Cities: Unsafe at any speed?

Weismann art museum on the campus of the University of Minnesota  Photo by Jeff Beddow

Bettany Hughes, a British historian, was talking about the sudden emergence of practical philosophy during the time of Confucius, the Buddha, and Socrates, all around 500 BC.  Her observation was that cities played an important role in the cultural disruption that gave rise to systematized, secular philosophies in all major urban centers, East and West.

In particular, she stated that cities created a massive dislocation for the rural folk migrating into these centers of learning, trade, and governance -- the morals and cautions they learned in their rural homes did not provide good direction in the anonymity, speed, and pressure of the city.  Before this transition, rural traditions conferred custom, mores, wisdom etc in the table talk and conversations among generations.

In my 50 years of active philosophical inquiry, I keep coming back to the relationship between the rural and urban cultures that exist in any region of note on the globe.(1)The dividing line is blurring, and that trend  has accelerated to the point that modern mobile communications and population centers have produced an emerging generation with no innate grasp of the rural cultures that provide them their breakfast cereal, leather shoes, wine, lumber and water.

You can find laments of the dissolution of character in the transition from farm to city in almost any culture, and any era.  From the Prophet Ezekiel in biblical times denouncing the great trading city of Tyre on the Mediterranean for its lack of geographical focus and tradition, to Lewis Mumford's laments in our own era of the rootless, opportunistic spirit of city dwellers compared to the integrity of rural culture. few writers have found a balanced view of the city and its rural extent.

I believe this is a major obstacle to thinking clearly about the future of the city.

If we can't formulate an objective understanding of the systems which link urban and rural so intimately, we simply impose our prejudice on the choices offered those who come after.

In a recent conversation, I was surprised to hear a very intelligent man declare that the rural areas are characterized by a lack of education and opportunity to expand their narrow views. While this might be true of one layer of the urban-rural complex, it ignores the much larger issue of the stability that is required from those families that tend the land.  The enterprise of crop and herd teaches lessons over generations about climate, soil, animal husbandry, and the development of personal character that cannot be acquired sitting in a classroom for a semester or even for several years.

So what are the better questions raised by this transition?

Is Lewis Mumford right in seeing the city as a massive machine that destroys the individual, and thus the locus of morality?  Is there a functional model of what the city provides the countryside, and vice versa, that answers the actual historical development of most cities across the globe?

What do you want to know?



1. http://www.prb.org/Publications/Lesson-Plans/HumanPopulation/Urbanization.aspx
Here is the relevant text:

Through most of history, the human population has lived a rural lifestyle, dependent on agriculture and hunting for survival. In 1800, only 3 percent of the world's population lived in urban areas. By 1900, almost 14 percent were urbanites, although only 12 cities had 1 million or more inhabitants. In 1950, 30 percent of the world's population resided in urban centers. The number of cities with over 1 million people had grown to 83.

The world has experienced unprecedented urban growth in recent decades. In 2008, for the first time, the world's population was evenly split between urban and rural areas. There were more than 400 cities over 1 million and 19 over 10 million. More developed nations were about 74 percent urban, while 44 percent of residents of less developed countries lived in urban areas. However, urbanization is occurring rapidly in many less developed countries. It is expected that 70 percent of the world population will be urban by 2050, and that most urban growth will occur in less developed countries.

The urban freshman.

http://www.ralphmag.org/IZ/washington.html

When asked what they think of when they think of cities recently, at least a dozen University students replied that they thought of art.  Cities were where art was, where it happens.  When a lecturer challenged one of the respondants to expand on his comment, the student said "you know, making art.  Art is made there."

At first I was dismayed by the quality of the student's response.  Thinking back a few decades to when I was in the same seat as the student in question, I knew I would have been able to cite the transition from bucolic to industrial urban themes in the late 19th century under the influence of mass production and industrialization.

But would I have actually been any smarter?  Or had I simply worked harder to sound smarter, in an essential vacuum shared by most undergraduates? (1)

 Very little reflection is required to see the influence of photography on the arts, indirectly at first, as the generation of the 80s started their first experiments.  By the turn of the century, with the Fauve and Cubist movements coming to the front lines, painters were taking giant steps in separating themselves from the fussy realism of photography.

What similar trends could be seen in Urban Planning, and at least Western attitudes toward the city in general?

Painting is considered one of the plastic arts, as is sculpture, printmaking, drawing, etc.  Not because they use plastic in their paint or plaster!  No, the concept of plasticity is that of malleable media, which can be shaped, formed, reformed, painted over or recut to achieve the final desired effect.  Architecture not so much - it requires planning, for the most part, and pretty diligent following of the plan.  Which leads us to Urban Planning, godchild of the famous "Baron" Haussmann who redrew the street plan of Paris in the mid 19th century.

His patron was Napolean III.  And Napolean III, unlike his predecessors, didn't see the city as set in stone.  He saw the city as a plastic art form, which could be manipulated, drawn, redrawn, to achieve certain goals.

Now, lets talk about the difference between plasticity, and organization.

Washington D.C. (See graphic above) was famously layed out by L'Enfant, under Washington's direction, to provide an order that has been parsed by a thousand conspiracy theorists in the last 5 years alone. (Washington insisted on calling him Lang Fang)  Planned in the 18th century, what inspired Washington to think he could design something ( a capitol city) better than nature herself?

Boom!  First question.  That's what I am talking about.

What makes some people think they can design a city better than the emergent mix of chaos and organization that results when cities just grow on their own?(2)
***********************
Notes
1. Full disclosure: for all my sophistication, I had never earned my undergraduate degree.  In fact, I witnessed this exchange as a Junior, at the age of 69, enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts, pursuing the same Urban Studies major that I had abandoned on several occaisions since 1972, when my advisor at the time defined Urban Studies as all the courses with the word Urban or City in them.

On a more serious note, I do think of art undergoing a significant change when the early Impressionist painters deconstructed the realism of the Academy, in France, around 1860, when Bourgoureau and Ingres were at their prime.  Seurat was a young man impressed with the impudence of Manet, who had painted a dead matador with no busy background, just the suit of lights, the white shirt and red scrap of a cape floating in a very unnatural visual space.


2. Side note on the history of Washington D.C. at the end: (From the blog http://www.ralphmag.org/IZ/washington.html)

Alexander Robey "Boss" Shepherd, a post-Civil War millionaire who in 1870 got himself elected to the local board of public works, and, by the simple expedient of spending every cent allocated to it and using a few more million dollars on top of that (he knew that even though Congress had not approved these funds, that when the shit hit the fan they would pay the bills), he had the major eyesores demolished (including the pestiferous Northern Liberty Market), got the B&O railway to reroute their main line out of the heart of the city, paved "more than 150 miles of roads and sidewalks and installed nearly 125 miles of sewers plus gas mains, water mains, and street lights." Thus, in the decade after the Civil War, he gave the city the infrastructure it deserved, so those who were demanding that Washington be moved en toto to Ohio, Illinois, or Missouri could be sent packing.

Model Parents and the Urb as child.

Brasilia from space:

By NASA/Paolo Nespoli - Flickr, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31770196

Most cities just grow.  By the time anyone tries to get them under control, they have already sussed out the local water supply, the arable land situation, the likely places for defensive structures, ports, markets, etc.

Most cities just grow, and the process has an indomitable nature to it.

Since the mid-19th century, when Paris was redrawn by Baron Haussmann under the direction of Napolean III, various notions of urban planning have inspired the efforts of municipal leaders to make their cities "better."

How is that going?  I become curious about the careers of planned cities, intentional communities, simulated cities on a scale of the real.

 Brasilia was a made-from-scratch capital city for a new government in Brasil, back in the sixties. It was conceived by a priest in a dream, in 1830, and took 130 more years to come true.  Dubai is world famous for its Burj tower, and 100 years ago it was a sleepy backwater in the middle of the desert, relying on a ton of support daily to keep from reverting to a barren hot sandbox..

Cities are fascinating because the are massive expressions of the conscious and unconscious meeting; developing, unfolding into a space you can stroll through. While all cities need water and a region which supplies them with the daily food needs, almost every other aspect is negotiable.

What about governance?  Does governance emerge through the same mysterious process as language and organ differentiation in the human body, or is it a reactive function which occurs in the presence of threat, and then tends to stick around indefinitely?

In Lagos, Nigeria, we can find a close approximation of a self-designing "emergent" city.  The example is skewed by the fact that the location and population are determined by exclusion from the monied, propertied population of Lagos proper.  Instead, the self-defining city in Lagos is a pariah community that nevertheless has power, ordering principles, enforcment of written and unrwritten rules. It falls under the category of "agglommeration" which I like better than "emergent."

Do agglomeration cities work better than planned cities, or cities forced into calculated constraints that work against the sensibility of the immediate location?

This question is the axis around which the rest of this blog will spin.

And the growth of cities is a dance between the conscious intention of the leadership of a region, and the spontaneous, urgent needs of those drawn to, or born in, the city. This encounter and collision and seduction is unpredictable.

But we love to sit in outdoor cafes and watch it happen.

I am making reservations for the first outdoor cafe in outer space.