Was the city a western phenomenon before nation-states took over?

[Keith Hart]

Max Weber argued in The City that the idea of the city as an autonomous social unit was peculiar to the West and had already been superseded by national societies which removed that autonomy. Was he right on both counts?
This is a way of raising a personal question which is why I never became an urban anthropologist. My second appointment was in that Manchester school which pioneered urban anthropology in Africa. They hired me to teach a course on urban anthropology: the rest had moved on to other topics! I too dropped it quite soon because my own research in Accra led me towards political economy rather than urban studies. I also argued that in West Africa cities were largely an expression of the agricultural basis of the regional economy. So Weber's idea has some resonance for me.

[Eeva Berglund]

Hello Keith,

Yup, questions of great generality these might be, but I'm in a position right now to start something new for myself, and given that I've decided to study Helsinki (rather than my mother's home town Tampere, a.k.a. Manse i.e. Finland's Manchester!!) and given that I have the knowledge of planning that I do, the points you and John raise have been really helpful. Also, I'd go with 'comparison is the mother of all learning' rather than 'repetition is the ...' Like good journalism (like Gillian's stuff), good anthropology feels like a great exchange of stories.

So thanks Keith for inviting me into OAC!

Any thoughts on architecture and anthropology? Probably a different thread, that.

[Keith Hart]

Eeva Berglund said:

Any thoughts on architecture and anthropology? Probably a different thread, that.

Well why not talk about it? I'll open another thread, might even be worth a group, but let's see.

[John McCreery]

Eeva Berglund said:

John,

Having said that, surely the way cities are shaped today so much by global investment opportunities – in everything from the look of a bus shelter to the location of a new business park – complicates things. Having said THAT, I was surprised to read that the masterplanning of Helsinki 100 years ago followed quite similar lines to what goes on today. So perhaps it's just the proximity of things that made me write that. Did you have thoughts on that?

Re "global investment opportunities": I recall that it has been around four centuries since "The Age of Exploration" began. I find myself wondering how many of the world's great cities have not been shaped by opportunity seekers throughout this period. Serendipitously, moreover, Ruth and I went yesterday to an exhibition titled "Egypt's Sunken Treasures" devoted to remains of Alexandria and two other nearby cities recovered by marine archeologists. The very first exhibit was a map showing Greek colonies throughout the Mediterranean. Not the whole globe, of course, but "the world" for the Greeks and their Mycenaean and other predecessors.

As for getting a handle on the city, I strongly suggest exploring available resources. Here in Yokohama, a visit to the city archives led to an encounter with a friendly librarian who pointed us to an illustrated history of urban planning published by the city government bureau in charge of planning to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the city's founding. She also directed our attention to a small library of books written by local history enthusiasts who belong to a study group associated with the archives. Ruth has assembled a collection of histories, maps and guidebooks of which new examples and editions are constantly appearing in local bookstores. While looking for new publications, we stumbled across a series of memoirs by notable local residents commissioned as part of the celebration this year of the 150th anniversary of the opening of the port. These appear to be verbatim transcriptions of interviews/oral history projects and provide vivid descriptions of growing up in the city during and after WWII. On that same run to the bookstore, I picked up a "Mook" (Magazine-format-Book) in a series devoted to evaluating the pros and cons of living in different parts of the Kanto plain, this one about Yokohama. The cover art alone (see attached JPG) could be the subject of an anthropological essay. The upper half depicts stereotypes of Tokyo suburbanites who have spilled into the inland parts of western Yokohama along the Denentoshi railway line: a harried salaryman, a local service provider, the salaryman's affluent but increasingly nervous wife. The lower half depicts stereotypes of real "Hamakko" (hard-core Yokohama folk): a trad-clad girl who probably lives in the upper middle-class bluff above Motomachi, a local fishmonger, and a (what would you call him) low-class layabout with permed hair.

Anyway, I am sure that we have barely scratched the surface of what is available, and I do suspect that with a little poking around you will find plenty of similar material about Helsinki. Do forgive me if I sound condescending; one of my hobby horses is anthropologists who do research in literate societies but ignore the wealth of information already readily available about the places they study.

Finally, changing subjects again, to my mind the best piece of urban anthropology that I have ever read was written by a journalist: Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau. Based on extensive interviews as well as thorough desk research, Edge Citydescribes the third wave of emigration from cities. The first was the growth of the suburbs as people moved their residences out of city centers. Next came the malling of America, as retailers followed their customers. The third wave occurred when corporations began to move their headquarters to the suburbs, adding jobs to the homes and the shopping that the first two waves involved. Garreau is a perceptive writer who observes both global facts, e.g. the location of the new edge cities near transportation nexuses (which, in the USA, means Interstate Highway interchanges) and ironies associated with them, e.g., that while U.S. corporations were spending an average of 15 million dollars on location studies for their new headquarters, oddly enough almost all of them wound up in places within 15 minutes drive of the CEO's home.

But again, enough of that. What I'm trying to indicate here is just how rich a holistic perspective can be in the hands of someone willing to do the legwork and sort through masses of readily available information.

Ruth and I look forward to hearing about your discoveries in Helsinki. Please do keep us up to date as things develop.

[Eeva Berglund]

John,
Indeed - when I did my PhD all that time ago on matters German I realised that to do a good job I'd need to become more conversant with a range of literary forms. And so I switched to studying Finland before quitting academia.
This time I'm going to have to come up with a literary form of its own I suspect, in addition to finding a consistent enough empirical set of materials to generate a compelling account and maybe even some analysis. Finns are not generally best pleased to be 'anthropologised' in my experience, but there is a lot of interesting and often very critical and imaginative writing and thinking that's not academic. So maybe I'll be an amateur anthropologist, the kind that hangs out in an open online co-operative, but also keen to do the leg-work! Porous boundaries there too, between analysis and ethnography.
I already have a blog about Helsinki which I may go and neaten up a little for more general consumption. Until now it's been a way of keeping track of my own thoughts and putting up some of my favourite photos!
Thanks for the book tip - I'd heard of it but now will go and seek it out!

[Abe Pena]

There is some merit in, Max Weber's, argument. But, modern societies try to standardize a cities identity and not let the city mature on it's own like traditional cities would that flourished since before Roman times. Until the last decade a city would build and adapt to its region and environment. It would create and address the needs of its citizens and freely adapt. It had the option to create markets to meet the demands of the people of its region and meet and cater to their needs. With the advent of the UN and IMF cities are now being standardized and failing because international treaties are trying to make cities of today standardized. These entities do not address nor cater to the cultural diversity, traditions, and even the needs of the people. Instead they try to TELL the people what they need, and what the cities SHOULD have to function. This is different from eons of world history. Although, history states much about empires and kings-law, societies were free to create cities where they most needed a location for markets. Most cities of the past had one thing in common. They started out on traditional trade routes. Most began as a trading post, they functioned as an oasis and gathering place. As populations grew those cities grew with them.

You mention Africa and eastern Europe so you understand the birth of modern cities. The first Egyptian cities were built on trade route to make the local peoples acknowledge the leaders of those times. They were a marketing tool. In Asia the first cities as stated were founded on trade routes, and most likely to obtain goods and information from other tribes of people. We also found other sites which on today's maps are cities, but on older texts they just were seen as training or functional locations. You would have to go in depth with the aspects of provinces, hierarchical lands, villages, etc. They term city in most regions was used not as it was today, but depending on the function and region. Even in Roman time a city was only a huge trading post, or marketing place, much like cities in the middle east.

I would have to note, "I do not see autonomy in any city of today, though." There was until about a decade ago. But with international treaties trying to over-ride regions sovereignty and needs. The idea of autonomous social units no longer exist. The biggest factor is the latest steps of monetary control of both countries and cities within those countries. Your assessment and view about the reflection of West Africa and its form of expression is a tradition city. But as you may have noted in observation of environment and international policies, those expressions are limited. The western "city" has never been autonomous. Even the older maps define populations as villages. They were once autonomous, but since the late 1990's almost all western cities have been reliant on resources from outside those locations. I wouldn't say he was right on both counts, I would say he was acknowledging the changes of a city in today's environment without pointing out the reasons for the changes. It's like saying you see a river and the ocean it flows to but never mentioning the glacier or snow-caps which are the source of the rivers waters.

[Keith Hart]

Thank you for this interesting reflection. The Egyptian symbol for a city was a circle with a cross inside. It was a market at a crossroads, but also had a fortified wall for self-defense. This was also Weber's definition of the western city, a fortified market, often on a hill or protected by water. So the city was a political as well as a trading entity. As you point out, it is the political and military self-sufficiency of cities that has gone, not their trading function. This is linked to another point, the industrial revolution which allowed nation-states and larger political entities to override the self-government of cities. Of course few cities were ever completely self-governing. It is a matter of degree.

Abeward G. Pena said:

There is some merit in, Max Weber's, argument....It's like saying you see a river and the ocean it flows to but never mentioning the glacier or snow-caps which are the source of the rivers waters.

[Simone Abram]

I'm not quite sure where this thread is going, but if I can go back to the question of getting a grasp on the city for a moment... the problem I always have with talk of 'the city' is that I can't really see it as a useful analytical term. It's more like an emic term for me, it's a category used by governments and businesses to organise themselves, for example. It's a term of bureaucratic management, made apparently concrete by either walls or maps or both or more. But the term city is so wide that it includes settlements of five thousand to fifty million, and covers self-government to empire and colonial centre. So one question for me is how do people create and believe in the city through language and practices?
(I don't know whether Weber was historically correct in his suggestion, but it does sound like a self-serving definition: identify one feature that seems characteristic of Western cities in the past and then say it's gone (sorry to be so crude, I'm sure I'll get told off for that)). There's lots of blather among European urban development people about reinventing the city state these days, though, so Weber might not have been right... yet.
John: there is now a sizeable cohort of people working on urban planning, certainly in the UK and Europe, so maybe this will be our way of reinventing an urban anthropology, not as urban but as an anthropology of planning.