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.
