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Under the flag of urbanity
In my day job, I suggested the name “Urbanity” for the research project that Emily Hamilton and I co-lead. I wasn’t sure about it myself, but it stuck. The noun urbanity, of course, refers both to the quality of being urban and that of being urbane. At their best, cities make us civilized, refined, and gentle.
We certainly weren’t the first urbanists to think this way. In Douglas Rae’s provocative book City: Urbanism and its End, he dialogues with Bart Giamatti, president of Yale and the National League.
Giamatti: A city is not an extended family. That is a tribe or clan. A city is a collection of disparate families who agree to a fiction: They agree to live as if they were as close in blood or ties of kinship as in fact they are in physical proximity… A city is a place where ties of proximity, activity, and self-interest assume the role of family ties. If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will and imagination – through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.
Rae: The urbanist city was full of citizens who were committed to it – by choice, by chance of birth, by economic necessity, or by some combination of these. A salesman or theatrical performer who passes through a city is not its citizen; he is uncommitted, ungrounded – a mere visitor, from whom no particular loyalty should be expected. Here is a test: Does the city he visits have anything to say about who he is? Probably not. A suburban commuter is perhaps considerably more committed, but for her, life and work are things apart. Her identity is perhaps tied to the city, but only in part. A fully grounded city citizen would work full time within her city, would live her nights and evenings there, would educate her children there, would routinely shop in stores there, would worship there if anywhere, would live in a social network pinned down on the city. Its streets, saloons, restaurants, corner stores, plant gates, ballparks, and many more very particular and localized features would organize her life. It would be hard to say who she is without reference to her city.
Rae:
Such a city is, among many other things, a sort of school for urbanity – learning the skill sand insights required for getting along with differences, for moving in a crowd not consisting of your own landsman, for adjusting to people richer or poorer, more or less pious than oneself. Bart Giamatti wrote in praise of those skills under the flag of urbanity:Giamatti:
Over millennia, this refinement of negotiation – of balancing private need and public obligation, personal desire and public duty, into a common, shared set of agreements – becomes a civilization. This is the public version of what binds us. That state is achieved because city dwellers as individuals or families or as groups have smoothed the edges of private desire so as to fit, or at least to work in with all the other city dwellers, without undue abrasion, without sharp edges forever nicking and wounding, each refining an individual capacity for those thousands of daily, instantaneous negotiations that keep crowded city life from being a constant brawl or ceaseless shoving match. When a city dweller has achieved that truly heightened sensitivity to others that allows easy access, for self and others, through the clogged thoroughfares of urban existence, we call that smoothness urbane. We admire the capacity to proceed, neither impeded nor impeding. If our origins or sentiments are rural in orientation, we may not trust that urbanity, for it may seem too smooth, too slick, but we cannot help but recognize in it a political gift in the deepest sense… Throughout the several millennia of our Western culture, to be urbane has been a term of high praise precisely because cities are such difficult environments to make work.
Thanks to Brenden Little for transcription.
A lovely article featuring one of my favorite books about cities. Thank you very much for sharing.
Giamatti’s first statement is actually pulled from a 1988 speech he gave at the 20th anniversary of the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center in New Haven. That speech, though practically impossible to find in its entirety online, also deserves a read. It’s one of the most evocative testaments to the nature and fundamental humanity of cities. The full speech also includes a lengthy discussion of the differences between city people and suburbanites, but the transcript below is all I was able to find online:
When musing on cities over time and in our time—from the first (whenever it was) to today—we must always remember that cities are artifacts. Forests, jungles, deserts, plains, oceans—the organic environment is born and dies and is reborn endlessly, beautifully, and completely without moral constraint or ethical control.
But cities—despite the metaphors that we apply to them from biology or nature (“The city dies when industry flees”; “The neighborhoods are the vital cells of the urban organism”), despite the sentimental or anthropomorphic devices we use to describe cities—are artificial. Nature has never made a city, and what Nature makes that may seem like a city—an anthill, for instance—only seems like one. It is not a city.
Human beings made and make cities, and only human beings kill cities, or let them die. And human beings do both—make cities and unmake them—by the same means: by acts of choice. We enjoy deluding ourselves in this as in other things. We enjoy believing that there are forces out there completely determining our fate—natural forces, or forces so strong and overwhelming as to be like natural forces—that send cities through organic or biological phases of birth, growth, and decay.
We avoid the knowledge that cities are at best works of art, and at worst ungainly artifacts—but never flowers or even weeds—and that we, not some mysterious force or cosmic biological system, control the creation and life of a city.
We control the creation and life of a city by the choices and agreements we make—the basic choice being, for instance, not to live alone; the basic agreement being to live together. When people choose to settle, like the stars, not wander like the moon, they create cities as sites and symbols of their choice to stop and their agreement not to separate. Now stasis and proximity, not movement and distance, define human relationships.
Mutual defense, control of a river or harbor, shelter from natural forces—all these and other reasons may lead people to aggregate, but once congregated, they then live differently and become different.
A city is not an extended family—that is a tribe or clan. A city is a collection of disparate families who agree to a fiction: they agree to live as if they were as close in blood or ties of kinship as, in fact, they are in physical proximity. Choosing life in an artifact, people agree to live in a state of similitude.
A city is a place where ties of proximity, activity, and self-interest assume the role of family ties. It is a considerable pact, a city. If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will and imagination—through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.