What is a city? In his classic book, The City in History, Lewis Mumford tells us that the city is primarily a space of culture, society, and civilization. Before the invention of the original cities humanity was a nomadic species that lived to survive and survived to live. It was only upon the invention of the first cities that humans settled down, formed cities, became domesticated or civilized beings, and invented culture, where culture means the ability to represent what matters in life in order to better understand human existence. If this was everything, and the city was simply a space of sociability and civilization, there would be nothing more to say because we would, of course, be living in utopia. As we know, this is not the case.
By the late 19th century and early 20th century what the classical thinkers of the city, from Plato onwards, had always known, had become completely transparent: that the urban project, and the drive to design well ordered human living spaces, was continually plagued by the problem of human nature, what the classical thinkers called passion. In the works of the modern German thinkers of technology, Marx, Weber, Simmel, and Tonnies, the city is a labyrinthine place, an anomic space, where the ancient ideal of civilized living has more or less collapsed into the capitalist desire for accumulation and luxury. It is this theme, the theme of the fragmented city, that carried over into the Chicago School theory of the atomisation of urban space and the rise of the notion of sub-culture. In the works of these American writers, the notion of a unified city was not even idealised, since it was no longer possible to conceive of urban community, in anything but the loosest sense.
Where the Americans were interested in thinking through the politics of the fragmented city, a desire that was translated into the British cultural studies’ concern for sub-culture, the French writers of situationism, and later post-structuralism and post-modernism, wanted to take advantage of the splintered state of late modern urban space and oppose the technologies of state power through various strategies, such as Debord’s theory of derive or drift. Against the regimes of power Lefebvre conceptualised through the idea of abstract space, the post-modern theorists of space turned to strategies of everyday life forms of resistance. In these theories, expressed in works such as Michel De Certeau’s work on everyday life, the alienated, de-industrialised, landscape of the post-modern city became a battleground between humanity, imagination, and desire, and the post-human forces of technology, administration, and capitalism.
Torn by the forces of high speed capitalism, the contemporary post-modern city barely resembles the space of social interaction, cultural exchange, and civilization imagined by Mumford’s early urban dwellers. Instead the post-modern city is a space of suspicion, paranoia, and violence, conditioned by deep divisions between the rich who seek to buy a protected civilized world at the expense of the poor who are left to fight it out in the state of second nature that closely resembles the violent pre-historic world that pre-dated the emergence of the first cities. The sociologist Loic Wacquant imagines this urban future through the concepts of the hyper-ghetto and advanced marginality. Where the term hyper-ghetto conceives of the city in terms of totally enclosed spaces of civilization and violence, the notion of advanced marginality explains that urban violence is not some kind of atavistic throw back that will be eradicated through processes of modernisation, but rather a product of modernisation itself that we can expect to increase in intensity until the future city is realised under the sign of the barely civilized neo-Darwinian principles of contemporary capitalism, such as competitive advantage. We can already trace the outline of Wacquant’s concepts if we consider the social condition of our most futuristic cities, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Lagos, and it may not be entirely hyperbolic to suggest that the best exemplars of the ideas of the hyper-ghetto and advanced marginality in the contemporary world are Baghdad and Kabul, with their sprawling slums, safe green zones, and ultra-violent hinterlands.
What I think we can see, then, in the contemporary world is a strange situation, where the urban form is simultaneously everywhere, since now, more than ever before in human history, we are an urban species, and nowhere, because none of our contemporary cities would measure up to the ancient ideal, in respect of the way they fall well short of the Platonic principle of the urban as well ordered, socially secure, civilized space. Given that my sense is that we are today caught somewhere between the complete realisation of the urban form and the total collapse of the idea of the city into some new form, my interest in the notion of urban futures resides in the way this basic tension will be played out. In this respect I am concerned with the predictive capacity of culture, and academia, even though this faculty is also under attack from the forces of capitalism that seek to quantify all cultural production, turning it into a commodity to be sold on the free market.
Against this situation, where it is no longer possible to ask ‘what is means?’, and the only relevant question is ‘how much?’, the role of what critical culture we have left is to think through our potential urban futures in order to oppose the virus of anomie, which is characteristic of the contemporary city, and is, if we believe Simmel and the other classical urbanists, a condition of the way the free market commodifies human existence. This is precisely how we must conceive the task of constructing sustainable communities. What is a sustainable community if it is not a creative response to reasonable projections about our potential urban futures coloured by decay, decline, inequality, and violence?
