#cover m-b-murray-bookchin-the-limits-of-the-city-1.png
#title The Limits of the City
#author Murray Bookchin
#LISTtitle Limits of the City
#SORTauthors Murray Bookchin
#SORTtopics municipal government, dialectics, urbanization, municipalism, libertarian municipalism, the city
#date 1974
#source [[https://archive.org/stream/BookchinTheLimitsOfTheCity/Bookchin%20-%20The%20Limits%20of%20the%20City_djvu.txt][Internet Archive OCR]] and [[https://archive.org/details/BookchinTheLimitsOfTheCity][Internet Archive scanned reference]].
#lang en
#notes Published by <em>Harper & Row</em>. This is the second edition of *Limits of the City*. 

*** Dedication 

*For my son Joey*


** Preface 

This essay attempts to provide a meaningful perspective 
on the development of the city. It begins with a remote era 
when the land dominated the town and traces urban evolution in the present, when great metropolitan entities dominate the countryside. In the course of dealing with this 
historic development and its consequences for us, the book 
examines certain traditions of urbanism That have been 
virtually forgotten today. My purpose is to provide the 
reader with an idea of what the city was once like at its 
best, to recover high standards of urbanism all the more to 
question the present lack of standards in judging the modern metropolis and the society that fosters its growth. 

This book is radically critical; it offers no recipes for urban revitalisation within the framework of the present 
social order, nor does it make those esthetically tender 
concessions to design projects that even radical urbanists 
offer as substitutes for meaningful social relations. If the 
modern metropolis is viewed against the larger background of urban history, it will be seem as the complete 
negation of city life as it was Conceived during the more 
civilized eras, of the past. My purpose is to strengthen such 
a comparison, and to emphasize as strongly as I can that the 
roots of the urban crisis today lie not merely in poor designing, bad logistics, neglected neighborhoods, and inadequate material support, but in the social system which has created these problems in the first place — and produced 
the modern metropolis. This book tries to show that the 
city must be viewed not only as a special arena for human 
sociation called “urban” — one that has changed in character From one historical period to another — but also as the 
product of distinct social relations and modes of social development. Accordingly, to rescue urban life today would 
require a fundamental change in society, not just a new 
urban design. Important as design may be, it is a function 
of social life itself; and since modern society is basically 
irrational, it should not surprise us that the city reflects and 
oven exaggerates the social irrationalities of our time. 

To draw sharp contrasts between the degraded standards of contemporary urbanism and the high standards 
achieved by earlier cities seams especially important today 
if only to rescue the latter from oblivion. We are slowly 
losing a humanistic conception of the very meaning of the 
word “city.” Paradoxically, we live in a world marked by 
rampant urbanization — but one that lacks real cities. As 
the once clearly demarcated cities inherited from the past 
are devoured by the expanding metropolis, the city begins 
to lose its definition and specificity, as well as its function 
as an authentic arena for community and solidarity. The 
city disappears in the great urban belts which spread across 
the laud Even the countryside is transformed into urban 
parkland or a complex, of highly industrialized agricultural 
factories. Contemporary city planning, insofar as it hypostatizes the design or logistical aspects of urbanism at the 
expense of its human and communitarian goals, becomes 
truly atavistic. If the priests of the ancient monumental 
cities were city planners who imposed a cosmological design on urbanized areas to glorify the power of deified 
monarchies, the modern city planners have become priests 
whose urban designs are crassly institutional and 
utilitarian. Both are architects of the mythic in that they 
subserve the city — its human scale and its communitarian 
dimension — to suprahuman and nonhuman ends. 

In the pages that follow, details and side developments 
of urban history have been deliberately sacrificed for 
brevity and clarity of presentation. Far too many works on 
the development of the city overwhelm the reader with a 
dense undergrowth of factual material and esthetic opinion, with the result that the reader loses all perspective of 
the essential trends in urban history and the making of the 
modern metropolis. This book tries to maintain a clear 
focus throughout and deals with what I regard as vital 
aspects of the relationship between town and country, the 
emergence of the modern city, and the social and civic 
deterioration which reaches into the very marrow of modern urbanism. 

The first two chapters, “Land and City” and “The Rise 
of the Bourgeois City,” as well as the “Introduction” and 
the opening pages of “The Limits of the Bourgeois City” 
were written in the late 1950s and published in abbreviated form in May 1960 in the Anglo-American quarterly *Contemporary Issues*. Those chapters had an underground circulation among friends who continually urged 
me to publish them in full. They appear here in complete 
form for the first time. The analysis they contain of the 
relationship between town and country parallels in so 
many ways Mars’s more fragmentary discussion of the 
same subject in the new-famous *Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie* that I was more than pleasantly surprised to note the similarities when Mars’s work appeared in Hobsbawm’s *Marx on Pre-Capitalist Formations*. Yet 
Mars’s work was unavailable to me when I wrote these 
chapters; indeed, the *Grundrisse* was generally unknown 
at that time, at least in the English-speaking world. The 
fragmentary Hobsbawm edition was not published until 
1964, more than six years after *The Limits of the City* had 
been written and more than four years after it appeared in 
its Contemporary Issues version,. Accordingly, readers who 
find Marx’s work on the relationship of the town to the 
countryside in the *Grundrisse* as valuable as I do will probably benefit greatly from a close reading of *The Limits of the City*. I’ve left these opening chapters untouched except for very minor stylistic changes. In the remainder of 
this book — which is to say, most of it — the material is entirely new and carries the analysis of the city into our own times. 

Today, my own social views are more committed to a 
libertarian perspective than they were in the 1950s. These 
views arc developed in considerable detail in my *Post-Scarcity Anarchism* (Ramparts Books, 1971) and are undergoing still further development in a work ! expect to complete shortly, *The Ecology of Freedom*. Despite this 
shift in perspective, however, I would be the last to deny 
the influence Marx has had on my thinking and I would 
willingly regard this volume as an elaboration of the views 
he so brilliantly developed in the *Grundrisse*. I suspect 
that the opening chapters of *The Limits of the City* will be 
of particular interest to readers who are concerned with 
Marxist studies. For my part, I would call *The Limits of the City* a dialectical work that deals with cities or the past acid 
present as phases or moments of a larger urban process, a 
process in which the potentialities of the urban development are internally unfolded, enriched, and reach their 
ultimate negation in the modern metropolis. The main 
purpose of this book is to enable the reader to see this 
process — the internal connections between different periods of urban history — and to recognize that urbanism must 
be viewed as a development that places us in a unique 
position to go beyond the city as such and produce a new
type of community, one that combines the best features of 
urban and rural life in a harmonized future society. The 
concluding pages of *The Limits of the City* hint at what 
such a community might be. For a more detailed discussion, I must refer the reader to “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” and my forthcoming *The Ecology of Freedom*. But this 
little volume clearly stands on its own ground. Indeed, it 
provides the necessary overall perspective and many of 
the criteria which make the concept of a harmonized community meaningful. 

March 1973 <br><br>
Murray Bookchin <br>
Social Ecology Studies Program <br>
Goddard College <br>
Plainfield, Vermont <br><br>
Center for New Studies <br>
Ramapo College <br>
Mahwah, N.J. 

** Introduction 

A well-known medieval adage has it that “city air makes 
people free.” Although the freedom afforded by medieval 
cities generally meant emancipation from serfdom, the 
same adage might have been repeated from slightly different viewpoints throughout the history of urban life. Cities 
embody the most important traditions of civilization. Owing to the size of their marketplaces and the close living 
quarters they render possible, cities collect those energizing Force? of social life that country life tends to dissipate 
over wide expanses of land and scattered populations. Seasonal renewals of nature that send hunters and food gatherers on migrations and reclothe the works of the peasant are 
replaced in cities by a more palpable heritage. From a 
cultural standpoint, the land, years ago, was regarded as 
fugitive, the city as permanent; the land as natural, the city 
as social. While this dichotomy may be greatly exaggerated, it is certainty true that the full’d!moot of individuality and intellect was the historic privilege of the urban dweller or of individuals influenced by urban life. Indeed, 
some kind of urban community is not only the environment of humanity! it is its destiny. Only in a complete 
urban environment can there be complete people; only in 
a rational urban situation can the human spirit advance its 
most vital cultural and social traditions. 

What, then, is a complete urban environment? 

This work will try to answer the question partly by 
means of a historical account of the limits of earlier cities 
in order to establish some standards by which urban development can be judged? partly, too, by means of a criticism 
of many contemporary urban characteristics, the removal 
of which are necessary For the emergence of a new land of 
human community. A historical discussion of the city 
seems all the more necessary because mere urban accretion these days is often a popular justification for the superiority of one city over another. The size of urban populations, the number of square miles a city occupies, the 
facilities it has to support these dimensions — all are treated 
as virtues that find their culmination in the modern city. 
This approach tells us that during the past century or two, 
cities, like the output of machines, have expanded tremendously. Cities now approximate territories rather than 
communities. The most vital characteristics of urban life, 
as these have been understood over thousands of years, 
generally remain unknown or unnoticed, reposing in the 
writings of a few urban specialists and critics. There seems 
lo be little widespread understanding that the quantitative 
changes to which I have alluded have decisively worsened 
the quality of urban life, supplying modern Cities with 
characteristics that are radically different from the best 
traits and traditions of urbanism. 

Just as there is a point beyond which a village becomes 
a city, so there is a point beyond which a city negates itself, 
churning up a human condition that is more atomizing — 
and culturally or socially more desiccated — than anything 
attributed to rural life. Although we think of cities as autonomous entities that have a life and history of their own, 
they are no different from other arenas of social activity; as 
Marx observed, they develop with the material conditions 
which shape society as a whole. In time, one body of 
material conditions is exhausted, often leading to another 
that may rehabilitate a given site for city life on an entirely 
different social basis. The newer city may even inherit the 
name of the older one, but by no means, can they be regarded as the same cities. Renaissance and modern Rome 
differ as fundamentally from each other as ancient and 
medieval Rome. They express entirely different economic, 
social, and cultural conditions, although they share the 
same name and occupy the same locale. 

Modern cities occupy a unique position in urban history 
 — a fact that I Feel is not dearly understood by those who 
dwell in them. On the one hand, the immense development of industry over the past century has created a remarkable opportunity for bringing land and city into a 
rational and ecological synthesis. The two could be 
blended into an artistic unity that would open a new vision 
of the human and natural experience. On the Other hand, 
the modern city — particularly the metropolis — develops 
the historic limits of city life *as such*, bringing the antagonism between land and city to a breaking point. Given its 
grotesquely distorted form, it is questionable whether the 
city is any longer the proper arena for social and cultural 
development. Thus, by exhausting the one-sidedness of 
city life based on a vast and malleable industry, the metropolis, by its own inner logic, tends to raise the issue of 
developing all that is desirable in urbanity into a qualitatively new human community. 

The development of a rational and ecological human 
community is, in fact, becoming a necessity. For if in 
Marx’s view the “whole economical history of society is 
summed up” in the development of the antithesis between 
town and country, it is fair to add that the destiny of the 
modern city may well summarize the future of humanity. [1] 
Either the limits imposed on the city by modern social life 
will be overcome, or Forms of city life may arise that are 
congruent with the barbarism in store for humanity if people of this age should fail to resolve their social problems. 
The evidence for this tendency can be seen not only in the 
metropolis, choking with an alienated and atomized aggregate of human beings, but in the “well-policed” totalitarian 
city composed of starved black ghettoes and privileged 
white enclaves — a city that would be a cemetery of freedom, culture, and the human spirit. 

[1] Karl Marx, *Capital* (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co.), 1:387. 

** 1. Land and City 

Cities play an indisputably dominant role in modern life. 
They visibly decide the development of modern society. It 
would thus seem that once urban communities arose, they 
quickly achieved a leading position and, like our own cities, 
entered into an overbearing antagonism with the countryside. 

But there was a time when urban life was either subordinated to or in balance with the countryside. The development of social relations through much of precapitalist history’did not definitively depend upon the development of 
city life until the late Middle Ages, when cities became the 
precursors of an authentic bourgeois economy. It is easily 
forgotten that most of human history is occupied with 
women and men as food cultivators, and that the social 
wealth of the past came primarily from agricultural pursuits. Moreover, agrarian society was itself the product of 
a long and complex evolution, involving different forms of 
land tenure and social relations. From the more or less 
communal forms of horticulture practiced by early clans
and tribes, agrarian society advanced through the Asian 
land system with its paramount monarchies to feudalism 
and to an agricultural society based on an independent 
peasantry. The problems of this long period were, primarily 
agrarian problems and the greatest economic weight lay 
not in cities but in the countryside, or at least among social 
classes based on the land. 

All cities constitute an antithesis to the land. They are a 
break in the solidity of agrarian conditions, a germ of negalion in the agrarian community. At the same time, however, rural life summons forth the city from its own inner 
development as a division of labor between crafts and 
trade on the one hand, and relatively self-sufficient agriculttural communities on the other. The emerging city begins 
by reflecting the social relations in the countryside so that 
there are different cities more or less corresponding to 
different forms of agrarian society. In various phases of 
social development, the City is raised from a distinctly 
subordinate position to one of equilibrium with the countryside and may remain so for long periods of time or, after 
overstepping the limits of its rural base, finally yield to the 
hegemony of the land when the two become clearly incompatible. Viewed over most of precapitalist history, city 
life did not have as complete an urban basis as it seems to 
have today. Urban centers were largely the foci of surrounding agrarian relations. They were horticultural clan 
cities, Asian cities. Feudal cities, and even peasant and yeoman cities. Urban life could be clearly understood only by 
searching back to the economic relationships that prevailed in the agricultural environs. Although city life acquired social forces of its own and often entered into contradiction with the land, the agrarian economy established, 
the historical limits for almost every Urban development. 

This can be demonstrated quite clearly by a number of 
examples, An illustration of the earliest cities can be drawn 
from descriptions of the Aztec “capital” of Tenochtitlan, 
encountered by Spanish *conquistadores* only three centuries ago. At first glance, the community is deceptively similar in appearance to a modern city. Although architecture 
and the design of life were “exotic,” the dimensions of the 
city, the height of its structures, and the lateness of its 
discovery by white men seem to place it closer to the end 
rather than the beginning of urban history. According to 
George C. Vaillant, to the Spanish invaders who first saw 
it, “in contrast to the drab towns and tawny bills of Spain,
Tenochtitlan must have appeared a paradise, for its green 
gardens and white buildings were set in the midst of blue 
lakes, ringed by lofty mountains.” [2] Vaillant quotes Bernal 
Diaz, one of Cortes’s soldiers:

<quote>
Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to 
say or whether what appeared before us was real, for on 
one Side in the land were great Cities and the lake itself was 
crowded with canoes, and in the causeway were many 
bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the City of 
Mexico.[3] 
</quote>

[2] G.C. Vaillant, *Aztecs of Mexico*, rev. e.d. (New York: Penguin 
Books, 1962). p. 225. 

[3] Ibid. 

But Diaz was not a provincial gazing spellbound at a 
cosmopolis, nor were the towns of Spain merely villages by 
comparison with Tenochtitlan. A closer, perhaps intellectually more ruthless view suggests that the brilliance of the 
Mexican city consisted largely of externals The city’s 
resemblance to a modern urban center rests on its lofty 
religious structures, its spacious plazas for ceremonies, its 
palaces and administrative buildings. Looking beyond 
these structures, the city in many respects was very likely 
a grossly oversized pueblo community 

It would be difficult to understand clearly the nature of 
Tenochtitlan without directing attention to the clan structure and horticultural basis of Aztec society. Although the 
city was unusually large for such a traditional society, the 
horticultural activities of the clans reached directly into 
the urban community. Together with religious and military affairs, the coordination of clans for social and economic activities formed the major interest of the city’s 
governing bodies. So complete was the integration of land 
and city, indeed the supremacy of agrarian interests over 
uniquely urban ones, that the Aztecs never quite developed money. Exchange normally proceeded on a barter 
basis — that is to say, on a village basis — ’equalized, by cacao 
beans when the value of one commodity exceeded that of 
another. The city dweller was born into a complex body of 
social relationships that essentially developed from life on 
the land. His position in society was defined by hereditary 
roots in groups of kinfolk and blood relationships. The clan 
formed the matrix of the Aztecs civic, social, and cultural 
life. 

The city, to be sure, differentiated a sizeable portion of 
the populace from their older agrarian elan ties, creating 
craftsmen and traders. But these groups were also obliged 
to participate in the traditional social scheme, formally 
duplicating relationships developed in the countryside. 
Vaillant observes: 

<quote>
The opening of intertribal contact through settlement and 
warfare and the growth of material and ritualistic wants 
led to the establishment of a class, the *pochteca*. 
whose members travelled all over Mexico, exchanging local for foreign produce. [4]
</quote>

The *pochteca*, however, “had their own god, and apparently lived in a special quarter” in a manner similar to 
other clans in the community. They held a position within 
the city or as part of it, not as its leaders; they did not 
represent the city like the burghers in the medieval towns 
and the modern bourgeoisie. 

Although a centralized monarchical “capital,” Tenochtiilan was managed by four executive officers and a variety 
of nobles who adjudicated disputes between the clans and 
cared for military affairs. Within this infrastructure, from 
the lowest lineages to the highest, power was a function of 
a very complex social stratification. Vaillant notes that the 

<quote>
continual election of such high officers of the same family 
or lineage, when democratic procedure obtained elsewhere, is harder to explain. Tradition is strong in primitive 
communities, and a family that produced one effective 
man might in the next generation produce another.[5]
</quote> 

[4] Ibid., p. 129. 
[5] Ibid.

More recent evidence reveals that the “democratic procedure” to which Vaillant gives so much emphasis had in fact 
waned to a point where the city council of Tenochtitlan, 
once a fairly democratic body composed of clan loaders, 
was appointed by the monarchy and largely controlled by 
the ruling stratum, By the time of the Spanish conquest, 
Aztec society had become a highly complex hierarchy of 
nobles and commoners, a hierarchy Still based on kin ties 
and superimposed on a clan structure, but one that may 
have been drifting toward art increasingly territorial form 
of social life. How fair the society might have developed in 
this direction — or, quite possibly, in the direction of a rigid 
centralized structure similar to the “state communism” of 
the Inca empire — will never be known. The Spanish conquest brought the Aztec development to an end and completely demolished its internal Structure. 

This urban society, viewed from the standpoint of its clan 
relationships, may have existed for centuries in 
Mesoamerica before it was encountered by white men. The 
Aztec and Inca empires seem to have marked the culmination of the Indian urban tradition in the Americas, perhaps 
its outermost limits. Generally, throughout Mesoamerica, 
as one city arose, another declined in eminence; a continual 
rising arid falling of cities was the rule. Once the old administrative structure was demolished in a given area — 
perhaps owing to land exhaustion or war — the city disappeared, only to reappear elsewhere when Favorable conditions for urbanism developed. These cities arose, flourished, 
and often vanished without abolishing the clan structure. 

It is fair to say that the American Indian city up to the 
Spanish conquest was essentially rooted in the clan or in 
similar kinship structures. As time passed and as populations increased, a tendency emerged to extend the “plan 
of government” (to borrow Lewis H. Morgan’s phrase) 
from clan to tribe and from tribe to tribal federation. This 
tendency must be seen as a quantitative linking of clan to 
clan, a colonization by social affinity of relatively self-sufficient, socio-natural organisms along increasingly hierarchical lines. Attempts to relate the Aztec and Inca empires to 
the historical city and landed aristocracy of Europe, despite their many similarities, are often misleading. An 
American Indian analogue to the historical cities of Europe 
and the Mediterranean basin would be meaningful if clan 
society had so completely decomposed that it yielded a 
class society based on territorial rather than kinship ties 
and eventually on the private ownership and control of 
social wealth. No such qualitative transformation actually 
occurred in Mesoamerica before the conquest. Generally, 
where the pressures of scarcity and survival abated in parts 
of Indian America, there emerged a fairly unified community, often superficially urban in character, that tended to 
integrate rather than exacerbate internal divergences. 
“There was little to harass the individual intellectually or 
economically,” observes Vaillant, 

<quote>
Existence was subject to divine favour, and a man fared 
much as did bits fellows. Large as some towns were — Mexico City [Tenochtitlan] had 300,000 people — the sense of community was strong. Freedom of thought, individual 
liberty, personal Fortunes, were nonexistent, but people 
lived according to a code that had worked well and continuously for centuries. An Aztec would have been horrified at the marked isolation of an individual’s life in our Western world. [6]
</quote>

[6] Ibid., p. 134. 

Viewed from the base of society, the clan established the 
limits of this type of urban life. The city was the product 
of the clan and was seen as the shelter of the clan’s federative tendencies. 

<br>

History, conceived as the account of conflicting social 
interests, begins when the external means for expropriating material surpluses (notably, war and pillage) are internalized as systematic modes of exploitation, restructuring 
the clan and transforming social life from within. Society’s 
transcendence of the clan is the greatest and most significant Single development of the ancient world. Humanity is exiled from a harmonized universe to the realm of social 
contradiction, where the problems of material want are 
Fell as harsh antagonisms between one stratum and another. Society becomes one-sided and incomplete, disrupting the balance within the human community and between humanity and the natural world. Mankind is 
propelled on a restless journey to round out social life on 
a higher equilibrium. It should not surprise us that the 
internal reworking of the clan, and later, its complete destruction, involves a more decisive technological revolution than any development known before. The division of 
tabor expands and new strata are set apart from agricultural work, each of which crystallizes into a social class with 
special interests that are often in sharp opposition to the 
interests of other classes. 

So far removed, as yet, are the early cities from the urban 
mainstream of history that changes in clan society arise 
from technological developments in the countryside 
rather than in the towns, notably the domestication of animals and the discovery of plow agriculture. With this new 
mode of agriculture, the clan ceases to be a precondition 
for social life. To have eliminated the clan in Indian America would have completely disrupted the material basis of 
society: without a highly dedicated, socially responsible 
labor force that alone could have provided the intensive 
cultivation required by maize and by a technology that had 
not advanced beyond the hoe and human muscle power, 
it is doubtful if the substantial material surpluses needed to 
sustain large cities would have been available in Mexico 
and Peru. Indian food cultivation on such a scale was possible only under social conditions in which people related to 
each other as kinfolk rather than isolated urban citizens. 
The significance of the clan structure becomes all the more 
evident if we hear in mind that food cultivation in areas 
like the Peruvian Andes depended in large part on terracing barren mountainous regions with soil painstakingly collected from distant lowlands. As Edward Hyams observes, owing to the fact that 

<quote>
they were Forced, in the Andes ... to create their soils in 
order to expand, ... they were forced to retain ... the 
ancient structure of society, at least in so far as it related 
to systems of land-tenure and land working. In the absence 
of machinery or of an advanced slave-owning economy, 
large works of terracing, or reclamation and of irrigation 
can only be carried out by communal efforts and common 
labour.... There has probably never been, unless under 
European Feudalism, a system in which agricultural practice and social organization were so locked together in a 
perfect artifact of the mind and spirit And nothing makes 
this clearer than the results which followed the imposition 
of the European system and religion on the Andeans. The 
soil was not directly attacked for the Spaniards were at first 
interested only in gold, but the social organism was destroyed and at once the soil itself began to die. [7] 
</quote> 

[7] Edward Hyams, *Soil and Civilization* (London: Thames and Hudson, 1952), pp. 228–229 

With the discovery of the plow and the broadcast sowing 
of hardy grains in the Near East — as well as the general 
application of animal labor to the tilling of the land — 
agriculture became extensive rather than intensive. Food 
cultivation now required a fraction of the work needed to 
achieve corresponding outputs in the Americas. But if the 
elan was no longer a limit to further social changes, neither 
was it, at least initially, an obstacle. Indeed, it persisted as 
a basic form of social relationship and labor mobilization 
well into historical times. Here, were would do well to emphasise that humanity does not casually change its social 
structures, particularly if they have been sanctified by millennia 
of development and the weight of tradition. Retrospectively, we might comfortably entertain many alternative’s to the historical development that actually occurred, 
perhaps to suggest more rational and humanistic lines of 
social evolution. But if nothing else, history teaches us that 
old institutions are rarely changed until their possibilities 
have been largely exhausted. Clan society was especially 
durable. Even where it exists today, it remains the most 
stable form of human association thus far developed. Perhaps no institution following it Fostered as deep a sense of 
solidarity, mutual aid, and supportive comfort to the individual. Owing to their natural basis in kinship ties, clans 
proved to be the most intimate and perhaps satisfying social forms devised by humanity. Accordingly, the clan 
tended to perpetuate itself against compelling social forces 
that easily overwhelmed or drastically altered other Forms 
of human association. 

At first, the new plow and field economy did not appreciably alter the social Forms based on the hoe and gardening economy of an earlier epoch. The evolution of one 
system into another, in Fact, proceeded so subtly and organically that it is often difficult to delineate the social 
distinctions between the two. Variations occurred in communal property and in the old nature religions, but communal systems of property persisted For a long time under 
new forms of social administration. Even the clans lingered 
on vestigially, if not intact, well into advanced historical 
periods. Formally speaking, the successors of the traditional clan system emerged when tribal chiefs, prominent 
warriors, or a consolidated priestly caste succeeded in 
becoming the solo proprietors of the land. They seasonally 
allocated plots for cultivation among the clansfolk, and collected agricultural surpluses presumably for use by the 
community as a whole. The change from the old social 
forms to the new assumed the character of a shift in emphasis rather than a total rupture with the past — a change 
in the original communal system that seemed to consist in 
enlarging its social functions and dimensions. 

In time, however, the clan form was so thoroughly divested of its original content as the determining factor in 
social Life that it became little more than a device for allocating labor and resources. Claus lost virtually all of their 
influence in the administration of the community. In the 
hands of ruthless authorities, clans often became the instruments of their self-exploitation and plunder, The change 
from older equalitarian relations in Egypt and Mesopotamia to new systems of exploitation and class stratification 
was not quite accepted passively by the oppressed; indeed, 
the archaeological record attests to widespread popular revolts and interregnums of social disorder in which futile 
attempts were made to restore the old order of things.
Interestingly, apart from separatist tendencies and uprisings by conquered populations, no internal social conflicts 
of such magnitude are known t o the civilizations of Indian 
America, for the preoccupation of dominated tribes in this 
region was not with the social structure as such, notably its 
clan form, but with the tribute which was claimed by domineering tribes such as the Aztec rulers of Mexico. 

We owe largely to Marx the term “Asian land system” as 
the designation of a mode of agriculture in which land is 
still inalienable, indeed communally worked, but its management is controlled by a powerful state apparatus. [8] Possibly the most archaic of class societies, its elements tend to appear whenever tribal society has begun to disintegrate and the need for viable clan structures has been 
removed by the economic development of the community. 
The Asian land system appears not only in early Egypt and 
Mesopotamia, but in a nascent form when agrarian kingships were established over the Greek, Roman„ and German tribes during the era of their settlement on the land. 
In all such cases, we see evidence that society is trying to 
formulate a compromise between a time-honored tradition that land is inalienable and belongs to the community 
as a whole with new tendencies toward private proprietorship in land or, at least, control of agricultural surpluses by 
a privileged stratum. Within these archaic parameters, exploitation of human by human emerges even before private property in land and resources has been firmly established. With the Asian land system, we encounter a society 
that enjoys a durability comparable to that of the clan 
structure: in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, it remained the basis of social relations For thousands of years; 
indeed, apart from Mesopotamia;, it was not substantially 
eroded until: fairly modern times. Nor is it difficult to understand why these civilizations, largely alluvial ones, 
failed to advance into propertied forms of Society, Irrigation, by virtue of its technical requirements, festers cooperative if not public forms of agricultural management.[9] In 
the ancient world, a world stilt heir to social ownership of 
land and a communal organization of labor, a society based 
on irrigation necessarily retained elements of the archaic 
clan and tribal structure, albeit in a highly centralized statist framework. Insofar as the cultivation of food required 
the coordinated management of water resources and an 
extensive system of canals, any regional particularism — 
much less any development of private property — would 
have vitiated the success of agriculture. Christopher Dawson observes: 

<quote>
The conversion of the jungles and swamps of the prehistoric valley into the rich cornlands which made Egypt the wonder of the world was only accomplished by ages of 
communal coordinated effort The prosperity of the country depends, not as in northern lands on the industry of the 
individual peasant and his family, but on the organized 
labour of the irrigation dykes, and on the fertilising waters 
of the annual inundation, for land in itself is valueless apart 
from the water which is supplied by the Nile and the irrigation canals. From the earliest times the measurement of 
the Nile flood and the maintenance of the irrigation works 
has been the primary duty of every Egyptian Government. 
The ancient Egyptian year began on July 19, the day that 
the inundation reached the neighborhood of the head of 
the Delta, and as early as the First Dynasty the annual 
taxation was fixed according to the level of the river, for the 
yield of the following harvest depends entirely on a good 
Nile.... Hence the power which regulates and controls the 
inundation is the master of the life and property of the 
whole population, arid the principle of compulsory public 
labor — the corvee — which elsewhere appears as a tyrannical infringement of the rights of the individual, is in Egypt the necessary condition of all economic life.[10]
</quote>

[8] Kart Marx, “Preface to *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy*,” *Selected Works* (Mew York: International Publishers, n.d), 1: 357.

[9] This viewpoint is developed in considerable detail id Karl Wittfogel’s *Oriental Despotism* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). Although Wittfogel simplifies this approach and has been criticized with good reason by Robert M. Adams and Jacques Garnet, the essential thrust of his thesis is, in my view, correct. Irrigation fostered cooperation if only on a local scale. And if centralized empires were a later development, it is hard to believe that they 
could have been sustained for centuries without the communication afforded by great river systems and the need for large irrigation works. 

[10] Christopher Dawson, *The Age of the Gods* (London. Shred and Ward, 1934), pp. 155–156. 

Irrigation, by necessitating coordinated communal labor, Fostered state centralization and bureaucratization. As 
early as the first Dynasty in Egypt, we learn from the 
historical record of the existence of a vizier, chancellor, 
chamberlain, master of ceremonies, royal architect. Superintendent of Inundation, and so forth, down to a Keeper of 
the King’s Cosmetic Box — in short, a wide spectrum of 
office holders, selected largely from the leading families of 
the valley, who remind us more of royal courtiers and 
bureaucrats than independent feudal nobles. In Egypt, 
apart From claims made by the priesthood, the land belonged to the Pharaoh. It was essentially in his name that 
local governors collected tribute and tuxes in kind, which 
were thereupon stored in royal warehouses. The peasantry, largely bound to the soil, was either left with a residue of its produce or rewarded in kind from the public 
Fund. In Mesopotamia, these privileges were pre-empted 
by priestly corporations, later to be transferred to the person of a monarch who enjoyed an authority not dissimilar 
from that of the Pharaonic power. In the course of time, 
this highly centralized system broke down before the assault of the landed nobility, but it was almost invariably 
reconstituted again, depending upon the vigor of successive dynasties and usurpers. The Asian land system remained the baste social form of Near Eastern and Oriental 
civilizations until modern times. 

These agrarian societies are the key to understanding 
ancient city development, for they not only advance but 
also limit the evolution of urban life. Agrarian interests, 
owing to the centralized power and wealth they command, 
subordinate the city to the land. Although many large and 
ornate cities arose in Mesopotamia (and, to a lesser extent, 
in Egypt), these urban communities did nut come into 
lasting balance with she authority exercised by lauded 
classes. Commerce, crafts, anti new industrial techniques 
were numerous, but these were placed in She service of the 
agrarian strata. Urban wealth, instead of returning to a 
local bourgeoisie in the form of capital accumulation, was 
expropriated by monarchies, slate bureaucracies, and local 
governors. Capital formation, in effect, was largely circumscribed and essentially arrested. The emergence of an independent bourgeois class was blocked by taxes, imposts, 
and state-owned enterprises. 

The scale on which industry and commerce was plundered can be dealt with Only summarily. As Late as 
Ptolemaic times, the Egyptian economy was snarled in 
over two hundred taxes. The internal market of the valley 
was effectively limited by a 10 percent sales tax, a 5 percent tax on home rents, an inheritance tax and, except for 
privileged strata, a poll tax. Wealthy classes were commonly burdened by costly liturgies and by obligations to 
give “crowns” to the monarchy. Commodity taxes were 
imposed not only at ports and frontier routes, but also at 
the borders of provinces. Virtually all handicrafts and 
professions were licensed by the state. Royal monopolies 
were established in the production of oil, papyrus, textiles, 
and in mining and banking, while state enterprises competed with the private sector in industries such as dyeing, 
leather, cosmetics, perfumery, glass, pottery, and beer. 

The economic controls exercised by the Ptolemaic pharaohs differed little in principle from the regulations and 
Imposts that burdened commerce and industry in nearly 
all the agrarian civilizations of the Near East and the Orient, The first waves of commodity production, so essential 
to the development of an authentic urban society, were 
thus scattered by the massive boulders of lightly knit, state-managed agrarian economies. Allowing for a few exceptions, City life became an ornament of agrarian kingly 
power and the product of agricultural superfluity, not unlike the huge monuments, temples, and mortuaries whose 
construction absorbed the surplus labor and resources of 
Egypt and Mesopotamia. Within this social arrangement, 
capital accumulation, which later formed the basis for an 
independent bourgeoisie and for an industrial economy in 
Europe, was virtually impossible under the Asian land system. While weathered by time, the granite structure of this 
system never Fractured or shattered. For thousands of 
years after the dawn of history, it persisted with surprising 
endurance — while men elsewhere picked up the main 
thread of social development and advanced to more promising and flexible urban forms. 

<br> 

After the first millennium B.C. a new agrarian system 
and a new mode of urban life began to emerge on the 
northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Pastoral tribes,
filtering into the Greek promontory, conquered and gradually mixed with pre-existing stable agricultural communities, rapidly developing away from tribal society. Hellenic society, allowing for its many unique qualities, in its own 
way recapitulates the evolution of agrarian kingships from 
communal relations to a loose kind of feudalism, passing 
through social forms not unlike the Asian land system. That 
this phase emerged prototypically is attested by a good 
deal of evidence from archaic Creek culture. The legendary figure of Theseus seems to group under a single name 
a number of Hellenic chieftains who organized the Creek 
tribes into federations somewhat reminiscent of early Nilotic society. “The first unquestionable fact which meets us 
in the life of this new kind community is that it was originally governed by kings,” observes William F Fowler. 

<quote>
The thing was expressed by various words — Basileus, Archon. Pyrtanis, [and among the Latins] Hex, Dictator — but, so far as we know, it was always I here in the childhood of the ancient State. Tradition, both in Greece and Italy, always told of a time when the essential acts of government were performed either by or under the authority of a single man; and in this case we Can be sure that tradition was 
right. Both Thucydides and Aristotle accepted it; at conservative Sparta the king himself survived throughout her history; and at Athens and Home kingship left traces behind it when it had vanished... [11] 
</quote>

[11] William F. Fowler, *The City State of the Greeks and Romans* (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 64. 

Indeed, archaic Greek society found its esthetic inspiration 
in an Orientalized art so alien to the sculpture which nourished during the later classical period that it seems difficult 
to believe that the people who produced the rigid, overstylized Apollo of Tenea could have shared any historical 
relationship to those who sculpted the figures which 
adorned the temples of Periclean Athens. 

Yet we know that the relationship existed and we must 
find our explanation for the differences between the two 
periods in the geography of southern Europe, The rugged 
mountain terrain of Greece made it virtually impossible to 
achieve the degree of political consolidation and centralism which so conspicuously distinguishes the high Asian 
and Near Eastern civilizations. Early Hellenic communities, like their Asian counterparts, invested land ownership 
in chieftains, but the centrifugal forces which episodically 
shaped Asian societies along feudal and particularistic lines 
became, in Greece, the dominant factors which guided the 
development of the political structure. By Homeric times, 
feudal vassalage rather than a highly centralized state had 
become the basis of Greek federation. George Thompson 
doubtless gives us an accurate picture of Homeric life 
when he notes that the Creek king 

<quote>
lives in s palace on some rocky eminence, surrounded by 
the dwellings of his vassals. The relation between king and 
vassal is such as we find in similar conditions among the 
primitive Germans 2,000 years later In reward for military 
service, the vassal holds in fee the rule of some portion of 
the conquered territory, and in return he takes up arms for 
the king when called on to do so. Such was the relation of 
Bellerophon to the King of Lycia, of Phonix to the father 
of Achilles; and we remember how Odysseus endeavoured, 
but in vain, to evade military service. The vassal is entitled 
to be consulted on matters of policy and to feed at the royal 
table. There are many such councils in the *Iliad*, and in the 
*Odyssey* the offense of the suitors lies in their abuse of a 
recognized privilege. Finally, each vassal stood in the relation of king to vassals of his own, Odysseus was a vassal of 
Agamemnon’s, but to the princes of Ithaca he was king. [12]
</quote>

[12] George Thompson, *Aeschylus and Athens* (New York] International Publishers, 1950), pp, 61–62.

If the investiture of control over tribal lands in the person of agrarian monarchs tends to disintegrate into feudalism unless the kingly authority is reinforced by the social 
need to coordinate a complex irrigation system, so feudalism, in turn, tends to give way to independent peasant 
communities based on small-scale food cultivation, especially after commodity production emerges in an agrarian 
society. The towns, freeing themselves from the waning 
authority of the territorial lords, reaches back into the 
countryside to replicate the same economic conditions 
which prevail in urban marketplaces and workshops. Commodity relations and trade turn the vassal and serf into 
independent peasants, the agrarian analogue of the free 
urban craftsman and master. This basic social tendency, as 
we shall see later, was to be followed in late medieval 
Europe. In ancient Greece and Italy, the development was 
considerably modified by the impact of successive tribal 
invasions From the north and by the settlement of craftsmen and traders from the more advanced Mediterranean 
civilizations. The northern invaders reduced the older, 
pre-existing agricultural communities to the Status of serfs, 
while the conquerors often acquired a quasi-peasant status, 
free in name if not in fact. Peasant and serf worked the 
land side by side, each shading socially into the other’s 
position. In time, a yeoman society of landed freeholders 
began to crystallize from the fluid, often tumultuous conditions of a disintegrating system of feudal land-tenure. A 
new kind of city now emerges, a city that forms the political, cultural, and commercial center of free farmers and 
craftsmen — each independent and producing primarily 
for the other in a remarkably well-balanced economy. 

By the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., a number of Greek 
cities already began to resemble, at least superficially, the 
modern image of an urban community. Athens, the Hellenic city with which we are most familiar, probably supported some 30,000 male citizens (and if we add their 
women and children, a total of 150,0001, perhaps 100,000 
slaves, and an estimated 35,000 metics, or free aliens. During Athens’s classical period, the city’s population may 
have well exceeded a quarter of a million. Generally, we 
must conceive of the new Greek cities as independent 
urban entities, freed from the suzerainty of territorial lords 
and landed magnates. (This fact decisively distinguishes 
the Greek city-states or, more accurately, *poleis* From the 
Cities of the Near East and Orient.) Urban life now exists 
as an end in itself, not as a supplement to a rural society, 
and enjoys art autonomy that would have been inconceivable within the framework of the earlier Asian land system.

But the Hellenic cities are not truly modern cities in the 
political and social sense of the term. As civic structures,
they differ profoundly not only from Asian cities but from 
the metropolises and even smaller cities of our own era. 
What Strikes us at once about Athens, the most advanced 
of the Greek cities, is that civic activity involves an exceptionally high degree of public participation. All the policy 
decisions of the *poiis* are formulated directly by a popular 
assembly, or *Ecclesia*, which every male citizen from the 
city and its environs (Attica) is expected to attend. The 
execution of the *Ecclesia*’s decisions falls to the authority 
of the Council of Five Hundred, composed of elected citizens from all parts of Attica, who, in groups of fifty, rotate 
their office every tenth of the year. The practical aspects 
of urban administration are ordinarily delegated by election or lot to public boards, not to a professional bureaucracy — notably to nine Archons, ten elected Strategoi or 
generals, boards of finance, education, dockyards, and so 
forth. Inasmuch as all the civic agencies of Athens are 
reconstituted every year, it would seem that a sizeable 
number of ordinary citizens participate in tine executive 
bodies of the city at any given time, William Fowler estimates that in the days of Pericles, 1,900 citizens out of an 
adult population of 30,000 men were actively engaged in 
the service of the city, thereby rendering wide public participation an inherent feature of urban administration: 

<quote>
Now if we take this in connection with the universal 
right of citizens to take part in the *Ecclesia*, and of those 
over thirty years of age to sit as jurors in the courts, it 
becomes at once plain that the Athenian people did actually conduct its own government, and that the State was a 
true democracy. Here is no privileged class, no class of 
skilled politicians, no bureaucracy: no body of men, like the 
Roman Senate, who alone understood the secrets of State, 
and were looked op to and trusted as the gathered wisdom 
of the whole community. At Athens there was no disposition, and in fact no need, to trust the experience of any one. 
each man entered intelligently into the details of his own 
temporary duties, and discharged them as far as we ran 
tell, with industry and integrity. Like the players in a well-trained orchestra, all contrived to learn their parts and to 
he satisfied with the share allotted to them. [13] 
</quote>

[13] Fowler. *The City State of the Greeks and Romans*. p 168. 

But the administrative aspects of Athenian civic life capture only an aspect of the well-rounded, balanced, and 
intensely social nature of what Edith Hamilton has so aptly 
described as “the Greek Way.” For centuries afterward, 
men were to leek hack to Attica where, for a brief period, 
there flourished a community whose development was not 
to he excelled over the course of later history. What immediately catches the eye in a study of Hellenic society is 
the rich flow of Athenian life — its all-encompassing rationality and its human scale. The “Men of Marathon” take up 
arms against the Persian invaders of their country with the 
same readiness that they take up the scythe in harvesting 
their farms. They nourish their minds with the same fortitude that they do battle in the mountain fastnesses of their 
land. Hellenic mythology, unequivocably naturalistic under the bright Mediterranean sky, gracefully intertwines 
with the monumental oaks of Attic tragedy; the Hellenic 
mind, cultivated in the most demanding schools of speculative reason, never fails to pause — almost childishly — to 
marvel at the physical beauty of the land and sea, and. 
above all, at the supple form of man. whose destiny in 
Athenian literature mingles a philosophical pathos with 
serene dignity. 

Athenian life, during its finest moments, formed a totality that was sustained by the balance And unity of the *polis* 
itself To a Greek, it would have seemed preposterous that 
mind should be separated from body, art from society, man 
from nature, culture from politics. The *polis* was the man; 
the man, the *polis*. To he exiled from the *polis* was to suffer 
an extinction more horrifying even than death. The Hellenic citizen was nourished by his community like a tree by 
the soil. So inseparably wedded were men and society that 
a social sunlight permeated everything Greek. We never 
fail to marvel at how remarkably welt the satires of Aristophanes read to this very day, how advanced they are over 
so much of our own contemporary literature of the same 
genre, how unexcelled they are in their energy; how refreshing their earthiness and realism, how generous their 
humanity, and how subtly philosophical their nuances, Yet 
these plays were political works — courageously incisive 
satires of the outstanding politicians of the day and savage 
commentaries on immediate civic problems. They Owe 
their unexcelled position in western literature to the clear 
rationality of the Greek mind, to the essentiality of all relations in the *polis*, to a candor toward life (hat chased away 
the false shadows of introspection and the shams of neurotic esthcticism. 

From the totality of the *polis* arose the Greek view, 
which Paul Landis so eloquently describes in his discussion 
of the Athenian drama: 

<quote>
An attitude toward life at once honest and so intelligent 
that the minds of men, however far they may be deceived 
by Fancy or philosophy, must always return to it at the end. 
By virtue of something that looks almost like racial genius 
the Athenians of the fifth century succeeded in looking 
upon life with a level gaze. They faced it neither with 
bravado and bluster, nor with fear and trembling; not with 
an ignorant assumption of power over it, nor with an 
equally ignorant and cowardly feeling of inferiority... 
</quote>

The message of the Athenian drama is 

<quote>
this honest intellectualism, this passion for truth, this serene and level gaze on life — and this has always been the modern spirit....It is the struggle to free the intellect, to tear from it the veils of hope and fear, so that it may look 
clearly and unafraid upon the face of life and know it as it 
is, terrible and pitiful and glorious and utterly nonsensical.[14] 
</quote>

[14] Paul Landis, Preface to *Seven Famous Greek Plays* (New York: Modern Library, Inc., 1931), p vi. 

That Hellenic society was scarred by slavery and by a 
severely patriarchal dispensation fur women need hardly 
be emphasized. These cruet features it shared with all city 
states I hat began to duster along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea — features that were part of the general barbarism of the epoch. But they do not explain why the *polis* succeeded so admirably in transcending that barbarism, 
indeed, the horrors which were to follow in the wake of the 
*polis*’s decline, notably the emergence of the Roman Imperium and the early Middle Ages. Lest we lose all sense 
of perspective toward urban development, we must never 
fail to focus on the essentials which produced so advanced 
a society as the Athenian *polis*. The civic spirit of Athens 
has its source in yeoman virtues, not in slavery or patriarchal ism, Athenian internal unity stems from men of strong 
character who were indomitable in their social allegiances 
and rounded in their urbanity because they had firm ties 
to the soil and were independent its their economic position. Labor and land, town and country, men and society 
were joined in a common destiny In bourgeois society the 
community dissolves into competing monads and is pervaded by spiritual mediocrity directly as the material being of man is rendered enslaved, insecure, and one-sided.
In the *polis*, the community achieves unity and flourishes 
spiritually as the material being of man achieves relative
freedom, independence, and roundedness. In bourgeois 
society, the commodity, which mediates all human relations, not only “unites” society in a cash nexus and minute 
division of labor, but at the same time separates man from 
the instruments of production, labor from creativity, object from subject, and eventually man from man. In the *polis*, the relative independence of the individual makes it possible to see the true dependence of man on the community, completely identifying the Athenian with his society. 

Finally, precisely because in bourgeois society man has 
“mastered” nature without rationally coordinating his social life, consciousness has only to reflect society as it exists 
to yield the most catastrophic as well as the most inane 
results. The untutored act of thought is brought to the 
service of horrors that the blindest Forces of nature could 
never yield. The more passive thought remains in the face 
of conditions it can no longer comprehend, the more actively demoniacal it becomes merely by acquiescing to the 
status quo. In the *polis*, thought reaches sublime height s of 
philosophy, poetry, and art if only because of the solidarity. 
Freedom, and independence it affords the individual, an 
independence rooted not only in civic conditions but also 
in material ones. 

Classical Athenian drama ends not with another Aeschylus, whose tragedies dwell on the consolidation of the *polis*, but with Aristophanes, whose savage mockery voices 
the tragic apprehension of social dissolution. The irony of 
Greek conditions, here, acquires its adequate form, for the 
very forces that produce the Hellenic yeomanry — the 
“Men of Marathon” — lead to their extinction. Given the 
limited material basis of Hellenic society, the aristocracy 
which emerges from tribal life cannot he replaced by the 
yeoman without also creating favorable conditions for a 
new and more pedestrian aristocracy — the aristocracy of 
trade, usury, and wealth. 

This crisis was by no means new lo Greek society. As 
early as the time of Hesiod, during the eighth century B.c., 
merchants and usurers began encroaching on the smallholding, consolidating farms into estates, and reducing 
many citizens to debtor-slaves. In the two centuries that 
separate Hesiod from Cleisthenes, Attica was torn by intense social struggles, later to be paralleled closely by similar conflicts in the early Roman Republic. In contrast to 
Rome, whose pillaging expeditions abroad reinforced the 
power and wealth of the nil trig classes, Attica’s crisis remained largely internalized and the *polis* was able to arrive at a more rational solution of its problems. Whereas 
Rome rapidly succumbed to the latifundia system (a plantation form of agriculture administered by wealthy land magnates and worked by slave gangs), Attica returned 
again to the small-holding. Solon, Pisistratus, and Cleisthenes divided the large estates among the dispossessed 
and allowed a limited margin of independence to its craftsmen and traders, Pisistratus, after his second exile, ruthlessly uprooted the big landowners. Their estates were confiscated and divided among the peasantry, dispossessed 
agricultural laborers, and the Athenian poor Cleisthenes 
completed this immense work: he put down all attempts at 
an aristocratic restoration and juridically established the 
Athenian democracy which was to pass into history as the 
political model of the classical *polis*. 

Was it indeed “something that looks almost like radical 
genius,” as Landis would have it, or was it perhaps more 
mundane factors that guided the Athenians to so rational 
a disposition of their social problems? That the Creeks 
were, in Marx’s words, the “normal children” of early history can be partly accounted for by the weight of their 
tradition and by their geographic setting. Athenian society 
was not so far removed from its tribal origins, nor so muddled by the rubbish of history, that it lacked a clear, direct, and humanistic view of its social problems. The memory of its primitive democracy was strong enough to find a more 
secular fulfillment in the establishment of the *Ecelesia*, 
Close to nature, situated in a hospitable climate, neither so 
rich as to yield oppressive standards of opulence nor so 
poor as to be strangled by oppressive poverty, decentralized by a mountainous terrain but repeatedly invigorated 
culturally by the sea, Attica remained remarkably flexible 
and generously susceptible to the civilizing crosscurrents 
of the age. Accordingly, Athenian leaders were favored by 
every opportunity to act with wisdom — to reconcile and 
fund the interests of the community into a common and 
harmonizing social perspective, H. D. F. Kitto is only just 
when he sharply contrasts the course followed by Solon, 
Pisistratus, and Cleisthenes with that of modern Europe: in 
Athens, the reconciliation of the community to new social 
demands occurred at a high point of social vigor, when all 
strata of the *polis* were able to contribute vitally to the 
community; in Europe, it occurred after the complete exhaustion and decay of the old society, when little remained 
of earlier traditions. Hellenic society resolved its problems 
rationally; Europe, as yet, has not freed itself from blind 
and demoniacal social forces. 

Owing to the fact that Athenian society was based on a 
yeomanry and on small agricultural holdings, town and 
country were brought into delicate balance. In turn, the 
preservation of this balance depended upon the internal 
self-sufficiency supplied by the division of labor between 
urban and rural society. The *polis* flourished only as long 
as one did not outweigh the other. To the Creeks, this 
social equilibrium was summed up by the term *autarkeia*:
a concept of wholeness, material self-sufficiency, and balance that is the core of the Hellenic outlook. But this outlook did not prove impervious to the powerful economic 
Forces which were gathering in the Mediterranean basin 
and gradually restructuring Creek society. With the expansion of handicrafts and commercial contact with the outside world, the nascent Hellenic bourgeoisie became increasingly powerful and began to alter the balance 
between town and country on which the unity of the *polis* 
depended. Athenian interests now graduated from a local 
scale to encompass the Mediterranean area. The *polis* was 
becoming a cosmopolis, a change that brought it into conflict with the self-sufficient small-holding, not to speak of 
Greek communities abroad. In 434 B.C., with the outbreak 
of the Peloponnesian War, Periclean Athens embarked 
upon a disastrous struggle for hegemony over other Greek 
cities and for a commanding position in the Mediterranean 
trade. The war lasted some thirty years, laying waste to 
Attica’s farms and exhausting her resources. “The Peloponnesian War,” observes Kitto, “virtually saw the end of 
the city-state as a creative force fashioning and fulfilling 
the lives of all its members.”[15] Although the Athenian 
economy recovered from this conflict, Athens ceased to be 
a stable small-holders’ community’ designed to meet local 
needs. Attic agriculture now became oriented toward the 
Mediterranean trade. Wealth and property were amassed 
in fewer and fewer hands;, political life became increasingly devitalized and corrupt until the independence of 
Athens was swept away by a Macedonian phalanx.

[15] H.D F. Kitto, *The Greeks* (New York: Penguin Books. 1951), p. 152.

<br>

Rome is little more than an epilogue to Athens. It is easy 
enough to draw parallels between the Latin development 
and the Hellenic: Camillus for Solon, the Gracchi for the 
Pisistradae, Cicero for Demosthenes. But however much 
Latium seems to follow in the wake of Greece From tribalism to feudalism and then to a community of independent 
farmers, the two diverge on the issue of public control over 
the administrative organs of society. In contrast to the *Ecclesia* and Council of Five Hundred, the Roman Senate 
develops into a specialized professional body, divorced 
from the populace. It becomes a legislative aristocracy. 
Moreover, unlike Solon and Pisistratus, Camillas and the 
Gracchi fail to restore the small-holding as a viable economic basis for the Roman city-state. The Greek *polis*, 
once it declined, could no longer be duplicated by other 
communities within the social framework of antiquity. Its 
passing bears witness to the fact that the elements which 
produced the *polis* had been exhausted. Indeed, the complexities of Mediterranean society were already present 
wills the consolidation of Latium and the historic pre-eminence of the Roman city-state. 

Once trade and the free cities acquired cosmopolitan 
proportions, two alternatives confronted the ancient 
world: either mercantile relations would expand to a point 
that would produce an authentic capitalist economy or the 
cities would become parasitic entities, living in vampire 
fashion on tho agricultural wealth of the older social system 
in the Near East and North Africa. The realization of the 
first alternative was almost completely precluded by the 
nature of Mediterranean economic life. Trade, while growing considerably, could never reach sufficient proportions 
to transform Mediterranean society as a whole. There was 
simply not enough quantity, as it were, to produce a 
change In quality. Although commerce managed to undermine the small-holding, which gave way to large-scale 
agriculture in Latium, the free cities were too few in number and much too weak economically to dissolve the self-contained wealthy land systems of the Near East and open 
them as commercial markets. The Asian land system imposed the same limits on the development of capitalist 
production abroad which confronted its domestic commercial strata at home. Owing to its solidity, it dosed off the 
only potential market of sufficient dimensions that might 
have transformed mercantile capitalism into industrial 
capitalism. Ancient trade remained primarily a carrying 
trade, a cement between the Free cities and economically 
impenetrable societies based on time-honored agricultural 
ways. 

The “Fall of Rome” can be explained by the rise of 
Rome, The Latin city was carried to imperial heights not 
by the resources of its rural environs, but by spoils acquired 
from the systematic loo Ling of the Near East, Egypt, and 
North Africa, The very process involved in maintaining the 
Roman cosmopolis destroyed the cosmopolis. Every attempt on Rome’s part to exact Further tribute from her 
colonies involved increasing coercion and expenditures, 
which in torn required more tribute. A point was finally 
reached where the negative aspect of this escalating development predominated over the positive: the costs of maintaining the city began to outweigh what it received. As the 
needs of die city and its urban satellites began to rise far 
out of proportion to the How of tribute, impoverishment 
and demoralization also increased; local taxation strangled 
domestic economic life, the urban population began to 
drift into the countryside, and the city’s birthrates declined. Rome could no longer be maintained as a viable 
entity. The imperial eagles migrated from the west to the 
east, from the artificial center of administration to the 
sources of real wealth, Constantinople replaced Rome as 
the authentic center of the empire and Italy now lay at the 
feet of the barbarians. Having passed beyond its domestic 
limits, Rome “fell” in the sense that the city contracted to 
its Own agrarian base — and declined even more as a result 
of the enormous urban heights from which it had fallen. 

What earlier historians once described as Europe’s “dark 
ages” comprise a sweeping readjustment of urban life to 
the only agrarian possibilities which lay at hand. Under the 
Roman empire, town and country had entered into sharp 
contradiction with each other. Lacking an adequate 
agrarian and industrial basis of its own. Rome had swollen 
to enormous dimensions around a system of plunder and 
parasitism. The city had turned upon the Land and introduced inefficient — even destructive — forms of agricultural 
exploitation, such as slave-worked latifundia owned by absentee proprietors. Not surprisingly, Rome succumbed to 
these internal weaknesses when the parasitic system overreached itself and began to acquire less than it lost. By 
slowly abandoning a slave-worked agriculture for a feudal 
one. Italy simply returned to the only stable agrarian forms 
which could satisfy her needs. The “Fall of Rome” as a city, 
quite aside from the destiny of the empire, was a local 
“retrogression.” Indeed, apart front Roman Europe, no 
such retrogression occurred elsewhere, No doc lino of urban life occurred in the Near East, where agricultural resources were adequate for the development of large cities 
Similarly in North Africa, In these areas, the free cities 
patterned themselves on pre-existing agrarian social forms 
and essentially became the urban creatures of the Asian 
land system. As to the central and northern areas of 
Europe, where Germanic peoples were emerging from 
tribalism and agrarian kingships, the development of feudalism was a logical extension of the course followed by 
tribal communities in early Greece and Latium. With the 
rise of feudal society, the European continent was thrown 
back upon its own mainsprings, A new relationship between land and city began to emerge, one that initiated an 
authentic development toward more advanced social relationships, 

** 2. The Rise of the Bourgeois City 

Only in western and central Europe, did the rise of urban 
life yield a lasting domination of town over country — not 
as a special Case in the Crevices of the ancient world, but 
as the general feature of a continental society, Europe’s 
development closely recapitulates the evolution of 
agrarian society through the social phases we have discussed in connection with Greece and Latium; but while 
the development of urban life in antiquity led to a *cul de sac*, 
in Europe the towns developed capitalism and established the bourgeois city. 

The striking social advances scored by European cities 
can be explained by many factors unique to the continent 
itself, although what stands out as the principal one Is again 
the influence of geography on agrarian relations. Wherever the forest cover was removed, the agriculturist found 
large areas: of arable land — a notable contrast with the 
Near East and North Africa, where substantial surpluses of 
food could be gleaned only from narrow strips of alluvial 
land While the river valleys of the Near East and North 
Africa were Surrounded by inhospitable wastes and mountains, European rivers flowed into the depths of vast forests 
in which new communities could be founded without interference from an all-encompassing centralized state, Indeed, m the absence of any need for extensive irrigation 
works, no need existed for the elaborate bureaucratic and 
monarchical apparatus which drained the commercial life 
of the ancient world. The very extent of the land, of its 
mountains and forests, vitiated any tendency toward centralization that might have been a political heritage of the 
Mediterranean civilizations. Classical European feudalism 
was nourished by the geography and climate of the continent with the result that European urban communities 
achieved a degree of independence unknown, apart from 
Greece, to ancient society. 

Fortunately, too, for the cities, European feudalism remained at chronic war with itself. This not only promoted 
further decentralization but often provided urban communities with a wide latitude for Independent growth. By 
the tenth century, the mutual pitting of French baronies 
against each other had divided the country into some ten 
thousand political units. When European cities began to 
emerge, they found an agrarian society incomparably less 
unified and materially weaker than the domineering and 
Wealthy Asian land systems of the Near East and North 
Africa. Given time and the steady settling of the continent, 
many medieval cities freed themselves from the control of 
the feudal lords and achieved a modest dominance over 
agrarian interests. 

To understand the uniqueness of the medieval commune (as these towns and cities were called in France), it 
would be useful to distinguish them from their urban antecedents in Indian America, the Near East, and Asia. Although ah cities emerge in varying degrees from the division, of labor among food cultivation, crafts, and commerce, 
the extent to which they rest on this division of labor often 
distinguishes one city from another. Quite often, functions 
other than economic activities determine the nature and 
development of an urban entity. Tenochtitlan’s size and 
population, for example, are not easily explained by its 
commercial and craft activities. In fact, as we have already 
seen, the city’s principal functions were ceremonial, military, and administrative. Administrative needs were important to the growth of many Near Eastern and Asian 
cities: in Egypt and Mesopotamia as well as in India Lind 
China. Which is not to say that crafts and trade were unimportant in these communities, but merely that they occupied an ancillary position with respect to political and 
religious activities. 

By contrast, the medieval commune was devoted almost 
entirely to handicrafts and local trade. The towns of the 
high Middle Ages were primarily marketplaces and centers for the production of commodities. Only in a few instances in European history do we encounter cities that 
expanded for reasons other than economic ones — notably, 
Aix-la-Chapelle, a city that grew or regressed With the political fortunes of the Caroiingian kings, and of course 
Rome, which increased owing to the tribute collected by 
the papacy from dioceses throughout Europe. For the most 
part, however, medieval communes furnished the skills 
and products which could not be acquired from the 
manorial domestic economy. Thus these towns never suffered from any confusion about their functions or about the 
factors which determined their destiny. They had a reasonably dear self-understanding of their commercial and craft 
interests. Far from being distorted like their antecedents 
into pliant instruments of agrarian classes, they jealously 
guarded their autonomy and provided a hospitable environment for independent traders and handicraft workers — the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. 

Yet the medieval commune was a feudal, not a bourgeois, city. Essentially, its economy was based on simple 
commodity production — a mode of production in which 
craftsmen use the marketplace to satisfy their needs, not to 
accumulate capital. Although goods were produced for exchange, that is, as commodities (to use Marx’s conception 
of the term), the owner of the means of production remained the direct producer rather than a bourgeois 
“supervisor” of productive activity. To be sure, a master 
craftsman was aided by apprentices, but the latter could 
realistically aspire to become master craftsmen in their 
own right once they acquired the skills to do so. In typical 
feudal fashion, guilds regulated economic activity down to 
almost the smallest detail; the output, quality, and prices of 
goods that found their way to the marketplace were carefully supervised by craft associations of master workmen. 
The atomization of labor and the chaos of the marketplace 
that are so indelibly etched into the modern capitalist system were unknown to the medieval commune Each individual had his secure position in the economy of the community, a position carefully defined by a system of rights 
and duties, and each fulfilled his responsibilities with dignity, artistry, and a deep pride of workmanship. 

In so self-contained and self-fulfilling a society, then, how 
did it come to this that these simple commodity relations 
were supplanted by bourgeois ones and the beauty of the 
medieval commune by the blight of the bourgeois city? 

Our own age tends to answer this question on its own 
terms, notably in technological ones — such as the advent of 
the steam engine and large-scale machinery — as though 
even an economic interpretation of historical changes does 
not include the totality of man’s social relations. Doubtless, 
European feudalism was not devoid of technological 
achievements of its own; indeed, the traditional image of 
the Middle Ages as a technologically stagnant era has since 
undergone considerable revision in the face of recent research. Feudal society scored significant advances in 
agricultural technique, the development of new sources of 
energy, and the discovery of new mechanical devices. Yet 
there is a real sense in which medieval technology did not 
go much beyond the millennia-old domestic economy of 
the neolithic period — the basic arts of manual plowing, 
broadcast sowing, horticulture, hand construction of dwellings
and small-scale weaving, pottery, and smelting. This 
was an economy of tools and skills, not machines and industrial administration. To the techniques prevalent, say, in 
ancient Egypt, medieval Europe did not add appreciably 
more than the adaptations of a traditional technology to its 
own soils and climate. Indeed, in some respects, European 
skills and crafts were inferior to those of Asia, which accounts for the centuries-long attraction that Eastern goods 
had for medieval traders. European agricultural techniques would have been useless, even harmful, in many 
areas of the world. What Europe primarily achieved, during the Middle Ages, was to advance her own continental 
economy. The most important material step performed by 
feudal society was not the discovery of any single corpus of 
new inventions that presumably made capitalism possible, 
but rather the opening, clearing, and settlement of the 
European continent itself and adaptation of the Mediterranean technology to the heavier soils, climatic rigors, and 
sparser populations of the north. And the greatest social 
advance scored by Europe was the development of commodity production in towns founded without decisive interference by agrarian interests — that is, urban centers 
with their own law of life, a law of life that found its expression in the development of commodity production. 

With the growth of international trade, commodity relations began to subvert the entire fabric of European feudalism, undermining traditional relations in the countryside as well as in the towns. From the thirteenth century 
onward, European society became the theater of social and 
economic developments hitherto unprecedented in history, In northern Italy, and throughout central and western Europe, the communes began to ally with each other 
to establish federations against local territorial lords. The 
first breezes of German unification wafted across the land 
when in 1256 the towns of the Rhine valley established the 
Rhenish League of Cities,; and although the League soon 
fell apart, it found more or less permanent successors in the 
Hanseatic League of the Baltic region and the Swabian 
League. Nor was this remarkable stirring of the cities 
confined merely to Germany. The Swiss cantons emancipated themselves from Austria; Flemish towns rose in 
revolt against Count Louis in the first of a series of civil 
conflicts in the Lowlands; and Paris, under Etienne Marcel, 
look up arms against the French dauphin. Although many 
of the urban revolts were premature and unsuccessful, 
their failures were more than compensated for by the success enjoyed by the Italian cities. In northern Italy, town 
after town managed not only to subordinate or assimilate 
the territorial lords to its commercial interests but each, in 
almost every vital respect, was now a bourgeois city. 

What is of paramount importance, hero, is that urban life 
was developing on its own authentic mainsprings. In the 
past, the land had in some sense beleaguered the city — if 
not always by dominating or circumscribing its evolution, 
then at least by distorting and finally undermining it. In 
late medieval Europe, by contrast, the commodity system 
developed by the towns began to reach into the countryside itself and transform the land into a social image of the 
city. Trade, by creating new needs within the manor, 
slowly dissolved the old self-sufficient agrarian economy 
and even the parochialism of the medieval commune itself, 
Increasingly, feudal relations were replaced by exchange 
relations and the traditional estate system — a hierarchy 
ossified in a time-honored nexus of mutual rights and duties 
 — by the mediation of commodities between independent 
and sovereign producers. By the fourteenth century, serfdom began to disappear from much of western Europe. 
The emerging free farmer and yeoman became the rural 
counterpart of the master craftsman in the town, Although 
much the same development had occurred in Greece and 
Latium centuries earlier, Europe’s evolution was favored 
by the fact that its commerce was continental rather than 
merely local, its agrarian system weaker and more resilient 
with the result that its commercial development was not 
blocked by the great Asian land systems which had detoured Roman society from an authentic bourgeois development into parasitic alternatives Primarily, the European 
merchant princes of the late Middle Ages sought 
commercial wares from the East rather than tribute — although they certainly pillaged wherever they could — and 
they acquired these wares for continental markets rather 
than for local consumption Indeed, the discovery of new 
wares abroad served to widen the market at home and, 
with the colonization of America, provided a sharp stimulus to commercial and industrial development. 

To form a reasonably clear idea of how the bourgeois city 
emerged, we must pause, here, to cleat with the dialectic 
of the commodity relationship and the modes of labor it 
yields — a dialectic to which Marx’s work forms an indispensable guide. To say that capitalism represents the most 
advanced Form of commodity production is now a truism, 
but the sense in which this statement is true requires some 
comment. The abstract treatment that Mars gives to the 
dialectic of the commodity relationship — the successive 
development of its potentialities from the accidental to the 
expanded and finally to money forms — tends to conceal a 
living historical process. As Marx demonstrates, the inner 
logic which yields these-forms is largely quantitative; given 
the fertile ground For expanding exchange, almost every 
aspect of the productive process, including labor power 
itself becomes a commodity, an object of exchange, hi the 
ancient worlds the expansion of trade was obstructed by 
the wealth and power of a strong agrarian society; indeed, 
so compelling were agrarian values that the merchant’s 
social ideals centered not on capital accumulation, but 
rather on the ownership of landed property. Tn Europe, 
this obstacle did not exist to a significant degree. Trade 
increasingly became an end in itself and, by the late Middle Ages, so too did capital accumulation. Feudal society 
lacked the viability needed to contain the continental percolation of commodity relationships. Once the exchange 
process became widespread enough, it simply engulfed the 
older order of relationships. Exchange created new divisions in the labor process and, simply by the process of 
continual division and subdivision, demolished the self-contained domestic economy of the manor. From a marginal source of goods and services, the market moved to 
the center of economic life. 

No major technological innovations were needed to 
achieve this profound transformation. Although the capitalist system later produced the most Far-reaching technological advances known in history, the bourgeoisie initially 
used the tools and materials of the craftsman to promote 
the new mode of production Capital simply altered the 
traditional labor process by hiring workmen to produce for 
exchange without appreciably changing the industrial 
practices of the time. Labor-power was converted into a 
commodity. AH the decisive technological advances 
achieved by the capitalist system thenceforth centered 
around the adaptation of natural Forces and energy to this 
mode of labor, Technology became an extension of labor 
conceived not merely as a *human* activity, but as *wage*
labor, a resource for economic exploitation. Economic activity began to subordinate the satisfaction of concrete human needs to the abstract goals of exchange and capital 
accumulation. Production, in effect, occurred for its own 
sake. This marked a fundamental change in all the values 
of previously existing societies, however exploitative their 
natures. 

We must focus more sharply on this unique economic 
transformation and its social consequences. Whatever else 
may be the principal functions of the early city, certainly 
in an advanced urban society the authentic nexus of the 
city is the marketplace — the arena in which the necessities 
of life are exchanged and in which urban contact has its. 
workaday center. The nature of the marketplace in any 
given period of history depends largely on the prevailing 
mode of labor. There is no mystery about this characteristically Marxian formulation. As we have already noted, tire 
marketplace of Tenochtitlan was primitive by virtue of the 
fact that Aztec trade never developed to the level of the 
money Form, Concrete labor — such as the specific skills of 
the food cultivator, mason, weaver, potter, or sculptor — 
more or less determined the way in which marketable 
goods were viewed in be marketplace, Although each object found its “reflection”, during the exchange process in 
another exchangeable object, the labor time involved in 
production did not reach the degree of quantification, abstraction, and generalization required for the development of money, Exchange was guided primarily by 
material need and by the quality of the objects to be exchanged, Labor, like the object, retained its qualitative, 
human, concrete features: it did not dissolve into a mere 
aggregate of muscular or mental energy and lose its identity as an expression of human powers. That the utility or 
use-value of an object retained its primacy over exchange 
value is demonstrated clearly enough by the fact that many 
use-values in primitive society were inalienable. Land in 
Indian America s For example, was never a “salable item”; 
it could not have been denatured into “real estate” until 
the coming of the white man. 

With the development of the money form under conditions of simple commodity production, labor, to be sure, 
does reach a fairly high degree of abstraction, but rarely 
does it lend itself to the degree of quantification attained 
under capitalism. The alienation of commodities still retains key human features, Trade remains an individual act 
in which the direct producers meet face to face in order to 
exchange the products of their own n labor. The mutual satisfaction of needs retains its pre-eminence over the mindless 
accumulation of commodities and capital Concrete labor 
prevails, as it were, over quantified, generalized, abstract 
labor, A large area of human needs is still satisfied outside 
the marketplace — that is, by the domestic economy — and 
even those who may depend upon the market for their 
existence are not so much its victim as its creators. They 
have individually mastered the conditions of production 
and they exchange their products under conditions tn 
which the needs of the community, the identity of producers and consumers, and the number of commodities 
required by the market can be determined with a lair degree 
of precision. However much such communities may compote with each other, there is little competition within the 
community itself, And there is no production For the sake 
of production. The value of a commodity is determined 
primarily by the workmanship and talent involved in its 
production and by Factors such as its durability and quality 
 — in short, by concrete labor, hence the extraordinary 
beauty of the simplest objects produced by many noncapitalist communities. 

Although all trade is alienation, in the medieval commune it was also relation. Inasmuch as this was an explicit 
fact of daily life owing to the prevailing mode of labor, the 
medieval commune created remarkable forms of association not only in civic life but in the economy itself. Lewis 
Mumford remarks that 

<quote>
the workshop was a family, likewise the merchant’s counting house. The members ate together at the same table, 
worked in the same rooms, slept in the same dormitory, 
joined Ln family prayers, participated in common amusements.[16]
</quote>

[16] Lewis Mumford, *The Culture of Cities* (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1938), p 35.

The intimacy between labor and life was revealed by the 
fact that “The family pattern dominated industry.” Urban 
lire was intensely, even artistically collective. The marketplace was a center not only for trade but also for

<quote>
public ceremony for if is on the porch of the cathedral that
the miracle plays were enacted; it was within the square 
that the guilds set up their stages for the performance of 
their mystery plays; it was here that great tourneys would 
be held. It was not merely acropolis but amphitheatre.[17]
</quote>

Yet even these remarks do not recapture for us the democratic ambience of many medieval communes, at the high 
point of their development. Nearly all communes were 
policed by their own citizens, who rotated to form the 
night watch and filled the ranks of the city militia. Commonly, mayors and town councils were elected by the 
guilds or by public-assemblies of the populace reminiscent 
of the Athenian *Ecclesia*. Indeed, the the *polis*, these 
towns Formed a complete and rounded totality. As Mumford notes: 

<quote>
Prayer, mass, pageant, life-ceremony, baptism, marriage, 
Dr funeral — the city itself was stage for these separate 
scenes of the drama, and the citizen himself was the actor. [18]
</quote>

[17] Ibid, p. 55. 
[18] Ibid, p. 64.

Perhaps no account of the commune more dramatically 
reveals the solidarity which welded this urban way of life 
together than Albrecht Dürer’s description of a religions 
ceremony held in Antwerp as late as the sixteenth century: 

<quote>
I saw the Procession pass along the street, the people being 
arranged in rows, each man some distance from his neighbor, but the rows close behind the other. There were the 
Goldsmiths, the Painters, the Masons, the Broderers, the 
Sculptors, the Joiners, the Carpenters, the Sailors, the Fishermen, the Butchers, the Leatherers, the Clothmakers, the 
Bakers, the Tailors, the Cordwainers — indeed, workmen of 
all kinds and: many craftsmen and dealers who work for 
their livelihood....A very largo company of widows also 
took part in the procession. They support themselves with 
their own hands and observe a special rule They were ail 
dressed from head to foot in white linen garments made 
expressly for the occasion....[19]
</quote>

To which Mymford adds: 

<quote>
Note the vast number of people arrayed in this procession. 
As in the church itself, the spectators were also the communicants and participants: they engaged in the spectacle, 
watching it from within., not from without: or rather, feeling ii from within, acting in unison, not dismembered beings, reduced to a single specialized role.[20]
</quote>

[19] Quoted by Mumford, ibid, pp. 63–64.

[20] Ibid., p. 64. 


During the Great French Revolution, the Parisians replaced the feudal nomenclature by the single word *citoyen* 
to express their newly discovered national solidarity, Later 
events were to reveal that beneath the apparent unity of 
the nation lay profoundly divergent and antagonistic social 
interests. The medieval commune for its part used the 
more organic term “brother.” “*Unus subveniet alteri tamquam fratri suo* — ‘let each hold the other like a brother’ — 
says a Flemish charter of the twelfth century, and these 
words were actually a reality,” observes Henri Pirenne, 

<quote>
As early as the twelfth century the merchants were expending a good part of their profits fur the benefit of their 
fellow citizens — building churches, founding hospitals,
buying off the market-tolls. The love of gain was allied, in 
them, with local patriotism. Every man was proud of his 
city and spontaneously devoted himself to its prosperity, 
This was because, in reality, each individual life depended 
directly upon the collective life of the municipal association. The commune of the Middle Ages had-, in fact, all the 
essential attributes which the State exercises today. It guaranteed to ail its members the security of his person and of 
his chattels, Outside of it he was in & hostile world, surrounded by perils and exposed to every risk. In it alone did 
he ha Ye a shelter, and for it he felt a gratitude which bordered on love, He was ready to devote himself to its defense, just as he was always ready to bedeck it and make 
it more beautiful than its neighbors. Those magnificent 
cathedrals which the thirteenth Century saw erected 
would not have been conceivable without the joyous alacrity with which the burghers contributed, by gifts, to their 
construction. They were not only houses of God; they also 
glorified the city or which they were the greatest ornament 
and which their majestic towers advertised afar. They 
were for the cities of the Middle Ages what temples were 
for those of antiquity.[21]
</quote>

[21] “Henri Pirenne, *Medieval Cities* (Princeton, NJ, Princeton Universify Press. 1948), pp. 209 — 210.

Yet, even these generous lines by Pirenne fail to do adequate justice to the attitude of the medieval urban dweller 
toward his city. The commune provided not only security 
to its populace but also a deep sense of community. It 
offered not only protection but the comfort of sociality and 
a human scale the burgher could comprehend and in 
which he could find a uniquely individual space The commune was home — not merely an environment that surrounded the home. The concrete nature of the labor process, the directness, indeed, familiar character, of nearly all 
social relations, and the human scale of civic life which 
Fostered a high degree of personal participation in urban 
affairs — all, combined to retain a natural core to social life 
which the cosmopolises of the ancient world had dissolved 
with the passing of the *polis*. One might say that the natural core of the medieval commune was not unlike the sexual division of labor which underpinned the economic life 
of tribal society. Marx, with considerable perception, notes 
that 

<quote>
Castes and guilds arise from the action of the same natural 
laws that regulate the differentiation of plants, and animals 
into species and varieties, except that, when a certain degree of development has been reached, the heredity of 
castes and exclusiveness of guilds are ordained as a law of 
Society. [22] 
</quote>


[22] Karl Marx, Capital (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906), 1. 373. 

Just as the guilds speciate the commune, so commune and 
manor could be said to speciate feudal society. As to the 
commune, a natural civic nucleus mutes the externalizing 
and disintegrative forces latent in trade. Even the prevailing technology retains this natural or organic characters 
toots are adapted to the proficiency of the craftsman, to his 
skills, talents, and physiology. The notion that a man is 
merely an adjunct of an impersonal machine that determines the tempo and nature of his work would have surely 
horrified members of a medieval guild. 

Contrast this mentality with that of bourgeois society — 
a society that dissolves the natural basis of civic life by 
transmuting the fraternal relations of the medieval commune into harsh commodity relations — and we are perhaps better equipped to judge the enormous psychic as 
well as economic changes that were to he introduced by 
the capitalist mode of production. The commodity, like a 
mysterious external force, now seems to rise above men 
and determine their destiny according to suprahuman autonomous laws. With the increasingly problematic abstraction of labor from its concrete forms, all relations, objects, 
and responsibilities acquire a monetary equivalent. Natural life shrinks from the community to the individual; the 
city becomes a mere aggregate of isolated human monads 
 — a grey featureless mass, the raw materials of bureaucratic mobilisation and manipulation. The guild, which 
once formed the spontaneous arena of authentic human 
fraternity, finds its caricature in the industrial and commercial corporation, with its smoothly engineered ambience of “togetherness” and “team play.” The procession 
described by Dürer becomes the parade; the spiritual ceremony, the reified spectacle. With the emergence of a 
highly monetized economy, human beings become interchangeable with the very wares that are the result of their 
human powers. They too become commodities, the passive 
objects — whether as workers or spectators — of economic 
laws. 

<br>

If the mere extension of commodity relations can be said 
to have transformed the medieval commune into the bourgeois city, the factory may be singled out as the agent 
which gives this city its structural form and its social purpose. By the word “factory” I mean more than an industrial 
enterprise: the factory is the locus of mobilised abstract 
labor, of labor power as a commodity, placed in the service 
of commerce as well as production. Accordingly, the term 
applies as much to an office building and a supermarket as 
to a mill and a plant. Once the factory becomes an clement 
of urban life, it takes over the city almost completely. Here, 
a very important historic contrast must be emphasized. In 
the medieval commune, the workshop was a homo: it was 
the locus not only of highly individuated technical activities, but also (as Mumford has already stressed) of complex 
personal and cultural responsibilities. With the emergence 
of the factory, home and work place are separated. The 
factory is. a place to which the worker goes in order to 
expend his human powers — powers that are steadily degraded to the degree that they are abstracted and quantified as mere “work lime” — in the service of increasingly 
anonymous owners and administrators, The factory has no 
personal or cultural functions; it is merely the collecting 
and mobilizing center for alienated depersonalized labor.

If these significant differences are viewed from a broader 
perspective, they reveal crucial differences between the 
very nature of the medieval commune and the bourgeois 
city. The guild, which unites homes that are also workshops, imparts a distinctly domestic character to the commune: it turns the city into a home, into an authentic human community that graduates personal affiliations and 
responsibilities to a social level Conversely, the factory 
transforms the city into a commercial and industrial enterprise. It negates the role of the city as a personal and cultural entity, and exaggerates its economic functions to the 
point of urban pathology. The medieval commune was 
primarily a place in which to live; the bourgeois city is 
primarily a place in which to work. The guilds made the 
city into a center of human solidarity, religious communion, and cultural vitality; although work was necessary to 
achieve these goals, it became the medium for artistry and 
the expression of creative human powers, not an end in 
itself. The factory degrades the city to a center of production for the sake of production and consumption for the 
sake of consumption. That people must live” in a city in 
order to work is obviously necessary to the existence of the 
factory, but the fact that they occupy dwellings is secondary to the fact that they work in office buildings, supermarkets, plants, and mills. 

We will examine the unique characteristics of the bourgeois 
city in a later section, but at this point, we must ask 
how tine medieval commune was transformed into the 
bourgeois city, The factory’ requires the separation of the 
small independent producer From the means of production: the alienation of the producer’s labor and the reduction of his labor power to a commodity. Generally as the 
market begins to expand beyond the environs of the commune, considerable differences in wealth emerge between 
members of the same guild and between individual members of the same community. In time, wealthy master 
craftsmen, traders (who are often organized into guilds of 
their own), and eventually the guilds themselves tend to 
become an exclusive stratum within the community with 
interests of their own that are set apart from and often 
opposed to those of the community as a whole. Such guilds 
begin to exclude apprentices and journeymen from 
becoming masters, turning them into authentic proletarians who must work for others in, order to survive, In some 
areas of Europe, this process of proletarianization occurred 
so slowly that it did not visibly upset the stability of the 
commune. The Swiss cities are a case in point. There, the 
transformation from the guild workshop to the factory was 
so organic that Swiss communities, nearly to the present 
day, could be cited as models of civic balance, stability, and 
the integration of craft skills with mass production. 

But in other areas, the expansion of the market from a 
local Or regional to an international Stale occurred at a 
tempo that gravely disrupted the harmony of the commune. As early as the thirteenth century, Flanders provides us with a not uncommon example of cities, based 
largely on international trade, in which the guilds developed into an oppressive hierarchical stratum that grossly 
exploited a large mass of dispossessed artisans. Nor did this 
change occur with tranquility. in 1280, nearly all the Flemish communes exploded into a bloody class war between 
proletarianized artisans and wealthy masters who were 
organized into exclusive guild monopolies. This conflict 
was not decisively resolved. Before either side could definitively vanquish the other, the territorial lords shrewdly 
used the occasion to intervene and hold both classes in 
check. Indeed, it may welt be that, owing partly to the fact 
that this struggle was never fought out to its logical conclusion and partly to the later subordination of the Lowlands 
to English commercial hegemony, civic life in Holland and 
Flanders retained the medieval charm that has turned 
their cities into the museum pieces of the modern world. 

We must turn to England to find the area in which the 
transformation of small producers into proletarians ran its 
full, perhaps most savage, course. And, ironically, this 
transformation first occurred in the countryside and only 
later in the cities. In the English countryside, the bourgeois 
development followed two distinct although complementary paths; more and more acreage was removed from food 
cultivation and village pasturage and devoted to raising 
sheep for the wool market of Flanders; and, capitalist entrepreneurs, blocked by guilds and merchant monopolies 
in the cities, turned to the villages to avail themselves of 
cheap unregulated labor for the domestic production of 
textile products. In both cases, this development was 
marked by the steady degradation and eventually dispossession of the English peasantry and yeomanry, a development in which the landed aristocracy and textile merchants dramatically transformed the social nature of the 
countryside and finally the cities 

By the sixteenth century, the English aristocracy — its 
appetite for riches whetted by rising world prices of wool 
 — began ruthlessly to expropriate and enclose the traditional common pasture lands of the villages, even the private holdings of tenants whose plots had been tilled for 
generations. These lands were simply turned into sheep 
runs and their occupants dispossessed. The story is told in 
a scathing manner by Thomas More in the opening pages 
of *Utopia*. More’s principal character; Raphael Hythloday, 
declares:

<quote>
Your sheep which are normally so gentle and need so little 
food ... have begun to be so ravenous and wild that they 
even eat up men. They devastate and destroy fields, houses 
and towns. For in whatever parts of the kingdom line and 
therefore more precious wool is produced, there the nobles and gentlemen, and also some holy abbots, are not 
content with the rents and annual profits that their predecessors used to get from their farms. They are not satisfied 
to live in luxury and idleness and be of no use to the state; 
they even harm it. they leave nothing for arable land, 
enclose everything for pasture, destroy houses, tear down 
towns and leave only the church to house the sheep; and 
as if the forests and parks lost yon too little ground, those 
good men turn all houses and cultivated land into a desert.[23]
</quote>

[23] Thomas More, *Utopia* (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965), p. 14.

An increasingly capitalist form of agriculture, in effect, had 
become the pacesetter in England For capitalist industry.

Even more significant for the long run development of 
English capitalism, “free” capital, seeking escape from the 
fetters of guild restrictions and merchant monopolies in 
the towns, began to colonize the countryside along industrial lines. Again, one finds in this development no remarkably new technological advances; rather, an entrepot sort 
of merchant-capitalist, traveling from cottage to cottage, 
provides village spinners with wool, weavers and knitters 
with yarn, and dyers with doth. Materials and, where 
necessary, machines were formed out and worked for tho 
barest subsistence wages instead of the higher guild-regulated town rates. With this putting-out system, the 
capitalist could easily undercut the urban standard of living and deliver his wares at such highly reduced prices that 
urban masters and journeymen were simply wiped out by 
the thousands. The entire family of the cottager, including 
his infant children, were put to work to meet the ravenous 
demands of the new economy. The factory system was 
born when the capitalist, finding it more profitable to 
mobilize rural labor and intensify its operations under 
close supervision, housed It in a single structure. English 
capitalist manufacture emerged primarily in the countryside rather than the cities and, in contrast to Flanders, 
essentially demolished the guild system From without 
rather than from within. 

With the spread of capitalist manufacture, all that remained of the traditional guild structure collapsed. And 
with the passing of the guilds went the last integrating 
forces of the medieval communes and Renaissance towns. 
Thereafter, a new basis for city life developed in the urban 
centers of the industrialized western world, changing 
qualitatively all pre-existing social and economic relations 
within the towns and between town and country. 

** 3. The Limits of the Bourgeois City 

The early development of the bourgeois city is, in many 
ways, comparable to the destructive invasion of the 
colonial world by capitalist relations. In England, the enclosure movement dislodged thousands of families from 
the country and they had no recourse but to flock to the 
towns. The larger cities, to which much of this influx was 
directed, lacked the physical and administrative facilities 
for dealing with so many beggared families (nor were they 
particularly concerned with their fate), with the harsh result that large numbers of urban poor simply perished in 
the Streets, In many cities, entire quarters were reduced to 
filthy hovels, demoralized by Crime, congestion, disease, 
drunkenness, and prostitution. Although the enclosure 
movement extended over two centuries, it reached its high 
point in the early 1800s. From 1800 to 1920, more than 
three million acres of English countryside were enclosed, 
an area nearly as large as all the enclosures which occurred 
during the seventeenth century. These sweeping dispossessions of villagers and tenant farmers flooded the cities so, as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, 
more than half of the adult population in London and in 
some sixty English and Welsh towns had not been born in 
the cities of their residence. 

During these bitter years, the demoralization of the urban population in England reached appalling proportions,[24]
Nearly all the traditional moral restraints carefully reared 
by centuries of precapitalist social development — including the sacrosanct puritanical values introduced by the 
bourgeoisie itself during the Reformation era — were shattered in a single generation. In slums and working class 
quarters;, drunkenness and profligacy rapidly became the 
normal condition of life, A moral blight, with its rampant 
debasement of family ties, sexuality, human solidarity; and 
dignity, followed doggedly in the wake of urban blight. 
Perhaps not surprisingly; the English population began to 
soar at a dizzying tempo despite pervasive malnourishmerit, appalling working conditions, and incomparably 
bad and unhygienic living conditions in the congested hovels. The joyless sexual promiscuity in working class quarters, so markedly irresponsible in its disregard of the newly 
born, reflected the conscious irresponsibility of the bourgeoisie toward the living conditions of the emerging proletariat. Although the increase in urban population can be 
partly accounted for by the influx of countryfolk into the 
cities, birthrates too began to rise, In 1800, the population 
of London numbered less than a million people, by 1850,
it increased to two million, and at the tarn of the century 
it reached four million„ an unprecedented figure in urban 
history. Barely manageable in 1800, the capital of England 
had turned into a monstrous urban cancer in a single century. 

[24] Although by no means in England alone, as is commonly supposed. Even the supposedly benign Scandinavian countries, for 
example, were victimized b y an enclosure movement of their 
own. Perhaps the most serious of these developments occurred in 
Sweden, where legislative challenges led to enclosures and the 
break-up of the traditional open-field system, This subversion of 
the peasant economy resulted in enormous urban congestion with 
a severe deterioration of Swedish cities. During the latter half of 
the nineteenth century, more than a million people emigrated 
From Sweden — mostly to the United States — and an equal number 
were obliged to abandon agriculture for work in crafts and in the 
new factories which emerged in the cities. The same development, although the product largely of agricultural mechanization and the “green revolution,” is taking place today in France. Asia, Latin America, and Africa. 


To account for this urban decay with an opprobrious 
word like “neglect” is to conceal the fact that this very 
moral — or immoral — state of affairs is. a fundamental social 
condition, or, more precisely, an inherent condition of 
bourgeois economic life and sedation. In precapitalist society, “neglect” might well be said to reflect an immoral 
state of affairs — the neglect of one’s kin, of comembers of 
the tribe, community, or guild — for it was a transgression 
of the a priori social relations (hat constituted personal life, 
Human sociation, by its very nature, implied solidarity between individuals. Every individual belonged to a basic 
social unit that defined the ego and from which the ego, in 
turn, could claim security, solicitude, and the irreducible 
material means of lift. Except for very unusual circumstances and in periods of social decay, these claims were 
never ignored by the community or brought into question. 

But once the traditional collective conditions of life, so 
highly charged with mythic and moral content, are dissolved by trade into monadic ones, once the clan, tribal, 
village, or guild nexus is dissolved into a cash nexus, the 
individual is denuded of any responsibility to society and 
to other individuals. All corporate and social ties must 
defer to the naked claims of egotism. Indeed, “self-preservation” 
and the dynamics of “social progress” are defined in 
terms of self-interest precluding, by definition, the 
time-honored ties of solidarity so integral to traditional societies. 
The primacy of the corporate “we” is replaced by the 
primacy of the self-sufficient “I.” The Leibnitzian monads 
which “have no windows through which something can 
come in or go out” become the elements of sociation — 
indeed, of society defined as such. Neglect other than self-neglect,
 now acquires the seemingly positive value of a 
self-interest that, according to the canons of traditional 
liberalism, serves the general interest by realizing its own 
egotistical goals. The term “self-interest” provides the 
rationale for what is neutrally designated as “social behavior”
and “human interaction.” Traditional society, whose divisibility 
always stopped at some collective level of sociation, 
is replaced under capitalism by this fictive windowless 
monad, which now becomes the ultimate “social” — or 
more properly, asocial — entity. Having dissolved all social 
ties into “free” and “private” individuals, all that remains 
of the explicit interdependence of people in precapitalist 
communities is a “civic compact,” or, if you will, a “social 
contract,” to protect lives and property — a “contract” that 
colonizes such a limited terrain of sociation that it becomes 
a. warrant for neglect beyond the contours of public order. 
Beyond these contours, each producer is an entity unto 
himself, busily engaged in the pursuit of his own private 
affairs. The language of physics is appropriate here: society 
is reduced to a mechanical Brownian movement of molecules, 
each bouncing against the other in the course of 
exchanging “goods and services.” There appears to be no 
social dimension and no development of relations in the 
traditional sense other than quantitative ones; nor is it 
surprising to find that social theory itself adopts this 
quantification of social relations as its research norms, and turns 
from social philosophy into sociology. 

Yet, despite these appearances, a qualitative social 
development occurs. by reducing every relationship to a cash 
nexus,capital removes all the moral and esthetic restraints 
that held the growth of earlier cities in check. The concept 
of social responsibility. Once intuitive to precapitalist 
communities, is replaced by a single goal: plunder. Every entity 
and human capacity is conceived of as a resource for the 
acquisition of profit, the land, forests, seas, rivers, the labor 
of others, and ultimately all the verities of social life from 
those which inhere in the Family to the community itself. 
The new industrial and commercial classes fall upon the 
social body like ravenous wolves on a helpless prey, and 
what remains of a once vital social organism is the tom 
fragments and indigestible sinews that linger more in the 
memory of humanity than in the realities of social 
intercourse, The American urban lot with its rusted cans, 
broken glass, and debris strewn chaotically among weeds 
and scrub reflects in the minuscule the ravaged remains of 
forests, waterways, shorelines, and communities. 

Society is now ruled by competition; and qualitative 
changes in social relations consist in the Fact that 
competition tends to transform the numerous small enterprises 
into fewer and fewer centralized industrial and commercial giants.
 All elements of society begin to change Civic; 
political, and cultural gigantism parallel industrial and 
commercial gigantism. Social life assumes dimensions so 
far removed from the human scale and human control that 
society ceases to appear as the shelter of humanity. Rather, 
it becomes a demonic force operating far above live heads 
of its human constituents, obeying a law of development 
completely alien to human goats. Cities and regions are 
delivered over to an autonomous national division of labor, 
to a scale of economic and social life that is far beyond the 
comprehension of the community. The city becomes an 
agglomeration of dispirited people scattered among cold, 
featureless structures. 

The now corporatism of late capitalism differs 
profoundly from traditional corporatism. Bourgeois 
corporatism aggregates the monads without transforming their 
relations to each other; they are reconstituted into an 
anonymous herd, not a personalized interdependent collectivity, 
The individual is denied sovereignty over those 
conditions of life that, make for authentic individuality 
Without gaining the mutual support afforded by traditional 
corporatism. The personalized collectivity, represented by 
the clan, tribe, and guild, is replaced by the anonymous 
bureaucratic institution or agency which, insofar as it 
provides a social service of value, does so with cold indifference. 
As Don Martindale observes: 

<quote>
There is a continual breakdown of older traditional, social 
and economic structures based on family ties, local associations, 
culture, caste, and status with the substitution of an 
order resting on occupational and vocational interests. 
Among other things this means that the growth of the city 
is accomplished by a substitution of indirect “secondary”
relations for direct, face-to-face “primary” relations. The 
church, school and family are modified. The school takes 
over some of the functions of the family. The church loses 
influence being displaced by the printed page.[25]
</quote>


[25] Donn: Martindale, “Prefatory Remarks” to Max Weber’s 
*The City* (New York: The Free Press, 1958), p. 21. 

One can add that the close vocational ties fostered by the 
guild are displaced by the bureaucratic manipulation 
characteristic of the trade unions the marketplace and the 
personal buyer-seller relationship have given way to the 
impersonal supermarket and mass merchandising; and the 
popular forms of community decisionmaking (such as the 
assembly and town-hall meeting) have been replaced by a 
mechanical electoral process which delivers the formulation
of policy into the hands of preselected “representatives”
whose roots in the community are tenuous or nonexistent. 
In its early revolutionary phase, bourgeois society 
could claim with a certain degree of justification that it 
sought the liberation of the ego from the trammels of caste, 
religious superstition, and authoritarian corporatism. 
Today, in its late, distinctly corporate phase, the same society 
retains the individualism of its early period all the more to 
create individuals without individuality, isolated egos 
without personality. 

Capitalism is pre-eminently an economic system, the 
demiurge of *homo economies* as distinguished from the 
traditional *homo collectivicus*. Civil society is the 
byproduct of economic society. Yet even in the latter sphere, 
the most sacrosanct of all, economic activity loses its 
relationship to human needs. Production occurs for the sake of 
production, driven on relentlessly by competition. Almost 
accidentally does industry respond to the material requirements 
of humanity; commodities are produced for exchange. 
Capital is indifferent to their social destiny; the 
producer is unconcerned whether commodities are 
beautiful or ugly, durable or shoddy, safe or dangerous. All that 
counts is realizing a sale and making a profit — so that more 
sales can be realized and more profits made to survive the 
perils of competition. So too with the city. All pretensions 
aside, it matters little whether the city is ugly, whether it 
debases its inhabitants, whether it is esthetically, spiritually, or physically tolerable. What counts is that economic 
operations occur on a scale and with an effectiveness to 
meet the only criterion of bourgeois survival: economic 
growth. 

We cannot ignore the devastating impact of this criterion 
on urban life. Precapitalist cities were limited by the 
countryside, not only externally in the sense that the 
growth of free cities inevitably came up against social, 
cultural, and material barriers reared by entrenched agrarian 
interests, but also internally, insofar as the city reflected 
the social relations on the land. Except for the late 
medieval cities, exchange relations were never completely 
autonomous; to one degree or another, they were placed in 
the service of the land. But once exchange relations begin 
to dominate the land and finally transform agrarian society, 
the city develops according to the workings of a suprasocial 
law, Production for the sake of production, translated into 
urban terms, means the growth of the city for its own sake 
 — without any intrinsic urban or human criteria to arrest 
that growth. Nothing inhibits this course of development 
but the catastrophic results of the development itself. The 
“exploding metropolis,” far from posing the cliche of 
“urban revitalization,” now raises the more crucial historic 
problem of urban exhaustion. The bourgeois city has limits 
too, but these no longer emerge from the relationship of 
the city to the land. They emerge from (he expansion of 
the very exchange relations which are so basic to urban 
development as we have known it for thousands of years. 

<br>

The most obvious limits of the bourgeois city arc physical. 
The larger cities of the world are breaking down under 
sheer excess of size and growth. They are disintegrating 
administratively, institutionally, and logistically; they are 
increasingly unable to provide the minimal services for 
human habitation, personal safety, and the means for transporting 
people and goods to places where they are needed. 
Perhaps the most obvious index to the scope of these problems, 
viewed in numerical terms, is the data on contemporary 
urban population trends. According to recent data 
prepared by the Urban Land Institute, the United Stales a 
decade ago contained twenty-three “Great Metropolitan 
Areas” with populations of a million or more, roughly 
embracing about 40 percent of the national population. By 
1070, there were twenty-nine of these urban entities, and 
their proportion of-the population was 44 percent. With 
clearly voiced alarm, the Institute projects that if present 
trends continue (and there is no reason why they 
shouldn’t), by the year 2000 about 63 percent of the 
American population will live in overwhelmingly urbanized 
areas, If this projection is accurate, the number of people 
living in large cities — even allowing for declining fertility 
rates — may well exceed 180 million; indeed, it may possibly 
equal the present national population.[26] 

[26] Jerome P. Pickard, “US. Metropolitan Growth and Expansion. 
1970–2000” (Washington, DC. Urban Land Institute, 1972), 
pp. 6–7.

We shall have occasion to examine the grotesque 
distortions this statistical picture suggests about land use, the 
distribution of resources, and ultimately, the very nature of 
human sedation under modern capitalism. For the present, 
it is important lo emphasize that the Institute’s statistics, 
“startling” as they may be to its compilers, do not fully 
convey the profound changes this growth indicts on the 
larger cities of the world and the historically different 
meaning it imparts to them as urban entities. Today, every 
City with a million or more people — and in the United 
States there are at least twelve cities and their environs 
whose populations exceed two million — is the nodal point 
for art immense urban belt that extends for scores of miles 
beyond its downtown district through suburbs and municipal 
jurisdictions that arc independent only in an administrative 
sense. If the word “city” traditionally conveyed a 
clearly definable urban entity, New York, Chicago, Los 
Angeles — or Paris, London, Rome — are cities in name only, 
in reality, they are immense urban agglomerations that are 
steadily losing any distinctive form and quality. Indeed, 
what groups these cities together under a common rubric 
is no longer the cultural and social amenities that once 
distinguished the city from the countryside, but the 
common problems that betoken their cultural dissolution and 
social breakdown. 

In all of these cities, transportation is a source of growing 
frustration because of overcrowded public transport facilities 
and thoroughfares; it tends to be unreliable, hazardous, 
and often near paralysis. Urban air is seriously polluted and 
urban wastes are reaching unmanageable proportions. Living 
quarters are in short supply and shoddy construction 
threatens to turn many newly built quarters into premature 
slums. Segregation along racial and economic lines is 
so much on the increase, particularly in American cities 
following the massive influx of blacks and Puerto Ricans 
into urban areas, that cities are internally divided into 
mutually exclusive, bitterly hostile enclaves — white 
against black and Latin, poor against well-to-do and 
wealthy. Taxes and administrative costs are uniformly on 
the rise; in fact, financial crises have turned from isolated 
episodes into a chronic fiscal condition. Crimes are 
multiplying to a point where, even in privileged areas, the urban 
dweller lives under a darkening pall of fear for his personal 
safety. Industries have been migrating steadily From the 
larger cities, leaving behind a *lazarus* stratum of the urban 
population that exists partly on a dole, partly on crime, 
partly on the sick fat of the city. Education is at the point 
of moral and administrative breakdown; the schools, in 
many areas, approximate juvenile prisons whose staffs are 
occupied more with the problems of order and discipline 
than pedagogy. Nothing more visibly reveals the overall 
decay of the modern city than the ubiquitous filth and 
garbage that gathers in its streets, the noise and massive 
congestion that fills its thoroughfares, the apathy of its 
population toward civic issues, and the ghastly indifference 
of the individual toward the physical violence that is 
publicly inflicted on other members of the community. In the 
meantime, the cities continue to expand — without 
meaning or form — despite the fact that for many urban centers 
the problems of growth have reached emergency proportions. 

It may be useful to examine some of these problems as 
they apply to the two leading cities of the United States:
Los Angeles and New York. Urban literature tends to view 
these cities as contrasts. Los Angeles as a comparatively 
new city without a visible tradition to mold its development;
 New York as a City tempered by standards from an 
earlier urban way of life. Yet precisely because this contrast 
was once valid, it is significant that today the differences 
between the two cities are rapidly waning. Both cities are 
beset not only by the same problems, but the Form of New 
York is slowly approximating that of Los Angeles. This 
convergence characterizes not only all large American cities 
but also cities abroad, whose traditions reach back to the 
classical, humanistic era of urban development. 

Modern Los Angeles, in a sense, is only a few decades 
old. The city has grown so large so quickly that it retains 
only the vestiges of an urban center despite recent 
attempts to revitalize its ambiguous downtown district. 
Harsh reality compels us to view this urban entity as the 
very antithesis of an authentic community. The city is 
actually a region; a fantastic agglomerate of shoddy structures, 
garish neon lights, oversized supermarkets, vulgarly bedecked 
gas stations, and snaking freeways for motor traffic. 
The official city area of 404 square miles, like its official 
population figure of 2.3 million, is an urban fiction. 
Actually, Los Angeles spreads out for almost five thousand 
square miles, from the coast to the Santa Monica mountains, 
engulfing scores of “independent communities” and 
county areas. It seemed, for a time, that the mountain 
ranges would offer a natural barrier to urban expansion. In. 
recent years, however, new tentacles of Los Angeles have 
reached out in almost every direction, probing into the 
Mojave Resort seventy-five miles away and even encroaching 
upon the Palm Springs area and the Coachella Valley. 
Over seven million people occupy the Los Angeles-Long 
Beach Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area — an urban 
cancer three times the size of Rhode island. 

The enormity of this metropolitan area yields a characteristic 
result: the city proper is not used in any human 
sense. It is merely a place in which to work. People neither 
stroll along its main street nor do they congregate in its 
squares. Los Angeles is normally seen through a windshield. 
Because of the city’s enormous size, the car is the 
essential and unavoidable means of transportation: about 
95 percent of travel in the metropolitan area is done by car. 
It is estimated that there is One automobile for every 2.5 
people, compared with 3.5 in Detroit, the automotive 
capital of the United States. And these cars are in daily use, 
bringing wage earners to their jobs, children to schools,
and shoppers to local stores. Roughly 60 percent of the 
central city’s land is devoted to parking lots, roads, and 
garages, in addition to the considerable area that is 
occupied by its multitude of gasoline and service stations. 

It is not enough to say that Los Angeles is an overgrown 
suburb made possible by motor vehicles and freeways, for 
this suggests certain natural amenities — trees, shrubs, and 
open fields — that are a secondary value to the southern 
California metropolis. In Los Angeles, the automobile is 
not only a means of transportation, but a state of mind that 
shapes the citizen’s sensibility toward his environment, 
life style, and concept of space and time. So committed is 
the psyche of the Angelino to the motor vehicle that a 
proposal to build a mass transit system for the city was 
resoundingly defeated in a popular referendum. To travel 
fifty or sixty miles to a choice restaurant — possibly, driving 
two hours in order to while away one — is often no more 
debatable an issue than to travel a smaller distance to and 
From work daily. The four wheels of a car, the din of 
freeway traffic, the space enclosed between a windshield and 
a back window become the essential elements of an urban 
space that finds Its counterpart in the home that is an 
extension of the garage. This mechanized, plastic, and 
tacky world blunts the Angelino’s taste for nature; the 
semblance of the organic tends to suffice For the real thing. Not 
surprisingly, one finds that Los Angeles city authorities 
arrayed plastic “vegetation” along a stretch of freeway to 
replace shrubs that were perishing from air pollution. The 
reason for this inspired experiment was net lower costs, 
indeed, it would have been more expensive to vacuum-clean 
the synthetic product than periodicaly restore the 
real vegetation. Hard as It may be to believe, the civic 
authorities thought that the plastic “plants” were more 
“attractive” than real ones. 

Gasoline exhausts from millions of motor vehicles produce 
air pollution problems in Los Angeles — a city that is 
notoriously burdened by temperature inversions and 
photochemical smog. In the celluloid world of southern 
California, dealing with this problem assumes the qualities 
of a technocratic nightmare. The only administrative institution 
around which Los Angeles coheres is its district-wide 
Air Pollution Control Board — an agency formed to 
deal with a potentially lethal environment. Los Angeles’s 
municipal apparatus may sprawl like the metropolis itself, 
its culture may be as diffuse as its urban center, but the city 
acquires civic coherence and energy when it is compelled 
to cope with the environmental results of its unique form 
of urban blight. This board has enormous powers. Its three-stage 
“smog alert” system stipulates that it can bring all 
traffic, industrial activity, and even power generation to a 
virtual halt. Presumably, if the final alert — a “general 
emergency” — failed to cope with a pollution crisis, 
Angelinos might use their motor vehicles to flee to the 
mountains or else, as one anonymous *Time* magazine writer 
acidly suggested, a squadron of planes could “sweep over 
the city and dust it with Miltown.”

In a metropolis of such enormous dimensions as Los Angeles, 
it would be preposterous to speak of a meaningful 
municipal government. More appropriately, one might 
describe the administrative apparatus of the city as an 
impersonal state power, as removed in many respects from civic 
immediacy as the national government thousands of miles 
away. Little exists to bridge the chasm between the 
average citizen, pursuing his private interests, and a massive 
governing bureaucracy Following its own law of life. 
Hardly anyone loves this city, except perhaps those who 
profit from it, like real estate operators, politicians, and 
businessmen And even they often prefer not to live in it.
Paeans to California’s climate, mountains, forests, and 
agriculture — even to a number of California’s cities — often 
exclude Los Angeles. The metropolis is brash rather than 
vital, nervous rather than energetic, and above all, 
disastrously big — big in the sense that it has been mass 
manufactured, put together cheaply and shoddily; its human 
qualities stifled by spiritual and civic poverty.

By contrast. New York evokes a measure of civic loyalty, 
if Los Angeles Is metropolitan, New York is cosmopolitan. 
The eastern city preserves a uniquely European flavor that 
reflects its greater age, stability, and cultural heterogeneity. 
Until the rising incidence of street crimes began 
to drive people indoors after dark. New Yorkers did more 
walking — spiritually, as well physically. The city had its 
own charms; its distinctive ethnic neighborhoods, its 
varied diet of visual experiences. Central and lower Manhattan, 
in sharp contrast to downtown Las Angeles, collected 
local inhabitants as well as tourists on a cultural and 
shopping spree. Despite its waning reputation. New York is still 
the publishing, theatrical, and literary center of the United 
States, a product of Its worldly outlook, it has a multitude 
of bookstores, a large number of universities, and many 
niches that are occupied by sophisticated professionals and 
creative eccentrics. With each passing year, however, the 
cultural reputation of the city is declining; and as an urban 
entity. New York is facing the same civic, logistical, and 
structural problems that confront Los Angeles. Queens, 
the most recently colonized of New York’s bed room 
boroughs,” already reproduces some of the most repellent 
features of the more densely occupied areas of Los Angeles; 
the long, wide, featureless avenues designed 
primarily For motor car traffic, the architecturally tasteless 
high-rise apartment houses, the side streets lined by 
uniform two-story dwellings, the dull vistas that reach toward 
the distant spires of Manhattan in one direction and the 
vacuity of Jamaica Bay in the other. 

The increasing approximation of New York to Los Angeles 
occurred by stages. As recently as the Second World 
War, New York still preserved a vital relationship between 
its cultural centers in Manhattan and its outlying residential 
districts. The boroughs retained their colorful ethnic 
neighborhoods and yet these wore linked by a highly 
serviceable public transportation system to downtown areas. 
The periphery of the city, where the subways and elevated 
lines terminated, formed a green open area which clearly 
demarcated the city proper from the towns to the north 
and rural Long Island. These were the delightful picnic 
and recreation spots which attracted urban dwellers from 
all parts of the City on Weekends, a refreshing preserve of 
countryside that offered a delightful contrast to more 
densely occupied districts. Within little more than a 
decade, these lovely areas were filled in by shabbily built 
suburban developments at densities averaging seven 
houses to an acre. Here, as the developments spread Out 
still further for miles, merging with the towns around the 
city, urban heterogeneity was replaced by suburban 
homogeneity, the subway by the commuter railroads, and 
the motor car became an increasingly significant feature of 
residential life. By the mid-1950s, a mere 30,000 acres of 
unused land remained within the 319 square miles of the 
official boundaries of New York City, more than half of 
which were located in Staten Island, 

The sixties opened another stage; the region beyond the 
city’s suburban fringe was occupied less densely. A more 
expensive kind of home appeared on Land zoned in Lots of 
a half acre or more. This development, which is still going 
on s has produced an entirely new social geography; a culture
based on the automobile, the suburban shopping center, 
and a high-income population that depends upon the 
city economically but is completely severed from it culturally. 
Here, twenty or thirty miles away From Times Square, 
“is evolving a type of urban area without parallel in eastern 
North America: an importation From the universal sprawl 
of Los Angeles,” observes Peter Hall.

<quote>
It depends almost wholly on the automobile, for a finely 
developed railroad net, or even adequate express bus 
transportation, is no longer economic. The commuter 
bound for Manhattan must drive long distances to a 
suburban railhead; his wife needs a second car for the long 
journey to the shopping centre. The early developments 
are tending to cluster around the infrequent junctions on 
the freeways; but this will be possible only for a privileged 
few. And losing the traditional advantages of’urban life, the 
new suburbanites will not gain complete rural seclusion 
either. True, they will not usually be able to glimpse their 
neighbours’ houses through trees; but they will still live at 
ten times rural densities. This new typo of suburbia needs 
a new name, Some Americans call it “exurbia.” The 
Regional Plan Association have christened it “spread city.”[27]
</quote>

[27] Peter Hall. *The World Cities* (New York: McGraw-Hill World 
University Library, 1966), pp. 198–100. 

To the inhabitants of “spread city,” New York is an object 
of active hostility. Although they depend upon the city 
for their means of life, they are oblivious to its civic 
problems, impatient with its inconveniences, disloyal to its 
political interests, and desperately fearful of its 
encroachment on their enclaves. They arc New Yorkers in fact and 
depend upon the city for their well-being, but their hatred 
of New York is as parochial and chauvinistic as the hostility 
that the rural dweller feels toward all large cities. Divorced 
by residence from the tax base that supports the city’s 
essential services, they provide only a minimal 
contribution to its revenues. The bad conscience they — and 
suburbanites generally — feel toward the city finds a perverted 
expression in the representatives they send to the state 
legislature: reactionaries who are responsible for the most 
vindictive measures against New York. 

Yet these suburbanites and exurbanites dog the city’s 
streets with their cars; they flood its subways, adding 
enormously to the congestion of its public transportation 
system, and they place a staggering burden on its services. By 
the ten? of thousands they enter the city in automobiles, 
filling its streets and overtaxing its parking facilities; over 
150,000 arrive each day in its downtown area by 
commuter railroad, and immense numbers fill its subways at 
terminal stations or for short rides from bus and railroad 
terminals. They flow into the immense throng of more 
than 1.6 million who people the city’s office buildings, 
manufacturing places, and retail outlets south of 61<sup>st</sup> 
Street, perhaps the most compact and dense business 
district in the world. In a city whose transportation system is 
already congested and overtaxed to inhuman proportions, 
they add the critical increment that reduces it to a chronic 
crisis. 

They are strangers to this city not only because of their 
active disloyalty to its interests but, perhaps most 
significantly, because of their oblivion to its agony. The 
commuter trains, buses, and automobiles that swoop past New 
York’s proliferating ghettoes are enclaves of an alien culture 
that is in mutual war with the urban environment. To
the ghetto dweller, these conveyances are not means of 
transportation, nor are the people who occupy them mere 
strangers; they are the self-enclosed strangers as enemies, 
The archaic hatred and fear of the Outsider, of the 
non-belonger who is necessarily a foe until his friendship has 
been validated by ritual, weds up like a primordial myth 
from the urban environment that traditionally was the 
solvent of all such myths — the city that replaced kinship ties 
with civil ties, the world of parochial ignorance by the 
world of civic culture. Now there is no ritual to dissolve this 
archaic estrangement, for the stranger offers no friendship 
 — merely the ancestral odor of fear and panic when black 
faces meet white, well-nourished bodies, malnourished 
ones, even if only through the window’ panes of a train or 
motor vehicle. The distance must be maintained like the 
no-man’s-land between opposing armies. The vehicle that 
conveys the suburbanite and exurbanite into tire city is not 
a cultural enclave, but a fortress. 

Are the outsiders within the urban milieu to be blamed 
for more than the common run of insensitivities that 
permeate bourgeois society? This tragic inhuman world is 
not of their making, and their treasured privileges are 
dubious possessions. The capitalist market, by an 
inexorable logic that would colonize the entire universe 
if it could, merely graduates estrangement from the individual level 
of the buyer-seller relationship to the Civic level of the 
ghetto relationship. A true community cannot grow out of 
monads, and insofar as monadic relationships invade all 
other relationships and transform them, they merely 
reproduce themselves agglomerations of monads. The 
word “ghetto,” which increasingly defines the internal 
limits of the bourgeois city, must be given a broader meaning 
than it has today. The outward radiation of urban society 
from its civic nuclei reads like a spectrum of increasingly 
deprived or seemingly privileged ghettoes; the materially 
denied black and Puerto Rican ghettoes in the central 
parts of the city (marbled by well-policed enclaves of fearful
whites); the materially more affluent but spiritually denied, 
suburbanite fringe, united by its aversion far the city 
proper; and finally that pathetic caricature of all privilege 
in bourgeois society, the beleaguered exurbanite fringe, 
inwardly paralyzed by a suspicion of invaders from the 
central city and suburbs, Just as the bourgeois marketplace 
makes each individual a stranger to another, so the 
bourgeois city estranges these central and fringe areas from 
each other. The paradox of the bourgeois city is that it 
unites these areas internally not in the felicitous 
heterogeneity of unity in diversity that marked the 
medieval commune — a heterogeneity unified by mutual aid and 
a common municipal tradition — but rather in the suspicions, 
anxieties, and hatreds of the stranger from the 
“other” ghetto. The city, once the shelter of the stranger 
from rural parochialism, is now the primary source of estrangement. 
Ghetto boundaries comprise the unseen internal walls within the city that once, as real walls, secured 
the city and separated it from the countryside. The bourgeois city assimilates rural parochialism as a permanent 
and festering urban condition. No longer are the elements 
of the city cemented by mutual aid, a shared culture, and 
a sense of community; rather, they are cemented by a 
social dynamite that threatens to explode the urban tradition into its very antithesis. 

<br>

The integrity of the individual ego depends upon its 
ability to integrate the many different aspects of human 
life — work and play, reason and emotion, mental and 
sensuous, the private and the social — into a coherent and 
creative whole, By no means 35 this process of integration a 
strictly private and personal activity; indeed, tor most 
individuals, the possibility of integrating one’s ego depends 
enormously upon the extent to which society itself is 
integrated existentially in the course of everyday life. The clan, 
village, and medieval commune were humanly scaled and 
personally comprehensible totalities in which the individual 
satisfied all facets of life, Within these km groups and 
civic entities, one found one’s mate, reared one’s children, 
worked and played, thought and dreamed, worshipped 
and participated in-the administration of social life — alt of 
this without feeling that any one of these facets was 
divorced from or opposed to others Here, one could truly 
say that the individual microcosm reflected the social 
macrocosm; the particular, the general. Separated from the 
clan, village, or commune, the individual withered; but this 
ts not to say that the individual ego was “subordinated” to 
the collectivity. Bather, the ego was, in itself, the whole as 
it was manifested in the particular, for each individual 
embodied the unity and multifaceted nature of the life of 
the whole. In contrast to totalitarian societies that subordinate the individual to a larger social mechanism and supra individual ends, the clan, village, and commune — and 
most eminently, the polls — nourished the integrity of the 
ego by recrystallizing its many-sided social goals and possibilities as individual ones.

The bourgeois city separates these facets of life and 
delivers them, one by one, to institutions, denuding the 
ego of the rich content of life. Work is removed from the 
home and assimilated by giant organizations in offices and 
industrial factories. It loses its comprehensibility to the 
individual not only as a result of the minute division of 
labor, but owing also to the scale of commercial and industrial operations. Play becomes organized and the imaginative faculties of the individual are pre-empted by mass 
media that define the very daydreams of the ego. The 
individual Is reduced to a vicarious spectator of his own 
fancies and pleasures. Reason and intellect are brought 
under the technical sovereignty of the academy and the 
specialist. Political life is taken over by immense bureaucratic 
institutions that manipulate people as. “masses” and 
insidiously try to engineer public consent. The most 
private domains of the individual — the home, child-rearing 
functions, sexuality, and the quiet moments reserved for 
personal reflection and meditation — become the fair game 
of the agencies and instruments of mass culture which 
dictate the norms of education, parental love, physical 
beauty, personal dress, home furnishings, and the most 
intimate aspects of human interrelationships, social life, as 
embodied by the massified city, rears itself above personal 
life, reducing the individual from a microcosm of the 
whole to merely one of its parts. The particularity of the 
individual is preserved, but its many-faceted content is 
active, like a fragment of a jigsaw puzzle, the individual 
is separable from the whole — in fact, he is compelled by 
the market relationship to fend for himself — but his 
particularity and separability are meaningless unless, to use a 
revealing colloquial expression, he “fits himself into the 
picture.” The urban ego, which once celebrated its many-faceted 
nature owing to the wealth of experience provided 
by the city, emerges with the bourgeois city as the most 
impoverished ego to appear in the course of urban development. 

Almost every aspect of urban life today, particularly in 
the metropolis, fosters this ego impoverishment. Metropolitan 
space produces neither the active feeling of awe, 
which sweeping avenues in Baroque cities like Paris inspire, 
nor the domestic feeling of hominess evoked by the 
medieval quarters of towns like Nuremberg It creates a 
feeling of insignificance. The towering skyscrapers of New 
Fork, which are Invading the downtown districts of nearly 
all American cities, diminish one’s sense of uniqueness and 
personal sovereignty. The gigantism of the structures 
dwarfs the souse of individuality in those who walk in their 
shadows and the less fortunate ones who occupy their cubicles. 
It matters little whether this effect is calculated or not; 
the important point is that it is not accidental. 

It is no longer a new concept that urban space can be 
hierarchical or egalitarian; esthetic qualities aside, 
a revealing history of architecture and city planning can be written 
within the framework of this perspective. Often, in the old 
cities of Europe, the convergence of wide processional 
avenues on bulky palaces in the Baroque districts contrasts 
sharply with, the narrow winding streets in the medieval 
quarters, lined with small dwellings and shops; the first is 
scaled to overpower and awe. the second imparts a sense 
of warmth, intimacy, and community. The eye tells us at 
a glance that urban space has been organised to express 
two different political and civic principles. Rut such a 
perspective alone does not suffice lo explain the full psychic 
impact of the unique structural monumentalise that is 
pervading the metropolis. Obviously, structural 
monumental ism is not new to the city — or, as the great 
megalithic ensembles of archaic society reveal, to the countryside. 
But the monumentalism of the precapitalist city 
differed in certain fundamental respects from the 
monumentalism of the metropolis. In the ancient cities of the 
Near East and Asia — and later in Rome and the Baroque 
capitals of European absolute monarchs — the size of a 
public structure was a function of power. Urban apace was 
undisguisedly hierarchical: it monumentalized authority 
and inspired awe of the dominant social classes. This 
power, however, was rarely abstract power. Deified 
Pharaoh and emperor, or temporal ruler and monarch — power 
was the attribute of a living personage, of a human being, 
whose authority was comprehensible, whose wisdom and 
fallibility could be weighed and tested, and, when 
necessary, whose status could be altered, 

The organic nature of this power found expression in the 
organic dimension that was added to public structures,
however geometric their overall design. Ornamentation — 
ids forms borrowed from the natural world or the human 
body — remained an inseparable feature of the structure. 
Indeed, if authority did not transfix rulership in commonly 
recognizable forms, it was meaningless to the beholder. 
For most precapitalist communities, abstract power had 
yet to be created — even *mana*, the archaic version of 
abstract power, exists only insofar as it manifests itself in the 
world of everyday beings and objects. Only among the 
ancient Jews, whose nameless god portends the abstract 
nature of social power, do we find stringent injunctions 
against graven images, although not against ornamentation. 

Viewed against this historic tableau, the modern metropolis 
constitutes a sharp rupture with traditional expressions 
of authority and urban space. It retains hierarchical 
space by virtue of its structural gigantism — but hierarchical 
space of a very special kind. Power is utterly abstracted 
by transferring it from persons to institutions, from definable 
individuals to faceless bureaucracies. Although power 
 — and powerlessness — are felt like a twitching nerve in 
every sphere of life, the locus of these feedings and forces 
becomes diffuse, To an increasing extent, the urban 
dweller can no longer clearly identify the source of his 
problems and misfortunes; perhaps more significantly, he 
can find no one against whom he can assert his own power 
and thereby retain a sense of control over the forces that 
seem to guide his destiny. The personified powers that 
once administered society evaporate from the social terrain. 
They are replaced by “the system,” the vague anonymous 
apparatus that lacks definite boundaries and forms. 

The immense canyons of skyscrapers that envelop the 
urban dweller in the large cities of the world both reflect 
and foster the anonymity of metropolitan, society. The 
soaring structures are no longer named after individuals; they 
normally bear the name of the bureaucratic corporations 
that erected them. They are the featureless megaliths of an 
institutionalized society — immense, ornamentless,
geometric slabs that offer no grip on which the imagination 
can fasten. Hermetically sealed from weather and climate, 
artificially illuminated throughout the day. odorless, 
sanitized. and self-contained to a point where many of these 
structures are linked to each other by a labyrinth of 
underground passageways, their most demonic effect is the sense 
of powerlessness they inculcate in those who live and work 
in their midst, If history tells us that the divine city once 
competed with the earthly city for ascendency over the 
human spirit, today it can be reasonably said that both have 
been pre-empted by the institutionalized and depersonalized city; for the metropolis is no work of man or god, but 
rather of the faceless bureaucracies that have acquired 
control over society and denature the human spirit.

The sense of powerlessness that the soaring structural 
slabs impart to the modern urbanite is deepened by the 
anonymous crowds in which he is immersed. The bodies 
that touch each other in the subways, in the elevators of 
the great buildings, and in the streets are surrounded by a 
psychic field of indifference. Herded together, they exude 
an active force of mutual unconcern, indeed, of latent
 hostility, and reinforce rather than allay the ubiquitous lack of 
human solidarity. To break this field of indifference is 
regarded as an eccentricity at host and a hostile act at worst, 
Paradoxically, each individual recognizes the other’s personal 
sovereignty by acts of nonrecognition. Any desire to 
communicate is muted by the unspoken understanding — 
a psychic equivalent of the “social contract” — that the 
urbanites personality can only retain its integrity in a mass 
society by a sullen inwardness, by a dumb impregnability 
to contact with the mass. The segmented roles that 
bureaucratization imposes on the ego are resisted by the myth 
that a blase indifference to the world at large is a mode of 
withdrawal from a homogenized society;the anomie that 
pervades the crowd can only be exorcised by clinging to 
one’s sense of privacy and by tending to one’s own affairs. 

But this unarticulated stance of exclusivity, social withdrawal, 
and isolation actually deepens massification and 
reinforces the sovereignty of suprasocial forces over 
society, of supraindividua! forces over the individual. As Max 
Horkheimer observes, true individuality 

<quote>
is impaired when each man decides to shift for himself. As 
the ordinary man withdraws from participation in political 
affairs, society lends to revert to the law of the jungle, 
which crushes all vestiges of individuality. The absolutely 
isolated individual has always been an illusion. The most 
esteemed personal qualities, such as independence, will to 
freedom, sympathy, and the sense of justice, are social as 
well as individual virtues. The fully developed individual 
is the consummation of a fully developed society. The 
emancipation of the individual is not an emancipation 
from society, hut the deliverance of society from atomization, 
an atomization that may roach its peak in periods of 
collectivization and mass culture.[28]
</quote>

[28] Max Horkheimer, *The Eclipse of Reason* (New York; Oxford 
University Press, 1947), p. 135. 

In retiring from arenas and facets of life that were once 
constitutive factors in the formation of individuality, the 
ego merely enlarges the space for the very forces that 
mutilate the ego itself. The individual who withdraws into 
himself and his private concerns, who fortifies himself with 
social neutrality and civic indifference, all the more delivers
 his privacy to the invasive social forces from which he 
tries to escape, Once this process goes far enough, it is not 
he who decides his destiny, but an increasingly bureaucratic 
and authoritarian apparatus whose interests are 
inimical to his own. 

Perhaps in no area of life is this regressive process more 
pathetically revealed than in that ultimate refuge for 
privacy and intimacy — the home. The high-rise apartment 
building, by virtue of its very structure, forms the residential 
counterpart of the office skyscraper. Here, private life 
is consciously massified and publicly administered. The 
need to compact thousands of people into minimal acreage 
without paying the toll in disease and overt misery 
demanded by the slum yields its own psychic toll in physical 
gigantism and bureaucratic manipulation. Structural 
monumentalism, in the form of residential skyscrapers and 
shopping complexes, with their odious homogeneity and 
hermetic environments, invades the neighborhood and destroys 
it. Aside from their featureless gigantism, these residential 
areas allow for no spontaneous sedation and novel 
life style?. In a housing development whose beehive apartment 
dwellers number in the thousands and whose tile-lined corridors 
divide into immense wings, neighborliness 
is often exhausted by a nod of the head. The standardization 
of the dwellings foster? a standardization of private life 
that subverts the physical and personal heterogeneity so 
vital to the give-and-take of meaningful communication. 
One can only put a limited amount of one’s authentic 
personality into these strictly functional apartment cubicles — 
and quite often, very little of that personality will be 
tolerated by the bureaucracies which administer the 
structures. That the architecture of these developments is 
featureless the corridors of the buildings institutional, and the 
apartments themselves nothing more tb.an a suite of offices 
is not accidental; the developments are bureaucratic 
institutions For self-reproduction and self-main tenancy just as 
the office skyscrapers are bureaucratic institutions for 
commerce and administration. 

The standardization of private life in these high-rise 
developments may reach appalling proportions. The 
immensely long queues before supermarket cash registers as 
the dinner hour approaches remind, the observer that 
everyone shops and eats very much the same thing at the 
same time. A walk through the corridors of a high-rise 
building is revealing. From door to door the rattle of dishes 
interrupts the din of similar television programs; the noises 
reveal a turgid uniformity of life rhythms arid personal 
interrelationships. The entire structure is simply one 
immense apartment, almost needlessly divided by thinly 
partitioned walls. At an administratively ordained hour, the 
knob of the television set is turned off — and so is this way 
of life. An eerie silence prevails, occasionally broken by a 
domestic quarrel or the sounds of a displaced eccentric 
whose muted record player or musical instrument reminds 
one that the human spirit still flickers in the darkness of a 
mass society.

Suburbia is no different, merely more affluent. In the 
costlier private dwellings that fringe the city proper, 
everyday life remains as standardized — and hence as socialized
 — as the more directly administered and regulated life 
of the superblock, but now it can be shared with a dog, a 
car, a lawn, Or perhaps a flower bed, Nevertheless the 
retreat from the social totality is as illusory in the suburbs as 
it is in the less privileged superblock districts of the city 
proper. For everything that the individual surrenders to 
the society at large is turned into a lever for opening 
another monadic window to the invasion of that society, 
Through the medium of the culture industry, the social 
totality assimilates even the amusement of the individual 
to the work process from which he is seeking a refuge. 
Mechanization exercises “such power over a man’s leisure 
and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture 
of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably 
after-images of the work process itself,” observe Horkheimer 
and Theodor Adorno. 

<quote>
The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what 
sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations. 
What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office 
can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s 
leisure time. All amusement suffers from this incurable 
malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to 
remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore 
moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association. 
No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: 
the product prescribes every reaction; not by its 
natural Structure (which collapses under reflection), but by 
signals, [29]
</quote>

[29] Max Horkeimer and Theodor Adorno, *The Dialectic of Enlightenment* 
(New York: Herder and Hereder, 1972), p. 137. 

Yet, after all has been said about the privatization of 
social life, it is hot a given that the urban dweller desires 
the alternative of withdrawal from civic affair; he is 
scarcely given more than the semblance of a choice. Rarely 
is lie permitted to participate in the decisions that affect 
where he will live, the kind of dwelling he will occupy, the 
taxes he will pay, and the destiny of the overall urban 
environment In the last analysis, these decisions are made 
by institutions over which he exorcises little or no control. 
At most he is permitted to choose between alternatives 
that these institutions present, a sly procedure which 
provides the form of autonomy and popular control, but 
makes a mockery of its content. Accordingly, his civic bah 
ties are defined by initiatives from above; whether he will 
resist a proposed highway that threatens to divide 
his neighborhood and pollute it with gasoline exhausts and 
noise, a proposed unclear power plant, a proposed 
redevelopment scheme that will replace old neighborhood 
dwellings by monster high-rise superblocks, and so forth. It is not 
he who exercises these initiatives; rather, they come from 
agencies which he never constituted, business interests 
which have no roots in his community, and political figures 
who are unresponsive to his needs. 

The past century bears witness to a steady erosion of the 
urban dweller’s participation in the social decisionmaking 
process, American Federalist mythology notwithstanding, 
popular control over municipal policy is in rapid decay. 
And the larger the municipality — the more incomprehensible 
its dimensions and the more “complex” Us problems 
 — the more complete this decomposition. Almost every 
civic problem is resolved not by action that goes to its social 
roots, but by legislation that further restricts the rights of 
the citizen as an autonomous being and enhances the 
power of supraindividual agencies. Crime is dealt with by 
conferring stronger powers on the police; transportation 
difficulties, by vesting more control in non-elected bureaucracies 
and commissions; neighborhood problems, by 
strengthening the authority of city planning agencies; 
urban administrative problems, by creating city managers 
who arc beyond the reach of public Influence or by extending 
the executive powers of the mayors, Instead of decentralizing 
municipal power by rescaling it to neighborhood 
dimensions so that civic problems can become more comprehensible 
to the urban dweller and open new avenues to 
his participation, the trend is overwhelmingly in the very 
opposite direction. Adjacent cities are merged or clustered 
together into regions that reduce the urban dweller to the 
totally passive object of super-agencies, agencies which 
orchestrate the drama of civic life on an epic scale.

Although the urban dweller may be permitted to voice 
his opinions at public hearings and, less directly, in the 
electoral process, experience eventually teaches him that 
decisions winch intimately affect his life are made behind 
his back, with little regard to his interests. Gradually, he 
succumbs to the reality principle of municipal life. Inured 
to deceit, corruption, fragmentation, and powerlessness, 
he sinks into cynical indifference. This state of mind has a 
quixotically active dimension: the modern urban dweller 
responds to the wanton disregard of his own interests by 
disregarding the interests of the powers that rule his life. 
Almost unconsciously, he takes revenge on these powers 
by ignoring their admonitions and regulations. The 
massive growth of misdemeanors in all the great cities of the 
world — from the wholesale nonpayment of traffic tickets 
and littering of streets to vandalism against all forms of 
“public property” — is the. product not of popular indifference, 
but of popular hostility. Swelling this tide of petty 
crimes is the enormous increase, of major crimes — burglaries, 
muggings, rapes, and murders — that reduce entire districts 
of the city to urban jungles. 

One must go back to the draft riots in New York a century 
ago or the Gordon riots in London two centuries ago 
to find periods that match the erosion of urban morale 
today. The rot within the cities is now so palpable that, 
however much attempts are made to conceal it with cosmetic 
schemes for urban revitalisation, the stench of decay 
rises from beneath the slick drawings and the blueprints to 
fill the nostrils. An urban totality that has lost all meaning 
to the great majority who dwell in it is already spiritually 
dead. The ordinary urbanite, to be sure, can try to relate 
to his job, his home and Family, and his immediate associates 
and friends; but when the overall city environment 
that forms the framework of these interrelationships is 
totally meaningless to him — indeed, the object of his active 
hostility — then its civic metabolism has come to a virtual 
halt. From a consciously thriving entity, the city passes into 
a comatose stater it may technically exhibit all the overt 
functions of life under the ministrations of its 
super-agencies and executive bodies, but for all practical purposes it 
is in a terminal condition. 

<br>

That modern urban entities can continue to grow despite 
their spiritual and physical decay is evidence of the 
unique pathology of the bourgeois city; the breakdown of 
the self-constitutive restraints that traditionally gave the 
city its definability and cultural vitality. Mumford’s paradoxical 
description of the metropolis as the “anti-city” is 
unerring; limitless expansion is itself a limit, a 
self-devouring process in which content is surrendered to form and 
reality to appearance. Accordingly, oven as the urban 
sprawl continues, it deurbanizes the urban dweller by 
restoring in him all the parochial qualities of the rural 
dweller without the compensations of a community life; 
even as urban densities increase — particularly in the 
bourgeois city’s historic Locus, the commercial and 
manufacturing district — they diminish the cultural effects of 
contiguity by substituting atomization for communication, 
The colonization of space by modern urban entities, far 
from producing the heterogeneity that made the 
traditional city a feast of visual and cultural stimuli yields a 
devastating homogeneity and standardization that impoverishes 
the human spirit, Modern urban entities are no 
longer sources of individuation; they arc the arenas 
*par excellence* of psychic and physical massification — the 
aggregation of the individual into a herd. This massification 
isolates rather than relates; it produces no “common mind”
in Gustav LeBon’s sense, but mindlessness and apathy. The 
bourgeois city, if city it can still be called, is a place where 
one finds not human contiguity and association, but 
anonymity and isolation. The limits of the bourgeois city 
can be summed up in tire fact that the more there is of 
urbanism, the less there is of urbanity. 

Here, the factory, as both source and model of the 
bourgeois city, acquires a multifaceted meaning. As the 
embodiment of capital accumulation, of production for the 
sake of production, it becomes the genie that effectuates 
unlimited economic growth as well as providing the main 
components of unlimited urban growth. To the bourgeois 
mind, moreover, there is a sense in which it forms the 
structural model for society as a whole. In the United 
States, perhaps more than elsewhere in the world, the 
national division of labor tends to pattern itself on the factory 
division of labor, not only conceptually but also as 
economic reality. To capital, in fact, the entire continent is 
nothing but a huge Industrial enterprise — its regions 
departmentalized according to resources and favorable 
locales for commercial and manufacturing operations. This 
mentality is betrayed in almost every speech at business 
gatherings. Ecological considerations are given only token 
acknowledgments soil. Forests, minerals, and waterways 
are merely “natural resources” whose exploitation 
requires no justification except when an ideological veneer 
of “environmental concern” is required to allay the 
feelings of an aroused public. 

This factory mentality finds its most telling expression in 
the man-made world of the city. Every esthetic urban 
pattern inherited from the past tends to be sacrificed to the 
grid system (in modern times, the factory pattern *par excellence*), 
which facilitates the most efficient transportation 
of good? and people. Streams are obliterated, variations in 
the landscape effaced without the least sensitivity to natural 
beauty, magnificent stands of trees removed, even treasured 
architectural and historical monuments demolished, 
and, wherever possible, the terrain is leveled to resemble 
a factory floor, The angular and curved streets of the 
medieval commune, which at every turn delighted the eye with 
a new and unexpected scenic tableau, are replaced by 
straight monotonous vistas of the same featureless 
buildings and shops. Lovely squares inherited from the past are 
reduced to nodal points for traffic, and highways are 
wantonly carved into vital neighborhoods, dividing and Anally 
subverting them. The bourgeois city, more than any other 
in history, purges the past and replaces its redemption, an 
essential notion in Hegel’s concept of freedom, with an 
eternality that consists in a mindless contemporaneity. 
History, as a visible fact in the monuments it leaves behind, 
may be retained, but only as an archeological curiosity; 
capitalism is eternal only in its capacity to accelerate the 
production and circulation of commodities. To the 
ancients, the razing of a captured city was the token of the 
enemy’s total extinction; for as long as the city stood, the 
enemy was still unconquered. Even after its capture, the 
city provided him with historical visibility. To the modern 
bourgeois, who demolishes his own city daily in a restless 
frenzy of construction and destruction, all that deserves 
eternality is the swelling flow of transient commodities. 
The past is a reminder that eternality his a qualitative 
dimension that is alien to the production of evanescent 
exchange values. 

Like every factory, the bourgeois city not only devours 
men but its own raw material — land. In the United States, 
this occurs at the rate of some three thousand acres a day. 
Since the end of the Second World War, more than thirty 
million acres have been buried under concrete and steel, 
much of it agriculturally productive land. To feed the 
immense populations that are absorbed by the cities, 
agriculture too must be industrialized, that is, reduced to a 
factory operation. This is achieved by spraying crops with harmful 
chemicals, saturating the soil with inorganic fertilizers, 
compacting it with huge harvesting equipment, and levelling 
the terrain in the countryside. Viewed in terms of 
population and land use, appalling dislocations develop 
between town and country. The majority of Americans 
collect along the highly urbanized seaboard areas of the continent 
and in the formless urban belts of the midwest, while 
rural communities languish and die. One in three rural 
counties shows a loss of population, but the cities continue 
to grow inexorably and blight the last semi-rural refuges 
from urban congestion, Roughly a quarter to a third of the 
American population now resides in the coastal belt 
between southern New Hampshire and northern Virginia, 
the urban-suburban region which Jean Gottmann has aptly 
named “megalopolis.” In this area, between thirty and 
forty million people occupy only ten thousand square 
miles, or three to four thousand people to a square mile of 
urban and suburban land. The densities soar as one 
approaches the major urban areas until they reach an average 
of eighty thousand people per square mile in Manhattan 
and substantially more in the older slum areas of the 
borough.

The ecological burden the bourgeois city places on 
the natural environment is staggering. The city is not 
only a victim of air and water pollution, but a grave 
pollutant in its own right. Its demand for water upsets the 
hydrologic cycle of the entire region surrounding it, and 
the solid wastes it produces are growing beyond rational 
control. New York alone generates 30,000 tons of 
garbage daily, aside from the sewage effluent that flows 
into its rivers and bays. In the meantime the bourgeois 
city continues to grow. Daily, it spreads over the court,
try side like a rampant cancer and destroys waterways 
and masses of land whoso preservation may well 
provide the indispensable agricultural margin of survival 
for humanity in the ages that lie ahead. The thought 
that there is no limit to this urban growth reminds us,
in fact, that the natural world raises a decisive ecological 
limit of its own — but one, perhaps, that may not be 
felt until the damage has been irreparable and the
recovery of a balanced ecology irreversible. 

** 4. Community and City Planning 

Can the bourgeois city be rescued from itself? Or, to ask 
a more basic question, can the high traditions of urbanism 
be instilled in the modern metropolis? In the United States, 
where science acquires the aura that the archaic world 
once reserved for magic, the answer tends to be biased 
toward technical expertise. The problems of the modern 
city can (and presumably will) be resolved by those who 
have the greatest urban “know-how” — the city planners. 
Not that these specialists are beloved by people, 
particularly those in the older urban areas whose neighborhoods 
are being savagely revitalised. Hut the prestige of 
American know-how, of professional technique., mystifies the 
minds of its victims even as it disillusions them in practice. 
As to the widening gap between ideal and real, the city 
plan and its grotesque actuality, this is comfortably 
explained as the work of the self-seeking, the greedy, and the 
indifferent. These villainous traits are bestowed not only 
on land speculators, construction barons, government 
bureaucrats, landlords, and corporate interests, who 
eminently possess them, but rather flippantly, on the general 
public, People, we are told, don’t care enough about their 
urban environment to do anything for it. An abstract “we” 
is distilled From the medley of conflicting social interests, 
a target of insidious propaganda that demands concern, 
but denies the power of action to those who are most 
victimized — the ordinary urban dweller who must endure the 
metropolis not only as a place of work but also as a way of 
life. 

In urbanism the counterpart of this abstract “we” is the 
abstract design: the architectural sketch that will resolve 
the gravest urban problems with the most sophisticated 
know-how. Frank Fisher observes:

<quote>
One question about city planning must have come to the 
mind of anyone who has fingered the magnificent volumes 
in which the proposals of planners are generally presented. 
Why do those green spaces, those carefully placed 
skyscrapers, those pleasant residential districts, and equally 
pleasant factory and working areas, still remain dreams for 
the most part? Why are our cities hardly any less ugly and 
unpleasant than they were the at the height of the 
nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution? [30]
</quote>

Fisher’s reply, as we shall see, is more reasonable than 
most, but the question itself is commonplace and it 
normally contains loaded presuppositions. The most 
important of these is that a rational city is primarily a product of 
good designing. Will “green spaces,” “pleasant residential 
districts,” “equally pleasant factory and working areas” — 
not to mention “carefully placed skyscrapers’ — in 
themselves produce human, rational, or even viable cities? 

[30] “Frank Fisher, “Where City Planning Stands Today,” 
*Commentary* (January 1954), p. 75. 

As a distinctive discipline, city planning arose in the
nineteenth century net only because the great cities of the 
world had deteriorated appallingly, but because planning 
and more precisely design had become mystically reified. 
The central notion that the city was essentially a man-made 
arrangement of space imputed to the Organization of 
space problems that basically inhere in society. This 
cunning operational approach begs the very questions it 
proposes to resolve. The external attributes of an entity, the 
obvious fact that the entity is located in “space” and 
“time/’ arc made into its essence. The far more important 
fact that cities embody modes of social relations — that 
those relations may be hierarchical or egalitarian, based on 
domination or liberation, promote conflict or harmony, 
governed by the market or by people — are evaded by a 
perspective that focuses on socially neutral categories. 

The spatial criteria of city planning do not provide us 
with an index For judging |be viability of urban entities. 
Indeed, some of the most socially and culturally vital cities 
in history were spatially chaotic by modern standards. The 
residential quarters of classical Athens, for example, have 
been described by Mumford as a “rubble of houses... built 
of unbaked brick, with tiled roofs, or even mud and wattle.”[31] 
A maddening disorderly maze, the streets were often 
no wider than the span required For a man and a donkey. 
To find one’s way through this confusion, one, in typical 
Greek fashion, had to know the city intimately. Dicaearchus, 
in his description of Athens around the second century 
B.C., complains that the “streets are nothing but miserable 
lanes, the houses mean, with a few better ones 
among them. On his first arrival a stranger would hardly 
believe that this is the Athens of which lie lias heard sa 
much.”[32] 

[31] Lewis Mumford, *The City in History* (New York: Harcourt 
Brace Jovanovich, 1961), p. 163. 

But Athenian life was not meant to be lived indoors in 
resplendent privacy, for to do so would have vitiated the 
*polis* as a community. Life was to be spent in the *agora*, the 
large square in which citizens gathered daily to transact 
their affairs, gossip, argue politics, and sell their wares. To 
fulfill this function, the *polis* had to be scaled to human 
dimensions — in Aristotle’s words, a city that could be 
“taken in at a single view.”[33] Urban space evolved spontaneously 
out of the desire for intimate sociation, not out 
of a priori considerations of trade, religion, or a geometry 
of formal urban esthetics. Since the *agora* was the
authentic arena of Athenian life, the “street was not treated as the 
principal design element but as the minimal leftover space 
for circulation,” notes Paul Spreiregen — the *agora*, that is, 
and the Acropolis, which served as fortress and religious 
center Seen from an aerial view, the structures of the 
Acropolis lack any orderly arrangement; indeed, to later 
observers, “the component buildings were once thought to 
lack visible design relations,” Spreiregen observes. The 
Hellenic mind, however, concerned itself little with a 
design that is meant to please a cosmic suprahuman deity that 
views man’s works from the skies, or, for that matter, an 
Olympian architect who places geometric symmetry 
above the mundane experiences of everyday life, The 
Acropolis’s Structures “were conceived, built, and rebuilt 
over a long period of observation and reflection — to be 
seen by the human eye and experienced by people moving 
on foot. Their design principle was not the abstract plan: 
it was the real experience of people.” [34]

[32] Quoted by Slumlord, ibid.

[33] Aristotle, “Politica,” in *The Basic Works of Aristotle* (New York; 
Random House, 1941). p. 1284.

The medieval commune retained this spirit of spontaneous 
human design and human scale — not From any knowledge 
of the *polis*, but as a natural actualization of the social 
relations that formed the basis of urban life. One must be 
blind to urban charm and beauty to dismiss these early 
European towns as “chaotic,” although this term has been 
used repeatedly an accounts of the commune. Close to 
nature and to the land, the medieval town as a matter of 
course followed the contours of the terrain, and in serpentine 
fashion formed those twisting lanes, delightful cul-de-sacs, 
and narrow curving streets that still charm the modern 
visitor. Mumford has captured the commune’s beauty 
and visual variety with unmatched descriptive passages:

<quote>
One awoke in the medieval town to the crowing of a cock, 
the chirping of birds nesting under the eaves, or to the 
tolling of the hours in the monastery on the outskirts, 
perhaps to the chime of bells in the new bell tower in the 
market square, to announce the beginning of the working 
day, or the opening of the market.[35]
</quote> 

In walking down the streets of the medieval town, one 
finds “no static architecture,” but a dynamic heterogeneity. 

[34] Pau! D. Spreiregen, *Urban Design: The Architecture of Towns and Cities* 
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1965), p. 3.

[35] Mumford, *The City in History*, p. 297.

The masses suddenly expand and vanish, as one approaches them or draws away; a dozen paces may alter the 
relation of the foreground and background, or the lower 
and upper range of the lino of vision. The profiles of the 
buildings, with their steep gables, their sharp roof linos, 
their pinnacles, their towers, their traceries, ripple and 
how, break and solidify, rise and fall, with no less vitality 
than the structures themselves.[36]

From an esthetic viewpoint, Mumford notes: 

<quote>
a medieval town is like a medieval tapestry: the eye, 
challenged by the rich intricacy of the design, roams back and 
Forth over the entire fabric, captivated by a dower, an 
animal, a head, lingering where it pleases, retracing its 
path, taking the whole only by the assimilating of its parts, 
not commanding the design at a single glance.[37]
</quote>

This is the space of a leisurely craft society that looks not 
only to quality but to detail. The totality acquires its unity 
by an interweaving of unique particulars. We see in this 
design pattern the civic evidence of an awakening individuality 
that, aside from the Greek *polis* was the western 
world’s claim to freedom and personality — that is, until 
this claim was debased by massification and egotism. It was 
also an egalitarian space of modest houses arid shared 
responsibilities. Contrast this civic tapestry with Baroque 
hierarchy and absolutism, and the change introduced by the 
courtly cities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
becomes painfully evident. Mum ford adds perceptively:

<quote>
For the baroque eye, that medieval form is torturous and 
the effort to encompass it is tedious; for the medieval eye, 
on the other hand, the baroque form would be brutally 
direct and over-unified. There is no one “right” way to 
approach a medieval building: the finest face of the 
Chartres cathedral is the southern one; and though perhaps the 
best view of Notre Dame is from across the Seine, in the 
rear, that view, with its engirdling green was not opened 
up till the nineteenth century.[38]
</quote>

[36] Ibid., p. 277. 
[37] Ibid., p. 306. 
[38] Ibid. 

In a sense the same is true of the Acropolis, despite, its 
seemingly classical coldness. Viewed from almost any 
angle and distance, it presents the ascending planes that 
invite the eye to move step by step from each structure to 
the Parthenon.

This spontaneous artistic achievement Hows from a complete 
integration of esthetic sensibility with workaday life. 
Accordingly, it would have been difficult for the Greeks 
and medieval burghers to exclude shops and vendors from 
their public squares, to reduce these squares merely to the 
visual object of passive loiterers. One did not merely linger 
in these squares during the afterhours of work; one lived 
in them and often conducted the main business of life 
there. The people who built the *polis* and medieval 
commune were independent, civicly dedicated smallholders 
 — farmers and craftsmen — for whom esthetic sensibility 
fused with work, trade, and politics, This sensibility was not 
reserved for religion and the more abstract realms of life. 
Indeed, art itself was a craft, the “extraordinary” rendered 
ordinary. In this context, where good taste inhered in the 
social relations themselves, these relations could be trusted 
to spontaneously evolve the city as a vital civic entity and 
a work of art. 

City planning, on the other hand, is an expression of 
mistrust in the spontaneity of contemporary social relations, 
and for good reason. Bourgeois society divides virtually 
all spheres of life against each other; it universalizes 
competition, profit, and the primacy of exchange value 
over mutual aid, art, and utility. Esthetic sensibility, if it 
can he called that in this context, becomes a merchandisable 
device; art, even the city itself, a marketable commodity. 
The damage and dislocations that “free enterprise”
inflicted on the cities of the western world over the 
past two centuries remind us that bourgeois social relations, 
if left unchecked, would ravage beyond redemption 
every esthetic treasure that the past has left to the present.
City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition 
that a burgeoning market society cannot not be 
trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or 
even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

But the critical self-consciousness of city planning did 
not go far enough. Rarely could city planning transcend 
the destructive social conditions to which it was a response. 
To the degree that it turned in upon itself as a specialized 
profession — the activity of architects, engineers, and 
sociologists — it too fell within the narrow division of labor of 
the very society it was meant to control. Not surprisingly, 
some of the most humanistic notions of urbanism come 
From amateurs who retain contact with the authentic experiences 
of people and the mundane agonies of metropolitan life. 
Furthermore, the overwhelming pragmatic 
mentality of bourgeois society muted city planning’s 
visionary outlook, one had to deal with the “facts of life” to 
get anything done, not with “utopian schemes.” To get 
anything done, in effect, meant to do one’s city planning 
within the parameters established by the social system. But 
the system is inherently irrational to begin with, so that 
city planning found itself in the impossible situation of 
trying to render rational a social organism whose very 
essence is irrationality — production for the sake of production 
and the subservience of human goals to economic 
ones. Insofar as city planning did not make bourgeois social 
relations as such the valid subject of critical analysis — a 
work that was done by the radical Utopians, the anarchists, 
and by Marx — it was rapidly assimilated (aside from “eccentric”
who fringe every discipline) into the prevailing 
social order. The hypostatization of design and technique 
is simply the shadow that planners cast on the harsh 
outlines of dehumanizing social relations — relations that 
debase not only the urban dweller but the city itself. The 
outlines, in effect, are both softened and obscured. As 
Leonardo Benevolo observes, “town-planning technique. 
Invariably lags behind the events it is supposedly controlling 
and it retains a strictly remedial character.” [39] Even 
this statement has ideological elements: the problem is not 
one of “technique” keeping up with events; city planning 
plays not a “remedial” role but an exacerbating one. 

<br>

A critical summary of the city-planning movement’s 
development lends compelling support to Benevolo’s 
verdict. Until the late Middle Ages, city planning was rarely 
centered on the city as an autonomous entity, nor could it 
be called “planning” in the modern sense of the word.
Conceptually, the pre-Hellenic ancient city was seen as a 
temple or a fortress, whatever additional Functions it 
acquired along the way or however significant they became 
at a later point. Its “planners” were priests and warriors,
not the general populace or specialists in urbanism. The 
layout of the city, when it was more than a military bastion 
situated in a defensible terrain, was defined by religious 
considerations. These considerations had an urban value in 
themselves, for they gave the city a formal unity that 
resisted the corrosive effects of trade and commercial self-interest. 

E.A. Gutkkind, drawing upon the example of precapitalist 
cities in India, gives us a glimpse of the factors that 
guided this formal unity.

[39] Leonardo Benevolo, *The Origins of Town Planning* 
(Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press, 1971), p. xi. 

<quote>
The old towns of India were limited in size. They reflected 
the ground plan of the world as devised by the Jainas, a 
religious group of North India related to the Buddhists. 
The innermost circle is occupied by the Earth, which is 
surrounded by a circular ocean. In the center rises Meru, 
the world mountain, from which issue four rivers separating 
four continents. Beyond the circular ocean is another 
circular continent with its mountain, Followed by another 
ocean and another continent. The bounding of’ the town by 
a wall, the situation of the temple or the palace in the 
center, the principle of walled-in quarters, the symbolism 
of figures as seen. For instance, in the number of gates 
(twelve gates corresponding to the twelve signs of the Zodiac), 
the symbolism of colors — all these factors were a 
direct transposition of the world concept into architecture, 
even though the cities were mostly rectangular, and only 
very occasionally, as in the case of the old town of Crikshatra 
in Burma, circular. [40] 
</quote>

[40] E.A. Gautkind, *The Twilight of Cities* 
(New York; The Free Press, 1962), p. 7. 

Significantly, early cities were not only economically 
dependent upon the land, but they often included space For 
Food cultivation within the urban perimeter. Tenochtitlan, 
for example, contained many of the famous “floating gardens” 
that the Aztecs created in Lake Texcoco by 
anchoring mud with osier reinforcements, adding trees whose 
roots fed the entire ensemble to the lake bottom. The 
Mesopotamian cities, Gutkind points out, “included large 
open spaces that were used as fields, gardens and orchards, 
contributing to the food supply of the population.” [41] Until 
the medieval towns became overcrowded toward the end 
of the Middle Ages, gardening and dairying were a normal 
part of family life. Plots were reserved for growing food 
and each family retained some pigs, chickens, and a cow or 
two which could be postured on common land. And if open 
space was in short supply, the countryside was easily 
accessible to the urban dweller. “Even ancient Rome, with its 
million inhabitants” observe Lynch and Rodwin, “was in 
visible relation to its surrounding countryside. One could 
easily walk from one district to another or From the central 
to the rural area.” [42] 

[41] Ibid., p. 5. 

The striking feature of precapitalist urban design is that 
it is conditioned by extraurban factors. Limited by a 
metaphysical or human focus, it subserves trade and material 
production to ends other than themselves. In the Asian 
cities, this focus may be the gods, a religious cosmology, or 
the deified monarch and state bureaucracy; in the *polis* the 
Focus shifts strikingly to the human community and finds 
expression in the centrality that is given to the *agora*; and 
in the medieval town the urban focus is directed toward 
the home, despite the growing Importance of the marketplace. 
Until late medieval times, not only is urban development 
physically and socially limited by the land, but its 
design criteria are guided by religious, political, or 
distinctly human considerations. One may find these criteria 
oppressively monumental owing to the supremacy they 
give to political and ecclesiastical authority; but rarely are 
the precapitalist cities ugly in the notable absence of 
esthetic values. However oppressive the monumentality of 
such urban environments may be, they clearly engaged 
the emotions of the urban dweller — in the *polis* and in the 
free medieval town. Ids direct civic participation as well — 
and imposed distinct esthetic limits on the rampant 
egotism that was later to be generated by the bourgeois 
marketplace. 

[42] Kevin Lynch and Lloyd Rodwin, “A World of Cities,” in 
*The Future Metropolis*, ed. Lloyd Rodwin (New York: 
George Braziller 1961) p. 9. 

Planning of sorts surety existed, initially, as we have 
noted, by priests and warriors; later, by architects and 
engineers, But in the ease of the latter, we encounter — no less 
than among the priests — a strong emphasis on religious or 
metaphysical considerations which Alexander Tzonis 
rather unfelicitously describes as “irrational planning” as 
distinguished from modern “rationalist” urban design. Yet, 
in all fairness, it could be said that the “planner” of the 
precapitalist city followed a rationality of his own. His goals 
were defined not merely by functional considerations, but 
by canons of balance, harmony, and beauty derived from 
cosmological or philosophical speculations. From what little
we know’ of Hippodamus, perhaps the earliest professional 
“city planner” of antiquity, to whom Aristotle 
erroneously imputed the discovery of the rectilinear gridiron 
layout, he strikes us as more of a Pythagorean-type mystic 
than the functionalist designer we encounter so commonly 
in our own time. Hippodamus was obsessed, with the 
coherence provided by triads. The land is divided as Aristotle 
tells us 

<quote>
into three parts, one sacred, one public, the third private: 
the first was set apart to maintain the customary worship 
of the gods, the second was to support the warriors, the 
third was the property of the husbandmen.[43]
</quote>

[43] Aristotle, *Politico*, p. 1161. 

Apart from the practically-minded Romans, this order of 
thinking guides city planning well into the Renaissance.
 
Increasingly, this thinking centered on specific 
structures and districts, rather than on the city as a whole, 
reflecting the particularizing process and individuation that 
marked the transition to the modern era, But religious and 
cosmological canons of architecture temper this development 
block thee reduction of the city to a mere arena 
for trade and commodity production. As Tzonis observes: 

<quote>
Many Renaissance and Medieval architects shared the 
belief that churches and other buildings of specialized 
functions should he designed according to rules dictated by a 
“divine model.” ... Both periods required certain 
buildings to be formed according to absolute rules created and 
determined by God. As God was considered in Medieval 
times the Architect of the Universe, *“elegans architectus,”* 
whose rules man as designer had to obey, so in the Renaissance 
the architect was valued “like a demigod *(‘come semidei’)* 
when he complied with God’s creations.” Accordingly, 
architectural rules “were expected to establish 
the link between the design product audits divine model”
Therefore architectural investigations were aimed toward 
accomplishing two tasks; the identification of the structure 
of the divine model, and the invention of means for implementing 
it in the architectural products. A design product 
is “true” or “harmonic” or “perfect” if it is “according to 
measure,” if it complies with the sacred prototype. [44]
</quote>

[44] Alexander Tzonis, *Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment*
(Boston: i Press, 1972), pp. 19–20. 

In a sense, this approach spontaneously guided the 
development of the city as a whole. To found a city was a 
sacred act and insofar as the city was built around the 
temple, it was initially sacred territory. Not that urbanism 
lacked secular dimensions, indeed the gradual divorce of 
the sacred from the secular (already reflected consciously 
in the pragmatic features of Hippodamus’s triad) is an 
important guide to the steady assimilation of the city to 
commercial ends. Yet even in its secular aspect, the early city 
revealed the influence of the land on the towns, of rural 
pursuits on urbanism — not only in terms of the gardens 
that craftsmen cultivated, but also in the contours and layout 
of the city. The rectilinear pattern of the gridiron city 
followed the “logic of the plow”; the circular form of 
settlement, the logic of pasturage, for the circle is “an ideal form 
for fencing in cattle” by enclosing “a maximum of land 
with a minimum of fence.” [45] Roman towns were laid out 
ceremoniously by priestly guidance. The plow that 
described the perimeter for the walls and the city’s system of 
four quarters, with major and minor streets at rectangles 
to each other, had an agrarian religions significance, The 
secularisation of these techniques and their transmutation 
into economic, military, and administrative criteria for city 
planning is a later development. This development reflects 
the increasing separation of the social from the sacred, of 
separate and growing antagonistic social interests from an 
internally coherent community life. 

In Europe, from the late Renaissance onward, the process 
of secularization quickened as an echo of the growing 
expansion, of capitalism. As wealth and social power 
became increasingly privatized, the architect’s vision shifted, 
in Tzonis’s excellent formulation, from that of “mirroring 
the secret map of the ‘Celestial City’ to that of creating the 
concrete reality of a ‘Pleasing Object.’” Lacking any guidance 

<quote>
from a superhuman formula of cosmic order, the designer 
had to search into the desires of the individual. If the 
desires of the individual recommended disorder, then 
disorder was acceptable to guide the organization of the 
design product. [46] 
</quote>

[45] Spreiregen, *Urban Design*, p. 1. 

[46] Tzonis, *Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment*, p. 49. 

In architects like Perrautt, structural design acquired an 
increasingly psychological bias, a matter of courtly taste 
and manners. A century later, in the work of Lodoli, the 
emphasis shifted to structural efficiency, which marked a 
continuation of the late Renaissance development rather 
than a break with it, Characteristically (and to the horror 
of the eighteenth-century Romans), Lodoli expressed a 
greater admiration for the sewers of Rome than the 
sacristy of St. Peter, which he regards as the worst building 
in the city, In fact, Lodoli, as Tzonis observes, 

<quote>
marks not only the beginning of the period of rationalization 
in architecture, but also the end of the period of the 
“Speculative mind,” the end of the brief period when the 
individual was thought to be emancipated from authority. 
Lodoli also marks the end of the period when theories of 
architecture considered the design of a building to be 
determined by a set of *independent* objectives, whether the 
Vitruvian triad (“Accommodation, Handsomeness and 
Lastingness”) or Perrault’s dichotomy between “Positive” 
and “Arbitrary” values.[47]
</quote>

[47] Ibid., p. 66.

Thereafter, architecture and its theoretical offspring, 
city planning, was to be dominated by structural efficiency 
and by functionalism. “Handsomeness” inhered in the 
capacity of the design product to facilitate the goals that 
society, specifically the bourgeois market economy, 
assigned to a structure or a city. We may bypass the various 
phases of architectural history since the Enlightenment, 
from the “rationalism” of the utilitarian era to that of the 
Modernists, to validate these goals. The romantic periods, 
inspired by Rousseau and Buskin, were interludes in a 
much broader development that debased ends into means, 
the speculative mind into the pragmatic, the metaphysical 
into the instrumental. To the precapitalist or metaphysical 
mind, design was the servant of cosmic or human goals; 
fundamentally, it was the means to express and reinforce 
the coherence of the community. In the archaic (Tzonis’s 
“prerationan era”) efficiency and function are not ends in 
themselves: 

<quote>
Given the insecurity, the grave danger, the intellectual
capacity and the love; of man, combined with the fact that 
the means of affecting production are poor, the means of 
conservation of products are elementary, and means of 
transporting products are very ineffectual, prerational 
man *does not* economize. He creates conditions under 
which the fluctuation of available goods do not permit 
hostility, aggression, or oppression between human beings of 
the same social group. Thus the order of the man-made 
environment is the projection of the non-oppressive social 
organization which has to be maintained at any cost.[48]
</quote>

[48] Ibid., p. 37. 

With the development of capitalist industry, particularly 
in the present century, efficiency, reduced costs, and stark 
functional utility in the interests of the marketplace 
become the all-important criteria for gauging the success of 
any enterprise, whether economic or esthetic. Modern 
architecture and city planning translate these 
instrumentalist criteria into canons of beauty and civic integrity, Le 
Corbusier’s description of the city as a “tool” and Frank 
Lloyd Wright’s view of it as “the only possible ideal 
machine” are a perfect fit, despite the expressed opposition of 
Wright to Le Corbusier’s work. Whether consciously or 
not, design is hypostatized all the more as a means of 
neglecting the social relations that vitiate its most rational 
goals, this by programming the irrationality of the society 
into the design product. Accordingly, the most well-intentioned 
designs are subverted by the very social relations 
whose ill-effects they are meant to mitigate. As garnish, 
these design products Function like a lid over a sewer. 
Tzonis’s pessimism about the Future of modernism in an 
inherently oppressive society is unerring: 

<quote>
The rationalistic acrobatics of the Modernistic Movement 
collapse. The contradictions between efficiency of 
production and expansion of the market are irreconcilable. 
Therefore, visual form assumes the force to consume as a value 
in *itself* and not for the sake of the acquisition of utilities. 
The so-called Pop Movement which is created (I am referring 
to architecture, in art the phenomenon is more complex) 
reflects neither the values of the *consumer* nor his 
style. It carries the values of consumption, consumption as 
a utility. In other words, once more it expresses the 
characteristics of the present organization of power. [49]
</quote> 

[49] Ibid., p. 91.

Or stated in bald terms: Modernism and the Pop movement 
become commodities. 

In the case of city planning, this debasement of 
community and human values to commodities assumes the 
dimensions of an immense environmental tragedy. Unlike 
architecture, which deals with a single structure or complex of 
structures, city planning tends to affect the general 
surroundings of the urban dweller. Until the late nineteenth 
century, attempts to reconstruct systematically old cities or 
lay out new ones were largely isolated projects or, at most, 
utopian visions whose actualization rarely went beyond 
experimental endeavors, L’Enfant’s plans for Washington 
and Haussmann’s remodeling of Paris stand out, for better 
or worse, as rare programs for dealing with cities as a 
whole. Most of the cities in Europe and America were 
simply left to the tender mercies of the new “free 
enterprise” system with the results we have already described. 

Generally, the first steps toward city planning consisted 
of legislation and regulations to deal with the terrible 
hygienic conditions that the Industrial Revolution had
produced during the first half of the nineteenth century. 
Increasing epidemics of cholera threatened not only the 
poorer quarters of die city but also the wealthy ones, and 
these could be brought under control only by conscientious 
efforts to improve urban Sanitation and living conditions. 
The 1840s reminded the European bourgeoisie that it had 
a restive, increasingly class-conscious proletariat on its 
hands; accordingly, the middle part of the century opened 
a period of bourgeois paternalism; toward working class 
dwellings, as witnessed by the construction of Louis Napoleon’s 
*cities ouvrieres* state-subsidized “model villages” for 
English workers, and the Krupp settlements En the Ruhr. 
These programs did not appreciably affect the established 
cities, nor did they greatly alter the urban landscape of 
Europe. As for the United States, Mel Scott not unjustly 
observes that as late as 

<quote>
that painful decade now ironically called the Gay Nineties 
there were few urban Americans who would have subscribed 
to the belief, or hope, that entire cities and metropolitan 
regions can be developed and renewed by a continuous process 
of decision-making based on long-range planning. [50]
</quote>

[50] Mel Scott, *American City Planning* 
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p 1.

Not that such plans were absent or lacked a certain 
amount of support among sectors of the English and 
French working classes, which were most victimized by 
the reckless urbanization of the early nineteenth century. 
These plans, formulated primarily by such so-called 
utopian socialists as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier,
envisioned a total restructuring of urban life along lines 
that merged town with country and industry with agriculture. 
Owen’s ideal village was spelled out in great details 
“squares of buildings” were to be erected “to accommodate 
about 1,200 persons each; and surrounded by a quantity 
of land, from 1,000 to 1,500 acres.” The village was to 
have a central building with a public kitchen, an infant 
school and lecture room, a place of worship, “lodging 
houses, chiefly For the married,” “dormitories for all the 
children exceeding two in a family, or above three years of 
age,” and so forth. The Owenite village allowed for 
gardens in which workers could cultivate their own food, and 
beyond these, “buildings for mechanical and manufacturing 
purposes.” A stern moralist, Owen provisioned for the 
instruction of the young to prevent “children from acquiring 
bad habits,” and for the population generally, a program 
of training, labor, and education “as shall remove 
them from unnecessary temptations, and closely unite 
their interest and duty.”[51] 

Fourier, by contrast, envisioned new communities that 
would remove restrictions on hedonistic behavior and, 
almost embarrassingly to his disciples, sought to harmonize 
social relations on the basis of pleasure. His famous 
"phalansteries," like the Owenite scheme, were meant to 
combine agriculture and industry, but Fourier 
emphasized cooperative living under a single roof. This roof was 
ample enough. “A Phalanx is really a miniature town,” 
observed its designer,

[51] Robert Owen, “Report to the County of Lanark,” in 
*A New View of Society and Other Writings* (London: Everyman Editions, 
1927), pp. 274–276. 

<quote>
but without open streets, exposed to all the inclemencies 
of nature; all parts of the building can be reached by a wide 
street-gallery on the first floor at the ends of this 
“street” excellently designed corridors, supported on 
pillars or not as the case may be, heated and ventilated at all 
times of the year, provide protected, warm and elegant 
communication with all parts of the building and its dependencies.[52] 
</quote>

[52] Charles Fourier, *Selections*. Londor: S. Sonnenschein & Co., 
1901, p. 138.

The emphasis in Fourier’s work is on elegance, pleasure, 
and comfort. Every detail of life is clearly specified: the 
number of inhabitants in each Phalanx (1,6201), based on 
Fourier’s notion of a “complete scale of characters”: the 
ratio of sexes; the division of profits; the layout of rooms, 
dining-halls, libraries, workshops, etc. Fourier, as a child of 
the Enlightenment, was in his own way a meticulous 
scientist, a veritable social Newton, who formulated a complete 
cosmology to replace the order of his era. Among the Utopians,
he is unequalled in his imaginative scope, in the coherence
be tried to provide to Iris schemes, and in the remarkably 
liberatory concepts he advanced in nearly all spheres 
of social and personal activity.

Such reconstructive notions began to wane in significance 
as labor unions acquired official recognition in the 
latter part of the nineteenth century and increasingly 
assimilated the working classes to the social order. Economic 
and political struggles, largely contained within the 
established framework, began to gain eminence over ideas for 
fundamental social change, despite the lip service which 
labor parties gave to the dream of a new society. Moreover,
these reconstructive notions suffered a telling theoretical 
setback with the spread of Marxism on the European continent. 
As a system of “scientific socialism.” the Marxian 
critique Scrupulously distinguished! itself from its “utopian”
antecedents. The issue of urbanism began to fall by the 
wayside. Friedrich Engels, in *The Housing Question* 
(1872) firmly devalued my attempts to formulate new 
schemes for the city and for working class housing until 
after a socialist revolution. Based on German material, 
Engels’s work made a number of incisive and relevant 
critiques of attempts to immobilize the German workers with 
stable housing sites and to reduce wages by providing them 
with gardens for cultivating food. Creditably, he links his 
views with the most vital concepts of Gwen and Fourier;
to resolve the housing problem — and, one may add, the 
urban problem as a whole — Engels argues that the big 
cities must be decentralized and the antithesis between 
town and country overcome. [53] But with the vulgarization 
of Marxism and its transformation into a powerful political 
ideology, even this tradition receded to the background. 
After the publication of Engels’s work, the problems of 
urbanism did not become a major theme in Marxian theory 
and (he notion of decentralization), even when taken up by 
Marxists, has been dismissed as a “utopian” absurdity. 

[53] Engels’s essential argument, in my view, is well worth 
repeating:
<br><br>
“The housing question can be solved only when society has been 
sufficiently transformed for a start to he made towards 
abolishing the contrast between town and country, which has been 
brought to its extreme point by present-day capitalist society. 
Far from being able to abolish this antithesis, capitalist society 
on the contrary is compelled to intensify it day by day. On the 
other hand, already the first modern utopian socialists, Owen 
and Fourier, correctly recognized this, In their model structures 
the contrast between town and country no longer exists. <br>
... To want to solve the housing question while at the same time 
desiring to maintain the modern big cities is all absurdity. The 
modern big cities, however, will be abolished only by the 
abolition of the capitalist mode of production, and when this is once 
set going there will be quite other issues than supplying each 
worker with a little house of his own.” (Friedrich Engels, 
*The Housing Question* [Moscow: Progressive Publishers, 1970], p. 
49).<br><br> 
Unfortunately, many “Marxists" have yet to be reminded that 
these views were expressed by one of the “founders of scientific 
socialism” and were emphatically repealed, again, in Engels’s 
later work, *Anti-Duhring*. 

Benevolo, with considerable justification, marks the 
1848 revolution in Europe as a crossroads in the separation 
of reconstructive technical design from its roots in 
a larger popular movement for social change. Owenites, 
the Fourierists, and other utopian socialists had not 
merely confined their notions of ideal cities to paper; 
they were activists, who agitated for the practical 
realization of their views. During the first half of the 
nineteenth century, design united theory with praxis. The 
1848 revolution exploded any myth that the urban crisis 
could be resolved merely by good will, moral suasion, 
and ruling class benevolence The future of design, as 
an integral part of social analysis, depended heavily 
upon how deeply reconstructive ideals could become 
integrally wedded to the revolutionary movement of 
the period. The influence of Marxian ideology largely 
foreclosed this development. As Benevolo observes, 

<quote>
Marxist Socialism, intent on explaining the 1848 Revolution 
and its failure in strictly political terms, stressed tine 
contradictions of the earlier movement but completely 
Lost sight of the link between tendencies in politics and 
in town-planning which, even if Formulated in over-simplified 
terms, had previously been firmly maintained 
Marx’s overwhelming economic emphasis on the struggle 
between wage-tabor and capital almost completely blanketed 
any civic issues. 

From that time onward political theory almost always 
tended to disparage specialist research and experiment, 
and attempted to assimilate proposals for partial reform 
within the reform of society generally Town-planning, on 
the other hand, cut adrift from political discussion, tended 
to become increasingly a purely technical matter at the 
service of the established powers. This did not mean, however, 
that it became politically neutral!; on the contrary, it 
fell within the sphere of influence of the new conservative 
ideology which was evolving during these years, of 
Bonapartism in France, of the reforming Tory groups in 
England and of Bismarckian imperialism in Germany. [54]
</quote>

[54] Benevolo, *Origins of Town Planning*, pp. xii-xiii.

Thus, from the outset, the modern city-planning movement — 
which has its authentic inception with Ebenezer 
Howard’s “garden city” scheme of the 1890s — turned to 
design as a substitute For radical social analysis and action, 
for both of these arenas had been largely monopolized by 
Marxian socialism. As Frank Fisher observes, Howard 

<quote>
was less concerned than the socialists with the social, 
economic, or political causes of urban misery. Frankly utopian, 
he combined certain ideas of his time in a specific and 
creative conception that has guided most of the thinking 
of city planners ever since. The garden city, or the notion 
of the balanced urban environment, was his original idea. 
Instead of letting industrial cities grow planlessly and 
depopulate the countryside, he proposed to build cities 
that would combine the social and cultural facilities of the 
city with the closeness to nature of the village. The “idiocy 
of rural life” and the slumminess of city life would both be 
obviated. “Town and country,” wrote Howard, “must be 
married, and out of this union will spring a new life, a new 
hope, a new civilization.” [55] 
</quote>

[55] Fisher. “Where City Planning Stands Today” p. 76, 

Howard, in fact, had been strongly influenced by socialist 
ideas, particularly Bellamy’s Looking Backward and the 
work of Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist theoretician. 
But as a pragmatic man, Howard essentially divested 
his scheme for the “marriage” of town and country of its 
socialist and anarchist elements. Fisher’s judgment of Howard’s 
social horizon is not inaccurate, It is worth noting, 
however, that the socialists were as lacking in reconstructive 
vision as Howard was in social and economic insight. 
Even so mild a group a& the Fabian Society initially denigrated 
the garden city proposal in terms so shallow and 
pragmatic as to reveal more about the British socialist 
mentality at the turn of the century than the feasibility of 
Howard’s project. With smug satisfaction the *Fabian News* of 
December 1898 noted: 

<quote>
His plans would have been in time if they had been submitted 
to the Romans when they conquered Britain. They set 
about laying-out cities, and our forefathers have dwelt in 
them to this day. Now Mr. Howard proposes to pull them 
all down and substitute garden cities, each duly built 
according to pretty coloured plans, nicely designed with a 
ruler and compass. The author has read many learned and 
interesting writers, and the extracts be makes from their 
books are like plums in the unpalatable dough of his 
Utopian scheming. We have got to make the best of our 
existing cities, and proposals for building new ones are 
about as useful as would he arrangements for protection 
against visits from Mr. Wells’s Martians. 
</quote>

Yet, these inane comments must not deter us from 
recognizing the limits of the garden cities’ proposal. In 
Howard’s work, design is assigned the task of achieving 
sweeping goats that actually involve revolutionary changes 
in the entire economic, social, and cultural fabric of 
bourgeois society. Compared to the metropolis, Howard’s 
garden city is attractive enough: a compact urban entity of 
about thirty thousand people, scaled to human dimensions, 
and surrounded by a green belt to limit growth and 
provide open land for recreational and agricultural purposes. 
Suitable areas of the green belt are to be occupied by 
farmers (Howard limited this agricultural population to 
two thousand), the larger urban population of thirty 
thousand will engage in manufacturing, commerce, and 
services. All land is to be held in trust and leased to occupants 
on a rental basis, Howard spelled out many design and 
fiscal details, of his proposal, but he was careful to 
emphasize at the very outset of his book, *Garden Cities of Tomorrow*, 
that these were “merely suggestive, and will probably 
be much departed from,”[56]

[56] Ebenezer Howard, *Garden Cities of Tomorrow* 
(Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1963), p. 51. 

But even, the most generous modifications of Howard’s 
garden city do not alter the fact that the project is a 
structural design — and, as such, is limited in what it can offer. 
Doubtless, even a structural design, if it is good enough, has 
a value of its own, but for all practical purposes it falls 
Within the framework of the “pleasing object.” It may provide 
the basis for greater human contiguity, the structural 
instruments for community, a measure of contact with 
nature, possibly tasteful architecture, and easy access with 
places of work, shopping centers, and service enterprises.
Nevertheless, it leaves undefined the nature of human 
contiguity, community, and the relationship between the 
urban dweller and the natural world. Most important, it 
leaves undefined the nature of Work, the control of the 
means of production, the problem of distributing goods 
and services equitably, and the conflicting social interests 
that collect around these issue. Actually, Howard’s 
scheme does provide an orientation toward all of these 
problems — namely, a system of benevolent capitalism that 
presumably avoids the “extremes” of communism and 
“individualism.” Howard’s *Garden Cities of Tomorrow* is 
permeated by an underlying assumption, so typically British, 
that a compromise can be struck between an intrinsically 
irrational material reality and a moral ideology of 
high-minded conciliation. 

Yet the offices, industrial factories, and shopping centers 
that arc intended to provide the garden city with the 
means of life are themselves battlegrounds of conflicting 
social interests. Within these arenas we find the sources of 
alienated labor, of income differentials, and of disparities 
between work-time and free-time. By itself, no structural 
design can reconcile the conflicting interests and social 
differences that gather beneath the surface of the garden 
city. These interests and differences must be dealt with 
largely On their own terms — by far-reaching changes in 
social and economic relations. Which is not to say that a 
social resolution of the problems created by the bourgeois 
factory, office, and shopping center obviates the need for 
a structural design that will promote community and a 
balance between town and country; rather, that one without 
the other is a truncated solution, and hence, no solution 
at all. 

Howard’s garden city, it is worth noting, falls far short of 
utopias and historical experiences that advanced highly 
progressive criteria in dealing with problems of social management
and modes of work. In contrast to the Greek 
*polis*, which administered its affairs on the basis of a 
face-to-face democracy, Howard merely proposes a Central 
Council and a departmental structure based on elections. 
The garden city has no mechanism for recalling political 
representatives of the sort that was established by the Paris 
Commune of 1871. Unlike More’s Utopia, there is no 
proposal for rotating agricultural and industrial work. In the 
garden city, the mode of social labor is decided by the 
needs of capital. Inasmuch as Howard’s economic horizon 
is not substantially broader than that of any benevolent 
bourgeois of his day, notions of industrial self-management 
are absent from his work, Mumford’s encomiums to 
Howard’s “statesmanship” notwithstanding, *Garden Cities for Tomorrow* 
is not overly burdened by great insights into the 
social and economic problems of the day: its superficiality 
on ibis score reveals that Howard was more of a designer 
than the perceptive social analyst Mumford makes him out 
to be. 

The intrinsic limits of Howard’s garden city, indeed, of 
the thirty-odd “new towns” that have been constructed in 
England and those that are emerging in the United States,
arc that these communities do not encompass the full 
range and possibilities of human experience. Neighborliness 
is mistaken for organic social intercourse and mutual 
aid; well-manicured parks for the harmonization of 
humanity with nature; the proximity of work places for the 
development of a new meaning for work and its integration 
with play; an eclectic mix of ranch-houses, slab-like 
apartment buildings, and bachelor-type flats for 
spontaneous architectural variety; shopping-mart plazas and a vast 
expanse of lawn for the *agora*; lecture halls for cultural 
centers; hobby classes for vocational variety; benevolent 
trusts or municipal councils for self-administration. One 
can add endlessly to this list of misplaced criteria for 
community that serve to obfuscate rather than clarify the high 
attainments of the urban tradition Although people may 
earn their incomes without leaving these communities — 
and a substantial portion must travel for considerable 
distances to the central city to do so — the nature of their work 
and the income-differentials that group them into alien 
social classes are not a matter of serious community 
concern. A vast area of life is thus removed from the 
community and delivered to a socio-economic system that exists 
apart from it. Indeed, the appearance of community serves 
the ideological function of concealing the incompleteness 
of an intimate and shared social life, Key elements of the 
self are formed outside the parameters of the design — by 
forces that stem from economic competition, class 
antagonisms, social hierarchy, domination, and economic exploitation.
Although people are brought together to enjoy 
certain conveniences and pleasantries, they remain as 
truncated and culturally impoverished as they wore in the 
metropolis, with the difference that the stark reality of 
urban decay in the big cities removes any veil of 
appearances from, the incompleteness and contradictions of social 
life. 

These internal contradictions have not been faced with 
candor by either the supporters or opponents of the 
garden city concept. That the “new towns” of England, the 
United States, and other countries modeled on the garden 
city design have not awakened “the soft notes brotherliness 
and goodwill” Howard described as their essential 
goal; that they have not placed “in strong hands implements 
of peace and construction” so that implements of 
war and destruction may drop uselessly down” — all of this 
is painfully obvious fact. [57] Nor is there any promise that 
they will approximate such far-reaching goals. In the best 
of cases, the new towns differ from suburbs primarily 
because job-commuting is short and most services can be 
supplied within the community itself. In the worst of cases,
they are essentially bedroom suburbs of the metropolis and 
add enormously to its congestion during working hours. 

[57] Ibid., p. 150.


Nor has reality been any kinder to the devotees of the 
metropolis. The old cities keep growing even as the 
number of new towns multiply, each urban form slowly 
encroaching on the other and creating urban belts that 
threaten to undermine the integrity of both. Jane Jacobs’s 
spirited defense of traditional neighborhoods shares all the 
unrealities that mar Frederic J. Osborn’s defense of 
Howard’s vision. This neighborhood world is dying: the same 
forces that truncate the inhabitant of the new town ate 
delivering the small shop over to the supermarket and the 
old tenement complex to the aseptic high-rise superblock. 
Doubtless enclaves of neighborhood life will continue to 
exists but they will remain merely enclaves — in 
contemporary society the counterpart of the existing medieval and 
Renaissance towns that attract the tourist to Europe for 
visual respite from the urban monotony that is rapidly 
prevailing in most cities of the world. 

Modern city planning offers no solution to this dismal 
tendency, for it presupposes the very social factors that are 
producing the present urban blight. Even the social goals 
that Howard hoped to achieve primarily by means of 
design are giving way to an acknowledgment that the city, as 
we know it today, is here to stay — and the sooner we accept 
this fact, the better. This acquiescence to the urban status 
quo (doubtless subject to new design elements) is fatal. To 
Fisher, the failure of city planning today stems from the 
need For planners “to think more deeply about the kind of 
life for which they are planning, and understand its ideals 
and its meaning, and the variety of forms in which it may 
express itself,”[58] In a sense, modern city planning, by 
unconsciously assimilating commodity relations as social 
ideals, has lived up to Fisher’s demand with a vengeance. 
It has helped to produce designs that debase the city to a 
marketplace and raised structures that have turned it into 
she home of concentrated bureaucratic power. Here, the 
tack of consciousness becomes a form of consciousness, and 
the opportunism of technical success as a goal in itself 
degrades urban life precisely to the degree that technique 
celebrates its power to control the city’s destiny. 

But Fisher’s demand is obviously not designed to 
validate the ideals of the status quo. And insofar as he sees the 
city as a way of life, his words might well have been taken 
from Aristotle’s Politics. To the Greeks, the city was more 
than a product of designing technique or of rationally 
placed structures, These considerations were secondary to 
the vision that the city was the domain of freedom and the 
“good life,” an arena in which people formed an organic 
totality without losing the individuality so essential to 
diversity and creativity. 

[58] Fisher, “Where City Planning Stands Today,” p. 82.

Modern city planning offers us functional urban designs 
without human values and rationally organized space 
without civic content, To relieve congestion without providing 
for intimate communication — or even to open new lines of 
communication without creating the social soil for 
meaningful human contact — is a parody of the high traditions of 
urbanism. Historically, the basis for a vital urban entity 
consisted not primarily of its design elements but of the 
nuclear relations between people that produced these 
elements. Human scale was more than a design on a drawing 
board; it emerged from the intimate association provided 
by the clan, the guild, and the civic union of free, 
independent farmers and craftsmen. Knitted together at the base 
of a civic entity, people created a city that formally and 
structurally sheltered their most essential and meaningful 
social relations. If these relations were balanced and 
harmonious, so too were the design elements of the city. If, on 
the other hand, they were distorted and antagonistic, the 
design elements of the city revealed this in its monumentalism 
and extravagant growth. Hierarchical social relations 
produced hierarchical apace; egalitarian relations, 
egalitarian space. Until city planning addresses itself to the 
need for a radical critique of the prevailing society and 
draws its design elements from a revolutionary 
transformation of existing social relations, it wilt remain mere 
ideology — the servant of the very society that is producing 
the urban crisis of our time. 

<br>

The 1960s opened an entirely new era in the modern 
definition of the city, or, more precisely, of a humanistic 
community. It is a noteworthy fact that this era acquired 
little of value from the work of the professional city 
planners, who continued to sink deeper into shallow problems 
of design and technical expertise; rather, its inspiration 
came from the countercultural values and institutions 
formulated almost intuitively by young people who were 
breaking away from suburbia and the regimentation of the 
multiversity. In the communes of dropout youth and in 
activist upsurges such as People’s Park in Berkeley, far 
more than design criteria were formulated. However 
naively, new values for human sociation were posed that 
often Involved a total break with the commodity system as 
a whole. The full implications of this movement — a movement 
that has yet to find its own confidence and its way 
through the maze of mod and pop culture — have not 
received the attention they deserve from the “urbanists,” 
For the values of this culture, carried to their logical 
conclusion, pose the problem of developing entirety new 
communities in a harmonized, ecologically balanced society.

The young people of the sixties who tried to formulate 
new valuer of sociation — values that have since been 
grouped under the rubric of the “counterculture” — 
unquestionably comprised a privileged social stratum. 
They came s For the most part, from affluent, white, 
middle-class suburbs and the better universities of 
the United States, the enclaves and training grounds of the new 
American technocracy, To adduce their privileged status 
as evidence of the trifling nature of the movement itself 
and casually dismiss it, as so many writers have done, sidesteps a key question: why did privilege lead to a rejection 
of the social and material values that had produced these 
very privileges in the first place? Why didn’t these young 
people, like so many before them in previous generations, 
take up the basic values of their parents and expand the 
arena of privilege they had inherited? 

These questions reveal a basic change in the material 
premises for radical social movements in the advanced 
capitalist countries of the world By the sixties, the 
so-called First World had undergone sweeping technological 
changes — changes which opened a new social perspective 
for the era that lay ahead. Technology had advanced to a 
point where the values spawned by material scarcity, 
particularly those values fostered by the bourgeois era, no 
longer seemed morally or culturally relevant The work 
ethic, the moral authority imputed to material denial, 
parsimony, and sensual renunciation, the high social valuation 
placed On competition and “free enterprise,” the emphasis 
on a privatization and individuation based on egotism, 
seemed obsolete in the light of technological achievements 
that offered alternatives entirely contrary to the prevailing 
human condition — a lifetime free from toil and a materially 
secure social disposition oriented toward community 
and the full expression of individual human powers. The 
new alternatives opened by technological advances made 
the cherished values of the past seem not only obsolete and 
unjust but grotesque. As I have pointed out elsewhere, 
there is no parade, in the fact that the weakest link in the 
old society turned out to be that very stratum which 
enjoyed the real privilege of rejecting false privilege.[59]


[59] Murray Bookchin, *Post-Scarcitiy Anarchism* (San Francisco 
Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 25. 

Which is not to say that the technological contest of the 
“counterculture” was consciously grasped and elaborated 
into a larger perspective for society as a whole. Indeed, the 
outlook of most middle-class dropout youth and students 
remained largely intuitive and often fell prey to the 
faddism nurtured by the established society. The erratic 
features of the new movement, its feverish metabolism and its 
quixotic oscillations, can be partly explained by this lack of 
adequate consciousness. Quite often, many young people 
were victims of cheap exploitation by commercial interests. 
Large numbers of them, exultant in their newly 
discovered sense of liberation, lacked a significant awareness 
that complete freedom, is impossible in a prevailing system 
of unfreedom insofar as they aspired to rapidly to replace the 
dominant culture by their own example and by moral suasion, 
they failed. But insofar as they began to see themselves 
as the most advanced sector of a larger movement 
to revolutionize society as a whole, they succeeded in 
keeping the counterculture alive, and it lives today in 
alternating ebbs and flows as the mainstream of a historic 
enlightenment that may eventually change every aspect of 
social life.

The most striking feature of the new movement is the 
emphasis it places on personal relations as the locus of 
seemingly abstract social ideals — the attempt it makes to 
translate freedom and love into existential realities of 
everyday life. If freedom in its fullest sense is a society based 
on self-activity and self-management, a society in which 
every individual has control over her or his daily life, then 
the counterculture may be justly described as the attempt 
to produce that self, free of the values spawned by 
hierarchy and domination, that will yield liberated social forms 
of management and activity. We have already emphasized 
that this degree of freedom can be definitively achieved 
only after sweeping revolutionary changes in society; but 
young people were quite right in sensing that existential 
personal goals must be defined and striven for even today,
within the realm of unfreedom, if future revolutionary 
changes are to be sweeping enough and not bog down in 
bureaucratic modes of social management. This focus 
added ail essential psychological element to abstract social 
doctrines that were formulated by traditional radical 
theorists. Accordingly, in its most advanced and theoretically 
conscious forms, the counterculture reached directly into 
and sought to change radically the lived relationships 
between people as sexual beings and as members of families,
educational institutions, and work places. One must return 
to the Writings of the early anarchists, whose appeal was 
often limited, to recover the moral and psychological 
dimensions this approach added to socialist theories of the 
sixties, most of which had become so denuded of 
humanistic qualities that they were little more than economistic 
strategies for social change. 

This personalistic yet socially involved approach yielded 
riot only an increasingly explicit critique of doctrinaire socialist
theory, but also of design-oriented city planning. 
Much has been written about the “retreat” of dropout 
youth to rural communes. Far less known is the extent to 
which ecologically-minded countercultural youth began to 
subject city planning to a devastating review, often 
advancing alternative proposals to dehumanizing urban 
“revitalization” and “rehabilitation” projects. Generally, 
these alternatives stemmed from a perspective toward 
design that was radically different from that of conventional 
city planners. For the countercultural planners, the point 
of departure for any design was not “the pleasing object” 
or the “efficiency” with which it expedited traffic, 
communications, and economic activities. Rather, these new 
planners concerned themselves primarily with the 
relationship of design to the fostering of persona! intimacy, 
many-sided social relationships, nonhierarchical modes of 
organization, communistic living arrangements, and 
material independence from the market economy. Design, 
here, took its point of departure not from abstract concepts 
of space or a functional endeavor to improve the status 
quo, but from an explicit critique of the status quo and a 
conception of the free human relationships that were to 
replace it. The design elements of a plan followed from 
radically new social alternatives. The attempt was made to 
replace hierarchical space by “liberated space.”

Among the many similar plans to be developed tn the 
late sixties and early seventies, perhaps the most 
impressive was formulated by an ad hoc group in Berkeley from 
People’s Architecture, the local Tenants Union, and
members of the local food cooperative or “Food Conspiracy”
The plan (erroneously attributed by Theodore Roszak in 
his excellent work *Sources* to the Berkeley *Tribe*, an
“underground” newspaper) shows a remarkably high degree 
of radical social consciousness. It draws its inspiration from 
the “People's Park” episode in May 1969, when dropout 
youth, students, and later ordinary citizens of Berkeley 
fought for more than a week with police to retain a lovely 
park and playground which they had spontaneously 
Created Out of a neglected, garbage-strewn lot owned by 
the University of California. The park, eventually 
reclaimed by its university proprietors at the cost of a young 
man’s life, many severe injuries, and massive arrests, is at 
this writing a parking lot and paved soccer field. But the 
memory of the episode has waned slowly To the young 
Berkeley planners, “People’s Park was the beginning of 
the Revolutionary Ecology Movement.” And the plan, 
entitled a *Blueprint for a Communal Environment* is 
radically “countercultural.” “The revolutionary culture,”
declares the *Blueprint*, “gives us new, communal, eco-viable 
ways of organizing our lives, while people’s politics gives 
us the means to resist the System.”[60] The Blueprint is not 
only a project for reconstruction but for struggle on a wide 
social terrain against the established order. 

[60] “Blueprint for a Communal Environment” in *Sources*. ed. 
Theodore Roszak (New York: Harper Row, 1972) p. 393. 

The plan aims at more than the structural redesigning of 
an existing communityit avows and explores a new way 
of life at the most elementary level oh human intercourse. 
This new way of life is communal and economically 
divorced as much as possible from commodity relationships. 
The design gives expression to a basic goal; “Communal 
ways of organizing our lives help to cut down on 
consumption, to provide for basic human needs more efficiently, to 
resist the system, to support ourselves and overcome the 
misery of atomized living.” In this single sentence, the 
social and private are thoroughly fused, Design is assigned 
the function of articulating a new life style that stands 
opposed to the repressive organization of society.[61]

Shelter in the *Blueprint* is redesigned to “overcome the 
fragmentation of our lives ... to encourage communication 
and break down privatization.” The plan observes that 
with “women’s liberation, and a new communal morality 
the nuclear family is becoming obsolete.” Accordingly, 
floor plans are proposed which allow for larger multipurpose
rooms which promote more interaction — “such as 
communal dining rooms, meeting spaces, and work areas.”
Methods are suggested for turning roofs and exterior upper 
walls into communicating links with neighboring houses as 
well as between rooms and upper stories. [62]

[61] Ibid., p. 394. 
[62] Ibid., p. 395. 

“All land in Berkeley is treated purely as a marketable 
commodity,” observes the *Blueprint*. “Space is parcelled 
into neat consumer packages. In between rows of land 
parcels are transportation ‘corridors’ to keep people 
flowing from workplace to market.” The *Blueprint* proposes 
the dismantling of backyard and sideyard fences to open 
land as interior parks and gardens, Platform “bridgeways”
between houses are suggested to break down the strict 
division between indoor and outdoor space. The purpose 
of these suggestions is not merely to bring nature into the 
urban dweller’s horizon, but to open intimate avenues of 
communication between people. The concern of the plan 
is not merely with public plazas and parks, but the 
immediate neighborhoods where people live their daily lives. With 
magnificant insouciance, the plan tosses all considerations 
of private property to the winds by suggesting that vacant 
lots be appropriated by neighborhoods and turned into 
communal space.[63] 

[63] Ibid., pp, 399, 400.

Half the streets of Berkeley, the plan notes, could be 
easily closed off to stimulate collective transportation 
experiments and reduce traffic congestion in residential 
areas. This would “free *ten times* more land area for public 
use than we now have in park acreage. Intersections could 
become parks, gardens, plazas, with paving material 
recovered and used to make artificial hills.” The plan 
recommends that Berkeley residents should walk or bicycle to 
places whenever feasible. If motor vehicles must be used, 
they should be pooled and maintained on a communal 
basis. People should drive together to common 
destinations in order to reduce the number of vehicles. 

Community services wilt make a “quantum leap” when 
“small groups of neighbors mobilize resources and energy 
in order to cement fragmented neighborhoods back 
together and begin to take care of business (from child care 
to education) on a local level and in an integrated way,” In 
this connection, the *Blueprint* suggests that men and 
women should rotate the use of their homes for child care 
centers. First-aid skills and knowledge of more advanced
medical techniques should be mobilized on a neighborhood 
basis. Finally, wastes should be collectively recycled 
to avoid pollution and waste of resources.[64]

At its core, the plan advances a refreshingly imaginative 
program for ruralizing the city and fostering the material 
independence of its inhabitants. Communally worked 
backyard gardens could be created and food cultivated 
organically. Here, the plan enters into the specifics of 
composting, mulching, and the preparation of seedlings. A 
“People’s Market” could be established “which will 
receive the organic products of rural communes and small 
farmers, and distribute them to the neighborhood [food] 
conspiracies. Such a market place will have other uses — 
craftspeople can sell their wares there.” The plan sees the 
People’s Market as a “solid example of Creative thinking 
about communal use of space. Its structure will be 
portble. and will be built in such a way as to serve neighborhood
kids; as play equipment on non-market days.”[65]

[64] Ibid., pp. 411–412.

[65] Ibid., p. 405.

The *Blueprint* creates no illusion that this ensemble of 
reconstructive ideas will “liberate” Berkeley or other 
communities. It sees in the realization of these concepts the 
first steps toward reorienting the individual self from a 
passive acceptance of isolation, egotism, and dependence 
on bureaucratic institutions to initiatives from below that 
will recover communal contacts and face-to-face networks 
of mutual aid. Ultimately, society itself will have to be 
reorganized by the great majority who are now forced into 
hierarchical subservience to the Few. But until these 
sweeping changes are achieved, a new state of mind, 
buttressed by working community ties, must be fashioned so 
that people will be able to fuse their deeply personal 
desires with higher social ideals. Unless this fusion is 
achieved, these ideals will remain abstractions and will 
never be realized at all. 

Many of the *Blueprint*’s technical suggestions are not 
new. The notion of roof openings to link houses together 
is borrowed From Pueblo Indian villages, the urban 
gardens from medieval communes and precapitalist towns 
generally, the pedestrian streets and plazas From the 
Renaissance cities and earlier urban forms. In the contest of 
an increasingly bureaucratic society, however, the 
*Blueprint* is unique in deriving its concepts from radically new 
life styles and reinforcing them in a single ensemble with 
many details of traditional design. Doubtless, quite a few 
of the design proposals in the plan can be assimilated 
piecemeal to new construction projects without having a 
significant impact on conventional ways of life. This has been the 
fate of many radical ideas and art forms in the past. But the 
*Blueprint* is true to itself insofar as it is not merely a 
structural plan. The authentic content of its proposals is the kind 
of life in which its design elements are rooted. The premise 
of the plan, in advance of any design, is a culture counter 
to the prevailing one — a culture that emphasizes 
community rather than isolation, the sharing of resources and skills 
rather than their privatized possession and accumulation, 
independence from rather than dependence upon the 
bourgeois marketplace, loving relations and mutual aid 
rather than egotism and competition. The planners, 
whether or not they were conscious of their historic 
antecedents, were presenting their vision of urban life in 
Hellenic terms. The truly human city, to them, is a way of 
life that fosters the integration of individual and society, of 
town and country, of personal and social needs within a 
framework that retains the integrity of each. A new 
synthesis is to be achieved which makes the fulfillment of 
individual and urban needs complementary to the fulfllLmeni of 
social and ecological needs. 

<br>

The countercultural movement has since subsided from 
the highpoint it reached in the sixties The beautiful hopes 
which young people so enthusiastically advanced in dropout 
and radical student communities have been diluted by 
the harsh 3 often brutal hostility of an adult public that, 
Owing to its own conditioning and insecurities, has 
entrenched itself in the status quo and sought respite from 
any challenges to traditional values. A Neanderthal state 
power, by characterizing creativity as “permissiveness” 
and enthusiasm as “licence,” has added its own telling 
weight to the thrust against innovation and social change. 
Where the counterculture has managed to hold its own 
against overtly hostile social forces, it has had to contend 
with a political mode of dope-peddling in the form of 
sectarian Marxism and “Third World” voyeurism. Archaic 
ideologies and modes of organization assume the 
semblance of radicalism and fester like toxic germs in the 
wounds opened by public malaise and political repression. 

Yet even this ebbing phase of a much larger 
development could he valuable, perhaps even indispensable, as a 
sobering period of maturation. A new world will not be 
gained merely by strewing the pathway to the future with 
flowers. The intuitive impulses that exploded with such 
naive enthusiasm in the sixties, only to become harsh and 
dehumanizing in the pseudoradicalism that closed the 
decade, were never adequate to the long-range historic 
project of developing a wider public consciousness of the 
need for social change. By the late sixties, the counterculture 
ceased to speak to America with understanding and in 
relevant terms, Its politicization took the worst possible 
form — arrogance and a senselessly violent rhetoric. Far 
more than the flowers of the mid-sixties, the angry 
clenched fists of the late sixties were irrelevant in trying to 
reach an increasingly alarmed and uncomprehending public. 
It has finally become evident that a crude commitment 
to muscle power by self-appointed political “vanguards”
will no more effectuate radical change than an intuitive 
commitment to flower power. Only a unity of intuition 
with reason, of hopeful enthusiasm with patient wisdom, of 
emotional sensibility with a coherent consciousness can 
hope to make the counterculture an influential force, 
perhaps the paramount force, in reshaping American life and 
carrying it beyond the crests reached in the sixties. 

Certain demands raised by the counterculture movement 
are imperishable. No matter how far the movement 
itself may recede From its earlier eminence, these demands 
must be recovered and advanced if there is to be any future 
for society at all. In calling for a melding of the abstract 
ideals of social liberation with those of personal liberation, 
in seeking to form the nuclear libertarian 
communistic relationships so necessary to rear a truly 
emancipated society, in trying to subvert the influence of 
the commodity nexus on the individual self and its relationship 
with other selves, in emphasizing the need for a spontaneous 
expression of sexuality, sensuality, and a humanistic 
sensibility, in challenging hierarchy and domination in 
all its forms and manifestations, arid finally, in trying to 
synthesize new, decentralized communities based on an 
ecological outlook that unites the most advanced features 
of urban and rural life — in raising alt of these demands as 
a single ensemble, the counterculture gave a modern expression 
to a historic mainstream of human dreams and 
aspirations. And it did so not from a hopelessly visionary 
utopianism, but based on the real technological and 
material possibilities at hand in the advanced capitalist 
countries of the world. Those demands can never be fully 
submerged by political or psychic repression. They are the 
voice of self-conscious reason that, once articulated 
theoretically and reinforced by material conditions that 
render them possible, are sedimented into the collective 
unconscious of humanity. The responsibility of the counterculture, 
when it matures to the level of theoretical self-consciousness 
and self-disciplined rationality, is to help 
make this collective unconscious acutely conscious. To 
fulfill this responsibility, the conscious nuclei that crystallize 
within the undefined countercultural matrix formed in 
the sixties require patience, wisdom, and an unflagging 
awareness that they are rooted in the mainstream of history 
that leads to the future, however much their efforts to 
promote consciousness may suffer periodic setbacks. 

This project is strongly favored by the harsh fact that few 
choices are left today for the existing society. The. city has 
completed its historic evolution. Its dialectic from the village, 
temple area, fortress, or administrative center, each 
dominated by agrarian interests, to the *polis* and medieval 
commune during an era when town and country were in 
some kind of equilibrium, to the bourgeois city which 
completely dominates the countryside, now culminates in the 
emergence of the megalopolis, the absolute negation of the 
city. No longer can we speak of a clearly defined urban 
entity with an authentically collective interest or outlook 
of its own. Just as each phase or moment of the city has its 
own internal limits, the megalopolis represents the limits 
of the city as such — of *civitas* as distinguished from 
*communitat*. The political principle, an the form of tine state, 
dissolves the last vestiges of the social principle, replacing 
all community lies by bureaucratic ones, Personified space 
and the human scale disintegrate into institutional space 
and urban gigantism, hierarchically grounded in the 
impersonal domination of one human by another and the 
destruction of nature by a rapacious society motivated by 
production for the sake of production. This “anti-city,”
neither urban nor rural in any traditional sense, affords no 
arena for community and genuine socitation. At most, the 
megalopolis is a patchwork of mutually hostile enclaves or 
gbettoes, each of which is internally “united” not by a 
positive harmony of creative impulses but rather by a 
negative hostility toward the stranger on its perimeter. 
Physically, morally, and logistically, this urban cancer is in 
rapid decay. It does not function on its own terms as an 
arena for the efficient production and marketing of 
commodities. To say that this creature is breaking down is an 
understatement: the megalopolis is an active force in social 
dissociation and psychic dissolution. It is the negation of 
the city as an arena of close human proximity and palpable 
cultural tradition, and as a means of collecting creative 
human energies. 

To restore urbanity as a meaningful terrain for sociation, 
culture, and community, the megalopolis must be 
ruthlessly dissolved and replaced by new decentralized 
eco-communities, each carefully tailored to the natural 
ecosystem in which it is located. One might reasonably say that 
these ecocommunities will possess the best features of the 
*polis* and medieval commune, supported by rounded eco-technologies 
that rescale the most advanced elements of 
modern technology — including such energy sources as 
solar and wind power — to local dimensions. The equilibrium 
between town and country will be restored — not as a 
sprawling suburb that mistakes a lawn or patch of 
strategically placed trees for nature, but as an interactive 
functional ecocommunity that unites industry with agriculture, 
mental work with physical, individuality with community. 
Nature will not be reduced to a mere symbol of the natural, 
a spectatorial object to be seen from a window or during 
a stroll, it will become an integral part of all aspects of 
human experience, from work to play. Only in this Form 
can the needs of nature become integrated with the needs 
of humanity and yield an authentic ecological consciousness 
that transcends the instrumentalist “environmental” 
outlook of the social and sanitary engineer. 

Our place in the history of the city is unique. Precapitalist 
cities either stagnated within their limits or destructively 
exploded beyond them as a result of the incomplete 
technological development that perpetuated material 
scarcity. If the city was not frozen as in Asia and the Near 
East by hereditary castes and agrarian hierarchies, its unity 
was dissolved by the commodity and marketplace. Modern 
technology has now reached so advanced a level of development 
that it permits humanity to reconstruct urban life 
along lines that could foster a balanced, well-rounded, and 
harmonious community of Interests among people and between 
humanity anti nature. This ecocommunity, which 
would be more than a city, would have no limits other than 
those consciously fashioned by human creativity, reason, 
and ecological considerations. The ecocommunity, supported 
by a rational eeotechnology, would be an organic 
urban entity respiritized by a new sensibility and reinforced 
by a new security in material life — an authentic 
arena for the harmonization and fulfillment of humanity’s 
deepest and most creative impulses. 

The alternative to this development can only be the 
horrifying disintegration of urban life into a condition of 
chronic social war, personal violence, and bureaucratic 
mobilization. If the archaic hieroglyph of the city was a 
wall intersected by two roads, the symbol of the megalopolis 
is rapidly becoming the police badge superimposed by 
a gun. In this kind of city, social irrationality will take its toll 
as the absolute division of human from human until a final 
harvest is reaped in the revenge of nature on humanity. 
The limits of the megalopolis can be formulated as nothing 
less than the limits of society itself as an instrument of 
hierarchy and domination. Left to their own development, 
these underlying elements of the megalopolis spell the 
doom not only of the city as such but of human sociation. 
For in such a “world, technology, subserved to irrational 
forces, becomes the instrument not of harmony and 
security, but the systematic plundering of the human spirit 
and the natural world.