“Without testament,” observed Hannah Arendt, “without tradition—which selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is—there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal change of the world and the biological cycle of creatures in it.”
If the city can be added to the lost treasures which Arendt laments in her deeply sensitive essays, this loss is due in no small measure to the modern stance of “contemporaneity,” a stance which virtually denies an urban past in its deadening claim to sempiternal change, to an eternality of problems that have neither the retrospect of uniqueness nor the prospect of visionary solutions. To the degree that the very word “city” is still applied to the formless urban agglomerations that blot the human landscape, we live with the shallow myth that the problems of the civic present are equatable with those of the civic past—and hence, in a sinister sense, with the civic future. Accordingly we know neither past nor future but only a present that lacks even the self-concsiousness of its social preconditions, limitations, and historic fragility.
[…]
Self-consciousess, at the very least, implies a new self: a self that can be conscious. Consciousness, certainly in the fulness of its truth, presupposes an environment in which the individual can conceptually grasp the conditions that influence his or her life and exercise control over them. Indeed, insofar as an individual lacks these dual elements of consciousness, he or she is neither free nor fully human in the self-actualized sense of the term. Denied intellectual and institutional access to the economic resources that sustain us, to the culture that nourishes our mental and spiritual growth, and to the social forms that frame our behavior as civilized beings, we are not only denied our freedom and our ability to function rationally but our very selfhood. The great cultural critics of society have voiced this conclusion for centuries. This conclusion has even more relevance today—an era of social decay that seems almost cosmic in its scale—than at any time in the past.
In terms of the city, such a conclusion means that a vision of the urban future can be regarded as rational and humanly viable only insofar as the city lends itself to individual comprehension—notably, that it is an entity that can be understood by the individual and modified by individual action. That the city whose population “can be taken in at a single view”—that is, scaled physical and numerically to human dimensions—remained essential to the Hellenic idea of the polis is merely another way of saying that a city without a citizenry, an active body politic, is not a city, indeed unworthy of anything but barbarians (Aristotle, 1943:VII, 5:25). Human scale is a necessary condition for human self-fulfillment and social fulfillment. A humanistic vision of the future city must rest on the premise that the authentic city is comprehensible to its citizens or else they will cease to be citizens and public life itself will disappear. A vision of the urban future is thus meaningless if it does not include from its very outset the decentralization of the great SMSAs [Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas], the restoration of city life as a comprehensible form of public life.
Murray Bookchin, “Toward a vision of the urban future,” in David C. Perry and Alfred J. Watkins, eds., The rise of the Sunbelt cities, Urban Affairs Annual Reviews 14 (Beverly Hills: SAGE, 1977), pp. 259–276.
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