological affinities were transformed into social affinities. It constituted the single most important factor that changed an ethnic folk into a body of secular citizens, and a parochial tribe into a universal civitatis, where, in time, the “stranger” or “outsider” could become a member of the community without having to satisfy any requirement of real or mythic blood ties to a common ancestor. Not only did political relationships replace kinship relationships; the notion of a shared humanitas replaced the exclusivity of the clan and tribe, whose biosocial claims to be “the People” had often excluded the “outsider” as an inorganic, exogenous, or even threatening “other.”

Hence the city was historically the arena for the emergence of such universalistic concepts as “humanity”—and is potentially the arena for the reemergence of concepts of politi- cal self-regulation and citizenship, for the elaboration of social relations, and for the rise of a new civic culture. The steps from a consanguineous clan, tribe, and village to a polis, or political city; from blood brothers and sisters who were born into their social responsibilities to citizens who in the best of circumstances could freely decide on their civic responsibilities and determine their own affinities based on reason and secular interests—these steps constitute a meaningful definition of the city. Cities, to be sure, can rise and fall. They can enjoy good fortune for a time or, owing to conflicts, totally disappear. But once the city established firm roots in the history of social development, it acquired a conceptual reality that still persists, and it can still undergo many metamorphoses despite the disappearance or stagnation of individual cities. The city, in effect, has become a historic tradition—often a highly moral one—that tends to expand uniquely human traits and notions of freedom, and an idea of civic commonality that corrodes the parochial bonds of blood ties, gender distinctions, age status-groups, and ethnic exclusivity.

We can thus legitimately speak of the history of the city without focusing on the rise, development, and decline of any one city in particular. And we can speak of this history as cumulative. The late medieval city, for example, united civic and ideological traditions that had originated in Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, and that persisted long after those cities had declined as innovative civic entities. Later, the cities of the Renaissance, the Baroque era, and the Enlightenment arose as reworked arenas of ancient and medieval cities, borrowing from them their architecture, literature, art, religions, and philosophies, yet transforming them to meet the needs of a new time.

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The ways in which actual cities provide US with processual definitions of the city form much of the content of this book. Insofar as I am guided by the Greek notion that a city or polis is an ethical union of citizens, I am committed to an overarching vision of what the city ought to be, not merely what it is at any given time. The term ought is the stuff out of which ethics is usually made—with the difference that in my view the “ought” is not a formal or arbitrary regulative credo but the product of reasoning, of an unfolding rational process elicited or derived eductively from the potentialities of humanity to develop, however falteringly, mature, self-conscious, free, and ecological communities. I call this integration of the best in first or “biological” nature and second or “social” nature an emergently new “third” or free nature—that is, an ethical, humanly scaled community that establishes a creative interaction with its natural environment. From a processual standpoint, I refuse to bifurcate that continuum we call “Nature” into a biological world and a social world that stand in flat opposition to each other. Both are in a very real sense natural, and their naturalness finds its evolutionary realization in those remarkable primates called human beings who, consciously responding to a sense of obligation to the ecological integrity of the planet, bring their rational, communicative, richly social, imaginative, and esthetic capacities to the service of the nonhuman world as well as the human.

This ethics of complementarity, as I called it years ago, would not only be a culminating point of eons of natural evolution, once it guided human behavior in the cities of an ecological society; it would eminently be a culminating point of reason itself—a condition in which rational goals could be established for citizenship not only in new, ecologically oriented networks of cities but in truly rational beings called citizens. For citizenship, too, is a process—as the Greeks so brilliantly saw—a process involving the social and self-formation of people into active participants in the management of their communities. As this book stresses, citizens today no longer even approximate the high and eminently human standard of citizenship that was established in the Hellenic world—a meaning that must be recovered, as well as the personal and social training, or paideia, for producing citizens.

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To this high civic and ethical calling, so to speak, we are summoned by reason: to networks of new, humanly scaled cities, to citizenship, to directly democratic political institutions, and to a vastly expanded ideal of freedom. The cities I have discussed in this book approximate the fulfillment of this calling—some more than others, a few more highly conscious of free civic ideals than the rest—in civic cultures that held to such intituitive, often naive notions of citizenship that they were highly vulnerable to destructive forces; and in thinkers who projected (often in revolutionary situations,) in thought what they believed should have been achieved in actuality but, alas, was not.

When I use the word networks in this book, I am alluding not to ad hoc interactions, tentative agreements, contracts, or transient associations among cities-although these were common enough, if usually very short-lived, in the past. Rather, I am referring to what has long been a theoretical ideal and at times an impressive municipal reality: namely, confederations. I cannot stress how integrally the confederal association of cities and towns is part of the development of a free, ecologically oriented society. Localism, in the narrow sense of a virtually autarchical locality that aspires to “self-sufficiency”—in the sense so popular in the ecology movement today—could easily produce a parochialism notable for such evils as racism, cultural insularity, and a stagnant traditionalism. Conceived localistically, municipalities would be as regressive as authoritarian nation-states.

Confederalism is explicitly not “localist” but is rather integrative, as I explain in the appendix to this book. It rests on the mutual obligations of confederated municipalities to systematically adjudicate conflicting claims, coordinate common efforts, and see to the administration of municipal policies without infringing on the right of the majority of its participants. That consensual forms of agreement where possible would be the most desirable decision-making procedure does not mean that majority decision-making should not be adopted if a confederation risks the prospect of being tyrannized by the few at the expense of the many. Moreover, confederation, if it is to be successful, must not only function in accordance with majoritarian forms of decision-making; it must diminish the authority of confederal councils, the higher they are, in coordinating the policies formulated at the basic level of decision-making—the citizen assembly of a municipality.

A clear distinction must be drawn between administration and policy-making: the former would fall within the province of the confederal councils, while the latter would fall within the province of the municipal assemblies. The traditional hierarchial pyramid of authority would thus be literally inverted in confederal municipalism; the “apex” of all authority would lie with the municipal assemblies, guided by majority rule both in the assembly and among the assemblies of a confederal region; the “base” would lie with the broadest confederal councils whose work is simply administrative and adjudicatory, and whose deputies, drawn from smaller confederal bodies, would be easily recallable and subject to careful popular oversight.

Is this a chimerical scheme? History has shown that the very contrary is true. Although confederations in the past often fell apart, each for very specific reasons that would require a full volume to explore, they were often shattered or confined to limited areas by imperial states and, more recently, the nation-state. Confederations, in fact, have a long and impressive history. They were the principal political weapons for resisting—and, for a time, diminishing—state power. The struggles of confederated Rhenish cities in the late Middle Ages against the Holy Roman Empire and of the confederated Spanish cities against Charles V during the Reformation era can be cited as partially successful attempts to abort or restrict imperial and national power. In Spain, confederal movements had an impact on public life that was felt well into the 1930s.

In many respects, this contest between confederalism and the nation-state is reemerging today, although very little consciousness guides intuitive opponents of the nation-state, a shortcoming that has more to do with the atrophied consciousness of so-called “Left”-wing movements than with any other single factor. Indeed, if the closing decade of this century is permitted to pass without the emergence of a strong, self-conscious, and well-organized movement that is committed to municipal confederation, radical theory and practice will deserve the ignominious oblivion into which Marxist and individualistic “anarchist” tendencies have been drifting for some time now. Today’s dogmatic or subcultural radical movements may one day be viewed with contempt if they reject the last—and in my view their only—prospect of functioning as popular movements, and if they fail to cross the line from academic or personalistic subcultures into the public sphere where they could still reach millions of eager but confused people. Popular albeit inchoate impulses toward these same ideas—local control, confederation, and a new politics—may well be used, in altered form, and manipulated by reactionary forces in the service of racist, parochial, and ultimately authoritarian ends.

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Urbanization Without Cities thus advances an appeal—perhaps the last that can be made in this period—not only for a new theoretical framework in which to develop a new politics (in this term’s Hellenic meaning rather than in the parliamentary meaning imparted to it by the nation-state). It also advances an appeal for a self-conscious practice in which confederal municipalists engage in local electoral activity to alter city and town charters, restructure civic institutions to provide the public sphere for direct democracy, and bring the means of production under citizen control—not under the particu1aristic forms of “workers’ control” that tend to degenerate into a form of collectivistic capitalism, or under forms of nationalized production, which enhance the state’s authority with greater economic power.

This practice is not a mere “strategy,” to use the language of the traditional Left—indeed, the language of all statist movements. It is not a “means” to an end, least of all a very unclear and muddled end. Rather, it is the unfolding of an end: the famous “Commune of communes,” to which socialists and anarchists alike long aspired, especially after the legendary Paris Commune of 1871, which explicitly used this term. In this process or dialectic of unfolding, the achievement of a Commune of communes—or in less colorful terms, a confederation of municipalities—requires a completely uncompromising politics. It rests on the notion of a fundamental duality of power in which increasingly independent and confederated municipalities emerge in flat opposition to the centralized nation-state. Indeed, whatever power confederated municipalities gain can be acquired only at the expense of the nation-state, and whatever power the nation-state gains can be acquired only at the expense of municipal independence.

In the force-field that exists between the two, either the municipalities and their confederations will increase their power by diminishing the the power of the ration-state, or the nation-state will increase its power by diminishing the authority of the municipalities and their confederations. Thus, for a municipalist movement to run candidates for state, provincial, or national office would be an absurd, in fact, oxymoronic subversion of its very claim to seek a “grassroots” or “participatory democracy,” if only because any office beyond the municipal level is, almost by definition, a form of representation rather than participation. Even more significantly, it would ignore the crucial fact that as they run candidates for local offices, confederal municipalists are also running them against state, provincial, and national offices and institutions. The demand for municipal confederations is simultaneously a demand for opposition to the nation-state in all its forms, and to the illusion that the control of state, provincial, or national legislative bodies on the “top” is a precondition for the attainment of local power at the “bottom.”

Not only would campaigns for state, provincial, and national office relax the tension between the “top,” which is the realm of statecraft, and the “bottom,” which is the realm of an authentic politics; they would diminish the educational function of politics at the “bottom,” which alone can become the realm of a new politics. Far from reaching greater numbers of people by running candidates for the summits of state power, such campaigns would confuse the distinction between politics and statecraft, between the participatory and the representative, between the confederal and the national. Not only would the tension between these two utterly opposing spheres of activity be relaxed and its dialectic aborted; and not only would the truly democratic nature of political education, which is based on face-to-face discourse between neighbors and citizens, be replaced by the media; but the very moral and educational thrust of a libertarian or confederal municipalist approach would be lost as a heavy mist beclouded the distinction between politics and statecraft. A “Commune of communes” is not a “Republic of communes” or a “Commonwealth of communes”; indeed, as a confederation of municipalities, it stands uncompromisingly opposed to any specious attempts to reduce a confederation or commune to a republic or a commonwealth.

Radicals, social-democrats, and liberals—not to speak of that hybridized phenomenon known as “the Greens”—have never learned how to deal with the problem of state power. If history from earliest recorded times to the present has demonstrated anything, it is the implacable fact that state power is corruptive. None of the most idealistic and principled revolutionary leaders of the past lived comfortably with the corruptive effects of state power. Either they succumbed to it, or they consciously tried to diffuse it. The retention of state power destroyed the moral integrity not only of the most radical Puritans of the seventeenth century, who were eager to gain it, but that of the most dedicated socialists, communists, and anarchists who actually held it for a time. The English, French, Russian, and Spanish revolutions provide compelling evidence of the capacity of state power to corrupt—a capacity that can no longer be regarded as a moral truism but, given its unrelenting nature, must be seen as an existential fact. To pursue state power—or to “seize” it, to use the language of traditional radicalism—is to guarantee that it will persist as a form of elitist manipulation, expand, and be brutally exercised as an instrument against a popular democracy.

A libertarian or confederal municipalist politics advances the best approach against “seizures” of state power and its retention by an elite, by slowly trying to accrete power for municipalities—initially, by acquiring moral power for municipal assemblies, as I have indicated in the closing chapter of this book. Libertarian or confederal municipalism seeks to expand the democratic institutions that still linger on in any modern republican system by opening them to the widest public participation possible at any given time. Hence the slogan that I have advanced: “Democratize the Republic! Radicalize the Democracy!” It is not that state power is to be “seized”—and then never relinquished—but that popular power is to be expanded until all power belongs to the institutions of a participatory democracy.

From this standpoint, the distinction between politics and statecraft must be maintained in a clear and uncompromising manner, all the more to assure that no “pragmatic” exigencies or parliamentary” strategies”—even if they are used only to propagandize one’s views or challenge the “top” from the “top”—are invoked for seemingly confederal-municipalist ends. Indeed, the most effective impact of municipalist propaganda comes precisely from the fact that it is municipalist—that is to say, that it can be conducted only by person-to-person contact and its scope hopefully extended by a movement that tries to reach every municipality in a region or nation. It is this kind of propaganda that makes for trust, personal interaction, and face-to-face education and that fosters the development of a face-to-face democracy. Its authentic starting point is the small study group, the local lecture hall, the neighborhood press, and personal discourse-not the electronic media of statecraft that hypnotized the countercultural “media freaks” of the 1960s.

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Most of the ideas that appear in this introduction are elaborated in the body of this book. They are developed against the larger background of a historic moment in the evolution—and I should add, the decline—of city life, namely the emergence of a major threat to city and countryside alike: urbanization. The existence of this threat—not merely as geographic sprawl but as a devastating dehumanization of city life, a destructuring of community and a denaturing of agrarian life—informs the views that follow. My argument runs counter to the conventional wisdom that city and countryside, like society and nature, are necessarily in conflict with each other, a theme that pervades so much of the writing on urbanity in Western society. Quite to the contrary: whatever may be the ways in which city life marks a departure from the more “natural” forms of human association such as tribal and kinship groups, the city has been more of a gift to social life and the ecological landscape than it has been harmful. To recover a feeling for the participatory civic institutions that once marked city life and citizenship is to recover those ideals of civic life and civic sensibility that could countervail the massive destruction that urbanization and the nation-state inflict on city and countryside alike.

My writing of this book stemmed from my conviction as a social ecologist and eco-anarchist that there is a pressing need to view the city—more generally, the municipality, if we are to include towns as well—as an ecological enterprise, not merely as a logistical or structural one. The word ecological means a good deal more here than it does in the conventional environmentalism of the single-issue movements that are concerned with pollution, the retention of relatively untouched forests, the perpetuation of wildlife, and the like. Ecology, in my view, is more a societal project than a biological one. It should be conceived in terms that explore how notions of domination and the historical development of hierarchy have led to the social as well as natural problems we face today. For a clearer understanding of my ecological perspective—social ecology—the reader is advised to consult my many books on the subject, particularly The Ecology of Freedom and Remaking Society. The present book is concerned with what are loosely called “urban problems,” or if you like, “urban ecology.” Its goal is practical as well as theoretical. Hence, the largest chapter in the book (“The New Municipal Agenda”) advances a programmatic agenda for recovering not only an ecological concept of the city and an active citizenry but the creation of a new politics that combines the high ideal of a participatory citizenship with a recognition of what the city or town can be in a rational, free, and ecological society.

In any case, the city, however much more distorted it may become in the future, will remain a problem. At its best, it has been a crucial part of human history and a force in the making of the human mind for some seven thousand years. Can we afford to ignore it? Must we accept it as it is—as an entity that sprawling urbanization threatens to obliterate, as it threatens to devour the countryside as well? Or can we give the city a new meaning, a new politics, a new sense of direction-as well as provide new ideals of citizenship, many of which were in fact once attained in previous times? We ignore the city and citizenship at the peril of becoming isolated from the great mass of humanity, which is threatened by the anonymity and powerlessness created by urbanization. This is an issue that all socially and enviromentally concerned people must face. My goal here is to pose the question of the future of cities and citizenship as clearly as I can and to advance solutions based on the principles of social ecology.

Murray Bookchin
Institute for Social Ecology
Plainfield, Vermont
January, 1992