Cities Hgainst Centralization by Greg Bryant The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, Murray Bookchin, Sierra Club Books, 1987, $22.95. Also published as. Urbanization Without Cities, Black Rose Books, 1992, paperback $19.95. It might seem like cities are the last places we should look for ecological sensitivity and social cooperation. After all, ‘ ‘urbanization ” is a word we often use to describe the obliteration of wild and rural habitat, and the urban and suburban varieties of human alienation. But it is only since the rise of industrialism, and the voracious economic growth that parallels it, that cities have come to remind us of little more than insensitive development. In their defense, city dwellers could produce a long history of resistance to feudal militarism, national and imperial centralization, industrial power, and capital penetration. Certain peoples in towns and cities have represented the best of humanity through cooperative self- reliance, mutual respect and care, participatory democracy and widespread solidarity. Murray Bookchin re-examines the history ofthe western world with an eye on urban folk's continuous battle against centralization and domination. He moves citizens and their political struggles to the foreground of urban history, challenging studies that unfortunately, for nearly a century, were written mostly for the benefit ofprofessional urban planners, whose job was often to quiet civic participation. Bookchin’s account is a pioneer effort that challenges misleading images of modern industrial achievement and triumphant western democracy. Whatfollows touches upon, by way of some substitute examples, only a few ofthe key points in his book, a series of unusual historical highlights relevant to modern ecological, political and social crises. Communal Cohesion Nearly 10,000 years ago some very lucky people found a terrific spot by a river in a rich forest not far from major runs of ruminant animals. Catal Hiiyuk is the name we now use for this site in Turkey. A city of some 6,000 people emerged, with houses pressed up so tightly against one another, without any streets, that the town was traversed on rooftop. Since these urbanites were capable of planting and harvesting, we call them neolithic. But the inhabitants of Catal Hiiyiik, the world’s oldest known city, survived some 1,000 years overwhelmingly as hunter-gatherers. Such a lifestyle is usually considered nomadic, not urban. Many other Mesopotamian cities, rooted in fertile river valleys, grew through reliance on improving agricultural techniques such as irrigation. Yet there is evidence of agriculture emerging very early without cities: the Wadi Kubbaniya of prehistoric Egypt were nomads, using the planting and harvesting of crops as just one of many means of survival. In other words, cities and agriculture do not necessarily require one another. Farming usually becomes a major tool for maintaining settlements in surroundings not so idyllic as Catal Huyiik’s. The exceptions do not imply that the neolithic urban trend wasn’t powerful, but they show that there must be other reasons why people pile upon one another besides the need to manage agricultural land. Humans were not the first species to find that mutual aid and cooperation improves one's chances of survival. Our social flexibility certainly evolved before Catal Hiiyiik was founded. Probably very early on in that city's career, people encountered serious health and sanitation problems with the dense living, yet the community stayed together a thousand years. Those who were uncomfortable left, but those who stayed benefited from reduced environmental pressures, superseded by social pressures within a system protecting a large number of families. Commercial pressures, such as buying cheap and selling dear along trade routes, are often considered of primary importance in the formation of cities. In Western Europe nearly 1,000 years ago, rising population stimulated the rapid growth of towns and cities, which became centers of regional trade and craftwork. Yet commerce, of the kind that in the late middle ages gave magnates of trade and production great political power, was of little importance in the large cities of the ancient world, difficult as this may be to imagine. Ancient Rome, which didn’t develop a commercial port until it was already a major power in Western Europe, was mostly a center of consumption, military bureaucracy, and local production. This is not surprising — a general rule for absolutist territorial states is that their largest cities produce very little. They are parasites, as Rousseau noted of 18th century Paris. There is some parallel to this in our own time: many of our biggest cities consume much more than they produce in tangible goods, even those which began as industrial manufacturing centers. But ancient west Europeans lacked respect for commerce — buying and selling was done but there were no great ancient trading houses, nor a Roman bourgeoisie. Commerce as we know it did not rule the ancient world. Looking only for the environmental, bureaucratic or commercial pressures that force people together into cities sidesteps what was to them an important cohesive force: community ideology. 2,300 years ago Aristotle protested against describing cities as strictly practical - he felt that strong community was a high point of civilization. Because of the pressures, towns pass a point where unorganized interfamily relations no longer seem suffiPage 32 Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2
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