It has always fascinated me that, despite the obvious disadvantages of city life, we choose it. In cities there is more crime, homelessness, disconnection, (some might argue more danger to children), unaffordable housing, lower air quality, traffic – I could go on – than in smaller towns and country areas. Yet in every country in the world we flock to cities in our millions.
Let us look at how cities developed.
As we evolved from hunter gatherers to farmers we could not all be farmers. Farmers, essentially, were food producers who sold food to other people who were not food producers. Success in food producing involved having technological support that I mentioned above (primitive at first, perhaps, in comparison with our modern standards – but technological nonetheless) to optimise food production, store it and transport it.
Those non-food-producers almost all chose (mostly for convenience) to live in close proximity to each other – so towns and cities grew up to accommodate the diverse skills and services needed to develop, test and market the tools that made efficient food production possible.
As landowners became more and more powerful, and a hierarchy of ownership developed, (ever before large scale industrialisation) cities developed into entities that were populated by people employed in the bureaucracies necessary to retain the power of the most powerful landowners, e.g. the lord, or king etc. These would have been military, civil servants, tax collectors, enforcers of various kinds, teachers and other educators, legal experts and various other professions and trades such as those needed to build houses, make clothes, fix things that broke, transportation workers, medical workers, police etc.
While the movement towards city living was driven mostly by economic factors, it is also interesting to look at cities from the perspective of relationship.
When towns became cities, we discovered that we could have different types of relationships. (Perhaps we are addicted to relationship and attention as I mentioned previously).
Cities also fostered richness of ideas, variety of work, opportunities for education and near constant stimulation. The word cosmopolitan generally applies to city life, diverse, modern and sophisticated. And more importantly than perhaps we think, cities also offer us a choice in respect of anonymity.
There is excitement generated by constantly meeting people because when we meet another person that we like our energy rises. We will endure all the disadvantages of cities referred to above to guarantee that encounter is a continual part of our lives.
We obviously like hustle and bustle, movement, being in a crowd, doing what the crowd are doing, and being in the company of other people.
In terms of public health, it is well known that deadly diseases that wiped out many of us spread quickly because of cities – but our ancestors living in cities also developed immunities from those diseases; which, in the long term, made city-based societies far more resilient.
This was a causative factor in countries where big cities had been located for centuries being able to conquer tribal societies of hunter-gatherers so easily. For example, in the Americas, the tribal nomadic peoples had little or no immunity to the diseases Europeans brought with them and they died in their millions [1].
Nowadays, despite the disadvantages – we are still choosing cities more and more. I mention it to stress how dependent we are on relationship – and highlght our insatiable desire to keep communicating with each other!
And the nature of cities also points to how enduring class is.
We might imagine that the melting pot of city life would lessen the differences between landowner-tenant, educated-uneducated, farmer-labourer etc. that might be more obvious in the countryside and smaller towns and villages where everyone knows everyone else – but while it dilutes it a little, it doesn’t get rid of it…….
[1]. I once saw a chilling documentary on TV about how European colonisers, when they realised that a particular native population had no immunity to smallpox, deliberately contaminated blankets and other goods that they were trading, knowing that they would cause the death of the native population a lot more efficiently than war.
They also concealed the antidote and/or knowledge of what would enable healing from the native population when they came looking for help. I’m not sure whether this weighs heavily on our conscience or not but it is an indication of just how indifferent we can be to the suffering of others when we have domination in mind.