Preface

The city at its best is an ecocommunity. To ignore this compelling fact is to ignore the destruction it faces by one of the most serious phenomena of the modern era, the massive urbanization that is sweeping it away together with so many natural features of our planet. Urbanization is not only a social and cultural fact of historic proportions; it is a tremendous ecological fact as well. At a time when the overwhelming majority of people in North America and Western Europe regard themselves as city dwellers, we are obliged, if only for ecological reasons, to explore modern urbanization. We must explore not only its impact on the natural environment, a subject that has already been discussed in considerable detail by many writers, but, more significantly these days, the changes urbanization has produced in our sensibility toward society and toward the natural world. A social ecology of the city is needed today if ecological thinking is to be relevant to the modern human condition.

This book attempts to lay the groundwork for such a social ecology. It tries to develop a concept of the city in those participatory terms that are uniquely characteristic of all “ecosystems” (or, as I prefer to call them, ecocommunities). It relates ecology’s participatory sensibility to the city in all its forms over the course of history, partly to show that the city was a social ecocommunity at various times insofar as it fostered diversity, mutualism, and connectedness. In applying a participatory sensibility to the city, I have been obliged to take the reader on a voyage into the evolution of the city, just as any serious natural ecologist would be obliged to deal with the biological development of an organism to better understand its life-cycle. To think about the city as an ecocommunity is to try to understand how it evolved, what forms it assumed over time, how it functioned as more than a mere market or center of production, and, in the last analysis, how member this urban ecocommunity called the city interacted with each other to produce a form of “second nature”—a humanly made “nature”—that existed in balance with the “first nature” we usually call the natural environment. Hence the citizens of a city of no less concern to me than the city itself, for the city at its best eventually became an ethical union of people, an ethical as as social ecocommunity, not simply a dense collection of structures designed for no other purpose than to provide goods and services for its anonymous residents.

What I wish to do is redeem the city, to visualize it not; threat to the environment but as a uniquely human, ethical, and ecological community that often lived in balance with nature and created institutional forms that sharpened human awareness of their sense of natural place as well as social place. My repeated references to the agrarian world could 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 if shaping the form of a natural ecocommunity; civic history, as the social counterpart of natural history. My goal, in effect, has been to redefine the city and the citizen in the language of social ecol ogy in the hope that environmentally as well as socially oriented people today will understand what the city and citizenship used to be in order to better understand what they should be in an ecological society.

The real urban crisis of our time, I shall emphasize, has resulted not from the emergence of the city as such; rather it results from the emergence of a relatively new and cancerous phenomenon that poses a deadly threat to the city and countryside alike: urbanization. The nature of this threat—not merely as geographic sprawl but a devastating dehumanizing of city life, a destructing of community, and a denaturing of agrarian life—is the underlying theme of this book. I must leave it to the pages which follow for a more complete description and elucidation of the vast problems urbanization is creating. 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 of western society.

Quite to the contrary: however much city life marks a departure in many social respects from the more natural forms of human sociation such as tribal and kinship groups, the city has often been as much a gift to the ecology of a landscape as it has been a harm. 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 a civic sensibility that could countervail the massive destruction that urbanization inflicts on city and countryside alike.

This book advances several reflections on how an ecological politics can be developed. In so doing, it redefines the word politics itself along ecological lines, much as Green groups in North America and Europe have been doing over the past years. Finally, this book makes a plea for a confederal and institutional politics, this is, for enlarging the democratic, grass-roots institutions that countervail the growing centralization of the nation-state, not the conventional electoral politics based on single issues and parliamentary tournaments.

Much that motivated my writing of this book stems from my conviction as a social ecologist and environmental activist that there is a pressing need to view the city—more generally, the municipality, if we are to include towns as well as metropolitican areas—as an ecological enterprise, not merely a logistical or structural one. Hence, the largest chapter in this book advances a programmatic agenda for recovering not only an ecological image of the city and an active citizenry but a way of looking at politics that combines the high ideal of a participatory citizenship—in short, ecological values based on participation as a mutualistic phenomena in society as well as in nature.

In any case, the city is here to stay. Indeed, it has been a crucial part of human history and a factor 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 faces obliteration by a sprawling urbanization that threatens the countryside as well? Or can we give the city a new meaning, a new politics, a new sense of direction—and, also, provide new ideals of citizenship, many of which were in fact attained in great part during past times? By ignoring the city and citizenship, we do so at the peril of becoming isolated from the great mass of humanity which is threatened by the anonymity and powerless created by urbanization. This is a issue which all socially and environmentally oriented people must face and answer in their own way: My goal, here, is to pose the question of urbanization and citizenship as clearly as I can and advance some modest solutions based on my own concerns as a social ecologist

Murray Bookchin
Burlington, Vermont

Director Emeritus,
Institute for Social Ecology,
Marshfield, Vermont

Professor Emeritus,
School of Environmental Studies,
Ramapo College of New Jersey