Preface

This volume is the result of a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary study initiated in a semester-long colloquium sponsored by the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy and National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. Some of the participants from various countries assisted also in a concurrent seminar at The Catholic University of America entitled, Metropolitan World: Tradition and Modernity. This volume is being published in order to extend the conversations begun during that semester and to catalyze additional inquiry into the issues of urban settlement, tradition and change. It is one attempt to respond to the need for international forums on timely issues that can enable us to think globally and to act locally.

The paucity of philosophic clarification that is rooted in the honest-to-experience reality of contemporary life makes this study on urbanization especially attractive, for it adopts a multi-disciplinary approach toward understanding the urbanize human condition. In addition it illumines the thought process by drawing on the resources of various cultural expressions and traditions. Such reflection can foster both the appropriation of cultural insights and the application of practical critique to current dilemmas which emerge at the intersection and interchange of forces which form contemporary urban situation in various cultures throughout the world.

The energy of vital cultural traditions and the dynamic character of urban modernity make such intersections interesting challenges and moving experiences of profound consequence for the human spirit and its encasement in social reality. To maintain scientific and systematic discipline over such an array is difficult, yet the tradition of intellectual questioning and applied dynamism which gave birth to the theory and practice of the modern city has been charted.

Francoise Choay's chronological chart of the modern philosophical social mathematical and natural sciences and their application in correlation with events in the development of city planning may be useful as an intellectual map of the journey you are invited to take (see Table I). This chart is also a semiontic algorithm which suggests relationships of an earlier era's tradition to World War I and II and massive transformation of human settlement and aspirations which followed these enormities.

The catastrophic and planned destruction of cities and civilizations and the weakness of moral vision measured and guided by an ethics of intention prompted some in the post world war period to announce absurdity as the only viable and honest symbol of the species. The same crisis prompted others to return to the humble origins and experiences of human praxis and to the deep insights into the human condition recorded by the ancients. For example, Camus' reflection on modern rebellion, which lead to his recovery of limits symbolized in the return to Ithaca--the ancient order and place of Odysseus--are worth pondering:

The errors of contemporary revolution are first of all explained by the ignorance or systematic misconception of that limit which seems inseparable from human nature and which rebellion reveals. . . . To escape this fate, the revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits. If the limit discovered by rebellion transfigures everything, if every thought, every action that goes beyond a certain point negates itself, there is, in fact, a measure by which to judge events and men. . . . Rebellion, at the same time that it suggests a nature common to all men, brings to light the measure and the limit which are the very principle of this nature. . . .

The men of Europe, abandoned to . . . the shadows, have turned their backs upon the fixed and radiant point of the present. They forget the present for the future, the fate of humanity for the delusion of power, the misery of the slums for the mirage of the eternal city, ordinary justice for an empty promised land. They despair of personal freedom and dream of a strange freedom of the species; reject solitary death and give the name of immortality to a vast collective agony. They no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life. Its blind men entertain the puerile belief that to love on single day of life amounts to justifying whole centuries of oppression. That is why they wanted to efface joy from the world and to postpone it until a much later date. Impatience with limits, the rejection of their double life, despair at being a man, have finally driven them to inhuman excesses. . . . The Rebel . . . the only original rule of life today: to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god.

At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggle and destiny of all men. We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, and the generosity of the man who understands. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which help;s one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the new dawn. With this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our time, and a Europe which will exclude nothing. Not even that phantom Nietzsche, who for twelve years after his downfall was continually invoked by the West as the blasted image of its loftiest knowledge and its nihilism; nor the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbelievers' polt at Highgate Cemetery; nor the deified mummy of the man of action in his glass coffin; nor any part of what the intelligence and energy of Europe have ceaselessly furnished to the pride of a contemptible period. All may indeed live again, side by side with the martyrs of 1905, but on condition that it is understood that they correct one another, and that a limit, under the sun, shall curb them all. Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.

The somewhat peaceful decades since this account and prescription have yielded a remarkable recovery of philosophical anthropology, a phenomenology of religious experiences, and a development of historical and economic analysis from which substantial retheoretization of urbanization and social reality have emerged. The application of such findings are needed now more than ever, for there has been no abatement of the processes which drive urbanization: population growth, a diminishing of rural isolation, and technological, communication, cultural and economic expansion. The world-wide expansion of urban life and the challenge of urban dynamics in various countries prompted the inquiry and reflection which has constituted this study.

Clearly the exchange among the participating scholars and the insights generated by the interaction of scholars from cities throughout the world can only be extended by aggressive reading of its findings. Equally important are the reader's receptive gaze into the authors' experiences of the drama of urbanization. A rethinking of, and reflection upon, the mysteries of being, of history and of diversity is the additional purpose of this presentation.

This study is significant because it moves beyond the analysis of urbanization and the descriptions, explanations and prescriptions of economic and urban studies literature. Such literature by and large ignores what Fustel de Coulanges reminds us about cities:

Civitas, and Urbs, either of which we translate by the word city, were not synonymous words among the ancients. Civitas was the religious and political association of families and tribes; Urbs was the place of assembly, the dwelling-place, and, above all, the sanctuary of this association.

We are not to picture ancient cities to ourselves as anything like what we see in our day. We build a few houses; it is a village. Insensibly the number of houses increases, and it becomes a city; and finally, if there is occasion for it, we surround this with a wall.

With the ancients, a city was never formed by degrees, by the slow increase of the number of men and houses. They founded a city at once, all entire in a day; but the elements of the city needed to be first ready, and this was the most difficult, and ordinarily the largest work. As soon as the families, the phratries, and the tribes had agreed to unite and have the same worship, they immediately founded the city as a sanctuary for this common worship, and thus the foundation of a city was always a religious act.

 

Thus, it is through the rearticulation of the contemporary civitas and the critical clarification of the signs which really represent it that the discoveries of the various inquiries can be anticipated and interpreted. The exploration of civitas and the movement toward an ethics of consequences has become increasingly important in an era of metropolitan and world-wide interdependence. The philosophic exploration of the tradition of analysis and action and the urban experiences and cultural traditions of various social realities are intertwined in this study. In this regard the volume complements the works of Eisenstadt and Schachar, Society, Culture and Urbanization (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1987), of Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), Dogan and Kasarda A World of Giant Cities and Mega-Cities (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1988).

The post WWII urban era generation of persons throughout the world has been seduced by reductionisms of various sorts as the focus of intellectual, economic and technical change reduced persons to workers, consumers and bureaurocratics. The emergence of rebellious citizenries in the face of desires and dilemmas excited by expectations, inequities and claims that impinge upon assumed prerogatives are signs of discontent with the managerial state and its underpinnings. The eruption of rebellious citizenries, chronicled by Manual Castello in City and the Grassroots, suggests that the city is the shaping locus and force of modern history. Extreme manifestations of this could be seen in the Khimer Rouge and Senderoluminosa and their violent and total critique of urban form. Conversely, the recovery of the political at the level of the neighborhood-community may be the key to a redevelopment.

In economic and social crises persons look beyond economics and sociology. While some of the basic search for meaning turns toward radical action founded on disillusionment with the symbols of existing order, a counter position argues that it is good to live in a good city. Burchard argues that such a place contained the following measures of urban amenities:

This array of human expressions should be extended to include as well other associations and communities such as churches and universities, political parties, self-help cooperatives, and means of production.

Curiously, the breadth of this field indicates that a single-minded focus on the government-political recovery, such as lies at the base of Castells' aspiration for overcoming the experiences of modernity, is insufficient. At bottom, Castells' invocation of Lewis Mumford's quote from Rousseau: "Houses make a town, but citizens make a city," reveals the tradition and legacy he hopes to bequeath. But the modern reality is more complex and differentiated. The honest-to-experience reality of the city reveals such a semiontic, institutional and cultural pluralism that it can be discerned only at the meridian, that is, on the one hand, the enlightenment vision of Voltaire implied in his celebration of privacy and anti-urban haven of his anti-hero Candide cultivating his garden and, on the other hand, the totalitarian vision of the mass-democracy of autonomous persons proposed by modern, comprehensive, citizenship.

Contemporary cities are the intersection of various spheres of human association and symbolization. These constitute various little worlds of meaning, or cosmions as Voegelin reports.

For man does not wait for science to have his life explained to him, and when the theorist approaches social reality he finds the field pre-empted by what may be called the self-interpretation of society. Human society is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to be studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon. Though it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole a little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization. It is illuminated through an elaborate symbolism, in various degrees of compactness and differentiation--from rite, through myth, to theory--and this symbolism illuminates it with meaning in so far as the symbols make the internal structure of such a cosmion, the relations between its members and groups of members, as well as its existence as a whole, transparent for the mystery of human existence. The self-illumination of society through symbols is an integral part of social reality, and one may even say its essential part, for through such symbolization the members of a society experience it as more than an accident or a convenience; they experience it as of their human essence.

The modern city is a maze of interesting cosmions which simultaneously are both concentrated and decentralized. To govern justly such complex settlements--social realities--depends on the ability to tolerate semiontic, institutional and cultural diversity. One step toward such a capacity is the development of a cosmionology that can hold its own among the sectors that are etched on the large urbanized zones of this planet.

A landset view of this multiplicity of cosmions is required. This collection of articles is an intermediate view--an angle of vision which establishes the horizon from which a fuller reading of our commonalities and differences may be observed. Such observations surely will suggest judgments and courses of action so that learning and doing can be yoked together for the commonweal of pluralistic cities. Only this can enable them to resist the impulses of homogenization and standardization which paradoxically grow weaker as they impose their claims on the pluraformity of reality.

John Kromkowski