Urban Sociology
Blog - February 4, 2007
FYI - Two books on urbanism
THE CITY A Global History By Joel
Kotkin Modern Library. 218 pp. $21.95
IMAGINED CITIES Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel By
Robert Alter Yale Univ. 175 pp. $27.50
ometime
within the next two years, we human beings will pass a demographic milestone
as significant as any in our history. By the beginning of 2007 -- at least
according to the calculations of Joel Kotkin in his new book, The City
-- the world's burgeoning ranks of urban dwellers will for the first time
constitute a majority of the planet's human population. Thanks largely to
the recent swift growth of cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Homo
sapiens , having traveled far from our roots as rural hunter-gatherers, will
become a mostly metropolitan species. While some people might regard this
development as undesirable or even unnatural (Thomas Jefferson and the
Unabomber spring to mind), Kotkin, a senior fellow of the New America
Foundation, argues that it is actually the culmination of a long and
perfectly logical evolution. Ever since the emergence of the first
proto-cities in the Middle East more than five millennia ago, human beings
have been congregating in progressively larger and more complex communities
to carry out their daily business. And although this increasing urban
concentration has created more than its share of problems, it has also
served as a crucial spur to human creativity and accomplishment. "From the
earliest beginnings," Kotkin points out, cities "have been the places that
generated most of mankind's art, religion, culture, commerce, and
technology."
Given the sheer variety of these byproducts of citification, one would
expect the urban experience itself to be just as multiform. However, as
Kotkin stresses in this short but audaciously comprehensive book, it is
instead the universality of city life that has been its most notable
characteristic through history. Whether the city under consideration is
ancient Ur, medieval Constantinople or modern Singapore, Kotkin finds the
essential patterns of urban existence remarkably consistent. Only when
cities fail to support these common patterns -- specifically, by failing to
provide the physical security, commercial opportunity and sense of sacred
place and purpose that are the sine qua non of urban success -- do they
begin to lose viability. "Where these factors are present," Kotkin writes,
"urban culture flourishes. When these elements weaken, cities dissipate and
eventually recede out of history."
Obviously, this is a rather sweeping argument, and in a 160-page book
(excluding notes) it can be only so persuasive. But over the course of this
breakneck survey of 5,000 years of urban history, Kotkin makes a credible
case for his ideas. Key to his analysis are several thumbnail accounts of
cities that, because they lost or never offered one of his three critical
elements, proved unfit for long-term ascendancy. According to Kotkin, for
instance, a metropolis like Carthage, despite being a commercial powerhouse,
ultimately proved ephemeral because it lacked a coherent sense of higher
purpose that would unify its population and so ensure its longevity. And why
did no major cities arise in Europe during the Middle Ages? Because the
prevailing authority at the time -- the Catholic Church -- could furnish a
strong context for the sacred but had no real provision for the safety and
commercial vigor of a large urban population. With the emergence of the
modern city after the Industrial Revolution, maintaining this delicate urban
balance has only become more complicated. As cities have grown in size and
complexity, new challenges have arisen, most notably those posed by
environmental decay, technology-driven decentralization and, as recent
events in London sadly confirm, the spread of worldwide terrorism. But while
these forces do much to undermine the health of contemporary urban areas,
the biggest threat of all may be something far less tangible -- what Kotkin
regards as a kind of creeping anomie among urbanites in the developed world,
evident in their devotion to "faddishness, stylistic issues, and the
celebration of the individual over the family or stable community." As
middle-class families retreat from the urban scene, a vital spirit of
community mission is being lost in many places. And the result, as Kotkin
sees it, is likely to be unpleasant. Without a shared civic identity, some
of today's great cities may soon follow Carthage onto the dusty backlot of
world history.
This fragmented, purposeless and often solipsistic turn in modern urban
consciousness is the subject of Robert Alter's Imagined Cities . Like
Kotkin, Alter is attuned to the disintegrative forces unleashed by the
explosive growth of cities in the 19th and 20th centuries, and he attempts
to register the resulting changes as they were perceived by a half-dozen
seminal authors. Focusing on the language used by each writer to portray the
new urban milieu, Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at
Berkeley, aims to adduce not the journalistically objective realities of the
latter-day city but "the shifting pulse of experience felt by the
individual, how the mind and the senses take in the world, construct it, or
on occasion are confounded by it." Writing with a precision that belies the
stereotype of tumid academic prose, Alter plots the trajectory of what he
calls "experiential realism" through six different authors writing about six
different cities. Beginning with Flaubert, whose Paris is a chaotic whirl
that can be perceived "only through the distorting medium of . . . private
preoccupations," Alter documents the increasingly disjointed and subjective
quality of the urban experience as depicted in Dickens, Kafka and the
Russian author Andrei Bely. Granted, he does find a more sanguine view in
the work of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who depict urban fecundity as a
source of exultation rather than disorientation. But for most of these
writers, the modern metropolis is a disturbing, unmanageable place -- a
clamorous human machine that breeds confusion, alienation and (especially
for Kafka) malevolent personal nightmare.
In neither of these two very different books is the outlook for the city
altogether bright. For Alter as for Kotkin, the loss of a strong communal
ethic among urbanites seems to be a particularly worrisome sign for the
future. But as each would be quick to confirm, there is no going back to a
pre-urban or even a less urban model of existence. For better or worse, ours
is now a world made of and by great cities, and it is their success or
failure that will ultimately determine our own.
Posted by Urban Sociology - MVCC at 8:27 AM
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