Cities and Central Projects
Friday 28 April 2023
This past week I came to explicit realization of a point of difficulty in the conceptual framework I have been constructing for civilization, and I can formulate this problem in one sentence: What is, or what ought to be, the relationship between cities and central projects? I have come at the problem of civilization from both the perspective of cities and the perspective of central projects, so I can appreciate the role that both play in civilization. That cities are central to civilization is clear from the etymology of civilization and its cognates, but we can no more define cities than we can define civilization. We know that cities have an essential relationship to sedentism, to population density (one could even define this in terms of a population density that exceeds Dunbar’s number), to the division of labor, to social hierarchy (which is integrated with the division of labor), to commerce, to literacy, and so on, until one has named all the factors that figure in V. Gordon Childe’s urban revolution, and all of the many variations on the theme of the factors of the urban revolution that have figured in the archaeological literature since Childe.
Central projects are less familiar than cities, and also difficult to define, but I have gotten to the point where I regularly substitute other terms — like a source of social cohesion, or a shared purpose, or what Robert Redfield called the Great Tradition, or the like — to give an idea of the diversity of forces that have already been recognized in history, sociology, anthropology, and the social sciences generally, but which have not been collected together (or indeed adequately analyzed on their own) as a force that originates and sustains civilizations.
If cities and civilizations are both central to civilization, what is the relationship of these two? How do they co-exist in their centrality to civilization? How do civilizations exist when the cities and central projects might pull them in different directions? And now that I realize that this is a problem, and that cities and central projects could be orthogonal, I realize how interesting this is, and it becomes an opportunity both to clarify and to deepen an account of civilization. Now that I can pose the question explicitly to myself, I can try to address this ellipsis and produce an account that gives all that is due to both cities and central projects.
The simplest approach to this would be to maintain that a city is a central project, or that it is the expression of a central project. I don’t think this is entirely wrong, but it definitely is not the whole story. The idea of something being an “expression of a central project” is admittedly vague, as anything human beings do within the context of civilization could be considered to be the expression of a central project. To pursue this we would need to be more explicit about the central project of a given civilization, and to distinguish degrees of distance from the central project (perhaps the institutional equivalent of degrees of separation), and use this scale of degrees of separation from the central project to distinguish primary expressions of the central project, secondary expressions, tertiary expressions, and so on.
This idea of the city as central project, or as an expression of the central project, will be useful, and I will come back to it, but there is more going on here. We can see that there must be something more going on because cities have changed over time, and do not always have the same function. Even in an industrialized economy, some cities are centered on trade, some on industry, some on government, and so on. Thus while cities have much in common, there is also much that distinguishes them, and what can distinguish them can be fundamental, like their purpose, and purpose is often derived from the central project. Indeed, one way in which we could define a number of cities as all belonging to the same civilization is that all their purposes align with the same central project. Thus one city may be a port involved in commerce (perhaps even commerce with other civilizations), another may be an industrial hub producing the widgets traded in commerce, and another may be a center of government that regulates both commerce and manufacturing, but if all these cities with their different purposes all align with a single central project, then all these cities belong to the same civilization.
One of the most useful exercises I have found for looking at both the past and the future of civilization is to find or to imagine alternatives to the city. This can become an exercise in hair-splitting, as we repeatedly face the question of how different an entity must be from some assumed template of cities that it no longer qualifies as a city. This may be considered an instance of a sorites paradox, and I actually consider that to be a good sign. When we start testing our familiar categories with cases that don’t fit in, then we have come to the hard cases, and these are the cases that bear the most fruit when carefully examined; the exercise of examining them allows us to put our assumptions under a microscope and to question what it is we really mean by “city.”
I like to point out that, in Western Europe, after the end of the western Roman Empire, cities steeply declined in terms of population, economic activity, cultural activity, and so on. Early medieval civilization is a civilization built around manorial estates as the central economic unit, and not around cities. This makes early medieval civilization, and the later medieval civilization that grew out of it, radically different from ancient and modern civilization. Still, some cities survived. Rome went from a peak population of around a million down two orders of magnitude to fifty thousand or fewer persons, but it was never totally depopulated. Some Roman cities shrank down to being a church, and village attached to the church, and so continued on as ecclesiastical centers. Is this latter example a city? It may have once been a city, but its function has changed beyond recognition. So there have been quasi-urban institutions that derived from cities but aren’t exactly cities as we know them. Also in the early middle ages there were large monasteries, which were the ecclesiastical equivalent of monastic estates, except run by a religious order rather than by a local lord. This was the social model, whether in the form of manorial estate or monastery, that dominated what remained of civilization in the early middle ages in Western Europe.
Looking ahead to the future, I have in several places suggested that artificial human habitats built in space could be communities of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that would be like a city in some respects, but radically unlike terrestrial cities in other respects. The example I like to cite is a large O’Neill style habitat with its interior surface given over to a “wilderness” and with all residences and industry below decks, or attached to the habitat in some way. There are also the examples of Paolo Soleri’s Arcologies, and current ideas like Neom, which may be a disaster in terms of planning and environmental impact, but it diverges sufficiently from the traditional city that we can reasonably ask if it is a city.
Throughout the development of civilization, with cities sensu stricto, and a variety of institutions that are quasi-cities or non-cities, but which serve a central role in a given civilization, we have the central project. All throughout these developments of civilization, there is a shared purpose, a unifying source of social cohesion, and a Great Tradition, variously expressed in these different social institutions. So, they way I see it, the central project is more fundamental to civilization than cities. But that doesn’t make cities unimportant or irrelevant. Everything that civilization has become has grown out of cities, and this observation allows me to come back to the idea that a city is a central project, of the expression of a central project.
Civilization on Earth had its origins in cities. In this sense, then, cities were responsible for the breakthrough to civilization on Earth. We could imagine as counterfactuals that, on other planets, the breakthrough to civilization might have been made in other ways. It might have been different on Earth, for that matter. We have the compelling example of Göbekli Tepe, which is a large structure dating to the pre-pottery Neolithic period, which seems to have been ceremonial in its function (although there are always jokes about archaeologists calling anything ceremonial when they can’t figure out what it was used for). Some have argued that this was the ultimate source and origin of civilization. One could interpret history in this way. The earliest civilization in the western hemisphere, thus entirely distinct in its origins from Old World civilizations, is Caral-Supe, in what is now Peru, which seems to have been built around a ceremonial center, as were many ancient civilizations. And then there are the civilizations of the desert southwest in North America, most famously that of Chaco Canyon, which has many puzzling features not yet explained. Whether we call these cities, sensu stricto, or ceremonial centers (thus likening them to Göbekli Tepe), is a matter of interpretation.
Throughout most of the ancient world, however, we see cities in the sense that Childe identified with the urban revolution, not primarily ceremonial centers, though perhaps also ceremonial centers, as the basis of civilization. The further we go back in time, the murkier it gets. At Çatalhöyük, ancestors were buried under the floors of homes, and there were a lot of apparent ritual spaces, but no central temple or cult center. Göbekli Tepe has an apparent cult center, but one could easily imagine that peoples at the distance from each other of Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük had similar but not identical traditions (I would call this a regional cluster with common traditions), so that we could call these developmental patterns related, and the social forces that created these settlements also related.
However, once we come forward a little more in time, cities become more and more secular, and civilizations come into being that seem to be based on what we could call Childean cities. I have many times in the last few months referenced the work of Fustel de Coulanges, and once again I could point out that this is the pattern he identified: the earliest cities formed out of a family cult, but, as the ancient world developed, and Rome came to dominate, this fell away and the family cult, while still in the background, was not the center of civic life.
Partly this is a case of how we choose to interpret the origins of civilization; partly it is a case of lacking information about the earliest civilizations; and partly it is a case of both. One could go so far as to posit a period of history prior to the Childean city, constituted by sedentary agricultural villages and cultic centers, followed by the Childean city proper. An understanding of civilization based on our current knowledge must remain agnostic on this point. But we can affirm that the vital and dynamic ancient world was constituted by cities, and, in this limited sense, the breakthrough to civilization (or, if you prefer, civilization as we know it) came with cities, with cities aligned with the same purpose being part of the same civilization. In Western Europe this urban basis of civilization failed, and a different form of civilization came into being as a result. When cities again appeared as populations expanded and trade revived, modern civilization would eventually supervene directly on medieval cities, and these medieval cities were seamlessly transformed into modern cities. Now, modern civilization is once again dominated by cities, as was ancient civilization, but we have seen that other social institutions can stand in for the city, albeit imperfectly.
As a side note, given my conceptual framework for civilization, I could observe that we can define an urban civilization as one that actually does take a city as its central project, or, a little more loosely, as a civilization that take cities in general as its central project. One could construct an argument that there are ancient civilizations that seem to exemplify this, especially in the light of both the Greeks and the Romans regularly establishing colonies as “daughter” cities of successful and growing cities. However, this would only be an abstract template, lacking much that gives character and flavor to a Great Tradition, which both the Greeks and the Romans also possessed. This bears further reflection, both as a possible counterfactual to known civilizations, and as a way of thinking about the layers of civilization — if one conception can be valid, but is merely a template that needs to be filled in with further detail, this implies that civilizations may have many such templates simultaneously, any one of which is a valid way of understanding them, but any one of which in isolation from the others is inadequate.
