Back in the beginning of the year, a classmate asked, “What is a city?” in class. If I recall correctly, the course was A Systemic Approach to Sustainability.
The evolution of the old cities started when nomads found land fertile enough and located near enough to a stable body of water to settle down and lay down foundations for camps that could later grow into towns, and then expand into cities. The primary function of the city would be to not only allow people to survive, but ‘thrive’; that sense of thriving may have shifted subtly over the centuries since. From market centers to hubs of industry and manufacture, of past centuries, today a city has evolved to a mixture of the two, along with supposedly elevated standards of living thrown in. My classmate already knew all that, of course. I don’t remember the rest of the discussion now, but I know he wanted to go further. I think we all do.
Because is that the purpose of cities? Is that all they are? ‘A city is a center of accommodation, finance, knowledge and overall progress.’ Do we draw up to a full stop right there? It doesn’t feel right to – cities aren’t static. No city is ever a standstill; it is always growing. So perhaps, ‘How do they always grow?’ is the next question to ask here. (And maybe, ‘What is the definition of progress?’, ‘Who made that definition?’)
Cities have not only undergone mitosis to grow and expand; a city does not expand outwards simply by systematically replicating its buildings and streets. A city is shaped through meiosis – engendered, way back, before the Greeks and Romans and Mesopotamians, by power and politics – shaping where people meet, where they live, how they traverse and take advantage of the natural landscape, where they carry out governmental office, where the barracks are, where the jails, the schools, the cemeteries.
Cities have evolved to host a plethora of complex machinations of politics and power, wealth and estate, poverty and discrimination, law and violence. How much is that dedicated to actually allowing people to thrive? Who is thriving? Why? How? At the expense of what? What are the systems that dictate these laws, and are these laws broken? Is the system incorruptible or incorrigible? What has the city become? What was it? What will it become?
In The Garden of Stubborn Cats, Italo Calvino says the city of cats and the city of men is no longer one and the same; for domestic cats, they must live in the city purely by kept inside, away from streets because of cat-crushing traffic, away from courtyards and abandoned complexes because of their constant gating, conversion into parking lots, demolition and reconstruction in malls, movie theaters and offices – all spaces that don’t provide the greenery and biodiversity that not only cats need to thrive in the wild, but that humans need, to thrive at all, anywhere. Yet we claim our forwardness in the city, even go so far as to say the united human future in the city – where what we need is cut off from us by walls of stained concrete and highways of cracked asphalt, in these urban jungles where one needs to pay to legally exist in the System, and without which one has no right to take up space.
When I was fifteen, I read After Dark by Haruki Murakami, my first introduction to the author, and was struck by something that I now realize handed me a lens to look at my surroundings through. Big city girl that I’ve always been proud of being, it gave me words to explain why I felt the way I did when my father drove us along the bridge home and I would roll down my window to get the hot breeze in my face as those government buildings and apartment complexes sped past me. For years I would just sit there, my eyes welling up and my throat stuck at the sight of all those windows and lights and cars on the street, and not have the slightest idea what was churning inside me.
It was because, as Murakami said, the city was a living creature. It had its own metabolisms, translations, organisms, and RNA spirals. It had membranes and real, breathing substance that, though I was part of it by living my life in a small, wandering way, was alien to its great volume. Over a thousand square kilometers that I hadn’t and would never see. The city was alive, in ways I, as a single individual – in a stacked apartment, in a low-rise building in a block of low-rise buildings, in a residential district outlined with main roads that took cars to the heart of the city and, with a couple of hours’ worth of gas, then to the border, the end of the metropolis that faces the vast desert – could never be alive.
Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature–or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains the life continues undiminished, producing the bass continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.
After Dark, Murakami
That city, each road a vessel my own body ached to hold and house and could not, surrounded by sand, filled to the brim with schools, skyscrapers, and supermarkets, bookstores, flower shops, the vegetable market to the north, the meandering farms embroidering the outlines, was system within system, parents and children, rule around rule, employers and employees, loopholes and clean breaks, laborers and supervisors, routine built around routine, taxi drivers and passengers, schedules and exams, car mechanics and baqala cashiers, project deliveries and contract handovers. All those humans, street cats, slow pigeons, stray dogs (not to mention the ants, bed bugs and cockroaches that, thankfully) I would never see. Nothing seemed a greater pity, a greater misfortune. All that achievement, that flood of life – and then, just me, in my father’s car. The distance from it all. That’s what got stuck in my throat, what I hadn’t the words for. The possibility of everything, beyond my single, human reach.
When I was younger than fifteen, I read A Wrinkle in Time (to this day still one of my favorite books). A girl’s little brother is deathly sick. She is transported inside his body, inside a single cell, and she sees – like we do, occasionally and in different contexts – repeated patterns throughout macrocosms and microcosms; as there are in the garden, inside her brother’s cells are trees, and stars. As outside she lives on a planet, inside her brother’s cell, her brother is the planet. The trees have minds and egos of their own, and this sickness that could kill her brother goes cell to cell, taking the form of warped thought and sound, infecting the trees and convincing them to disrupt the balance of the cell that is a city of trees, a city in a country of organ countries, the organs that make up a planet. A Wrinkle in Time gave words to another idea I always cherished – that we are all our own planets. That inside us are such multitudinous thoughts and ideas and loves and hates that we are as populated with these facets of ourselves and our relations to others, as planets are with people.
In that way, that living organismcity of Murakami is really a galaxy. There are so many of us, so many millions of our bodies in each city, host to billions of our thoughts and potentials. A city is many planets, many systems – each resident uniquely orbiting different functions and fulfilling different needs, at times similar to, at times different from, other residents, in spaces that are similar to, and different from, other residents’.
Here’s the kicker. These likenesses and unlikenesses may well be by choice and effort, but the fact is that a large, unforgivable amount of these likenesses and unlikenesses are brought about by circumstances outside of the control of many, and only in control of few. A few who rule systems, who strike that balance between law and violence, who set in motion discrimination against poverty. These are inequitable systems. These are what we live in. These cities that make up nations, nations that sum up this distressed, dissonant world. This worldplanet, home to so many peopleplanets as to hold a universe of lives within a single galaxy of stars.
Should we remain at a standstill? Should we let these systems continue? That foreboding moan of the city has risen and warped now; it is no longer driving Calvino’s cats out of courtyards, and it is no longer, as Murakami described, audible only at night. That moan goes through the city at all hours. It is the thud of unjust gavels; the congregated applause at the passing of wrecked policy; the razing of homes to raise highways; the steady pulse of an arrogant hand, holding up a singular veto; the blast of bombshells and artillery; the silence of blood; the hiss of death.
It is driving out people.
Amongst all of that, a speck. In front of a screen late at night, throat catching, wanting to fight that distance to possibility. Just me.
In future posts of this blog, I will be trying to raise a magnifying glass to specific contexts of inequity or inequality in cities, through the lenses of different courses I have taken at EFI. I’ll do my best to try looking at a number of problems, and raise questions about the contexts of different cities. Piecemeal investigations on the built environment, let’s call it.
It’s been done before, by better, of course. But I’ll give it a go, too.
That’s it for now, planet. See you around.
