The City is Me

Rosane Araujo

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781841507798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia urbana

Chapter 1

About Concept

We must think with concepts because, most of the time, we think that we think with things, but it is false. (Magno, 2005: 195)

Conceptualizing is an activity which is inherent to every task of describing, classifying and making previsions about cognoscible objects. That is undoubtedly a very general definition, liable to include any sign or semantic procedure referring to any object, concrete or abstract, particular or universal (Abbagnano, 2003).

There are as many concepts as there are cognitive situations that involve some kind of naming – mainly when facing the syntactic and semantic apparatus of a language – which abstracts, formalizes, discerns, distinguishes, separates and sometimes opposes, significations for comprehensive and explanatory purposes. Automobile, comet, G/god(s), State, man, red, sadness, Universe, entropy, square of the hypotenuse, mammals, square root of 2, pi, infinite, unicorn, speed, social class, city, territory, space, time (space-time), identity, value, desire, reason, excluded middle, renaissance – these are but a few of the countless concepts we use as basic cognitive activity of being in the world and proceeding to its description, classification, comprehension, explanation, ordering, transformation, conservation, projection, modeling or simulation.

A concept is usually indicated by an available name in a language’s lexicon. Thus, when I say “house” this word encompasses a more-or-less defined set of images and recognizable scenarios in a given list of meanings. The concept, however, is not limited to the lexicon because several names may express a similar concept just as several concepts may be expressed by the same name, or yet a new word may be created to show more clearly the idea one tries to make explicit.

From that perspective, “habitation”, “dwelling”, “residence”, “home” may all be taken as equivalents to “house”, just as the name “house” may, anthropologically and historically, mean the domestic space in traditional societies¹⁶, the oikos, understood as a social-economic unit in the Sumerian city (Bouzon, 1998: 21); or a space of morally-imposed social representation, characteristic of the Brazilian society as heritage of the colonial period and built on opposing tension in relation to the “street” (Da Matta, 2003); or even the “house” transformed into “street” through the social diversity that inhabits and transforms social urban space, relativizing the difference between public (street) and private (house) (Santos, 1985).

But the concept is not only an abstract entity identifiable by the presence of a word, be it new or rearranged.¹⁷ As an object of the thought that operates thanks to the language and to other signs, the concept possesses a mediating function that organizes the internal order of the speech, being, therefore, a fact of broader comprehensibility, subject to suffering progressive restrictions regarding its epistemic definition. A concept is not identifiable with things either, even if it maintains a relation of co-pertinence with reality. I do not trip over the concept of “house”, which is different from the house that I can see being demolished. One could say that concepts have a particular property of being abstract entities produced by human understanding and that move farther from products of the imagination, perceptions or affections, all of them mental states which can evoke the conceptual work, but which are not directly correspondent to it.

There is also the matter of validity of concepts; that is, the discussion about their true or false character as, upon coherently and systematically building explanations about the world, a conceptually-organized speech operates through exclusion of the statements or principles that are in opposition to it. The true values – statement or included principle – and false values – statement or excluded principle – are thus distributed. Ever since the Greeks, we work with the rule known as “law of the excluded middle”: given a statement A and its negation B, they both cannot be simultaneously true.

But something happens when we face the infinite array of coherent and systematic explanations that mankind has been capable of forging. For instance, let us consider the matter of origin and functioning of the cosmos. It may be explained by the parthenogenesis of the Goddess-Mother Nammu who, according to the Sumerian myth, generated An (Sky) and Ki (Earth) (Eliade, 1978: 80); or by the pre-Socratic principle of the Unlimited which originates all things; the fountain whence all beings extract their provenience and where they perform their dissolution¹⁸; or by the initiative of Olorum who, according to the Yoruba, initiated the creation of the world, entrusting its finishing and ruling to a lesser god (Eliade, 1978: 75); or by the creating act of Yahweh, supreme deity of the Hebrews, who manifests his power to men through thunder, lightning, smoke, storm, fire or rainbow (Eliade, 1978: 127–128); or by the principle of mutation which takes place in the alternate game of yin and yang understood as being the constitutive factors of all reality (Jullien, 1997: 30), or even by Newton’s gravitational theory, broadened and overtaken by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

What does this variety of testimonies show us from the conceptual work point of view? The insufficiency of the law of the excluded middle and the related need for it being suspended as methodological posture and exercise. “Mythical”, “scientific”, “religious”, “rational”, “philosophical”, “sapiential” explanations, despite their different specificities, have worked for centuries or millennia in the most diverse cultures demonstrating that, from the point of view of value they are all equivalent, leaving to discussion, if and when it is the case, their force of authority and power of performance as far as the problems that may be presented by them are concerned, and for which there may or may not be possible solutions.

Once, the possibility of suspending the validation judgements as a previous methodological posture is in place, we can then choose a conceptual set to the detriment of another. This means operating conceptually: I lend validity – in a broad sense, the value of truth, belief, ideology, effectiveness, adequacy, opportunity – to a given set and circumstancially exclude others. I proceed to the fixation, relation and hierarchy of sense units, whence result universes more or less autonomous in meaning. In short, the concept is not a simple entity, but a functional complex in which each “doctrine” or “knowledge” places the elements as they find most adequate, true or effective. This universe cannot stop producing some kind of enclosure given that it follows rules of internal coherence, which ensure the necessary link between notions, differentiating itself from other knowledge procedures.

However the game of comparison, choice and exclusion between concepts is dynamic. The very plasticity of human language and cognitive competence takes over the task of creating points for passage and translation between concepts, facilitating their presentation, explanation and transmission. Besides, there are conceptual fields that are dedicated to exploring the convertibility of knowledge and the transitivity of fields of knowledge, creating a universe of conceptual problematization that facilitates exactly the production of epistemic-value conceptual equivalencies.¹⁹ For instance, there is the book compiled by Lepetit, where, in order to present the transference of self-organization models (originally from Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Artificial Intelligence) to urban studies, it counts on the contribution of demographers, archeologists, economists, geographers, historians, etc. In the same book, the compiler establishes the following difference between the immediate past and the present: “In contrast with the monotonous time of classical mechanics and of the functionalist urbanism, the time of self-organization theories is characterized by the unexpected course of some of its evolutions as well as by complexity” (Lepetit, 2001: 137).

In the field of social research and, more specifically, in Urbanism, we encounter an active process of conceptual questioning. Traditional definitions become troubled – medieval city, renaissance city, pre-industrial city, industrial city – committed to a comfortable diachrony and, very often, indifferent to the plurality of social representations that come across in the construction and experience of the city. We assume that “the representation is active”, and “does not only ‘say’ the city, but ‘makes’ the city” (Lepetit, 2001: 268), and turns the latter into a kind of mediating and mobilizing space of the mental equipment of a time, its beliefs, techniques, institutions, social orders, etc. One seeks, therefore, scenarios that enable highlighting of the polysemy and ‘polyphony’ of the city, betting on the epistemological gain of the study of such notions as clarifying the very considerations on the contemporary conditions of urban modification.

In that sense it is important to stress the current state of questioning about the possibilities of comprehension of the contemporary urban space, given the relativization of the parameters of its definition, parameters that were accumulated throughout millennia of construction and representation of the city. Along with that, we will link to that question the fact that any understanding results from the network that informs and forms a given comprehension of reality. Thus we intend to develop inclusive arguments that consider the multiplicity of possibilities that any reality offers. That being said, how does one understand the city today? How does one apprehend the plurality of its representations? What has changed?

1.1 The concept of City

Like Magritte, we will have to say, before our corpus of definitions, this is not a city, but its apprehension. (Lepetit, 2001: 246)

Let us think a little about the idea of city. It is almost impossible to imagine the history of human occupation of the planet disentangled from the urbanization process, already traditionally considered as equivalent to civilization. We grew used to conceiving urban space from its most immediately visible and traditionally established marks, which, with a little historical imagination we see in the Neolithic period: the furrowed soil, the agglomerate of inhabitations creating bonds of physical proximity, the palisade, social time regulated by the cyclical rhythm of agricultural work, regulated, in turn, by environmental regularities difficult to relativize . . . and, at last, the human groups, scattered around the planet, generating and raising children in face of the most varied social strategies which domesticate the sexual polymorphism, polytropism and polyvalence that make the human species so oddly creative.

Men and women socially turned into “ventriloquist machines”²⁰ of the kinship rules, those countless regulating principles of sexual/social reproduction of the species, that articulate social and cosmic order and disorder, uniting, separating, punishing, condemning, restraining, terrorizing, seducing, and creating myths for people in their more-or-less compulsory social insertions, even though far from definitely having the last word on the human experience: social, physical and geographic settings where protection, defense and nourishment activities took place for a long time.

Following historians such as Lewis Mumford, we can, according to classical parameters, synthetically establish a route where the concept of city has its origin in the references inherited form the Neolithic village, associated to birth and place, blood and soil. The village’s components were rebuilt in a more complex way and were incorporated by the new urban unit. Around the year 5000 BC, some villages turned into cities; then food producers started to produce surplus in order to provide for the population of specialists: craftsmen, merchants, fishermen, warriors, priests.

With the rise of the city, many activities which used to be scattered and disorganized were gathered within a limited area, contributing to a considerable technological expansion (mathematical calculation, writing, astronomical observation, the calendar, are just a few examples). The city becomes a structure equipped to store and transmit the goods of civilization with a maximum amount of ease within a minimum space. Such concentration expanded human capabilities in all directions. The city mobilized the human potential, achieved domain over transportation, and communication over long distances in space and time enabled enormous inventiveness and accelerated development in engineering, besides promoting a substantial increase in agricultural productivity.

From there, references were established that organize the traditional way of conceiving the city and are present in several historical experiences: physical and geographical conception of space that confirm ideas of settlement, delimitation, belonging and exclusion; preponderance of the physical form of the city converted into the materiality of the streets, houses, religious space, administrative space, space of workshops, market; city as a meeting place, place of protection, place of exchange, place of cultural interaction, place of creativity and technical evolution, a “special receptacle destined to store and transmit messages” (Mumford, 1991: 114), place of transmission of cultural heritage.

The main characteristics of the city as aesthetic symbol were already configured, even if primitively, in the citadel, around 2500 BC (Mumford, 1991: 104). Its form varied in time and space, but the lastingness of some solutions is surprising. The street, the house block, the market, the religious and administrative space, the space of workshops are visible symbols we are still used to thinking of as a possibility when conceiving the city.

1.2 The city

What is the city? How did it come into existence? What processes does it further: what functions does it perform: what purposes does it fulfill? No single definition will apply to all its manifestations and no single description will cover all its transformations from the embryonic social nucleus to the complex forms of its maturity and the corporeal disintegration of its old age. (Mumford, 1991: 9)

Well, considering the city is considering the concept of city, in the sense of a historically-built conceptual tool, whose successive elaborations suffer the impact of the transformations that history itself imposes on the social agents of a given space-time which, in turn, experience the demand of conceptually elaborating a consentaneous consideration with the problems of their time. The city, in turn, that transforms itself today thanks to the flow of capital and information, accelerated by the new technologies, may be considered as e-topia, metapolis or cybercity: forged words that involve the issue of relativization of traditional parameters that identify the urban, such as physical and geographic space and chronological time. Given the contingency of ours being the age of the “network society”, of the “global city”, of the “metapolis”, of the city of “bits”, of the “e-topia”, of the “digital” or “instant” city, it is in our interest to contribute to the debate, broadening its analysis conditions with the proposition: the city is me.

Thinking the contemporary city implies the elaboration of a problem and its conceptual formulation. We work with conceptual constructions within the perspective that there is no hierarchy between the object of study as real and its approach as ‘representation’. In other words, between the facts and their descriptions, there is no more distance than between what is known and what is built. In order to place the issue in strict terms of Urbanism, we once again quote Lepetit: the real of the city one tries to reach is a practice of such reality, a practice of the city (a way of dealing with the city) (Lepetit, 2001: 266–67). Or yet, we may remember the statement by Castells that “there is no separation between ‘reality’ and symbolic representation”.²¹ Our hypothesis, the city is me, is the conceptual formulation that there is no distance/difference between reality and symbolic representation. If we wish to cross into these terms, “the city that a person is” are their symbolic representations. A person-city is a set of symbolic representations.

So, for instance, with the concept of territory, Solà-Morales examines not only the matter of the “system of inhabited spaces, with its topographic, historical and social determination; but also [territory] as a starting point, meeting place of the formative activity which is at the same time the architecture and the city in any sense we may give to these terms” (Solà-Morales, 2002: 25–27). Starting from the issue conceptually elaborated as territory, the author also seeks what Social Sciences, Geography, Economics, Anthropology and Urban Sociology have to offer as “propositions” about contemporary city and Architecture (Solà-Morales, 2002: 25–27).

Likewise, the city is me takes, as conceptual construction, a field of articulation and analysis. In order to do so, it will establish a grid of conceptual relations whose intelligibility depends on the very space it creates. However, if it consisted only of this, a meaningless monologue would be all that was left; an impossible exercise, by the way, because, if we articulate, we do so already within a context with the objective of having a dialogue...