The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (26 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

PREFACE

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

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

INTRODUCTION: PLACES SACRED, SAFE, AND BUSY

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

2. Ibid., 119.

3. Ibid., 190–92.

4. Tertius Chandler and Gerald Fox,
Three Thousand Years of Urban Growth
(New York: Academic Press, 1974), 365.

5. Herodotus,
The Histories,
trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt (London: Penguin, 1954), 5.

6. Kevin Lynch,
The Image of the City
(Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press, 1960), 4.

7. Henri Pirenne,
Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1925), 55–57.

CHAPTER ONE: SACRED ORIGINS

1. A.E.J. Morris,
History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolution
(London: Longman, 1994), 1.

2. Ibid., 2–5; William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1974), 27.

3. Werner Keller,
The Bible as History
(New York: William Morrow, 1981), 3.

4. Gordon Childe,
What Happened in History
(London: Penguin, 1957), 89.

5. Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000–2000 B.C. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 56.

6. Grahame Clark,
World Prehistory: An Outline
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 85–90.

7. Childe,
op. cit.,
92–96.

8. For example, in Sir Peter Hall’s magisterial and comprehensive work,
Cities in
Civilization
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), there is virtually no sustained mention of religion in general, Islam, Christianity, or cathedrals in the making of urban history. Similarly, in Tony Hiss’s well-written
The Experience of
Place
(New York: Knopf, 1990), there is loving treatment of parks, apartment houses, office buildings, and train stations, but little of places of worship.

9. Childe,
op. cit.,
137.

10. Mason Hammond,
The City in the Ancient World
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 35; Keller,
op. cit.,
8.

11. Mircea Eliade,
The Myth of the Eternal Return,
trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 13.

12. Hammond,
op. cit.,
37–38.

13. Ibid., 28.

14.
The Epic of Gilgamesh,
trans. Andrew George (London: Penguin, 1999), 1; Keller,
op. cit.,
17.

15. Childe,
op. cit.,
102; Hammond,
op. cit.,
44.

16. Eliade,
op. cit.,
14.

17. Clark,
op. cit.,
107–9.

18. Robert W. July, A History of the African People (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 14.

19. Childe,
op. cit.,
114–18.

20. A. Bernard Knapp, The History and Culture of Ancient Western Asia and Egypt (Belmont, Calif.: Wadworth Press, 1990), 109–10.

21. Clark,
op. cit.,
109–11; Morris,
op. cit.,
11–14.

22. Hammond,
op. cit.,
73.

23. Chandler and Fox,
op. cit.,
300–301.

24. Lewis Mumford,
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its
Prospects
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961), 80.

25. Childe,
op. cit.,
129.

26. Clark,
op. cit.,
182–85.

27. Joseph Levenson and Franz Schurmann,
China: An Interpretive History, from the
Beginnings to the Fall of Han
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 19–22.

28. Morris,
op. cit.,
2.

29. Paul Wheatley,
The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the
Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City
(Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1971), 71.

30. Ibid., 175, 179.

31. G. C. Valliant, Aztecs of Mexico (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1944), 35, 44–45; Jeremy A. Sabloff,
The Cities of Ancient Mexico: Reconstructing a Lost World
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 28, 41; Jorge E. Hardoy, “Two Thousand Years of Latin American Civilization,” in
Urbanization in Latin America:
Approaches and Issues, ed. Jorge E. Hardoy (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1975), 4; Rene Million, “The Last Years of Teotihuacán Dominance,” in
The
Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 108–12; Clark,
op. cit.,
225–30; Garcilasco de la Vega,
The Incas,
trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1961), 57, 119.

32. J. Alden Mason,
The Ancient Civilizations of Peru
(London: Penguin Books, 1957), 40–48.

33. Sabloff,
op. cit.,
28; Million,
op. cit.,
108–12; Clark,
op. cit.,
225–30; de la Vega,
op.
cit.,
57, 119.

34. Sabloff,
op. cit.,
134–35, 144–45.

CHAPTER TWO: PROJECTIONS OF POWER—

THE RISE OF THE IMPERIAL CITY

1. Hammond,
op. cit.,
56–57; Knapp,
op. cit.,
156.

2. Knapp, op. cit., 85–92; H.W.F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon: A Sketch of
the Ancient Civilization of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley
(New York: Hawthorn Publishers, 1962), 61.

3. Saggs,
op. cit.,
50–53.

4. Knapp,
op. cit.,
97–100.

5. Chandler and Fox,
op. cit.,
300–301.

6. Hammond,
op. cit.,
52.

7. Saggs,
op. cit.,
72; Knapp,
op. cit.,
151.

8. Herodotus,
op. cit.,
70–71; Chandler and Fox,
op. cit.,
301.

9. Chandler and Fox,
op. cit.,
300.

10. Hammond,
op. cit.,
51–55; Knapp,
op. cit.,
224–25; Mumford,
op. cit.,
111.