Structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata

Over millions of years, the inland megacities of Delhi and Moscoqw will largely erode into sands and gravels, to be spread by wind and water into unreadable expanses of desert. The coastal cities of new York and Amsterdam, those claimed soonest by the rising sea levels, will be packed more carefully into soft-settling sediments. It is the invisible cities – the undercities – that will be preserved most cleanly, embedded as they already are within bedrock. The above-ground structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata: medleys of concrete, brick and asphalt, glass compressed to a milky crystalline solid, steel dissolved to leave trace impressions of its presence. Below ground, though, the subways and the sewerage systems, the catacombs and the quarry voids – these may preserve their integrity far into a post-human future.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) pp. 170-171 

All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere

All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) p. 138 

Urban space does not simply exist; the land first needs to be tamed

Urban space does not simply exist; the land first needs to be tamed. By the time the British arrived in Singapore in 1819, their approach to land and nature had already been determined. All it needed was the complementary will and the easy compliance of the population for the opening up of that territory. As soon as tigers 'appeared' to and for humans, their very existence needed to be wished away. The island was, quite simply, not big enough for two alpha predators.

Kevin Chua, 'The Tiger and the Theodolite: George Coleman's Dream of Extinction' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 216

Animals and the development of modern cities

The process of domestication of some animals like dogs, simultaneous with the systematic marginalization or removal from city centres of certain other animals, both wild and livestock, which started in the Renaissance and intensified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across Europe, is for Alÿs an integral aspect of the emergence of the modern era and the development of modern cities.

Miwon Kwon, 'Dogs and the City' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 203

Det mäktigaste av alla narkotika

Vilken lycka att arbeta från tidiga morgonen till sena kvällen för sig och sin familj, att ordna tak över huvudet, att odla upp jord för att sörja för födan, att likt Robinson bygga upp sin egen värld, imitera skaparen då han skapade universum, att i sin egen moders efterföljelse gång på gång återföds sig till världen!

Så många tankar som går genom medvetandet, så mycket nytt man kommer att fundera över när armmusklerna är upptagna av kroppsarbete, av grovarbete eller timmermansjobb, när man tar itu med förnuftiga uppgifter, som man kan lösa genom fysiskt arbete och som skänker belöning genom den glädje och den framgång deras lösande innebär, eller när man sex timmar i sträck håller på att yxa till någonting eller att gräva i jorden ute under en öppen himmel som genomtränger en med sin heta och välgörande andedräkt. Och just detta, att dessa tankar, dessa aningar och denna närhet inte låter sig överföra till papperet utan glöms bort där de hastigt fladdrar förbi är inte en förlust utan en vinning. Du stadens eremit, som med starkt svart kaffe eller tobak piskar på dina slappnade nerver och din försvagade inbillningskraft, du känner inte det mäktigaste av alla narkotika, det som ligger inneslutet i verklig nöd och en god hälsa.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 305

An entire new concept of the urban

Just as architects read the city as a historical palimpsest produced by social forces that become coded into material form – layers upon layers of ruins constituting a living fabric of social relations – Amazonia must be interpreted through the syntax of urban design, or else the concept of the urban must be crafted anew to incorporate the constructed nature presented by the forest. The relation between figure and ground is subverted, insofar as that which was defined as the surroundings – the antithesis to, or outside space of, the civic – are incorporated as a constituent part of an "expanded polis," within which humans and nonhumans cohabit in a common political space. In this process an entire new concept of the urban is made visible, one whose contours encompass a multi-species polity that we may initially find difficult to recognize because for too long our perspective has been confined to the epistemic enclosures of the Western city.

Paulo Tavares, 'The Political Nature of the Forest: A Botanic Archeology of Genocide' in The Word For World Is Still Forest (K. Verlag, 2016) p. 151

Urban life and class struggle

The collective labor involved in the production and reproduction of urban life must therefore become more tightly folded into left thinking and organizing. Earlier distinctions that made sense – between the urban and the rural, the city and the country – have in recent times also become moot. The chain of supply both into and out of the cities entails a continuous movement, and does not entail a break. Above all, the concepts of work and of class have to be fundamentally reformulated. The struggle for collective citizens' rights (such as those of immigrant workers) has to be seen as integral to anti-capitalist class struggle.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities (Verso, 2013) p. 139

Capitalist urbanization destroys the city

Capitalist urbanization perpetually tends to destroy the city as a social, political and livable commons.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities (Verso, 2013) p. 80

The concrete mixers churn and churn

The concrete mixers churn and churn until only a single row of corn grows between two cities, and is finally ground between their walls.

Tom Stoppard, 'Albert's Bridge' in Plays Two (Faber and Faber, 1996) p. 85

It would seem impossible to be a great friend to many people

As regards good friends, should we have as many as possible, or is there a liit to the number of one's friends, as there is to the size of a city? You cannot make a city out of ten men, and if there are a hundred thousand it is a city no longer. But the proper number is presumably not a single number, but anything that falls between certain fixed points. So for friends too there is a fixed number – perhaps the largest number with whom one can live together (for that, we found, is thought to be very characteristic of friendship); and that one cannot live with many people and divide oneself up among them is plain. Further, they too must be friends of one another, if they are all to spend their days together; and it is a hard business for this condition to be fulfilled with a large number. It is found difficult, too, to rejoice and to grieve in an intimate way with many people, for it may likely happen that one has at once to be happy with one friend and to mourn with another. Presumably, then, it is well not to seek to have as many friends as possible, but as many as are enough for the purpose of living together; for it would seem actually impossible to be a great friend to many people. This is why one cannot love several people; love is ideally a sort of excess of friendship, and that can only be felt towards one person; therefore great friendship too can only be felt towards a few people. This seems to be confirmed in practice; for we do not find many people who are friends in the comradely way of friendship, and the famous friendships of this sort are always between two people. Those who have many friends and mix intimately with them all are thought to be no one's friend, except in the way proper to fellow citizens, and such people are also called obsequious. In the way proper to fellow citizens, indeed, it is possible to be the friend of many and yet not be obsequious but a genuinely good man; but one cannot have with many people the friendship based on virtue and on the character of our friends themselves, and we must be content if we find even a few such.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009) pp. 179-180

The current destruction of the city

Universal history was born in cities, and it reached maturity with the city's decisive victory over the country. For Marx, one of the greatest merits of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class was the fact that it "subjected the country to the city," whose "very air is liberating." but if the history of the city is a history of freedom, it is also a history of tyranny – a history of state administrations controlling not only the countryside but the cities themselves. The city has served as the historical battleground for the struggle for freedom without yet having been able to win it. The city is the focal point of history because it embodies both a concentration of social power, which is what makes historical enterprises possible, and a consciousness of the past. The current destruction of the city is thus merely one more reflection of humanity's failure, thus far, to subordinate the economy to historical consciousness; of society's failure to unify itself by reappropriating the powers that have been alienated from it.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) pp. 125-126

Pseudocommunity and collective isolation

Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem of safeguarding class power by atomizing the workers who have been dangerously brought together by the conditions of urban production. The constant struggle that has had to be waged against anything that might lead to such coming together has found urbanism to be its most effective field of operation. The efforts of all the established powers since the French Revolution to increase the means of maintaining law and order in the streets have finally culminated in the suppression of the street itself. Describing what he terms "a one-way system," Lewis Mumford points out that "with the present means of long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control" (The City in History). But the general trend toward isolation, which is the underlying essence of urbanism, must also include a controlled reintegration of the workers based on the planned needs of production and consumption. This reintegration into the system means bringing isolated individuals together as isolated individuals. Factories, cultural centers, tourist resorts and housing developments are specifically designed to foster this kind of pseudocommunity. The same collective isolation prevails even within the family cell, where the omnipresent receivers of spectacular messages fill the isolation with the ruling images – images that derive their full pwer precisely from that isolation.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) pp. 123-124

What is urbanism?

What is urbanism? A superstructure of neocapitalist society, a form of "organizational capitalism," which is not the same as "organized capital" – in other words, a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption. Urbanism organizes a sector that appears to be free and accessible, open to rational activity: inhabited space. It controls the consumption of space and the habitat. As superstructure, it must be distinguished from practice, from social relationships, from society itself. [...] It is only from an ideological and institutional point of view, however, that urbanism reveals to critical analysis the illusions that it harbors and that foster its implementation. In this light, urbanism appears as the vehicle for a limited and tendentious rationality in which space, deceptively neutral and apolitical, constitutes an object (objective).

Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) pp. 163-164

Stanza of the self-imposed siege

In the Middle Ages it was fear to allot allotments inside fortified walls for growing food during assaults.

Today new forces attempted to siege the city — but from within.

Today it is the time of sustainable gardens to reincarnate the new spectres of siege — and the ‘moral equivalent’ of war.

The pacified horizon of sustainability manifests like a wartime without war, the hostility of a silent Ghost Army.

The patriotic war for surplus has indeed moved its home front to the inner front.

The patriotic war is now the war on surplus: on the individual calculation of energy, water, proteins, and any social appetite.

As there is no longer an outside, within the ideology of degrowth we have established the borders of our own siege.

Urban cannibals — eat the rich!

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 12

Stanza of the inorganic life

Urban cannibalism emerges from the biomorphic unconscious of the metropolis.

Innervated by flows of energy and matter, the urban landscape is alive.

Hydraulic forces ebb and surge through a tangled skein of canals and sewers, flowing water the main metabolism of the city.

But also buildings are liquid strata of minerals — just very slow.

It was eight thousand years ago: the city was born as the exoskeleton of the human, as the external concretion of our inner bones to protect the commerce of bodies in and out its walls.

As our bones absorb calcium from rocks, the inorganic shell of the city is but part of a deeper geological metabolism.

Fossils crushed and concealed within building’s bricks, organic memories of prediluvian beings petrified in the modern maze of concrete.

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 3

We must make a distinction between technique and mode of production

But we must then also make a distinction between such techniques of production and the mode of production which is their particular social form. We call the technical changes improvement and progress, welcome some of their effects and deplore others, and can feel either numbed or divided; a state of mind in which, again and again, the most abstract and illusory ideas of a natural rural way of life tempt or at least charm us. Or we can fall back on saying that this is the human condition: the irresolvable choice between a necessary materialism and a necessary humanity. Often we try to resolve it by dividing work and leisure, or society and the individual, or city and country, not only in our minds but in suburbs and garden cities, town houses and country cottages, the week and the weekend. But we then usually find that the directors of the improvements, the captains of the change, have arrived earlier and settled deeper; have made, in fact, a more successful self-division. [...] An immensely productive capitalism, in all its stages, has extended both the resources and the modes which however unevenly, provide and contain forms of response to its effects.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1975) pp. 293-294

The complaints of change

It is useful, for example, to see three main periods of rural complaint in which a happier past is explicitly evoked: the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the late eighteenth and early nineteenth; the late nineteenth and early twentieth. And it is clear enough that each of these corresponds to a period of exceptional change in the rural economy, which we find directly reflected in varying ways. But it is not only that each of these reflections comes to include other social and metaphysical ideas. It is also that the convention of the country as a settled way of life disturbed by unwanted and external change has been complicated, in our own century, by very similar ideas about towns and cities. The complaints of rural change might come from threatened small proprietors, or from commoners, or even, in the twentieth century, from a class of landlords, but it is fascinating to hear some of the same phrases – destruction of a local community, the driving out of small men, indifference to settled and customary ways – in the innumerable campaigns about the effects of redevelopment, urban planning, airport and motorway systems, in so many twentieth-century towns and even, very strongly, in parts of London. I have heard a defence of Covent Garden, against plans for development, which repeated in almost every particular the defence of the commons in the period of parliamentary enclosures. Clearly ideas of the country and the city have specific contents and histories, but just as clearly, at times, they are forms of isolation and identification of more general processes. People have often said 'the city' when they meant capitalism or bureaucracy or centralised power, while 'the country', as we have seen, has at times meant everything from independence to deprivation, and from the powers of an active imagination to a form of release from consciousness.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 291

The urban condition is becoming ubiquitous

What once could be described as mass regional suburbanization has now turned into mass regional urbanization, with virtually everything traditionally associated with "the city" now increasingly evident almost everywhere in the postmetropolis. In the Era of the Postmetropolis, it becomes increasingly difficult to "escape from the city", for the urban condition and urbanism as a way of life are becoming virtually ubiquitous.

Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis (Blackwell Publishing, 2000) p. 242

Glass is the concrete negation of dwelling

Glass is the concrete negation of dwelling. Not only because architectural form drowns in it, but, because glass, when so used, renders visible those who seek shelter within it. [...] The language of absence here testifies to the absence of dwelling – to the consummate separation between building and dwelling which no heterotopia is capable of remedying. The "great glass windows" are the nullity, the silence of dwelling. They negate dwelling as they reflect the metropolis. And reflection only is permitted to these forms.

Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’ in Oppositions, 21 (M.I.T. Press, 1980) p. 114

Stories and legends that haunt the urban space

Totalitarianism attacks what it quite correctly calls superstitions: supererogatory semantic overlays that insert themselves "over and above" and "in excess", and annex to a past or poetic realm a part of the land the promoters of technical rationalities and financial profitabilities had reserved for themselves.

Ultimately, since proper names are already "local authorities" or "superstitions," they are replaced by numbers: on the telephone, one no longer dials Opera, but 073. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) marks the city a "suspended symbolic order". The habitable city is thereby annulled.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) p. 106