Authors Comparisons of the Costs of Cities

¶ … Cities

There must be few citizens of the 21st century - at least few who are citizens of both the 21st century and the First World - who do not view the city as a problematic accomplishment of humanity. Certainly, cities are the highest expression of human civilization, at least in some ways: They support the flourishing of the arts and culture, of haute cuisine and high-tech medicine, of universities and research labs. But cities are also the expressions of the worst that humans have created, both in terms of how we treat each other and in terms of how we treat the planet, as the readings that we are examining for this paper argue. The city is many things, but it is and always has been essentially a site of commerce, and the basing of relationships upon commercial grounds is never unproblematic.

Gary Brechin, in his examination of the city of San Francisco, has picked what many people might consider to be an example of a "good city" (even as others consider it to be a modern Sodom - but that is beyond the argument of this paper). San Francisco has a long tradition of both liberalism and humanism; it seems in many ways a city that is not built on the demands of businesses (that are equally likely to cannibalize workers as the environment) as a city built on an acknowledgement of human relationships and fundamental needs.

But Brechin argues that San Francisco, like all other large American cities (and indeed all large cities across the globe as well as a number of smaller ones) is essentially rapacious: The city, he argues (and does so quite convincingly, with a number of historical details to back him up) is a rapacious organism. Divorced from the ecological constraints and realities of agrarian life, the city allows its inhabitants - even encourages them - to run roughshod over ecological concerns and limits.

The Roman writer Cicero thus envisioned agriculture as a kind of ecological bookkeeping, observing that "the farmer keeps an open account with the earth" which returned interest depending on how wisely he treated the principle. Like other classical writers, Cicero associated farming with simplicity and morality, a connection that shaped Thomas Jefferson's hopes for a new agrarian republic. Jefferson failed to foresee how the western empire that he coveted would transform his nation as profoundly as Rome had been transformed by its continental dominions (p. 16).

It was this disconnection with the land as well as the imperial desires of the new nation that would allow it to do so much harm in the form of its cities - not that farming too doesn't exact an environment cost, as all four of these writers argue. But cities allow people to pretend - for generations at a time - that their account with the earth can be safely kept closed, or rather that it can be transformed into an account from which there are only withdrawals and no deposits.

Pena would agree in the main part with Brechin, although his perspective is different, examining as he does not the kind of large First World city that is at the center of Brechin's analysis but rather the borderlands that lie on both sides (although primarily the southern exposure) of the U.S.-Mexican border. Pena seems the same fundamental lack of accountability between the present and the future in the outsourced labor that occurs at the behest of U.S. firms (and American urban residents) along the Mexican border. One of the ways that cities have been able to endure as long as they have, Pena argues (and Resnick would agree with this) is that they are able in many cases to disguise the true level of the exploitation that they encourage and even demand.

The ugliest sides of commerce from those "dark, Satanic mills to maquilas," as Pena explores in his second chapter, are often hidden away out of sight of the residents of cities, who are thus able to enjoy cheap clothing, cheaper plastic geegaws and even cheap "expensive" goods such as cars because of the labor of those who are hidden from view. Pena argues that since at least the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and perhaps even since urbanization itself such slums (whether in the city itself or at a remove) have been a necessary effect of "progress." Cities demand zones of exploitation (Pena 135-6).

Foster's argument does not contradict that of Resnick, Pena and Brechin, but it does extend it. One of Foster's key points is that we (like Jefferson) might like to imagine that there was an idyllic human world that existed on the farm and that if we could simply return to that sort of existence we would be blessed with both wealth as well as ecological balance. But such a hope (and Resnick concurs with this) is simply a delusion.

Our planet, Foster argues, is indeed a vulnerable one, and that vulnerability has lasted from far before the onset of the Industrial Revolution (pp. 34-6). The damage that people do to the earth is at least as old as agriculture, and certainly existed in the earliest, small-scale cities. While Brechin focuses on the ways in which the dense populations of large, modern cities allow for terrible actions to be taken against the planet, Foster warns that - while it is certainly true that the scale of damage is greater with larger cities and more people - the potential for harm has existed pretty much since humans won the evolutionary battle against other Homo sapiens sub-species.