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The History of Cities of the Future: from the Ancient Polis to the City. Based on Interests
Ivan Smekalin
DOI 10.55140/2782-5817-2022-2-S2-16-23
When it comes to the cities of the future, most people are likely to imagine colorful computer renderings of futuristic-looking, zero-carbon buildings. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the talks about the city of the future are of a much larger scale and have been going on for centuries. This journey into the history of the concept will touch on the historical, social, and cultural aspects of the discussion of the city of the future and how the notion of the city changed in different historical eras.
Ivan Smekalin
Analyst, Positive Changes Factory, MA in Sociology student (EHESS, Paris)
As a community of city dwellers, the ancient polis differs from what is understood to be a city nowadays: the city merged with the village and was undivided from it and the state (Svanidze, 1999). Plato, in his Republic, depicts the ultimate social order that is effective precisely within the boundaries of the polis.
As part of the ideal polis, Plato described the coexistence of different social categories for the public good. The city is structured as nested circles with the center in the form of a temple complex and palace (Polyakov & Kryukova, 2015). The polis consists of the city proper and the adjoining land, where a citizen has two dwellings – in the city and on the outskirts. Citizens’ houses in the city are continuously arranged around a circular block with public buildings (courts, market squares, gymnasiums, and military units) in the center. Rings of residential development are surrounded by greenbelts and bodies of water. This city layout was to support the concept of a just social order – a middle way in politics, where each citizen occupies a clear position in the state (philosopher, warrior or craftsman) and in the city. Plato’s polis was based on autonomy and was completely static – the project did not envisage trade with the outside world or any change in the structure of the city.
Historically, the city as an independent phenomenon is the result of the specialization of labor. In the 9th and 13th centuries cities were separated from villages as places where artisans and church hierarchs lived. Cities emerge as centers of trade and craft production (Tilly, 2009). It is worth noting that the city in the modern sense is a historically contingent phenomenon that is about a thousand years old. Moreover, during these years most of humanity lived in villages, and it was not until 2006 that city dwellers began to be more numerous [7] .
7
DESA, U. (2019). World urbanization prospects 2018: highlights (ST/ESA/SER. A/421), New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Population Division, United Nations.
It was in the Middle Ages that the city began to demonstrate social distinctions: it became the center of trade, administration, religious and social life (Svanidze, 1999). Residents moved from the village to the city also for the reason that there was a legal custom "The urban air makes you free" (Gurevich, 2005). It meant that a serf was liberated after several years of life in the city. Cities were created on someone’s land – the land of a feudal lord, monarch, or church. Simultaneously with the formation of the urban system came the communal movement. It was a struggle of the urban community (commune) against their liege lord. The ideal city of the Middle Ages is artistically and metaphysically typified by the City of God without a concrete image of the urban layout.
The industrialization would alter a medieval city very much. Industrial buildings and new social classes appeared in its center. The period of transition from the medieval to the modern city saw the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. In it he strongly criticized contemporary industrialization and the negative effects it had on the community: "Your sheep… be become so great devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves." Here More describes the practice of enclosing farmland as pasture for wool production, which accompanied the creation of the cloth industry in Britain – the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The enclosures damaged the economic well-being of the peasants, their culture and customs.
Thomas More’s Utopia used Plato’s ideas. In contrast to the emerging industrial society, the agrarian family community was taken as the basis of the ideal city – the city included individual households propagating their craft skills. More’s Utopia is known for then-sensational proposal of abolishing private property and achieving complete uniformity, ultimately ending up in having identical clothes and dwellings. The square city is centrally crossed by a river with cultural and public buildings along its banks.
The spatial arrangement in Utopia is in many ways similar to the concepts of the "ideal city" that were prevalent during the Renaissance. The general principles of these projects were: clear geometric forms, symmetry and centricity, defensive buildings on the edges and public spaces in the center (Romanova, 2015). It is noteworthy that the projects of the "ideal city" were literally utopian – that is, they were abstractly spaced and were common in design, i.e. with no regard to the geographical features of the territory.