The Nature of Cities
by Jason GodeskyThe word civilization comes from the Latin civis, meaning “city.” This curious epiphenomenon of civilization gives us as good a definition for civilization as we could ask for; etymologically and anthropologically, “civilization” means a culture of cities. Civilizations certainly count as complex societies, but we can imagine other kinds of complex societies which, whether or not they prove tenable in reality, would still fail to meet the criteria of civilization, chiefly because they would also lack cities, and all that goes with them. So what do we mean by a “city,” and what makes it so uniquely unsustainable?
Cities typically feature “city life”: the unique social network of bureaucrats, merchants, and a dense human population that arises in such urban centers, but defining a city in such terms seems tautological. No standard definition for “city” (versus other permanent settlements like a “village”) exists. From the American Heritage Dictionary, we get “A center of population, commerce, and culture; a town of significant size and importance.” Archaeologists define a city in terms of population density, with 5,000 or more people living in an at least semi-permanent settlement.
Such definitions try to capture an intuitive understanding that ultimately comes down to an ecological relationship: they point to the city as a unique form of human population density, with a unique relationship to its landbase. In his two-volume book Endgame, Derrick Jensen offers perhaps the best definition of the city to date, in explicitly ecological terms:
I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as a culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts— that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning city-state), with cities being defined—so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (meadow long in the Tolowa tongue), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville. Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth. Beautiful or not, Tenochtitlán required, as do all cities, the (often forced) importation of food and other resources. The story of any civilization is the story of the rise of city-states, which means it is the story of the funneling of resources toward these centers (in order to sustain them and cause them to grow), which means it is the story of an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside.
In the documentary, What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, William Catton (author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change) concurs, noting that we can almost define a city as a population that grossly exceeds its local carrying capacity.
To define a city as an ecological phenomenon, we now have several points which our previous definitions reached towards but ultimately failed to bring together satisfactorily, including:
- Permanent settlement
- A population density that grossly exceeds its local carrying capacity (5,000, for instance, acting as a fairly arbitrary number that would generally meet this criteria; by recognizing this as an ecological relationship, rather than a matter of absolute numbers, we can see that 5,000 acts simply as a rule of thumb for a more important ecological relationship)
- As a result of #2, cities require the importation of resources. In former times, a “hinterland” supplied this.
Because of this, cities give rise to civilization: concentration of power and wealth, class society, standing armies and the rest of Vere Gordon Childe’s primary criteria for civilization all follow from meeting the needs of cities, made possible (and in many ways, required by) agriculture. If we accept this definition of a city, then the unsustainability of the city seems tautological—it follows from the very definition of a city.
This has upset some observers, including Ran Prieur, who wrote:
The other night I watched What A Way To Go again, and noticed a sloppy, circular argument about cities: 1) Define a city as requiring the importation of resources. 2) Anything that requires the importation of resources will exhaust its resource base and collapse. 3) Therefore, we must give up living in cities.
A more careful and empowering argument would go like this: 1) Anything that systematically takes more than it gives will exhaust its resource base and collapse. 2) Cities as we know them take more than they give. 3) Therefore, if we want to live in cities, we must reinvent them.
Primitivists like to think that anything that wasn’t done 20,000 years ago cannot be done, or is not worth doing. At the other extreme, the myth of “progress” says that something impossible—eternal increase—is inevitable. I’m trying to find a middle ground. I envision a dynamic future, full of change and experimentation, but stabilized by having no ratcheting increase—no “growth”.
Applying this to urban design, we come up with pretty much what Leopold Kohr envisioned decades ago: a world of small independent city-states, with urban centers supported by surrounding farmland. Integrate some newer and older ideas, and “farming” becomes permaculture and forest gardens and wild lands managed to optimize foraging and hunting. The people in the dense central area have to import food, but they can export their composted waste, as well as providing things that give “civilization” a good name, like complex tools and urban culture.
We already know everything we need to know to do this now, with one exception, the ancient problem that nobody has yet solved: If just one culture falls from stability to “growth,” and starts depleting its landbase, increasing its population, and conquering, what’s to stop that pattern from consuming the whole world like a fire? Tragically, the more we restore the land, grow forests, build topsoil, the bigger that threat becomes.
Let’s take a closer look at this idea. Could our definition straight-jacket “cities” too narrowly? Might we simply need to expand our imagination of what a city could look like?
A crucial distinction divides agriculture from permaculture, namely, the kind of change they effect on their environments. Agriculture cultivates by means of catastrophe, while permaculture (or horticulture) cultivates by means of succession. We can see the clearest difference in their ecological impacts: the first farmers turned the vast cedar forests of Iraq into the desert wasteland we know today, while Indian permaculturalists created the Amazon rainforest and the Great Plains. We can see examples of Indian civilizations, such as the Mexica (Aztec) already mentioned in the quote from Derrick Jensen. But notably, those civilizations did not take part in the great ecological terraforming projects that their tribal, permacultural neighbors undertook. They, like civilizations in the Old World, also created deserts. Why do we find this consistent behavior?
Ran’s critique does make some good and valid points: we know how to cultivate and regenerate soil simultaneously, and such techniques can feed permanent settlements, namely villages. Villages differ from cities in several important ways. For example, they remain within local ecological limits, and even, typically, within the human cognitive limits set by Dunbar’s Number. That said, the reasons for permaculture’s success also limit its ability to scale. The reliance on edge in permaculture means that we can’t simply multiply yields per acre times the number of acres. Permaculture relies on the interaction of ecological zones, and those zones require a certain amount of area simply to remain viable. If a particular permaculture garden relies on a forest edge, then it can’t multiply its acreage into the forest without damaging the forest and destroying the edge it requires. Agriculture, based on catastrophe, works much more simply: if you need more food, you can always just rip up another acre of soil, because agriculture doesn’t rely on ecological relationships, but instead relies on breaking down ecological relationships.
Permaculture also proves difficult to mass-produce or ship very far. That means that human population density must more or less match the nutritional density of permacultural output. Even the most optimistic permacultural advocates, including David Mollison, while they expect permaculture could feed even more people than the current population, also readily admit that doing so would require a much more evenly distributed human population: i.e., the end of cities. Anthropological precedent clearly shows us that while permaculture works well for village life, it does not scale up to the level of cities. To export food to cities requires the raw, absolute production that only agriculture can provide.
Exporting waste to match food intake cannot make a city sustainable, due to the law of conservation of energy. Such an arrangement finds precedent in Chinese “night soil,” and while it can slow the damage of an unsustainable system, it cannot make the system sustainable. Food imported into the city becomes human energy, and the city’s population uses some of that energy for breathing and blood flow and keeping themselves alive. They excrete only a fraction of it as waste. So with each iteration of the cycle, less energy comes back to the “farm” than originally left, so the system still exports the ecological health of the land to keep the city alive.
These factors seem to underline, rather than detract, from our definition of a city. It suggests that the city has fundamental problems, and simply cannot become sustainable without ceasing to exist as a city. Villages certainly show potential for the future, but villages differ from cities in many ways. It also seems worth noting that what Ran calls “things that give ‘civilization’ a good name, like complex tools and urban culture,” do not occur uniquely in civilization, so we have no need to give up such things. While primitive technology does emphasize elegance over complexity, this often results in more effective tools. But city life itself likely makes up the thing most people will miss most of all: the chance to meet many new people, and to engage in the bustle and frenetic energy of the urban setting. For that, primitive societies had festivals and fairs which would bring together all of a region’s tribes and bands in a single place for a short time. They would trade, meet up, sometimes exchange members, get married, and effectively create a temporary, ad hoc city life for a few days, before dispersing again, before they began to have a lasting detrimental impact. That kind of “flash mob” approach to city life strikes a balance between our occasional needs for mass interaction, and the ecological (and psychological) strains that such interactions take. Even if we ignore the ecological implications, most of us eventually become stressed and fatigued from the constant bustle of city life, and eventually seek retreat into a more-than-human world to rejuvenate from that. The festival provides everything we love best about cities, without destroying the land that gives us life, or even outlasting its usefulness when it energizes us, to become the hectic urban trap that ultimately drains us.
I anticipated a post of this nature. Thanks for getting on it.
But I have to say, I agree with Ran. The conservation of energy concern is somewhat moot next to the fact that we do have a steady supply of energy from the sun.
Now, to say that cities have always been unsustainable is I think legit, and Ran’s initial post I saw as more about definitions than substance. That is, what Ran imagines as ecological cities of the future, I would just call ecological villages, as you may as well, Jason.
I mean, I’m generally pretty confident that it’s not just an arbitrary attachment to what happened 20,000 years ago that legitimates the primitivist suspicion of more recent developments. It seems far more likely to me that if it could have worked back then, our forager ancestors would have tried it and incorporated it, as they did fire, for example. Like Daniel Quinn says, evolution is not perfect, but damn hard to improve on. Maybe we can refine our talents and capacities more, and likely we will if we emerge from this mess. But my general outlook is that what happened 20,000 years ago, for example, happened for a reason, and moving beyond it is probably constrained in certain ways for very real and legitimate reasons beyond philosophical or ideological attachment.
On the other hand, we don’t know if we don’t try, so I’m all for our future primitive descendents trying stuff. Sankofa and all- after we retrieve what we left behind, we can proceed along.
Comment by Archangel — 5 September 2007 @ 9:37 AM
I was kind of surprised to see Ran take that tack, as it rather misses the point. We’re not talking about energy that the sun can replenish, we’re talking about the nutritional energy in the soil that agriculture takes out. Things like night soil can slow down an unsustainable practice, but they can never make an unsustainable practice sustainable. Sunlight doesn’t put minerals in the soil, does it?
So you’re left with cultivation that works with succession to build up stronger ecologies. But those all depend on building up ecological relationship (edge is a perfect example), which can be extraordinarily productive, but relationships fundamentally do not scale. That means that whatever you come up with, the one thing it won’t be is anything we would recognize as a city.
In the Fifth World, we’re trying to envision some of the possibilities for the future, and it really runs the gamut. There’s no end to what’s possible. But that doesn’t mean that everything’s possible. Cities are unsustainable, basically by definition. Villages can be incredible things, arranged any number of ways, but the level of human population density you see even in an ancient city is simply not sustainable in the long term. Look at cliff-side villages in the southwest U.S., or Paleolithic fairs, and you’ll start to have an inkling of the mind-boggling diversity ahead of us. If anything, I think the hang-up on preserving cities is symptomatic of a distinct lack of imagination.
Now, Ran’s latest response does get it right:
That’s the very crux of the problem, because there are other concerns to take into account: how much energy does it take to transport the food to the center, for instance, and when does it no longer become viable (where the energy to transport the food becomes greater than the energy value of the food itself). That’s precisely what creates a “foodshed.” In order to produce a city, you need the nutritional density to feed it: not just a question of your absolute production, but also how far away it’s being produced. With sustainable methods, you get the nutrititional density needed for a village, but not for a city. So while we can concentrate our populations differently than our food sources (as villages, and even hunter-gatherer camps, do), there’s a limit to that, as well.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2007 @ 9:48 AM
Great post. Great e-prime. Great… Scott?
Comment by Urban Scout — 5 September 2007 @ 10:04 AM
Heh, thanks!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2007 @ 10:10 AM
I was listening to a recording of a Derrick Jensen talk the other day and he repeated this definition of a city. I had already read it in Endgame and pretty much accepted it but I suddenly realised that it’s not as sharp as it could be.
Clearly, almost any human settlement requires the routine importation of food. The Tolowa indians cited may have feasted on local salmon but they had to walk out of the village to get it. A reasonably sized town is also reliant on importation of food from the surrounding environment, but seems different from a city in both function and form. So is the transition to a city merely a quantitative, rather than a qualitative shift? We could go back to defining a city on the basis of size, or complexity of activity found within, or link it to a certain time in the cultural phase when political complexity results in the shift to greater centralisation of bureaucratic and mercantile functions.
It would be useful to retain the conceptual link to the landbase, though, and I think the key is this: A city requires the routine importation of food _by other people_. A town can still support a majority of people who work in surrounding fields and orchards (or gardens and forests!), or can be seen as a centre primarily serving the local rural population and hence an extension of their settlements, but a city is something turned in upon itself (often defining its boundaries in an overt manner with the city wall), where the people rely on a flow of resources from outside.
This may sound like a minor distinction, but i think it’s important, because it highlights the political difference - a small town may subsist through offering genuinely useful goods and services to the external communities, but a city can only operate through the _enforced_ subjugation of those communities, and is, hence, exclusively found where the classic hierarchy of a dominator culture is operative. Whether through violence or religious hypnosis (or, more usually, both), the local custodians of the landbase are forced into producing surplus resources and delivering them to the city.
A city can thus also be defined by its growth. Since the urban population is no longer constrained by offering ‘value’ back to those external to it, it can command greater and greater flows of resources be diverted to it, depleting the natural stores and generally being unsustainable in all the ways we know so well. The population can grow in direct proportion to the size of the surrounding area under military control and not be subject (at least, not yet…) to the consequences of this depletion.
So when Ran suggests cities might continue to exist, and you suggest that their function could be taken over by festivals, the issue seems to turn on what services cities can offer people in a primitivist / post-civilisation context. For most of history the answer has, obviously, been “not much” (and I hesitated even to claim that towns can offer value-for-landbase to surrounding communities, although there’s a reasonable argument to be made there), but I think that the areas where this current civilisation stands out from previous ones - globalised knowledge and scientific understanding - might make a compact settlement of some kind viable, offering, e.g., a storehouse of advanced knowledge of plant chemistry, holistic medicine, ancient history, etc. beyond that which can be sustained in oral form in a tribal situation. The examples we have of city-like settlements supported by non-civilised communities seem to be mostly ceremonial centres, only fully populated during the festival season, and I can imagine some kind of monastic institution preserving certain kinds of knowledge and wisdom in return for voluntary support from the surrounding landbase.
So there you have it, a city manned by a skeleton staff of monks which also forms the centre for a bi-annual festive gathering -of-the-tribes. Behold as I split the difference between Jason and Ran! Or something.
Comment by cheeba — 5 September 2007 @ 10:13 AM
I think you may be overthinking this a bit, with a bit too strict a definition of “import.” No, the food’s rarely right inside the village. There’s a garden, and the garden could even be a mile away. But it’s still, in a less formal sense, part of the village. Do you “import” food from one room to another in your house? The word “import” implies a lot more than just straightforward transport. American Heritage Dictionary gives us, “To bring or carry in from an outside source, especially to bring in (goods or materials) from a foreign country for trade or sale.” OK, so we know that “country” is a useless and arbitrary concept, but there does seem to be something real here. What about bioregion? Or simply, territory?
Sustainable cultures have a bond with their land, the territory that gives them birth. And, hunter-gatherer or permaculturalist, the food for any sustainable culture comes from that territory.
City folk don’t live in wheat fields. They may never even see one. Their food is not coming from their territory in any meaningful way. There is a clear divide between the city and the hinterland that does not exist with, say, a horticultural village.
Though, it’s funny you mention the special case of the ceremonial city. We’ve been working on a few spin-offs of the city idea, including that one, for the Fifth World. Chavin and Cahokia right now, being the primary models.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2007 @ 11:15 AM
Nice post, Jason (it’s been a while since I’ve replied to your writing, but I have been reading it). Importation of food seems to be the common character defining a city, and diminishing returns is the limit, as you say.
There are so few minerals in crops, compared to carbon and nitrogen, that minerals are pretty easily replaced through bedrock weathering, minerals in rain, and a teeny bit of rockdust. If carbon is replaced (and photosynthesis does that nicely), and nitrogen is carefully husbanded via nightsoil (we excrete far more N than we use) and N-fixing plants, you can keep cropland in good shape.
I’d like to believe it’s possible for a modest urban center to have a beneficial relationship with both the surrounding humans and ecosystem, rather than the exploitive, destructive ones we have. A garden city, say, where each home is surrounded by some significant fraction (half?) of the 4000 sq ft of garden that John Jeavons says is necessary to produce food and compost crops per person. Ecologically functional food forests surrounding that, and wilderness corridors penetrating and surrounding those. But there’s clearly a limit to how big that urban center can be.
Christian Peters looked at some cities in NY, asking how many acres were needed to feed the their population if all calories, for simplicity’s sake, came from corn. They calculated that Rochester NY (pop. 210,000) could get their food from within a 17 km radius, Canandaigua (15,000) from within 2.1 km radius. Of course they’re ignoring all the land needed for manure, ores, smelting, etc, so the footprint is going to be vastly bigger using industrial farming. But if permacultural methods could be applied, I bet the foodshed wouldn’t be much more than double or triple those areas. So a city of 15,000 might need a 5 km radius foodshed, which is easily reached in an hour’s walk. Bigger than that and preserving ecosystem function gets dicey, I suspect, unless you’ve really got food forestry down pat. But now we’ve got some numbers for how big population centers can get before they become parasitic. History suggests that 100,000 is above the upper limit. Renaissance Florence was 50,000, so you can have a pretty rich culture with 50,000.
I suspect what we’ll see after the oil descent is a continual pulsing of villages growing into cities, reaching their limits, and sliding back down to village scale again. Unless we develop taboos that hold village size within their carrying capacity.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 5 September 2007 @ 12:50 PM
Hey jason,
I certainly am overthinking it! But that’s because I have the mother of all agendas that I’m trying not to bring into the discussion unnecessarily. As usual, I’m trying to make the case for re-emphasising the cultural and political aspects and the way in which they inflect the purely environmental considerations. (I’m also trying to avoid just talking about semantics, but I don’t know how succesfully
So I guess in suggesting that there is actually a spectrum of importation - from walking outside the village to the garden to denuding the wheatfields of Egypt - I’m arguing that a clear definition must therefore fall within the zone of the political (specifically, in the issue of coercion). After all, even horticultural villages might send people off on week-long hunting trips to supplement the local sources of food (or even trade with other villages?), whilst cities also have gardens and orchards of their own (18th-C London totally had wheat fields! You could walk there in half an hour).
A small town with a few useful specialist artisans could be 80% self-sufficient and trade goods and services for the remaining 20% of food in a sustainable manner.
So unless we pick an arbitrary percentage of importation, there is no definition of city here other than ‘an unsustainable concentration of people’, which brings us right back to Ran’s point - the city is being defined as that which is unsustainable. In reality we can recognise a city instantly and it has nothing to do with size or with any calculations of the carrying capacity of the local landbase. It has to do with a concentration of functions, a shift in the consciousness of the inhabitants, an acceleration of cultural change and innovation and, historically, is usually linked with a breakdown of feudality, the transformation of religion and the development of an early form of capitalistic exchange.
So I agree with you that the nature of the city revolves around the ‘clear divide’ with the external region, but I think of the city wall as as much a means for an exploitative elite to store cultural and environmental wealth stolen from the surrounding bioregion as it is a means of protecting the city against marauding armies and/or a natural sense of connection to the landbase. Rather than tautologically defining cities as ‘that which is unsustainable’ i think it’s worth looking at the specific cultural etiology of the phenomenon, which is that cities occur at a certain point in cultural complexification, share certain common characteristics across cultures, and sustain their status (and hence existence) through a complex process of political coercion and cultural legitimisation.
I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said, I’m just swapping perspectives, really, but I’m interested in seeing whether you have any use for a more politicised understanding of the nuances of ‘importing’. Who is importing what? Are they doing it willingly? Quite aside from how big a settlement can get before it’s unsustainable, how does the ‘city’ phenomenon work, how are people convinced/coerced to send food there (pace premise 2 of ‘Endgame’) and how can we stop it happening again?
[OK, now I’m really overthinking it. Why don’t I just post my dissertation on the internet and be done with it?…]
Comment by cheeba — 5 September 2007 @ 1:54 PM
Hey –
Cheeba…. I tend to agree with Jason that you are over thinking this a little. Importation implies that the product is coming from others as opposed to simply being acquired by the natives at a distance. Remember, also, that trade does not necessarily count, in that it would be fully sustainable (potentially) for two villages to trade foodstuffs for variety, whereas it probably would not be if those same to villages traded food in one direction and only other products in return.
Toby…. good to ’see’ you again. Hope life is treating you well….
Like you I have been relatively non-participatory here for a while, but this question did peak my interest. A couple of the things you referenced in particular….
First on adding garden space in an urban environment… it strikes me that even half of the necessary garden space per person exceeds the average living space of most urban households. So while it may not seem like much in some cases, within the context of city living it is a huge expenditure of space….
Next, on the Christian Peters thing…. I don;t think, from the quick perusal I gave his report, that his research has much of anything to do, fundamentally, with what we are generally accustomed to talk about. Corn is a super high density food source AND (obviously) a monocrop. So how does that relate to sustainable practices, permaculture, etc? For every square kilometer he recommends, are we really talking about ten? twenty? more? Without looking at those variables specifically I don’t think we can really discuss how much outlying area a population density may need (And, of course, this is also totally lacking the local ecology and the variability therein………)
Anyway, saw something that peaked my interest and couldn’t let it pass… Hope all is well with everyone!!!
Janene
Comment by janene — 5 September 2007 @ 4:06 PM
Janene, good to hear from you, too.
Jane Mt. Pleasant has some good data showing that corn/beans/squash yields more food, with better nutritional content, than monocrop corn. So I think we can use Peters’ numbers as a starting point and figure that we can get similar yields when using sustainable practices, or, at worst, half the yield or so. And then add in compost crops, etc. Peters at least has asked, “how much land will feed a city?” even though the assumpions are not too useful in the real world. If someone knows of better data, please chime in.
And yes, to grow a significant portion of your own food takes more land than an average urban lot. I’m figuring cities will be pretty depopulated at some point. Then whoever lives in my house can garden half my block. I also eagerly await the day that at least every other city street is removed (and used to build village walls?) and turned into a food forest, since there won’t be cars any more. That’s a lot of land.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 5 September 2007 @ 5:24 PM
Hey Toby –
Fair enough. Three sisters certainly does change things a bit, although I have some question about the ecological stability of the guild (because it is so small/limited) particularly over varied bioregions. But it does provide a better starting point at the least….
Oh… as to the urban thing… I’m not even thinking of lots at this point…. I’m thinking of apartment complexes, sky scrapers and so forth. Figure a typical family of four living in a 1000 sq foot apartment, one of thirty on a plot of land that is what, a couple acres in size? That’s a lot of depopulation. And then we come to the question…. does that even describe a ‘city’ anymore? (Bringing us back to the main theme
)
Ah well….
Janene
Comment by janene — 5 September 2007 @ 5:43 PM
“Permaculture also proves difficult to mass-produce or ship very far.”
This is just asserted. Not argued. And it’s the entire frikkin’ issue.
“To export food to cities requires the raw, absolute production that only agriculture can provide.”
To export food to cities as we know them…
To make things extraordinarily blunt for an example, say we have 1000 ‘gardens’ spread out over a large region, integrated with the larger ecosystem. Each garden could feed a village of 400, but could still be up kept by just 100. The villages federate/contract individually/whathaveyou and ship the direct raw material of their horticultural harvests to their comrades in a city. Just because they’re not uniformly stacked crates of a single product doesn’t invalidate their functionality or make them less efficient. Consider a care package sent by grandma, with 15 strawberries, three pumpkins and a bag of legumes, sent directly to its recipient… Think of the villages as each “sponsoring” their friends in the city.
The villages could all be upstream on some watershed and the city at the coast. The villages raft resources constantly down the rivers as they are generated, while the city ships back items that are more efficiently created in Mass Society (Wi-Fi routers, solar panels, shower plumbing, highly non-linear social art) in clumps, so as to minimize energy consumption.
(Positioning cities at the bottom of watersheds also has a bunch of other positive effects on the sustainability and long-term economic security of a city. Fishing, for instance, although it is certainly limited, is far more scalable that horticulture.)
“Exporting waste to match food intake cannot make a city sustainable, due to the law of conservation of energy…. So with each iteration of the cycle, less energy comes back to the “farm” than originally left, so the system still exports the ecological health of the land to keep the city alive.”
This is a deranged invocation of “conservation of energy” because the exact same amount of gross energy leaves the soil irregardless of whether you have 20,000 people living evenly spread out through the countryside or 5,000 in the countryside and 15,000 in a city that exports its waste back to the countryside.
You could argue that energy would be lost in the shipping of that waste, and then you’d be right. But such energy lost needn’t come from biochemically stored energy within the ecosystem (instead transportation could directly tap solar, wind, whatever).
Comment by Anonymous — 5 September 2007 @ 9:14 PM
Jason
Did you mean to conjoin David Holmgren and Bill Mollison and create a David Mollison? I can see in the future how the originator’s of permaculture could get mixed into a single mythical figure but I think we should probably wait until they’re dead before we start
Ananonymous, I’m really interested in what you’re discussing because regardless of the rest of the debate we’re a city based culture and a lot of people are going to gravitate toward large settlements in the mid to near future. I think we need to know how we are going to make it work and I’m glad to see you’re thinking about it.
Comment by Aaron — 5 September 2007 @ 9:33 PM
Hi, Toby! Great to see you around!
But do you think those techniques could make tilling sustainable?
There’s the key. What’s that limit? It really seems like it’s something closer to the village level, which really makes it not a city anymore.
I think we have plenty of ethnographic examples that the case city-dwellers make that cultural richness is a function of urban centers is bunk. We have rich cultures from horticultural villages and hunter-gatherer bands, too. The idea that you need cities to have a rich culture is one of those “just-so” stories that cities tell to justify their existence, and, I think, is really the kind of condescension that fuels the rural-urban antagonism.
I think that’s true; I’d guess that that kind of pulsing would eventually develop not just taboos, but specific ecological limits that would limit village size to a sustainable scale.
But cities only rarely resort to coercion. There’s just not enough energy to make a habit of that. Most of the time, it’s concensual trade.
But it’s a pattern we’re surrounded by. If it’s unsustainable by definition, that’s not a mark against it. Don’t you think we need a word to describe this phenomenon?
Most cities throughout history have had none of those things. We can instantly recognize a city, but it has everything to do with size and carrying capacity. The ideological impacts of that have varied from culture to culture, so defining it in terms of the ideological consequences of that pattern of living seems backwards, especially since there’s so much variation in those ideological consequences that to define the city in those terms would leave us with a word so useless that everything would be a city.
That’s not a tautology. “A city is a city,” would be tautological. But the fact that a city is unsustainable by definition is not tautological; it is the direct consequence of a particular ecological phenomenon. We’re surrounded by this phenomenon. It needs a name. That this phenomenon is inherently unsustainable does not change that. You could as easily that defining overshoot as unsustainable is tautological. It isn’t, either; it’s an ecological phenomenon that’s fundamentally unsustainably, but it happens so often that it needs a name.
Those are worthy of analysis, but I don’t think they can help you define a city. As I said before, most cities exist from consensual trade, which would make them indistinguishable from horticultural villages or hunter-gatherer bands, yet we can clearly see that they are still very different. Ultimately, consensual trade or violent conquest makes very little difference; the energy flow remains the same.
Do you think a situation like that would still be recognizable as a city?
That is true. I’ve gone through this so many times now, I’ve forgotten to crunch all the numbers. Fair enough, especially now that Ran’s expanded this to essay-length, this obviously deserves a more in-depth response. So a more in-depth response shall you have!
Later.
Or to any settlement that would have the population density necessary to make it recognizable as a city. Granted, if you change the nature of the city so drastically that no one would any longer recognize it as a city, then that may change, but at that point, are you talking about a different kind of city, or just plain something that isn’t a city anymore?
Not sure your premise is actually plausible. What keeps the population from rising when the food is available? Why do they put in all the extra effort that they’re not going to use? And how big would that garden have to be?
More problems. To make this sustainable, it’s got to be spread out. Quite a bit. How do you account for the energy needed to travel that far? And how does the city pay back not only for the food, but for the energy involved in transport?
Yeah, that doesn’t really change much. Grandma can send a care package now because it doesn’t cost her much, just postage. What if she had to walk 200 miles to deliver those 15 strawberries, three pumpkins, and a bag of legumes? Because it seems like that’s what we’re talking about here. So basically, the city would need the hinterland to feed it.
How does this differ from the current situation? All the cause of our current unsustainability are still there.
Now we’re getting somewhere, but even rafting downstream takes time and energy, to say nothing of getting back home, upstream. And you’re still perpetuating the urban myth that only cities can provide high culture. Wi-fi routers, solar panels, shower plumbing and “highly non-linear social art” lose a lot of their appeal when you live in a horticultural village.
That’s true, and the point stands: if you’re doing something unsustainable to the soil, “night soil” isn’t going to make it better.
YES!
DAVID MOLLISON!!!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 September 2007 @ 9:29 AM
It seems that everyone is talking at cross purposes and I think I know why.
When we hear the word city we (mostly) don’t think of unsustainable concentrations of people, or people that require imports. We consider a city as composed of three things:
1. Government
2. Infrastructure and services
3. Dense Population
Foremost, a city is a compact area with a government that provides infrastructure and services for a dense population. (Note, I recognize at least two problems with that definition in the words “compact” and “dense”, bear with me)
So, Jason (and others) come up with a definition of city like “requires imports” and those, like Ran, who like cities cry foul. If the technophiliacs or post-modern druids come up with a scenario for maintaining a dense population then Jason either says “won’t work” or “not a city”. To me, without a huge stake in the argument, “won’t work” with explanation is a fine answer, but “not a city” isn’t unless the above general definition of city is obviously not met.
The reason “not a city” doesn’t work for me (us?) is that since the scenario is attacking the definition of city that response seems to begging the question. As in:
A: Imagine a sustainable lifestyle like…
B: That’s not a city.
A: Why isn’t it.
B: Cities aren’t sustainable, so that can’t be a city.
A: But it’s got people living in a compact area, with a dense population, with a government providing infrastructure.
B: Doesn’t matter, if it’s sustainable it’s not a city.
I would much rather read either, why the scenario is unsustainable, or in what way it would fail as a generally understood city. For example, in the given example of a collection of riverside farms growing food and shipping it down the river to the city my objections were (in no particular order)
1. 400 people is going to be a huge garden. (A square mile is 640 acres, so that would be about 1.5 acres per person, and assuming a 5 foot swath would require walking 1056 miles to harvest Assuming you could harvest it all on one pass.)
2. Why would the food growers bother?
3. What are the city people going to do to make themselves feel secure when all of their sustenance is being imported on the river?
4. What happens to the city when the river floods or dries?
5. What if there is a bad weather year for the crops?
A response based on those objections would be much more fruitful for the discussion.
On the other hand, you probably don’t want to get too bogged down responding to ridiculous scenarios. So what’s a poor man to do.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 6 September 2007 @ 10:57 AM
I dunno, I really think it’s an issue of needing an old-fashioned illustration. I’m going to start with Toby’s numbers (btw, Hey Toby!) ’cause they strike me as reasonable numbers.
So to state it clearly: we’re looking at a city of 15,000 people producing food, medicine & all other material needs in a 5km radius (about 8 mile radius). So, let’s look at a city like, oh, I don’t know, how about Columbus, OH? Columbus, OH has 700,000+ people and occupies an area of about 212 sq miles. How do these two cities match up? Well, the area of our hypothetical city in square miles is pi * r^2, or about 202 sq miles.
Take a moment to think about that.
The industrial city has 700,000+ people and occupies only slightly more area than our proposed post-industrial, permacultural city of 15,000.
We may well have cities in the near (maybe even long-term) future, but, they aren’t going to be anything like “the city” that most of us carry around in our heads.
Comment by jhereg — 6 September 2007 @ 11:38 AM
D’oh! damn it!
Got my conversions all wrong…. bloody metrics…
Please disregard the entirety of the above post.
Comment by jhereg — 6 September 2007 @ 11:47 AM
Okay, 2nd attempt: 5km ~ 3mi, so we’re talking about a population of 15,000 occupying an area of about 30 square miles. To translate this to Columbus, OH it would take about 7 of these cities to occupy the same area, equating to about 100,000 people (as opposed to the 700,000 people currently occupying it).
The actual density would probably be a little lower tho, just to maximize “edge”.
Comment by jhereg — 6 September 2007 @ 11:59 AM
Jim, you’re completely misrepresenting the argument. Like any other social structure, a city represents a specific kind of ecological arrangement: in this case, a special case of overshoot. That is what has always defined a city, as we’ve already seen above. The various “civic” functions attached to it do not require a city (as seen by Paleolithic fairs), and are not always present in cities (the post-Roman British theory of “life in cities, but not city life”), so they obviously do not define a city in any way, they merely correlate with cities (and that, only loosely). What a city always has is a unique ecological relationship: a population dense enough to require the regular importation of resources.
A: Imagine a big, vegetarian cat like…
B: That’s not a lion.
A: Why isn’t it?
B: Lions are carnivores, so that can’t be a lion.
A: But it’s got a big mane, and a tail, and big teeth.
B: Doesn’t matter, if it’s a vegetarian it’s not a lion.
Big manes, tails and big teeth do not define lions. Lots of things have big manes, and tails, and big teeth, that are clearly not lions. A lion is a specific species. The fact that carnivorism comes along with that definition doesn’t change that, so if you’re talking about a big, vegetarian cat, you may be talking about something possible, but you’re first and foremost not talking about a lion. If a city doesn’t require the importation of resources, then it has a different relationship to its ecology. It is something different. That unsustainability goes along with that doesn’t change anything. So you can have dense population centers, but if they’re able to feed themselves, they’re not cities. Not because they’re sustainable, but becasue you’re talking about something very, very different, something no one would intuitively recognize as a city.
But that is the response I gave. I asked those very questions above.
I think a few examples are precisely what we need. Anonymous gave us a good start. Since I asked the exact same questions you did, I think we can agree that there’s some holes that make that scenario look either unrealistic, or exactly the same as the unsustainable cities we have already. My guess is that with enough examples, we’ll see a pattern emerging: (1) schemes that are really variations on the idea of a village, and (2) schemes that aren’t actually sustainable.
So 1/7 the density there is now? And you’re still talking about much less population density there than even pre-industrial cities. Is it still fair to call something a “city,” when no one would recognize it as such?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 September 2007 @ 2:02 PM
Jason,
I think you just made my point. Can you imagine a lion that has never eaten meat? I can, (in a zoo, fed the equivalent of manufactured cat food) and it would still be a lion. The definition of a lion is a cat that looks like (pic) that lives in place. While lions may be carnivores it is not an inherent part of the definition of lion.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 6 September 2007 @ 4:00 PM
Y’know, I thought of that as I wrote it, but that doesn’t prove your point, it just means it’s a bad example.
But to take just one more swing at it, just because you feed a lion vegetables doesn’t make him a vegetarian. He’s still not suited for it. He’s still got the sharp teeth and shorter digestive tract of a carnivore. Regardless of what you feed him, a lion is always a carnivore, because carnivorism is an inherent part of the definition of a lion: Panthera leo is a member of the Order Carnivora.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 September 2007 @ 9:30 AM
No. It would look like . . .SUBURBIA!
Seriously, Holmgren (that would be Bill Holmgren in your mythology–and I love the superhero graphic!) has written a couple of articles about retrofitting the suburbs (still in a very mainstream way–cottage industries, farmers markets, etc., so we’re only going partway down the energy descent here) and I’ve often looked at those big suburban yards with food forests in mind.
Here’s a related thought prompted by your regular references to foragers and intact ecosystems. Right now we’re using oil to supplant work that used to be done by ecosystems: cleaning water, waste recycling, food production, etc. You can shit in the woods and it will turn quickly to fertilizer. The ecosystem takes care of it. Shit in your back yard, even your groovy permaculture yard, and it’s a health hazard. The ecosystem services are missing, and the human presence is too frequent.
I think the same is will apply to much of the ecological repair work currently done by oil.
Post-oil, we may have food forests and Zone 1 gardens, but I think there will still be a lot of abatement of the human impact of permacultural villages that can only be done by large surrounding areas of intact ecosystem (though they may be as altered by humans as the Amazon and Eastern US were, pre-Columbus). A village is still a pretty dense settlement. Eventually, I imagine there would be nitrogen-rich runoff, soil biota imbalances, smoky air, etc. These things could be best mitigated by a large surrounding “wilderness” (I use the term advisedly). And impact on the village itself would be reduced by foraging in that wilderness. For this and a fwe other reasons, I see a lively and beneficial connection between forager and horticultural people, and they would probably even be the same people.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 7 September 2007 @ 11:56 PM
I read Holmgren’s articles about retrofitting suburbia a while back, and it struck me that what he was outlining was really a transition plan from suburbia to a village.
I’m very much on the same page with regards to not-for-humans land.
As I’ve said before, there’s a spectrum from foragers to horticulture, and I think what you’re suggesting here is exactly right. People are going to be compelled to leave large areas with little use for a fairly long time, simply to allow for enough area to make viable, intact ecosystems that can begin cleaning out some of our worse impacts. When they try to do otherwise, they’ll just end up getting sick, and once you get some foragers really entrenched, there could be an even more immediate feedback to keep that kind of encroachment from happening: like threatening arrows landing at your feet, shot from the shadows by marksmen you can’t see. 
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 September 2007 @ 12:14 AM
Hey –
hmmm…. well, assuming Jason’s projection of collapse (which y’all know I question, but cannot prove either way, so let it stand as premise for now
)… I expect the suburbs to be as denuded by the crash as the urban environment. However, just as foragers may find a useful ecology in the burned out remnants of the cities (a la Fight Club), I can also see where horticulturalists may find suburban environments useful.
Imagine… a relatively new, wealthy, suburban neighborhood, with its 100 homes on 1/4 acre lots, with the large park on one end that is currently grass with a few trees and a playground………… that could be a very attractive setting for a new village trying to establish itself both physically and culturally. The gradual change from ‘neighborhood’ to ‘community’ paralleling the gradual change from ’suburbia’ to ‘village.’
Good stuff there
Janene
Comment by janene — 8 September 2007 @ 9:54 AM
Excellent post! I have thought about this for a long time, but it’s the first time I’ve seen the entire idea fully articulated.
I would also like to add that in our case we have a limiting factor which our cities are founded on that can and probably will cause them to collapse before the countryside is absolutely pillaged to desertification. That factor is oil. The oil allows for bigger cities because of it’s importance in the infrastructure. When it gets scarce food will become inreasingly expensive and people will start dying off, triggering a total collapse of the city.
Comment by Torjus Gaaren — 8 September 2007 @ 12:49 PM
There are very good arguments on both sides of the issue here. My personal belief is that cities are fundamentally not sustainable. The second law of thermodynamics seems to apply in this regard more than the law of conservation of energy. Humans don’t seem to want to work harder than is necessary for survival, as it is with all other species on this planet. Transportation of nutrition goes against this principle, as it is easier to take from the natural surroundings than to labor.
Cities have their purpose as meeting places of trade. I have a farmers market/ flea market just 5 minutes drive from the house. A farmers market is not a sustainable situation, but it does give people a chance to come together for mutual benefit. A city is really a prolonged farmers market with no beginning or end, that has been in session far too long.Why not define a city as an area that has too high a population density (exceedes carrying capacity)? The problem with defining a city, and civilization in general, is that these are not static structures. They rise and fall just as all other human institutions do.
It seems as if one of the fundamental questions we have to ask ourselves is if we are ready for partial domestication of animals. At the risk of sounding too Human-centric, I do believe that if I take care of the area that has somehow become mine to look after, I deserve to harvest what was sown, always keeping in mind that my grand children will need to eat as well.
What is the real nature of our natural contract as opposed to our social contract?
Comment by Jason G — 8 September 2007 @ 10:37 PM
I desperately hope people pick up on humanure in a hurry (and, of course, correctly).
It’s interesting to note that Detroit is way ahead of us (http://earth-works.org/) and looks to already be well on the road to turning into horticultural villages.
But that’s only possible due to Detroit’s hollowing out phase over the last decade or so. I suspect that the cities currently doing well will probably end up in the worst situations.
Comment by jhereg — 9 September 2007 @ 3:08 PM
Fascinating debate - one of the most interesting I’ve seen for a while. I’ll be back to contribute more very soon…
Comment by strange but true — 10 September 2007 @ 10:45 AM
OK, but the city, as a special case of overshoot, is the specific definition you’re giving to a city in this argument. I don’t think the average person defines a city that way. A few other ways of defining a city are given here by other posters. The argument: if a settlement meets all these criteria, and is sustainable, then it refutes the “cities are unsustainable” argument. It falls flat because, in the context of this argument, you define a city as a special case of overshoot. The two camps don’t have the same meaning for the word city.
Jason, Derrick Jensen, et all, you are trying to put forward a new definition of what a city is. Within the context of your own argument, it holds true. But in order for it to work, we have to accept that city Means that type of overshoot. I don’t.
I think a city is a mythological artifact, not a specific type of settlement. Practically any small town today would be a city by archeological standards. I say: The largest permanent settlement in a given area is likely to be called a city by the people in that area. I think it’s not a condition, but a title. A man is a duke because everyone calls him a duke and acts like it is true. It changes nothing about the characteristics of a man, except in how others treat him. However much we don’t want to argue semantics, that is what this argument is. I don’t thin