Situating the City
Sohail Inayatullah
May 1996
“The Urban Imagination,” Edges (Vol. 3, No. 4, 1991); expanded and reprinted in New Renaissance (Vol. 2, No, 3, 1991).


CONSTRUCTING THE CITY

The city is constructed in numerous ways. In the modern view, a city is defined by its civic culture; urban planners focus on the architecture and infrastructure of a city. Others believe a city must have an economic exchange system and a system of authority and governance to be called a city. Modern American cities are largely defined by energy systems and by consumption patterns: the car and the shopping mall. From the geographical view, cites emerge as the number of individuals on a given territory increase. They must find ways to negotiate food, power, wealth, and personal and impersonal relationships. How the city comes to be organized is based on these negotiations. Moreover, cities reflect and are constituted by the cultures and worldviews that create them. For example, American culture defines the city as a place one transports to for work or pleasure but one does not live there. American cities also exhibit expansion and decline unlike Asian cities which continue to expand and European cities which because of high energy costs have found ways to retain the old ancient city and new development. American cities emerged as part of America's colonization of the frontier while Asian cities have historically been the foci of polity, economy and culture. In recent US history the construction of the city has gone through various stages, from the City Beautiful (designed around large government buildings), to the City Efficient (concern with sewage systems, water and other basic needs) to the City Radical (the city and its social and human consequences).

Another way to understand the city is by its relationship to its opposite, the rural. Historically the city is the center, the rural the periphery (the city consumes the rural produces). History is the history of the city for that is what remains, that is what archeologists find, moreover, history shows the future the grandness of past human efforts. But this grandness is based on finding ways to appropriate wealth from those that produce goods and grow food. This is done either through tributary coercive systems in military states, by ideological systems when power is concentrated in priests or through exchange systems such as capitalism. In either case, the city exists because of the rural and because of the ability of those in the city to appropriate this wealth from workers and peasants.

POSTMODERN VIEWS

In the emerging postmodern view, important not only is how the city appropriates wealth but also how the city obfuscates its location in our technocratic discourses. In this view the city is not constructed as a place that creates policy rather the city is in itself a policy, in itself a way of organizing the world, indeed of knowing the world. The city then more than anything is a space, a configurement of power, values and more importantly ways constructing the world. However, most often we see the city as a fixed place that produces politics (in places like city hall, in ghettos) instead of a place that is politics. The city then is a practice: a changing set of values, ways of organizing, and structures that emerge and disappear. For us this is difficult to see for we rarely see the city, its boundaries are wholly present to us and thus unable for analysis. Only when we distance ourselves from the city can we see our categories, our city spaces. We can do this by tracing the history of cities: to see how a particular city developed in one way rather than another (because of geographical factors, because of sackings from invaders, because of the local and regional economy or because of the religious culture). We can also do this be examining the structure of a city: what functions does it serve?

Honolulu, for example, is divided into recreation spaces (beaches and parks), an industrial zone that produces wealth (Waikiki), shopping consumer zones, a range of living zones broken down by affordability or class, government and business areas (downtown), natural reserves, and garbage spaces. One's situation within the political economy of wealth is based on living either on the hills or on the beach (in a house not as a homeless beach person). Alternatively in a religious culture, the city is defined not by tourism (physical beauty and leisure activities) but by other places of congregation: shrines, temples and mosques. Again, in the emerging postmodern view of cities, the effort is not to see these categories as natural but to show how they have emerged, to ask how the categories we use to talk about the city have historically changed, and how cities are reflections of civilizational worldviews. For example, in medieval times, the emerging mercantilists existed outside the city--they were the traders--it is only later when capital accumulation took center stage that they moved inside the city. With the traders now inside, the military was forced outside of the city, as a kind of a modern day wall. Historically, security and sovereignty too have changed.

Once a city was defined by its wall, protecting against trade and ideas: the modern city no longer has these walls (electronic technology and the car have made this idea remote). Indeed the modern city is abstract: created by economic and media forces. By virtue of this abstraction, the modern city searches for an identity (the "I love New York" buttons or "I love Islamabad" t-shirts, and marketing slogans such as "the Gateway between North and South America" the "Crossroads of the Pacific" and "Most Liveable City") is an attempt to regain community, a collective "we". However, the reality is that there is no such community; indeed, the trend across large cities irrespective or culture is the remedievalization of the city with community defined by security systems, with private security agencies guarding plush areas and other areas identified through the color of the gangs that roam them. Security not abstract identity once again has become central in defining the city.

KHALDUN AND SPENGLER: THE MORAL DISCOURSE

But this is what the ancients predicted would happen with the city. For them the way to undertand the city is not by the political or the economic or the social ways of seeing the world but by the moral discourse. For Islamic philosopher Ibn Khaldun, there are two types of culture that are at near opposites; the nomadic and the city. One has values of bravery, morality, unity, strong kinship ties, and respect for parental authority, while the other has cowardice, fragmentation, economic ties and individuality. But once the nomadic gains power and wealth, once the size of the tribe increases then new relationships emerge; the values of the rural breakdown. Old loyalities disappear, there is fighting within the dyansty, and with each new crises, the legitimacy of the body that governs the city weakens and the nomadic spirit that created the city disintegrates. The culture then declines and the invaders march in.

For Oswald Spengler, in the beginning there is culture but as cities become megalopolises culture degenerates into "civilization". Culture begins not with nomadic struggle but with the awakening of a great soul. As cities develop, power becomes concentrated into the hands of two classes the nobility and the priests. Eventually however a capitalist class emerges and urban values replace agricultural ones. Money emerges victorious over traditional values and landed property. In culture, democracy is controlled by the intellect, in the megalopolis, in "civilization", it is money that buys votes. It is the money spirit that forces the civilization to expand, for cities to become bigger cities. Eventually the mass develops. At this stage, Spengler, who follows the classic model of birth, adolescence, adulthood, senility and death, concludes that death is but near, the culture has lost its conviviality and creativity its spirituality. Instead of folk, there is but mob. Power now becomes concentrated in rude force: the city is in its final days, only a few can remember the brilliance of the past, the city but now provides panems and circuses.

William Irwin Thompson finds these two visions of space as part of an unchanging historical pattern. "When one believes in an alternative
vision of history ... he is stepping outside the city to see a pastoral vision in which the office building and the universities do not obscure the archaic stars ... Those left behind in the city define themselves as responsible and sane and see the wanderer as a madman. The wanderer defines himself as the only sane person in a city of the insane and walks out in search of other possibilities. All history seems to pulse in this rhythm of urban view and pastoral visions." (Thompson, 152-153, 1971)

If these visions of the city appear obvious to us now, it is because they have inflitrated our gazes making them folk wisdom. Moreover, they capture traditional dichotomies. They also point to the structurual difficultes in creating alternative futures for the city. While green activitists and efforts by Richard Register in Ecocity: Berkeley argue for creative cities where the communal and the spiritual is possible in the city properly designed, Leopold Kohr taking the structural view reminds us that it is size that engenders the problems of urbanization. Others such as Mark Satin, speaking for the American counter cultural movement, have based their entire theory of New Age Politics on this variable arguing against what he calls the "big city outlook" (patriarchy, centralization, bureaucratization, corporatization).

THE IMAGINED MODERN ASIAN CITY

But cities do attract people. In rural Asian villages, cities are places of necessity, once debt forces the selling of land or bad harvests force migration. They are also the places of imagination. Anything is possible in the city: wealth, sex, power; new relationships. The city person goes to the village in search of solace, in search of a past, of community, of an old rhythm. But those in the village yearn for the luxury of paved roads, of freedom from the oppressive family structure, of links with the global and release from the confines of the eyes of the neighbor.

For these in the megacity the community and stability of the village attracts, while those in the village long for the freedom of the city. For those in the village, the city represents wealth, bureaucracy and the official discourse of power. In the village morality is easier to control: one does not need police or laws, mere ostracism is enough. However, villages can become fiefdoms where there are no checks and balances for power: landlords have executive, legislative and judicial powers. In the city, this power stranglehold does breakdown with the emergence of the government bureaucracy and the entrepreneurial classes. At the same time, those in the village know that the city represents the breakdown of the natural order of "man" and environment; thus even as the city attracts it repulses.

Nonetheless, having a magnificent city is among the prerequisites of modernity. In the linear theory of social evolution, a city must have a sports stadium (to show that humans as producers of games have been transformed into consumers of sports, that is money is now involved and victory over other nation-states near and far is possible) fine roads (preferably without cow dung lining them), a university (where universal and hegemonic knowledge displaces shamanistic folk wisdom), and grand shopping centers (replacing the unmediated marketplace of sellers and buyers to the mediated shopping malls wherein city space becomes merchandizing space representing affluence and "choice"). The city is then the official tribute to the dominant materialist way of understanding the world: through exchange and capital at present, in other epochs through religion and priests, and through expansion and military power. However in all eras the city represents humans and their efforts to conquer and dominate the environment.

The city is a category in the march of time and in the city, time itself, changes. Cities speed up time; indeed they are designed so as to catch up with those who are ahead in time. Village time is slow time, seasonal time, mythological time and ancestral time (where ancestors are still alive, guiding our movements as with the Maori and Australian Aboriginal). Village time is also future generational time in that land is scarce and the livelihood of future generations must be planned for, thought about. Of course, the traditional plan has been to move to the city to a place where time is faster, where there are not only more people but more activities, where more wealth generation is possible. City time is also electric time, where the mythological power of the moon is reversed, and city lights enthrall our senses.

In the city, time is planned time, it is organized time; seasonal time, mythological time and generational time have less currency. To mobilize and organize and to laborize (the work day and the work hour) large amounts of people there must be agreement as to time, thus the clock not the moon or the sun or the leaves falling off the tree.

The city then is an apt metaphor for linear economic development. Just as in modernity the village must be transformed into the city (but parts of it miniaturized either in the museum, or in the fables of writers), Third World nations must be transformed into modern nations (and their exotic or primitive culture miniaturized for display).

Each Third World country aspires for this vision. Pakistan created Islamabad to be its modern city. Islamabad with the aid of the interventionists of history, the Ford Foundation and other liberal escort agencies, was entirely planned. There was a residental area, a university area, a diplomatic area, a bureaucratic area, and a retail area. However, no place was planned for the poorer classes, for they would not be needed in this technocratic enterprise: instead of sweepers (a central job in Pakistan's hierarchy) there would be vacuum cleaners. But the enormous size of Islamabad's houses, the dust that is Pakistan, and the cost of vaccum cleaners, added with inexpensive labor led to a high demand for sweepers. But with no place to live, sweepers built their own houses with dirt and mud. But these katchi abadis (soft residences) were an eyesore to city planners so remembering the medieval days of the fort, a pucka abadis (hard wall) was built around the sweepers. Even Islamabad which attempts to escape the poverty of Pakistan finds that the other as sweeper, its past, returns within its center.

Islamabad is also interesting for another reason. It has no culture, no history, no sense of place. There are no bazaars or Moghul architecture like in Lahore; there are no places to consume high art and fashion as in Karachi; there is no feeling of identity. And yet how can it have culture: created by technocrats, and midwifed by bureaucrats who desire to escape, to but reinscribe their walls of bureaucracy on to the city. But culture can be thought of as other then history or place or community; culture is also as Ashis Nandy writes: resistence. The village sweepers in this example are that resistence, the hidden culture that cannot be extinquished, the counter culture to the official culture of diplomats and bureaucrats. And yet, as the rest of Pakistan disintegrates from ethnic and geo political battles, it is Islamabad that remains secure and safe. For now. It is disconnected in time and place, thus the attraction to Islamabad and naturally the repulsion one might feel when there.

Singapore, too, is a city which has managed to claim entrance into the modern world, largely through its Pacific Rim generated wealth. Under the leadership of the stern father Lee Kwan Yew , it too has managed to domesticate culture, it too has managed to create a replica of the scrubbed clean house, one where diversity and wildness all but disappear. But this is too harsh. After a few weeks in South Asia where the wildness of warring ethnic groups, of water shortages of electric brownouts, of traffic anarchy, of roads not numbered sequentially, and of a life by bribery consume one's rationality, Singapore appears like a modern haven. Confucian culture with its respect of authority and hierarchical relations are indeed welcome when compared to the democratic anarchy that is South Asia. South Asian cities have more freedom (driving on any side of the road is optional for while there are laws, there is no way to enforce them) but Singapore is more efficient.

Contrast this with rapidly developing Third World cities: Los Angeles or New York or London. Reversing traditional patterns, these cities have the core as low-wage labor intensive and the outskirts as high-finance intensive. These latter day cities remind us that cities like civilizations do decay and disaggregate; that history is not linear but full of reversals and betrayals, cycles and seasons; the linear model of modernity cannot explain the decline of the city except by blaming it as an infestation from the outside, from the barbaric. But cities can have many ethnicities and be rich, as Singapore shows us; and while race is a predictor of poverty it is not a cause of poverty or decline, rather these factors must be placed on the hierarchical structure of capitalism itself (real estate speculation and trickle down theories, for example). It is not immigrants that cause the decline of a city but rather the association of certain spaces with low-wage labor and the inability of government to provide these sites with necessary infrastructure. Part of this inability can be explained by the actual poverty cycle in these low-income areas (where community breaks down) and partly by their mental construction by city leaders as places of and for the poor.
But this decline of the city was not the vision of the modernists.

The 1964 World's Fair did not imagine multicultural cities rather the city was the site of efficiency and technology. The American television series The Jetsons best exemplifies this vision. This is the high-tech/one culture model. The Fred Flinstone vision is remarkably similar although set in prehistoric times. Contrast this with Blade Runner (or more recently Strange Days) which extrapolates present Los Angeles and ends up with a unruly city, with multiple cultures (human and android) and high-technology. This vision is far more likely then the vision of the future as the electronic cottage, the electronic village; rather the future will more likely be the electronic city, the Los Angelization of the world.

THE SPIRITUAL/ECOLOGICAL CITY
Alternatively, there is the ecological vision. Here the city is designed for low energy use, the car is made problematic as it damages the enviornment. In addition, size and distance are critical. Ivan Illich, for example, has argued that after a certain velocity in transportation systems, social justice and equity decrease. Eco-cities are thus designed to create possibilities for closeness, wherein the group (kin or work) is the prime unit of identification. In terms of recent exemplary designs, there is Ananda Nagar, the abode of Endless Bliss. This city is designed by the late P.R. Sarkar on ancient sacred site wherein individuals gained enlightenment. Sarkar takes the ancient Tantric worldview (as modernized by his social movements Ananda Marga and PROUTist Universal) and constructs city spaces to reflect the values of spirituality, global/local community, economic democracy, and multi-culturalism.

Ananda Nagar is an ecological city intended to regenerate the rural economy. As other intended communities it is meant to be self-sufficient (through and interlinking of education and soft energy economic wealth creation projects). It also has sancutaries for animals and rare plants. Instead of a huge dams there are shallow ponds which restore the environment, thus anticipating the global water crisis. Streets are named after scientists and philosophers: Einstein, Gandhi, Tagore, Shakespeare to mention a few. This is an example of a city that is culture: it represents global spiritual culture. It is different from cities developed by other social movements in that is meant to revitalize an impoverished area by creating self-reliance and self-sufficiency, solving the problems of water and poverty as opposed to finding a home for a monoculture of those with a similar worldview (although certainly the city is a monument to its founder, Sarkar). Moreover, this city is connected to history even as it creates an alternative vision of the future for India and other peripherialized places.

Central to this rethinking of the city is the resituation of land from individual and state owndership to cooperative means. Historically Indian village were ecological sound as the local village government controlled the environment (community management), when this responsibility was transferred to the British, to government, the bureaucracy developed centralized rules to control the common areas taking away power from the community and granting it to those far away. The example of Ananda Nagar is among the strategies to recover the rural and to develop methods of community development management and is translatable to Detroit, Amsterdam or Calcutta. Critical is the development of a community spirit, of local pride, of one's surroundings. For example, voted the best in the world, Calcutta's subway system--in a city where nothing else runs--can but be explained, if at all, by the pride and the sense of collective ownership citizens have of it.

GLOBAL AND LOCAL CITY SPACES

While efforts to create new cities built on history and based on community self-reliance are laudable the city still exists in a larger cultural and political economy. When localized, capitalism might be protected against, but the juggernaut of modernity is difficult to vanquish until the city itself become an alternative policy and becomes part of a larger civilization. This, of course, is Sarkar's project: the creation of a new civilizational ethos with an alternative spiritual--around pillars of economic democracy, inclusion of the Other, better use of our physical, intellectual and creative resources, and dynamic balance between technology and nature.
Placing the city in the global is the classic tension between globalism and localism. Localism creates community but also ossifies narrow and dogmatic practices. Globalism opens up to the Other but currently it is only capital that is truly global, labor and ideas still are resisted at national borders.

Cities, however, manifest this tension and have the possibility of creating a new space wherein they are locally managed within a context of a global design. But we should not forget that this was Pol Pot's brutal design as well. The history of creating intended cities as a response from modernity or as an attempt to transcend modernity are ripe with failures as well. While necessary, planning and design often place the "city" in the policy arena of technocracy and bureaucracy (like land zoning planners) not in the hands of culture or spiritual consciousness.
Finally, even as part of our selves might wish for cities like Islamabad--clean and efficient--they are only possible with the removal of certain classes. For one can not escape history and one can not escape those that the city displaces: the other classes and more importantly the spiritual and ethical discourse that the city attempts to remove from our creations and understandings of the world. While we all want the City Efficient, the social and economic consequences of city design force us to remember the City Ecological and the City Spiritual. The city might attempt to wall what the dominant culture fears but in its creation of physical and intellectual security, it robs itself of the Other; an Other that eventually finds some way of reentering the minds of those in the City, often through various forms of cultural resistance.

But the City Ecological and Spiritual, community managed and ecological sound, are faced with the larger forces of modern capitalism and with the lure of city lights. The new form that contests all these city images, is the cyber city: the node of networks and relationships created through the internet. However, at on level these but continue the Los Angelization of the planet; they create community without face-to-face meetings, they allow individual expression without responsibility to the Other. At another level, however, the continue the process of the creation of a planetary culture, albeit a materialistic one. But once the the idea of the planet supercedes other identities then the spiritual unity that is humanity can hopefully not be too far behind.

Cities then are representations of various theories (theories of modernity, or Tantra, e.g.) and they themselves are the creators of theories. City do not create culture or public policy rather they are culture and policy. City spaces are but the concrete manifestations of our paradigms or our imaginations of the real. We need to imagine alternatives spaces for the city and create cities that help transform us.



REFERENCES

Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (Harper and Row, 1974)
Karl Kim and Kem Lowry, "Honolulu," Cities (November 1990)
Leopold Kohr, Overdeveloped Nations: The Diseconomies of Scale (Schocken
Books, 1978)
Ray Lenzi, "Ananda Nagar: Building a Sustainable Society," Prout
Journal, (Vol. 5, No. 1, 1989)
Nikos Papastergiadis, "Ashis Nandy: Dialogue and the Diaspora--A
Conversation," Third Text (Summer 1990).
Kevin Robins and Mark Hepworth, "Electronic Spaces: new technologies and
the future of cities," Futures (April 1988)
Richard Register, Ecocity: Berkeley (North Atlantic Books 1987)
Mark Satin, editor, New Options. Box 19324. Wash. D.C. 20036
Strategies (No. 3, 1990). Special Issue: In the City
Michael Shapiro and Deane Neubauer, "Spatiality and Policy Discourse:
Reading the Global City." Alternatives (July 1989)
William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History (Harper and Row 1971)



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Dr. Sohail Inayatullah is a political scientist/futurist and judicial planner Phil McNally provided useful comments to an earlier draft.