The City as Political Center

In Western political thought, ideas about cities, citizenship, and democracy have always been inextricably linked. Since Socrates suggested in The Republic that his interlocutors help him to create a city in speech, the city has functioned as a real and metaphorical center for struggles over what it means to be political. Ideas about civilization and barbarism, egalitarianism and exclusion, virtue and vice, civic participation and social unrest, all find expression in discussions of the city. Yet the city is and has always been an ambiguous achievement; its success (or failure) as a form of political organization rests on its citizens' dubious abilities to govern themselves, deliberate with strangers, act on principles beyond narrow self-interest, and collectively determine their future. Thus the state of a nation's cities is often used as a barometer to judge the quality of its political life.

City as Democratic Ideal

In its most utopian incarnations, the city is common ground, a space where the democratic values of equality, heterogeneity, public life, and creative expression might be freely lived. In the United States the roots of its democratic heritage are routinely traced to ancient Greece, where in Athens in the fifth century b.c.e. the vision of the "good life" was concomitant with city life. As Pericles famously argued:

Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law.… [J]ust as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get in a state with our next door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way.… We are free and tolerant in our private lives, but in public affairs we keep to the law.… Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics—this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. (Pericles' Funeral Oration, in Thucydides, pp. 145–147)

Equality before the law, tolerance of difference, and civic participation—these are the qualities of city life that are found desirable and worthy of imitation.

In the modern context, the ideal of metropolitan democracy is grounded in the potential found in these three aspects of city life originally articulated in Pericles' speech. First, as Max Weber argued, modern city life—as characterized by economic and bureaucratic rationalization and autonomous law and administration—disrupted feudal and paternalistic forms of governance. Traditional and often immutable hierarchies (such as tribe, religion, or kinship) thus were replaced by more egalitarian political associations.

Second, democratic urbanists exalt the city's inherent heterogeneity as democracy's greatest good. The city is a place where citizens are required to negotiate many different axes of identity and difference (for example, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation), so city life cultivates an appreciation of diverse groups without necessarily assuming either assimilation or exclusion. While in ancient Athens the boundaries for demarcating "citizen" and "other" were considerably narrower than they are in the early twenty-first century, the principles of toleration and noninterference are cornerstones of democratic urbanism. The city functions as a place where persons unknown to each other and often without shared familial, religious, ethnic, or cultural ties have the opportunity to act in concert to achieve mutual good; a certain kind of cosmopolitanism (or an ability to "move comfortably in diversity") is intrinsic to discussions of democratic urbanism (Sennett, p. 17).

Third, because political life is not based on private relationships but on the whole body of citizens deliberating among themselves (the public's business is everyone's business), the presence of truly public spaces—boulevards, parks, and plazas—is a requirement for collective action. In fact such places serve as stages for political activity, facilitating interaction among diverse groups with different interests and creating the necessary conditions for collective decision-making. This very material public sphere both presupposes and cultivates political imagination by encouraging citizens to think and act in ways that transcend their particular experiences.

The City as Democratic Menace

From its inception, however, the city's equality and diversity have also signified its instability—the threat it poses to moral, social, and political order. The city has been regarded as the site of sinful excess and moral turpitude, where upstanding citizens may risk succumbing to the depravity of the mob. Despite (or because of) its status as the rationalized center of Western political and economic life, the city has also been the site of its revolutions; from Europe in 1848 to the United States and Paris in 1968, cities have been recognized as the epicenters of democratic upheaval.

Attempts to secure the city as a political and cultural center have historically often sought to contain, control, or eliminate many of the very elements urban democrats find so promising. Efforts to create meaningful, modern urban life have varied greatly, ranging from the reinvention of Paris by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891), the Garden City of Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928), the City Beautiful of Daniel Burnham (1846–1912), and the Radiant City of Le Corbusier (1887–1965), to numerous public housing projects across the United States and Europe. But as Elizabeth Wilson notes, what these efforts have in common is the desire to replace chaos with order, heterogeneity with uniformity, and the noise and commotion inevitable in lively public places with placidity and good behavior.

Contemporary Challenges to the City's
Democratic Potential

One of the widely debated issues regarding cities in the early twenty-first century is how their democratic possibilities might be realized in practice. While (at least implicitly) remaining sympathetic to the ideal of the city as a democratic space, important contributions in critical urban thought examine the inequalities woven into the urban fabric that delimit the amount and quality of freedom allowed to citizens, especially through residential segregation and the privatization of public space.

Residential segregation is caused by any number of factors. In the American context, typical examples of these include the use of racially restrictive covenants and redlining up through the 1960s; the priority placed on the federal highway system rather than public transit; federal tax incentives offered to homeowners (via deductions for mortgage interest) rather than to renters; and the use of local property taxes to fund public schools. These practices are not accidental but institutional and political, and they work to create, sustain, and embed economic and racial inequalities in the urban landscape. All result in widely divergent experiences for living, working, and pursuing educational opportunities in the context of modern city life.

As a result of these practices the inner city and inner-ring suburban areas are increasingly racially segregated and economically isolated. The results of this are myriad. First, the economically privileged have less and less contact with working-class and poor people, especially persons of color. Second, geographic segregation often produces serious spatial mismatches, where jobs and workers move in opposite directions; as more companies move to areas outside the central city, low-wage workers have more difficulty finding jobs and then commuting to them, since they often cannot afford to work, live, and find child care in the same areas. Finally, residents in poor and working-class neighborhoods often pay more for basic goods and services, such as groceries (Dreier et al., pp. 41–77).

These costs are not only directed at the economically underprivileged, however. Instead, what is commonly referred to as "urban sprawl" (low-density development at the edges of an existing city) is the other side of concentrated poverty and has its own burdens: complete car dependency and longer commutes, shrinking green space and loss of farmland, increased pollution and flooding, and higher taxes to support new infrastructure (roads, schools, water and sewer, and power lines). Furthermore, these sprawling, redundant netherworlds between city and suburb defy Kevin Lynch's (1960) aesthetic prescriptions for memorable, livable cities: a legible city, he suggested, would be one whose physical features and landmarks are easily identifiable. As a result of sprawl, urban peripheries look more and more similar (freeways and off-ramps, chain stores and traffic), while also looking less and less like traditional urban centers.

Intensifying residential segregation finds its apotheosis in gated communities, which not only include elite suburban housing developments but also increasingly many inner-city, middle-income apartment buildings. While scholars stress numerous reasons for Americans' affinity for living behind walls (ranging from fear of falling property values to craving privacy, security, and/or like-minded neighbors), they generally agree that such arrangements inhibit, rather than promote, democracy. In gated communities, typically public spaces such as streets, sidewalks, and green spaces are walled off and "forted up" (in Blakely and Snyder's evocative phrase), privatizing not only individual residences but community space as well. Gated communities also are often racially homogenous. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2001 American housing survey, while the white and Hispanic middle classes are embracing gated communities in greater numbers, African Americans are much less likely to live in such areas. Although gated communities take a variety of forms and serve myriad functions (from retirement communities to inner-city security zones), spaces that promote homogeneity and exclusivity can only have a chilling effect on democracy. Their net result, then, is division rather than diversification, thus "undermin[ing] the very concept of civitas, organized community life" (Blakely and Snyder in Ellin, ed., p. 85). Residential segregation—especially as exemplified in gated communities—thus undermines the city's potential to foster tolerance of and political alliances across class and racial differences.

In part gated communities are symptomatic of the second challenge to urban democracy: the rapid privatization of public space. In City of Quartz, Mike Davis observes that "the American city … is being systematically turned inside out—or, rather, outside in. The valorized spaces of the new mega-structures and super-malls are concentrated in the center, street frontage is denuded, public activity is sorted into strictly functional compartments, and circulation is internalized in corridors under the gaze of private police" (p. 226). Boundaries between public and private spaces are consciously constructed through the use of walls, landscapes, and police or private security guards, but they are also marked through less tangible (though no less real) obstructions: commodities some cannot purchase, real estate that some cannot afford, a history and traditions that are not commonly shared. Davis argues that while architectural critics (often members of the dominant racial group and economic class) are often oblivious to these sorts of spatial segregation, marginalized groups recognize these borders immediately (p. 226).

This is all to say that urban space is no longer exemplified by truly public places. Instead, urban space at the millennium is increasingly contained, sanitized, monitored and defended; its goal is not to promote democracy (as in the Athenian polis) but rather to provide safe spaces for (predominantly white) middle-class suburbanites to work, shop, and play (Davis, p. 227).

Whither the City Center?

Many predictions for the future of urban democracy are dire. As Elizabeth Wilson plainly states, "The result is that today in many cities we have the worst of all worlds: danger without pleasure, safety without stimulation, consumerism without choice, monumentality without diversity. At the same time, larger and larger numbers of people inhabit zones that are no longer really either town or countryside" (p. 9).

These indeterminate zones that are not "town or countryside" indicate a final challenge for the city as political center: a new kind of urbanism typified by exurbs or edge cities that are no longer economically dependent on an urban center and defy the "core-periphery" model of the twentieth-century city. In fact, some would argue, casting the "city as political center" at the new millennium is entirely misguided. Rather, as Robert Fishman contends, "the true centre of this new city is not in some downtown business district but in each residential unit. From that central starting point, the members of the household create their own city from the multitude of destinations that are within suitable driving distance" (p. 185).

The "city" as it exists for most people, then, no longer matches the traditional picture of centrally concentrated economic and cultural life but rather comprises travel routes and endpoints, transportation and communications networks that together form weblike metropolitan regions that often include more than one urban center and frequently span several states. Edge cities and exurbs, some commentators assert, are almost entirely disconnected from their nearest urban centers, containing within themselves all the necessities of life: opportunities not only to live (as in traditional suburbs) but also for commerce and leisure, functions previously delegated to cities. Faced with the dilution of urban public life, the "city on a hill" is replaced by the "dream home" as the site of utopian possibilities.

The diminishment of the city as political center raises the question of whether or not the city has declined in importance as an economic center. Some theorists of the global city argue that industrial restructuring and the development of sophisticated communications networks have rendered city space less crucial than what Manuel Castells calls "the space of flows," or the continual movement of people, goods, technology, and information over large distances, and the material infrastructure that makes this movement possible. For Castells, what is important is no longer centers but networks, which allows real-time interaction between dispersed actors. Others, most notably Saskia Sassen, contend that the past few decades have seen the emergence of truly global cities, which provide an immense telecommunications, design, and service infrastructure for transnational corporations. This has created an unprecedented concentration of wealth and labor power in these cities while at the same time forging even greater disparities of wealth.

Throughout history people have staked claims to better lives in better cities, knowing that this particular spatial form of organization carries with it the potential both for hegemony and equality, disenfranchisement and deliberation. The question for advocates of urban democracy is how to correct some of the egregious inequalities rendered by twenty-first-century urban planning practices and globalization and how to best modify governance systems to take into account the changing shape of metropolitan democracy. The shapes presently given to cities and towns, the lines drawn with concrete and steel or building codes and zoning ordinances—or the connections forged with digital communications networks—enable citizens to make material their ideas about assimilation, stratification, and segregation. Uncritically adopting the city as a normative ideal, however, ignores the ways in which the built environment can legitimate and perpetuate exclusion, inequality, and even disenfranchisement from the ranks of proper citizenship.

See also City, The: The City as a Cultural Center ; Democracy ; Public Sphere .

bibliography

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Blakely, Edward J. and Mary Gail Snyder. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997.

Castells, Manuel . The Informational City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

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Margaret E. Farrar

City, The (1909), a play by Clyde Fitch.[Lyric Theatre, 190 perf.] George Rand Jr. ( Walter Hampden), seems to have his world by the tail. He has been nominated to run for governor, is engaged to marry Eleanor Vorhees ( Helen Holmes), and has watched his sister, Cicely ( Mary Nash), make an excellent marriage to his private secretary, George Frederick Hancock ( Tully Marshall). But matters take an ugly turn when his father ( A. H. Stuart) dies after confessing that Hancock is a secret drug addict and his illegitimate son as well. Cicely refuses to divorce Hancock, but when Rand tells him he has married his own sister, Hancock goes berserk, kills her, and attempts suicide. George prevents him from killing himself, even though Hancock has threatened to destroy Rand's career by revealing the family secrets. Rand withdraws from politics and makes a clean breast of his situation. He feared his confession to Eleanor would mean the end of their engagement, but she remains loyal. Fitch and many of his critics considered this his best play, although just how successful he was in contrasting virtuous small‐town life with corrupting city life (his expressed purpose) is debatable. The play was the last he wrote and was not mounted (by the Shuberts) until after his death. The opening night was one of the most sensational in history, with near pandemonium reportedly breaking out after Hancock, learning the truth, screamed at Rand, “You're a God damn liar!” “Damn” had been employed before, but never the complete expletive.

CITY, THE.

This entry includes four subentries.