q
Dedication
For Jane Coleman and Dan Chodorkoff—
and in memory of Zeitel Kaluskaya (1860–1930),
my grandmother, who raised me
and showed me a world long gone by. (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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,... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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 s...
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 contradi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter Two: From Tribe to City
Conventional accounts of the city’s origins tend today to be stridently technological: they anchor the emergence of the city in the discovery of food cultivation, particularly its highly productive form of animal-powered agriculture. The city, it is assumed, appeared because of the large food surpluses farming folk could provide with the Neolithic technological innovations that marked the cultivation of the land. With this new material plentitude at their disposal, we are told, people began to detach themselves from agricultural pursuits and develop their skills as potters, weavers, metallurgists, carpenters, jewelers, and masons, not to speak of administrators, priests, soldiers, and artists. As agr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter Three: The Creation of Politics
Politics has acquired a fairly odious reputation among the great majority of people today. The word seems to denote techniques for the unsavory end of exercising power over human beings. We “play politics” not only on an international national, and local scale; we do so in domestic relations, in schools and places of learning, in ordinary jobs or extraordinary careers. Politics, in effect, is seen to have invaded the most private recesses of our lives. At worst, it is viewed as oppressive, manipulative, cunningly seductive, and basically degrading. Few words more readily evoke a contemptuous sneer than the term “politician.” Conceived instrumentally as a means to control peo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter Four: The Ideal of Citizenship
If the city makes it possible for us to single out politics as a unique sphere of self-governance that is neither social nor statist, the citizen as the viable substance of this unique sphere makes it possible’to undo the confusion that blends these very distinct spheres into a collage of overlapping terms and blurred meanings, For it is in the citizen—in his or her activity as a self-governing being—that! the political sphere becomes a living reality with the flesh and blood of a palpable body politic.
The Greeks may have been the first people to give us a clear image of the citizen in any politically intelligible sense of the term. Tribal peoples form social groups—familie... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter Five: Patterns of Civic Freedom
Although the city was the cultural center of the ancient world, its material base was extremely fragile. Hence the remarkable rise and fall of cities throughout antiquity. City life depended to a remarkable degree on the viability and the economy of agrarian communities and labor so that cities appear more as islands in a vast rural ocean than self-sustaining economic entities. Indeed, prudent estimates of the number of rural workers needed to sustain a single city dweller have been placed at a ratio of ten to one. Hence any serious agricultural catastrophe like a drought, floods, or pest infestation, not to speak of wars that devastated agriculture, could lead to the breakdown, indeed the complete... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter Six: From Politics to Statecraft
It remains one of history’s great ironies that the city, which reworked stagnant archaic systems of corporate life based on status and kinship into the innovative, free realm of politics and citizenship, was to produce the very factors that led to its own undoing. European cities, I have pointed out, were different from their ancient counterparts because of their inherent autonomy as civic entities. The increasing separation of the medieval town from the city’s traditional agrarian matrix produced not only a new kind of city with an identity of its own; it also produced a new type of economy, culture, and political structure that profoundly altered the countryside and slowly remade it ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter Seven: The Social Ecology of Urbanization
From the sixteenth century onward, Europe was the stage for a drama unique in history: the development of nation-states and national cultures in which populations tended to identify with what we, today, accept as a commonplace—a sense of personal nationality. Even the notion of citizenship, long-rooted in loyalty to a city and the public body that occupied it, began to shift toward a large territorial entity, the “nation,” and to its “capital” city. Politics, too, began to acquire a new definition. It increasingly denoted the professionalization of power with roots in the state and its institutions.
We would be gravely mistaken to assume that these changes a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter Eight: The New Municipal Agenda
From the moment nomadic hunter-gatherers began to settle down into stable villages, they introduced radically new changes that go beyond the turn’from food gathering to food cultivation. Where villages became towns, human beings began to “detribalize” themselves, and create those civic institutions we associate with “civilization/’ The blood tie, the male-female divisions in functions, and status groups based on age formed the sinews of tribalism and were slowly absorbed into an entirely new social dispensation: the city. Cities were to be structured primarily around residence, a vocational division of labor, and a variety of “orders” and classes, some of w... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
{1} George Orwell: 1984 (New York: Signet; 1950), p. 156.
{2} James Melaart: Çatal Hüyük (London: Thames and Hudson; 1967), pg. 58.
{3} Ferd Wendorf, Romuald Schied, and Angela E. Close: “An Ancient Harvest on the Nile,” Science 82, November, 1982, pg. 68.
{4} Ibid., p. 73.
{5} Karl Polanyi: Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi, George Dalton, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press; 1968), p. 81.
{6} Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract (New York: Everyman Edition; 1950), p. 15.
{7} Aristotle: Politics (London: Loeb Classical Library; 1932), 1326a30- 40. Translation modified by author.
{8} Ibid., 1280a-1280b.
{9} Aristotle, op. cit., 1252a3. Translation modified by author.
{10} Lilly... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
