Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

The Significance of the City for Social Ecology

Written by Giorgos Papahristodoulou

In many of Murray Bookchin’s works, the founder of Social Ecology, we find the term “polis.” which derives from the ancient Greek language and translates to “city.” This is not due to a thinker’s unexplained obsession with antiquity, an occurrence typical for those who view historic phenomenas in terms of dominance and upper-lower cultures.

For Bookchin, the emergence of the polis is one of the turning points in historical evolution since the individual found in it space where he could form political relations with others, breaking with ancestral connections based on blood ties (race and village). “The city increasingly replaced the biological fact of lineage, and the accident of birth into a particular kin group, by the social fact of residence and economic interests” he notes in Remaking Society.

The emergence of the city in the ancient Greek world is marked by a creative phase in the human history at the level of laws (institutions), meaning, culture (arts, discourse, places, and monuments). It is a creative break, centered around the Mediterranean, which brings the city and democracy to the forefront of history and is accompanied by three important points that are relevant today:

– The sense and demand of universal equality as “the notion that people were basically alike, irrespective of their tribal and village ancestry, began to gain ascendancy over their ethnic differences.”

– The emergence of an individual right combined with social mobility as “people were not simply born into a distinct social condition; in varying degrees they could begin to choose and change their social condition.”

– Expanding the notion of the urban community from the moment when “the stranger or “outsider” could now find a secure place in a large community of human beings,” even if it was partial (excluded from citizenship, as was the case with the settlers in ancient Athens).

Consequently, at this turning point in history, other social institutions were created, and direct democracy became the system that seeks individual and collective self-realization, through the participation of all in decision-making and social control. The city cultivated responsibility and outlined, with the imperfections that characterize every social institution, the meaning of the citizen.

This does not occur overnight nor does it indicate an end to history, as many thinkers and regimes have heralded in the past. Like a land cultivator, they planted a seed—a seed that got re-fertilized centuries later in the medieval cities, specifically in the fourteenth century AD. Then an alternative road appeared, that of self-governance and federations of free municipalities, which challenged the emerging nation-state, with the latter prevailing in the nineteenth century by the means of fire and iron. Today, however, statecraft is once again being challenged by societies on global scale, by experiences such as those of the Zapatistas and Rojava.

The medieval flourishing of free municipalities (the Mediterranean remained at the heart of this process) is the age of civitas, the system of free people as opposed to a cold, statistical definition of the city as urbs, a sum of buildings. Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) will observe that the houses make a settlement (the town complex), but only citizens can form a city, echoing the ancient Greek άνδρες γαρ η πόλις (the people are the city).

Let’s examine one of the values of that time, a value that is transformed into virtue¹: It is the concept of self-limitation, which results from a deep sense of commitment and moral dedication to the political community, a phenomenon that we also find in the ancient Greek polis.

As Bookchin writes,

“Medieval Italian cities, for example, created remarkable checks and balances to prevent one interest in the city from gaining too much ascendancy over another, a balance that the Greek polis had established earlier in antiquity. Self-restraint, dignity, courtesy, and a strong commitment to civic decorum were part of the psychological attributes that many pre-capitalist cities, structured around assemblies, actually translated into institutions in a system of checks that fostered harmony.” As for the essence of the concept of the citizen: “the citizen of a pre-capitalist democratic city, in short, was not the “constituent” of a parliamentary representative, or a mere “taxpayer,” to use modern civic jargon. He was, in the best of cases, a knowledgeable, civically dedicated, active, and, above all, self-governing being who exercised considerable inner discipline and made the welfare of his community—its general interest—his primary interest to the exclusion of his own self-interest.”

Remarks of significant importance for a contemporary effort at reclaiming the concept of the citizen as participant in decision-making primarily in the field of the city, within the framework of refusal to the perception of human beings, as well as of nature, as mere numbers or tools in the service of “developmental” models.

And we arrive at the modern metropolis, as an advantage of which can be considered the feeling of anonymity coupled with the promise of wandering around in a world of successive transportation, as moving from place to place can be revealing but also exploitable by hyper advertisement.

It is the promise of overcoming physical labor that characterizes life in the countryside, especially before the technological modernization of the latter, a promise of individual and collective security, a promise that was quickly rejected by the rising exploitation of the industrial proletariat by the rising capitalism, which today is undergoing a phase of technological hyper supremacy. In one of the highlights of this rural-to-urban transition, captured in film footages,² however, a deep sense of discomfort developed, fueling the 60s social movements, which criticized the dominant model (western or State capitalism) and refused the understanding of production and the economy as central meanings of life itself. At the same time there is the reverse tendency of the so-called suburbanization, a diffusion of the metropolis spirit in the rural-semi-urban space, diffusion with degenerate characteristics as it alters the natural landscape by turning it into a commodity intended to meet consumer needs. The landscape is transformed into a plot with the main focus being the square kilometers on the topographic maps or beach umbrellas on the coasts, not the fertility of the seeds, which, sprinkled with the gold dust of chemical farming, can now come from afar with whatever burden the latter causes to the climate or to the income of farmers in other countries.

In this context emerges the question posed, already since 1973, by Bookchin in his book “Limits of the City,” where he deconstructs the urban planning in service of capital and state bureaucracy and proposes instead the eco-community.

Does this indicate a conservative, closed-minded, retreat to nature as suggested by a certain section of the ecological movement, which refuses enlightenment rationality, democracy as a model, and nature itself as it views it as a “blind world” dominated by authoritarian relations, such as the famous “right of the strongest” (a metaphor from the human world), ignoring its tendency for diversity and stability? Or should we leave our present and future in the hands of State bureaucracies, arbitrary international organizations, parties, or businesses (the self-regulated market)?

From the brief historical overview of the evolution of the city, one can begin seeing the latter as a system and cultural meaning, not as a sum of buildings, but as something, which human beings experience as a potential space of freedom, political decision-making and creation. A place for the development of human’s and nature’s potential.

This development cannot be identified with the dominant imaginary that glorifies the unlimited expansion of the so-called forces of production, a point in which, despite their partial differences, the tendencies of Marxism and economic liberalism both agree. Nor is it enough the introduction of economic degrowth to magically challenge hierarchical social relations, a development which is allegedly already taking place.³

Aristotle suggests that “nature is an end in itself” in his “Politics,” when writing about the city, and argues that when someone because of his nature (not due to accidental circumstances) happens to be without polis is either superior or inferior to common beasts. This reference to the self-limitation of the person in relation to nature and the city (in opposition to Descartes’ position on the need to become “masters and possessors of nature”), a reference to the ecological boundaries of growth, offers a rational foundation on which the city, liberated from the chains of profit, extra-social power and hierarchical organization, will be at the core of building an ecological society.

The new forms of self-governance at the level of towns, cities and neighborhoods emerging worldwide in recent years have the opportunity to tap into the historical heritage of the ancient Greek city, the free medieval municipalities, the Paris Commune (1871), the experience of the Spanish Revolution (1936), the experiences of the new social movements (since the 1960s), the social experiments of the Zapatistas or Rojava. Within the frames of the necessary awareness of the ecological boundaries set by the planet itself and a moral commitment of all modern urban communities that in order to function they need to be small, autonomous and based on direct democracy in order to self-manage the current issues of housing, nutrition, education, media communications, water and energy networks, mobility, public space etc. The modern megacities of electronic surveillance and mass control, dressed in the promise of “smart” life, coupled with authoritarian political and economic elites’ management of the climate crisis, make one such project of moving beyond the State and the capitalist market more needed than ever.

“To be sure, the municipality’s capacity to play a historic role in changing society today depends on the extent to which it can shake off the state institutions that have infiltrated it: its mayoralty structure’ civic bureaucracy, and its own professionalized monopoly on violence. Rescued from these institutions, however , it retains the historic materials and political culture that can pit it against the nation-state and the cancerous corporate world that threatens to digest social life as such,” Bookchin wrote in 1985 in “Rethinking Ethics, Nature, and Society.” Some have interpreted these positions for a libertarian local governance as a confirmation of a secret desire for participation in the local electoral game, but were soon proved wrong when the direct democratic politics on city level were replaced by the world of representation, privileges, and professionalized decision-makers, while sporadically local movements make efforts at reclaiming power away from the State, the market and their mechanisms.

The experiences of freedom created by grassroots citizen movements across the globe interact with space and its inequalities. Space is not neutral—it reflects the dominant social relationships and power distribution. It is, at the same time, open by its nature—constantly changing, on the move and its transformation into an ecological and democratic city depends on the attitude of the citizens. From the city, in the city, with the city.

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