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.

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

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.

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.

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 aesthetic 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 aeons 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.

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.

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.

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

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 contradiction forms the very rationale for writing this book. “Urbanization against cities” is meant to focus as sharply as possible on a human and ecological crisis so deep-sfeated we are hardly aware of its existence, much less its grave impact on social freedom and personal autonomy. I refer to the historic decline of the city as an authentic arena of political life (that once lived in some balance with the natural world) and, perhaps no less significantly, the decline of the very notion of citizenship.

So sweeping a statement obviously requires some clarification at the outset of our discussion. According to most social theorists, the traditional “contradiction” created by the rise of urbanism has been the city’s ages-old “conflict” with the countryside. History, we are commonly told, is filled with innumerable examples of the city’s efforts to free itself from the trammels of agrarian parochialism. The city, it is emphasized, has always tried to assert its cosmopolitan culture and secular civic institutions over the narrow provincialism and constrictive kinship ties of the rural town and village. We take it for granted that from ancient to modern times the city and countryside have been at “war” with each other. Historically, this “war” is supposed to be embodied in the conflicting interests between the feudal lord and the urban merchant, the peasant food-cultivator and town-dwelling craftsperson, the landbased aristocrat and the citified capitalist, the farmer and the industrial worker.

That such conflicts have existed over the course of history and echo in modern society is true enough. We still retain ingrained visions of a cleansing and virtuous pastoral life that stands in moral contrast with the tainted and sinful world of the city. The contrast has been the subject of Biblical invectives, the theme of some of our most outstanding novels, and a centerpiece in the writings of many distinguished sociologists.

Taken as a whole, however, this Manichean drama can be a gross simplification of reality. It is certainly true that city and countryside have commonly viewed each other antagonistically in the past. And there have been long stretches of history when each tried to assert economic and political dominance over the other. But there have also been times when they existed in an almost exquisitely sensitive, creative, and ecological balance with each other. Some of the most admirable human adventures m culture, technics, and social freedom have occurred precisely in those periods when a complementary relationship between city and country, indeed between society and nature, successfully replaced the mutual rivalry for supremacy.

Today, it would seem that the city has finally achieved complete dominance over the countryside. Indeed, with the extension of suburbs into nearby open land on an unprecedented scale, the city seems to be literally engulfing the agrarian and natural worlds,

absorbing adjacent towns and villages into sprawling metropolitan entities—a form of social cannibalism that could easily serve for our very definition of urbanization. All talk of metropolitan Babylon and Rome to the contrary, we have no comparable parallels in the past to urbanization on our present-day scale. Worse, the city seems to be replacing rural culture and all its rich traditional forms with the mass media and technocratic values we tend to associate with “city life.” If all of this is true—as I frankly believe it is—I plan to introduce in this book a very discordant qualification. Contrary to most views on the subject, I plan to show that if we use words such as “city” and “country” meaningfully to describe this process of physical, cultural, and ecological urban cannibalism, the image of an all-devouring “city” that is engulfing a supine and helpless “country” is a sheer myth.

The truth is that the city and the country are under siege today—a siege that threatens humanity’s very place in the natural environment. Both are being subverted by urbanization, a process that threatens to destroy their identities and their vast wealth of tradition and variety. Urbanization is engulfing not only the countryside; it is also engulfing the city. It is devouring not only town and village life based on the values, culture, and institutions nourished by agrarian relationships. It is devouring city life based on the values, culture, and institutions nourished by civic relationships. City space with its human propinquity, distinctive neighborhoods, and humanly scaled politics—like rural space, with its closeness to nature, its high sense of mutual aid, and its strong family relationships—is being absorbed by urbanization, with its smothering traits of anonymity, homogenization, and institutional gigantism. Whether or not the urbanization of both the city and the country is desirable is an issue that I shall earnestly explore, But I cannot emphasize too strongly that even if we think in the old terms of city versus country and the unique political contrasts such a time-honored imagery has nurtured, the conflict between city and country has largely become obsolete, Urbanization threatens to replace both contestants in this seemingly historic antagonism. It threatens to absorb them into a faceless urban world in which the words “city” and “country” will essentially become social, cultural, and political archaisms.

Perhaps our greatest difficulty in understanding urbanization and its grave impact on social and personal life today stems from our tendency to link it with our very naive idea, of the city. We are often satisfied to call any urban entity a city if it is demographically congested, structurally sizable, and, most significantly, populated by individuals whose work no longer deals directly with food cultivation. Urbanization, like citification, seems to meet these criteria so completely that we commonly identify the two, and distinguish them more as a matter of degree than of kind. Thus, we tend to regard a sprawling metropolitan area merely as an oversized city, or it may be an agglomeration of closely packed “cities” that Americans call “urban belts” and the British call “conurbations.”

Granted that we are finding it increasingly difficult, on careful reflection, to regard urban belts and conurbations merely as cities. We uneasily sense that they are something more—if not something newer—than what previous generations called cities. What confuses us about such perplexing issues is that the people who live in such new urban entities are plainly engaged in city-type occupations and seem to follow citified lifeways. Increasingly removed from the natural world, metropolitan dwellers rarely, if ever, earn their livelihood as farmers, however fashionable urban and suburban gardening has become in recent years. They are employed in urban jobs, be they professional, managerial, service-oriented, craft-oriented, or the like. They five highly paced and culturally urbane lifeways-that lock into mechanically fixed time slots—notably, the “nine-to-five” pattern—rather than follow agrarian cycles guided by seasonal change and dawn-to-dusk personal rhythms. Urban environments are highly synthetic rather than natural. Food is normally bought rather than grown. Dwellings tend to be concentrated rather than dispersed. Personal life is not open to the considerable public scrutiny we find in small towns or rooted in the strong kinship systems we find in the country. Urban culture is produced, packaged, and marketed as a segment of the city dweller’s leisure time, not infused into the totality of daily life and hallowed by tradition as it is in the agrarian world. That country life is growing more and more like city life and losing its simplest natural attributes is a point that will become highly salient for the purposes of our discussion. For the present, what counts is,that the aforementioned distinction still exists’ in the image of what we call urbanization (conceived as citification) as distinguished from ruralization.

Superficial as these continuities and contrasts may be, they begin to dissolve completely when we start to explore history for richer, fuller standards of what we mean by the word cities. I use the plural, cities, advisedly: Despite certain similarities, the differences between cities of the past also have considerable importance. History presents us with a wide range of unique and distinctive cities—the earliest in Sumer centering around temples; later ones, such as Babylon, around palaces; the more dynamic Greek democracies around civic squares that fostered citizen interaction; medieval and more recent ones, around a variety of different marketplaces. However diversified cities may have been in the past, our language gives them considerable prestige. The term civilization has its origin in civitas—a Latin word occasionally used for city—and denotes the cultural sophistication the western world has traditionally imparted to some kind of urbanism. Most of our utopian visions, whether heavenly or earthly, take the form of a pity, a “New Jerusalem’’ to. speak in sacred terms, or an idealized version of the Hellenic “city-state” to use Secular language.

But here we abruptly encounter the limits of the term urbanization as a synonym for citification. Urbanization does not comfortably fit into an imagery of the city drawn from theocratic, monarchic, democratic, and economic communities peopled by craftsfolk and small merchants who were engaged in a natural economy. Our urban belts and conurbations are vast engines for operating huge corporate enterprises, industrial networks, distribution systems, and administrative mechanisms. Their facilities, like their towering buildings, stretch almost endlessly over the landscape until they begin to lack all definition and centrality. It is difficult to root them in a temple, palace, public square, or the small, intimate marketplace of craftsfolk and merchants. To say that they have any specific center that gives them civic identity is often so ill-fitting as to be absurd, even if one allows for centers that linger on from past eras when cities were still clearly delineable areas for human association.

What, then, do our premodern cities with their rich diversity of forms and functions have in common? We arrive at a basic characteristic of city life that is the result not only of human propinquity, structural size, occupations, and an urbane culture. What major cities of the past share—whatever their differences are largely moral, often spiritual, attributes with deep roots in a natural environment that sharply distinguish them from the physical attributes we associate with urbanization. Cities of the past from their very beginnings were ultimately what I would call communities of the heart”—moral associations that were nourished by a shared sense of ideological commitment and public concern. Civic ideology and concern centered around a strong belief in the good life for which the city provided the arena and catalytic agent. The good life by no means meant the affluent life, the life of personal pleasures and material security. More often than not, it meant a life of goodness, of virtue and probity. This sense of civic calling could assume a highly spiritual form such as we find in the Jews’ reverence for Jerusalem or a highly ethical form as in the Greeks’ admiration for Athens. Between these emotive and intellectual extremes, city dwellers of the past tended to form social compacts” that were guided not only by material and defensive considerations but by loyalties to their cities that were shaped by richly textured ideological commitments.

Love of one’s city, a deep and abiding sense of loyalty to its welfare, and an attempt to place these sentiments within a rich moral and ecological context, whether God-given or intellectual, clearly distinguishes the majority of cities of past eras from those of present ones. We have virtually no equivalent in the modern city of the Near Eastern sense of civic spirituality, the Greek feeling of political affiliation, the medieval endearment to communal fraternity, and the Renaissance love of urban pageantry that infused the otherwise disparate citizenry of the past. Such loyalties, with their moral underpinnings, may linger on in the residents of modern cities, but more as a fevered appetite for the material, cultural, and nervous stimulation of what we today designate as the good life than as a product of the ethical sturdiness, spiritual commitment, and sense of civic virtue that marked the citizenry of earlier eras. It also meant a love of the land, of place and natural setting that gave rise to a rich ecological sensibility and respect for the countryside.

To speak truthfully, our present-day relationship to the city usually takes the form of very pragmatic material requirements. A modern city, suburb, town, or, for that matter, a village is often evaluated in terms of the “municipal services” it offers to its residents. The traditional religious, cultural, ethical, and ecological features that once endeared citizens to their city, and its natural surroundings have dissolved into quantitative, often ethically neutral, criteria. The city is the first fund into which we make a series of social investments for the express purpose of receiving a number of distinctly material returns. We expect our persons and property to be protected, our shelters to be safeguarded, our garbage to be removed, our roads to be repaired, our environment to be physically and socially tidy—which is to say, spared from the invasion of “undesirable elements.”

Doubtless we want our cities to be culturally stimulating, economically viable, and attractive in reputation. But such attainments are not necessarily a function of the city as such. They often depend upon the results of personal enterprise, the presence of individual types who reside in it by virtue of birth or choice. For a city to claim a famous son—and, more recently, a famous daughter—does not necessarily reflect well upon the city’s reputation for producing gifted or renowned people but rather on the individual gifts of one or more of its residents. It does not provide us with evidence of the city’s cultural milieu but of a specific person’s gifts and biography that often involve a valiant effort to transcend a community’s oppressive environment. Such was the case, for example, with James Joyce’s relationship with Dublin, Oscar Wilde’s relationship with London, or Cezanne’s relationship with Paris.

Hence, urban “civilization” as we know it today is the erratic byproduct of a particular city, not its main and distinguishing consequence. Such a “civilization” emerges from the wayward activities of fairly privatized individuals or corporations rather than the innate traits of the municipality itself. A civic culture does not stem from the collective efforts of a unique and cohesive public, however unusual the city may be in terms of its regional location and its historic traditions. It stems from the personal activities of certain individuals wKo happen to occupy a residence within the city’s confines, staff its shops and offices, work its industries, and, of course, produce its artistic artifacts. Urban “civilization,” today, is not a characteristic civic phenomenon that emerges from a distinctive public and body politic; it is simply the exudate of free enterprise with its patina of “public service” and cultural charity. That mayors, corporate leaders, and philanthropists may vie with each other in celebrating the projects they initiate—projects that may range from concert halls and museums to airports and industrial parks—is simply evidence of the shallowness of what today is called “civic-mindedness.” Rarely do these projects, which in any case are seldom free of vulgarity, nourish the city as a collectivity and arena for public activity. Like iridescent bubbles that rise, glisten, and burst, they form the surface of the city’s often stagnant cultural life and social malaise.

In fact, like any marketplace, the modern city is the hectic center of a largely privatized interaction between anonymous buyers and sellers who are more involved in exchanging their wares than in forming socially and ethically meaningful associations. Cities today are typically measured more by their success as business enterprises than cultural foci. The ability of an urban entity to “balance its budget,” to operate “efficiently,” to “maximize” its service with minimal cost, all of these are regarded as the hallmark of municipal success. Corporate models form the ideal examples of urban models, and civic leaders take greater pride in their managerial skills than in their intellectual abilities.

This dominant entrepreneurial concept of the city has its precise counterpart in the dominant contemporary notion of citizenship. If we tend to view the city as our most immediate social “investment,” we expect the city to give us adequate material “returns.” We pay our taxes with a distinct expectation of the services they will buy. The greater the services for the money we pay, the more profitable it is to reside in a given city. Civic amenities are clearly measurable in terms of the number of schools, class sizes, parks, firehouses, transportation facilities, police, crime rates, parking spaces—indeed, in terms too numerous to inventory. When we “buy” into a residential area, we reconnoiter it primarily for these material and logistical amenities and secondarily, if at all, for the cultural stimulation and sense of community it provides.

Not surprisingly, the resident of most cities today tends to develop a very distinctive self-image. It is not the image of a citizen—a historically remarkable term that I have yet to describe—but that of a taxpayer. He or she does not have a sense of self appropriate to what we might call a public figure but rather that of a free-wheeling investor. Doubtless, taxpayers and investors often form many associations, but they ally with each other to advance or protect very specific interests. Like all sensible entrepreneurs who are involved in the business of residing in a city, they want a favorable return for what they pay, and, as the saying goes, “in numbers there is strength.” Accordingly, all common adages to the contrary, they can fight City Hall—presumably, the place where the corporate board meets—and, depending as much upon their wealth as upon their numbers, they may succeed.

But beyorid this economically secure interplay of conflicting interests and demands, the citizen qua taxpayer is not expected to get deeply involved in municipal affairs. Nor does the contemporary urban environment encourage him or her to do so. A “good citizen” is one who obeys the laws, pays taxes, votes ritualistically for preselected candidates, and “minds his or her own business.” This notion of appropriate civic behavior is no t merely a mutually shared, quietistic vision of modern-day citizenship; it is a political desideratum that, if violated, exposes—more active taxpayers to charges of “meddling” at best and “vigilantism” at worst. Both taxpayers and municipal officials prudently acknowledge that the people of a city should be properly represented by efficient, specialized, and professional surrogates of “the public.” Day-to-day power, however, resides’ precisely in the hands of these managerial surrogates, not in their “constituencies” who increasingly acquire the anonymity and’ facelessness that the word “constituency” denotes. Like the traditional liberal concept that government is best when it governs least, so the contemporary liberal Concept of citizenship seems to be that a “constituent” is best when he or she acts the least.

Such a concept of citizenship is fraught with grave psychological as well as political consequences. Individuals whose public lives barely transcend the social level of mere taxpayers tend to form very passive images of their personalities and of the natural environment around them. An increasingly disempowered citizen may well become a quietistic and highly retiring self. A major loss of social power tends to render a person less than human and thereby yields a loss of individuation itself. Such constituents live in a painfully contradictory world. On the one hand, society becomes an intensely problematic presence in their lives. The social realm is a potential source of war, of economic instability, of contending factions and ideologies that may reach directly into the most guarded niches of private life. These problems become particularly intimate when issues such as abortion, military conscription, sexual freedom, and earning capacity invade the individual’s domestic realm.

On the other hand, while such issues rage around the “constituent,” he or she is steadily divested of the power to act upon them. Indeed, the “constituent’s” intellectual equipment to form an assured opinion is eroded by an ever-deepening sense of personal incompetence and public detachment. A preoccupation with trivia—the problems of shopping, fashion, personal appearance, career advancement, and entertainment in a thoroughly boring milieu—replaces the more heroic stance of a socially and environmentally involved body politic. We thus encounter a twofold development: a world in which growing social power preempts concerns that were once largely within the purview of the individual and the community, and the steady erosion of personal power and the individual’s capacity for action. Within this paralyzing forcefield, the individual’s self-identity begins to suffer a crucial decline. Self-recognition dissolves steadily into a grim lack of selfhood. Inaction becomes the only form of action with the result that the “constituent” retreats into an inwardness that lacks the substance to render one individually functional.

A world in which personality itself resembles the tabula rasa of an aimless society and a meaningless way of personal fife would seem to raise more universal issues than the fate of the city and the citizen. But in many respects this universality expresses itself as a need for a larger perspective toward civic issues. The city is not only the individual’s first social “investment”; it is his or her most intimate social environment. Owing to its vital immediacy,

the city remains (as it has throughout history) the most direct arena in which the individual can act as a truly social being and from which he or she can attain the most immediate social solutions to the broader problems that beleaguer the privatized self. Insofar as the individual’s self-definition as an empowered person and citizen is even possible today, the civic terrain on all its levels must be regained by its constituents and reconstituted in new ways to render people socially operational. Civic reempowerment of the citizen thus becomes a personal issue as well as a social one. It Is equivalent to regaining one’s private selfhood as well as one’s public selfhood, one’s personality as well as one’s citizenship.

To attain such reempowerment and self-reconstitution has its presuppositions. So much of civic participation and civic-mindedness has been lost in this century, particularly its latter half, that we will have to probe deeply into the buried history of the city and of Citizenship for reference points by which to understand where we Stand in the swirl of urbanization that surrounds us.

We will want to know what the concepts of “city” and “citizenship” really mean—not simply as ideal definitions but as fecund ecological processes that reveal the growth of communities and the individuals who people them—indeed, that turn them into a genuine public sphere and a vital body politic. It is painfully characteristic of our present-day myopia that these very words, public Nphere and body politic, have simply dropped out of our social vocabulary. When we use them at all, we rarely seem to understand what they mean or at least meant to earlier civilizations in which we claim to have our civic and social roots. They have been supplanted by such terms as “electorate” and, of course, “taxpayers” and “constituents”—administrative terms that denature the concepts of politics and community by definition.

It also behooves us to examine the kind of institutions cities have created to foster citizenship and public empowerment. A romarkable number of conflicting institutional issues clustered around the city as it meandered its way through different historical forms: decentralization versus centralization, direct democracy versus representative republicanism, assemblies of the people versus councils of deputies, recall and rotation of public officials versus lengthy tenure in office and professional fixidity. popular management of social affairs versus bureaucratic control and manipulation. These issues have exploded repeatedly, from ancient times to the present, into bitter civic conflicts. They persist in our very midst under the rubric of “reform” movement to alter city charters and most recently as neighborhood movements to establish “grass-roots” democracy.

We will want to know how the high ideals of a free citizenry with a sense of place in a cherished natural environment were variously realized and lost, often to be regained for limited periods of time in the same area or in other parts of the world. We will have to ask how “communal liberty” (to use Benjamin Barber s phrase) has fared with the fortunes of the citizenry and how each interacted with the other, for neither the city’s forms of freedom nor the citizen can be isolated from each other without doing violence to the meaning of both. That urbanization eventually separated from citification to take on a life of its own and ravage the city and countryside, ecological as well as agricultural alike will be an abiding theme in all we shall have to explore. This separation begins with the massive institutional, technological, and social changes that eventually dispossessed the citizen of his or her place in the city’s decision-making processes. Urbanization, in effect, both presupposes and later promotes the reduction of the. citizen to a “taxpayer,” “constituent,” or part of an “electorate.” We shall see that urbanization yields not only a drastic colonization of the countryside but also of the city’s and the citizen s very self-identity. Like the modern market, which has invaded every sphere of personal life, we shall find that urbanization has swept before it all the civic as well as agrarian institutions that provided even a modicum of autonomy to the individual. Born of the city, urbanization has been its parent’s most effective assailant, not to speak of the agrarian world that it has almost completely undone.

It will be important to see the extent to which presumably nonurban institutions, often remotely tribal in origin and rooted in a more naturalistic society, became integral features of the democratic city in the form of popular assemblies, neighborhood councils, and the town meetings so redolent of an active municipalism and citizenship in our own day. Ironically, the same can be said for feudal, theocratic, and monarchical institutions, with the castle, temple, and palace as their centers. Indeed, we need go no further, if we choose, than the American and French revolutions to find that popular assemblies under different names have been the principal means by which ordinary people fought out the issues of justice and freedom with nobles, monarchs, and centralized nation-states. Each opposing camp has fought with the other for civic and ultimately social sovereignty. The current legalistic image of the city as a “creature” of the state is not an expression of contempt. It is an expression of fear, of careful deliberation in a purposive effort to subdue popular, democracy. That the term has been codified into laws, even in self-professed “democracies,” expresses a dread of a menacing civic or municipal incubus in every centralized social system, one that has always threatened to dismember centralized power as such and restore the control of society to a public that has been cruelly dispossessed of its very identity..

History is an all-important vehicle in our enterprise, the counterpart of evolution in an ecological approach. The “powers-that-be” live in a compulsive fear of remembrance, a fear of humanity’s social memory of past institutions, cultures, and the search for origins. An essential theme of George Orwell’s 1984 is the effort by a highly totalitarian state to eliminate the sense of contrast earlier lifeways imposed as a challenge to existing ones. Thinking itself had to be restructured to exclude this challenge by using words—Orwell’s famous “Newspeak”—that attenuated their previous wealth of meaning and the disquieting alternatives that the past posed to a fixed, eternalized, and ahistorical “now” or commitment to “nowness.” Previously, authority had rested on tradition, often in a highly distorted form; today, it rests oil conditioning, with no regard to a troubling past.

The purpose of Orwell’s “Newspeak” Was to change thinking by “the invention of new words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and insofar as possible of all meanings whatever,” Words such, as “free,” Orwell tells us, still existed in “Newspeak” but not “in its old sense of‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free,’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts and were therefore of necessity nameless.” One could only use the word “free” in a strictly functional, amoral, and technical sense, such as in the statement “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” “Newspeak was designed not to extend but diminish the range of thought” by a process of abbreviation—by rendering concepts more functional than moral in nature and by dememorizing thought (if I may coin a phrase) that was designed to uproot the mind from a sense of continuity and contrast with a challenging past.

The Rise of Urbanization and Decline of Citizenship makes no compromises with an emphasis on “nowness” and the cybernetic language of electronic circuitry that is so fashionable today. The pages that follow are thoroughly infused with history and its moral meaning, and with language that is rich in secondary meanings. The reader will find no words like “feedback,” “input,” “output,” and “bottom lines,” which are currently used as substitutes for processual and thought-laden terms such as dialogue, origins, “explanations,” “judgements,” and “conclusions.” I have been at pains to emphasize my use of history and traditional language for a very distinct reason. This book deals with cities and citizenship—traditionally, the shared fate that confronts “town and country” in the modern era—and the impact of urbanization upon personality, freedom, and humanity’s sensitivity to nature. But it is also a book about morality and ethics. My concern with the way people commune—that is, actively associate with each other, not merely form communities—is an ethical concern of the highest priority in this work. I am concerned with the “social compacts” people form as ethical beings and the institutions they create to embody their ethical goals.

To a great extent, this is the Greek, more precisely, the Athenian, ideal of civicism, citizenship, and politics, an ideal, that has surfaced repeatedly throughout history. I believe this ideal forms a crucial challenge—despite its many limitations for the modern era. I propose to explore not only the ills of urbanization insofar as they have subverted town and country (including the natural environment), alike, but to explore the social and cultural conditions that gave rise to communities, citizens, and a politics whose high regard for personal activism has always made community the richest and most fulfilling expression of our humanity.

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 agrarian villages increased in size and density, they are said to have reached a “critical mass”—often of undefinable size—that apparently qualified them to be called “cities.” Generally, we tend to regard the city itself as a sharp economic breach with the countryside, marked by a typically urban development of crafts, administration, and, to use a grossly denatured word, “politics.” This new, largely nonagrarian ensemble of activities produced what we like to call “civilization”: a literate world, culturally “enlightened,” presumably more rational institutionally and technologically than the agrarian, society on which, it relied—in short, what the distinguished Marxian archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe, called the “urban revolution/’

This conventional image of the city’s origins projects a highly modern view, largely ecbnomistic and progressivistic, onto the past. It assumes that because we are primarily, economic beings whose civic activities are deeply rboted in industrial, commercial, and service occupations, our urban “forebearers” gathered in towns and cities to follow similar pursuits. They, too, we tend to believe, conceived of the city as an economic enterprise, massively committed to nonagrarian tasks. We are prepared to concede that in a more “barbarous” era early city dwellers were also preoccupied with their safety or defense from rival cities or pastoral nomads. Hence, they congregated in great numbers behind defensive palisades and fortified walls. While defensive concerns might account in part for early urban density, they too were a function of economic concerns in modern eyes, just as we, today, assign economic motivations to what we also call defense by nation-states and imperialistic blocs. Thus we assume that our urban “forebearers” were very much like us. They were economic beings who were busily engaged in the pursuit of their material interests within the fixed confines of a structural and territorial entity called the “city.”

With equal alacrity we assume that just as they shared our economic lifeways (albeit in a more rudimentary fashion), they also shared our civic attitudes. Although we are likely to concede that their sense of communal loyalties was stronger than ours, we often believe that they judged their cities with a shared viewpoint like ours. However exotic many of their civic institutions seem in the light of our own, we tend to believe that their notion of citizenship was essentially as self-serving and self-interested as our own. They participated in civic affairs to the degree that their material interests were involved, and essentially their interests were no less economic than our own. Unwittingly, we subject their civic-mindedness as well as their “civilization to the very economistic class analyses we profess to reject in the name of our “higher ideals” and “morals,” however much these are honored in the breach.

This view is greatly reinforced by the historical literature at our disposal. Athens, we are reminded, had its demos; Home, its plebs; the medieval commune, its popolo, just as we have our proletariat and lower middle classes who live in gnawing envy or hatred of their aristocratic and bourgeois elites. We are reminded that such Lorms as “ancient,” “medieval,” and “modern” should not impel 118 to greatly distinguish the unalterable content of human nature, that human beings will seek to satisfy their egoistic impulses despite all their ideological avowals to the contrary. This excursion Into an unvarying psyche that lies at the core of human behavior defines the city dweller—particularly the citizen—with the same modern attributes that define our contemporary metropolitan dwellers. Hence, we comfortably sit back before the vast tableau of urban historical development with a sense of self-assurance that Our contemporary ills are as ancestral and incorrigibly “human” as our biological attributes and pathologies. They belong to us as assuredly as the human brain, human fingers, and ingrained human psychological traits that our species shares with its ancestors and with its heirs.

If the city provides any evidence of human association and the immutability of human behavior, a serious account of its rise and development in no way supports this simplistic and conventional Imagery. It would be difficult to find one all-embracing reason that oxplains the emergence of a settled human collectivity such as a village, much less a population of thousands that we would expect to find in a city. The earliest cities archaeologists have unearthed do not seem to have been based on advanced forms of food cultivation, notably animal r powered plow agriculture, a point that Jane Jacobs has so ably highlighted in her book The Economy of Cities. Although it is doubtful that an “urban revolution” gave rise to an “agricultural revolution,” as Jacobs seems to contend, strong evidence exists that such very early cities as Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia and Jericho of Biblical fame may have consisted of sizable communities that acquired much, perhaps most, of their food from the hunting of game and the harvesting of undomesticated plants. Much plants as were domesticated seem to have been recent achievements of people who were harvesters of wild wheat varieties rather than experienced food cultivators. Bones of aurochs—the extinct ancestors of modern cattle—as well as those of wild deer, boars, asses, geese, and the skeletal remains of such predators as wolves, foxes, and leopards, suggest a “citified population of hunters and gatherers whose arts of gardening were of recent origin. By conventional standards, this economic tableau does not comfortably explain why a city such as Çatal, with an estimated population of at least 6,000 people occupying some 30 acres, should have been able to flourish on two nearby sites 9,000 years ago, many millennia before Mesopotamia became the region for Childe’s celebrated “urban revolution.”

If Çatal Hüyük is to be accorded a major place m the origins o the city, the reason for its existence—indeed, for its persistence for centuries—seems primarily to have been religious. Although the city was close to a rich source of obsidian that was almost certain y bartered for a wide variety of nonindigenous foods it is most conspicuous for its large number of religious shrines. James Melaart, who has provided us with detailed and richly interpretive studies of the city, found no less than 40 shrines among the 139 buildings he examined. These shrines were generally larger than the surrounding houses and decorated with elaborate religious artwork, paintings on opposing walls that symbolized death in one case and life in another...

Mellaart found no pottery in Çatal Hüyük—one of the principal hallmarks of Neolithic culture that, together with plow agriculture and domesticated animals, would normally be associated with a compact city of thousands. The thick walls of Çatal, its pueblolike houses, its small plazas, and its ornate artwork so visible to the public suggest an intensely vivid religious fife that is equally suggestive of an intensely active civic life. Its tool kit and higly naturalistic artistry suggest an ecologically oriented community of late Paleolithic hunters and gatherers rather than an early neolithic community of food cultivators. The culture is marked by a very sophisticated stone and bone technics, by markedly collective dwellings adorned with images of animals and shamanlike figures amidst paintings of reindeer, leopards, and bow-carrying hunters. If we are to judge by the considerable amount of comment Çatal has elicited—owing partly to Mellaart’s own interpretations—the occupants of the city were strikingly matricentric in their orientation. Women figure highly in the symbolism of the city’s cults. The Mother Goddess is the most conspicuous figurine that we find among the city’s statuettes, and careful attention seems to have been given to the internment of women and infants in joint graves, presumably mothers and their children, a feature that is absent in male burials. Nor do hierarchy and warfare seem to be features of the city’s social life. Judging from the size of Çatal’s dwellings and the implements found in burial remains, the city was fairly egalitarian despite minor differences that are observable. There are no “obvious signs of violence or deliberate signs of destruction,” Mellaart observes for the original city and its nearby successor, both of which were simply abandoned for no apparent reason after centuries of occupancy. Cases of violent death among the hundreds of skeletons examined on the sites are notable for their absence.

If the emergence of a city as large as Çatal Hüyük cannot be explained by a high degree of technical development or by warfare, it is interesting to note that an unknown people, already familiar with the arts of planting, harvesting, and milling grains, did not form any kind of permanent settlements on fertile soil as early as 18,000 years ago, when ice sheets still covered vast portions of the European continent. Evidence of food cultivators has been found quite recently adjacent to the Nile River at Wadi Kubbaniya in upper Egypt. They were planting wheat, barley, lentils, and chickpeas at a time when Magdelenian hunters were still wandering over the European tundra of Spain and France, leaving behind their celebrated wall paintings of animals in remote cave sites. The Wadi Kubbaniya people were not Neolithic farmers, although by every precept of technological or economic determinism they should have been. Their “diversified agriculture did not lead directly to the beginnings of village life,” observed Fred Wendrof, Romauld Schild, and Angela E. Chase, who unearthed the remains of these early food cultivators. “Probably people continued their wandering ways as hunters and gatherers for thousands of years more. Farming was just one more resource in a broad-based way of life. These conclusions raise anew the question of why civilization emerged.”

In fact, it is fair to say that both the Çatal Hüyük and Wadi Kubbaniya peoples, who may not have been particularly exceptional, raise the question, Why did “civilization” (more precisely, the drastic change from hunting and gathering to food cultivation and civic social relationships) emerge at all? This question seems shrouded in mystery because the changeover from one cultural form to another seems to be more drastic than it actually was. What Çatal Hüyük and the earliest food cultivators tell us is that the transition from tribe to village and city was not the predictable result, as archaeological orthodoxy would have it, of technological change or, as more recent theories would claim, of population pressure, war, or other drastic environmental pressures that might have produced hunger on a large scale. In short, the transition from tribe to city was not the necessary result of economists relationships that our Euro-American minds foist upon prehistory and history; nor was the transition, when it occurred, as deliciously complete and sharply delineated with polarities of a war between town and country as theoretical orthodoxy would have us believe.

Conversely, hunting and food-gathering peoples, who by all conventional standards of archaeology seem to have lacked the “economic base” for an urban society, actually formed sizable cities and initially used a technics more akin to late Paleolithic lifeways than Neolithic. As the anthropologists who studied the Wadi Kubbaniya sites conclude, “There does not, in fact, seem to be any single ‘cause’ for the beginnings of agriculture [and we may reasonably add, the city]. It may well have begun as a natural interaction between early peoples and the plant species they came to exploit regularly. It probably happened many times in the past, whenever Paleolithic peoples made extensive and sustained use of plant resources. It is important in this instance because the plants used [by the Wadi Kubbaniya people] were cereals, and these cereals provided the economic base for the development of our civilization. The rise of agriculture, however, did not lead rapidly or inevitably to identifiable social or economic change. It simply provided another resource in a broadly based hunting, fishing, and gathering economy.” I find this conclusion, with its wayward suggestions and its shades of heterodoxy, all the more tantalizing because its authors do, in fact, use the conceptual framework and terminology of traditional archaeology with its recourse to such words as economic base, resource, and exploit.

Which is not to say that cities congeal out of mere mist. Clearly a city requires a tangible food supply, one that is sufficiently plentiful to support such nonagrarian strata as artisans, administrators, and shamanlike priests to perform their specialties. If the remains of Çatal Hüyük and the Wadi Kubbaniya cereal farmers suggest anything, however, it is that early cities formed to meet cultural rather than strictly economic or defensive needs. The shrines so evident at Çatal suggest that the population of the city was committed to the performance of religious rituals, that cultic and priestly functions do more to explain why this city arose in Anatolia many millennia ago than do economic or military functions. Paleolithic lifeways; richly elaborated by time and environmental changes, may have been more tenacious than we have supposed them to be. They may have been more attractive to tribal peoples, even many self-anointed “civilized” ones, or, at least, more deeply rooted in the long evolution of human culture.

If this conclusion is sound, the urban and agricultural “revolutions” so closely associated in the archaeological literature with the rise of urban culture do not form an elegant fit by modern standards. The rise of cities may have had more to do with shrines, cultic practices, and temples rich in naturalistic symbols than with the “discovery” of cereal cultivation, plows, and domesticated animals. Not that the city gave rise to these agrarian basics, as Jane Jacobs seems to suggest. Apparently, agriculture in a simple form was known to hunters and food gatherers long before villages began to dot the landscape that phased from the Paleolithic into the Neolithic. But the shrine, later enclosed by a temple, may have been more authentically a harbinger of the city than the plow, and a quasireligious figure such as the shaman or priest may have been an earlier civic leader than the politically astute chief. By the same tokeri, the earliest “citizen” may have assumed his or her civic functions as a member of a congregation rather than, as a “resident” of an urban district. The earliest civic center, in effect, may have been a ceremonial area rather than a marketplace, a center for the worship of natural deities and forces.

If this background accurately portrays the factors that gave rise to the city and the functions of its residents, it highlights many features of early city life that contradict modern economistic biases about urbanism, notably contemporary ones that visualize the city as a business enterprise and its concerns as primarily fiscal or commercial. Despite the highly sophisticated crafts that appear in cities as differently situated in time from our own cities as Çatal Hüyük, there is no evidence of the existence of an internal market within the community itself, and certainly very little beyond local barter. A considerable amount of trade may have developed between cities or between a city and an essentially tribal community. But trade inside the city itself was minimal or, at least, marginal. To summarily repeat Karl Polanyi’s rich probing into what he was to call “the anonymity of the economy in early society” and his compelling demolition of the view that the market was necessarily the decisive element in the founding of the city would exhibit a lack of appreciation for the thoroughness and elegance of his analysis. Indeed, according to Polanyi, no domestic marketplace appears in early cities until Hellenic times, when the Athenian agora became a modest center for exchanges of goods as well as intense civic activity. Even so, Aristotle was to regard moneymaking as an “unnatural” urge that required public control and self-restraint. What early city dwellers actually exchanged with each other were services. More precisely, men and women cojointly contributed their share to the common fund of material goods. It was this shared pool of the means of life that constituted the economic life” of tribal communities and early cities. People contributed, in effect, their skills in growing food, in working wool and flax, in crafting metals and stone, and, by no means of least importance, their artistic and decorative talents in bejeweling and designing artifacts for deities, priests, and members of their own community.

“Postulates” of “self-sufficiency” and the distinction between “natural and unnatural trade” are not strictly archaic. We find them most self-consciously and philosophically stated in Greece. But prior to the full flowering of the Hellenic polis, material life in cities was deeply embedded in the blood ties, religious obligations, mutual loyalties, magical techniques, and the intensely naturalistic sensibilities of the tribal world. Guided more by custom than rationally vdiced strictures, these form the psychological setting and institutional carryovers for the more rationalistic civilization we later find in the Greek archipelago. This unconscious tribal and mutualistic substrate of obligation and association was, in fact, more forceful as a guide for human behavior than its formulation into a sophisticated civic and political philosophy or social theory.

In the so-called “primitive” or archaic worlds, more than food entered the “common pool,” Possibly, all things short of one’s closest possessions, including aspects of one’s very identity, had a highly collective aura that destined them to be shared or to be used communally. Initially, if the city had a pronounced function at all, it was a religious one. The strong emphasis that many anthropologists now place on political and centralized governmental forms as institutions for efficiently redistributing produce from ecologically different areas may be overstated. That great imperial systems, such as those of the Incas, Aztecs, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, and Chinese, were centers for collecting and redistributing a great variety of goods from highly diverse and distant ecological regions can hardly be faulted as a reality. Indeed, by imperial times many ancient cities were as conspicuous for their warehouses as they were for their temples and palaces.

But such an emphasis on material function, like the highly deterministic strategies to explain the existence of every community within our purview, betrays a very modern bias. It reveals a proclivity, almost an unthinking compulsion, to assign a “material role” to every phenomenon, particularly every institution and form of association, that exists in the past as well as the present. Worse, it crudely downgrades the richly associative role played by material things such as gifts, which serve to foster a much deeper human attribute: the need to be grounded in community, to enjoy shared sensibilities that are spiritually supportive and without which authentic individuality is chimerical. Human personality, which is nurtured by parental care, kinship ties, friendship, and the assurance or security provided by personal support systems, becomes a material thing—a manipulatable object among many other objects and commodities—precisely when its immaterial support systems are subverted and its traits reified. Quite an opposite case can be made for the belief, so widely promoted by contemporary “cultural materialists,” that chiefdoms, monarchies, bureaucracies, armies, clerical hierarchies, and the unlimited investment they required were distributive agencies and processes that served humanity’s “needs,” mythic or real. It could be more validly shown that they reflected a mania for domination that created mythic “needs” and systems of control on a scale so harmful to the communities they were pledged to service that they and their legacy of waste, destruction, and cruelty now threaten the very : existence of society and its natural fundament, Indeed the domination of nature was to have its roots in the domination of human by human such that a credo of domination was to embrace the planet.

But an important caveat must be voiced here when we speak of a mania for domination that can so facilely be used to color our image of the early, essentially temple, cities at the dawn of civic life. By no means is it clear that the sacerdotal hierarchies that emerged in these cities from Erech in Mesopotamia to Teobhuacan in Mexico immediately led to a hierarchical restructuring of the fairly egalitarian tribal or village peoples on whom they depended—peoples who built their monuments, often massive in size; who created their plazas, dwellings, and altars; who filled their temple storehouses, erected their walls, and shaped the sculptures that dazzle the modern eye. That such vast efforts with their enormous mobilizations of labor could have been made for purposes that seem so “profitless” and “useless” by present-day urban standards without coercion of the most authoritarian kind seems unthinkable at first glance—so much, in fact, that all early temples and mortuaries are normally regarded as the work of savagely coercive rulers and brutal tyrants.

But if this imagery is certainly true well into history, we have no reason to believe that it reflects the social relationships that gave us our earliest cities and their cultic structures at the dawn of history. I have described elsewhere, in great detail, how an egalitarian society may have slowly phased into an increasingly hierarchical one-initially theocratic, ultimately feudal, and finally monarchical. Here, I would like to emphasize that the earliest cities were largely ideological creations of highly complex, strongly affiliated, and intensely mutualstic communities of kin groups, ecological in outlook and essentially egalitarian and nondomineering in character. We do not know if a sizable city like Çatal Hüyük, which dates back 9,000 years, or a hugely monumental city like Teotihuacan, which was slowly erected around 300 B.c. and ceased to be occupied around 800 A.D., were originally constructed by forcibly “mobilizing” large numbers of “oppressed” villagers in surrounding communities or, surprising as it may seem, whether they were voluntary enterprises undertaken by devout “parishioners” who viewed their civic responsibilities as a sort of “calling.” We assume that a coercive strategy was followed by oppressive elites at the inception of city life because we read our literary accounts of Mesopotamian and Egyptian forced labor back into city lifeways in a misty preliterate era. It is easy to. overlook the fact that any literary tradition of urban, life, even the very early Gilgamesh epic that dates back to the beginnings of Mesopotamian city life, is already evidence of a technically advanced, often coercive, society. Çatal Hüyük, Jericho, Erech, Teotihuacan, Monte Alban, and Tikal, to cite cities far-removed from modern urban development in the cultured areas of the Near East and the Americas, are mysteries to us that we try to dispel with our own motivations and social interests. Yet their archaeological remains are rich with the evidence of ideological aspirations and human relationships that were fundamentally different from our own secular ones—cultic and communal sensibilities that viewed “the city” (if such a word can be used indiscriminately to encompass all sizable human settlements) as a monument to lifeways and sentiments that were basically different from our own. Possibly, the ordinary people who reared the monuments in the earliest of these cities were closer in their outlook to the medieval artisans who often willingly gave of their time and skills to slowly erect over generations the great cathedrals of Europe. In either case, they speak to a dedication that stands in marked contrast to the mentality of the engineers and construction crews who are seeding the modern world with high-rise residential and office structures in urban areas of every continent.

We are confronted, too, with the differences between early and modern conceptions of “citizenship.” How did ancestral “citizens” of the first cities view themselves? In what sense were they different from us—or similar to us? By asking these questions, we encounter a problem that lacks the degree of completeness and fixity that we find in a physical structure such as the remains of a temple or palace. Citizenship, as we shall see, is a process, not a reality that is reducible to a concise, single-line definition. It does not leap into being from a vacuum, surrounded by streets for personal display, buildings into which the sovereign individual can retreat, and dense populations that foster personal intercourse. Çatal Hüyük, in fact, had no streets at all, to cite an intriguing feature of the city. A pueblolike city, it had small squares but no open byways. It lacked the streets that such modernists as Marshall Berman and Richard Sennett regard as the structural essence of urbanism, particularly in the form of wide boulevards in which the monadic ego of our time can display itself in dandylike fashion and assert its “individuality.” One moved from one part of Çatal to another over rooftops, ascending or descending ladders, entering into the recesses of dwellings and crossing small squares.

This is a significant personal fact, not merely a structural eccentricity. Çatal Hüyük must have been a highly collective community. It was intensely peopled—more like a tribe than what we, today, would call a city. Yet even by modern standards of urbanism such as size and density, it was a town, not a village. From a historical perspective, given time and place, it was even an immense city if archaeological calculations of its populations are remotely correct. What does this tableau mean? In what sense were its men and women “urban”? We can surmise that they were not mere “residents” of the city or the ancestral members of modern-day “constituencies.” They were not burdened by the anonymity and awesome sense of personal isolation that is the most characteristic trait of the modern urban dweller. In some sense, they were “protocitizens” of a highly articulated and richly textured community in which a high sense of collectivity, nourished by such organic facts as kinship ties and a sexual division of labor, was integrated with the civic facts of politically defined rights and duties. They were communities in transition between the biological realities of the tribal world, rooted in blood ties, gender, and age groups, and the political realities of the urban world, rooted in residential propinquity, vocational mobility, and legal prerogatives. Early cities probably did not contain citizens in the sense of self-empowered individuals ethically united by ideals of civic virtue, rational in their social policies, and completely free to participate through discourse and practice in the management of their cities—in short, those attributes that Greek social thinkers were to call phronesis, the practical reason involved in creating and managing a community. All the evidence we have of these protocitizens suggests that their power for social action was largely controlled by obligations to kin groups and theocrats, their ideals guided more by faith than reason, their sense of virtue more pragmatic than ethical, and their social institutions more biologically derivative than cultural in character.

Yet these seemingly uncivic features provided a crucially important matrix for what was to grow into the highly sophisticated classical notion of the “citizen.” If social empowerment seemed to derive more from such group attributes as the family or the clan than from personal attributes, the individual living in these cities enjoyed a real sense of power as such, not a body of conferred rights that were more formal and juridical than substantive. Tribal societies are known that exhibit a high degree of respect for individual uniqueness and free will, however much custom and public opinion seem to place limits on personal behavior. One cannot simultaneously deny the existence of primitive individuality while acknowledging the existence of a fairly spontaneous ego and considerable self-assertion among, say, certain hunting and gathering communities such as the pygmies of the Ituri Forest who include outrageously boastful men and extremely shrewd women. By their marked presence, such personal traits as boastfulness and shrewdness, indeed humor, gaeity, and reflectiveness, frankly contradict the conventional image of preliterate peoples as divested of ego and personality, the modern claim to individuality. The contemporary neurotic notion of personality may not have been as common among so-called primitives as it is today in the metropolitan areas of Europe and America, although by no means is it absent. But individuality certainly exists among remaining preliterate communities, albeit in a different form and faced by more overt constraints than our own, notably where the rules of the game are fairly explicit and mutualistic in contrast to our modern, highly engineered society, which bombastically celebrates its formal “freedoms” and tries to ignore its lack of social concern.

Surprisingly, citizenship and the political forms that foster it would be difficult to explain withou