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.