The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21)

by Joel Kotkin

  THE FUTURE, AND LIMITS, OF GENTRIFICATION

  In the twenty-first century, some cities or parts of cities may survive, and even thrive, on such an ephemeral basis and, with the support of their still dominant media industries, market that notion to the wider world. The brief but widely acclaimed rise of urban technology districts—such as New York’s “Silicon Alley” or San Francisco’s “Multimedia Gulch” during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s—even briefly led some to identify hipness and urban edginess as the primary catalyst for information-age growth.31

  Both of these districts ultimately shriveled as the Internet industry contracted and then matured, yet the market for new housing continued to grow. This demand came partly from younger professionals, but also from a growing population of older affluents, including those hoping to experience “a more pluralistic way of life.” These modern-day nomads often reside part-time in cities, either to participate in its cultural life or to transact critical business. In some cities—Paris, for one—these occasional urban nomads constitute, by one estimate, one in ten residents.32

  The rush in many “global cities” to convert old warehouses, factories, and even office buildings into elegant residences suggests the gradual transformation of former urban economic centers into residential resorts. The declining old financial center of lower Manhattan seemed likely to revive not as a technology hub, noted the architectural historian Robert Bruegmann, but as a full- or part-time home for “wealthy cosmopolites wishing to enjoy urban amenities in the elegantly recycled shell of a former business center.”33

  Over time, however, this form of culturally based growth may not be self-sustaining. In the past, achievement in the arts grew in the wake of economic or political dynamism. Athens first emerged as a bustling great mercantile center and military power before it astounded the world in other fields. The extraordinary cultural production of other great cities, from Alexandria and Kaifeng to Venice, Amsterdam, London, and, in the twentieth century, New York, rested upon a similar nexus between the aesthetic and the mundane.34

  Broader demographic trends also pose severe long-term questions for these cities. The decline in the urban middle-class family—a pattern seen in both the late Roman Empire and eighteenth-century Venice— deprives urban areas of a critical source for economic and social vitality. These problems will be particularly marked in Japan and Europe, where the numbers of young workers are already dropping. Superannuated Japanese cities face increasing difficulties competing with their Chinese counterparts, enriched by the migration of ambitious young families from their vast agricultural hinterlands.35

  Under these circumstances, it is difficult to imagine the continued dominance of the Italian fashion industry or Japan’s preeminence in Asian popular culture as their populations of young people continue to decline. 36 Over time, the economically ascendant cities around the world— Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Shanghai, Beijing, Mumbai, or Bangalore— seem certain to generate their own aesthetically based industries.37

  Finally, the ephemeral city seems likely to face often profound social conflicts. An economy oriented to entertainment, tourism, and “creative” functions is ill suited to provide upward mobility for more than a small slice of its population. Focused largely on boosting culture and constructing spectacular buildings, urban governments may tend to neglect more mundane industries, basic education, or infrastructure. Following such a course, they are likely to evolve ever more into “dual cities,” made up of a cosmopolitan elite and a large class of those, usually at low wages, who service their needs.38

  To avoid the pitfalls of an ephemeral future, cities must emphasize those basic elements long critical to the making of vital commercial places. A busy city must be more than a construct of diversions for essentially nomadic populations; it requires an engaged and committed citizenry with a long-term financial and familial stake in the metropolis. A successful city must be home not only to edgy clubs, museums, and restaurants, but also to specialized industries, small businesses, schools, and neighborhoods capable of regenerating themselves for the next generation.

  SECURITY AND THE URBAN FUTURE

  Over time, no urban system can survive persistent chaos. Successful cities flourish under a strong regime of both law and order. Citizens must feel at least somewhat secure in their persons. They also need to depend on a responsible authority capable of administering contracts and enforcing basic codes of commercial behavior.

  Maintaining a strong security regime can do much to revive an urban area. One critical element in the late-twentieth-century revival in some American cities, most notably in New York, can be traced to a significant drop in crime. This was accomplished by the adoption of new policing methods and a widespread determination to make public safety the number one priority of government. Indeed, the 1990s represented arguably the greatest epoch of crime reduction in American history, providing a critical precondition for both the growth of tourism and even a modest demographic rebound in some major cities.39 Even Los Angeles, following the devastating riots of 1992, managed to curtail crime and then stage a significant economic and demographic recovery.40

  Yet even as security concerns in American cities improved, new threats to the urban future surfaced in the developing world.41 By the end of the twentieth century, crime in megacities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo had devolved into what one law enforcement official called “urban guerrilla war.” Drug trafficking, gangs, and general lawlessness also infest many parts of Mexico City, Tijuana, San Salvador, and other cities.

  Inevitably, such an erosion in basic security undermines city life. Fear of both crime and capricious authority usually also slows the movement of foreign capital, sometimes in favor of safer locations in the suburban periphery. Even in relatively peaceful countries, “kleptocratic” bureaucracies deflect business investment to safer and less congenitally larcenous locales.42

  Perhaps even more insidious are the effects of the polluted environment and growing health-related problems in many cities of the developing world. At least 600 million city residents worldwide lack access to even basic sanitation and medical care; these populations naturally become breeding grounds for deadly infectious diseases, against which neither foreign nationality nor affluence can always immunize.43 Such threats also drive both indigenous professionals and foreign investors to seek more healthful environments abroad or in secured suburbs.44

  THE TERRORIST THREAT

  The Islamic Middle East poses the most immediate lethal threat to the security of cities globally. Here the familiar woes of developing countries have been exacerbated by enormous social and political dislocations. In trying to adopt Western models of city building during the twentieth century, many Islamic cities weakened traditional bonds of community and neighborhood without replacing them with anything both modern and socially sustainable.

  This transformation, suggests the historian Stefano Bianca, “sapped the shaping forces of cultural identity,” leaving behind a population alienated from its increasingly Westernized environment.45 This alienation has been further deepened by political conflicts, most importantly the struggle with an economically and militarily advanced Israel. The aspirations of Islamic, and particularly Arab, cities were perpetually thwarted not only by economic, social, and environmental failures, but also by repeated humiliations on the battlefield.

  To a large extent, Islamic societies have also failed to adjust to the cosmopolitan standards necessary to compete in the global economy. Beirut, the Arab city best positioned for cosmopolitan success, foundered because of incessant civil strife and only in the late 1990s began to make any serious efforts to rebuild itself. Other potentially successful Islamic cities such as Tehran and Cairo still lack the social stability or transparent legal system critical for overseas investors. Even the best-run of these countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, still suffer from political and legal systems far more arbitrary than those in the West or in such Asian cities as Singapore, Taipei, Seo
ul, or Tokyo.46

  From this difficult milieu has emerged perhaps the most dangerous threat to the future of modern cities—Islamic terrorism. This phenomenon differed from the radical nationalism associated with writers such as Frantz Fanon. A black psychiatrist from Martinique deeply affected by his experiences during the Algerian war for independence, Fanon saw the struggle of the developing world as “starting a new history of man” that still embraced the urban culture of the West.47 In contrast, the Islamic terrorists regarded the West, and particularly its great cities, as intrinsically evil, exploitative, and un-Islamic.

  One Arab scholar has labeled the leaders of the Islamic movement as “angry sons of a failed generation”—the ones who saw the secularist dream of Arab unity dissolve into corruption, poverty, and social chaos. For the most part, their anger has been incubated not in the deserts or small villages, but in such major Islamic cities as Cairo, Jiddah, Karachi, or Kuwait. Some have been longtime residents in such Western urban centers as New York, London, or Hamburg.48

  This experience abroad seemed only to deepen their anger against Western cities. As early as 1990, one terrorist, an Egyptian resident in New York, already spoke of “destroying the pillars such as their touristic infrastructure which they are proud of and their high world buildings that they are proud of.”49 Eleven years later, that anger shook the urban world to its foundation.

  In the years following the 2001 attack on New York, both individuals and businesses began rethinking the advisability of locating close to prime potential terrorist targets in high-profile, central locations. To the already difficult challenges posed by changing economic and social trends, cities around the world now have to contend with the constant threat of physical obliteration.50

  THE SACRED PLACE

  Throughout history, cities have faced many challenges to their prosperity and survival. Even the nature of the most immediate current threat— loosely affiliated marauders rather than states—is not unique. Some of the greatest damage done to cities in history has been inflicted not by organized states, but by nomadic peoples or even small bands of brigands.

  Despite such threats, the urban ideal has demonstrated a remarkable resilience. Fear rarely is enough to stop the determined builders of cities. For all the cities that have been ruined permanently by war, pestilence, or natural disaster, many others—including Rome, London, and Tokyo— have been rebuilt, often more than once. Indeed, even amid mounting terrorist threats, city officials and developers in New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, and other major cities continue to plan new office towers and other superlative edifices.51

  Far more important to the future of cities than constructing new buildings will be the value people place on the urban experience. Great structures or basic physical attributes—location along rivers, oceans, trade routes, attractive green space, or even freeway interchanges—can help start a great city, or aid in its growth, but cannot sustain its long-term success.

  In the end, a great city relies on those things that engender for its citizens a peculiar and strong attachment, sentiments that separate one specific place from others.52 Urban areas, in the end, must be held together by a consciousness that unites their people in a shared identity. “The city is a state of mind,” the great sociologist Robert Ezra Park observed, “a body of customs, and of unorganized attitudes and sentiments.” 53

  Whether in the traditional urban core or in the new pattern of development in the expanding periphery, such issues of identity and community still largely determine which places ultimately succeed. In this, city dwellers today struggle with many of the same issues faced by the originators of urbanity anywhere in the world.

  Progenitors of a new kind of humanity, these earliest city dwellers found themselves confronting vastly different problems from those faced in prehistoric nomadic communities and agricultural villages. Urbanites had to learn how to coexist and interact with strangers from outside their clan or tribe. This required them to develop new ways to codify behavior, to determine what was commonly acceptable in family life, commerce, and social discourse.

  In earliest times, the priesthood usually instructed on these matters. Deriving their authority from divinity, they were able to set the rules for the varied residents of a specific urban center. Rulers also gained stature by claiming their cities to be the special residences of the gods themselves; the sanctity of the city was tied to its role as the center for worship.

  The great classical city almost everywhere was both suffused with religion and instructed by it. “Cities did not ask if the institutions which they adopted were useful,” noted the classical historian Fustel de Coulanges. “These institutions were adopted because religion had wished it thus.”54

  This sacred role has been too often ignored in contemporary discussions of the urban condition. It barely appears in many contemporary books about cities or in public discussions about their plight. This would have seemed odd not only to residents of the ancient, classical, or medieval cities, but also to many reformers in the late Victorian age.

  “New urbanist” architects, planners, and developers, for example, often speak convincingly about the need for city green space, historical preservation, and environmental stewardship. Yet unlike the Victorian-era progressives, who shared similar concerns, they rarely refer to the need for a powerful moral vision to hold cities together.55

  Such shortcomings naturally reflect today’s contemporary urban environment, with its emphasis on faddishness, stylistic issues, and the celebration of the individual over the family or stable community. The contemporary postmodernist perspective on cities, dominant in much of the academic literature, even more adamantly dismisses shared moral values as little more than the illusory aspects of what one German professor labeled “the Christian-bourgeois microcosmos.”56

  Such nihilistic attitudes, if widely adopted, could prove as dangerous to the future of cities as the most hideous terroristic threats. Without a widely shared belief system, it would be exceedingly difficult to envision a viable urban future. Even in a postindustrial era, suggested Daniel Bell, the fate of cities still revolves around “a conception of public virtue” and the “classical questions of the polis.”

  Cities in the modern West, Bell understood, have depended on a broad adherence to classical and Enlightenment ideals—due process, freedom of belief, the basic rights of property—to incorporate diverse cultures and meet new economic challenges.57 Shattering these essential principles, whether in the name of the marketplace, multicultural separatism, or religious dogma, would render the contemporary city in the West helpless to meet the enormous challenges before it.58

  This is not to suggest that the West represents the only reasonable way to achieve an urban order. History abounds with models developed under explicit pagan, Muslim, Confucian, Buddhist, and Hindu auspices. The cosmopolitan city well predates the Enlightenment: It may have surfaced first in pagan Greek Alexandria, but it also flourished later in coastal China and India as well as throughout much of Dar al-Islam.

  In our time, perhaps the most notable success in city building has occurred under neo-Confucianist belief systems, mixed with scientific rationalism imported from the West. This convergence, an amalgam of modernity and tradition, eventually overcame Maoism, which was intent on destroying all vestiges of China’s cultural past. Today, it struggles both with the ill effects of unrestrained market capitalism and, particularly in China itself, with the self-interested corruption of a ruling authoritarian elite.59

  It is to be hoped that the Islamic world, having found Western values wanting, may find in its own glorious past—replete with cosmopolitan values and a belief in scientific progress—the means to salvage its troubled urban civilization. The ancient metropolis of Istanbul, with more than 9 million residents, has demonstrated at least the possibility of reconciling a fundamentally Muslim society with what one Turkish planner called “a culturally globalized face.” The future success of such a cosmopolitan model, amid the a
ssault from intolerant brands of Islam, could do much to preserve urban progress around the world in the new century.60

  Indeed, in an age of intense globalization, cities must manage to meld their moral orders with an ability to accommodate differing populations. In a successful city, even those who embrace other faiths, like dhimmis during the Islamic golden ages, must expect basic justice from authorities. Without such prospects, commerce inevitably declines, the pace of cultural and technological development slows, and cities devolve from dynamic places of human interaction into static, and ultimately doomed, congregations of future ruins.

  Cities can thrive only by occupying a sacred place that both orders and inspires the complex natures of gathered masses of people. For five thousand years or more, the human attachment to cities has served as the primary forum for political and material progress. It is in the city, this ancient confluence of the sacred, safe, and busy, where humanity’s future will be shaped for centuries to come.

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  1. Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City, trans. Dennis Pardee (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1970), 5.

  2. Witold Rybczynski, City Life: Urban Expectations in the New World (New York: Scribner’s, 1995), 49.

  INTRODUCTION: PLACES SACRED, SAFE, AND BUSY

  1. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521 trans. A. P. Maudslay (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1956), xii. In the American introduction, Irving Leonard fixes Bernal Díaz’s “approximate” birth date as 1492, the same year Columbus sailed to the Americas.