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CONTEXT
ENDURANCE, OBSOLESCENCE, AND CHANGE—A THEORETICAL FOUNDATION
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TOM VEREBES > THE CITY AS CULTURAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL EXPRESSION
This chapter charts the historical and theoretical foundation for an understanding of the city as inherently dynamic and evolutionary in nature. Globalization is understood as arising from a deep connection to the proliferation of networks. The emergence of megacities is a feature of the radically changing conditions of urban earth. What follows is a critique of the prevalent western bias in the history of urbanization, focusing on pertinent issues at stake in the urbanization of Asia. The associative logic inherent to urbanism is introduced as a fundamental shift from a mechanical paradigm to one guided by an understanding of life.
The city is everywhere. The local is now global. What happens here may affect what happens elsewhere. No one is alone. Nowhere is isolated. We will be concerned with the future of urban earth in later pages of this book. Initially, our investigation focuses on the ancients.
From the first sedentary settlements, over half the world's population now lives in cities, a process which has taken 12,000 years. What explains this rate of global urbanization? Man as a social animal? Is it our apparent need to exchange knowledge, resources, and goods? Cities are at once an expression of the cultural practices and technologies of the present. The shift from an agrarian, migratory civilization toward an increasingly sedentary one over time evolved into urban civilization, and the origins of globalization. Just as infrastructural networks and communication technologies have evolved, so have the civilizations they serve. The beginnings of globalization are located in the relation of the urban population of the planet—now in the majority—to the interface of man-made technological endeavors, and their instrumentality as infrastructure and networks.
Urbanism has its roots in the taming of nature. The first widespread territory to be altered irrevocably by mankind was the Nile delta, the irrigation canals of which spawned one of the first sedentary regions. Similarly the draining of swampland or the taming of the wild tributaries of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Mesopotamia represent the will of mankind to dominate and conquer nature on a large scale. It is not surprising that natural waterways were the first locus of urbanity, as the rise of the city was “contemporaneous with improvements in navigation,” and this newfound mobility provided the city with “command over men and resources in distant areas,” thus proving the means with which to procure and distribute goods beyond the locale.1
Cities grew. They were not designed. Before there were cities (without wishing to make any claims about when this threshold occured), villages and towns comprised a new kind of sedentary settlement, “a permanent association of families and neighbors, or birds and animals, of houses and storage pits and barns, all rooted in the ancestral soil, in which each generation formed the compost of the next.”2 Urbanization, as defined by Kingsley Davis, is “the increase in the proportion of the population that is urban as opposed to rural.”3 Lineated inscriptions of sedentary agricultural patterns are evidence of how “the plough radically changed the way the Earth's surface was utilized.”4
The Neolithic revolution, arising from greater security, the abundance of food, and higher survival rates, marked the shift from stone-age nomadic groups to sedentary agricultural societies and was, for V. Gordon Childe, the first of three revolutions. It was followed by a second, “urban” revolution, in which trade and manufacturing enabled more complex and hierarchical organization of the roots of urbanity, between 3000 and 4000 BC. Later we will investigate Childe's third revolution, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.5 A fourth revolution—the information revolution—has since taken place and has permeated contemporary urbanity.6
It is at the stage that man's evolution shifts from the transient huts of hunting and gathering societies to more permanent, sedentary societies that “the basic prerequisites are reached for the birth of urban settlements.” Prior to longer-lasting dwellings, presumed by historians to be permanent, housing had evolved, as outlined by Norbert Scheonauer, from “ephemeral or transient dwellings,” to “episodic or irregular temporary dwellings,” to “periodic or regular temporary dwellings,” to “seasonal dwellings,” and to “semi-permanent dwellings.”7
The origins of urbanity remain largely inaccessible, and few physical remains exist prior to the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. This account is less concerned with an analysis and reconstruction of the basis of former civilizations than in the reasons for their emergence, their growth, and their demise. The endurance of civilization is a misconception, evident in the history of sequential failed empires and civilizations.
The Roman Empire was a systematic city-building endeavor. It created 5,627 cities in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Aelius Aristides told the Roman Emperor in AD 144, “you have cast a net over the totality of the inhabited world.” The Romans had systematized the principles and sequences for establishing and growing a city by the Roman system, “as a manual, a repertory, a how-to book, a dictionary, an anthology of quotations—a compromise between a treaty (indeed a manifesto) and a book of procedures.”8 In his Ten Books of Architecture, Vitruvius detailed a logic of a set of performance criteria and their parameters to be balanced in the city. Environmental orientation, exposure, altitude, climate, and flora are set out as the basis for locating the city to create optimal conditions for health. Military defences, roads, and sea ports are also initial considerations in setting out the position and height of defenses, and the location and design of the buildings and spaces of the city.9 The Roman guidelines for the desirable location of a city had predictably led to “simple societies [being] found in the least desirable regions, and more complex societies claim[ing] more favourable regions.”10 Joseph Rykwert, in his narrative analysis of Rome, laments “the transition from topological and ritualistic town-making to the imposition of the geometric grid” and its effects.11 Nostalgia aside, the grid was a device for the domination of land, and a tool of globalization.12 The Harvard Project on the City studio describes the Roman System as the first pro forma for urban globalization, its systematic deployment of infrastructural, financial, and military networks across a vast territory demonstrating the operation of networks enabling vast connectivities.13 Rome propagated technology and culture through networks.
The Scottish ecologist Patrick Geddes, in his 1915 book Cities in Evolution,14 described how the specific topography of cities helped to shape them, in relation to “where food and water supplies came from [and] where the settlement was established.”15 Geddes defined the period of industrial development as “paleotechnic” followed by “neotechnic.” Mumford added another term for the era between 1000 and 1750, calling it the “eotechnic” period, which he saw as the dawn of modern technologies.16 This era maintained the balance between industry and agriculture, between nature and man. The industrial revolution was to interfere with this balance.
In the case of primordial settlements, three different path systems develop: The territorial path network makes searching for food easier, the settlement path network connects individual resting places and houses. The central point is the water source. The long-distance path network connects places of habitation and is used for interregional migrations.
Frei Otto17
Globalization did not happen suddenly nor did it occur recently, rather it has been ongoing for centuries, even millennia, beginning in earnest with the opening up of trade routes in the fifteenth century. Before large-scale and long-distance shipping created the roadmap for globalization, ancient trading routes facilitated exchange among far-distant societies, and the development of the world's infrastructures solidified land transport, canals, and railways, as well as longer distance transport by sea and air. Networks enable the flow of people, products, information, and knowledge. The building of canals and railways in industrial Europe enabled transport of resources and goods, and connected localities in a web of industrial relations.18 Shipyards later emerged for the building of large ships for the European empires, and car transport, while it did not immediately inscribe a whole new network onto industrialized regions, brought about more independent and spontaneous movement. The proliferation of air travel and high-speed railways, coupled with telephony and the internet, are collapsing time, shrinking space, and again creating possibilities for global communication to unforeseen extents.
The term “city” has become inadequate to describe twenty-first-century Asian urbanism. Patrick Geddes was one of the first urban theorists to argue for the history of cities being one of continual, but not constant, evolutionary change. Geddes had little hope for the future of the city: he mapped urbanity from the “polis” in Greece to the “metropolis” and the emergence of the “megalopolis,” to what he called the “parasitopolis” and the “patholopolis,” and through to the terminus, the “necropolis.”19 Geddes, who used the term “world cities” as early as 1924, foreshadowed the current generation of urban theorists grappling with the interconnectedness of urbanization in the twenty-first century.20 The sociologist Jean Gottmann coined the term “megalopolis,” in his book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (1961).21 “Megalopolis” refers to the condition of the city when it becomes so large it cannot be conceived of nor managed as one single city, or when multiple smaller cities grow into expansive territorial conurbations. Gottman's research focussed on the “enormous scale jump that had occurred in an urban agglomeration stretching from Boston to Washington,” which connected thirty-two million people in 1961, and fifty-six million today.22 These figures pale in comparison with the extent of urbanization in Asia in the last half-century.
Today's growing “megacities” are of interest both for their global economic influence and as “magnets for their hinterlands… as a function of their gravitational power toward major regions of the world.”23 It is the formlessness of the megacity which allows its expansiveness. The metropolis of the twenty-first-century city has no single center, nor any edges. The emergence of megacities represents “the shift of ...
