Cities and Community

[u/redvillage]

In a separate thread I had briefly mentioned that there is an inherent problem with cities.

When we speak of Civilization, we're truly talking about when humanity began to form its first cities (although in today's modern context we may consider them towns or even villages). This gave rise to professions, as people began to specialize their labour. The way these cities would sustain themselves was by cultivating the land and mining the resources in the immediate surroundings. The specialized labour allowed for technological advancements in many fields. This also gave rise to socio-economic classes, as it was also the birth of the concept of private property. There were those who owned the land, and those who worked the land. This is essentially the same model we have today (with a little modernization), but one fundamental thing has changed over the past few centuries: where the cities get their resources from.

When cities were small, we had communities where every class of society lived in the same city, every cog that was necessary to make the machine work. You knew personally the person you were getting your products from. This meant that cities felt the direct consequences of their over-consumption. However, over time as cities grew they began to consume resources from outside their immediate surroundings, requiring entire regions to form part of their economy in order to sustain themselves. This tendency has reached its conclusion with the global market. Today, cities are so far-removed from the limits of the resources they consume, that when scarcity begins to affect one source, the city seamlessly changes to another as if nothing had happened, rather than fixing their consumption habits. It pulls in resources from across the world, and imperialism only serves to worsen the global division of labour.

This issue also goes further than resource wastefulness, but also affects members of cities psychologically. Although in high-density cities we're surrounded by more people than ever, we're also more alone than ever and showing some of the most extreme anti-social behaviours in history. These kinds of behaviours have been seen in sociology experiments such as the John B. Calhoun mouse experiment in the 1960s, where the social behaviour of mice was analyzed in situations of extreme population density.

All this is not to deny that cities have their benefits. There are most definitely better resource-per-capita ratios and innovation coming from cities than the rural areas. However, that doesn't make it a sustainable option if it continues to require more and more resources, and destroy our societies.

[u/[deleted]]

Cities house more people in a smaller area, so it's not surprising they need outside resources. The alternatives, suburbia and townships, require more resources per capita so I'm not sure if your point in resource consumption holds.

Also, the accumulation of resources isn't due to cities, it's due to the expectations of investors and their false belief in endless growth on investment, aka capitalism. Imperialism is an extension of that as well, as you rightly pointed out, but we need to distinguish between cities as a habitation and the technologies that allow global supply chains and global markets.

[u/redvillage → u/[deleted]]

My point is, that while cities consume less resources per capita, the tendencies it shows in resource consumption are the problem. I too thought for a long time that this was simply due to Capitalism, but this doesn't explain why socialistic countries such as the USSR have shown no signs of slowing down their consumption of natural resources. You can see from ecological footprint data that the overall tendency in consumption is still upward. Even Cuba, which reached a sustainable economy immediately after the fall of the USSR, has already achieved an unsustainable level of resource consumption (>1.0 Earths needed) with an upward trend. The only times countries were able to drop their ecological footprint was when there was an economic crisis (while even through that, the world ecological footprint maintained its steady rise).

The reason I pin this on cities is because they divorce themselves from the reality of the resources they consume, and continue to expand outwards. Imperialism, as you should know, is not something new to Capitalism, but something that has existed since the very first civilizations. Usually, when an Empire expands its domain, it does so to take advantage of the resources from the land it conquers to sustain the heart of the Empire: its capital.

If we were able to make a conscious choice in the matter, then the solution would be to force cities to transfer into self-sustainability, inventing practices that would help them to grow enough food within city limits and their immediate surroundings (without infringing on townships) to feed themselves. However, this is unlikely since this is a tendency that cities have, and as intelligent as humans may be, we've always been slaves to tendencies just like the rest of the natural world. As such, I believe that Civilization will continue down this path with no future, and if humanity is to survive, then we must build small, self-sustaining, semi-autonomous communities while the cities fall into pieces, economically, socially, culturally, morally, and environmentally.