Part 2 of a 3-part series on the origins and nature of urban life
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