Letter III

I write this from Cihangir, on a hill in Istanbul, where the streets fall toward the water and the cats are as numerous as the people. You are building fires against a winter; I have the windows open to the Bosporus. Between your last letter and this one we have been through Rome, and down the Tyrrhenian coast, and across to Turkey, and I am not the same man who wrote to you from Ireland, though I could not tell you exactly what has changed.

When I wrote last, we were moving toward something. There was a school we meant to see near Turin, a life in the north of Italy we were beginning to imagine for the children. We went to see it. And then, somewhere along the coast, the imagining stopped. I cannot account for it entirely. It was not that Italy failed us. It was that, having come all this way to look for a new place, I found myself remembering a certain light on a coast we already know, and the strange possibility that the road we are on might curve back rather than forward.

You quoted the poet who says he moves to keep things whole. I have found myself carrying that line through these weeks. Then, on a road trip from Istanbul along the west coast of Turkey, we climbed the hill above Ephesus to the ruins of the basilica they raised over the grave of St. John. That’s the same John who wrote his Gospel in that place, the one that begins before all beginnings.

The children climbed with us. They ran the broken steps, balanced along the low walls, ducked under fallen arches, called to each other across the stones. They did not know they were on the grave of the man who wrote In the beginning was the Word, and it would not have slowed them if they had. And yet they were not lost among those ruins. It was a holy and commonplace play. They were entirely at home there, conversing with the stones and with the long afternoon as naturally as they would with the furniture of their own house.

I stood and watched them and thought: this is the thing I have been trying to understand for two letters now. A great city stood here and emptied. The sea withdrew, the people left, the harbor became a field. And still a child can climb these stones and be at home on them, because what the stones carry has not emptied with the city.

You wrote that seeing past the bad to the good is part of the task, and that this seeing is somehow in these letters. And I think I saw it there, on John’s hill, watching them play.

We keep asking where we should go, as though wholeness were a place we have not yet reached. But the children were whole on that ruined hill, two continents and two thousand years from wherever they will grow up, because they carried their home with them into the ruins. Perhaps that is the new way of staying put: not to find the right place at last, but to be so grounded in what one already is that any place becomes a place one can be at home in.

Outside, the ferries are crossing to the Asian side and back, as they have for longer than anyone can remember. Soon we go on. Soon the road turns toward America and the house, and the boxes I have still not begun to fill.

For now, it is enough to know that the road does not always lead onward.

Next: your move, and then mine.

(Lorenzetti’s the Effects of Good Government fresco.)

We have seen what “the urban commons” is, how it dies and at Ephesus what remains of it when a city has finished dying. We turn now from the ruined agora to the living one: to the deepest origins of the commons, in the public square of ancient Greece, in the gospels, and in the painted walls of a medieval Italian city hall.

The Fathers of the Commons

All the great historical cities of the western world have several societal rooms which make up “the urban commons.” Each of these urban spaces plays its own individual social function, while at the same time their particular organization helps to make up the larger urban room which is the city itself.

Names such as Miletus, Athens, Thebes, Sparta and all the Greek city-states must be duly honored as the fathers of “the urban commons,” which often became, and were encouraged to become, something much more than commercial farmer-markets. The Hellenic World inspired the connotation that the city-square is our public living room; an urban room which may be used by the people as a theatre stage and as an academic classroom, for their leisure and for their enterprise.

The story of Socrates, which marks the beginning of the great political conversation of the western world, points to the intimate relationship between the invention of “the urban commons” and the birth of the moral philosophical tradition. It’s worthwhile to remember that the Greek word “idiot” signifies someone who doesn’t understand politics.

What Socrates Saw

The Greek city-square, the agorá, was the maternity-ward for the midwives of the mind, also known as the Socratic school of philosophy. What did Socrates see on that city-square? What was the insight of Socrates?

If we stand with Socrates and his friends in The Piraeus of Athens, reading from the beginning of Plato’s Republic, we might gain an insight as he slowly builds up his city in speech. Since the agorá is the public room which all the citizens share equally, it also becomes a space for our moral awareness, of ethical norms and etiquette. It becomes a classroom, a school of life, where we learn that not only noblemen, but even roaming gangs have a social etiquette.

We learn that Socrates was not a man who sat alone in his home by his writing-desk, that he preferred to walk among the people on the agorá of Athens. In contrast to St. Paul, he didn’t present any doctrines there; he preferred to talk, to engage in conversation. But he wasn’t known as a public orator, being quite content to ask people questions as he met them.

The philosophy of Socrates rested in the insight that facts and figures neither inspire conversion nor conversation, as our conversation partners will perceive us as threatening, thereby entrenching and fortifying themselves in their points of view. In order to interact creatively on the public square, the Socratic method of nonthreatening dialogue is the only path of communication.

Nonetheless, he was condemned to death by the Athenian democracy in 399 B.C. Yet his cause endured and his public dialogues were preserved by Plato, as they’ve also lived on within countless conversations upon numerous squares throughout the world.

The Marketplace in Scripture

St. Matthew writes in chapter 20 of his gospel that Jesus likened the City of God to a householder who “went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the marketplace,” in order to hire those unemployed men on the city-square to work in his vineyard. The marketplace of the city and the marketplace of our lives is a common theme of western civilization.

In his famous painting “The School of Athens,” in the Vatican Museums, Raphael depicted Plato and Aristotle walking under classical arches amid the marketplace of ideas, as two conversation partners on their daily stroll through the agorá. Theological doctrine, political dispute and moral philosophy fight for air in this painting, just as they have done within every city-square throughout history.

A little research into this phenomenon will quickly lead us to some obvious conclusions: an exchange of intellectual and existential experiences presupposes a conversation, this conversation presupposes a meeting between persons, this meeting presupposes a comfortable meeting-place for these individuals. Turning this little induction on its head, we may deduce that the city-square is an indispensable part of the urban landscape and of our philosophy of life. What the maternity-ward is for the potentiality of motherhood, “the urban commons” is for the potentiality of the citizen.

The Room at the Heart of the City

The agorá, the piazza, the plaza, the praça, the place, the platz, the torv, the torg, and the square is the central room inside every city or neighborhood, because it makes space for something that lies at the heart of our human existence.

The square is in the middle of our towns, where we would traditionally find both City Hall and the Cathedral, because both contain some part of our civic lives within themselves. The square is a room with many shapes, but it’s also an institution which makes space for something important. Its urban quality consists in what very quantifiable good the room makes space for.

It’s not enough that it’s a room; a city must also embrace us maternally, as we must welcome it, through a civic exchange on “the urban commons.” Failing to do so results in a fatal mistake.

In St. Matthew’s gospel, we find Jesus’ lament over the city of Jerusalem. He says: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.” This is one of the few instances where God is given female characteristics, but if the City of God is for the children of God, this analogy makes perfect sense.

Good Government Painted on a Wall

The city has an almost maternal instinct in how it wishes to take care of its citizens. One of the most striking presentations of this familial relationship is a painting inside City Hall, the Palazzo Pubblico, by the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted a series of frescos in the year 1339 where the subject matter is civic rather than religious. They go by the name Allegoria ed effetti del Buono e del Cattivo Governo, which means “The Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government.” The most importance is the fresco entitled “The Effects of Good Government,” which summarizes how Christendom understood man and urbanity.

First, the artist has depicted the existence of a harmonious relationship between buildings and people, between citizens and architecture. This is an urban ideology. The city is made for man, not man for the city, as Jesus said, “the law was made for man, not man for the law.” Likewise, it is clear that good government is made for man, not man for good government, for if man were virtuous there would be no need for good government.

The next harmonious relationship which we notice is the balanced interplay between the city and the countryside, where urban culture is in harmony with its surroundings. There is a wall between them, but the bridge between them is the city-gate. This is an ecological ideology. Not only does the city achieve a balance with its natural surroundings; rural culture is itself in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

As we can see from these examples, contemporary obstacles to balance and unity within our societies would be greatly enriched by looking to the medieval renaissance.

Naples: Where the Sacred Meets the Civic

The Piazza del Campo in Siena is only one of countless squares in Italy, which are all very different from each other, yet all express an aspect of this ideological harmony. Naples may be the third largest city of Italy after Rome and Milan, but her squares tend not to be as famous. Perhaps the reason rests in their preservation of an uncomfortable medieval atmosphere of cacophonous sounds and pungent smells. Local priests will even confide that they minister to a city still divided between patricians and plebeians.

Rising over the rooftops of this metropolis is the Cathedral on Piazza del Duomo. The facade is a formidable mixture of art and architecture, making it difficult to know where one style ends and another begins. But it’s not so strange. The whole structure speaks of Christendom’s development from a marginalized whisper on the bay of Naples into the proud voice of this southern city. The mornings are reserved for the Mass-goers, while in the afternoon the square turns into a soccer pitch for the children of the neighborhood.

Beyond the square, the Cathedral protects a chapel with the relics of their patron saint, San Gennaro. The chapel is the property of the city for its people, not of the church for its faithful. The border between the church and the city is marked at the chapel entrance by a large iron gate crowned by a bust of San Gennaro, and in the floor is the seal of Naples before three altars. An innumerable collection of gold, silver and jewels, donated by the faithful as votive gifts of thanksgiving, are kept in an adjacent room.

Here the interplay between the city and the church is underscored further, for while the treasures belong to their patron saint, his miracles belong to the city for its people. This relationship reflects an old tradition, for in Catholic social theory the church magisterium and the city government are separate in their functions but not in their principles. Therefore, the result of this unique arrangement is not that the city has imposed its power over the church, but that we can read the Cathedral as another chapter in the imaginative use of “the urban commons.”

Whatever its effect, this simultaneously holy and secular space underscores that a societal room has to have a story attached to it. Something has to happen there. It has to be about something.

The Square as Theater of Life: Piazza del Plebiscito

Naples was, between 1282 and 1860, primarily ruled by the Spanish royal houses, and the Andalusian atmosphere is evident in many of the older quarters. The most significant break from Spanish rule was the Napoleonic parenthesis between 1806 and 1815. The greatest square of Naples was built during this era, known first as Largo del Palazzo, built to celebrate the return of the Spanish kings.

It was then renamed Piazza del Plebiscito due to the plebiscite balloting held here in October 1860, which annexed the defeated Bourbon Kingdom to the Savoy Kingdom, officially uniting the peninsula to become the Kingdom of Italy. Piazza del Plebiscito thereby became a majestic building project trying to combine the political ideology of a royal restoration after the Napoleonic Empire with Italian nationalistic sentiments within Neapolitan life.

This has given this particular square a place in the unfolding story of the city, which is a story about populism and power, about the role of the people within a monarchy. All kinds of local and national celebrations, pregnant with symbolism, from Christmas pageants to political balloting, have taken place here. Two bronze statues designed by Antonio Canova stand guard in the middle of the square, one dedicated to King Charles III, the other a representation of King Ferdinand I, who each sit on bronze horses.

During the day, if there’s nothing specifically happening on the square, Piazza del Plebiscito is still filled with visitors on their way to various parts of the city, lending a noble backdrop to whatever is on their schedules.

The architects stole freely from Gian Lorenzo Bernini for this project, combining themes from two of the most famous squares in Rome: the piazza San Pietro and the piazza Rotonda. A wide curving colonnade embraces the square, similar to the great colonnade before St. Peter’s Basilica, lending a maternal intimacy to an otherwise spacious square. The colonnades flank the Basilica of San Francesco da Paola, built to faithfully mimic The Pantheon in Rome. They also connect the surrounding palaces with this public square, emphasizing a gradual transition between outside and inside.

The square even slants slightly upwards as in an auditorium, giving the overall impression of an operatic theatrical setting. But it’s not merely a backdrop for a rehearsed performance, it’s built for the everyday stage of life, as a very Neapolitan interpretation of the societal room.

We can enjoy this play of life while sitting down at the celebrated Gran Caffè Gambrinus on the north end of the square. Whether we decide to order another espresso at our table or to keep walking over our common floor, we are an equal part actor and spectator upon “the urban commons.”

Pax et Bonum!

C.W. Höjer

This closes a short series on the urban commons. But the argument only lives when it meets a real place. I have been testing it on the road this year: on the worn walls of Youghal, inside the open squares of Italy, in the emptied streets of Ephesus, along the two-continent ferry lines of Istanbul. If you would like to walk these cities with me, the dispatches are here, and there are more to come.

Thank you for reading Good Cities!

We came to Ephesus with the children, down the long marble street the ancients called the Arcadian Way, which once ran from the theatre to a harbor that is no longer there. The sea has withdrawn. Silt filled the port over the centuries until the water eventually lay miles from the quays, and the city that lived by it slowly emptied out. Now you walk toward a harbor of grass.

This is the first thing Ephesus teaches, and it teaches it before you have read a single plaque: a city is a living thing, and living things can die. Not by conquest — Ephesus was not sacked into oblivion — but by the quiet failure of the conditions that made it possible. The harbor silted up; the trade moved; the people left. What remains is a complete urban commons of the ancient world, a whole city of public rooms open to the sky, with no one to fill them.

The Rooms Without Roofs

I have written that a city lives in its spaces rather than its buildings: in the thresholds, the streets, the squares, the societal rooms where public and private life meet. Ephesus is that argument made visible, because at Ephesus the private buildings are mostly gone and the public rooms remain. You walk the Curetes Street between the ghosts of shops and see, still standing, the things that belonged to everyone: the great theatre cut into the hillside, the agora, the terraced houses, the Library of Celsus with its facade of marble.

The children ran ahead of us along the marble, as children do, indifferent to the meanings our guidebook had prepared for us. They wanted the cats, of which Ephesus has many, sunning themselves on two-thousand-year-old stone. And there was something very right in that. The commons was never a museum. It was a place where life happened, where a child might chase a cat while his parents argued philosophy or bought fish or shouted in the theatre. The stones do not know they are old.

The Riot in the Theatre

It was into that theatre — the great one, carved into Mount Pion, large enough to hold twenty-four thousand people — that the city poured in a fury one day around the year 55, and the story is told in the nineteenth chapter of Acts.

St. Paul had been preaching in Ephesus, and his preaching had a commercial consequence. A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, saw his trade threatened, as Paul taught that gods made by human hands are not gods at all. Demetrius gathered his fellow craftsmen and reminded them, plainly and clearly, that their prosperity depended on the goddess. The city filled with confusion and rushed into the theatre, seizing two of Paul’s companions, and for the better part of two hours the crowd roared with one voice: Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Paul wished to go in and face them. His friends would not let him. In the end the town clerk quieted the mob down with a lawyer’s argument: the courts were open, and they risked being charged with rioting, and the assembly dispersed.

I stood in that theatre with my own children nearby and thought about what the story actually shows. Here was the urban commons doing exactly what a commons does: gathering the whole city into one room to contend over what it loves and what it fears. And here, too, was the oldest sickness of all cities: private greed dressed in the robes of public piety. Demetrius did not say my income is falling. He said the temple of the great goddess will be despised. The coin beneath the creed. It is the same thing we have heard many times before, the Caesar’s-coin logic, the moment when a city’s shared devotion is revealed to be, underneath, a protection of someone’s trade.

The theatre held both things at once: the genuine passion of a people for their goddess, and the silversmith’s ledger. That is what a great societal room does. It brings the whole argument into the light where it can be seen.

The City of St. John and the Virgin

Ephesus is layered, as all long-lived cities are, and the layer that came after Artemis was Christian. On the hill above the ruined city stand the remains of the Basilica of St. John, built over the traditional grave of the evangelist, who by ancient tradition spent his last years here and wrote his Gospel and his letters in this place. Below, the marble street; above, the apostle’s church. The city that rioted for Artemis became a city that guarded the tomb of the man who wrote: “In the beginning was the Word.”

A few miles away, up the wooded slope of the mountain the Turks call Bülbüldağı, the Hill of Nightingales, is the small stone house they call Meryemana — the House of the Virgin Mary, where tradition holds that John brought the mother of Christ to live out her days, as he had been charged to do from the cross. Since it was rediscovered in the last century many pilgrims come to it, Christians and Muslims, to drink from the spring and to tie their written prayers to a wall. We went, with the children, and it was quiet in the way that only places worn by generations of prayers are quiet.

On the way up the mountain to Mary’s house we passed the Cave of the Seven Sleepers on the northern slopes — seven young Christians who hid from persecution, fell asleep, and woke generations later to find the empire itself had become Christian. It’s a story about time, and waking, and how long a city’s memory can sleep before it stirs again.

What Ephesus Leaves Us

We looked out over the empty harbor as the light lengthened, the children tired now, carried and cajoled. A great city had stood here for a thousand years and more. It had a theatre that held twenty-four thousand, a library, an agora, temples that were counted among the wonders of the world. And it died. Not violently, but by the withdrawal of the sea and the slow departure of the people, until nothing was left but the commons itself, the public rooms standing open under the Aegean sky.

This is the lesson that answers the one I have been writing about cities that die: that the commons is the last thing to go, and the first thing to be read. When the private houses have fallen and the harbor has vanished and the people are two thousand years gone, what remains is the shape of how they gathered: the theatre where they roared, the street where they walked, the agora where they met. A city’s soul is legible in its public spaces long after everything else has failed.

Maybe our children will remember Ephesus. Or maybe they are too young. But they ran its marble street and chased its cats and stood, without knowing it, in the theatre where a city once shouted for two hours over the difference between a god and a silversmith’s trade. The stones held them for an afternoon, as they have held so many, and will hold many more, and know nothing of any of us.

Pax et Bonum!

C. W. Höjer

Next: we return from the ruined agora to the living one — what Socrates saw in the public square, and how a fresco in Siena still shows the difference between good government and bad.

In a previous reflection, we explored what “the urban commons” is, namely, the shared social spaces, the public living rooms, the societal rooms that make a city more than a collection of buildings. Now we must confront how these spaces are destroyed, and what happens to a city when they are.

Metastatic Growth

We inflict serious harm upon a city if it is not allowed to grow and expand according to its nature. By forcing ourselves upon a city with suburbs and satellite-housing, we introduce a kind of metastatic growth instead of a natural growth, which is a serious affliction for a city.

Streets are no longer paved as corridors into a societal room, but replaced with motorways and sidewalks. “The urban commons” is suddenly privatized, transformed from a square into a parking lot. The little clothing boutique, the newspaper kiosk, the quaint corner cafe is replaced with superstores and strip-malls.

This is the exact opposite of the traditional piazza-culture of the Latin world, which spreads its social functions across a wide span of smaller establishments. They gather under the welcoming form of an enclosed urban space, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.

The suburban culture collects these social functions in places spread far and wide, imposing further material necessities to connect them, such as cars and credit cards, while the less economically fortunate must rely on public transportation. Thereby it has split form from function, fatally undermining “the urban commons.”

The Problem with Transit Spaces

Few citizens would consider subway-stations and bus-stations as good social spaces in which to gather with friends at night. While they can at times be the most practical meeting points of a city, they can never be confused with societal rooms since nothing happens there, except for the frustrating activity of waiting and a growing expectation to be somewhere else.

At best the subway-station or the bus-station has a water fountain and a vending machine. Otherwise they serve no other function than to provide a space where citizens can get on or off a train or a bus.

In order for these public waiting rooms to become societal rooms within “the urban commons,” they must offer citizens a greater span of activities. For example, there must be an inviting coffee shop, maybe one that is open past sunset, perhaps a movie theatre and a croissant bakery which serves fresh pastries at night.

But even if all these suggestions were realized they would still not amount to anything if people choose not to live around these transportation-stations. Few urban developers see much promise in housing projects around these areas and even fewer citizens wish to move to them. For this very reason the only people drawn to them tend to be gangs and criminals, who crawl out of their trenches at various hours of the night. It’s a veritable no man’s land which these urban warriors may freely occupy without any social resistance.

The Exclusive Line

This also explains why criminal activity moves into the deserted downtown areas, even if these same areas might contain the Concert Hall with adjacent champagne-lounges and French restaurants. The pivotal factor is that the societal room has collected the patrons within its radius and moved them all indoors behind an exclusive line.

Thereby the concert audience and the restaurant guests are locked up within their own society, while the other societal room outside their doors — the would-be “urban commons”— is the only thing open for those who aren’t going to a concert or to a restaurant. The open societal room of our city is then only open to those who have nothing to do there, transforming this urban space from an architectural shape meant to serve the body politic into an urban dead-zone, a necropolis.

If fewer people live downtown, if the evening attractions grow ever more exclusive, if the daylight hours bring more pedestrians than street lamps, these downtown areas become no different than subway stations and bus stations for those without money, who search the streets for a place they might belong, or spend the night.

The Direction of Causation

A self-destructive urban phenomenon may unfortunately appear anywhere on the public map. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it does not appear within an “urban commons” which remains intact.

It’s symptomatic of an unhealthy urban environment, from Wall Street to Main Street, if these areas become depopulated and alienated from the wider social life of the city. The problem will not only be evident in the low number of residents there, but in the lamentable fact that people will only go to these areas for a very specific purpose.

We see symptoms of urban decay if, after a performance, concertgoers leave the downtown Concert Hall by hailing a taxi towards another area of town. However, it’s important to note that it’s not the taxi-hailing concertgoers who, by abandoning this common space, open it up for gangs and criminals. It’s rather the other way around. The common urban spaces have abandoned them.

These areas become criminalized through a deconstruction of “the urban commons.” Any downtown which deconstructs its social functions will experience the same abandonment and criminalization. If there are no longer any establishments, any markets or businesses which encircle the auditoriums and the theaters, then there will be no civic downtown, only an increase in convenient parking lots.

Should “the urban commons” become an urban desert, it not only witnesses to an anti-urban prejudice, but it witnesses to a violent assault over and against our most natural form of life, long before the gangs arrive to complete this criminal action.

Getting the Order Right

While cities need to remain attractive to the surrounding world by investing in concert halls and stadiums, they need to be placed appropriately, at the appropriate time. Neighborhoods are delicate ecosystems. Naturally, everyone enjoys a sporting event, a movie or an opera, but these venues never give birth to “the urban commons,” instead they complete them.

It would be better to treat neighborhoods as villages. What every village needs is architecture, not just a row of buildings. In order to curb violence and crime among its inhabitants, cities need to invest in handsome housing, public art and churches, temples and Cathedrals. They need cafes and bars to be open at night, after the bakeries and boutiques close their doors for the day. They need a busy open air market instead of a strip-mall parking lot, and they need local eateries instead of fast-food chains.

After these things have been accomplished, after the implementation of perennial urban principles, cities may pour the foundation for a new concert hall or athletic stadium.

The error of so much modern urban planning is to reverse this order: they build the monument first and hope the community follows. But community cannot be summoned by spectacle. The concert hall completes a living downtown; it cannot create one. The stadium crowns a thriving neighborhood; it cannot conjure one into being. First the bakery and the butcher, the cafe and the market, the housing and the church. Only then the grand venue.

We have inverted this wisdom across the western world, building gleaming arenas surrounded by parking lots, wondering why the surrounding blocks feel dead, why crime creeps in after dark, why no one lingers once the event has ended. The answer is simple: we built the crown before we built the head that should wear it.

Nowhere is this seen more plainly than in a city that has already finished dying.

Pax et Bonum!

C. W. Höjer

Next: a dispatch from Ephesus, where the harbor silted, the people left, and nothing remains but the commons itself: open to the sky.

A city is not only composed of its buildings, as music is not only composed of sound. In equal measure a city is composed of space, as music is composed of silence.

We’ll never know we’re in Florence, Siena or have entered Rome by checking into our hotel room or standing in front of Michelangelo’s David, The Duomo or under The Sistine Chapel. No, it’s rather in the in-between spaces, as we transport ourselves through the city from one place to the next, that we recognize where we are.

Even if the Statue of Liberty in New York City, Big Ben in London or the Eiffel Tower in Paris are urban profiles which we easily identify with an individual city, we never encounter the city in front of these monuments. Nor is what happens inside The Stock Exchange, The Houses of Parliament, the Élysée Palace or behind any number of powerful facades across western civilization more important for our urban life than what happens outside on the street.

As in a musical composition, urban life is actually to be found in movements and transitions. It’s to be found between the outside and the inside, in the doorways, in the thresholds to churches and museums, to clothing stores and business offices, to schools and train-stations. It’s on the outstretched floor of our common ground, between the play of crosswalks and squares, where men and women walk in and out of each other’s circles—in “the urban commons” of our cities—that architecture can embody the necessary harmony and space within the metropolis.

How Space Takes Shape

If we walk long enough back and forth across our cities, we may observe that the shapes of our big urban spaces can be divided into many smaller individual shapes; we may even observe that these shapes can change their forms. Architectural shapes weave themselves into the social fabric, producing new existential spaces.

A local florist who has placed a bucket of bouquets outside his storefront has expanded the allotted shape of his private business by borrowing from the common space. The owner of a local coffee shop who has expanded his business by placing a table and two chairs outside his establishment is advertising to the passerby that “the urban commons”—the common ground which exists outside his doors—continues inside his own cafe.

Perhaps we will never feel at home in a city before we know the do’s and don’ts of the common spaces, of the shared living spaces, of how we are to use “the urban commons” of a city.

A Seat in the Theater of the City

We can enjoy an instructive vision of how urban shape and space interweave with our lives by sitting down at one of the numerous squares of the western world. By allowing our legs to lead us down to Piazza Rotonda in Rome, Taksim Meydani in Istanbul, Place Dauphine in Paris or Praça Rossio in Lisbon, we first choose to approach a cafe which attracts us in some way, then we choose an outside table in the back row close to the facade.

From this position we have an auditorium chair for the stage-play going on in front of us, where we let our neighbors become our actors, coming and going across our common ground. From this position we have built an invisible Odeon around us. Behind us are customers who walk in and out of the coffee bar, in front of us they also walk in and out of the row of tables, while around us people walk in and out of the common ground.

Some of our neighbors make an entrance upon the square, while others exit. They not only enter from various alleyways and hidden turns, they’re also opening and shutting doors to the sound of locks and keys. Whenever they step out into the square, they’re inside the play of the city, which brands them with a particular identity, a visible character, for citizens live in a city as much as the city lives in them, whether for a lifespan or if only for an afternoon.

Few pictures can summarize the interplay of spatial and existential relations better than the vision we receive on any of these famous squares, but the same thing happens in every town as well. Whenever restaurants or bars place tables and chairs in front of their establishments, we enter under the canopy of the common grounds, even if we’re walking outside on the city streets.

Listening to a City, Not Lording Over It

Regarding the do’s and don’ts of “the urban commons,” it’s important to listen to a city and not merely to lord order over it. If we are to sustain healthy norms for our public life, then our common living-rooms must be kept open and alive, especially if we are to avoid violence and delinquency.

The tightly built cities of The Classical World repeatedly show us that social constraints are often more effective than legal prohibitions. While working to avoid vicious acts in our cities, we must not attempt to crush them by oppression, for if our cities are to remain virtuous, they must also remain open to vice. It’s a facet of western Christian civilization that we recognize a virtuous society from a sinful society by its vulnerability to being undone by people who make the wrong decisions.

In order to understand this perspective, we may recall the stress placed on the family and family-life as the basic unit of society. The virtuous society within Christendom is therefore normative, not legislative. This makes perfect sense, since if citizens are meant to inhabit a city, they must learn to live with it as well.

But if we take the Puritans of New England as the guiding star for how to organize “the urban commons,” then it’s the politicians themselves, by enforcing certain law codes over our public houses and public squares, who exercise violence against their own cities. Famously, often infamously, the Puritans of The Massachusetts Bay Colony banned Christmas festivities from all their public spaces, which would otherwise have been filled with people coming in and out of open establishments, both singing and dancing on the squares.

The City as Ecosystem

If we picture all the people of the world who don’t live in a bucolic village, but in high-rise buildings and apartment blocks, a walk to their local coffee shop can be as liberating as a stroll through the countryside. When going outdoors to meet friends and family necessitates going inside a cafe or a beer house, usually due to weather conditions, we’re still “out on the town.” Likewise, if we meet friends and family outdoors on the square, we’re still inside the city—namely, inside the city’s outside spaces.

Since a city is animated by our family-life, it might be compared to a well-balanced biotic system, where human beings are dependent upon the proper functioning of its particular ecosystem. Whoever wishes to destroy a city doesn’t need to study tactics of war and peace, but the organization of crime and punishment. He needs to destroy its social ecosystem.

Whoever wonders about the causes of urban violence and delinquency needs to study the perpetrators of political violence upon “the urban commons” and the rules and regulations which violate its being.

What Defines a Societal Room

A city without common social gathering spaces is a city which has lost its essential completeness. Urban nature requires societal rooms. Sometimes this is referred to as our “third spaces,” which are neither our homes nor our workplaces, yet they may be some combination of these. Should these spaces be absent from a city, we may be justified in asking if it’s a city at all.

It’s not a question of designing parks and squares, it’s not a question of physical shape and open space which defines a room—rather it’s a question of use and functionality which defines “the urban commons,” that is, a societal room. A narrow alleyway around Montmartre in Paris can become a larger and more welcoming social space than an open boulevard, as an intimate square is often more inviting than a flat space before a bombastic monument.

Nor is there any social benefit in having a flowering garden in front of our townhouses, if our urban gardens are fenced-in and private. Similarly, the landscaped lawns of the nouveau riche serve no purpose if they only serve a visual function. Nor does an urban park, where we can either let our children play on a playground or exercise our domesticated dogs, fulfill the ends of a social gathering space for western civilization.

“The urban commons” is a public living room which has a certain character that defines it, by the simple fact that we walk into it. Equally important is what this social space gives us access to. The original problem of green spaces between our twentieth and twenty-first century apartment blocks is not that they don’t help to humanize the otherwise soulless quality of grey concrete, but that their only real purpose is to express a geographical relationship to which building we live in.

Architecture Prepares Us for Something

Architects have designed a functional space upon which a central garden is surrounded by entrance-ways to various apartment-blocks, where the only function a man or woman can have is the ability to find the right key to a particular door. Yet architecture is not only an art that enables man to do something, it’s also an art that prepares man for something.

We build something for a purpose. A home doesn’t only have a function, it has a form as well. The function of a home is human flourishing, which includes protection from weather and wild beasts, but it also includes form. It includes lines, designs, patterns and the craftsmanship to execute them. Architecture is understanding how form and function work together.

The modern architect Louis Kahn famously defined the architectural plan as a “society of rooms.” Since every urban society needs designated rooms for social interaction, these “third spaces” need to contain an array of establishments and businesses in which this interaction is made possible. Something needs to be happening on “the urban commons” beyond the fact that we happen to be standing there. There must be a reason for our fellow citizens to want to go there as well.

An open space doesn’t become a societal room by people using it as a meeting point; rather, “the urban commons” is defined by the public sphere meeting the private sphere. Whether citizens meet each other in the street or on a square, an open space will never become a common room without certain public functions having their permanent address in those places and spaces.

The Qualitative City

A city may be understood qualitatively as a place where we can exit our homes and soon enter a common room. It’s not defined quantitatively by the number of people we meet, but by the qualitative experience of having our needs met. The urban life is very different from the rural life. The urban life is not defined by the number of people around us, but by the number of places we can walk to.

We must be able to walk to the bookshop to buy novels and to the butcher to buy meat. We must be able to buy flowers and a fedora in the same neighborhood. We must be able to attend Mass or to order a Martini, we must be able to sit down or to remain standing, we must be free to speak or free to hold our tongues. We must live in a city where we are free to choose vice, but encouraged to choose virtue.

The sign of a healthy urban environment is if we keep our urban forms vibrant and dynamic—which is to say that we keep “the urban commons” open and alive for the various activities which define a city. These spaces are informed by an assembly of people who follow the natural rhythms of the city, instinctually knowing what to encourage and what to discourage among its members.

Pax et Bonum!

C. W. Höjer

Next: how suburbs, parking lots, and transit deserts dismantle the urban commons—and how cities die when their shared spaces are abandoned.

When I wrote to you last, I was still in Kansas City, surrounded by shelves being emptied and books whose destinations I did not yet know. I write now from a rented house in East Cork, a short drive from Ballymaloe, where Sally is spending her days at the cookery school.

The house in Kansas City still exists. We still rent it. In a few weeks we will return and begin the work of packing it up in earnest. Between now and then there will be Rome, and then Istanbul. I am not sure whether this counts as leaving a place or postponing the act of leaving it.

You wrote that when one is moving the veil feels as thin as wax paper. I have been thinking about that since I read it.

A few days ago, while Sally was at Ballymaloe, I took Crispin and Clemence to Youghal.

The town sits at the mouth of an estuary. We walked the old walls, which still stand above the rooftops, and wandered into St. Mary’s church. There is a stone there, very old, worn smooth by generations of hands. I put my own hand against it. It was cool, despite the warmth of the summer day.

Both children touched it. Crispin with the impatience of someone already half-turned toward the next thing. Clemence more slowly, her hand flat against the stone for a moment before she too was looking elsewhere.

It is her hand I remember.

She will not remember any of it. She is too young. The stone has been touched by over six hundred years of hands and will be touched by more, and hers was among them for a moment this week, and she will never know it happened.

What has gone missing since arriving here is not any particular object. It is familiarity itself. The shops are different. The roads are different. Even the way people give directions is different.

And yet, after a few days, something else begins. A child runs ahead. A hand goes flat against an old stone. Someone carries groceries home along a street I have never walked. New friends make room for one more chair in their courtyard. I do not immediately recognize the place, but I begin to recognize what is happening in it.

You wrote that the road will continue to reveal itself. For the moment ours runs through Cork. Soon it turns toward Rome and then Istanbul, and then back to the house we have not yet finished leaving.

I have not yet begun to pack it.

Next: July 2026

The road from Ballymaloe to Youghal runs east through hedges, wet fields, and small settlements that seem less arranged than grown. One has the sense, driving it, that East Cork still remembers how to belong to itself.

At Ballymaloe this instinct appears first through food. The gardens, the bread, the butter, the slow confidence of meals built from what the surrounding land can actually provide — all of it rests on the assumption that culture begins locally, that a place should know what grows there, what the sea gives, what the season allows. The undeniable achievement of the Allen family is not merely culinary. It is civilizational in miniature. They have built a world from the logic of the local and proximity.

A few miles away, Youghal expresses the same instinct in stone.

The Walls and the Estuary

The old walls still stand above the town. You climb a narrow passage and suddenly the estuary opens beneath you: slate roofs, gulls, the slow width of the Blackwater moving toward the sea. Underfoot the wall is uneven, worn smooth by centuries of feet. Dating to around 1250, these are the most intact and complete town walls in the Irish Republic — nearly a mile and three-quarters of battlemented stone, curving from the Raleigh Quarter down toward the Clock Gate, with the Half-Moon Tower still standing to its full height along the way.

The town has modern traffic now, pharmacies, parked cars, takeaway signs. But the form remains. The walls still tell the town where it ends.

This matters more than modern people tend to understand.

A wall is not only a defense. It is a declaration that a place possesses shape. Medieval towns assumed that human life required boundaries in order to become intelligible. Outside lay fields, marsh, uncertainty. Inside lay market, parish, guild, memory, obligation. The wall was less about exclusion than coherence. I often think of the Lorenzetti frescoes in Siena, where the painted wall between city and countryside is crossed by a single gate—the wall defends, the gate welcomes, and the two are in conversation rather than opposition. Youghal makes that allegory literal, just as well as Siena, and lets you walk along the top of it.

St Mary’s

You feel this most strongly in St Mary’s Collegiate Church, nestled within the walls in the Raleigh Quarter. The wooden roof rises overhead like the hull of an overturned ship—fitting, in a port town that prayed for safe arrivals. Light falls softly along the stone. Monuments from vanished centuries still crowd the interior: the marble Boyle family monument reaching almost to the roof, an older carved stone bearing the etched outline of a Viking longship, and the chest from which Cromwell is said to have delivered a funeral oration in 1649.

Yet it is a smaller thing that lingers in the memory. Set beneath a pointed arch is a thirteenth-century double piscina, worn smooth by centuries of use. Here priests washed the vessels used at Mass, the water returning directly to the earth beneath the church. A narrow slit remains in the stone between the basins. For generations visitors have passed a finger through it and offered a prayer. The stone itself has become a record not of events but of repetition: hands reaching, prayers spoken, water poured away. Standing there, watching a child place her hand upon the same worn surface, it was difficult to know where memory ended and participation began.

One does not experience the building primarily as an attraction but as continuity. Founded around 1220, St Mary’s was built for the celebration of the Mass, and much of what gives the church its character still bears the imprint of that purpose. The piscina remains in the wall where priests once washed the vessels; the long roof still shelters a space ordered toward prayer. Centuries of religious and political change have passed through Ireland since then, yet the building endures, carrying traces of the faith that raised it.

Today it is cared for by Cork County Council while the Church of Ireland congregation gathers there each week. Whatever changes history has brought, the visitor remains conscious that these stones were first shaped by the sacramental imagination of medieval Christendom. The church survives not merely as a monument to the past but as a reminder that prayer leaves traces more durable than the generations that offer it.

The Clock Gate

Then there is the Clock Gate at the center of town, traffic still passing beneath it as it has for generations. It was completed in 1777 on the site of an older medieval gate, and for a time it served as the town jail — a beautiful thing built over a hard one, as so much civic architecture is. The old gate was never wholly removed because the town never entirely surrendered the idea that its inherited form meant something. Three clock faces look down over Main Street, all showing, reassuringly, the same hour.

Places That Still Know Themselves

Modern development usually begins by dissolving such limits. The bypass, the retail park, the chain restaurant, the parking lot: each treats land as interchangeable with every other piece of land. Place becomes surface. The result is efficiency accompanied by a strange spiritual weightlessness.

We have built a civilization that asks us, almost everywhere, to navigate rather than to dwell — to drive between functions spread far apart, to assemble a life from interchangeable parts. It works, after a fashion. But it forgets the older wisdom that a town, like a meal, is better when it is rooted in a particular patch of earth and knows what that earth can give.

The Living Answer

But in East Cork another possibility still flickers.

At Ballymaloe, food remains tied to the surrounding fields. In Youghal, the town still remembers its walls. Both insist, in different ways, that a good life cannot be entirely abstracted from geography. Human beings require forms that place them in conversation with a specific patch of earth.

The food school and the walled town are the same idea in two forms. One draws its boundary around a kitchen garden and a coastline; the other around a parish and an estuary. Neither is a museum-piece. The walls of Youghal defend nothing now, and the gardens of Ballymaloe feed a school rather than a fortress—but both are alive, both are working, both still say “here, and not everywhere; this, and not anything.”

And perhaps that is why these places feel restful in a way modern environments rarely do. They have not escaped history. They have simply remained located within it.

Pax et Bonum!

C.W. Höjer

Florence has often been hailed as the most beautiful city in the world and blessed are those tourists or residents who can judge this claim for themselves in the footsteps of Dante, Michelangelo and Brunelleschi. But if we spend a day sitting on Piazza Santo Spirito, in the Oltrarno neighborhood, we may actually gain a better understanding of city-living in this Tuscan town than any amount of information we may acquire on the many walking tours offered by the tourist board.

If we take the time to spend such a day watching as life passes us by on a city square, we will probably learn more about urban phenomena than any amount of academic research promises to attain for us.

Dawn

At dawn, with the first rays of the new rising sun displacing the moon, the piazza wakes from her slumber. A church door flings open for morning Mass. The creaking of old carts announces the arrival of the vegetable sellers. They’re lifting boxes, carrying bags, opening parasols and securing their tables. Then they’re joined by the fruit sellers, the clothing vendors, the cheese makers, the butchers and the bakers. All of them bring their treasures to the square as they’ve done all year, in every season, since time immemorial.

The first customers arrive in lockstep with the morning rays which begin to shine through an alleyway and bathe a curve of the square in light. In that sunny spot, the first coffee shop opens its doors to the local patrons, the young and the old, who enjoy a pastry, a cappuccino and the headlines of a newspaper. The relaxed authenticity of the piazza feels natural, inviting us into its ecosystem.

An elegant gentleman leaves the cafe in mid-conversation with the barista on his way to the office. A group of languid locals discuss soccer and politics over a cigarette as they lean against the fountain at the piazza’s heart. As the golden globe of the sun rises higher over the rooftops, the population increases in both density and volume across the square. In the space of a few hours all of the businesses have opened their doors to the public.

Midday

Then the pace begins to quicken as the various eateries, the Osteria and the Trattoria, begin to prepare for lunchtime. Each owner scurries around his establishment, preparing the outside tables, expertly aligning them in order to occupy his allotted section of the public living-room. Lunchtime coincides with that wandering light of Heaven we call the sun. If one stands upright to look at the clouds, one can almost count the seconds until the sun reaches its zenith in the sky.

Within arms reach of the perfectly medieval market sellers, we sit and eat from dishes piled high with the same seasonal delicacies that they are selling: fresh spinach, beans or tomatoes in paper cartons, fresh spinach, beans or tomatoes on our plates, and rotten spinach, beans or tomatoes in the gutter. We hear orders for *affettati, crostini, crostoni, schiacciata, trippa, lampredotto, patate, fagioli all’uccelletto, spinaci, peposo, frattaglie, ribollita, pappardelle, pappa al pomodoro*—not forgetting the jewel of the Tuscan kitchen: La Bistecca.

The well known aroma of gnocchi under a truffle sauce emanates from the hands of a waiter as he passes our table.

Afternoon

When we begin to consider a dessert, the market stalls are taken down as vendors pack up their goods to gain some rest before another early start the following morning. Now the municipal cleaning crews arrive in the piazza to collect their scattered debris. The street sweepers brush the cobblestones until doves search in vain for seeds and scraps. The lull of the siesta settles over Piazza Santo Spirito.

The eateries close for the afternoon, but the wine-vendor keeps an open door for the rest of the day. When he’s not selling bottles of Chianti, he runs a bar for the people dipping in and out of the square. Leaning our elbows against his wooden counter, we gaze out over the square where satisfied diners disperse into alleyways to other corners of the city. Students and professors, priests and tourists, move together across the public living room, which has been transformed from an arena into a crossroads, for suddenly no one has their daily business here anymore.

Therefore it seems quite natural for us to take a stroll through the surrounding streets ourselves, in search of new cultural delights, while we wait for something to happen.

Evening

Every time we cut across the square, as dusk draws nearer, we notice a change. When the first glimmer of evening coats the city with an orange hue and the golden glow from the lampposts becomes more pronounced, there’s some movement behind the doorways. Suddenly people emerge from inside their establishments and start to animate Piazza Santo Spirito once more.

Voices raise their volume again and there’s the sound of aperitivo with clinking glasses, filled to the brim with Aperol Spritz. It’s a wonderful sight, as the drink’s bright orange liquid matches the hues of the sunset. Out on the square it’s the hour of whimsy and revelry. Someone strums a guitar, friends embrace over the cobblestones and we grab one of the few empty tables ourselves. Where we sit we can recognize the faces of those who have visited and revisited this square throughout the day.

Night

The piazza is still alive as shadows fall when the sun goes down, fueled by food and drinks, chance meetings and conversations over the dinner tables. As we finish the last bites of our Florentine meals, the entire square transforms itself into one giant bar as sitting guests combine their parties and others stand or perch with their friends.

First as night draws near around midnight, one can experience Piazza Santo Spirito as an abandoned living room. Only Cosimo Ridolfi, opposite the church, stands alone on his pedestal. He was the founder of l’Accademia dei Georgofili which promotes the “art of Tuscan cultivation”—in other words the arts of agronomy, economy and geography.

What the Piazza Teaches

This rhythm—dawn to midnight, market to meal to gathering to silence—isn’t planned by urban designers or mandated by zoning boards. It emerges from the simple fact that the piazza serves multiple purposes throughout the day, that it belongs to no single use or user, that it accommodates the full spectrum of urban life.

In the morning it’s a marketplace. At noon it’s a dining room. In the afternoon it’s a crossroads. At evening it’s a gathering place. At night it’s a bar. And through all of this, it remains a public living room—a space that belongs to everyone precisely because it’s claimed by no one exclusively.

This is what good cities understand: urban space works best when it can transform itself throughout the day, when it serves the baker at dawn and the student at dusk, when it welcomes the priest to Mass and the guitarist to play, when the same cobblestones that host a vegetable market in the morning become a stage for conversation at night.

The tourists who rush through Florence collecting photographs of monuments miss this essential truth. The real beauty of the city isn’t in its museums or churches, magnificent though they are. It’s in the daily rhythm of a square that knows how to be many things to many people, that pulses with life from sunrise to midnight, that creates space for the full range of human activity without needing to announce what it’s for.

Piazza Santo Spirito doesn’t need signs or rules to function. It needs only what it has: good proportions, human scale, flexibility of use, and a community that knows how to inhabit it. Everything else—the market, the meals, the music, the conversation—follows naturally from these simple conditions.

This is the lesson every modern city planner should learn by spending a day on a Florentine piazza: don’t design for a single use or a single hour. Design for transformation. Design for rhythm. Design for life as it actually unfolds across the course of a day, and trust that people will know what to do with space that truly belongs to them.

Pax et Bonum!

C.W.Höjer

Slowly. Without plan. From what we notice.

Letter I

You are in New Zealand and I am in Kansas City, and for a week I have been trying to write the first sentence of this letter.

This morning I could not find my copy of the Purgatorio. It is not where it should be.

I stood in front of the shelf longer than I needed to. At some point I realized I had already stopped thinking of this house as the place where things are where I left them.

I did not look for it anywhere else. There are other books on the shelf that are not where I remember leaving them, but I have not checked them closely. It seemed possible that I would find them and that they would not be the same books I thought they were. I left the room without deciding anything about it.

Sally was in the dining room when I came through, folding something that had already been folded once. I think it was one of the children’s things, but I did not look closely. There are a few boxes now, not many. Some of them are open. Nothing in them seems finished. The house is still in use, but not in the same way.

It occurs to me, a little after the fact, that I have already begun to think of this place as something that will need to be remembered rather than something that can still be relied on. I am not sure when that happened. It is not something I decided.

There are rooms I pass through now without fully entering them. Not because there is anything in them that I am avoiding, but because they no longer seem to require the same kind of attention. I notice that I am already moving differently through the house, more quickly in some places, more slowly in others.

Outside, the street is the same. A car passed while I was standing there, slowly, as if the driver were looking for something. I did not recognize it. The trees have begun to change, but not fully. There are a few days now where the light stays longer than expected, and then disappears all at once.

There is a point in the late afternoon when the house feels briefly suspended. The children are still occupied somewhere else, the evening has not yet begun, and there is nothing that requires immediate attention. It is at that hour that the shift is most noticeable, though I would not have known to look for it if it had not already been underway.

You are already further along in this than I am. I imagine there are things there that no longer feel provisional, even if they are not yet secure. Or perhaps it is the opposite. I do not know how it appears from your side.

There are objects in the house that I have not decided about. Not large things. Books mostly, and a few smaller things that do not seem to belong to any category that would justify carrying them or leaving them. I have moved some of them more than once.

There is a drawer in the bedroom that I opened yesterday without remembering why. Inside it were things that had not been touched for some time. I recognized them, but not in a way that required anything of me. I closed the drawer again without taking anything out. Later, I could not remember which drawer it had been.

The Purgatorio has not reappeared. I have not asked anyone about it.

I have begun, without fully admitting it, to think of certain things as no longer belonging to this place, though they have not yet been removed from it. This includes not only objects but habits — ways of moving through the day that seem less necessary now. There are moments where I notice myself beginning something and then stopping, not because it cannot be finished, but because it no longer seems to lead anywhere that remains.

At the same time, nothing has been formally concluded. The routines of the day continue. Meals are prepared. Conversations take place. There is no outward sign that anything has changed, except perhaps in the small pauses that have begun to appear where there used to be continuity.

I am writing this at the table where I usually sit, but the arrangement of things on it has changed slightly. There is more space than there was before, though nothing has been fully removed. It is not an emptying, exactly. Something closer to a loosening.

I have not yet begun to say goodbye to anything.

Next: May 2026

On an inscription above the door to Plato’s academy it was written, “Let none but geometers enter here.” Geometry naturally set limits upon how many ways one can draw up a plan for an urban republic such as the one Plato dreamed about. Squares and triangles can be repeated in a regulated pattern, where every latter section resembles the preceding section.

When all of our facades represent buildings which follow a right-angled street, it’s natural to expect that every street will eventually meet another street between four corner buildings on a crossroad. Several villages, towns and cities, but even more neighborhoods, are designed according to such a pattern.

The Grid and Its Discontents

The right-angled city is the easiest to draw and the grid-planned city is the quickest to build. It’s also the easiest to map out and the most convenient design for accommodating automobiles. But it’s not always the easiest for mankind to find his way around in, oriented as we are towards the multifaceted truth of life and not the mere fact of life.

Since all forms are strictly speaking geometric, every urban block in such a neighborhood of buildings are thus the same, making it impossible to lose our way, perhaps, but very difficult to recognize where we are. Any tourist who’s ever wandered around the Haussmann districts of Paris must be forgiven if he forgets which streets leads him to or from the Bois de Boulogne. The same experience is reported wherever his geometric legacy has cast a light or a shadow over the urban plan, such as the Prati district of Rome, the Östermalm neighborhood of Stockholm, and the 1909 Plan of Chicago.

The Limits of Geometric Planning

Every student of Euclidean geometry knows that mathematical figures can be organized in many ways. They can be ordered according to an intellectual axis of parallels and crosses, or they can be organized according to a central principle such as the masculine rectangle and a multifaceted pentagon. They might even be organized with the sharp, dramatic angles of two overlapping squares which jut out like a star. Or they might be linked together in a softer, more feminine pattern, such as the oval or semicircle and according to other irregularities which help to make the urban space more inviting and welcoming.

However, the latter, more feminine approach, has never been the preferred method for a comprehensive urban plan. The overwhelmingly male theoreticians have since time almost-immemorial confirmed that we have the grid pattern, the axis pattern, and the central pattern to choose from. They add that we can either categorize our cities into the classical tightly enclosed city, the modern openly functionalist city, or the city within a garden of the “city beautiful movement.”

Hence, there is nothing we would call an irregular city. Yet every city we can think of is blatantly irregular. How can this be?

The Reality Beyond the Blueprint

Even if every city we visit has its roots in an original principle of urban organization, even if all the neighborhoods of these cities together exemplify every type of pedagogical pattern, the fate of human mortality have without exception altered the original plan. Urban development has passed through so many contrasting epochs and its evolution has passed through so many competing considerations that the result has almost universally become a sort of architectural potpourri.

Guidebooks in hand, we begin to make out combinations of these various schools of urban renewal and then combinations of certain elements of these architectural schools, until the parade of human endeavor reaches a point where we surpass Euclid’s geometry. In this new non-Euclidean geometry we enter a world that is no longer a flat blueprint, but a spherical plane, where universal definitions give way to nominalist ones, beyond numbers and names, into a more rounded reality. One might even say into a more inviting, feminine, irregularity.

Happily, we don’t need to visit a university lecture on urban logic and postmodern mathematics to perceive this reality.

A Walk Through Rome’s Irregularity

Let’s take another stroll down the streets of Rome, the most urban of all the cities in the world. Let’s exit Rome from the Porta Flaminia, the northernmost gate of the city. Then we quickly enter an area known as Quartiere Flaminio for those that don’t live there, but which is an area with many neighborhoods for those who have their addresses here.

It runs from the famed gate re-dedicated by the popes to the convert regent, Queen Christina of Sweden, and then extends over Via Flaminia across the Ponte Milvio bridge where Emperor Constantine had his famed battle against Maxentius, which initiated Rome’s conversion to Catholicism. From an urban planning perspective, these neighborhoods are only united by a series of disunited areas, yet such wounds in the design-pattern have an organic tendency to heal nicely as intriguing scars.

We walk through grid patterns and axis patterns; through a grid pattern between the Porta Flaminia and the Marine Ministry, through an axis pattern when Via Guido Reni decides to divide a grid pattern in half. In the grand bird’s-eye view perspective, Rome cannot be said to have any central axis in this area, but when we’re walking through the streets the urban experience is more of a worm’s-eye view perspective.

In many places we see that streets will break off into other roads or diversions, as when a beam of light is broken into other colorful directions through a glass prism. Suddenly the beam of light that was Via Guido Reni is broken by Piazza Apollodoro where it dances around the Palazzetto dello Sport. Then we can be thrown back into Piazza dei Carracci where a slightly crooked Via Flaminia will carry us to the Oratorio di Sant’Andrea, and before we know it we’ve been placed on the banks of the Tiber River.

Perspective Shapes Reality

The entire walk is composed of such street patterns which, formed by a developmental law, explain why Via Flaminia is the axis of a grid-pattern when we approach it from the south through Porta Flaminia, but becomes a central radius when we approach it from the north into the round traffic circle of Piazza dei Ponte Milvio.

A street’s nature is namely not only dependent upon its architectural direction, but upon the pedestrian’s direction when he walks the street. In other words, our perspective is conditioned by our point of departure; where we stand governs what we see.

If we continue on our walk within these variations of urban construction, we soon come upon yet another combination: the enclosed city which opens itself up, as a flower, towards a city within a garden. Finding our way through Via Condotti up the stairs of The Spanish Steps to Viale Trinità dei Monti, where the grid-pattern is dutifully preserved, we find the famous villas of Villa Medici, Casa Valadier and Villa Borghese which soften and break apart both the urban grid-pattern and the tightly enclosed city.

The first thing we notice is not that organic urban organization contains within itself such a mixture of developments, but that it’s in these irregular transitions where we know where we are, where we don’t feel the same necessity to look at a map to know where we are. The utopian geometry of past architects hold no stronger power than that the gardens of Villa Borghese become a wandering milestone along our walk through the city. It’s organic, it’s natural, it’s reflective of our humanity.

Even pedantic formalists with elbow patches and logarithm tables must admit that Dante found his way back home through a wild wood, having lost his way on the straight and true.

The Lesson of Siena

By studying a map of the town of Siena, in Tuscany, we can see that it has a completely intact medieval wall surrounding the old town, which, in turn, still represents the historical core of the surrounding new town. A bird’s-eye view of the town clearly shows us that medieval and renaissance Siena, protected by a Medici-family fortress outside its city wall, lies as the heart of a larger urban body which has continued to grow with a more modern plan, representing the new riches of a new age.

We can clearly see that the modern town is regulated by a more functionalist city plan which takes over the cityscape right outside the brick walls. These new roads and traffic circles leave the ancient gates as they wind their way around the natural landscape as so many wide strands of pappardelle pressed through a pasta machine.

The bird’s-eye view also tells us that history has bequeathed to posterity a towering gothic church, an open square, crooked streets and bent alleyways.

However, I still remember the first time I visited there, when I came upon an important realization: in the modern neighborhoods of Siena, where livelihoods depend on commerce and industry, reflected in the straight and true of a well-regulated urban design, we lose our way. But, once we enter within the city walls, the bent alleyways and crooked streets of the historical center unceasingly leads one by the hand—manuductio—to the public living room beneath Town Hall, Piazza del Campo.

In other words, while maps never lie, mapmakers do, for bird’s-eye views can never replace the experience of treading across those medieval streets.

When Theory Meets Reality

Architects tend to be passionate cartographers. They can enclose themselves within their minds, within their studios, and draw maps of a city they would like to build. They feel an inherent need to form spatial solutions across a wide plane, to hold a blueprint of reality in their hands. Admittedly it’s an important aspect of the visual intellect, but it’s a poor imitation of the reality outside their studios.

Something amazing tends to happen when we walk outside to meet the world, namely, the world comes to meet us in turn. It was in the month of April when I first strove around the medieval streets of Siena, and I was on my way from Rome to Florence. In the regional bus that took me there I had been studying a local map shortly before I saw the hilltop town appear through my passenger-side window.

I had heard about this famous tourist attraction, so I expected to find a cultural exhibition of an otherwise dead city within its walls. After we had pulled into the parking lot before a church dedicated to Saint Catherine of Siena, I no longer felt the need to study my map, for I had, so to speak, stepped into it.

Moments beyond the first city gate my feet were led by a cobblestoned guide through the myriad labyrinth, where after a few minutes I stood under the shade of the Torre del Mangia, next to Town Hall on the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo. From the piazza, I could count eleven narrow streets which radiated into the cityscape.

The Categories of Beauty

I remembered something I had read about the categories of beauty, for around me I saw Integritas, “wholeness,” in its harmony with the ground, I saw Consonantia, “proportionately,” in the symmetry and arc of the Gothic houses, and I saw Claritas, “radiance,” in the sunburst pattern of the concave square.

As I marveled at the beautiful vitality of the commerce and its patrons, I understood that this was no dead exhibition—the urban organization was an organism. The city didn’t just contain life, no, life contained the city!

Somewhere outside this square, outside the walls, the modern Italian city had been constructed according to the dictums of functionalism in order to facilitate efficiency and materialism, yet a university campus displayed many more invigorating signs of diversity and vitality. However, between those medieval walls from the age of Christendom, in a city which could never compete with modern industry or transportation, there passed a breath of fresh inspiration.

I thought to myself: a contemporary life can also look like this, and children can grow up here as well. I filled my lungs with this healthy spirit, as I sat down to drink a cappuccino. I had walked into a piazza, for I was inside a city, where one is never outside, but always at home, within a community under Heaven.

What Siena Teaches Us About Good Cities

The lesson of Siena is profound and simple: the crooked medieval streets lead us home more surely than the rational modern grid. Not because irrationality is superior to reason, but because human wayfinding operates on principles deeper than Euclidean geometry.

We find our way through landmarks, through memorable turns, through the experience of moving through space toward a destination we can sense even before we see it. The medieval builders of Siena understood this intuitively. They built streets that followed the contours of the hill, that created memorable vistas, that channeled movement naturally toward the center.

The modern planners outside Siena’s walls built streets for automobiles and abstract efficiency. They created a landscape where every block looks like every other block, where finding your way requires constant reference to a map, where there are no natural gathering places because there is no natural center.

The Final Question

This series has explored how cities embody moral and political visions, how they contain nested hierarchies of belonging, how different urban organisms achieve unity through different means, and how geometry both enables and limits urban life.

The fundamental question remains: Are our cities made for virtue or for greed? Do they facilitate human flourishing or commercial efficiency? Do they create spaces where communities can form naturally, or do they impose abstract patterns that ignore how humans actually navigate and inhabit space?

Siena, with its crooked medieval streets that lead unfailingly to the communal heart, offers one answer. The grid-planned suburbs and functionalist districts offer another. The choice between them is not aesthetic—it’s moral. It’s about what we believe cities are for, and therefore what we believe human beings are for.

Every zoning decision, every street plan, every choice to preserve or demolish, to build high or low, to prioritize cars or pedestrians, to create public squares or private developments—all these seemingly technical decisions are actually theological and philosophical statements about the nature and purpose of human life.

Not all cities are created equal. Some lead us home. Others leave us perpetually consulting maps, searching for a center that was never built.

Pax et Bonum!

C.W. Höjer

This concludes this little series on good and bad government in place and time. From the drama of urban virtue to the nested hierarchies of community, from Rome’s unity to Istanbul’s reinvention, from abstract geometry to lived experience—we’ve explored what makes cities good or bad not just aesthetically, but morally and politically.

The question now is: What will we build? And for whom?

As a tourist our plane or train ticket may say that Rome, Italy, is our destination, but it may quickly occur to us that as we step out of our taxi we’ve arrived in Parioli instead. Parioli is a neighborhood that was developed in the nineteenth century as an autonomous community for the new bureaucrats of a unified Italy. It lies in the heart of Rome, on the far side of Villa Borghese, but is a rather unpretentious residential area in comparison to the monumental buildings of the centro storico, “the historical center.”

On the other side of the Tiber River we can be charmed, even mesmerized, by Trastevere, which was the ancient neighborhood of plebeians and foreigners. It was here that Saints Peter and Paul preached the gospel, making it the original place of Christian conversion and conversation. You may also travel outside the walls of Rome to a rather uninteresting neighborhood called Garbatella, which wasn’t incorporated into the city until Mussolini’s fascist regime.

The Mystery of Urban Experience

In other words, the western tourist can spend days and weeks in Rome without being introduced to the majority of the urban environments which constitute modern Rome. One can also visit Rome for a day and be guided to everything Roman in atmosphere and sense experience from the taste of Spaghetti Alfredo to the incense at St. Peter’s Church and the wonder of The Roman Forum.

Likewise, one can pore over every detail on the syllabus, use every minute to the study of theology and politics, to the developing visions of Roman empire, lend one’s ear to the music of Palestrina, train one’s eyes to the architecture of Bernini, walk with one’s nose inside a book for weeks on end, and still not form a relationship with Rome as a living society.

A disappointing and unduly expensive espresso in the Piazza Navona, or a successful dinner on a mistaken outing to the wrong neighborhood, can make or break one’s experience of the city. How could it be otherwise, when men and women were created for love and life and not for facts?

The City as Organism

Every cosmos, every urban society, is an organic construction built by people and for people, but it’s also a living organism in and of itself. The matter of our cities is composed of wood and stone, steel and glass, cement and marble. Its shape and design is constituted by families and individuals, social classes and worker’s guilds, craftsmen and builders, while the end or purpose of our cities is informed by religion and politics, poetry and architecture, fashions and values.

This means that our cities are as interesting and intriguing as the people who inhabit them, requiring an equal amount of caution and receptivity to gain their trust, the same amount of psychological tact and social creativity, a similar cultivation of dialogue, in order to form a lasting friendship. This is why one can fall in love with a city, as one can fall in love with a person.

It was therefore no idle dream when Leonardo da Vinci presented his Vitruvian Man as the ideal for architectural proportions and man’s body as an analogy, in microcosm, for the workings of the universal cosmos.

Istanbul: The City That Contains Everything

A global metropolis often contrasted with The Eternal City of Rome is Istanbul, sometimes known by its classical name, Constantinople. Istanbul is a world capital if not a national capital, on the edge of western civilization and it’s the largest European city by population.

It’s been said that migrating Turkish horsemen in the eleventh century stopped some Greek farmers in the fields of Anatolia to ask them what they saw on the horizon and where they were heading. The farmers looked up from their labor and answered them, “eis Tçn Polin,” you’re heading “to The City,” hence the development of the name Istanbul. Like its imperial counterpart in the west, which was simply known as “Urbs,” Constantinople was simply known as “Polis.”

Istanbul can be an informative example of how a city resembles the people that inhabit it and how to interpret her social and historical cues. For example, after several days of sightseeing around the Bosporus one can gain the uncomfortable feeling of having admired every major sight, except for Istanbul. Istanbul is a myriad of impressions containing all of western civilization. Arguably it has everything, but it can also be argued that that’s all it has.

Not all cities are created equal for not all cities are the sum of its parts—some cities are greater than its parts, while some cities are less. As we search for the heart of Istanbul, an Istanbulian spirit, we’re calculating our experience according to this measure.

The Search for Istanbul

Visiting the “New Rome,” we’ve been spellbound by Hagia Sophia and admired the Blue Mosque. We’ve visited the underground chambers of ancient Constantinople, we’ve wandered through the hallways of the Topkapi Palace to gaze at The Spoonmaker’s Diamond, and we’ve crossed into the Besiktas neighborhood to visit the Dolmabahçe Palace, home of the last Caliph and the first residence of Atatürk.

We’ve been mesmerized by the Spice Bazaar in the Eminönü neighborhood and played the western intellectual at the Pier Loti cafe overlooking the Golden Horn. We’ve even visited The Patriarchal Cathedral of St. George, seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch, to think about religious unity and division. We’ve found our favorite coffee bar on Algerian Street, behind the Galatasaray High School, which after a few days of tourism we can almost find without directions.

We’ve even walked to the Galata Tower, where we climbed its staircase to enjoy the panorama over Istanbul from its observation deck. It was originally built by emperor Justinian, but was later rebuilt for the Genoese colony as the Holy Cross Tower, before the Muslim Ottomans claimed it as their own after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

And yet, with The City at our feet, we feel the need to ask ourselves: where is Istanbul?

The Field and the Garden

Istanbul contains all these things and the things beyond them, but it’s also none of these things too, and it’s also more than the things we see, for it contains multitudes. Precisely in the recognition that a great city has so many parts to it, lies the realization that it would still be itself without a great deal of them. Istanbul would still be Istanbul without the Hagia Sophia, but not without that urban tradition which could beget something like the Hagia Sophia.

This parental relationship is exemplified by an old French adage: Dans l’art comme dans la nature, on est toujours fils de quelqu’un,” which translates, “in art as in nature, we are always someone’s child.”

Istanbul is not the Pier Loti cafe, but the Pier Loti cafe is very typical for Istanbul. We sit with a Turkish coffee at a round table on which we placed a copy of his book Aziyadé, overlooking the Golden Horn, with a commanding view over the European as well as the Asian banks of the Bosporus. Several historical neighborhoods lie under our feet. It’s as if we were sitting inside an aerial postcard, yet we don’t have the impression that it resembles what we’ve experienced down on the streets among its people and buildings.

We know we’re in Istanbul, yet we sit and stare at Istanbul as if we were in another time and place. Later, when we rise from our table to wander down into the city again, we’re not stepping into that panoramic postcard. Instead, as we return to Istanbul, we return to the bustling energy of the city, and as we return we notice how Istanbul disappears into its component parts again.

The imminent experience is a very existential one, which may be compared to a field of soil where you wish to build a beautiful garden, of which the Muslim world has so many. As soon as our garden is completed, our field has disappeared. We know the field is still there because our garden grows upon it, but in this field there is no longer any field to be seen, but a garden.

Istanbul’s Dynamic Personality

By such imaginative ways we begin to understand the urban history of Istanbul. We start to comprehend that even if the city is ancient, Istanbul is a modern city. Its history from Roman capital to Catholic empire, from Christian bulwark to Muslim caliphate, from Ottoman stronghold to Turkish Republic, is a story of developing modernity.

It becomes quite clear that Istanbul has a dynamic personality, which consists in constantly reinventing itself by displacing its own past. It’s by studying its broken trajectories along streets which speak of ideological and religious conflicts, political renewal and social revolutions, that we see how Istanbul nevertheless has become Istanbul.

The city has grown through such diverse and violent eras, from the eastern capital of the Roman Empire, of which there are so many memories around the Hagia Sophia, to Atatürk’s muslim democracy in the Twentieth century, that we must utilize reading glasses with an “archaeological prescription” in order to catch sight of Istanbul in all of Istanbul.

Tourists are not prepared for this, for in contrast to Rome Istanbul doesn’t notify us when we walk from one historical era to the next, as we climb up and down its layered history. It rather seems to tell us an opposite narrative, that a haphazard history has at different moments sprinkled its cultural parsley over Istanbul’s bountiful, divergent, smorgasbord.

The Grand Bazaar as Political Philosophy

This is what confuses us, since it doesn’t lack definitive personality traits, quite the opposite. Eventually we come to recognize that its typical characteristic is a strong desire to show the world that Istanbul can survive everything and everyone, that it can master the cultural balancing act between Asia and Europe.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, in the era of classical Ottoman architecture, Süleyman the Magnificent, challenging both his namesake and referencing Emperor Justinian, is supposed to have boasted: “Solomon, I have surpassed thee!” Nowhere in Turkey is this saying more evident than in Istanbul.

From an empire to a republic, the historical pattern has remained unchanged: Istanbul is more than a city, but it’s a city through being Istanbul, which is to say that it’s a grand bazaar showcasing power, riches and influence. It’s the personification of The Sublime Porte, as Istanbul was once known in diplomatic circles. In its patterns of architecture and summarizing language, the contours of Istanbul’s urban design draw a political silhouette.

It’s striking how the hills of Istanbul have been covered with streets and squares which are meant to express the magnificence of the Ottoman-Turkish empire. We can delight our eyes by admiring Mimar Sinan’s architecture, who designed the Süleymaniye Mosque complex, where we can experience his dynamic designs. He has been compared to Michelangelo, his contemporary in the West, who was building the St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome at the same time.

Two Approaches to Urban Unity

With this in mind, one can’t say that the modern socialist and fascist-inspired Istanbul University or the contemporary Nordic-inspired Istanbul airport are in any way out of place. They’re by point of fact prominent examples of the same manner of assimilation which has always been so dominant throughout Istanbul’s urban history.

It’s at times rather moving—one might say paradoxically—that although the Ottoman Empire is a distant memory, the city still speaks with the same grand Caesarian language, forever under the gaze of Emperor Justinian and Süleyman the Magnificent. This helps to explain why the interlaying neighborhoods, with all their eastern Mediterranean flare, are experienced as idyllic and quaint, happily untouched, as they circle under the wing of these buildings. It’s here, between the tulip-shaped tea cups and endless games of backgammon, that the local Istanbullu live and feel at home, where we can see how a disjointed evolution is typical for Istanbul, while a development of unity is typical for Rome.

What This Reveals About Good Cities

Rome and Istanbul teach us something crucial about urban organisms. Rome has achieved unity through continuity—layer upon layer of development that somehow speaks the same language, from ancient columns to Baroque churches to modern neighborhoods. Even when it changes, Rome remains recognizably Rome.

Istanbul achieves its identity through constant reinvention—by demonstrating that it can absorb and survive anything, by making a virtue of its capacity to be many things at once. Istanbul is Istanbul precisely because it refuses to be any one thing definitively.

Neither approach is inherently superior. But they reveal two fundamentally different philosophies of urban life: one that sees the city as an inheritance to be preserved and extended, another that sees the city as a stage for perpetual transformation and display of power.

The question for every city is: which model serves human flourishing better? Which creates spaces where people can actually live, work, worship, and form communities? Which respects the principle of subsidiarity, allowing neighborhoods to maintain their character while contributing to a coherent whole?

Pax et Bonum!

C.W. Höjer

Next: The Geometry of the City—how urban patterns shape human experience, from the grid to the organic labyrinth.

In his book The Republic, Plato compared cities to caves in his famous Allegory of the Cave, and he pointed out that there are many types of caves in the world. There are even smaller caves within larger caves, as there are many smaller communities within larger communities—a series of plays within the play.

Our big cities contain inside them several smaller cities, which is obvious to anyone who has ever spent time at a university campus.

The University as City

Anyone who has ever visited a university, or toured a university, knows that a university is not just one building, but a whole series of buildings, entire streets of buildings, forming entire neighborhoods, making them in effect a city onto themselves: we might playfully call it a “universe-city.”

We find them inside the safe confines of their own walled-in community, much like the medieval towns of Christendom, who were kept safe behind their own city walls. Passing through the city gate, policed under the strictest supervision, we soon find ourselves standing before a large map. It’s an impressive creation. The map shows us the inner workings of this civic body, how its different buildings refer to each other, how they live off each other, how a gridded network of roads and bridges leads to reception desks and auditoriums, parks and libraries, garages and laundromats, coffee shops and food marts, dormitory rooms and prayer rooms.

All of these separate organs of the university fill social, professional and intellectual roles which fit into a hierarchical system of groups and classes. As soon as we pass through the security checkpoint, the lawmakers confer upon us a function within this ecosystem. Whether we enter as a professor or a janitor, a receptionist or a groundskeeper, a student or a family member, our position is immediately confirmed within this hierarchy, which also communicates to us what role other people play.

Suit jackets and uniforms, habits and gowns, clipboards and notebooks, desks and blackboards, briefcases and backpacks, or camera flashes and flowers, are attributes which identify us anywhere in the city, whether out on the streets or inside rooms or corridors. Our roles become our uniforms rather clearly in a university setting, yet it’s an equally urban casting which identifies us in hotels and hospitals, train stations and government offices.

It’s the design of our cities which has made them into these recognizable organizations. However, it’s not only a form of human craftsmanship, it’s also the city which has shaped us as humans, to the extent that it’s hard to say what came first: our society or our community?

The Medieval Inheritance

As a city within a city, the university was founded for a single purpose: to educate the ignorant. Because of this formal function, the university has to be a specialized society which doesn’t fulfill other needs of the community. But the university receives its purpose within the city from the city which surrounds it. Whatever happens on the university campus is therefore a reflection of the city itself and a contribution to the maintenance of that city.

The word “university” comes from the Latin universitas which means “the whole,” which in medieval Latin came to signify community or society. In the academic sense, this word was a shortening of the phrase universitas magistrorum et scholarium which meant a community of masters and scholars.

In the Emilia-Romagna region, in northern Italy, lies the world’s oldest university, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna. Since the year 1088 when it developed out of the spontaneous and informal initiative of a few students tied to the pre-existing Cathedral schools, Bologna has been a center of Italian learning, quickly lending the city its nickname as La Dotta meaning “The Learned.”

All over Europe, where the temples had previously towered over the market squares, bishops erected Catholic churches dedicated to the early apostles to the pagans. Wall to wall with these Cathedrals there grew, almost organically, these Cathedral schools which then developed into the universities. It was a practical solution to the declining Roman municipal education in the late Roman Empire, when the Roman Catholic Church began to establish schools to provide the church with an educated class of clergy and nobility.

When the university campus continues to protect rules and routines which in significant aspects separate it from the rest of urban society, it’s due to the fact that they developed out of schools run by the Catholic Church. They were founded and run by Catholic religious orders, which in time grew so large that they became cities unto themselves. In addition, they were deeply characterized by the medieval culture and the Mediterranean habits of Christendom.

The Rhythm of Academic Life

When modern students follow an hourly regiment that begins with early morning classes and ends in the afternoon, it’s not because they are necessarily brighter and more energized at dawn, or more able to engage in professional or social life at dusk. It’s an open debate within many societies, especially within the northern hemispheres, if these hours are universally beneficial—it’s simply that these hours are a millennial old inheritance from the academic habits of clerics and religious with roots in the Latin world.

There are three reasons why the academic schedule of our Cathedral schools and Catholic universities developed into their particular time zones:

First, since electricity was yet to be discovered by Benjamin Franklin and since Thomas Edison was yet to invent the lightbulb, daylight from the sun had to be utilized to the greatest possible extent.

Second, the path of the Mediterranean sun across the sky produced an early daybreak and an early sunset throughout the year.

Third, the prayer-life and Mass-schedule of the schools and universities could only be planned before and after their academic obligations.

Neighborhoods as Urban Cells

In this manner we can trace the development of our cities in their various layers of cultural heritage and local inheritance. In this manner we can also trace the outline of how the western man and woman has been shaped by our history, building up a European map that’s sprinkled to the brim with urbane villages and small villages within our great cities, in which we can immediately feel at home without needing to study their design.

The more distant their urban foundations, the more intimately they speak to us today. The ancient streets of central Mantova, Italy, the home of Virgil, will quickly bring you over its Roman foundations to the medieval square of Piazza dell’Erbe. There’s practically no temporal distance between antiquity and modernity as children enthusiastically kick a soccer ball over the cobblestones which is constantly disappearing behind the colonnades. Their delighted screams tell you that western history is here and now.

You’ll never lose your way in the adjacent alleyways, for this neighborhood of Mantova isn’t big enough to cause any disorientation, nor modern enough to inculcate any feeling of cultural alienation. It’s only when a city grows so large that the urban plan consists of many competing urban plans, when we notice their archaeological overlap in space and in time, that we can’t see the forest for the trees, or rather, that we can’t see the city for its villages.

The Nested Hierarchy

Within the great caves that we call our cities, there are many smaller caves. Some of the largest cities in the western world, such as London, New York City and Paris, have many smaller parts to them, with unique social, historical and ethnic differences. These areas appear to be so distinct from one another that they’re practically independent areas, causing the visitor to feel connected to either one village or another, while losing track of the city as a unified whole.

As a visitor explores these various recesses and alcoves of the city, it may soon feel rather burdensome to find the heart of the city, even mentally taxing. In contrast, the local citizen enjoys the existential peace he or she experiences behind the invisible walls of the urban neighborhoods.

It’s quite common to meet local citizens of large metropolitan areas who never explore the historical sights or cultural landmarks of their own cities. They often view their homes as too remote from downtown or the historical center. Perhaps they need to walk for half an hour to reach the Cathedral, Temple or City Hall. They appeal to their local neighborhood as their natural habitat, where they live between small lots and tight shops, between their own houses of prayer and their own coffee bars. That’s where they live, where they work, even where they worship. That’s where they mingle with other families, where they have community.

They never really call their metropolis home, because in actuality they live in an adjacent village to their metropolis, which embodies the concept of home for them.

The Principle of Subsidiarity

If we continue to compare our urban centers to human life, our neighborhoods function as cells within the body within the macrocosm of the city, while the city functions as the microcosm within the universal cosmos surrounding all of us. In this perspective, our childhood bedroom may be compared to the smallest part of a Russian Matryoshka Doll, which in this relationship of an object within a similar object has space for the whole world.

This nesting-doll perspective is still how many American children will write their addresses to Santa Claus: Johnny Smith Jr., 201 Main Street, Town of Lewes, Delaware, USA, North America, The American Continent, The Earth, The Universe. This is a correct hierarchical truth which corresponds to the principle of subsidiarity within traditional Catholic social teaching.

Our conception of place and time is developed in similar degrees and steps. It’s a conception born through personal relationships, whether we grow up in a neighborhood or on a countryside farm. Since our perspectives are completely dependent on our original starting points, whether they are Fernandina Beach or Madrid, Mantova or Copenhagen, our conception of place and time must be gradually uncovered, step by step, doll by doll, in life as in our countries.

What This Reveals About Good Cities

This nested structure of cities within cities reveals something crucial about good urban government: the city works best when it respects and preserves these natural hierarchies of belonging. The good city doesn’t flatten everything into one undifferentiated mass. It allows for the university to be its own world, for neighborhoods to maintain their distinct characters, for communities to self-organize around their particular needs and customs.

The bad city, by contrast, imposes uniformity from above. It tries to manage everything from a central authority, ignoring the principle of subsidiarity that places decision-making at the lowest effective level. It destroys neighborhood character in the name of efficiency or progress. It fails to recognize that people don’t primarily belong to “the city” in the abstract—they belong to this street, this block, this parish, this corner café.

Pax et Bonum!

C.W.Höjer

Next: The City as Living Organism—how Rome and Istanbul embody different approaches to urban unity and diversity.

Not all cities are created equal. When we consider the theatre of life which is performed before our eyes in every city, we see a master play containing many parts, if not every part of life, which is dependent upon a dramatic organization, on the proper roles of its characters, who support one-another as in a well-written script.

This is something we rarely think about. Yet urban histories have developed on the world stage for all to see, in a causal relationship and with an inner logic, which has driven their plot lines with an almost natural determinism. Different cities have told different stories. Some cities have told a story which is better at presenting human reality, while some have prevented us from seeing this same reality. The different forms of urban life arise from a deep relationship between imitation, reason and innovation.

The City as Movement

The urban reality is not simply a place, it is also a human movement towards something and away from something, because if we tell the world what we’re for, then we automatically tell the world what we’re against as well. The human drama is always unfolding towards some end in every city. It has a motive and the motion of human bodies is oriented towards the original commission of mankind, which is the original fulfillment of man’s end—that is, our ultimate values.

In other words, our lawgivers are dramatists and our virtues are reasoned decisions in an unfolding public spectacle. The craft of civic leadership is to rule by our values, making politics a moral dilemma, for any political regime which isn’t leading man to his ultimate end and facilitating that movement is not to be left alone.

The Question of Virtue and Greed

In his book on politics, De Regimine Principum, St. Thomas Aquinas argues that we are raised by our families in order to become virtuous citizens who seek to work with other virtuous citizens to create a very particular type of city: an altruistic society which Jesus names The Kingdom of God. Since the art of politics traditionally falls under the category of moral philosophy, the aim of legislation is the defense of virtue which entails protecting common goods and promoting the public good.

Yet St. Thomas asks the reader to consider what will happen to our cities if common virtue is not the fulfillment of politics—what if it is private greed?

The Sign of the Coin

The sign and symbol of cities motivated by private greed, instead of common virtue, is the coin, which is why the quintessential political story is Jesus’ comments about Caesar’s Roman coin. It’s a story which we find in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.

In all of these accounts the Pharisees question Jesus in order to trick him, that he might convict himself of a civic crime. The question involves whether it is right for Jews to pay the taxes demanded by Caesar. At first, Christ asks his interrogators for a Roman coin, since he never carries money himself. The coin which he holds up for the crowd to see has the image of Caesar Tiberius emblazoned on it with the inscription, “Son of The Divine Augustus.”

When Christ replies to the Pharisees that man should “render onto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” it tends to lead some modern commentators to interpret this as a bifurcation between virtue and politics. But we might ask what precisely is not the property of God? For as the story progresses, Jesus says that what we owe God as citizens is our love with all our heart, mind, soul and strength.

In other words, the divine law is meant to be an invitation for mankind to fulfill his human anthropology. The traditional interpretation of this story is that the Roman coin is shown to be an idol. Therefore, the only thing which we can render unto Caesar is our idolatry, and not our civic virtue, which is meant to be directed toward the common and public good.

The Prophetic Warning About Globalization

In a prophetic description of our globalized world, St. Thomas, quoting Aristotle, writes that if every city is driven by greed, then all people will soon live in one city. In ancient Athens, Aristotle had said that if commerce and trade with other cities is the ultimate end of our urban lives, then international trading laws will need to be formulated which override any national laws on trade, facilitating commerce and private profit.

Coins will need to be minted that are universally accepted. Since capital is designed to unify two parties within a trade agreement, then difference and culture will need to be sacrificed or replaced by uniformity. Customs and rules tend to be diverse from one culture to the next, which builds obstacles to free trade and inhibits the formation of an international financial class.

It’s easy to see that if prices vary according to custom and culture, then trade or exchange cannot be done from abroad but must be done in this or that particular market square, in accordance with the laws of each city. Globalization must therefore carry in its wake the destruction of every dialect, local custom and regionalism, over upon which is constructed a uniformity of aesthetics and philosophical outlook.

Western philosophers, such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, staunchly defend local civic life, by praising the varying forms of urban cultures as opposed to the uniformity of networks.

The Stakes of Urban Design

This opening reflection reveals what’s at stake in how we build and govern our cities. Are they stages for virtue or monuments to greed? Do they cultivate local particularity or global uniformity? Do they facilitate human flourishing toward our proper end, or do they reduce us to economic units in a vast commercial network?

These are not abstract philosophical questions. They manifest in concrete form every day in the choices our cities make: what they build, how they zone, what they permit, what they celebrate, what they preserve, what they demolish. Every street corner, every public square, every neighborhood tells us what the city values—and therefore what it believes human beings are for.

In the posts that follow, we’ll explore how cities embody these competing visions through their actual forms and structures, from the nested communities within great metropolises to the geometric patterns that shape our streets.

Pax et Bonum!

C.W.Höjer

(Next: Cities Within Cities—how great metropolises contain multitudes, and what that reveals about urban life.)

As the night draws to a close along the harbor of Kennebunkport, we’re reminded of an important insight into the birth of America. The original British colonies had to have been made up of many small communities such as Kennebunkport, which were more or less self-governing and living as they saw fit. But between 1776 and 1789 they were famously combined under new political theories by men such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and James Madison.

But how many sons or daughters of New England knew about such theories? It would be far more constructive to look at what was already here in their villages.

Life Before Theory

The abstract ideas within the foundational documents did not beget The United States of America as much as the lived reality of The United Colonies begot America. The traditions of thought in the minds of men who lived along these coastlines weren’t born out of The Enlightenment, but out of love for their local civic freedoms, their local community, their friends, their neighbors, and their local Christian church.

Some say The United States of America was founded as a free Christian nation, but the name Jesus Christ is never mentioned in the founding documents. The so-called Christian nation must rather be proved to have existed through a collection of Christian cities, where each city was local and real, for faith is either lived or it isn’t lived at all.

This is the crucial lesson that Kennebunkport teaches us about the nature of political life: it emerges from the ground up, not from the sky down. The city precedes the theory. The community precedes the constitution. The lived experience of self-governance in small coastal towns and inland villages created the conditions that made American independence thinkable.

The Urban Foundation of National Identity

Throughout this series, we’ve traced how cities are the natural habitat of political animals, how they arose from human necessity long before Vitruvius drew his first architectural plans, how they laid the foundations for nation-states, and how they speak through an architectural language that transcends time and place. In Kennebunkport, we see all these principles alive.

Here is a city that maintains its original form—a harbor town inside an inlet. Here is a community that preserves its traditions while adapting to modernity. Here is a place where the architectural language of New England colonialism still frames daily life, where shingled homes and white porches aren’t museum pieces but living structures.

The colonnade we saw in Kansas City, echoing Athens and Rome, finds its vernacular expression here in the covered porches and widow’s walks of Kennebunkport. The same principles of form and function, of creating spaces that serve both practical needs and aesthetic ideals, manifest differently in different climates and cultures, yet remain recognizable as part of the same urban tradition.

The Precedence of the Local

What makes Kennebunkport a good city? It’s not that it perfectly implements some abstract political theory. It’s not that it represents the ideal form decreed by urban planners. It’s good because it has remained what it essentially is: a self-governing community of people bound together by shared place, shared work, shared rituals, and shared faith.

The lobstermen who stack their traps along the harbor, the restaurant owners who serve the day’s catch, the homeowners who maintain their colonial cottages, the visitors who return year after year—all participate in an urban ecosystem that has developed organically over nearly four centuries. This is not the International Style imposing its vision from above. This is vernacular urbanism at its finest.

When we discussed in earlier posts how cities must be built where they are founded, how they cannot be transported but must grow from their geographical and cultural conditions, Kennebunkport exemplifies this principle. It is what it is because of where it is: on this particular inlet, with access to these particular waters, settled by these particular people with their particular religious and political convictions.

Cities as Laboratories of Self-Government

The Puritans who founded Kennebunkport and similar towns along the New England coast were conducting political experiments. But these were not abstract experiments in philosophy. They were practical experiments in living together, in self-governance, in balancing individual liberty with communal responsibility.

Each town meeting, each shared harvest, each communal defense against hardship or threat, each decision about how to organize public space and private property—these were the laboratories that developed the political instincts and institutions that would later be codified in state and national constitutions.

The famous town hall meetings of New England weren’t invented by political theorists. They emerged naturally from communities that needed to make decisions together. The separation of church and state wasn’t primarily a philosophical position. It emerged from the practical experience of communities where religious conviction informed public life but didn’t entirely determine it, where different denominations had to learn to coexist.

What We’ve Lost and What Remains

In our contemporary moment, when many American cities have grown beyond recognition, when urban sprawl has created “bedroom communities” and “gated suburbs” that lack the coherence of true cities, Kennebunkport reminds us what we’ve lost.

We’ve lost the sense of the city as a complete ecosystem where work and home, commerce and culture, public and private life exist in walking distance of each other. We’ve lost the architectural vernacular that made cities recognizable as themselves rather than as generic expressions of international modernity. We’ve lost the scale at which genuine self-governance and community participation remain possible.

But Kennebunkport also shows us what remains possible. Not every place can or should be a small coastal town in Maine. But every place can ask itself the questions that Kennebunkport asks by its very existence: What is this place essentially? What are the geographical and cultural conditions that make it what it is? How can it grow and adapt without losing its essential character? How can it serve as a stage for human ritual and community life?

The Pattern That Connects

From the ancient trading post in the Tiber River valley that became Rome, through the temple societies of the Near East that became cosmopolitan Hellenic cities, through the grid-planned Roman colonies that became Toledo, Paris, and London, through the coastal settlements of New England that became American cities—we see a pattern.

Cities arise from necessity. They organize themselves around certain functions: defense, trade, worship, governance. They develop architectural languages to express these functions. They create public spaces for community gathering. They balance private interests with public goods. They become laboratories for political experimentation. They preserve traditions while adapting to change.

The good city—whether ancient Athens or modern Kennebunkport—is one that understands and honors this pattern. It recognizes that it exists not to implement abstract theories but to serve the concrete needs of actual people in actual places. It understands that form follows function, but that both form and function serve deeper human purposes: the need to gather, to govern ourselves, to pass on traditions, to create beauty, to live in harmony with our environment.

The City as Our Common Home

As we conclude this series, having traveled from the archetypes that precede all building, through the ancient origins of urban life, through the development of cities into nation-states, through the architectural language that unites all western cities, and finally to this living example in Kennebunkport, we return to a simple truth.

The city is our common home. Not the nation-state, which is an abstraction and a latecomer to history. Not the international order, which speaks no vernacular language and respects no local traditions. But the city—the polis, the urbs, the particular place where particular people gather to live their particular lives together.

When John Winthrop preached about a city on a hill, he understood something that our contemporary world has largely forgotten. He understood that the city is not just a collection of buildings and streets. It’s not just an economic engine or an administrative unit. The city is the fundamental unit of political and cultural life. It’s where abstract principles become concrete practices. It’s where theoretical rights become actual freedoms. It’s where national identity is either lived or remains mere rhetoric.

The good city—from Rome to Kennebunkport—is one that remembers this. It’s one that understands itself as the natural habitat of political animals, as the stage for human ritual, as the preserver of traditions, as the laboratory for self-governance. It’s one that speaks the architectural language that connects it to cities across time and space while remaining rooted in its own particular place.

This is what good government of our cities, in place and time, ultimately means: honoring what cities essentially are while allowing them to become what they’re called to be in their particular circumstances. It means resisting the temptation to impose abstract ideals from above and instead nurturing the organic development that emerges from below. It means remembering that before there were constitutions, there were communities. And it means recognizing that the health of our nations ultimately depends on the health of our cities.

Pax et Bonum!

C.W. Höjer

This is part of my series on the origins and nature of urban life. From ancient archetypes to living examples, we’ve explored what makes cities good or bad, successful or failed. The lessons remain urgent: in an age of globalization and homogenization, we must remember that cities are not interchangeable units but particular places with particular characters. Our task is not to build more cities that look like everywhere else, but to help each city become more fully itself.

What cities have shaped your understanding of urban life? What makes them good or bad?

After exploring the ancient origins of cities—from the archetypes that preceded Vitruvius, through the political development from Jericho to the nation-state, to the architectural language that speaks across millennia—we turn now to a living example. How do these principles manifest in an actual place? What does it mean for a city to preserve its essence while remaining vital?

A particular town in Maine offers answers to these questions. It’s called Kennebunkport, a small coastal town incorporated in 1653, when it was subject to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One arrives driving steadily on Route One, which stretches for miles along the eastern border of the United States with the wide Atlantic on one side and the wide expanse of land on the other.

This New England coastline is famous for its lobster industry. The saltwater lobster, which was once served to New England prisoners, has since become a delicacy and a source of local pride—there is even a lobster mosaic in Pompeii suggesting how much the Romans valued this food. Eventually we catch a glimpse of Kennebunkport, and perhaps it’s the thought of melted butter and lemon juice which lends a particular taste to our expectations of this old maritime village in modern America. “Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps,” said New Englander Henry David Thoreau.

The Maritime Village Intact

In the next moment one is surrounded by seafood eateries and fisherman’s restaurants serving various incarnations of the catch of the day, recently hauled inside the bay from the Atlantic Ocean. We can catch a glimpse of lobstermen stacking their traps or fishermen hanging their nets along the harbor. A flotilla of boats lie bow to bow on the water, some tied to docks, others tied around mooring buoys, floating between the buildings of Kennebunkport which hug their beloved inlet. One finds the historic Colony Hotel across from The River Club, under a sky which has become an ocean of seagulls.

Kennebunkport is home to a presidential headquarters, the Bush Family compound, which brings modern America and the globalized world order into this coastal village. But the visitor also experiences it as charmingly old fashioned, protecting rich treasures of a long history. Some of her inhabitants even trace their heritage to the pilgrim-ship The Mayflower, and from the late nineteenth century a steady stream of American tourists have nourished both body and soul along her colonial streets and vernacular alleyways.

The Biblical Foundations of New England Urbanism

Kennebunkport shares her genesis with the city Boston, which was an ambitious project, founded as “a city on a hill,” with the eyes of all the earth upon them, to quote a sermon by John Winthrop from 1630. This courageous Atlantic Crossing, which signified European man on new soil, must be considered as a political experiment stemming from our deepest hope for a better tomorrow, as much for their times as for our own.

The great western expansion during the Age of Sail had its economic reasons, many sharing the goal to dig, mine and search for gold, silver and copper. Yet the original, deeper motivations of religion and government never left these shores. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony traced their noble silhouettes against a biblical background. As the Israelites had crossed the Jordan River, the Puritans were crossing the Atlantic Ocean. As the Israelites had entered Canaan under Joshua, the Puritans, under Winthrop’s leadership, were now entering a new land, brimming with promise.

While the temptations for the Israelites were the false Canaanite gods, the temptations for the Puritans were the false gods of pleasure and profit. This image of a shining city on a hill would retain its power throughout American history, later defining America’s self-understanding during the Cold War, under the leadership of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

However, John Winthrop had meant it as a warning: if America should fail as a shining city on a hill, the whole earth would witness their demise. So their hope for the new towns along this coastline was that civilians across the world would pray that the Lord might make their communities resemble those in New England, which combined ancient views of political life with traditional Christian virtues.

From Augustine to Aristotle on American Shores

The founders of New England believed that God had chosen Man as his deputy to rule the earth. Winthrop emphasized that God chose to work through his creatures to bring about His will in society. But the original society of Adam and Eve had allowed pleasure and wickedness to prevail against their duty, making God’s natural law within them insufficient for government. The punitive law of a just government was therefore needed.

The Puritans were quite clearly echoing St. Augustine in this conviction, who had held that government was a result of The Fall (original sin), while also anticipating James Madison who would famously be attributed as saying that if men were angels then government would be unnecessary. Still, their purity and education compelled them to preach that government also cherished those who do good, that judicial administrations were still capable of kindness and charity.

For even if Adam and Eve had never fallen, government would still have coordinated mankind for the common good of the political community. As Aristotle had claimed and as St. Thomas Aquinas had reiterated within a Catholic context, man is a political animal. This intellectual orientation towards the political philosophy of the Old World was a natural East/West relationship for New England. While it was undoubtedly the case that the Puritans were disappointed in Europe, New England retained a loyal devotion to their western heritage.

Old World Wisdom in the New World

One might think that such ancient tradition might not have survived an Atlantic Crossing, that Kennebunkport must have developed into a secular enterprise, that it’s only an antiquarian enthusiasm inside the atrium of the Colony Hotel which momentarily carries one away inside a palette of sea-worn colors to Piccadilly and Parnassus. One might be forgiven for such thoughts while sitting with an old book on well-worn furniture.

Yet when later in the seventeenth century John Locke would write to anyone disappointed in the social contract of England that they could then travel into the vacuis locis, into “the empty places,” to start anew, he wasn’t referring to Puritan New England. The pilgrims of the Atlantic Crossing navigated between the old and the new, towards new lands using old charts, expecting these Elysian Fields to be filled with both ancient wisdom and modern challenges.

In Kennebunkport one is neither in Portland nor Boston, two nearby coastal cities which can at times seem degraded in their modernity, in particular by the size to which they have grown. Kennebunkport is not only less famous than the other two, and much smaller, but above all the only one which can still boast to being what it originally was: a harbor town inside an inlet.

That’s why there’s still a cozy atmosphere stretching from Dock Square to the marinas along Ocean Avenue. The cottages on Cape Arundel still form the backdrop to the shingled homes which reflect their wide porches onto the water. Caribbean waiters, dignified and swift, serve their summer patrons on white wicker chairs.

One thinks momentarily of the ships from Spain, which set a course for ports in Havana and Santa Domingo. One thinks of the Caribbean Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and his poems about identity and integration. But here in Kennebunkport the inhabitants remember writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who, while living along this coastline, was inspired to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a story which was sympathetic to the plight of slaves in the United States. Highly controversial at the time, it became a symbol of the abolitionist movement.

They also remember Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a visitor from Portland, who was the first poet to use the American landscape and the Native American as the focus of his work. The inhabitants of Kennebunkport say their town encapsulates nearly four centuries of American culture.

The Ritual of Place

At dusk, visitors and locals wander in the yellow glow of shop windows, hanging lights and ship lanterns. The gentle bobbing of fishing boats animate the docks below a glittering line of lobster shacks and breweries. They guide one to choose from a row of eateries along the inlet. At times it can seem that opening a new seafood restaurant is a local obsession.

Eventually we choose a handsome table, preferably outside, to fully enjoy a true maritime ritual. The menu seems more expensive since last year, but it’s soon forgiven as a moon river flows into the Atlantic. Only some yards from the tables lie the same ships who earlier in the day hauled our dinner from the blue depths.

The menu begins with Maine oysters from a cold, fresh, clean ocean. We bring the shell, with a drop of lemon juice, to the lip of our mouth, before we chew and swallow. Then we order swordfish and a Haddock fish chowder. Before the evening comes to an end we suddenly decide to enjoy a plate of steamed lobster as well. We’re in Maine, after all.

Paired with all this delectable seafood we drink a pint of local Shipyard ale and feel as a wayfarer inside, complete with a salty brow and a briar pipe. Our body feels reinvigorated and our soul wants to sing English sea shanties and swelling odes about these distant ports in Far Arden. We lean back and look around, wishing we lived here all the time.

This is what the Romans understood when they built their cities around the forum, what the Greeks knew when they designed their agora. The city exists not merely as shelter or commerce, but as the stage for human ritual, for the daily practices that bind us to place and to each other. In Kennebunkport, this ritual centers on the sea, on the harvest of lobster and fish, on the gathering at dusk to share the bounty together.

Pax et Bonum!

C.W. Höjer

Next post: The lesson of Kennebunkport—how America’s founding was not born from abstract philosophy but from the lived reality of local communities.

Part 3 of a 3-part series on the origins and nature of urban life

Sitting in Concourse Park in Kansas City, watching our son run in and out of the fountain pool, we could see the pillared walkway of The Colonnade behind his little scurrying body. Those pillars were based upon earlier examples in Rome and Athens. This colonnade had been raised by American hands with Roman ideals, which were based upon Roman hands with Greek ideals.

They pointed to a tradition, to an architectural language. For at least three thousand years these particular load-bearing pillars called columns have not only been constructed according to a very similar design, but have been a necessary part of all western cities. Since Mediterranean antiquity we’ve consistently been playing with four or five types of columns, which through an ever expanding geographical reach have transmitted to us the same lesson: this is how a church or a theatre, a law court or a university is meant to look like.

These ancient columns have been reused and reinterpreted from Rome to Constantinople, from Moscow to Washington, as a timeless language. They are true signs of a good social order and the symbols of a beautiful empire. The Roman State finally gave them a standardized form, a precise aesthetic definition, which still allows them to be universally understood through the mother tongue of every city: architecture.

From Log to Column

Anyone blessed to be a tourist in the southern Mediterranean can sense that columns were once nothing more than robust logs erected to hold up a simple canopy. Certain Doric columns which make up the temples of Paestum, below Naples, resemble thick palm trees upholding a temple roof.

After all, there are only two reasons why anyone should wish to erect a roof in the Middle East or the Mediterranean: either to protect oneself from a scorching sun, or to keep oneself dry from a driving rain. There are reasonably only two ways to erect a roof as well—either by latching it onto a large tree, or by supporting it on some wooden posts. By a simple historical deduction, the column is now invented.

If a group of people wishes to live in the same area, due to its favorable conditions, but under separate roofs, they soon develop a type of tent-city. Further, if these early tenants should wish that their plot of dirt become a more permanent residence, the area has to be maintained according to some useful rules. Through another historical deduction, the urban aesthetic is now invented.

If this tent-city continues to grow and expand both in its population and geographical area, but without losing its favorable qualities, then its citizens must think in both practical and aesthetic terms. Through a further historical deduction, a guiding norm for urban development is now invented. To enforce such a norm, management is also invented.

Columns as Cultural Products

As we let our eyes span our view from the columns of The Colonnade to the columns of The Kansas City Museum between the trees on Gladstone Boulevard, to the columns of The Catholic Church of St. Anthony around our backs, we could deduce that they not only carried the buildings physically, but they carried the city metaphorically and symbolically. This was a poetic insight, with a historical reality.

For these columns, which are all around us within western civilization, tell much of the story of our urban development. In the beginning, the column was a simple weight-bearing construction, just as the city was a simple collection of tents. The material for these columns quickly changed from wood to stone, cut from granite or marble quarries.

This was not out of extravagance, but rather tragically out of poverty. The ancient Greeks had so ravaged their environment that the great woods and leafy ridges which had once graced their hills were now piles of timber and their shimmering meadows grazing grounds for goats and sheep. The subsoil was then left unprotected and directional winds blew their wooded islands, literally, into the sea. So the ancient lumberman soon become a stonecutter.

In other words, the Greek column was a natural product of their land before it became a cultural product of their civilization. Likewise, the first city was formed in nature, upon a plot of dirt or a flat plateau, before it became a cultural archetype.

Greek Progress and Natural Harmony

In contrast to the Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations which retained very static cultures, the Greeks fostered a real enthusiasm for the idea of progress. As theology tends to serve as the starting point for cultural perspectives, it’s important to see this aspect reflected in the Greek myths, which were always speaking of rebellious sons overthrowing their fathers.

Yet throughout the development of the Hellenic column and its architectural uses and designs, the Greeks remained loyal to their natural landscape. Perhaps because they had once destroyed their original environment due to technical progress, they had placed their myths in nature, rather than in cities, to protect what was left.

In the classical world we notice how the Greeks constructed their buildings within an open landscape. These cities were constructed around temples and theaters made for pious citizens, but they were also constructed in a way that honored the nature in which they lived. These structures showed reverence to the light that illuminated their world and to the air that they breathed into their lungs, in deep intimacy with the earth they tilled for cereals, olives and wine.

They raised these columns to be transparent walls against green valleys and craggy cliffs, as a window onto creation. They formed the space between the columns to be both inside and outside, playing upon the harmony that ought to exist between a building and the place in which it is constructed. Following generations could then produce a normative pattern for subsequent cities; in other words, they had been provided with a measure of the urban Kosmos to determine how they might define the Greek Polis.

Archetypes and Forms

This power of cultural progress generated various discoveries within our western civilization across many centuries. Yet alongside this idea of development there’s always been a conservatism, or rather a change within a continuity. Through the evolution of Tuscan to Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns, a column remained a column from the plane post to the composite column, just as a city remained a city and a chair remained a chair. The original forms for these things were developed not to be different, but to be the same.

The original forms, seen in all the visible things, discovered and recognized at specific moments of human history, stand as timeless objects for our imagination, our thoughts and our intellects. They also build upon each other in a very organic way, so that a specific solution for a very practical problem then serves as an aesthetic norm, as a guiding light, for the solution of another very specific problem.

Whenever we’re able to recognize a staircase as a staircase by a combination of its form and function, we’re entering into this reality. We can recognize a staircase without ever needing to climb up or down its steps, while at the same recognizing that we don’t need to use it for this sole purpose. A staircase remains a staircase even if we use it for theatre seats, or a chair remains a chair even if we use it as a table.

When a staircase doesn’t need to convince us of its function as a staircase, it’s because mankind has a universal understanding of its recognized form. Within our cities it’s never a question of merely the functional shape, or the mere functional form of any one thing. Rather, it’s a question of the aesthetic forms, of the objective shapes, which reside so deep within our rational capabilities that we might call them archetypes.

Roman Unity Through Urban Form

After the long Punic Wars ended with the sacking of Carthage in 146 B.C., the Romans realized that they could better spread their empire by founding new cities of their own than by destroying the old cities of their enemies. This change meant that cities achieved a monumental significance and a greater normative quality. They became political icons of the urban life, making their most prominent architects, such as Vitruvius and Apollodorus of Damascus, synonymous with their empire.

The Roman city was carefully molded after an established formula. They followed an identical urban plan with two intersecting main axes inside a grid system of streets organized around a central square. A Roman city was therefore recognizably Roman, whether it was established in Hispania, Brittania or Gaul. The Romans founded perennial urban centers such as Toledo, Paris and London.

Their ideology was unity within pluralism, where all nations could be Roman, living under one Roman law with Roman rights and Roman duties. It was an ingenious philosophy which could incorporate every conquered tribe into one body politic. A single empire originated from one city, the urbis, which had become one world, the orbis. The city was the weapon, or to borrow a modern phrase, “the medium was the message,” whereby urbanity was the preferred strategy of colonialism.

The Greco-Roman column was the unifying architectural principal, not merely because it was the most practical way to carry a roof, but because it was an indispensable component of how a city ought to look like—it helped to make the city into a city. The column quickly became a concept within western civilization by which we measured our nobility, from the Parthenon to the Pantheon, from the Cathedral to the City Hall, from The Apostolic Palace to Buckingham Palace. It was the backdrop to our culture, neatly framing our lives and our conversations.

From Ancient Columns to Modern Skyscrapers

The longer we sat by The Colonnade above Kessler Park and the Kansas City skyline, the clearer we saw the similarities between the 6th century B.C. architects of The Acropolis and the 19th century architects of the world’s first skyscraper in Chicago, the financial hub of the American Wild West. For though they were separated by space and time, they were somehow united by natural law in their urban solutions.

It was the ancient architects of Greece and Rome who invented the apartment block over two thousand years ago. Since they lacked some of our modern technological advances, they seldom built buildings taller than four floors. In America, it was never due to an aesthetic preference that the architects of the Industrial Age began building skyscrapers. There were some natural conditions to live by and new technologies could be utilized to solve some of the pressing problems of the day.

After the Great Fire of 1871, Chicago had its area redesigned in a new grid-network requiring innovative solutions. Chicago had a stable foundation lying on a solid flat plain of limestone and the architects of Chicago had access to the newest technologies within engineering and construction, which utilized elevators, electricity and fireproofed iron.

Seen in this light, the high-rise building was an urban innovation which developed naturally out of certain spatial conditions at a certain time in history for specific human needs, not unlike the ancient column. After the building boom of the early Twentieth Century and especially after the two World Wars, the skyscraper became a modern form, a new normative trend, which other architects and urban designers translated into their own contexts.

This was not due to any pressing social or environmental need, but because the high-rise building had become the universal symbol of the modern city in the Age of International Technology. These skyscrapers of the International Style stand alone on individual plots of land, rather than as a part of a row of high-rise buildings, to promote a more open and transparent society, universally applicable, without reference to any vernacular designs.

The Question of Modernity

These norms have been critiqued as totalitarian and elitist in nature, which are modern norms that forget, perhaps, that buildings are made for people, not people for buildings. The result is that skyscrapers can only make a city as modern as its people allow it to become. This contemporary critique among architects and political philosophers has been called post-modernism.

The city speaks to us through its forms—through columns that have carried civilization for three millennia, through streets that follow patterns first laid by Roman engineers, through squares that echo the agora where democracy was born. Understanding this language, this architectural grammar that transcends time and place, helps us distinguish good cities from bad, human-centered design from ideological imposition.

The question for our age remains: Will we continue to honor the timeless forms that have served human flourishing, or will we break with tradition in ways that forget that cities, like columns, must serve the people who inhabit them?

Thank you for reading this series on the origins and nature of urban life. What cities do you find speak this ancient language most clearly?

Pax et Bonum!

C.W. Höjer

In order that a city might become a natural solution for us—that is, a tangible design for political animals—there must first be a geographical concentration of people. It’s a tantalizing task to try and explain why enough people suddenly decide to stop harvesting their own grapes and slaughtering their own sheep.

It seems that before people will gather together into an urban pattern, they must already become dependent upon one-another through a division of labor and a hierarchy of delegated tasks. It might be an instinctual force which guides our rational development, since many non-rational animals also live together in colonies, such as in flocks or herds. By studying a school of tropical fish or a congregation of eagles we can draw the conclusion that all animate life was made for some form of society.

The Oldest City

Perhaps, East of Eden, a banished mankind wandered as a pilgrim into the woods and became wise to society when he observed the animals in their habitat. Perhaps, at a certain mysterious moment in his wanderings, he decided to raise up tents with his brother, to break bread together next to a babbling brook and to call their settlement Jericho, which is considered the oldest settlement on earth and the oldest inhabited city in the world.

Since 1868 in this area of the West Bank, archeologists have unearthed the urban remains of a settlement built some fourteen centuries before Christ. The visible remains are attributed to the Canaanites before the Israelites destroyed the city and its famous walls under Joshua, after The Hebrews had crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land.

Yet despite these scientific excavations, the answer to the cause of cities remains clouded in a certain metaphysical mystery. As urban history has no point in which Man has been separated from God, as every city has had a temple, perhaps history cannot separate God from the City.

The Requirements of the First City

In order to find our way to the first city, to Cain’s City of Nod, to ancient Babylon or even to chart our sail to the mythical Atlantis, we must first find a geographical location with abundant goods and natural resources. The first city on earth must be a political society that’s originally self-sustaining. If the city also wishes to nourish itself through trade, there must exist another city within a reasonable geographical vicinity, or else an adjacent territory, which produces a surplus of necessary resources.

This city must also be built in an area from where it can look out for danger on the horizon and defend itself against military attacks—preferably a city set upon a hill, which the etymology of Acropolis would suggest. Recognizing that war is only waged between tribes and peoples, we may deduce that as the population increases arithmetically, the threat of war increases exponentially.

Since the cause of war is to be found in the values that a people choose to nurture and protect, a proper defense of the city must be achieved. It follows that the city must have a hierarchy of decision-making. It must have a way to provide for a political establishment, which may be described as having a decider-in-chief as much as a commander-in-chief.

The politics of this urban population must also enable the government to have the power to enact decisions for the city. This will in turn demand that an administrative and judicial branch of government must at times override the self-governance of each individual citizen. The demands of community and human relationship also point our search towards new types of work.

The establishment of occupations necessitate a transformation of earlier hierarchies of value. The value of supporting one’s immediate family is translated into the value of supporting one’s larger community. The city is now to be cared for with as much attention as one’s own household. In other words, chores and obligations are developed into occupations which supply the city with such things as teachers and civil servants, soldiers and physical laborers who either need to be supplied room and board, or be given something which they can exchange for their daily meals and necessities. This goes on to explain the development of currency and slavery, leisure and social classes.

Cities as the Foundation of Statehood

Through this little urban pilgrimage we can already deduce that early cities laid the foundations for the notion of statehood. To the rightful stress placed upon our ethnical heritage, which otherwise dominate the discussion of our nations, must be added the role of cities and townships in breaking the ground and then laying the groundwork for our modern nation-states.

Seen in this light we are all children of the city. As members of society we are all the products of what happened when mankind first decided to make a life for himself within the walls of a city. It’s a human development made evident when the nation-state first formed a constitution according to the precedents set by the city-state. The whole development process, over centuries, relies upon the proper division of power between the individual and society, or between the private and the public spheres of life—but the need is essentially urban.

The organization of the city may be seen as corresponding to the natural law, while the nation-state may be seen as a technical development of positive law.

From Temple to Cosmopolitan Life

In the beginning of urban life, in the proto-urban society, moved by an innate need to propitiate the gods, the areas of public assembly were reserved for the heavenly realms, religious sacrifice and rituals. These are also known as the temple societies of the Near East.

Gradually, through increasing trade and warfare, these places of public assembly were expanded to include the worldly realms of the city. It’s first at this stage of development that we can begin to see cities with a larger purpose in their design, architecturally speaking, in order to embrace the advantages and challenges of a burgeoning cosmopolitan life.

The cosmopolitan design includes, as the Greek etymology of the word suggests, both the Polis and the Kosmos, both the city and the world. It’s at this moment that we can begin to speak of mankind purposefully building cities which embrace the possibilities of this new form of life.

When we arrive at this early point in urban history, as a mythical dawn shines with her rose-red fingers upon Aegean shores, to paraphrase Homer, we’ve entered the Hellenic world. In this era we can see that the structural principles regarding function and form are already in place. In the further development of our urban variations, dependent in their becoming upon place and time, geography and politics, we see that when the city finally appears in the form of Imperial Rome, it has discovered the purpose of its existence, its being, while at the same time reaching its zenith.

Urbanity reaches its fulfillment under the Caesars, complete with a gilded dome to match the heavens and a keystone to uphold the arc of history.

Urban Identity vs. National Identity

Peering across a cultural panorama which stretches from Athens to Rome, from Moscow to Washington, we recognize an urban life and an urban language which we seem to have an instinctual affinity for as a species. Yet it’s not so much a national instinct, as an urban instinct. The nation-state uses the natural language of the city-state, but in an imitative manner, in a shadowy manner, which has produced the questionable art of the international order.

If we have this innate desire to discover our place in the world—not just who we are as individuals, but what our mission in life is truly meant to be—it can be fulfilled within the maternal embrace of our city walls. It’s not earlier in our human narrative than the American and French Revolutions, with their attendant aftermaths, when we exchanged our urban identity for a national identity.

The cause of this paradigmatic shift was that the principles, along with the rights of citizenship were now tied to a national constitution. This political earthquake on both sides of the Atlantic produced a tidal wave of nationalistic consciousness which flooded Europe and the entire Americas during the nineteenth century.

Even in our own contemporary days there are plenty of examples of localized patriotism which we notice in relation to a city. In Kansas City we could easily hear devotion to the football athletes who fight for their city’s honor as the Kansas City “Chiefs,” or how their veins “bleed Barbecue Sauce.” Among Italian immigrants it’s apparent that their ancestral patriotism is still passionately tied to Palermo, Napoli, Bologna and Milano, rather than to Italy. These cities were often at war with each other until they were forcefully unified into a national kingdom in the 1870’s.

This original urban identification is strong among westerners on both sides of The Atlantic. We see this local affinity most emphatically in sporting competitions. In America it has to reach to the level of The Super Bowl to lend one’s hometown loyalty, briefly, to another team. In Europe it has to be international championships for a Palermitano or a Milanese to root for the national team.

Next post: The Language of the City—how columns, forms, and architectural norms create the universal grammar of urban life.

Pax et Bonum!

C.W. Höjer

Architects and sociologists tend to differentiate between planned urban centers and original urban centers—between cities which grow according to a set agenda and cities which spring up naturally out of human necessity, especially along waterways and coastlines. Still, many cities have an origin story which is a combination of these two forms of urban procreation.

Rome itself, the crown of pagan citizenship, the city of cities, is probably one of these hybrid types. It was founded far back in antiquity by the Trojan-blooded Romulus on April 21st, 753 BC, but precisely over and above an earlier trading post in the Tiber River valley. This location already possessed enough geographical strength to have become a crucial meeting point between the Etruscan, Sabine, Oscan and Latin peoples. The Romans transformed this early trading post into a marble phenomenon over a gridded, domed and rectangular-shaped urban landscape.

After the Roman “One Thousand Years” and the sack of Rome by Alaric and his Goths and Visigoths, it was slowly rebuilt by the papal court during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Yet Rome can aptly be called a Baroque city due to its architectural transformation during the Counter-reformation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Modern architects have contented themselves with formalizing individual areas and neighborhoods, which time and space had already made into small towns within the larger city.

Before the Eureka Moment

But before the architectural genius of Michelangelo and Bernini, even before Vitruvius, there was the city as an archetype for the social and political animal we call mankind. There seems to have existed certain preconditions and certain needs within our human nature which developed into villages, towns and cities.

There is no deductive reasoning which leads us to assume that a farmer, such as the biblical Cain, woke up one morning, washed his face and wondered if he ought to build the city of Nod that day. Urban history doesn’t begin with a Eureka-moment in the bathtub, but rather through a development, a slow organization of our environment. Most likely, the human organism required an urban organization.

Historians are similarly left speechless if asked when and why we began to cut our hair or sew our clothes. Recognizing the usefulness of rising heat, the Roman bathhouses used underground fireplaces to heat their pools and walls, so it’s a mystery why they didn’t simultaneously invent the steam engine. We can only guess at the instrumental achievements mankind could have acquired, maybe offsetting the whole trajectory of The Industrial Revolution sixteen hundred years before James Watt. Perhaps lacking the Christian convictions against the crime of slavery allowed the Romans to overlook the necessity of machine-power, despite their scientific knowledge. Still, the mystery remains.

The First Cities

Returning to that ancient brotherhood of Cain and Abel, we must ask what makes an agricultural people, formed out of a nomadic culture of sheep herders, to found a city. A tent is different from a house. Man cannot carry a house on his back, a city cannot be transported from the Hellespont to the English Channel, as if Brutus of Troy could have moved the temples of Illium to Britain when he founded England, Scotland and Wales.

No, a city must be where it’s founded, until it’s either burned to the ground or leveled by war or plague. If it’s abandoned due to political turmoil or environmental disaster, a city will slowly be overgrown with weeds and flowers until nature decides to hide it from history. Under layers of mulch and ash such ruins slowly sink into a collective forgetfulness until archeologists of the modern age uncover them again.

It wasn’t until Pompeii was uncovered under Mt. Vesuvius in the 18th Century by Karl Weber that archeology was born. By that time nearly eighteen-hundred years had passed since that city was covered with volcanic ash and overgrown with weeds and flowers, but the excavations told us something important about urbanity: as a citizen is much more than his home address, a city is much more than its design. It’s not merely a shelter from the storm, but in its genesis strives to be an architectural solution for perennial social problems.

The Political Animal

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle defined mankind as a political animal, and every city, every polis, has as its foundation the organization of our human lives. Our cities depend upon an original balance of private interests and public deliberations, which then inevitably assimilate foreign elements into their urban cosmos either through their seaports or airports. These foreign elements may be new gods or new people, new foods or new philosophies, either because the city thrives through such commerce or because it is occupied by a foreign power.

If cities weren’t a natural place for us to preserve our accumulated traditions and knowledge, we wouldn’t know our history very well, nor would there be such a wealth of knowledge to acquire through a system of education.

The veins and arteries which vivify the urban body are not invented by political decree or a gathering of sociologists and master builders. Rather, it’s something that grows and develops out of natural necessity and specific cultural conditions into a social map, a recognizable pattern, of human interaction.

Next post: From Jericho to the Nation-State—how cities laid the foundations for modern political order.

Millions of men and women live in these places with fabulous nicknames like the The Big Apple, The Windy City, or, indeed, The City of Angels, yet we are not angels, nor are we devoid of material necessities, as we need both cars and roads in our modern world. But the greatest invention of mankind is not the self-moving vehicle but our urbanity, or the self- governing city for self-governing people, what the Greeks called their Kosmos and Polis, wherefrom we derive our word “cosmopolitan.”

I found myself discussing these themes one day in The Paris of the Plains, which is the popular nickname for Kansas City, Missouri, on a park bench above Cliff Drive. It’s an American city in the Midwest which one might not automatically associate with great civilizational importance, until one contemplates its silhouette against the western sky from Scarritt Point. Preferably, one should arrive there in the fall, as a soft autumn light hits the Greek columns of The Colonnade above Kessler Park, after Mr. Kessler who dreamed of a city within a park in the City Beautiful Movement.

Children were playing outside in the fountain and running across the square, jumping in and out of the classical columns, which was a good environmental reminder of where these architectural archetypes were once born. Namely, within an ancient Near-Eastern culture called the Middle East, which the Hellenic expansionism under Alexander the Great spread far and wide, which the Roman Empire transformed into a universal language of imperial ideology.

We talked of many things that day, as friends tend to do when they get together, especially about life within our western cities. We asked ourselves why the little neighborhood church, in Columbus Park, not far from us, nestled between a cafe and a restaurant in a laidback atmosphere, reminded us more of a little town in central Italy than of a bustling neighborhood in the American Mid-West.

The great settlers of the American Wild West were able to develop thriving commercial businesses across this land through their entrepreneurial enthusiasm, but could they have built a cosmopolitan culture if there wasn’t the appropriate soil in which it could grow? The old European urban ideals could spread across The United States by horse-carriage and train-carriage, but would it have rooted itself within the new American people if such urban archetypes weren’t already imbedded in our human nature?

We talked about why Kansas City has more in common with Paris, than Kansas City has with a farming town in Missouri, or Paris has with a countryside village in France. Fundamentally we were asking ourselves why it’s the city and not the nation which is the transmitter of our traditions, and why our contemporary life of electric wonders, so full of confidence and vitality, still seems to cower in awe before the wonders of the ancient world.

Fast cars, filled with fast food, circled around us where we sat on our bench, discussing the slow movements of time and ideas. As we would try to locate the earliest precedents of our western urbanity, we had to think far back into the recesses of our memory, to the geographical areas called Syria and Mesopotamia, before written history.

The Greek columns of The Colonnade became mere temporal embryos in comparison. We had to fumble our way through a dimly lit library of arcane place-names such as Jericho and Ur. We had to engage in mental acrobatics to imagine the grandeur of Babylon, supposedly the largest city ever built on earth. We had to picture the Phoenician fleet landing on the shores of Africa to found the city of Carthage some nine centuries - or perhaps many more - before Christ.

We thought back to some fruitful travels we had made throughout the classical world, where we had walked with Hesiod through Arcady and swum with Homer in the Mediterranean. We felt that we could never exhaust the wonders of the Aegean world. We were left peering across that wine dark sea towards famous cities like Knossos on Crete, Mycenae in the Peloponnesos - these various ships-of-state, with their white sails spread wide, skimming the whitecaps, cutting towards their goal. To try to comprehend our urban heritage is akin to sitting along the breaking surf, trying to hear the faint echoes of civilization from within the cave where Zeus was born.

Reading the histories of Herodotus, which tell of the Persian wars in the fifth century before Christ, we can at least begin to make out the urban silhouette of Athens, which would soon reach its peak under Pericles. When he ascended to his leadership position as “The First Citizen of Athens,” Knossos had already been a ruin for one thousand years, and during the same decades the famous Temple of Saturn was being erected in the Roman Forum. Today its base and eight remaining pillars can still be viewed, very picturesquely, from a lookout point on the Capitoline Hill.

As we turned our heads from our bench in Kansas City and lifted our heads towards the Greek columns of The Colonnade, we wondered how long they would last. A grand city such as Alexandria in Egypt was founded by Alexander the Great in the year 331 before Christ, at which time Rome had already celebrated its four hundredth anniversary, Ab Urbe Condita, that is, “from the founding of the city” by Romulus. The city of Constantinople, which was founded in Byzantium by Emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor, seemed far too modern to mention. The so-called Middle Ages of Christendom which followed upon the reign Constantine the Great, had baptized an urban language which was far more ancient than any Cathedral-town of Europe to be worthwhile mentioning.

Instead, we had to travel far back into more oriental lands to find our western heritage, East of Eden in fact, to the Land of Nod where the fratricide Cain, Adam’s son, built the first city on earth. But why? The annals of history cannot give us an explanation. St. Augustine tells us in his book “City of God” that a civic community is nothing else than a multitude of men bound together by some associating tie. So perhaps Cain, as his family increased in number, was less of an urban planner and more of an urban provider…!

Pax et Bonum!

Wilhelm Höjer

1. Wrong Questions beget Right Answers

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Political Cornerstone: We must ask the wrong questions to get the right answers.

1. A consumeristic society————————————————

Are we the slaves of consumerism? In earlier times than ours the conquering of new lands was the norm. We expanded our borders and often in dramatic ways later romanticized by history. The most famous example is probably the conquering and colonization of the American west in the middle of the nineteenth century. As we all know, “The Frontier” soon came to an end. In 1874 a man by the name of J.F. Glidden from Illinois began to sell barbed wire. Thereby the farmer had the opportunity to wall-in and protect his plot of land at a greatly reduced cost and the Wild West was no more. The attention of Western people was then turned away from the quest for virgin earth. We also found many other uses for barbed wire.

Every activity in which we partake is in one way or another tied to a piece of the earth, most often expanding an inhabited area on this plot of land or by that body of water. This means human activity constantly demands new land, or when there is no new land it demands a more intensive use of existing land. A point often inspired by the indigenous peoples of the world is that these demands can only be met if the earth is used in a more efficient and sustainable way.

One common reaction to our modern achievements proclaims that we have fulfilled the dreams of our pioneers. Utopia is actually a place and time on our maps of meaning. We say: It was for this day that man and woman dreamt and for which they worked. Lifestyles have been steadily improving. The endless work for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity has been successful. The chimes of freedom have rung out poverty and rung in a new golden age of material wealth. But was this the utopia we were promised? Or is there still a better utopia, somewhere, out there?

There is. But we should always be careful to criticize our latest achievements as the product of some soulless materialism. There is, of course, some truth in the critique about an overemphasis on material goods, but the person who complains about materialism is often the same person for whom welfare and high standards of living have always been a banal reality. It’s easy to forget that for many people they can and do represent a considerable personal liberation, a new possibility for human contact and experiences that lead to a greater and richer life.

3. Elements of Liberation

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What is liberation? Perhaps we often forget what it takes to achieve authentic liberation. It is the fruit of human consciousness, truth and right, interdependence, citizenship, and above all – time. This combination is as necessary as it is rare. Perhaps we too readily admire our freedoms forgetting that they are a privilege.

We should never turn a blind eye to the connection between economic conditions and liberation. Freedom of expression, that is, freedom from imprisonment for one’s opinions is a great thing, an essential goal, but does it mean anything if the free-thinker goes to sleep hungry and impoverished?

4. Searching for the Way

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What is the true and right way? We cannot remain indifferent to the problems of the world, such as hate and destruction. Indifference turns hopeful optimism to devastation. International questions come to meet us in our living rooms, our town squares and in our hands. They make us conscious about the world and force us into conversation. We reach out into the world and the world reaches into us.

One of history’s greatest debates about indifference occurred in 1550 in Spain, remembered as the famous Valladolid debate, between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The contrasting views between a monk and bishop of Chiapa and a learned humanist, turned into a debate about whether the Europeans’ actions when they explored the New World were morally justifiable or not. Spanish priests and intellectuals looked at the Spanish maritime empire and began to ask themselves, on the basis of their Christian beliefs, if they were justifiable according to Catholic teaching.

The lively debate lasted over a year and the result was that the native people they encountered also had souls and spirit. Or call it human consciousness. Since they had this quality there were certain things one could not do to them and many things one had to do for them. This is the root of human rights. A conscious soul is what makes us all into equals. We are all different when it comes to beauty, wealth, social position and talent. But what cannot be denied is that our individual souls are equal. This is why political consciousness is fundamental, because it means that all people in the world regardless of race, color, sex, or religion, have soul and spirit. This also means freedom. As each person is independent with inalienable rights, their individual freedom is defended by our interdependence.

5. Mercy: The True Way

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What is mercy? Mercy is the face of love. To oppose despair and work for hope is not just a material benefit, it is mercy in action. Mercy is solidarity. It inspires practical changes which change the way we look at each other, value one another.

Mercy is not only a matter of loving our neighbor. Public relationships, political organizing, is an iconic image of love for the world. When we can live into that image, then we are ready to enter into a City of Love.

6. To Serve and to Share

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What is serving and sharing? There is an old Roman saying which states, “That which concerns all, should be decided by all.” That’s the democratic ideal. A City of Love is to will something for the good of the other. It is to will a social change, because such a change gives a promise of improvement.

The Politics of Love has the audacity to propose that all of life should be understood within the broader framework of love. Democratic relationships need to be contextualized within the framework of charity, less they devolve into manipulation. Our entertainments and recreations need to be conditioned by love, less they devolve into self-indulgence.

7. Light and Joy = Liberation

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A City of Love proposes that the light of solidarity and the joy of individuality is liberation and fraternity. Can we present to the world what our culture has produced through a fruitful tension between spirituality and worldliness, faith and humanism, morality and law, order and freedom? We must be courageous enough to integrate our children into this and to show our willingness to uphold and expand it.