Toward a Vision of the Urban Future

“Without testament,” observed Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future, “... without tradition — which selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is — there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal change of the world and the biological cycle of creatures in it.”[57]

If the city can be added to the lost treasures which Arendt laments in her deeply sensitive essays, this loss is due in no small measure to the modern stance of “contemporaneity,” a stance which virtually denies an urban past in its deadening claim to sempiternal change, to an eternality of problems that have neither the retrospect of uniqueness nor the prospect of visionary solutions. To the degree that the very word “city” is still applied to the formless urban agglomerations that blot the human landscape, we live with the shallow myth that the problems of the civic present are equatable with those of the civic past — and hence, in a sinister sense, with the civic future. Accordingly, we know neither past nor future but only a present that lacks even the self- consciousness of its social preconditions, limitations, and historic fragility.

Our very language betrays the limitations within which we operate — more precisely, the preconceptions with which we define the functions of the modern city and our “solutions” to its problems. However operational it may be, the most unspoken preconception that guides our view of the modern city is an entirely entrepreneurial one. Indeed, all shabby moral platitudes aside, we simply view the city as a business enterprise. Our underlying urban problems are commonly described in fiscal terms and often attributed to “poor management,” “financial irresponsibility,” and “imbalanced budgets.” Judging from this terminology, it would seem that a “good city” is a fiscally secure city, and the job of civic institutions is to manage the city as a “sound business.” Presumably, the “best city” is not only one that balances its budget and is self-financing but even earns a sizable profit.

To anyone who has even a glancing acquaintance with urban history, this is a breathtaking notion of the city, indeed, a notion that could arise only in the most unadorned and mediocre of bourgeois epochs. Yet lacking a sense of both past and future, we would do well to recall that the city has variously been seen as a ceremonial center (the temple city), an administrative center (the palace city), a civic fraternity (the polis), and a guild city (the medieval commune). Heavenly or secular, it has always been uniquely a social space, the terrain in which the suspect “stranger” became transformed into the citizen — this, as distinguished from the biological parochialism of the clan and tribe with its roots in blood ties, the sexual division of labor, and age groups. As the Greeks so well knew, the “good city” represented the triumph of society over biology, of reason over impulse, of humanity over folkdom. That capitalism with its principle of unlimited growth and its own economic emphasis on “sempiternal change” began to expand the medieval marketplace beyond any comprehensible human scale is a problem that has been more than adequately explored; but where this tendency would take us was still conjectural.[58] The last century saw the city defer to — and even model itself — on the factory.[59] The opening years of the present century witnessed the conceptual reduction of the city to a “machine,” a notion which was accepted by such presumably disparate architects and planners as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. McLuhan brought us into the multinational corporate world with his catchy phrase “the global village,” and Doxiades presumably afforded us the “multidisciplinary” tools for making the multinational city seem like an international one.[60]

If the schemes of Le Corbusier, Wright, McLuhan, and Doxiades seem remote at present, if they have been preempted by the bookkeeping of Abe Beame, the shift is not without its irony. Beame plodded his way to the center of New York politics as a comptroller, not as a social reformer or city planner. His concept of community is probably exhausted by the New York Democratic Party’s headquarters and backrooms. He lacks even the Dickensian eccentricities of a Scrooge. Only his gray hair, aging face, and diminutive stature rescue him from appearing as a corporate technocrat. He is, oddly enough, a man of the LaGuardia generation who, like the Abbe Sieyes of the French Revolution, could claim a supreme credential for having lived in a colorful, dramatic, and dynamic era: he managed to survive. By virtue of his very appearance and professional background, Beame personifies the transformation of New York’s urban problems from those of social reform into those of fiscal manipulation.

Lest this transformation be taken too much for granted, it has implications that go far beyond any mere headlines. The change means that our modern capitalist society has not only subverted the city s historic role as a medium for socializing parochial fold into worldly humans; it has completely degraded the city into a mere business venture to be gauged by monetary rather than social or cultural criteria. It has, in effect, added a vulgar dimension to Arendt’s worst fears of “sempiternal change” by removing the city from the history books and placing it in account books. The city has become a problem not in social theory, community, or psychology but in bookkeeping. It has ceased to be a human creation and has become a commodity. Its achievement is to be judged not by architectural beauty, cultural inspiration, and human association but by economic productivity, taxable resources, and fiscal success. The most startling aspect of this development-long in the making when the city was subordinated to the factory and to commerce — is that urban theory must cease to pretend that its revered social and cultural criteria apply to the modern city. Architecture, sociology anthropology, planning, and cultural history tell us nothing about the city as it exists today. Urban ideology is business ideology, ts tools are not Doxiades’ ekistics but double-entry bookkeeping.

The extent to which we have removed the city from the history books and placed it in the account books is evidenced not only by the declining ining cities of the northeast but by the burgeoning cities of the sunbelt. Success, here, is a quixotic form of failure — for the historic urban trend of our day has not been toward cities but rather a curious form of urbanization without cities. The devolution of the sunbelt cities almost entirely into industrial and commercial “mousetraps” (to quote a Fortune journalist) has yielded a devastating form of “success.” Business has become a cult; growth, a deity; money, a talisman. The mythic has reappeared in its most mundane quantified form to create one of the most dehumanizing ideologies in urban history. In the plastic, unadorned subdivisions, high-rises, and slab office buildings of Los Angeles, Phenix, Dallas, and Houston eastward to Tampa and Miami, life and culture have been sacrificed to the most robotized forms of mass production, mass merchandizing, and mass culture. The faceless structures that sprawl across the “southern rim” lack the seasoning of history, of authentic cultural intercourse, of urban development and centering. The cities themselves have moved, for the most part, by huge leaps, not by evolution, and the propelling force of the leaps has been some sort of “resource,” be it copper or petroleum, aerospace or electronics, range empires or agribusiness. The “gold fever” has never left the sunbelt; it has merely produced gold in different, often more feverish ways. If the American empire found its original colonies on the western frontier, the sunbelt cities have been its traditional outposts and provided the nodal points for its most aggressive domestic impulses.

Accordingly, these nodal points — now, sprawling Standard Metropolitan Statistic Areas — are economically “relevant.” They form the centers of the “new” industries spawned by World War II, of intensively worked factory “farms,” of fuels for high- technology, of shopping malls and retail emporiums. Big government, particulary the Federal government, occupies every niche that has not been filled by big business and the two inevitably interlink to form big bureaucracy. Municipal autonomy has rarely been a strategic concept in the SMSA’s of the sunbelt. The earliest cities were often cavalry fortresses, not the new “Jerusalems” established by radical, often anarchistic religious and political dissenters. Although the frontier nourished the myth of rugged individualism, community, and vigilantism, its daily life and tenacious greed nourished self-interest and privatism. Not surprisingly, regional administration tends to supplant municipal administration, digesting not only neighborhoods but entire cities in the entrails of huge administrative bureaucracies. Citizenship, in turn, tends to be gauged more by the capacity to attract investment, make money, and engage in big-spending than by civic activism and social reform.

The northeastern cities are significantly different. New York, whose urban agony has made it paradigmatic for the cities of the entire region, was the most important point of entry for immigrants into the continent and their first point of contact with the realities of the “American Dream.” The city achieved its elevated status not merely as a major port and financial center, but as the crucible in which the polyglot immigrants of Europe were melded into a usable labor force. American business itself accorded the city a special status, however resentfully and boorishly. Whether by virtue of high investments, political privileges or, more significantly, social reforms, the city had to be supported as the demographic and cultural placenta to Europe. More cosmopolitan than any other city in the land, it formed a lifeline to the old world with its material and intellectual riches. If a single part of the United States was the American “melting pot,” it was New York City, and if America needed a space to achieve a measure of demographic and cultural homogeneity from which to draw Europe’s labor and skills, it was through New York City.

The present “fiscal crisis” in New York means, quite frankly, that the city has been abandoned. Its traditional function is no longer necessary. Today, New York does not receive the bulk of its immigrants from Europe but from within the United States and its Hispanic “posessions.” At a time when technology requires less muscle and more skill, New York has ceased to be an historic port of entry for needed “human resources” and has become the dumping ground for superfluous “human waste.” The Statue of Liberty exhibits its backside to domestic refugees from religious and political persecution. With its growing proportion of blacks, Hispanics, and aged, the city has turned into an economic anachronism and a political menace. Its “minorities,” who now comprise residential majorities in many parts of the city, are seen as impediments to a highly corporate, mechanized, and planned economy. Like the “masterless men” who appeared all over Europe during the decline of feudalism, these minorities have become marginal people in an era of technocratic state capitalism. From the bad conscience of the system, the city rears itself up as a specter from the past that must be exorcized. Physically it must be set adrift, abandoned to its squalor, archaisms, and leprous process of decay.

It is not a satisfactory argument to rake up the trite explanations, such as “fiscal mismanagement” and an “eroding tax base,” that Washington has flung at New York to justify its neglect of the city. One could reasonably ask if Washington itself has a more sound fiscal or economic base than the cosmopolis to the north. That Washington is largely a subsidized city, indeed subsidized partly by the massive taxes it drains from New York, suggests that the viability of any city in an era of oligopoly and state controls can no longer be explained by the precepts of “free enterprise” economics. Washington is artificially sustained because it is needed as a national administrative center. To the degree that any city is a heavy recepient of direct or indirect Federal funds, exorbitant revenues from oligopolistic practices, or loot drained by leisured high-income counties from exploited low-income ones, it is artificially sustained by the country as a whole. Accordingly, Washington lives on tax revenues requisitioned on a national scale, the sunbelt cities on aeronautic, and military subsidies, oil money, and real-estate hustles, the wealthy communities of southern California on riches plundered from the poorer countries of the north and east, the Imperial Valley on artifically inflated food prices by which New Yorkers, Bostonians, and Chicagoans are bled daily. That New York has been the object of opprobrium rather than support at all levels of the Federal government and the financial world is evidence not so much of its “fiscal mismanagement” but its lack of economic relevancy. Its eminence as a center of immigrant labor has waned and the immigrants it currently receives are viewed as despised social flotsam.

Perhaps no less significantly, the city has become politically dangerous. One could easily visualize that New York, which once provided the space for melding needed immigrant labor, could again be favored as a space in which “dispensable” sectors of the population could be dumped. It might seem plausible that, as “friendly fascism” oozes over the social landscape, it might leave oases in which the ethnically abused, the indigent, even the eccentrics, might find a home in the interests of social pacification. The most sinister feature of the trend toward corporate and state capitalism is that such oases are basically incompatible with a totalitarian trend, even of the “friendly” variety. The sixties have vividly demonstrated that “affluence” does not placate the restless but awakens them. In the language of modern sociol- ogese, improved material conditions arouse “high expectations” and ultimately a rebellious ambiance throughout the country. Viewed from this standpoint, current attempts to subvert New York City’s traditional reformistic policies are not without political cunning. The centralized state’s growing police functions and its increasing manipulation of the economy have been followed by its growing control over local administrative authority. New York’s loss of municipal self-administration to the central government could portend a far-reaching destruction of municipal institutions everywhere. Rearing up before us would be an immense political behemoth that could engulf the last administrative structures of American towns and cities.

In the sunbelt cities, the emergence of such a behemoth already has acquired considerable reality. The tremendous weight that is given to economic expansion, to business operations, to governmentally fostered projects has served not only to promote mindless urban expansion but an appalling degree of civic passivity. The extent to which these cities have surrendered to industrial, commercial, and governmental operations is comparable only to the squalid decay of cities during the Industrial Revolution. The consequences of this surrender can be expressed as a form of municipal growth that occurs in inverse proportion to civic attrition — civic in the sense that that city once comprised a vital body politic. Homogeneity has effaced neighborhoods, regionalization has effaced municipalities, and immense enterprises, fed by the bequests of big government, have effaced the existence of a socially active citizenry. The basic concerns of the sunbelt cities are growth, not reform; the basic concerns of its citizens are services, not social participation. Politically, the residents of the sunbelt cities constitute a client population, bereft of citizenship and social activism by the very success of their economic growth. To the degree that meaningful politics is practiced in these cities, it is bureaucratically orchestrated by business and government.

If the great Hellenic standards of urbanism have meaning any longer for students of the city and its development, the disappearance of an active body politic, of an authentic, socially involved citizenry is equivalent to the death of the city itself. Greek social thought viewed the city as a public arena, a realm of discourse and rational administration that presupposed a public opinion, public institutions, and a public man. In the absence of such a public, there was no polis, no citizens, no community. The sunbelt cities have replaced public life by publicity, by a spectacular, typically American form of “dialogue” that involves the promotion of political and economic entities. In the spectac- ularized world of publicity, even the classical market of free entrepreneurs is converted into oligopolistically managed shopping malls, democratic political institutions into appointed bureaucracies, and citizens into taxpayers. What remains of the city is merely its high residential density, not its urbane populace.

If the municipal success of the sunbelt cities is marked by civic failure, the municipal failures of the older cities have been marked by a certain degree of civic success. Owing to the decline of municipal services in the older cities of the northeast, a vacuum is developing between the traditional institutions that managed the city and the urban population itself. These institutions, in effect, have been compelled to surrender a considerable degree of their authority to the citizenry. Understaffed municipal agencies can no longer pretend to adequately meet such basic needs as sanitation, education, health, and public safety. An eerie municipal “no-man’s-land” is emerging between the institutional apparatus of the older cities and the people it professes to service. This “no-man’s-land” — this urban vacuum, to be more precise — is slowly being filled by the ordinary people themselves. Far more striking than New York’s fiscal crisis is the public response it has evoked. Libraries, schools, even hospitals and fire houses, have been occupied by aroused citizens, a trend that is significant not because amateurs can often exhibit a technical capacity to replace the services of professionals but rather the high degree of social activism that the crisis has aroused at a grass roots level. From the seeming decline of the older cities, taxpayers are slowly being transformed into citizens, privatized districts into authentic neighborhoods, and a passive populace into an active public.

If would be naive to overstate this trend and view it as a practical solution to the crises that beleaguer the northeastern cities. The awakening of public life in these cities will not end the erosion of their economic and fiscal bases. If the destiny of the American city is to be determined largely by its industrial and commercial “growth potential,” this very criterion implies a redefinition of the city as a business enterprise, not a social and cultural space. So conceived, the city will have ceased to exist precisely because of its strictly economic preconditions and its standards of successful performance.

If the real historic basis of the city, on the other hand, is seen to be an active body politic and a spirited public life, then New York is more successful as an authentic municipality than Dallas or Houston. The evidence for this reawakening of citizen activity amid urban decay is often compelling. For example, a convocation last year of block-association representatives by the Citizens Committee for New York City and the Federation of Citywide Block Associations, yielded 1,300 activists who, according to a New York Times report, “debated community with the zest, and frequently the contentiousness, of an election-year political convention.” The report notes that the “neighborhood activists” were guided by the “conviction that civic betterment starts on the block where on lives.” However oppressive the problems discussed — “crime, sanitation, housing improvements, fund-raising, recycling, day care and ‘fighting City Hall’” — the mood of the activists “was anything but grim. There was almost an evangelical, upbeat spirit as block leaders told of ways they had successfully dealt with safety problems or found new techniques of raising money for tree planting.”

It matters little that the issues raised may often be trivial and inconsequential. What is far more important than the agenda of such forms is the extraparliamentary nature of the form itself and the participatory features of the association. Convocations of molecular civic groups like “block associations” that resemble a “political convention” in a normal year mark a rupture with institutionalized governmental processes. They comprise, in Martin Buber’s sense, social structures as distinguished from political ones. Power acquires a public, indeed a personal, character which, to the bureaucrat, is a kind of social “vigilantism” and “anarchy” and to the participant is a “town meeting.” The energy that buoys up the convocation, the anti- hierarchical character that often marks its organization, and the verve of its participants implies a renewed sense of power as distinguished from the powerlessness that constitutes the social malaise of our times.

The trivialities of the agenda should not blind us to the historic importance of municipal reawakenings at this level of action. The role of civic activism as means for far-reaching social change dates back to the American and French revolutions, and formed the basis for revolutionary change in the Paris Commune of 1871. In revolutionary America, “the nature of city government came in for heated discussion,” observes Merril Jensen in a fascinating discussion of the period. Town meetings, whether legal or informal, “had been a focal point of revolutionary activity.” The antidemocratic reaction that set in after the American revolution was marked by efforts to do away with town meeting governments that had spread well beyond New England to the mid-Atlantic and Southern states. Attempts by conservative elements were made to establish a “corporate form (of municipal government) whereby the towns could be government by mayors and councils” elected from urban wards. Judging from New Jersey, the merchants “backed incorporation consistently in the efforts to escape town meetings.” Such efforts were successful not only in cities and towns of that state but also in Charleston, New Haven, and eventually even Boston. Jensen, addressing himself to the incorporated form of municipal government and restricted suffrage that replaced the more democratic assembly form of the revolutionaries of 1776 in Philadelphia, expresses a judgment that could apply to all the successful efforts on behalf of municipal incorporation following the revolution: “The counter-revolution in Philadelphia was complete.”

A decade later, the French revolutionaries faced much the same problem when the sans culottes and enrages tried to affirm the power of the Parisian local popular assemblies or “sections” over the centralized Convention and Committee of Public Safety controlled by Robespierrists. Ironically, the final victory of the Convention over the sections was to cost Robespierre his life and end the influence of the Jacobins over subsequent developments. The municipal movement, indeed a rich classical heritage of the city as community that had nourished the social outlook of German idealism and later utopian socialist and anarchist theories, dropped from sight with the emergence of Marxism and its narrow “class analysis” of history. Yet it can hardly be ignored that the Paris Commune of 1871, which provided Marxism and anarchism with its earliest models of a liberated society, was precisely a revolutionary municipal movement whose goal of a “social republic” had been developed within a confederalist framework of free municipalities or “communes.”

Although the older northeastern cities of the United States hardly bear comparison with their own ancestral communities of two centuries ago, much less revolutionary Paris, it would be myopic to ignore certain fascinating similarities. The block committees of New York City are not the town meetings of Boston or the sections of Paris; they do not profess any historic goals for the most part nor have they advanced any programmatic expression in support of major social change. But they clearly score a new advance in the demands of their participants — primarily, a claim to governance in the administration of their “blocks,” a proclivity for federation, and in the best of cases, an emerging body politic. The city itself is riddled by tenants associations, ad hoc committees and councils to achieve specific neighborhood goals, a stable Neighborhood Housing Movement, and broad-spectrum organizations that propound an ideology of “neighborhood government.” These groups, often networks, that advance a concept of decentralized self-management, however intuitive their views, stand out in refreshing relief against a decades-long history of municipal centralization and neighborhood erosion. Even demands of “municipal liberty” are being heard in terms that are more suggestive of an earlier civic radicalism than its proponents are prepared to admit.

In a number of instances, such “block” and neighborhood organizations have gone beyond the proprieties of convocations, fundraising, sanitation, public safety, and even demonstrations to take over unused or abandoned property and stake out a moral right to cooperative ownership. Apart from episodic occupations of closed libraries, schools, and a “peoples” firehouse, the most important of these occupations have been neglected or unhabitable buildings. One such action, now called the “East Eleventh Street Movement” has achieved a national reputation. Initially, the Movement was a Puerto Rican neighborhood organization, one of several in the Lower Eastside of Manhattan, which formed an alliance with some young radical intellectuals to rehabilitate an abandoned tenement that had been gutted completely by fire. The block itself, one of the worst in the Hispanic ghetto, had become a hangout for drug addicts, car-strippers, muggers, and arsonists. Unlike most buildings which are taken over by squatters, 519 East 11 St. was a city-acquired ruin, a mere shell of a structure that had been boarded up after it had been totally destroyed by fire. This building was to be totally rebuilt by coopers, composed for the most part of Puerto Ricans and some whites, by funds acquired from a city “program” that accepts labor as equity for loans — the now famous “sweat equity program.” The Movement’s attempts to acquire the building, to fund it, to expand its activities to other abandoned structures were to become a cause celebre that has since inspired similar efforts both in the Lower Eastside and other ghetto areas. To a certain degree, the building was taken over before “sweat equity” negotiations with the city had been completed. The city was patently reluctant to assist the co-opers and apparently yielded to strong local pressure before supplying aid. The building itself was not only rebuilt but also “retrofitted” with energy-saving devices, insulation, solar panels for preheating water and a Jacobs wind generator for some of its electric power. An account of the conflicts between the “East Eleventh Street Movement,” the city bureaucracy, and finally Consolidated Edision would comprise a sizable article in itself. What is perhaps the most significant feature of the project is its libertarian ambiance. The project was not only a fascinating structural enterprise; it was an extraordinary cooperative effort in every sense of the term. Politically, the Movement was “fighting City Hall” — and it did so with an awareness that it was promoting decentralized local rights over big municipal as well as big State and Federal government. Economically, it was fighting the financial establishment by advancing a concept of labor — “sweat equity” — over the usual capital and monetary premises of investment. Socially, it was fighting the preeminence which bureauracy has claimed over the community by intervening and often disrupting the maddening regulatory machinery that has so often, in itself, defeated almost every grass-roots movement for structural and neighborhood rehabilitation.

All of these conflicts were conducted with a minimal degree of hierarchy and a strong emphasis on egalitarian organizational forms. Participants were encouraged to voice their views and freely assume responsability for the building itself and the group’s conflicts with municipal agencies and utilities. This organizational form has been preserved after the rebuilding of 519 East 11 Street was completed and occupied. The entire block was — and, in part, remains — involved in varying degreees with the group’s activities and its efforts to reclaim other buildings in the area. Many participants have acquired a heightened sense of social awareness as a result of their own efforts to achieve a degree of “municipal liberty,” if only for their own physical space and nearby blocks. Activists who remain involved with the larger aspects of the project — its explosive political, social, and economic implications — have a radical consciousness of their goals. What began as a desperate effort of housing co-opers to rescue their own homes, in effect, has become a social movement.

Such movements, in some cases involving “illegal” seizures of abandoned buildings, are growing in number in New York and other older cities. Although they have not always exhibited the staying power and libertarian ambiance of the “East Eleventh Street Movement,” they must be seen in terms of the context they have themselves created. “Municipal liberty” in the older cities, to be sure, does not mean the “liberty, equality, and fraternity” which the more radical Parisian sections tried to foster; nor does it have the mobilizing and solidarizing qualities of the more radical American town meetings. The projects than can be related to this new civic trend — be they housing co-opers, “sweat equity” programs, block committees, tenants groups, neighborhood “alliances, or cooperative daycare, educational, cultural, and even food projects — vary enormously in their longevity, stability, social consciousness, and scope. In some cases, they are blatently elitist and civically exclusionary. To a large extent, they form a constellation of new subcultures that have evolved from the broader countercultural movement of the sixties, a constellation that has been greatly modified by ethnic disparaties, urban disarray, a broad disengagement of municipal government from its own constituency, an emerging “free space” for popular, often libertarian, civic entities, and the civic bases for a new body politic.

But a living trend they remain — and the most important trend to emerge in American cities today. In contrast to the bureaucratically managed and municipally regimented sunbelt cities, they represent a largely regional development. The very fact that they have been fueled by urban decay conceals their significance as the most significant trend in generations to reclaim the city as the public space for an authentic citizenry. If they are not a “vision” of the future, they may well be one of its harbingers. Certainly they are one of the most exciting links American cities have yet produced between the urban past and the urban future — a new “treasure,” as Arendt might have put it, in the development of human community and the human spirit.

A vision of the urban future — if it is to be conceived as a city and not a sprawling agglomeration of man-made structures — is haunted by the past. The assumption that we cannot “return” to the past can become a trite excuse for ignorance of that very past or an unconditional renunciation of what we can learn from it. To the serious student of urban life, the most fascinating point of departure for relating past to future is the Hellenic polis. That we live in a world of nation-states and multinational corporations is no excuse to continue do so. The urban future must be viewed from a standpoint that may sharply contradict the immediate future of our present SMSAs, a future that seems to consist of more business, more structural as well as economic growth, and more centralization, whether in the name of “regionalization” or “federalism.” That future must be above all a new conception of the “city of man” that fulfills our most advanced concepts of humanity’s potentialities: freedom and self-consciousness, the two terms that form the historic message of Western civilization.

Self-consciousness, at the very least, implies a new self: a self that can be conscious. Consciousness, certainly in the fullness of its truth, presupposes an environment in which the individual can conceptually grasp the conditions that influence his or her life and exercise control over them. Indeed, insofar as an individual lacks these dual elements of consciousness, he or she is neither free nor fully human in the self-actualized sense of the term. Denied intellectual and institutional access to the economic resources that sustain us, to the culture that nourishes our mental and spiritual growth, and to the social forms that frame our behavior as civilized beings, we are not only denied our freedom and our ability to function rationally but our very selfhood. The great cultural critics of society have voiced this conclusion for centuries. This conclusion has even more relevance today — an era of social decay that seems almost cosmic in its scale — than at any time in the past.

In terms of the city, such a conclusion means that a vision of the urban future can be regarded as rational and humanly viable only insofar as the city lends itself to individual comprehension — notably, that it is an entity that can be understood by the individual and modified by individual action. That the city whose population “can be taken in at a single view” (Aristotle) — that is, scaled physically and numerically to human dimensions — remained essential to the Hellenic ideal of the polis is merely another way of saying that a city without a citizenry, an active body politic, is not a city, indeed unworthy of anything but barbarians. Human scale is a necessary condition for human self-fulfillment and social fulfillment. A humanistic vision of the future city must rest on the premise that the authentic “city of man” is comprehensible to its citizens or else they will cease to be citizens and public life itself will disappear. A vision of the urban future is thus meaningless if it does not include from its very outset the decentralization of the great SMSAs, the restoration of city life as a comprehensible form of public life.

Still another vision of the future must include the recovery of face-to-face form of civic management — a selfhood that is formed by self-management in assemblies, committees, and councils. We can never “outgrow” the Hellenic ecclesia or the American town meeting without debasing the word “growth” to mean mere change rather than development. The existence of an authentic public presupposes the most direct system of communication we can possibly achieve, notably, face-to-face communication. Again, another of Aristotle’s caveats is appropriate here: “... in order to decide questions of justice and in order to distribute the offices according to merit it is necessary for the citizens to know each other’s personal characters, since where this does not happen to be the case, the business of electing officials and trying law-suits is bound to go badly; haphazard decision is unjust in both matters, and this must obviously prevail in an excessively numerous community.” It need hardly be emphasized that Aristotle would have been appalled as much by the telecommunications of a “global village ” as he would have been by the very concept of the world as a huge city or village. Human scale thus means human contact, not economic, cultural, and institutional comprehensibility alone. Not only should the things, forms and organizations that make up a community be comprehensible to the citizen, but the very individuals — their “personal characters” — who form the citizen body. The terms “citizen body,” in this sense, assume more than an institutional concept; they take on a physical, existential, sensory, indeed protoplasmic, quality.

Thus far, I have been careful to stress the conditions that foster public life rather than the things that make for the “good life” materially. Decentralization and human scale have been emphasized as the bases for a new civic arena. Whether they are more “efficient” systems of social organization or more “ecological” types of association, as some writers have argued, has not been emphasized. That a city, landscaped into the countryside, will promote a new land ethic and afford its citizens greater access to nature — perhaps even restore the urbanized farmer so prized by the Athenian polis and republican Rome — adds to the case for physical environment. But ultimately it is the very need for a reactivated citizenry that must be stressed over efficiency, ecological awareness, and vocational roundedness. Without that citizenry we now face the loss not only of our cities, but of civilization itself.

Finally, the recovery of a body politic and a civic community can scarcely be imagined without the commutarian sharing of the means of life — the material as well as social communizing that authentic community presupposes. In a technological world where the means of production are too powerful to be deployed any longer for means of domination, it is doubtful if society, much less the city, can survive a privately owned economy riddled by self-interest and an insatiable need for growth. More than the “good life,” materially speaking, is involved in a communitarian system of production and distribution; the very existence of a coherent community interest is now at issue. Here, too, Hellenic culture has much to teach us about the future. Private interest can not be so dominant a motive in social relationships that it subverts the public interest. If private property once formed an underpinning of individualism in the corporatized cities of the past such as the guild-directed medievel towns, today, in the “free market” of giant oligopolies it has become the underpinning of naked egotism, indeed, the institutionalized expression of asocial behavior of the most ruthless kind. If the city is to become a public body of active citizens, it must extend the public interest to the material as well as institutional and cultural elements of civic life.

Here we can part company with the Hellenic outlook and view the future as more than a recovery of the past. Modern technology — “hard,” “soft,” “appropriate,” or as I would prefer to call it, liberatory — has finally made it possible for us to eliminate the fears which stalked Aristotle: “an overpopulous polis / of / foreigners and metics / who / will readily acquire the rights of citizens...” To these potential upstarts, one might also add slaves and women. The leisure or schole — the freedom from labor — that made it possible for Athenian citizens to devote their time to public life is no longer a birthright conferred by slavery on an ethnic elite but one conferred by technology on humanity as a whole. That we may feel free to reject that birthright for a “simpler,” “labor intensive” way of life is a historic privilege that itself is conferred by the very existence of technology. Although a “global village” created by telecommunications would be an abominable negation of the city as a citizen body, “global citizenship” in clearly defined cities would constitute its highest actualization — the civic socialization of parochial folk into a universal humanity.

This vision of the urban future must now stand as it is — vague, perhaps, and broad but hopeful. Any additions or details would be utopian in the worst sense of the word. They would form a “blueprint” that seeks to design without discussion and impose without consent. A libertarian vision should be a venture in speculative participation. Half-finished ideas should be proferred deliberately, not because finished ones are difficult to formulate but rather because completeness to the point of details would subvert dialogue — and it is dialogue itself that is essential to civic relations, just as it is logos that forms the basis of society.