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Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship
The city at its best is an eco-community. Urbanization is not only a social and cultural fact of historic proportions; it is a tremendous ecological fact as well. We must explore modern urbanization and its impact on the natural environment, as well as the changes urbanization has produced in our sensibility towards society and toward the natural world. If ecological thinking is to be relevant to the modern human condition, we need a social ecology of the city.
This book attempts to lay the groundwork for such a social ecology. It tries to develop a concept of the city in those participatory terms that are uniquely characteristic of all 'ecosystems'. It relates ecology's participatory sensibility to the city in all its forms over the course of history, partly to show that the city was a social eco-community at various times insofar as it fostered diversity, mutualism, and connectedness.
In applying a participatory sensibility to the city, I have been obliged to take the reader on a voyage into the evolution of the city. What I wish to do is redeem the city, to visualize it not as a threat to the environment but as uniquely human, ethical, and ecological community that often lived in balance with nature and created institutional forms that sharpened human awareness of their sense of natural history.
This book attempts to lay the groundwork for such a social ecology. It tries to develop a concept of the city in those participatory terms that are uniquely characteristic of all 'ecosystems'. It relates ecology's participatory sensibility to the city in all its forms over the course of history, partly to show that the city was a social eco-community at various times insofar as it fostered diversity, mutualism, and connectedness.
In applying a participatory sensibility to the city, I have been obliged to take the reader on a voyage into the evolution of the city. What I wish to do is redeem the city, to visualize it not as a threat to the environment but as uniquely human, ethical, and ecological community that often lived in balance with nature and created institutional forms that sharpened human awareness of their sense of natural history.
340 pages, Paperback
First published April 12, 1987
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826 people want to read
About the author
Murray Bookchin
121 books637 followersMurray Bookchin was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology. In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with the strategy of political Anarchism and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.
Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.
Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.
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June 18, 2017
"The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking." (p. 290)
As Murray Bookchin did with The Ecology of Freedom—in which he traces the rise of hierarchy throughout history, and out of which he identifies a new potential realm of freedom—so he does with this book, but the focus being the city.
Bookchin makes the argument that urbanization and citification are antagonistic concepts. Modern day "citizens" view the city in economistically reductionist terms of what services it has to offer. And in turn the "citizen" is reduced to a mere "taxpayer", "voter", "constituent". Bellow I will try to lay out the structure of the argument as briefly as I can, to give a very shallow overview of what the reader can expect.
The unfolding of the dialectical argument is as ever prevalent in this work as well: urbanization is pitted against city, the roots of which are laid bare in the very emergence of the city from the tribe [1]. The "good" traits of the early city are identified—partly—in the Athenian polis [2], from which the author then identifies two other concepts which are at odds with each other, the body politic and the electorate, the well-rounded citizen vs. the passive victim. Out of which emerges the yet even greater distinction between the democracy, and the republic (Athenian democracy vs. Roman Republic in history). This ever-unfolding argument, naturally, returns to previously stated arguments to enrich them. Chapter four (The Ideal of Citizenship) then synthesizes the most important lessons we have to draw from history in our quest to reinvigorate citizenship [4]. Chapter 5 (Patterns of Civic Freedom) is a pleasure to read, and is mostly a historical account of various ways in which face-to-face democracy has existed throughout Europe. Chapter Six (From Politics to Statecraft) tries to explain how politics degenerated into statecraft, and identifies how confederation was a viable candidate (and partially succeeded in the case of Switzerland) to the centralist tendencies of the nation state. Critiques of the nation-state abound [5], [6]. Bookchin maintains that the potential for confederation still exists, and should definitely not be ignored (as it is) by the majority of people; this is of the most striking importance for current day Rojava which are trying to make these decentralist ideas into reality [7]. Chapter seven (The Social Ecology of Urbanization) tries to create an ecological view of the rise of urbanization, i.e. to repudiate simplistic theories (like those of marxist historical materialism) and consider a vast array of factors, and explore their interplay. Capitalism—of course—is among the main culprits [8]. Chapter eight, tries to synthesize a "New Municipal Agenda" (as is its name) from everything that was learned in the previous chapters. It puts cities in conflict with the state, it puts confederation in conflict with centralism (and command-control hierarchy), it puts well-rounded citizens in "conflict" with the voter, and the market vs. the moral ecological imperative to live [9], [10], [11]. At the same time having an honest discussion about the potential failures of this new agenda [12].
The appendix (The Meaning of Confederalism) is a must read for it provides quite clear distinctions of what the limits of this vision are, what its preconditions are, and what obstacles it faces.
At the end of the day, the message of this book is quite clear, dire, urgent, and explicit. We either reclaim citizenship in the classic sense and arrest urbanization, or "Another ultimate vision also faces us: one in which urbanization will so completely devour the city and the countryside that the word "community" will become an archaism; a market society filtering into the most private recesses of our lives as individuals and effacing all sense of personality, much less individuality; a state that will not only render politics and citizenship a mockery of these words but a maw that will absorb the very notion of freedom itself." (p. 287)
[1] "The civic institutions that we most commonly associate with a "participatory democracy" often reach back in almost unbroken continuity to tribal assembles." (p. 29)
[2] "The municipal space of Athens, in effect, was expanded to create a largely civic citizenry, unencumbered by the mindless tribal obligations and blood oaths that impeded the rights of the stranger but in a form that wore the symbols and enjoyed the prestige of tribal tradition. Indeed, one of the great tasks of ecological thinking will be to develop an ecological civicism that restores the organic bonds of community without reverting to the archaic blood-tie at one extreme or the totalitarian "folk philosophy" of fascism at the other." (p. 30)
[3] "Perhaps the main reason why the confusion between politics and statecraft persists so strongly today is that we have lost sight of the historic source and principal arena of any authentic politics—the city. We not only confuse urbanization with citification, but we have literally dropped the city out of the history of ideas both in terms of the way it explains the present human condition and the systems of public governance it creates." (p. 54)
[4] If moderns find democratic politics and citizenship a desideratum, they will never achieve them without a supreme act of consciousness. They must not only want it but know it. Athenian civic goals, for all their shortcomings (notably Athens's treatment of women, alien residents, and its widespread use of slave labor), must be rooted in an everyday notion of what we mean by politics. Is it statecraft? Or does it center around social entities such as cooperative, vocational societies or tribes in the countercultural sense of this much-abused term? Or some broad concept of grass-roots organization that passes under words such as "localism," "decentralism," and "bioregionalism"? Is it an educational activity—a civic paideia—that fosters the citizen's empowerment, both spiritually as well as institutionally? Or is it primarily a form of "management" whose goal is administrative efficiency and fiscal shrewdness? No modern body of ideas, to my knowledge, has wrestled with the answers to these questions adequately enough to draw clear distinctions among the social, the political, and the statist so that a meaningful outlook can be formulated-one that will seek the delicate balance of ingredients (traditional, familial, ethical, and institutional) and the paideia that articulates an authentically democratic politics with a concept of citizenship that gives this outlook reality. Nor do we have a clear idea of the extent to which the city, properly conceived as a humanly scaled ethical community, differs from urbanization and the inhuman scale produced by the nation-state. We rarely understand how integrally an ethical politics is wedded to a comprehensible civic scale, to the city itself, conceived as a thoroughly manageable and participatory union of citizens, richly articulated by tradition and by social, cultural, and political forms. We live so contemporaneously within the given state of affairs, the overbearing "now" that eternalizes the status quo, that no society is more prey to the workings of mindless forces than our own. Bereft of a serious regard for history, indeed for the experiences of our own century, we find ourselves in the airless vacuum of an immutable "present," a time warp that precludes any sense of futurity and ability to reason innovatively. (p. 83-84)
[5] I should emphasize very decidedly that "the state" can be less pronounced as a constellation of institutions at the municipal level, more pronounced at the provincial or regional level, and most pronounced at the national level. These are not trifling distinctions. We cannot ignore them without grossly simplifying politics. Differences in degrees of statification can have major practical consequences for politically concerned individuals and communities. (p. 136)
[6] Viewed with hindsight, the images of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco rise up to remind us that the ideological celebration of the nation-state, which marked social theory during the Victorian era, was grossly misplaced. We of a later generation have good reason to lament the loss of the confederal alternative that appeared at an earlier epoch in Europe, one that might have averted the terrifying turn "national unity" took between 1914 and 1945. (p. 158)
[7] This problem [of centralization or decentralization] is not an academic one. It raises the crucial question of whether or not seemingly "undeveloped" peoples today are to achieve what we so flippantly call "modernization"—by confederalism or nationalism, decentralism or centralism, libertarian institutions or authoritarian ones. We have not removed these questions from the future of our civilization nor can they be concealed from purview by the veil of history. If anything, hindsight has made them as searing today as they were in earlier times, when the terrifying future that now looms before us was very far removed from the eyes of men and women in the sixteenth century. (p. 163)
[8] the newly gained dominance of the capitalistic market relationship over all other forms of production and consociation is a major source of what I have denoted as "urbanization"—the explosion of the city itself into vast urban agglomerations that threaten the very integrity of city life and citizenship. What makes the market society we call "capitalism" unique, even by contrast to its early mercantile form, is that it is an ever-expansive, accumulative, and, in this respect, a cancerous economic system whose "law of life" is to "grow or die." Capitalism in its characteristically modern and "dominant" form threatens not only to undermine every "natural economy" (to use Marx's own terms), be it small-scale agriculture, artisanship, simple exchange relationships, and the like; it threatens to undermine every dimension of "organic society," be it the kinship tie, communitarian forms of association, systems of self-governance, and localist allegiances—the sense of home and place. Owing to its metastatic invasion of every aspect of life by means of monetization and what Immanuel Wallerstein calls "commodification," it threatens the integrity of the natural world—soil, flora, fauna, and the complex ecocommunities that have made present-day life forms and relationships possible by turning everything "natural" into an inorganic, essentially synthetic form. Soil is being turned into sand, variegated landscapes into level and simplified ones, complex relationships into more primal forms such that the evolutionary clock is being turned back to a biotically earlier time when life was less varied in form and its range more limited in scope.
The effect of capitalism on the city has been nothing less than catastrophic. The commonly used term "urban cancer" can be taken literally to designate the extent to which the traditional urbs of the ancient world have been dissolved into a primal, ever-spreading, and destructive form that threatens to devour city and countryside alike. Growth in the special form that singles out modern capitalism from all earlier forms of economic life, including earlier forms of capitalism itself, has affected what we still persist in calling the "city" by leading to the expansion of pavements, streets, houses, and industrial, commercial, and retail structures over the entire landscape just as a cancer spreads over the body and invades its deepest recesses.
Cities, in turn, have begun to lose their form as distinctive cultural and physical entities, as humanly scaled and manageable political entities. Their functions have changed from ethical arenas with a uniquely humane, civilized form of consociation, free of all blood ties and family loyalties, into immense, overbearing, and anonymous marketplaces. They are becoming centers primarily of mass production and mass consumption, including culture as well as physically tangible objects. Indeed, culture has become objectified into commodities as have human relationships, which are increasingly being simplified and mediated by objects. The simplification of social life and the biosphere by a growth-oriented economy in which production and consumption become ends in themselves is yielding the simplification of the human psyche itself. The strong sense of individuation that marked the people of the mixed society preceding capitalism is giving way to a receptive consumer and taxpayer, a passive observer of life rather than an active participant in it, lacking in economic roots that support self-assertiveness and community roots that foster participation in social life. Citizenship itself, conceived as a function of character formation, and politics, as part of paideia or the education of a social being, tend to wane into personal indifference to social problems. The decline of the citizen, more properly his or her dissolution into a being lost in a mass society—the human counterpart of the mass-produced object—is furthered by a burgeoning of structural gigantism that replaces human scale and by a growing bureaucracy that replaces all the organic sinews that held precapitalist society together. The counselor is the humanistic counterpart of the indifferent bureaucrat and the counseling chamber is the structural counterpart of the governmental office. (p. 202-203)
[9] This conceptual framework, which sees human consociation as a distinctly human, and humane, attribute of individual socialization—so markedly in contrast to the egoistic and interest-oriented, indeed disciplinary image of the contemporary public sphere—would mark a highly significant turn in the way we conceive the management of society and the participation of its citizenry in the political process. A dual structure of municipal government, paralleling the state's conventional legal structure, could open a creative institutional restructuring of the body politic—one that would not only countervail the centralizing and destructuring process of urbanization and growing state power but introduce a new principle of politics based on morality as well as cooperation and personal responsibility. (p. 274)
[10] A moral economy is either a moral enterprise that is guided by a genuine spiritual desire to create one, even at the expense of strictly economic considerations, or it will degenerate into another profit oriented and exploitative use of resources. Citizens who are not prepared to pay higher prices to support such an economy and volunteer their own efforts on its behalf are not likely to be pr& pared for self-governance in any form. Hence the need for a new municipal politics to become an intensely educational and participatory experience at every level of civic life. (p. 276)
[11] The word "moral" must be repeated—not as rhetoric to match the claims of reaction but as the felt spiritual underpinnings of a new social vision. It must be repeated not as part of a patronizing sermon but as a living practice that people incorporate into their personal lives and their communities. The vacuity and triviality of life today must be filled precisely by those visionary ideals that sustain the human side of life as well as its material side, or else the coordinates by which the future should be guided will totally disappear in that commodity oriented world we call the "marketplace of ideas." The more serious indecency of this "marketplace" is that these ideals will be turned into objects—mere commodities—that will lack even the value of things we need to sustain us. They will become the mere ornaments needed to garnish an inherently antihuman and antiecological society that threatens to undermine moral integrity as such and the simple social amenities that foster human intercourse. (p. 278)
[12] That decentralism can mean local parochialism, even racism; confederation, a denial of any rational coordination of resources and services; and individualism, a psychology of rampant egotism—all are simply the most negative way of viewing a constellation of notions whose logic can yield genuine freedom. (p. 279)
As Murray Bookchin did with The Ecology of Freedom—in which he traces the rise of hierarchy throughout history, and out of which he identifies a new potential realm of freedom—so he does with this book, but the focus being the city.
Bookchin makes the argument that urbanization and citification are antagonistic concepts. Modern day "citizens" view the city in economistically reductionist terms of what services it has to offer. And in turn the "citizen" is reduced to a mere "taxpayer", "voter", "constituent". Bellow I will try to lay out the structure of the argument as briefly as I can, to give a very shallow overview of what the reader can expect.
The unfolding of the dialectical argument is as ever prevalent in this work as well: urbanization is pitted against city, the roots of which are laid bare in the very emergence of the city from the tribe [1]. The "good" traits of the early city are identified—partly—in the Athenian polis [2], from which the author then identifies two other concepts which are at odds with each other, the body politic and the electorate, the well-rounded citizen vs. the passive victim. Out of which emerges the yet even greater distinction between the democracy, and the republic (Athenian democracy vs. Roman Republic in history). This ever-unfolding argument, naturally, returns to previously stated arguments to enrich them. Chapter four (The Ideal of Citizenship) then synthesizes the most important lessons we have to draw from history in our quest to reinvigorate citizenship [4]. Chapter 5 (Patterns of Civic Freedom) is a pleasure to read, and is mostly a historical account of various ways in which face-to-face democracy has existed throughout Europe. Chapter Six (From Politics to Statecraft) tries to explain how politics degenerated into statecraft, and identifies how confederation was a viable candidate (and partially succeeded in the case of Switzerland) to the centralist tendencies of the nation state. Critiques of the nation-state abound [5], [6]. Bookchin maintains that the potential for confederation still exists, and should definitely not be ignored (as it is) by the majority of people; this is of the most striking importance for current day Rojava which are trying to make these decentralist ideas into reality [7]. Chapter seven (The Social Ecology of Urbanization) tries to create an ecological view of the rise of urbanization, i.e. to repudiate simplistic theories (like those of marxist historical materialism) and consider a vast array of factors, and explore their interplay. Capitalism—of course—is among the main culprits [8]. Chapter eight, tries to synthesize a "New Municipal Agenda" (as is its name) from everything that was learned in the previous chapters. It puts cities in conflict with the state, it puts confederation in conflict with centralism (and command-control hierarchy), it puts well-rounded citizens in "conflict" with the voter, and the market vs. the moral ecological imperative to live [9], [10], [11]. At the same time having an honest discussion about the potential failures of this new agenda [12].
The appendix (The Meaning of Confederalism) is a must read for it provides quite clear distinctions of what the limits of this vision are, what its preconditions are, and what obstacles it faces.
At the end of the day, the message of this book is quite clear, dire, urgent, and explicit. We either reclaim citizenship in the classic sense and arrest urbanization, or "Another ultimate vision also faces us: one in which urbanization will so completely devour the city and the countryside that the word "community" will become an archaism; a market society filtering into the most private recesses of our lives as individuals and effacing all sense of personality, much less individuality; a state that will not only render politics and citizenship a mockery of these words but a maw that will absorb the very notion of freedom itself." (p. 287)
[1] "The civic institutions that we most commonly associate with a "participatory democracy" often reach back in almost unbroken continuity to tribal assembles." (p. 29)
[2] "The municipal space of Athens, in effect, was expanded to create a largely civic citizenry, unencumbered by the mindless tribal obligations and blood oaths that impeded the rights of the stranger but in a form that wore the symbols and enjoyed the prestige of tribal tradition. Indeed, one of the great tasks of ecological thinking will be to develop an ecological civicism that restores the organic bonds of community without reverting to the archaic blood-tie at one extreme or the totalitarian "folk philosophy" of fascism at the other." (p. 30)
[3] "Perhaps the main reason why the confusion between politics and statecraft persists so strongly today is that we have lost sight of the historic source and principal arena of any authentic politics—the city. We not only confuse urbanization with citification, but we have literally dropped the city out of the history of ideas both in terms of the way it explains the present human condition and the systems of public governance it creates." (p. 54)
[4] If moderns find democratic politics and citizenship a desideratum, they will never achieve them without a supreme act of consciousness. They must not only want it but know it. Athenian civic goals, for all their shortcomings (notably Athens's treatment of women, alien residents, and its widespread use of slave labor), must be rooted in an everyday notion of what we mean by politics. Is it statecraft? Or does it center around social entities such as cooperative, vocational societies or tribes in the countercultural sense of this much-abused term? Or some broad concept of grass-roots organization that passes under words such as "localism," "decentralism," and "bioregionalism"? Is it an educational activity—a civic paideia—that fosters the citizen's empowerment, both spiritually as well as institutionally? Or is it primarily a form of "management" whose goal is administrative efficiency and fiscal shrewdness? No modern body of ideas, to my knowledge, has wrestled with the answers to these questions adequately enough to draw clear distinctions among the social, the political, and the statist so that a meaningful outlook can be formulated-one that will seek the delicate balance of ingredients (traditional, familial, ethical, and institutional) and the paideia that articulates an authentically democratic politics with a concept of citizenship that gives this outlook reality. Nor do we have a clear idea of the extent to which the city, properly conceived as a humanly scaled ethical community, differs from urbanization and the inhuman scale produced by the nation-state. We rarely understand how integrally an ethical politics is wedded to a comprehensible civic scale, to the city itself, conceived as a thoroughly manageable and participatory union of citizens, richly articulated by tradition and by social, cultural, and political forms. We live so contemporaneously within the given state of affairs, the overbearing "now" that eternalizes the status quo, that no society is more prey to the workings of mindless forces than our own. Bereft of a serious regard for history, indeed for the experiences of our own century, we find ourselves in the airless vacuum of an immutable "present," a time warp that precludes any sense of futurity and ability to reason innovatively. (p. 83-84)
[5] I should emphasize very decidedly that "the state" can be less pronounced as a constellation of institutions at the municipal level, more pronounced at the provincial or regional level, and most pronounced at the national level. These are not trifling distinctions. We cannot ignore them without grossly simplifying politics. Differences in degrees of statification can have major practical consequences for politically concerned individuals and communities. (p. 136)
[6] Viewed with hindsight, the images of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco rise up to remind us that the ideological celebration of the nation-state, which marked social theory during the Victorian era, was grossly misplaced. We of a later generation have good reason to lament the loss of the confederal alternative that appeared at an earlier epoch in Europe, one that might have averted the terrifying turn "national unity" took between 1914 and 1945. (p. 158)
[7] This problem [of centralization or decentralization] is not an academic one. It raises the crucial question of whether or not seemingly "undeveloped" peoples today are to achieve what we so flippantly call "modernization"—by confederalism or nationalism, decentralism or centralism, libertarian institutions or authoritarian ones. We have not removed these questions from the future of our civilization nor can they be concealed from purview by the veil of history. If anything, hindsight has made them as searing today as they were in earlier times, when the terrifying future that now looms before us was very far removed from the eyes of men and women in the sixteenth century. (p. 163)
[8] the newly gained dominance of the capitalistic market relationship over all other forms of production and consociation is a major source of what I have denoted as "urbanization"—the explosion of the city itself into vast urban agglomerations that threaten the very integrity of city life and citizenship. What makes the market society we call "capitalism" unique, even by contrast to its early mercantile form, is that it is an ever-expansive, accumulative, and, in this respect, a cancerous economic system whose "law of life" is to "grow or die." Capitalism in its characteristically modern and "dominant" form threatens not only to undermine every "natural economy" (to use Marx's own terms), be it small-scale agriculture, artisanship, simple exchange relationships, and the like; it threatens to undermine every dimension of "organic society," be it the kinship tie, communitarian forms of association, systems of self-governance, and localist allegiances—the sense of home and place. Owing to its metastatic invasion of every aspect of life by means of monetization and what Immanuel Wallerstein calls "commodification," it threatens the integrity of the natural world—soil, flora, fauna, and the complex ecocommunities that have made present-day life forms and relationships possible by turning everything "natural" into an inorganic, essentially synthetic form. Soil is being turned into sand, variegated landscapes into level and simplified ones, complex relationships into more primal forms such that the evolutionary clock is being turned back to a biotically earlier time when life was less varied in form and its range more limited in scope.
The effect of capitalism on the city has been nothing less than catastrophic. The commonly used term "urban cancer" can be taken literally to designate the extent to which the traditional urbs of the ancient world have been dissolved into a primal, ever-spreading, and destructive form that threatens to devour city and countryside alike. Growth in the special form that singles out modern capitalism from all earlier forms of economic life, including earlier forms of capitalism itself, has affected what we still persist in calling the "city" by leading to the expansion of pavements, streets, houses, and industrial, commercial, and retail structures over the entire landscape just as a cancer spreads over the body and invades its deepest recesses.
Cities, in turn, have begun to lose their form as distinctive cultural and physical entities, as humanly scaled and manageable political entities. Their functions have changed from ethical arenas with a uniquely humane, civilized form of consociation, free of all blood ties and family loyalties, into immense, overbearing, and anonymous marketplaces. They are becoming centers primarily of mass production and mass consumption, including culture as well as physically tangible objects. Indeed, culture has become objectified into commodities as have human relationships, which are increasingly being simplified and mediated by objects. The simplification of social life and the biosphere by a growth-oriented economy in which production and consumption become ends in themselves is yielding the simplification of the human psyche itself. The strong sense of individuation that marked the people of the mixed society preceding capitalism is giving way to a receptive consumer and taxpayer, a passive observer of life rather than an active participant in it, lacking in economic roots that support self-assertiveness and community roots that foster participation in social life. Citizenship itself, conceived as a function of character formation, and politics, as part of paideia or the education of a social being, tend to wane into personal indifference to social problems. The decline of the citizen, more properly his or her dissolution into a being lost in a mass society—the human counterpart of the mass-produced object—is furthered by a burgeoning of structural gigantism that replaces human scale and by a growing bureaucracy that replaces all the organic sinews that held precapitalist society together. The counselor is the humanistic counterpart of the indifferent bureaucrat and the counseling chamber is the structural counterpart of the governmental office. (p. 202-203)
[9] This conceptual framework, which sees human consociation as a distinctly human, and humane, attribute of individual socialization—so markedly in contrast to the egoistic and interest-oriented, indeed disciplinary image of the contemporary public sphere—would mark a highly significant turn in the way we conceive the management of society and the participation of its citizenry in the political process. A dual structure of municipal government, paralleling the state's conventional legal structure, could open a creative institutional restructuring of the body politic—one that would not only countervail the centralizing and destructuring process of urbanization and growing state power but introduce a new principle of politics based on morality as well as cooperation and personal responsibility. (p. 274)
[10] A moral economy is either a moral enterprise that is guided by a genuine spiritual desire to create one, even at the expense of strictly economic considerations, or it will degenerate into another profit oriented and exploitative use of resources. Citizens who are not prepared to pay higher prices to support such an economy and volunteer their own efforts on its behalf are not likely to be pr& pared for self-governance in any form. Hence the need for a new municipal politics to become an intensely educational and participatory experience at every level of civic life. (p. 276)
[11] The word "moral" must be repeated—not as rhetoric to match the claims of reaction but as the felt spiritual underpinnings of a new social vision. It must be repeated not as part of a patronizing sermon but as a living practice that people incorporate into their personal lives and their communities. The vacuity and triviality of life today must be filled precisely by those visionary ideals that sustain the human side of life as well as its material side, or else the coordinates by which the future should be guided will totally disappear in that commodity oriented world we call the "marketplace of ideas." The more serious indecency of this "marketplace" is that these ideals will be turned into objects—mere commodities—that will lack even the value of things we need to sustain us. They will become the mere ornaments needed to garnish an inherently antihuman and antiecological society that threatens to undermine moral integrity as such and the simple social amenities that foster human intercourse. (p. 278)
[12] That decentralism can mean local parochialism, even racism; confederation, a denial of any rational coordination of resources and services; and individualism, a psychology of rampant egotism—all are simply the most negative way of viewing a constellation of notions whose logic can yield genuine freedom. (p. 279)
November 28, 2022
Urbanization Without Cities details civicism, community organization, and social development (primarily within the scope of the West) as Harrari’s Sapiens tells our story through the lens of anthropology. Some of the reading is dense (and the preface/first chapter are conceptually ambiguous), but it is one of the most rewarding and inciteful pieces of nonfiction I’ve read
September 27, 2022
This is an interesting book that predicted what we're living under today. Bookchin foresaw the current reality of the entirety of social structure sitting on and being ordered towards commerce. The state destroyed any possibility of life being ordered outside of corporations/their aims, and now we're stuck in (pre) neo-feudalism. You meet friends through business, you meet partners through apps, and maintain contact through ostensibly "private" social media sites. If you refuse to conform with this, you get "canceled" via "organic" efforts that mysteriously look like a decommissioned state program, to dump the perceived responsibility from the system onto fellow citizens.
Some interesting takes outside of that. Ultimately, I think the author was much better than those guys out there today, despite my obvious disagreement.
Some interesting takes outside of that. Ultimately, I think the author was much better than those guys out there today, despite my obvious disagreement.
October 1, 2014
Thought it might be interesting for relationship of urbanization to industrialization, citizenship to environmental awareness... but couldn't find anything helpful to current project...
May 15, 2022
Türkçede siyaset ve politika kelimelerinin kökenlerine bakmak, bu kitabın ne hakkında olduğunu kavramak için çok iyi bir yol olacaktır diye düşünüyorum. Nişanyan Sözlük'ten süper özet geçerek alıntılarsak siyaset, Arapçada "seyislik, at bakımı, tenkil ve tedip etme, cezalandırma" gibisinden anlamlara sahip. Bir tür gütme, zorla ehlileştirme hissiyatı alıyorum bu kelimeden. Ama politika... Eh, Antik Yunan orada duruyor, bakın bakalım neymiş :)
Üniversitedeki felsefe derslerinde sezdiğim bir şeyi çoook daha yetkince bellememi sağladı bu kitap. İnsanlığın ve dünyanın sorunlarını görmemi, bunun da ötesine geçerek ona bir çözüm önerebilmemi sağladı. Teşekkür ederim Melis, iyi ki seni tanımışım ve iyi ki önermişsin bana bu kitabı.
Çoook nadiren harf basım hatası, noktalama hatası gibisinden şeylere rastladım. Bir iki yerde "ben olsaydım daha farklı bir kelimeyle çevirirdim" dediğim kısımlar vardı. Onun dışında harikulade bir eser.
Başlayacaklara, her ihtimale karşı, kitabın sonundaki "Konfederalizmin Anlamı" adlı ek bölümü okumalarını öneriyorum. Bütün bir mevzuya süper geniş çaplı bir özet sunduğu için kitaptaki anlatıyı takip etmeniz kolay olacaktır.
Üniversitedeki felsefe derslerinde sezdiğim bir şeyi çoook daha yetkince bellememi sağladı bu kitap. İnsanlığın ve dünyanın sorunlarını görmemi, bunun da ötesine geçerek ona bir çözüm önerebilmemi sağladı. Teşekkür ederim Melis, iyi ki seni tanımışım ve iyi ki önermişsin bana bu kitabı.
Çoook nadiren harf basım hatası, noktalama hatası gibisinden şeylere rastladım. Bir iki yerde "ben olsaydım daha farklı bir kelimeyle çevirirdim" dediğim kısımlar vardı. Onun dışında harikulade bir eser.
Başlayacaklara, her ihtimale karşı, kitabın sonundaki "Konfederalizmin Anlamı" adlı ek bölümü okumalarını öneriyorum. Bütün bir mevzuya süper geniş çaplı bir özet sunduğu için kitaptaki anlatıyı takip etmeniz kolay olacaktır.
July 27, 2022
Yine bir Bookchin klasiği - çok iyi kitap. Çok kafa açıcı, çok bütünlüklü. Okuduğum en iyi kitaplarından biri kesinlikle okunmalı. Kent kentleşme üzerine düşünürken sistemsel olarak düşünmek bize çıkış yollarını da gösteriyor. Kenti (civitas kökeninden city) eden bir kentleşme (urbanization) kimseye bir hayrı olmadığı kesin. Çağdaş görüş kenti ticari bir girişim olarak ele alırken, kentleşme de buna hizmet eder.
Antik Yunan’a ait olan Paideia, philia kavramları ise gerçekten çok kıymetli. Bookchin de detaylı inceleyerek günümüz eğitim sistemi ve yurttaşlık kavramları üzerinde düşünmemizi sağlıyor ve çözüm önerileri sunuyor.
Kitabı 7-8 ayda ortaklaşa okuduğumuz için de her yeri çizili ve bir sürü notum var-hangi birini paylaşayım noktasında da olduğum için çok sözü aza indirmek zor, bu kitap notlarım da burda bitsin.
Antik Yunan’a ait olan Paideia, philia kavramları ise gerçekten çok kıymetli. Bookchin de detaylı inceleyerek günümüz eğitim sistemi ve yurttaşlık kavramları üzerinde düşünmemizi sağlıyor ve çözüm önerileri sunuyor.
Kitabı 7-8 ayda ortaklaşa okuduğumuz için de her yeri çizili ve bir sürü notum var-hangi birini paylaşayım noktasında da olduğum için çok sözü aza indirmek zor, bu kitap notlarım da burda bitsin.
April 19, 2022
Probably the best introduction to Bookchin's ideas on libertarian municipalism. It takes you through the history of cities from ancient times to the present and shows how, rather than simply being tools of empire, cities have often served as the basis for resistance to empire. Confederation has indeed been the one form of resistance to empire with a long-standing historical pedigree. Reclaiming our cities is therefore crucial to the liberation of society.
July 1, 2025
“Both are being subverted by urbanization, a process of threatens to destroy their identities and their vast wealth of tradition and variety. Urbanization is engulfing not only the countryside; it is also engulfing the city. It is devouring not only town and village life based on the values, culture, common institutions nourished by agrarian relationships. It is devouring city life based on the values, culture, and institutions nourished by civic relationships.”
February 5, 2020
Really good book on what it meant historically to be a citizen, and how to build a true democracy through municipalities
August 11, 2024
An interesting way to understand what the role of cities are as a politician and civic entity, instead of a formal one as planners and architects usually conceive them as. While dwelling a lot on ancient history and classicism, the historical arc of the book makes Bookchin’s arguments more sound. A must read for planners!
October 3, 2025
Bookchin when i catch you...
December 30, 2023
The oddest part of the book is his emphasis on the freedom that citizens of Greek cities had to stand around and debate what was best for the city... because their fields were being tended by slaves. At the end he notes that self-sufficient village communities (without slaves) are easily controlled by exogenous elites. So how do you have locals making decisions for themselves unless they have slaves working for them? Bookchin spends pages and pages admonishing us to work hard to find a way to wrest control from the Nation-State, and he sees positive signs that that is possible. Except that was 1992, and clearly the town meetings of Vermont have not magically spread across the country, and no power has been wrested.
So it is a lot of pages and big words to discuss what could be, which seems to have little relation to how things are. Yes, the massive urbanization propelled by the Nation-State is devouring any remaining local authentic communities, we get it. But short of important, well-trained citizen-debaters having time to debate while the slaves work their land, how would we realistically get to this magical confederalism? A lot of talk but no practical answers.
So it is a lot of pages and big words to discuss what could be, which seems to have little relation to how things are. Yes, the massive urbanization propelled by the Nation-State is devouring any remaining local authentic communities, we get it. But short of important, well-trained citizen-debaters having time to debate while the slaves work their land, how would we realistically get to this magical confederalism? A lot of talk but no practical answers.
January 2, 2024
"In un'epoca di mercificazione, concorrenza, anomia ed egoismo, il nostro compito è creare consapevolmente una sfera pubblica che immetta i valori di umanesimo, cooperazione, comunità e servizio pubblico nella prassi quotidiana della vita civica. La cittadinanza dal basso va di pari passo con la politica dal basso."
un excursus storico minuzioso sulle forme cittadine di politica, dal demos alla Comune di Parigi passando dalla Lega Lombarda. ho apprezzato molto il focus sulle istituzioni e gli aspetti organizzativi.
ideologicamente condivido molto dello sguardo e delle teorie di Bookchin, è una lettura che mi ispira; la sua utopia è invecchiata male, ma il discorso regge.
un excursus storico minuzioso sulle forme cittadine di politica, dal demos alla Comune di Parigi passando dalla Lega Lombarda. ho apprezzato molto il focus sulle istituzioni e gli aspetti organizzativi.
ideologicamente condivido molto dello sguardo e delle teorie di Bookchin, è una lettura che mi ispira; la sua utopia è invecchiata male, ma il discorso regge.
April 20, 2017
The politics are good but I don't think he needed to spend 200 pages on Athens. His ideas for a parallel "moral" legislature that will eventually supplant/replace our real legislature is interesting, but feels rather ineffectual in an era of tremendous Federal/executive overreach. Also the last 20 pages are just Bookchin's airing of grievances about Bernie Sanders, whom he considers a paternalist autocrat. lol.
May 4, 2020
Gosto da reconstrução histórica de experiências políticas centradas na cidade, mas me parece que as questões de como um sistema centrado no municipalismo democrático poderia surgir e se desenvolver no mundo atual poderia ter recebido mais espaço que apenas o último dos 8 capítulos.
Curiosamente temos hoje um movimento político tentando tornar real esse sistema: o Rojava no Curdistão sírio.
Curiosamente temos hoje um movimento político tentando tornar real esse sistema: o Rojava no Curdistão sírio.
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