Cities - early thoughts

Attempts to understand cities should probably begin with a basic question: why did humans, at a particular point in their history, opt to congregate in close proximity in larger and larger groups, and to create as a by-product “built environments”? It is certainly the case that for much of the history of humans in cities (and in statistical terms it is still the case today) there were enormous problems – of reliable access to potable water and food, and of sanitation

and communicable disease – that were symptomatic of city life to an even greater degree than in an impoverished countryside. Despite the clear downsides of life in the city, it was clearly a successful social, economic and political group “mutation” in human evolution.

Fernand Braudel, a historian of the Mediterranean and of France in the era of the birth of Western capitalism (1400-1800), an era in which population growth, industry, technology, trade, warfare, political organisation and productivity were transformed in an apparent virtuous cycle of growth and economic sophistication, introduced a chapter on Towns in the following terms:

“The towns are so many electrical transformers. They increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange and ceaselessly stir up men’s lives. They developed out of the oldest and most revolutionary division of labour: the fields on the one hand and the activities described as urban on the other… Towns are also oppressive, parasitical formations. The town-country confrontation is the first and longest class struggle history has known. We should not pass censure or take sides: these parasitic towns also embodied the intelligence, risk, progress, and modernity towards which the world was slowly moving. They had the finest foods, the luxury industries, brisk currencies and soon calculating, clear-sighted capitalism. To the rather unwieldy body of the state they lent their irreplaceable vitality. They were the accelerators of all historical time. Which does not mean that they did not make men suffer throughout the centuries, including the men who lived in them.” [Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800, p.373].

 

 One useful way to look at it is through the perspective of Adam Smith’s concept of the “division of labour”. A division of labour occurs both within a production process (Smith’s famous example of a pin factory) and more generally in terms of human knowledge, experience, social role and expertise. In one sense, increasing specialisation is the key to human civilisation (if complex human groups are in fact more “civilised”). But in order to specialise humans must have the ability to exchange their skills, and the products of their knowledge and work (goods and services) with each other, on a mutually-beneficial and equitable basis. So historical progress, “civilisation” and the growth of towns and cities can be understood as essentially synonymous terms for the growth of markets, with towns and cities being the physical manifestation of markets. In fact, Braudel spends several volumes looking at the evolution of markets and marketplaces in the pre-industrial world – local, regional and global.

The key problem with any exchange in a marketplace that goes beyond barter is that it involves a relationship in which one person is required to trust another person to deliver his or her side of the transaction – the other person being someone they probably don’t know and have no particular reason to trust. So what comes with markets is a whole framework of customary practice, codes of behaviour, laws, courts, police, accounting … and in particular money and credit.

A big part of the function of cities is to provide a bureaucratic and administrative framework, as well as a physical environment, in which markets can be effective. Of course there is a lot that goes on it city life that is not directly concerned with markets – the whole rich “ecosystem” (as Jane Jacobs applied the term) of social, artistic, cultural and community life. But I would suggest that a surprising amount is explainable in market terms: when a Medici commissioned a statue from Michelangelo the marble had to be quarried and transported by someone who expected to be paid, as did Michelangelo. The statue moreover would not be intended to be put in Cosimo’s living room for his private satisfaction; rather it was intended for prominent public display – an act which was all about city pride, a belief in the significance to the community of public space, and as an expression of philanthropy, status, wealth and power within that community. The message was basically: “this is an expression of the wealth, stability and strength of our system and our city, which benefits all of us.”

In addition to markets for goods and services, the market for capital (“capital markets” generally) is historically central to the evolution of cities, in particular the mercantile city states of Europe, and of any centrally-governed human system. Money and credit are essential to reconcile any exchange where either time and/or distance is involved – therefore any investment for production as well as trade. Here’s another long quote from Braudel:

“When we bring money into the discussion we reach a higher level … However a view of the whole picture from this vantage point enables us to understand monetary activity as a tool, a ‘structure’, a deep-seated regular feature of all slightly evolved commercial life. Above all money is never an isolated reality; wherever it is, it influences all economic and social relationships. … Although it is an ancient fact of life, an ancient technique, money never ceases to surprise humanity. It seems to them mysterious and disturbing.
First and foremost it is complicated in itself … It was a novelty more because of what it

brought with it than what it was itself. What did it actually bring? Sharp variations in prices of essential foodstuffs; incomprehensible relationships in which man no longer recognised either himself, his customs or his ancient values. His work became a commodity, himself a ‘thing’”. [p.325].

A final point made by Braudel (and also by John Gray in his book “False Dawn”) is that markets, being social and political organisations and relationships rather than some automatic mechanism outside human agency, always tend to develop in ways that reflect very human interests. One aspect is a tendency towards a self-reinforcing cycle of concentration of political power and wealth. Another is the tendency towards the development of cartels, monopolies, guilds, and trades unions.

 

Restrictions of markets seem to have been intrinsic features of capitalist societies from the earliest city states onwards. Broadly speaking these occurred in one of two ways: “top down” as nation states and state administrations gave specific rights to individuals or corporations (e.g. protected trade rights in the Dutch and English East India Companies, or tax farming rights by the French 18^th century state); and “bottom up”, as individual capitalists formed cartels and increasingly asserted control over the state (what we would today probably refer to as “crony capitalism”), or as groups of workers formed associations to defend and promote their interests. The literature on the tendency of democratic republics to evolve towards plutocracy, and for large and centralised bureaucratic states to evolve towards oligarchy, is enormous, reaching back to the ancient Greek (or rather Athenian) experiments. In the modern context the writings of C. Wright Mills, Mancur Olsen and Gore Vidal should be on the reading list for anyone interested in these themes.

What does this have to do with cities and the urban environment? If cities can be seen as physical manifestations of the division of labour and markets in any complex society, then it must be the case that the physical structure of cities (architecture, design, planning regimes, infrastructure and the choices of technology of building and transport) is intimately linked to the nature of markets (production, trade and capital flows) and the organisation of the state systems that give birth to, and provide the wider environment for, cities.

To take the example of Chicago from William Cronon’s work [“Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West”]: although the politics and political economy of the city and the US are not Cronon’s focus, the era of Chicago’s rise in US history was notoriously one of extreme concentration both of market power and political power – heavily cartelised markets and the domination of politics by a tiny plutocracy of “robber barons” even though the broad direction of American society and politics was towards democratic mass participation. The robber barons were particularly concentrated in the new industries (railways, steel, coal, oil, the mass press, mass retailing) as well as in banking and property.

 

"The Bosses of the Senate", a cartoon by Joseph Keppler depicting corporate interests–from steel, copper, oil, iron, sugar, tin, and coal to paper bags, envelopes, and salt–as giant money bags looming over the tiny senators at their desks in the Chamber of the United States Senate. Published in Puck on January 23, 1889

 

The “shape” of urbanism in the late 20^th/early 21^st century US is clearly very different: automobile and freeway-based suburbanism rather than rail-based concentrated cities; a financialised consumption-orientated rather than a primarily extractive and industrialised production-centred economy; and an unprecedented concentration at the Federal level of monetary, credit, regulatory, military and national security power. But the new urban shape, and the choices of technology and investment it represents, is surely as much a reflection of the interactions between markets, states, elites and corporations as was Cronon’s Chicago in the 1900s or Braudel’s Italian city states in the 1500s.