THE NATURE OF THE CITY

A.        Cities as Rainforests

Urban problems abound filling the news: safety on the streets, educational chaos, traffic congestion, rising crime, the sudden loss of a water supply, slums, urban financial rip-offs.  Each problem is grappled with in isolation.  But we need to look for the deeper levels of interconnectedness. 

A city is like a rainforest.  Down at the grass-roots where we live most of our lives helping damaged individuals to dream new dreams, we see only the grass of our little suburb, and ministry, the roots of some neighbouring tree which overshadows that grass and occasionally the beautiful plumes of a bird in full fight above us or the dim rays of the distant heavenly light of a Father who superintends this city.

One urban problem dominates others - poverty - that problem particularly of the ethnic minorities, where the majority of unemployment, crime, and ghetto-ization occur.  As we walk with Jesus in the midst of it, the question of poverty drives us to the deepest levels of interconnectedness of philosophy.  For the problems are not in the neighbourhood or in  the  ethnicities but in the city itself for "Happy" city has "Oppressed" ethnic minority, yet its problems are parallel with the "Exploited" minority in "Joyful" city across the globe.

Thus we must raise our eyes, at least to the level of the undergrowth and then beyond into the level of the grand trees that make up the forest and look at the several discordant functions of the city.  For the major functions are often in conflict.  It is this series of related conflicts which creates the pain, the complexity and the artistry of the city (isn't the best art is found in the contrasts). 

B.        Cities as Concentrations: The Demographics of Cities

1.         More Persons in Less Space

Cities like rain forests are high density clusters of trees (people).   Calcutta for example is 58,000 people per square mile.   While the 1000 people per square mile approx. of the greater Auckland area   hardly compares, both in their contexts are significant concentrations (Auckland is spatially one of the largest cities in the world - perhaps due to our past philosophy of a quarter acre section as an inviolate right of every family). 

Prior to the modern urbanisation process, man had fulfilled the mandate to fill the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28), by scattering across it.  From that time on his task has been from concentrated nerve centres.  The urban forest has become the nerve centre of the rural farmland.

2.         Spatial Arrangements of The City

God consistently pays great attention to fixing the boundaries of the habitation of the peoples (Deut 32:8).  How he does this in cities is a matter of wonder, for it as f a hand outside of humankind has generated patterns into which we fall.   Urban geography is a great study of these processes of God’s activity.   Ultimately the scriptures speak of a cubic city, 1000 stadia high, 1000 stadia long, 1000 wide.  Is it only symbolically complete, space maximised, or perhaps it will actually be this shape.  Certainly the world’s population can fit one family per cubic stadia.

i.          Concentric

Burgess proposed a model of the American city where the value of space decreases from the centre.  The centre is thus restricted to business interests.  Around this is a no-man’s zone owned by speculators waiting for the city to expand and allowing housing to decay while renting it. A third belt is industrial workers, seeking to live near their work.  Beyond this are  residential areas.

ii.         Sectoral

In this model the availability of land is determined by the radial arteries radiating from the centre of the city.

iii.        Nuclear

Manila shows another model, where five major city centres have deliberately been determined as the place of new growth based around certain leading industries. Beteen these cities squatter areas emerge in the as yet unused land waiting for the urban expansion.  Auckalnd currently is trying to develop such a model.

C.        Cities As Amoebas: Organisms

A city comes into being by growth, rather than by design (with occasional exceptions such as Canberra , or Brasilia).  So it has various stages of construction and inadequacy.  These are a sign of its vitality, just as a healthy tree has multi-hued falling leaves, in the midst of new shoots, and a healthy forest has a jumble of fallen branches and logs from which new plants take root and grow.

The growth has life, that breath of life breathed into mankind, multiplied a thousand thousand times.  The life of God, not dissimilar to the life which sustains the rain forest in its patterns.

D.        Cities as Parties: Social Systems

That life has fire, passion, noise, celebration, communication.  And that is broken into subsets. But the subsets- communities, neighbourhoods, ethnic groups - do not define the whole.  The interrelationships between the communities and to the whole are more important than the communities themselves.  Social defines “when people interact”, and the networks between people and groups end up as the “structures” of the city.  “Social group” defines persons who find and feel themselves together with a common identity differentiating themselves from others.

i.          Ethnic neighbourhoods

People need to be loyal members of a well defined group, need to be emotionally attached to some tribe, clan, or community.  They feel lost when they cannot do so. As migrants enter the city, the very processes of rejection by the residents who can not understand them, thrusts them together into their own supportive communities. 

ii.         Socio-economic communities

Another process occurs, as communities of similar socio-economic values form, to some extent because the banks and developers cluster communities by the level of their bank accounts, to some extent by the inclination or necessities of the families.   Poor families may not choose Otara - but economics may.  But immigrant Indians with money choose Hillsborough because near here are the best schools, and a primary motivation for their migration is education of their children.

iii.        The non-social workplace

These clusterings of the night erupt down the motorways early in the morning to reconfigure themselves in workplaces.  Here race, ethnicity, social class, and economic success are no longer the determining factors as how relationships cluster. These are the contexts of social mobility.  But generally these are secondary relationships, relationships of economic necessity rather than those of choice.  

An interesting side issue here is the failure of urban mission of a generation past which focused on mission in the workplace.  Noble, and well thought through attempts were made across the Western world to establish patterns of ministry among industrial workers.  But today we hear little of these attempts.  It is facile to say that this may be because of the powerlessness of liberal theology from which they merged and which emphasised presence but not proclamation.  A deeper level of analysis indicates that even where attempts involved a healthy Biblical view of the evangelistic mandate, they foundered because the workers primary relationships focused around family and geographic community.

iv.        A simplified model of an American city

"It consists of a cluster of ethnically distinguished neighbourhoods whose members collaborate in staffing the firms, markets and other economic and political organizations of the city.  Economic co-operation brings the members of the diverse ethnic communities into intimate and daily contact with each other.  Social predilections separate them at the end of the day.  .."

v.         The solution to ethnic tensions

Thus there is a tension between the ethnic integration in the economic realm and the separation of ethnic communities in the social realm.  Dorfman advocates that the healthy survival of an ethnic group depends on its ability to acquire influential if not dominant positions in some significant market in the city.

Ultimately the community organisation of the ethnic communities into self-supporting economic and political power contexts within the wider diversity is the key to racial harmony.

E.         Cities as Technique: The Defining of Modern Urban Man and Woman

Man is not independent of the land from which he comes and to which he returns.  Ash Wednesday reminds us of that, reminds us that we are defined by the land and hence by technology which is an extension of man’s relationship to the land.  Jacques Ellul, the great Christian French urban philosopher,  sees this as destructive.  I would tend to see it as amoral, open to both positive and negative interconnectedness, both a godly interaction with technology and an ungodly interaction where the technology becomes master.

The rapid expansion of the city over the last century has been closely related to the multiplication of technological innovation.  Could you have New York as a mega-city prior to the invention of the elevator?  Would Los Angeles exist independent of the invention of the freeway?

Technology defines the patterns of our humanness.  It is technology that largely differentiates the characteristics of rural and urban persons.  Similarly the nature of technology of any given city defines a person as against that technology in another city.   By the same token, the levels of similarity of technology globally define the universal modern urban man.

F.         Cities as Providers: Economic Units

The produce of the land, its fruitfulness provides the food, the minerals, the chemicals, the computer chips that allow for increasing economic development.  This is godly, part of our involvement with his ongoing creativity. 

Cities house markets, which depend on numerous contacts and flows of information.  Each city is the centre of a market of one sort or another: London as banking centre, Hollywood as movie production centre, New York as fashion centre, Calcutta as centre of Hindu philosophy.

G.        Cities As Order: Social Controls

1.         Political Necessities

Order belongs to the political domain, part of our responsibility to function as God’s vice-regents.  The economists and technocrats can increase productivity, but are unable to order in a just way the configuration of economic relationships, so as to reduce maldistribution, exploitation or the ongoing chaos of a continually changing city.

2.         Citizenship and Legitimacy

In apportioning resources, who has the legitimate right to those resources?  If we take land for example in a squatter community, the first appeal is by the owners of that land to the right of private ownership.  Hence the squatters must be dispossessed of what is illegally theirs.  But this line of argument is in conflict with a higher law, the fundamental right of all to a space to live worthy of their humanness.  If the rich landowner makes the land a piece of (selfish, excessive, usurious) speculation and in the process tramples on this basic need for the migrants to find somewhere to live, his legitimacy is reduced on both counts.

In some cities this is exacerbated by the lack of citizenship of the migrant until he has legitimate rights to a piece of land.  Until then he does not belong. He is thus disenfranchised of all legitimacy, without a viable way of entrance.

Responding to the dehumanising effects of such an approach, cities find ways to give partial legitimacy.  In Manila, for example a one peso document before elections gives people citizenship regardless of residence, and enables the politicians to then use their vote.  In the U.S. frequent amnesties for overstaying Latin migrants enables many to obtain legitimate status recognising the unsolvable problem of a long uncontrollable border with Mexico.

3.         Order and Chaos

“The rule of law” is a good British concept but our tendency to see legality as black and white issue is not helpful in the chaos of most urban life.  For the person creating order has to live with certain healthy levels of ambiguity.   To whom do you pay local rates? water rates? who controls the power distribution? who sets up the school boards? the boards that regulate alcohol?  Cities are a  diversity of multiple people-powers.  A higgledy-piggledy jumpled-up patchwork of committees and bureaucracies.  The very confusion is part of the distribution of power, the checks and balances needed to diffuse decision-making to the lowest possible level.  Total order results in total power, and eventually total corruption.

4.         Concepts of Urban Planning

If the culture of a city emerges out of its spontaneous response of the human spirit to conditions , planning is a deliberate, reasoned response, and in some senses part of the expression of secularisation based as it is on rationalisation. It is a reflection of that structuring God who sustains the universe by his word, his laws. 

Control of land is the central issue around which disharmony in the political, economic, social life of the city occurs, followed by the issues of ethnicity.  Urban planning perspectives on the city seek to untie the knotted complexities of land that occur.

“ An initial response to this question is this: it is necessary to control, by appropriate legislation (and its timely implementation), the use that private interests can make of urban land.  The liberty of the individual can and must be limited.  This would allow for the “minimum” necessary to make urban planning possible.  But at least for the cities of the Third World, it seems that this “minimum” will not suffice.”

How then can this occur and not end up benefiting the elites?  The answer has been a clear evolution of processes of “peoples’ participation” in urban planning issues.  This opens the door for significant Christian input at multiple levels - but a door we can only enter if we have a Biblical view on the use of land, and the nature of God’s intentions for the city.

H.        Cities as Soul: Integrators of Cosmic Meaning

The city is not simply systems.  It is that which creates light in peoples’ eyes, as they see beyond their limited past, learning daily a plethora of new ideas, seeing beyond.  The city is the source of new philosophy and meaning birthed from constantly changing themes intersecting for seasons, solidifying into “isms” and dispersing into new dialectic processes.

Cities contain cultures and each develops its own  culture.  Wellington is a city of bureaucrats, cautious, slow moving, considering issues of state and society in their everyday conversations.  Auckland is a city both of the entrepreneur and the migrant, bolder, faster, concerned with making money more than policy.

Cities emerge their own soul, from the collective interactions of the peoples.  That soul gives integration and meaning to the lives of the city’s inhabitants. in classic theology the soul consists of mind, emotion and will.   Cities have volitions, directions.  They have a collective mind, ways of thinking and expanding their intelligence, their patterns of wisdom (decision-making) their thought process.  They have emotions. Paris is a city of charm.  New York a city of banking -style efficiency, Bangkok of sensuality,  Hong Kong of rapid business, and each of these carry with them emotive patterns that mould the people of that city, so that as they arrive in your city, you can tell that they have been citizens of one of these others.

There is a spirituality at the core of this soulishness.  Religions interpret meaning, and link man to the gods (spirits) or to the Almighty God.  Spirit beings may be invited into that soul for good or for ill, as in the daily dedication of Bangkok to the resident spirits, of Rome or Mexico to the Virgin Mary or the Virgin of Guadalupe, Calcutta to Kali,  wife of Shiva....