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Title: Cities Against Centralization
Author: Greg Bryant
Date: 1992
Language: en
Topics: civilization, decentralization, history, democracy, the city
Source: http://www.rainmagazine.com/archive/1992/cities-against-centralization

Greg Bryant

Cities Against Centralization

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 Hüyük is the name we now use for this site in modern-day 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 Hüyük, the world's

oldest known city, survived some 1,000 years overwhelmingly as

hunter-gatherers. Such subsistence is usually assumed to reflect a

nomadic life-style, not an urban one.

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 Hüyük's. The

exceptions do not indicate 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 improved one’s chances of survival. Our social flexibility

certainly evolved before Catal Hüyük was founded. Probably very early in

that city’s history 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benefited from reduced environmental pressures, superseded by social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: this is

how Rousseau described 18th century Paris. There is some parallel to

this among citadels of power 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 itself a high point of civilization.

Because of natural and human pressures, townspeople come to see

unorganized interfamily relations as no longer sufficiently fruitful.

There emerges an apparent need for broader discussion of community

goals, ethical and practical. The society learns to depend upon this

discussion, as well as the benefits of carrying out a community plan and

the satisfaction of seeing the results. Participation in this kind of

community can become addictive.

There are exceptions of course -- there is pervasive evidence of

single-family homesteads, hamlets of a few isolated families, and

hermits engaging in either tactical or psychological refuge. Most people

lived in villages that needed to conduct rather little political

discussion on a day-to-day basis. But for others, the special kind of

community feeling in those small pre-industrial towns and cities, once

tasted, was difficult to get off the palate. When Sparta defeated

democratic Manitea, dismantled the city and dispersed the inhabitants to

villages, Xenophon suggests that the Maniteans suffered mostly

psychologically. When given a chance, they re-declared their city a

generation later, under no strictly environmental or commercial pressure

to do so. They just wanted their town back.

The city is the psychological and political center for much of recorded

history, partly because cities are where records are kept. But it must

be admitted that they can foster unusually vigorous social interaction.

Urban communities can hold as strong a place in the human imagination as

religions, ethnicities, nations, kingdoms or empires. What we today call

the Roman empire was in ancient times known primarily as Rome, the

Eternal City. To destroy their rivals the Carthaginians, some Roman

senators felt they needed to destroy the city of Carthage itself, a

difficult, rash, and genocidal deed whose ultimate consequence was the

political collapse of the Roman republic.

Many cities developed gradually from villages, castles, churches or

ports. But powerful ancient metropoles such as Rome, Carthage and Athens

established many cities at one stroke to serve as outposts and colonies.

Though quickly constructed for openly territorial purposes, these towns

were still meant to satisfy personal cravings for diversity and

interaction.

In most pre-industrial towns, ecologically responsible behavior was

perfectly compatible with the city's peculiar, vibrant level of regular

social contact. To imagine a kind of ecological city, one has to blink

away modern urban impressions, and visualize cities based in and served

by primarily rural economies, cities that produced goods mostly for

their own or their region's consumption and where urbanites helped with

their region's harvest. They were proudly local, willing to defend their

city's and their region's autonomy. Their casual contact would seem to

us today to be overwhelmingly personal. It was in these cities that the

original form of politics was born: regular group discussion and

face-to-face decision-making. This kind of direct politics has almost

disappeared in the mass media demagoguery of the modern age.

Today what we call politics is really statecraft, something done by

professional politicians and those who imitate their individualistic

manipulations in smaller groups. The change in the use of the word

politics, with its root of polis or city, reflects the astounding

changes that the world has undergone in the past two hundred years:

among them the formation of the modern bureaucratic nation state and the

invasion, through modern communication, of corporate values into our

social relations. An early example of the original politics, that of the

city, can be found in classical Athens.

The Athenian City-Democracy

An indication of unusually wide political participation in Athens is the

torrent of criticism Greek political institutions received from Greek

writers allied with the rich. In contrast, Roman institutions,

constructed to the advantage of the wealthy, were rarely criticized by

contemporary literate Romans.

The Athenian assembly gathered around 40 times a year, attended by as

much as 1/4 of the city's population. They were an experienced,

politically active group, rich farmer and poor peasant citizens alike.

When Theophratus criticizes peasants, he complains that they

inappropriately provide too much detail of assembly meetings to

neighbors in the countryside who didn’t make the gathering. We’d praise

this today as healthy grassroots communications.

A staggering number of Athenian residents were involved in running the

city and debating its future. It is difficult to compare its level of

participatory democracy to any city of its size since. From the end of

the 6th century B.C. for some two centuries, keen attendance at the open

assembly, selection by lot of 500 new people every year to serve on the

council, juries of up to 1,000 people, and scores of official posts

rotating regularly, point to a depth of citizen participation at odds

with modern ideas of politics.

Citizens participated broadly not only in decision-making, but in

carrying out policy as well. When a decision to go to war was made, it

was often a reluctant one since many of the people voting would

themselves have to go to battle. Assemblies meeting to choose among such

serious options were especially well attended. The close connection

between decision and implementation gave demagogues a very difficult

time in Athens -- no matter how well someone's speeches roused the

crowd, if their policies did not work their influence quickly dissolved.

Freedom of speech in Athens meant the freedom to speak and be heard by

the entire assembly. It meant the freedom to present legislation and

participate in the discussion prior to making decisions. The open public

assembly then had full power to act -- the assembly even structurally

dissolved itself for a short time in 411 B.C. Of course, the bulk of

public debate took place outside of the formal meetings, where even

non-citizens must have contributed.

A smaller council of 500 did what the full public assembly decided they

should do, and these duties changed constantly. This embodied a very

important lesson: in responsible government, representatives shouldn't

be given blanket power; instead, the full body politic must actively and

regularly decide the limits of the officials' powers, to allow for

changing circumstances. These specific limits must be determined in

person, constraining somewhat the scale at which this kind of assembly

system can be used. Athens was a very large body politic, perhaps a

hundred thousand citizens, so various mechanisms were found to ensure

that officials would not abuse their positions.

Most offices lasted for one year, could not be held twice, and were

followed by a public review of behavior in office. Influence mongering

was difficult since most offices were filled by a random drawing from

among all citizens, i.e. sortition, rather than through campaigning. Not

only did this prevent the buying of votes, but culturally it required a

deep commitment to educating everyone well enough to be loyal, competent

and principled public servants.

Athenians were, in a sense, extremely well educated. This does not mean

that they were literate, for this was mostly a verbal, interactive age.

For these Greeks, education was not a systematic program of lectures and

exams leading to certification, but rather the regular lessons and tests

of daily life. In such an active political community no one could be

shut out of unofficial discussion, since the future responsibilities of

the average citizen would be very great.

This immersion into community life was what developed the distinctive

individual. Rather than mold the citizen through the homogenization of

formal education, as Sparta did, the Athenians felt that individual

character and original opinion must develop in order to best serve the

city. A follower adds less than an independent, thinking individual,

enlivening important discussions on community direction. This was the

purpose of education, or paideia. Nietzche's complaint that genius can

develop only against the community doesn't take into account Athenian

ideals of personal development, and instead reflects the fear, among his

generation's elite, of the emerging impersonal era of mass politics.

Athenians not only encouraged individual ability -- laws often required

paid officials or jurors to take some stand in a debate -- they also

fought the creation of state structures that would limit the citizen.

Athens had no bureaucracy to speak of, making the phrase "city-state"

now applied to it seem inappropriate. The small administration changed

every year. The judicial system was not run by judges, but by juries

that were extremely large, discouraging bribery, and which were paid by

the city and selected by lot. They were diversely constituted and

empowered to interpret law, evidence, custom and notions of justice in

whatever way they felt fair. Yet courts were called only as a last

resort in resolving a conflict: prosecutors were fined if unsuccessful,

cutting down on unnecessary legal proceedings, and the overwhelming

social preference was settlement through informal mediation or sometimes

arbitration. Citizens over sixty years old were expected to make

themselves available to anyone needing mediation.

At every turn we see Athenians resisting state structure. They

considered the maintenance of standing armies in times of peace a waste

of the individual. In the end, however, they maintained a small empire,

in part because of the employment opportunities its navy offered some of

its poorer citizens. This was something of a circular trap they

inherited: the poor could find few other jobs mostly because of the

import of slaves captured in imperial looting.

Even within their empire the Athenians tried to convert others to a

direct democratic model of government, and in most subject cities they

counted on the support of the poor and the hostility of the rich. They

were well aware that their social and political achievements were unique

-- the theme runs through the best of Greek drama. But their ideas of

progress and empire were not boundless. For example, unlike many later

empires they were acutely aware of the limited ability of their local

ecology to sustain them.

Athens was the political center of a rural region, more like a modern

county than a city, with most of its wealthiest and poorest citizens

living directly off the land. Since the citizens of Athens were

overwhelmingly agriculturalists, it should not be surprising that

self-reliance was the mark of success in this city. In fact, those who

did not grow their own food were considered politically suspect -- how

could they form an independent judgement if they were not independent in

life? Because many of those who were not independent were urban manual

workers, this thinking is often misinterpreted as some general Greek

disparagement of work, brought on by the over-dependence on slave labor.

It was instead a disparagement of producers who were totally dependent

on buyers, and of employee-employer dependent relationships. Most

wealthy and poor citizens worked very hard for themselves and for the

community.

The community was of course not always united and cooperative. The

Greeks were keenly aware of the battle between rich and poor. The rich

often put up much money to hold festivals, developing a patron-client

relationship in city and countryside. This largesse was encouraged, and

its influence held in check, by Athens’ diverse political body.

Although it never developed the level of urban democracy Athens did,

Rome experienced a warping of a similar patron-client relationship, one

which took political power away from the poor and accountability away

from the rich, a consequence of self-sustaining wars. This is the urban

political atmosphere that spawned the gratuitous destruction and

enslavement of Carthage, leading to a burden on Rome’s poor and an

attempt by the Gracchi brothers to relieve it.

Reforming the Republic

Roman tombstones always list the state offices held by the deceased

during their lives, and classical Athenian tombstones never do. The rich

in the city of Rome aspired to the bureaucracy, to powerful official

positions that emerged from centuries of military growth. A magistrate's

imperium, with its root sense of command, allowed him to issue arbitrary

punishments against the populace without appeal. This is a very long way

from Athenian direct democracy.

In Rome the Republic held assemblies, but there was little discussion of

issues. The existence of the assembly merely maintained a fiction of

popular power. Citizens could only vote on legislation and candidates

presented to them through the senate. The assembly became just another

arena for political maneuvering among a corrupt elite, of a kind we are

very familiar with today.

The senate was the key decision-making body of the Roman republic,

basically an extremely exclusive lifelong club. There were no ways to

work within the system: Livy and Dionysis of Halicarnassus attributed

what early victories were made by the poor to riots and demonstrations.

The rulers of republican Rome succeeded in professionalizing politics,

in making it less personal. In parallel, the poor lost their sense of

community power, and very often community concern, at the center of this

growing military-bureaucracy. It's easy to understand the classical

difference between democracies and republics -- in one the masses act,

in the other they are acted for. But among representatives they

occasionally find a champion.

Around 135 B.C. Tiberius Gracchus was elected a tribune of the people.

He was unusually sensitive to his role, and risked a great deal to try

to repair the lot of the poor Roman citizen. Tiberius prepared

legislation and proposals, for the approval of the open popular

assembly, within what was traditionally considered the territory of the

senatorial elite -- a strategy for power redistribution that modern

radical politicians might pursue. He had the assembly vote to remove

from office tribunes in the pockets of the rich. He passed reforms to

redistribute lands to the peasants, lands that had been taken by the

rich to create plantations farmed with the new slaves from Carthage. For

his trouble Tiberius was clubbed to death by a mob of senators.

Gaius Gracchus, Tiberius' brother, was later elected tribune and pursued

the same course -- but he managed to create a serious problem for the

elite of the Roman state by passing laws to remove the senate from

complete power over the judicial system. He was assassinated by senate

interests, and the city plunged into increasingly violent struggles for

power until Augustus established himself as Rome's first Emperor.

The popular romantic notion that the senatorial republicans were in some

way the "good guys" versus dictators and emperors, must be displaced by

the evidence that it was the republican patricians' resistance to

democratic reform, both urban and rural, that led to the destruction of

stable city politics and eventually to Imperial rule.

Medieval Tensions

Around the 5th century, with the final collapse in western Europe of the

Roman empire and its formalisms and codes, came the widespread community

reassertion of informal local custom. Custom was both locally

distinctive and unwritten. Throughout the middle ages most political,

legal and economic systems were flexible: indeed those three aspects

were never considered individually. It was not until just before the

early modern period in Europe, an era we associate with the Renaissance,

that rigidity, formality and statecraft began again to seriously take

hold of daily life.

Informal custom and local common sense were the primary guides for

people in the middle ages, a time of unusually pervasive collective

rule. This does not mean that an egalitarian ideology prevailed: a loose

hierarchy was generally accepted as natural. But anyone with power had

to consult and come to agreement with their community. The basis of

these communities were assemblies, either town assemblies where everyone

could make themselves heard, or assemblies of nobles or representatives

meeting with a king. The idea of hierarchy wasn't much questioned as

long as the people in power acted responsibly, and as long as it was

possible to check corruption. If rulers overtaxed those who provided

their food, they might starve, so there were strong and deeply felt

social obstacles to abuse. When there was abuse, it was considered the

duty of those below to get rid of the abuser, despite lower social rank.

It was at this time when we first see the word 'commune' take on its

radical connotations: communities asserted themselves against the rising

nobility.

With population increases leading to a strengthening of the formality of

lordships and kingdoms in the 13th century, we see an increase in

charters declaring town rights. These were typically explanations of

existing custom presented to the nobility. Gradually the habit of

consulting with the community at large gave way to government by

committee, where not only did people need to evaluate their trust in

nobility, but also their trust in representatives attending various,

nearly invisible, small meetings. The transition to "committeeism" was a

subtle one, and though it surely seemed natural, it allowed

bureaucracies to organize decision-making without involving the public.

Yet even in these growing states popular pressure could easily assert

itself. Many communities and groups were easily organized in medieval

times, through the informal 12th century guilds of family, friends,

parish or craft, as well as through the more formal alliances of later

centuries. There was no topic truly outside an organized community's

domain: justice, public ownership, economic restrictions, parish

priests, or revolt. When decisions were made, strong unanimity was most

highly regarded, compromising consensus was accepted if unanimity was

impossible, and voting was considered a distasteful necessity on

occasion. Overall their cooperative decisions were successful in keeping

harsh domination in check.

In prehistoric times, towns like Catal Hüyük survived because they

represented advantageous cooperation, and the same can be said of many

medieval towns and cities. But if their neighborhoods were run by

conflicting crafts or families, the cities needed to form complex

governments to deal with internal conflict -- otherwise they would not

continue to enjoy the benefits of communal living. Sometimes these

actions led to further erosion of communal custom. In Italian communes a

town leader, the podestá, was often elected from outside, so as not to

be partisan to neighborhood family disputes. But an outsider could not

maintain custom and would lean increasingly on Roman and church-inspired

formalisms.

The necessary alliances of different interests within a city made

associations between cities a natural extension of politics. Cities

often formed leagues in defence against alliances of nobility. Many were

temporary, such as the Lombard League of the independent communes of

Northern Italy, whose sole purpose was to push out the German King

Frederick Barbarossa in the 12th century. Other alliances, such as the

2nd Rhenish League and the Swiss Confederation, aimed for more permanent

mutual support against the taxes and controls of Kings, Emperors and

Barons.

Most significant medieval history may be seen freshly as the actions of

alliances, and with this in mind we can see emerging awareness of the

problems with territorial centralization. When King John was forced by a

league of rebel Barons to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, the point was

unrelated to modern democracy, and was instead the maintenance of local

authorities against the King's abusive centralizing tendencies. Local

control was maintained through an alliance against the center. Kings and

Emperors were often elected positions, or treated as such, and the Magna

Carta was just one of many charters written at the time asserting the

customary collective responsibilities of people on different levels of a

hierarchy.

Cooperative associations were both pervasive and manifold in medieval

times. In Bologna, a town where many teachers and students gathered as

early as the 11th century, students felt cheated by both teachers who

did not cover much ground and by townspeople who overcharged for

lodging, clothing, food and books. The students formed a union, modeled

after the guilds, hence the name Universitas, University, meaning "all

of us" -- a medieval alliance still with us in greatly modified form.

In the 14th century many large scale alliances and interests became

formalized. The Church, nobles and patricians formed estate committees

to check the King's power within government. Demands for structural

reform arose, even demands to be freed from the hierarchy. Switzerland

is of course a prime example. In France in the 1350's Etienne Marcel

tried to unite merchants, artisans and the peasants of the Jacquerie

rebellions through the 3rd estate, an assembly meant to represent

everyone neither noble nor clerical. His attempt to create a union

against the King and nobility is of the same trend as Wat Tyler's

successful British peasant revolt in 1381, and Cola di Rienzi's

insurgent government in Rome in 1347. Cola called for an Italian

confederation of communes, and 25 Guelf towns sent him representatives.

As trade increased and cities grew, monarchs tried whenever possible to

tax their wealth, setting the economy of the cities against the

territorial state. Many, such as the free cities within the Hapsburg

Empire and their various leagues, resisted and maintained commercially

supported independence for centuries. However, the wealthy classes

within the cities generally made political amends with the royalty of

the solidifying territorial states, often against the interests of

peasants or rural barons. The territorial states swallowed the cities,

their wealthy merchants, independent artisans and working poor alike.

Urban governments then tended towards tyranny, maintained by gun and

guile, and were plagued by insurrection.

Unfortunately for absolutist states, they were in the end unable to

digest all the forces represented by cities, and it wasn't until the

failure of absolutism that new models of the territorial state could

emerge. And these new models had far more potential for centralization

than any previously.

Modern Times

In France, where royal absolutism was most developed, the Bourbon Kings

regularly taxed commerce beyond the economy's limits, making merchants

pine for a constitutionally limited monarchy, like Britain's. Revolution

against the Stuart Kings in the 17th century had weakened the British

monarchy, and this unfettered the merchant economy. Government support

for import and export set the stage for the massive textile production

of the industrial revolution.

The French monarchy went bankrupt in their support for the American

Revolution against rival Britain. The ensuing dissatisfaction with the

Bourbon administration was one of the causes of the French revolution.

Contempt for a monarch's centralizing tendencies was nothing new: the

medieval rich were a united class only in the face of peasant

rebellions. Positions like the prime minister, originally the King's

valet, smacked too much of the kingdom as an extension of the King's

household, and angered nobles who felt that power within their own

households was then undermined.

Aristocratic discontent created opportunities for the bourgeoisie, the

extremely wealthy, free-thinking group that had evolved around commerce.

With the support of the masses the modern alliance of urban insurrection

with social revolution was forged. This opened the door, which the

bourgeois then tried to shut, on a wildly democratic, revolutionary

experiment in the heart of the former absolutism: the Paris commune of

the sans-culottes. By 1792, sectional assemblies all over the city were

opened to every class, and the poor were paid to attend. The sections

ran their own police, relief and defense against the reacting

aristocracy. The assemblies succeeded in maintaining the economy and

judiciary for their sections, but within two years they were betrayed by

the hardening revolutionary government under Robespierre.

With the revolution came a major component of modern centralization:

patriotism. In France, the revolution gave a bigger portion of the

population than ever before a feeling of having a stake in their

country, more than could have ever been possible under Kings. This

patriotism allowed Napoléon to tear through Europe's aristocracies, and

develop what was at the time unprecedented central authority.

The downfall of royal power, and the emergence of an urban-based

professional class of bourgeois politician, made room for a new economic

trend. By the middle of the 19th century, after Britain's successes in

the cotton trade, industrialism began to take hold, supported by capital

and nations in a force that is one of the most destructive of modern

times: self-sustaining growth.

Transport costs had kept inland exploitation in check for centuries: the

situation in 1800 was barely better than it was in ancient times, when

it was cheaper to ship from Constantinople to Spain than overland 75

miles. But the railroad, invented originally to haul coal, opened the

land for exploitation of people and resources. The return on money

invested was phenomenal, making possible the colonization of both inland

Europe and what was to become the third world.

Expectations for investment returns were high, and the economic pressure

on borrowed money has continued to drive capital and technology into

every corner of natural and human existence. For the sake of profit,

ancient life-styles were uprooted, spawning romanticism, starvation,

migration and the dissolution of medieval agrarian self-sufficiency.

When the economy slowed down towards the end of the 19th century,

formally laissez-faire states bean to panic and compete with each other

for markets and resources, leading to wars in the 20th century of

unprecedented violence.

Transactions within the tight trading districts of cities facilitated

this growth, but cities cannot be completely blamed for the new

economies. The industrial revolution started in the countryside,

spawning new cities as it grew successful. Cities and their citizens can

most usefully be seen as tools of the process, but not passive ones:

they resisted many changes along the way.

Artisans involved in export production, such as home weavers who were

paid to use hand looms well into the industrial revolution, were

completely lost as automation began to take over. Their resistance had a

major impact on the first half of the 19th century, such as in the

nationally organized Chartist movement in Britain, and in most of the

revolutions leading to the continent wide rebellions in 1848. Guilds,

and later labor unions, were often banned because of the insurrectionary

potential of artisans, and central city police forces now first appeared

to put down riots over food and living/working conditions. Rioting

occurred more often in cities than in the countryside in part because

there were more obvious sites for protest. The rural situation was much

worse, however. In Ireland the famine of 1846-1848, during which one

million died and another million emigrated, was a consequence of the

pressure for rents by absentee landlords. The pressure forced Irish

peasants into dependence on the highest yield crop of the day: the

potato.

A civic resistance now fought the massive centralization taking place

for the sake of capital. In the worst of times in Europe, both before

the 1848 revolts and after the depression starting in the 1870's, mutual

aid societies, revolutionary organizations and socialist groups pushed

their way onto the political stage, leading many nationalist movements

and toppling many monarchs. These groups pushed for democracy, usually

in the form of electoral republicanism. It must be pointed out that

modern democracy developed in reaction to capitalism, mostly in the

second half of the 19th century, and in spite of the hesitance of a

liberal commercial class who at the time paid mostly lip-service to

equal rights.

The corporate elite looked for easier game to exploit than the newly

enfranchised people in their own countries. They began to look towards

overseas conquest, and the popular support it would bring in the

industrialized world. This mix of mass politics and gunboat economic

growth ended in territorial wars among countries no longer satisfied

with the kind of sophisticated, bounded political treaties Bismarck was

so good at forging in the late 19th century. Industry and capital grew

in great leaps, and national ambitions replaced civic ones as cities

grew larger and more impersonal. When conditions grew bad enough in

cities to affect the wealthy, great expenditure and management was

forthcoming, along with ghettos and police to isolate "the problems".

Such local and international exploitation sparked global migration,

overwhelmingly to urban centers. Within cities to this day we see very

strong immigrant neighborhoods not so easily assimilated to corporate

consumer culture. Cities are hotbeds of activism, their problems and

density often sparking cooperation that cannot be easily detected, for

example, in the suburbs of the United States, where much of the country

lives. It is difficult to imagine insurrection in suburbia, with

political discussion limited by distances and a prevailing tendency to

hire government to do politics and run cities. In suburbia we can see

considerable loss of social cohesion, and it has become obvious that, to

use Bookchin's phrase, society's grassroots are turning to straw.

When urban governments find themselves without money, as they do today,

public volunteerism begins to look more attractive. But officials still

hold onto the decision-making power, both because that is what they know

how to do and because citizens believe that the city is a business for

which one must employ professionals. But what better way to satisfy

increasing numbers of volunteer citizens than to give them back the

ability to make serious decisions? Decentralized cities can run with

much less money than centrally administered ones because the work that

gets done is for your friends and neighbors, who pay you back in similar

fashion without participating in the cash network. Athens and the first

Paris commune were both such "amateur cities", where the government's

role is to help organize, not to force ideas or perform services.

The ideals of city-democracy have not disappeared. Town meetings, still

common in New England, have a respectable resonance in US culture, and

these kind of assemblies are the key to uniting people on the local

level. In confederation it is still possible that assemblies in towns,

cities and the countryside can break up the enormous centralized power

of wasteful, hulking nation-states.