The 2005 U.S. Census Bureau counted 232,581,397 Americans, 82.6% of the population, living in the nations cities, but if our moralists and intelligence services are to be believed, they do so at no small risk to the safety of their persons and the security of their souls. There is an obvious contradiction. If the city is the sewer of vice and a slough of despond, why do so many people choose to live there? On what toxic landfall does the city stand as the embodiment of its ennobling cognate, civilization? The questions bear asking because the future is urban, and the answers are what the new millennium is likely to make of its art and religion as well as of its government and working arrangement with nature.
Lewis H. Lapham
Demographic experts project that by 2050, that is before the time when you reach the ripe old age of 50, about 75% of the global population will live in cities. And just to be clear about how significant that is, since the appearance of the first cities it has taken humans over 9000 years to reach a 50% urbanized population. So while the seduction of the city has been around for a very long time, mass urbanization is a relatively new phenomenon. The reaction to COVID, however, has thrown a wrench into the projections and currents trends, at least in the United States, are raising questions about government’s ability to keep cities livable and attractive. As professor Joel Kotkin points out, many of the problems facing our cities – rising crime, growing social instability, increasingly disruptive politics, high costs, and overly-burdensome regulation – predate the pandemic. But they have been exasperated by it and are not likely to go away without serious policy changes. Increasing disorder is driving people – especially the tax-paying middle classes – away from the urban centers of some of America’s largest cities. Glossy advertisements to the contrary, many just aren’t convinced that the benefits of urban living outweigh the liabilities. This is a real problem, one that will have an impact upon the prosperity and integrity of the United STates in the coming decades. It is important, therefore, that we know something about the origin and development of cities, their importance for sustaining economies and cultures, and why their preservation is important for civilization itself.
Cities have existed for some nine thousand years or so, but only in 2008 did more than 50% of the global population live in one, marking a significant milepost in the history of urban development. Given both the age of cities and the span of all recorded history, we would not be wrong in identifying one grand theme across ALL of history: humans learned to live together in functioning cities.
Great Britain was the first nation to have a majority of its population living in cities. And this occurred only around 1850 due to industrialization and brought about significant changes politically and socially. At the same time, just prior to the U.S. Civil War, the vast majority (75-80%) of the United States’ population still lived in small settlements or on family farms. Today, that statistic in the US is reversed and now fewer than 18% of the American population live in a rural situation. The United States reached its urban/rural tipping point around 1930, just about the time that the Great Depression and two world wars irreparably changed the face of the country and its position in global affairs. China, on the other hand, just reached the mark a few years ago. Urbanization itself seems to be, and perhaps always has been, a feature of modernization. As more regions of the globe become part of the so-called developed world, they too will have more city dwellers than not. Each year, for example, six-hundred thousand new West African immigrants pour into the Nigerian city of Lagos. Current cities are becoming mega-cities and new cities appear every year. To borrow from one PBS exposé on American cities, the United States is now a “metropolitan nation on an urban planet.” 1 City life, for good or ill, is the human future, and urban issues will certainly remain at the forefront of public affairs during your lifetime. It is, therefore, in your interest to understand the history and functions of this uniquely human institution.
One may argue that humanity’s greatest creation, the one institution that now sustains a global population of over six billion, has been the city. While rural farming was, and is, important for feeding large populations and small farmers did create unique and stable cultures, cities are the engines of change. From the star-charts of ancient Babylon and the colored glass of medieval Venice to the computer-chips of modern Palo Alto and Taipei, cities have driven major changes in both the way we think and the way we live.
Since ancient times people have discovered that even though urban life presents unique challenges and dangers, it also offers greater opportunity for a more dynamic and productive life. Hangzhou, Athens, Rome, Tenochtitlan, Kyoto, Chicago, and Cape Town all share certain characteristics that allow large, high-density populations to thrive in relative peace and they provide public and private spaces that foster social and commercial complexity. On the contrary, places such as Caracas, Damascus, or Baltimore, likewise share certain characteristics that can lead one to reach the opposite conclusion, i.e. that the city creates an environment of chaos, violence, and misery on a grand scale. What explains the divergent outcomes? Why do certain cities flourish while others are inundated with crime and poverty? Why do some cities demand our attention as historical players of major importance while others simply exist without generating much interest at all? What, for example, do you know about the history of Shenzhen? Despite being China’s fifth largest city with a metropolitan population of well over 10 million, nearly three million more than Hong Kong, few Americans have even heard of it. In Medieval England, by contrast, a ‘city’ (a town by today’s standards) with more than two thousand souls definitely stood out as a major settlement, an urban island amidst a sea of sparsely settled lands, and played a significant role in the kingdom. Wincester, for example, the site of the royal mint, housed fewer than two thousand people. Fewer than ten cities of that size even existed in all of England at the time of William the Conqueror. During the Middle Ages, therefore, cities were wondrous oddities amidst Europe’s overwhelmingly rural population, yet they were well known and extremely important for the movers and shakers of the age. All of educated Europe, for example, knew of Oxford during the Middle Ages and it attracted the greatest scholars of the age, despite never achieving a population of over three thousand. So historically, absolute size did not always determine significance. Despite their vast separation in time and space, Medieval Oxford and modern Shenzhen share a great deal more than you may think. So what makes us notice one and not the other?
No matter if we speak of Asia, Africa, of America, certain cities have attained special status historically because they contributed essential elements to the development of civilization – the other element of our course title. Cities, argues one recent commentator, unleash the creative urges of humanity and are forever reimagining man’s situation. 2 Certain cities have played greater roles in that reimagining. They were, and in many cases still are, fundamental to understanding civilization itself. You can’t understand America, for example, without knowing about Boston or New York. Likewise, you can’t understand ancient Greece without knowing about Athens. Cities provide both the space and the opportunity for serious technological and cultural advancements that make a ‘civilized’ life possible. They are and have always been the generators of civilization. As if to underscore the point religiously, Hebrew Scripture (the Old Testament) even locates the famed Garden of Eden and first humans precisely in the region where cities and civilization first made their appearance, that is, between the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. One highly regarded author and web guru (and St. Albans alumnus), Steven Johnson, has gone so far as to argue in a recent book that the history of Homo sapiens as a species should begin and end with a single story line: we learned to live in cities. 3 It is in cities, then, that man collectively designed a new way to live together, organized government and expanded commerce, and shaped enduring and beautiful cultural traditions. And it is in cities that humans developed a sense of history itself.
The development, evolution, and management of cities are critical elements in the story of humanity. While man has been around for tens of thousands of years, our collective history, strictly speaking, does not extend much beyond the past five thousand years. The historical era begins roughly around 3500 BC due to the fact that what we call ‘historical time’ only starts when man began to keep written records. And writing itself first appeared in the cities of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, later in India and China. Writing not only helped organize resources of larger populations, it allowed for the more efficient transmission of ideas from generation to generation. Writing preserved knowledge and ensured that it could be passed along to those who followed. In short, it allowed men and women to learn from the dead and allowed them in turn to instruct the not-yet-living. Writing, in essence, fundamentally transformed man’s sense of time; a sense of past and future was born.
It was also in the city that man first adopted a settled life, stopped following the herds of animals from which he fed, began to construct much larger structures, and began managing much larger communities based upon farming. (It should be pointed out that while today we associate agriculture with rural living, the first ancient agricultural communities were associated with cities.) History, in the strictest sense, therefore, begins in the city. So it follows that the study of history in the Upper School begins with an investigation into the nature and origin of cities and the first civilizations they created.
Where, then, do we start? What themes should we follow in such an investigation? What commonalities do urban environments share? Let’s start with a basic definition: 1) a city is an area of dense settlement of people who are bound by cultural ties rather than family association. There is a fundamental difference, therefore, between tribes or clans that tend to be associated by blood and are ruled by custom and a city which binds diverse people by law and shared culture. 2) At its most basic level a city exerts control, both internally over its own population and externally over the surrounding countryside that feeds it. The city effectively dominates the countryside. 3) Because living in densely settled space demands a greater degree of both organization and restriction on personal freedom, the city, first and foremost, imposes order and control over the life of its inhabitants. Cities order talent and manpower and control nature and human interactions. The original city builders from Mesopotamia, Africa, and China strictly regulated the activities of urban immigrants, while the cities they constructed also imposed radically new orders (or systems) upon the regions surrounding them. A new style of authority and domination emerged (the state) and forged entirely new social, political, and economic arrangements for the people that came under their influence. Thus, we can conclude that the city brought a new type of systematic order into human social life.
The great historian Fernand Braudel once declared that “a town is always a town, wherever it is located, in time as well as in space.” 4 Despite vast differences in culture, geography, and climate, because they live in a city, city-dwellers across the globe share similar experiences when it comes to the very basic idea of living cheek-by-jowl in these ordered spaces. When the Spanish conquistadors first laid eyes on the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1519, for example, they discovered a man-made environment that functioned in similar ways as did Seville or Madrid and one that possessed recognizable structures and institutions of control. City managers across the globe, whether in Nairobi or New Orleans, still attempt to impose order on their environments, still regulate human relationships, and still try to harness the natural resources of the surrounding region in order to improve living standards for their inhabitants. On the other hand, all city dwellers also remain vulnerable to similar threats, whether natural (most recently proved by COVID) or man-made, that come from living in close association with so many people who are not family members. There are similarities in what the people of Lisbon faced during the earthquake of 1755 and what the people of New Orleans experienced in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Crime in modern Chicago is not much different from crime in Medieval London or in Renaissance Verona — recall the street brawls between the Capulets and Montagues in “Romeo and Juliet.” In all cities institutional control of violence (either police or the army) is necessary to detering chaos, to keep the ‘Capulets’ away from the ‘Montagues.’ An institution with the authority to use force has always been a necessary element of a successful city. As the famous French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, cities cannot exist without some form of power, protective and coercive. So all cities mediate, limit, and control human interactions.
– Fernand Braudel
The city, then, allows men and women to live together in large numbers, allows them to pool and share resources efficiently, allows them to share ideas that lead to technological innovation, and even, we are discovering, allows them to reduce their environmental footprint. If you want a million people to share an environment (and not destroy it) and benefit from each other, it simply makes more sense, for a variety of reasons, to put them all in ten square miles (think ancient Rome) than to spread them out over several hundred square miles (think strip-mall sprawl south and west of Washington, DC). While agricultural production (i.e. farming) is often synonymous with life in the countryside, and is the sine-qua-non — look it up! — of urbanization, rural life throughout history has not offered the same opportunities for advancement, intellectual, political, economic, cultural or technological. “Cities are centers of opportunity, tolerance, wealth creation, social networking, health, population control, and creativity,” writes Johnson. 5 There is a buzz about urban life, a special feel that we get when we walk down a busy city street, a perception that things are happening around us, that stuff is being made, that items and services are being bought and sold, that things are happening, and that possibilities for human interactions abound. The very fact that we can actually WALK in a real city seems significant as well (again, think strip-mall suburbia which rarely ever provides sidewalks for its non-existent pedestrians). Cities, quite simply, are where the action is.
All cities share similar characteristics and function in recognizable ways. But what are those functions? What are the goals of a successful city? One contemporary scholar, Joel Kotkin, has identified three critical functions common to all urban environments throughout history. All cities, according to Kotkin 1) create sacred space for the religious practices of a society, 2) provide basic security for a large number of people in a relatively confined space, and 3) provide greater opportunities for commercial exchange among people of every economic category. 6 Today, different cities around the world still carry out these three functions with varying degrees of success. Where one of the critical functions is lacking, we often see serious problems. Caracas, Venezuela’s capital city, for example, has recently failed to provide adequate commercial opportunity and, as a result, has devolved into chaos. The absence of one critical function is causing dysfunction to the entire enterprise
Throughout history, successful cities, on the other hand, have not only secured the three critical functions, but universally gone beyond the normal limits imposed by nature and actively improved the human condition. Despite differences of origin and development – different histories, that is – and despite being governed by radically different cultural ideas, the ancient cities we will be investigating throughout the course of the semester have all provided environments that offered many more opportunities to their populations than any village or tribe could possibly hope to, and in so doing, they attained a certain status at the core of a civilization.
NOTES
1. Bill Moyers, ‘Journal’, America’s Cities (2008).
2. Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History (New York: Modern Library, 2000).
3. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007), p.232.
4. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p.481.
5. Johnson, p.237.
6. Kotkin, The City.
Photo: ‘Top of the Rock’ by Taylor Robinson, 2015.
Cities and Civilizations 