PAUL PEA CHEY

Horace Miner once wrote, "Everyone knows what a city is, except the experts." Don Mar tindale, in his "Prefatory Remarks"¹ makes the same point: "The theory of the city somehow cannot account for what every journalist, poet and novelist knows__the city is a living thing." Martindale drives the point home by listing a few of the myriad elements that comprise a city, then continues, "One may find anything or everything in the city texts except the informing principle that creates the city itself." In the end, however, whether intentionally or not, Max Weber's ideal type of the city serves Martindale as a stand_in for a city theory. Weber's conception will engage us later in this essay.

In the absence of an informing principle, urbanists are much like the fabled blind men of Hindustan, trying to describe an elephant. Each is right in the semblance which he discerns, but wrong in concluding that what he has his hand is the organizing principle of elephantness. Yet the need and the desire for a basic theory are so persistent that every successful part_theory soon sounds like a candidate for the real thing. Meanwhile, any urban dimension, coherently viewed, is theoretically valid. But the dimension chosen in any given instance depends of the observer's stance and purpose. The urbanist likely has one advantage over the blind man of Hindustan. If he or she finds the elephant very like a rope, it is not because of the happenstance of reaching the tail first, but rather because of an interest in ropey things.

Given its assumptions, the question: "How is it possible in the modern urban environment to form the communities within which new human self-understanding and hence new values can emerge?" lands us somewhere midstream. It assumes that values exist, that they are essential, that they depend on human self_ understandings, which in turn depend on communities. Finally it implies that the urban environment is somehow problematic for communities. Any one of these questions deserves a monograph to determine what they entail before we take them finally as axiomatic. But overarching these problems is the implication that we know what "the modern urban environment" is, in a word, that we have a conception and theory of the city.

All this represents our human predicament. Always we must begin somewhere midstream, else we are doomed to infinite regression. For the purposes of this study and its authors, a better question can hardly be posed. Both our interests and competencies, presumably, pertain to the human component of the city rather than to its spatial order, its architecture, or even its demography. It is human beings, of course, who build cities; and as they are built they act back upon their builders in an unending spiral. Thus we confront both dialectic and paradox in the urban experience.

The human consequences of city growth is what the question intends to probe. It is an ancient question, yet ever new; and not merely with every generation, but also with every new turn of the urban screw. A recent urban textbook, in its opening remark, formulates the problem as the "difficulties cities have encountered in performing their communal functions."² Communal functions are the "we"_creating consolidations out of which the human self, in this instance "the new human self," emerges. Both Berger and the present study sense that these processes are jeopardized in the growth of cities. Cities presuppose and require a new type of human being, an autonomous and individualized self, which traditional societies neither required nor produced, but which nonetheless must be communally rooted.

THE AGE OF THE CITY AT AN END?

In the absence of a full_fledged urban theory, we are compelled nonetheless to posit a working definition with some degree of generality. For that purpose I shall accept Weber's conception of cityness, without seeking here either to critique or to defend it. As a direct route to the heart of that conception I shall take Martin dale's final prefatory sentence. Given Weber's definition of the city, Martindale concludes that "the age of the city seems to be at an end." Martindale's preface is thirty years old and a great deal has transpired meanwhile, both in historical developments and in the social sciences, of which we need to take account. Given the often explosive urban growth meanwhile, the claim that the age of the city is at an end at first blush may seem nonsensical. If we go deeper, however, we discover an important key to a decoding of advancing urbanization in the world today.

Allow me to quote the pertinent paragraph from Weber's text. "An urban 'community,' in the full meaning of the word, appears as an eternal phenomenon only in the Occident. Exceptions occasionally were to be found in the Near East (in Syria, Phoenicia, and Mesopota mia) but only occasionally and in rudiments. To constitute a full urban community a settlement must display a relative predominance of trade_commercial relations with the settlement as a whole displaying the following features: (1) fortification; (2) market; (3) court of its own and at least partly autonomous law; (4) related form of association; and (5) at least partial autonomy and autocephaly, thus also an administration by authorities in the election of whom the burghers participated."³

In effect, Weber takes here the European medieval city, with its Greek antecedents, as the "ideal type" of the city. The backdrop, of course, is the pre-modern era. The "city," thus conceived, contrasts starkly with the tribal, feudal, agrarian and patrimonial orders of the traditional world. A city is an autonomous and free community, composed of free, self_determining citizens. A military encampment, a royal court or a kinship_based settlement is not a city. The case in point is the walled medieval city, ruled under a contracted charter which had been wrested from the authoritarian rule of the territorial prince or from the Empire by independent craftsmen. "The City Makes One Free" (Die Stadtluft macht frei) was the slogan that inspired the serf to abscond. If he escaped detection for a year and a day, he was formally free as well.

In the above setting urbanization meant the growth in the number and size of urban settlements in populations and territories that had not been urban^.4 The measure of urbanization was thus the proportion of the total population living in urban places or changes in that proportion.⁵ In the Western world, however, the growth in the number and size of settlements and the increasing proportion of populations that was urban was linked to other development in technology, industry, and economic and political organization. Not only did the urban sector become dominant, but the entire population or society became "citified."

Urbanization thus appears as a finite process, a process that does not and cannot continue indefinitely. Sorok in and Zimm erman⁶ likened this process to a parabolic curve. In the beginning the rural_urban distinction does not exist because there are no cities. As the number and size of urban settlements grows a rural_urban contrast emerges and increases. At a more advanced stage, when the rural population is itself drawn increasingly into the process, the distinction declines. Cityward migration of rural peoples ends when the rural population has been incorporated into the urbanized whole. It should be noted in passing that the last decennial census (1920) before the Sorokin_Zimmerman text appeared reported that the urban portion of the American population for the first time had passed the 50% mark.

Martindale's postulate that the age of the city is at an end applies only in those instances in highly industrialized countries where the society generally has been urbanized. The proposition, moreover, entails a change in the definition of the city, and hence is subject to challenge. We noted above the distinction between the two word_families, urban and civic, the former referring to physical space, the latter to social quality. The earlier definition of urban referred to number and size of settlements and to population proportions residing in urban settlements. To shift the definitional focus to qualities characterizing entire populations, in fact, refers to a different phenomenon. Even in urbanized societies, differing popula_ tion densities persist, and in that sense Martin dale is wrong__high density/low density distinctions have not disappeared, and are unlikely to do so.

Sociologically, nonetheless, the argument can be sustained. The technologies generated in the industrial city have greatly reduced the friction of space. "Cities were evolved primarily for the facilitation of human communication,"⁷ hence the rise of high density settlements. High density, however, has certain negative side effects. With the advance of communication and transport technologies, deconcentration of urban settlements set in (see below). Much initially uniquely urban activity has now been delocalized and characterizes entire populations irrespective of place of residence. We have only to recall that our entire political vocabulary arose by extension of civic (urban) categories to entire populations, and hence to territorial states.

The flip side of this development, however, is the reversal at some levels of the dominance flow between cities and societies. As Martindale observes, the city has "everywhere lost its military integrity__its right to defend itself by military means." Its local self_sufficiency and self_determination has been superseded by larger national and supranational systems of action, of which it is now the dependent variable." "The modern city is losing its external and formal structure. Internally it is in a state of decay while the new community represented by the nation everywhere grows at its expense."⁸ Lewis Mumf ord makes the same point in the preface to his work, The City in History.⁹ The book opens, he says, "with a

city that was, symbolically, a world; it closes with a world that has become, in many practical respects, a city."

From Family to Individual

Before returning to our original question regarding the formation of "the communities with which new human self under_standing . . . can emerge," we must engage another, even more fundamental problem. We noted that the language of cities refers to qualities characterizing urban dwellers, specifically "citizenship," rather than to properties of geography or real estate. This notion was critical in Weber's definition of the city, which depended on the action of free citizens. Louis Wirth, whom Martindale mentions briefly, and whose 1938 essay, "Urbanism as a Way of Life,"¹⁰ has been considered by some as the most influential paper ever published by an American sociologist, defined the city as "a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of social heterogeneous individuals." It is not the family, but the individual that is the basic social unit. Wirth's essay is in fact a distillation of the classical literature on urbanism to which Martindale refers.

One of Wir th's predecessors, the legal historian, Henry Sumner M aine^,1¹ contrasted traditional, kin_based "stationary" societies with modern "progressive" societies. The distinction lies in the fact that in the latter instance, "The Individual is steadily substituted for the family as the unit of which civil laws take account." We readily recognize here the categories of social and political expectation that continue to make revolutionary history around the world in our own time, and even in such ostensibly advanced societies such as the United States. Every person, irrespective of variations in kinship, race, religion, sex, nationality, occupation, place of residence, claims equal dignity and right. One person, one vote. Coercive, ascriptive qualities, the ties and definitions of blood and of place, must yield to the self that each individual creates. This is an urban phenomenon. The city is the atelier of human individuality and personhood.

The Urban Malaise

Despite the fact, however, that historically the city has been the scene of human liberation, the growth and spread of cities has been accompanied by considerable gloom among both subjects and analysts of urbanization. Cities have been the scene of disorganization, alienation, violence, and crime. Curiously enough, American culture long harbored a strong anti_urban bias. I say "curiously" because here, if anywhere, the traditional definition of urbanization developed above is misleading. Low density and the long dominance of ostensibly rural life diverts our attention from the fact that the republican conceptions underlying the entire system are highly urban. The American system presupposes, in the words of Maine, that the individual has already been substituted for the family as the unit of which

the civil laws, indeed the values, the mores and institutions of the society, take account.

One can detect malaise behind the question. "How is it possible in the modern urban environment to form the communities with which new human self-understanding . . . can emerge"?--the implication is that this may not be happening. Berger is more explicit__cities are experiencing difficulty "in performing their communal functions." Indeed, we must go further, for at least in the American case we see serious problems, even breakdown, in many sectors of our urbanized society. Counter_urbanization, the increasing deconcentration of the population, is but one response to the problem.¹²

In fact, however, the situation is bewildering. Continuing advances in science, technology, affluence, and other areas are paralleled, as it were, by increases in alienation, rebellion, crime, substance abuse and the like. Yet the relationships among phenomena, both positive and negative, elude ready detection.

Still there are anomalies, lags and anachronisms. For women in the United States the shift from family to individual has not yet fully matured. "Status" continues to prevail over "contract," to use Maine's language, and Freud's old adage, that `anatomy is destiny', has not yet been fully surmounted in the society. The historical reasons for this are instructive and, if understood, could hasten progress. On the other hand, families increasingly come apart or are never established as families in the first place, as births out of wedlock become more common--and it is families above all that form "human self understanding" and hence autonomous selves.

From Consanguinity to Conjugality

Early human societies were family and kin based. In fact, for kin_based peoples the term "society" is inappropriate, for there is no enveloping social fabric beyond family and clan. In the rise of the Greek polis we witness the rise of the "public" realm over against the private, a realm in which further differentiation then appears, eventually that between state and society.¹³ Meanwhile, the rise of the public realm has meant a corresponding abridgement of the kinship system. As the public realm expanded and became more highly differentiated, it assumed the economic, political, and educational functions once vested in family systems. By the same token, household and family, now more limited in scope, specialize in the nature of persons.

Kinship, however, is a resilient force, and until the modern political and industrial revolutions the ascriptive power of kinship__the attachment and placement of people in the social scheme__remained decisive. While many champions of modernization viewed familial solidarities as obstacles to progress, the process was viewed more popularly and sorrowfully as family decline. In this climate the significance of these transformations were often obscured.

It will be argued here that the ostensible decline of the family was, in fact, its liberation. Contrary to widely prevailing views, especially among anthropologists, the intrinsic axis of the family system is not the blood tie or consanguinity, but the marital tie or conjugality. Failure to recognize and to come to terms with this fact in the modern world is the source of much of our trouble. To be sure, the resulting isolation of the marital pair and of the nuclear family is in itself a problem with which we have scarcely begun to cope. But this is merely a special case of the more general problem in the society.

Our concepts of human dignity and liberation require the attenuation of family_based ascriptive solidarities in favor of personal achievement. But liberation is understood too often as mere freedom from external constraints, as the possibility of impulsive, self_interested action. ("I'm entitled to my own happiness.") Ethicists, to the contrary, stress the importance of the proper balance between rights and duties. The problem is not merely perceptual or attitudinal; it is structural as well. The social, economic, and political dynamics of American society impinge on us in ways that permit, even foster, communal irresponsibility. The issues come into sharp focus in the mounting rates of marital breakdown, for one_sided individualism makes the marital "we" ever more difficult to realize.

This paper, however, is about the city, and not in the first instance about marriage or the family. The city breaks down and recombines the raw human material, as it were, much as a factory of synthetic materials breaks down and recombines substances given in nature. Thereby individuals are freed from the unwilled ascriptive ties given in nature, and are made available for recombination in the willed contractual relations that constitute society. The formation of communities "within which the new human self_understanding can emerge . . ." now confronts us on two levels: the infra_urban and the urban or societal.

On the former, or infra_urban, level, the family persists as the primary matrix of personal identity. But once reduced to its nuclear core or husband, wife and immediate offspring the family is often too isolated from communal supports of kinfolk and place to carry this freight. Thus, we confront the question: given modern urbanized contact, how can the communal underpinnings of family life be reconstituted and maintained.

On the urban or societal level, meanwhile, cohesion falters. The synthetic urban fabric consists, strictly speaking, of systems of roles which are separable from the persons (individuals) who perform them. This permits social collaboration on a scale unimaginable in pre_urban settings. Role_incumbents, on the other hand, invest only limited facets of the self in these roles, enabling them to participate in many diverse configurations of action. Role_based affiliations make only role_specific demands on the incumbents; the rest of the person remains beyond the reach of the given role set. Multiplicity of roles means multiple partial identities as well. Thereby personal autonomy is enhanced, not only because individuals choose among numerous roles, but above all because such diversity of experience and affiliation enriches and expands the socially constituted self.

Integration and cohesion, in both the self (or personality) and the city or society, now become problematic. In traditional settings, personal identity is anchored in family, clan or village. Apart from emigration or exile, alternative affiliations or identities scarcely exist. In urbanized societies individuals must "choose" their identity from among the various affiliations and possibilities the context offers^.1⁴ Many people are poorly prepared for this terrifying task. Indeed, we lack the understandings and norms essential for this task. Much of our insight is fragmented, locked up in specialized investigations. The lack of cross_fertilization between century-long reflections on the nature of the self in philosophy and modern inquiries in the behavioral and social sciences is a glaring example.

But how is "community" and/or cohesion to be formed and sustained on the level of the urbanized society? Emile Durkheim, one of sociology's founding fathers, proposed that the interdependence that is rooted in advancing division of labor provides a partial answer.¹⁵ On the expressive or emotional side of the human enterprise, nationalism has been perhaps the strongest communal force on the societal plane. But this has proven to be vulnerable to excess, perhaps largely because the nation state, in displacing numerous lesser loyalties, has had to assuage the emotional needs thereby generated. Yet in many respects both nation and state are too remote and impersonal to meet the very needs which they thus evoke. For this reason modern societies are emotionally volatile and vulnerable to symbolic fluctuation and manipulation.

It is unlikely, even on a theoretical level, and much less in practice, that a single answer can be given to the question put forward for this study. Societies differ too greatly in their point of departure, as in their resources, their composition and their possibilities. Urbanization nonetheless possesses features that we may well regard as intrinsic, and thus--however varied in manifestation--generally identifiable. It is these common features and our global diversity that makes the work of this study both possible and promising.

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.

1. Don Ma rtindale, "prefatory Remarks: the Theory of the City," in Max We ber, The City. (New York: Free Press, 1958), pp. 9-62.

2. Alan S. Be rger, The City: Urban Communities and Their Problems (Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Browne, 1978).

3. Max Weber, The City (New York: Free Press, 1956).

4. Hope Tisd ale, "The Process of Urbanization," 20, Social Forces (1942), 311-316.

5. Kinsley D avis, "The Urbanization of the Human Population," Scientific America, Sept. 1965.

6. Pitrim A. So rokin, Zimm erman, C.C., Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology (New York: Holt, 1929).

7. Richard Me ier, A Communications Theory of Urban Growth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962).

8. Don Marti ndale, "òrefatory Remarks: the Theory of the City," in Max Weber's The City. (New York: Free Press, 1958), p. 62.

9. Lewis Mum ford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961).

10. Louis Wi rth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," American Journal of Sociology XLIV (1938).

11. Henry Sumner Mai ne, Ancient Law (London: Dorset Press, 1861).

12. Brian J.L. Be rry, ed., Urbanization and Counter Urbanization (Vol. 11, Urban Affairs Annual Reviews; Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976).

13. Werner Jaeg er, Paideia. The Ideals of Greek Cuture (New York: Oxoford University Press, 1965), vol. I.

14. Bertram Bro wn, Mental Health and Social Change (Washington, D.C.: HEW, 1968).

15. Emile Durkh eim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Macmillan, 1933/1893).