The Active Creation of the New City
William Hogarth - A Midnight Modern Conversation, circa 1732.
“a relationship is like an organism, you starved it so it turned against you. Same thing happened in the Blob.”
-Jerry Seinfeld
Thaddeus Russell’s fun book, Renegade History of the United States, starts with a section called ‘Turning Renegades into Americans’. It neatly obliterates the narrative that Americans went from puritan colonists, humbly yet heroically toiling away in the fields, straight to stoic revolutionaries who were guided by the highest ideals of enlightenment humanism. Instead, it paints a picture of one of the most lazy, diverse, free, joyous and depraved points in history. At the center of all this revelry was the early American city.
American port cities were filled with fabulously dressed, gender-fluid pirates. They brought with them interracial love, drugs, lawlessness and homosexuality. “Pirates brought to shore an anti-work, pro-pleasure ethos” Russell tells us. Women worked in “every imaginable profession”, owned land, owned businesses and divorced when they wanted. “Women were extraordinarily free during this period – most strikingly in their ability and willingness to leave their husbands”. Prostitutes not only operated openly but did so free of social stigma. Common store shelves contained “sheep gut condoms, pornographic almanacs and various pills and potions to cure venereal disease”. Blacks, whites, and Native Americans drank, played music and had sex in taverns that generously populated the colonial cities.
Colonial Philadelphia had around one tavern for every hundred residents, whereas Philadelphia in 2007 had one for every 1,000 residents. Russell says, “In New York in the 1770s, there were enough taverns for every resident of the city to drink in a bar at the same time. In Boston, in the middle of the century, it was estimated that liquor was sold in one out of every eight residential houses.” People didn’t just frequent taverns to socialize, “During the war of independence, Americans drank an estimated 6.6 gallons of absolute alcohol per year, equivalent to 5.8 shot glasses of 80 proof liquor a day for each adult 15 years or over.”
The founding fathers wrote extensively about the bad behavior of early Americans and knew that it was part of their project to turn these barbarians into upstanding citizens. One of their answers was to drive the public back to the land, away from the theaters, taverns and brothels of the cities.
Cities have been the center of social change, art and exchange of ideas since their beginning, right up to the present moment and yet radical thought on the topic of cities focuses almost entirely on critiques of the city, that they are dirty, dangerous, antisocial, violent, full of social inequity, etc. These critiques are important, but to consider them the final word on the subject has several issues. The first is the false dichotomy between nature and the city, born from the notion that humans are somehow above nature. The second is that, here in the US anyways, to condemn the city is to condemn many historically marginalized communities. The third issue is that cities have the potential to significantly shrink the environmental footprint of large communities of people. And the fourth is that it fails to distinguish between problems caused by capitalism and the state and problems caused by the characteristics of the environment itself.
The rural US is around 80% white, as opposed to urban and suburban centers which are around 60% white. In the 2021 Gizmodo article Is It More Sustainable to Live off the land or in the City?, Dharna Noor looks into the issue. From managing waste to dispersing resources and building upward, cities actually have a relatively low ecological footprint for their population density. The flip side of the coin is that living 100% off the land can have an enormous environmental impact. There are plenty of instances of primitive cultures, without industrial technology, completely depleting their finite resources, wiping out animal and plant species in the process. If even half of the world's population used wood stoves, the consequences for air quality and tree populations would be significant.
On a simpler note, and maybe a more anarchist one, people like cities. I like cities. I like the lights, the tall buildings, the views, the graffiti, diverse neighborhoods so authentic that you feel like you’ve actually traveled to another country, the food, the music, the history, the night-life, walkability, public transit, art galleries, theaters, professional sports teams, subcultures, and bars. And I love the people! From eccentric locals to world travelers – in a city, one conversation can transport you to the other side of the world and back, all throughout time, without ever leaving your bar stool.
In Erik Davis’s book High Weirdness he points out that the Timothy Leary’s idea of Set and Setting, the outsized impact of one’s mental state and environment has on a psychedelic experience, has a further promethean implication, that improvements to the environment could lift people and populations up to utopian heights. So for those of us unwilling to leave the city behind, what might the future of the city look like?
2013’s Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery is an exhaustive study of the way that cities impact the lives of their residents. From the housing needs of individuals to the aesthetics and dignity of public transit to the density and diversity of city blocks to the impact our modes of transportation have on the quality of our relationships with our neighbors, Happy City leaves no stone unturned. Though it is a data heavy book, full of statistics and interviews with experts, Montgonery’s earnest approach to “transforming our lives” necessarily leads to so many poetic passages about community, trust, human nature and the meaning of life you’d be forgiven for thinking they came from an impassioned political radical or ecstatic religious revelation. In the end, Montgomery uses real world examples to paint the picture of a beautiful complex, diverse, and equitable new city built not on shiny new technological infrastructure but on walkability, trust, human experience and sustainability.
Happy City is a book on design not politics, but Montgomery makes the important point that under state capitalism (not his terminology) you can’t simply design a better city and leave the inhabitants to flourish. With improvements come higher property values, and inevitably the poor are priced out. While this may complicate Montgomery’s argument, it bolsters mine, that the problems of cities are problems of state capitalism and that the city has potential. One of the central concepts of the book is walkability, a deceptively banal term. Walkability scores now appear in many apartment ads, it hides the seed of the cities potential, that the street level everyday relationships of the urban pedestrian make up the relationships that are the fabric of trust and healthy communities, safe neighborhoods and anarchism.
In The Meaning of the City, Christian anarchist Jaques Ellul makes the argument that the city is in fact the perfect site for the final redemption of humanity and the end of history in the founding of the New Jerusalem. In the city’s very imperfect humanness, societal inequity and alienation pushed to logical extremes, that we are finally forced to confront our inner demons and learned to be good neighbors. For Ellul, an anarchist and author of The Technological Society, an extremely influential text on green anarchism and the critique of technology, the New Jerusalem prophesied in the bible would be something like a global harmonious anarchist society. Could the community relationships of the walkable city be the essence of this new city?
In the 1950s, the French avant-garde collective the Letterist International (LI) began experimenting with a concept member Guy Debord termed psychogeography. Psychogeography was a playful attempt to deconstruct and rebuild the individual’s relationship to the urban environment with fun exercises like intoxicated wondering. Early publications of the LI periodical Potlach contained psychogeographical games and exercises, such as building and decorating a temporary home in a random urban area and hosting a party there.
Merlin Coverley’s book Psychogeography, covers a broad range of literary walking traditions centering around London and Paris, both before and after the Letterist’s and their successors, The Situationists, with the common thread being the place where psychology and geography meet. For the most part, Coverly finds psychogeography’s roots at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries in a sort of preemptive nostalgia for the city that was slowly being rebuilt by modern industrial technology – replacing a city centered around the pedestrian with one centered around commerce and, soon, the car.
By the time the project was taken up by Debord, the nostalgia had been replaced by an overtly political agenda to fight the indignity, loneliness, and boredom of the modern city. Since Debord, the subject as defined by Coverly has taken on an even larger set of approaches, aims, and world views, from catholic to absurdist, but most commentators agree that the subject has produced so few tangible results, certainly nothing like the actionable data of Happy City, that it can be considered a failure.
In the comprehensive book Seeing Like A State, James C. Scott points out how older cities, and the older sections of these old cities, in particular, are characterized by a certain natural illegibility that lends itself to freedom, insurrection and the pedestrian. Legibility and illegibility are the central theme of Seeing Like a State, the basic argument being that forest surveys, population censuses, and linear grid urban planning, all mechanisms for the state to keep tabs on its assets, oversimplify and homogenize environments to the detriment of human beings and nature. Raised as I was, in the post-war planning of the American west coast, I don't personally know this type of illegibility, but the potential to locally cultivate civic illegibility enchants me.
Perhaps it is the very subjective nature of psychogeography, its necessarily illegible results, that are in fact its biggest strength. My favorite of the later psychogeographical writers is the work of Stewart Home. A book of his collected works on the subject, Mind Invaders: A reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism, is a ruthless, gleeful and comprehensive deconstruction and cut up of the mythology that glues urban society together. Coverly quotes NME magazine on Homes’ work, “Extremely entertaining bollocks, combining gutter-nutter tabloidese with bitchy art-student gibberish”. Home’s surrealistic collage of occult conspiracy theory, new age mysticism, anarchist politics, and practical jokes invites the reader to create their own subject maps of meaning around their environment, stringing together strange synchronicities and hidden histories.
Perhaps with this subjective intentional play, we can rewrite illegibility back into the landscape and reanimate our everyday lives, recreating spaces for the mythic walker and harmonious community. One of Home’s better exercises consists of creating poker hands with found cards, games can be played with many players and across many geographical locations. To me, this exercise is perfectly characteristic of the play and synchronicity that should guide the active creation of the new city.
Ian Blumberg-Enge
Ian Blumberg-Enge is a model agnostic anarchist, writer, and utopian kook. His work is focused on the intersection of mysticism and anarchism. He is co-author, with Peter J. Carrol, of Interview with a Wizard, published by Mandrake of Oxford.