Something I Wrote In Defense of Cities

Below is a slightly rewritten version of a comment I wrote on this thread at Infoshop.org.  It’s mostly irrelevant to the article, and so I wondered if I should have posted it.   Although, fortunately, I also wrote something else that was much more relevant.  (You can see the other comment that I wrote, because I signed them both “Richard S.” Oh, and by the way, also check out the article, on the social systems of the Iroquois - Mr. Stephen Arthur obviously put a lot of work into it.)  Anyway, I felt compelled to write my particular, mostly irrelevant comment because someone else in the comments section seemed to be going in the direction of a traditional primmie take on cities:  cities = bad, cities are the cause of imperialism and environmental destruction, etc.  And that’s one thing that I can’t let go without disagreeing, because…

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In present times, to say that cities are most responsible for imperialism or economic destruction and people outside of cities less so would be absurd.  It is extremely rare to find people and communities outside of the city who can use means of transport and sources of food or energy that aren’t in some way connected to the global system that survives by a destructive level of extraction from nature and major exploitation of labor.  Moreover, it is extremely misleading to imply that in a place like, say, the U.S., individuals living outside of the cities are less responsible for this extraction and exploitation than people inside the cities. 

To give one small example…  Who lives outside the city who doesn’t depend on driving a car at some point?  I’ve lived in NYC for most of my 45 years and never even learned to drive.  And there are a lot of other people in NYC who never drive, even if they might have at one time.

Argue as much as you like about how cities contributed to the destruction and exploitation (and imperialism) in ancient times…  But in the present situation, the creation of cities -  that is, areas in which people live in larger concentrations -  actually provides more of an opportunity to minimize each individual’s contribution to ecological destruction and global exploitation, because it forces people to share more resources and it provides them with more of an ability to travel by public transportation, especially subways, etc., than a suburban or rural dwelling that requires virtually everyone to commute in automobiles.  Moreover, because people in the cities are by necessity in the most direct contact with the collective waste and pollution generated by their daily living and working lives, they become more directly aware of, and responsible for, the necessity of cleaning up after themselves.  (Not that we do this so well - but we might do better, if the city residents’ waste were all we had to deal with.  If only the city - especially the poorer areas in today’s cities - didn’t have to be the dumping ground for so much garbage and pollution from people living in safe suburban or rural areas many miles away…  Even when the city is not the direct recipient of garbage from such people’s homes, it’s the recipient of so much waste caused by  many of them during the workday, before they hop into their polluting, gas-guzzling automobiles to flee to a superficially cleaner environment.) 

Given all of the above… I believe that the most “green” environment in the present day, and probably in the future, would be an ecologically conscious city, especially one designed to encourage equal sharing of facilities and public transport (which would be most possible, of course, if it didn’t function according to capitalist principles).

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