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.

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:

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]

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 merchandizing; 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 preeminently 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.

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]

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 paralyzes. 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, oversize 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. Peans 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.

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 center. 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 neighbors’ 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]

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^st 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, busses, 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.

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, worshiped 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 preempted 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 homeyness 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 organized 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 monumentalize 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 ascendancy over the human spirit, today it can be reasonably said that both have been preempted 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 exorcized 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

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]

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.

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]

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 exorcizes 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 revitalization, 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.

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 archaeological 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 leveling 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.