💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › colin-ward-notes-on-anarchist-cities.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:55:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Notes on anarchist cities
Author: Colin Ward
Date: March 1975
Language: en
Topics: notes, cities, urbanism
Source: Retrieved on 31st August 2021 from http://www.panarchy.org/ward/cities.html
Notes: A review of some approaches towards an anarchist city. Published in the joint issue of Resurgence and Undercurrents, March 1975.

Colin Ward

Notes on anarchist cities

Governments are invariably based in cities: whoever heard of a nation

ruled from a village? Very often they actually build cites to house

themselves: New Delhi, Canberra, Ottawa, Washington, Chandigar and

Brasilia are examples. And isn’t it significant that the visitor who

wants to sample the real life of a place has to escape from the city of

the bureaucrats and technocrats in order to do so. He has to go ten

miles from Brasilia for example, to the Cidade Libre (Free Town) where

the building workers live. They built the “City for the Year 2000” but

are too poor to live there, and in their own homemade city, “a

spontaneous wild west shanty-town life has arisen, which contrasts with

the formality of the city itself, and which has become too valuable to

be destroyed”.

Anarchism—the political philosophy of a non-governmental society of

autonomous communities—does not at first sight seem to address itself to

the problems of the city at all. But there is in fact a stream of

anarchist contributions to urban thought that stretches from Kropotkin

to Murray Bookchin historically, and from John Turner to the

International Situationists ideologically. A lot of the people who might

help us evolve an anarchist philosophy of the city would never think of

trying because in spirit, though less often in practice, they have

abandoned the city.

Particularly in Britain, the most highly urbanised country in the world,

we have for centuries nurtured a myth of rural bliss —a myth cherished

by people all across the political spectrum. Raymond Williams in his

book The Country and the City has shown how all through history this

myth has been fed into literature, always placing the lost paradise of

rural bliss in some past period. And E. P. Thompson comments that what

is wrong with the myth is that it has been “softened, prettified,

protracted, and then taken over by the city dwellers as major point from

which to criticise industrialism. Thus it became a substitute for the

Utopian courage of imagining what a true community, in an industrial

city, might be—indeed of imagining how far community may have already

been attained.”

Like Williams, he sees this as a debilitating situation: “a continuous

cultural haemorrhage, a loss of rebellious blood, draining away now to

Walden, now to Afghanistan, now to Cornwall, now to Mexico, the

emigrants from cities solving nothing in their own countries, but

kidding themselves that they have somehow opted out of contamination by

a social system of which they are themselves the cultural artifacts”.

All those merry peasants and shepherdesses of the pastoral dream are

now, they point out, “the poor of Nigeria, Bolivia, Pakistan”.

And the paradox is that the rural poor of the Third World are flocking

to the cities in vast numbers. If you want examples of anarchist cities

in the real world today, in the sense of large-scale human settlements

resulting from popular direct action and not on governmental action, it

is to the Third World you would have to turn. In Latin America, Asia and

Africa, the enormous movement of population into the big cities during

the last two decades has resulted in the growth of huge peripheral

squatter settlements around the existing cities, inhabited by the

“invisible” people who have no official urban existence. Pat Crooke

points out that cities grow and develop on two levels; the official,

theoretical level, and that the majority of the population of many Latin

American cities are unofficial citizens with a popular economy outside

the institutional financial structure of the city.

One way of reducing the pressure on these exploding cities, would be to

improve life in villages and small towns. But that would demand

revolutionary changes in land tenure, and on starting small-scale

labour-intensive industries, and in dramatically raising farm incomes.

Until that happens, people will always prefer to take a chance in the

city rather than starve in the country. The big difference from the

explosion of urbanism in 19^(th) century Britain is that then

industrialisation preceded urbanisation, while today the reverse is

true. The official view of the shanty-towns of the Third World is that

they are breeding-grounds for every kind of crime, vice, disease, social

and family disorganisation. But John Turner, the anarchist architect who

has done more than most people to change the way we perceive such

settlements, remarks:

“Ten years of work in Peruvian barriadas indicates that such a view is

grossly inaccurate: although it serves some vested political and

bureaucratic interests, it bears little relation to reality ... Instead

of chaos and disorganisation, the evidence instead points to highly

organised invasions of public land in the face of violent police

opposition, internal political organisation with yearly local elections,

thousands of people living together in an orderly fashion with no police

protection or public services. The original straw houses constructed

during the invasions are converted as rapidly as possible into brick and

cement structures with an investment totalling millions of dollars in

labour and materials. Employment rates, wages, literacy, and educational

levels are all higher than in central city slums (from which most

barriada residents have escaped) and higher than the national average.

Crime, juvenile delinquency, prostitution and gambling are rare, except

for petty thievery, the incidence of which is seemingly smaller than in

other parts of the city.”

What an extraordinary tribute to the capacity for mutual aid of poor

people defying authority. The reader who is familiar with Kropotkin’s

Mutual Aid is bound to be reminded of his chapter in praise of the

mediaeval city, where he observes that “Wherever men had found, or

expected to find, some protection behind their town walls, they

instituted their co-jurations, their fraternities, their friendships,

united in one common idea, and boldly marching towards a new life of

mutual support and liberty. And they succeeded so well that in three or

four hundred years they had changed the very face of Europe.” Kropotkin

is not a romantic adulator of the free cities of the middle ages, he

knows what went wrong with them, and of their failure to avoid an

exploitive relationship with the peasantry. But modern scholarship

supports his interpretation of their evolution. Walter Ullman for

example remarks that they “represent a rather clear demonstration of

entities governing themselves” and that “In order to transact business,

the community assembled in its entirety ... the assembly was not

‘representative’ of the whole, but was the whole.”

This implies a certain size and scale of communities, and Kropotkin

again, in his astonishingly up-to-date Fields, Factories and Workshops,

argues on technical grounds for dispersal, for the integration of

agriculture and industry, for (as Lewis Mumford puts it) “a more

decentralised urban development in small units, responsive to direct

human contact, and enjoying both urban and rural advantages”.

Kropotkin’s contemporary Ebenezer Howard, in Garden Cities of Tomorrow

asked himself the simple question: how can we get rid of the grimness of

the big city and the lack of opportunities in the country (which drives

people to the city)? How on the other hand can we keep the beauty of the

country and the opportunities of the city? His answer was not only the

garden city, but what he called the social city, the network of

communities. The same message comes from Paul and Percy Goodman in

Communitas: means of livelihood and ways of life where the second of

their three paradigms, the The New Commune is what Professor Thomas

Reiner calls “a polynucleated city mirroring its anarcho-syndicalist

premises”. And the same message comes again in Leopold Kohr’s dazzling

essay The City as Convivial Centre where he finds the good metropolis to

be “a polynuclear federation of cities” just as his city is a federation

of squares.

And like Kropotkin too, the Blueprint for Survival sees the goal as “a

decentralised society of small communities where industries are small

enough to be responsive to each community’s needs”. And long before the

energy crisis hit people’s consciousness, Murray Bookchin in his essay

“Towards a Liberatory Technology” (which I published in Anarchy in 1967

and is now in his book Post-Scarcity Anarchism) argued the energy case

for the polynuclear city:

“To maintain a large city requires immense quantities of coal and

petroleum. By contrast, solar energy (from the sun), wind power and

tidal energy reach us mainly in small packets. Except for great dams and

turbines, the new devices seldom provide more than a few thousand

kilowatt-hours of electricity. It is hard to believe that we will ever

be able to design solar collectors that can furnish us with the immense

blocks of electric power produced by a giant steam plant; it is equally

difficult to conceive of a battery of wind turbines that will provide us

with enough electricity to illuminate Manhattan Island. If homes and

factories are heavily concentrated, devices for using clean sources of

energy will probably remain mere playthings; but if urban communities

are reduced in size and widely spread over the land, there is no reason

why these devices cannot be combined to provide us with all the

amenities of an industrial civilisation. To use solar, wind and tidal

power effectively, the giant city must be dispersed. A new type of

community, carefully tailored to the nature and resources of a region,

must replace the sprawling urban belts of today.”

A quite different line of anarchist urban thought is presented in

Richard Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder: personal identity and city life.

Several threads of thought are woven together in this book. The first is

a notion the author derives from the psychologist Erik Erikson, that in

adolescence men seek a purified identity to escape from pain and

uncertainty, and that true adulthood is found in the acceptance of

diversity and disorder. The second is that modern American society

freezes men in the adolescent posture—a gross simplification of urban

life in which, when rich enough, people escape from the complexity of

the city to private family circles of security in the suburbs—the

purified community. The third is that city planning as it has been

conceived in the past, with techniques like zoning and the elimination

of “nonconforming users”, has abetted this process, especially by

projecting trends into the future as a basis for present energy and

expenditure. “Professional planners of highways, of redevelopment

housing, of inner-city renewal projects have treated challenges from

displaced communities or community groups as a threat to the value of

their plans rather than as a natural part of the effort at social

reconstruction.” What this really means, says Sennett, is that planners

have wanted to take the plan, the projection in advance, “as more ‘true’

than the historical turns, the unforeseen movements in the real time of

human lives”.

His prescription for overcoming the crisis of American cities is a

reversal of these trends, for “outgrowing a purified identity”. He wants

cities where people are forced to confront each other: “There would be

no policing, nor any other form of central control, of schooling,

zoning, renewal, or city activities that could be performed through

common community action, or, even more importantly through direct,

nonviolent conflict in the city itself.” Nonviolent? Yes, because

Sennett claims that the present modern affluent city is one in which

aggression and conflict are denied outlets other than violence,

precisely because of the lack of personal confrontation. (Cries for law

and order are greatest when communities are most isolated from other

people in the city.) The clearest example, he suggests, of the way this

violence occurs “is found in the pressures on police in modern cities.

Police are expected to be bureaucrats of hostility resolution” but “a

society that visualises the lawful response to disorder as an

impersonal, passive coercion only invites terrifying outbreaks of police

rioting”. Whereas the anarchist city that he envisages, “pushing men to

say what they think about each other in order to forge some mutual

pattern of compatibility”, is not a compromise between order and

violence, but a wholly different way of living in which people wouldn’t

have to choose between the two.

And are cities going to change? They have to because they are

collapsing, replies Murray Bookchin in a book recently published in

America The Limits of the City. The cities of the modern world are

breaking down, he declares, under sheer excess of size and growth. “They

are disintegrating administratively, institutionally, and logistically;

they are increasingly unable to provide the minimal services for human

habitation, personal safety, and the means for transporting goods and

people ... Even where cities have some semblance of formal democracy,

“almost every civic problem is resolved not by action that goes to its

social roots, but by legislation that further restricts the rights of

the citizen as an autonomous being and enhances the power of

super-individual agencies.”

Nor can the professionals help: “Rarely could city planning transcend

the destructive social conditions to which it was a response. To the

degree that it turned in upon itself as a specialised profession—the

activity of architects, engineers and sociologists—it too fell within

the narrow division of labour of the very society it was meant to

control. Not surprisingly, some of the most humanistic notions of

urbanism come from amateurs who retain contact with the authentic

experiences of people and the mundane agonies of metropolitan life.”

He’s right. Ebenezer Howard was a short-hand writer and Patrick Geddes

was a botanist. But the particular bunch of amateurs who, for Murray

Bookchin, point the way are the young members of the counterculture:

“Much has been written about the retreat of dropout youth to rural

communes. Far less known is the extent to which ecologically-minded

counter-cultural youth began to subject city planning to a devastating

review, often advancing alternative proposals to dehumanising urban

‘revitalisation’ and ‘rehabilitation’ projects ...”

For the countercultural planners “the point of departure was not the

pleasing object or the ‘efficiency’ with which it expedited traffic,

communications and economic activities. Rather, these new planners

concerned themselves primarily with the relationship of design to the

fostering of personal intimacy, many-sided social relationships,

nonhierarchical modes of organisation, communistic living arrangement

and material independence from the market economy. Design, here, took

its point of departure not from abstract concepts of space or a

functional endeavour to improve the status quo, but from an explicit

critique of the status quo and a conception of the free human

relationships that were to replace it. The design elements of a plan

followed from radically new social alternatives. The attempt was made to

replace hierarchical space by liberated space.”

They were, in fact, rediscovering the polis, reinventing the commune.

Now Murray Bookchin knows that the countercultural movement in the US

has subsided from its high point of the 1960s, and he inveighs against

the crude political rhetoric which was the next fashion. “Far more than

the flowers of the mid-sixties, the angry clenched fists of the late

sixties were irrelevant in trying to reach an increasingly alarmed and

uncomprehending public.” But he insists that certain demands and issues

raised are imperishable. The call for “new, decentralised communities

based on an ecological outlook that unites the most advanced features of

urban and rural life” is not going to die out again because of the harsh

fact that “few choices are left today for the existing society”.