The city is literally
civilization. Cities - not nations
or American “states” - are the engines of creation and progress. Geniuses can
be born anywhere; but they come to the city. Farming is everyone’s bread and
butter, but cities buy their foods from all the farms in the world. Agriculture
was invented in the first cities as a consequence of division of labor in an
industrial society. While dressed as a federal union of disparate states, the
American republic is culturally a very large city.
- The City by Max Weber (Translated and edited by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth), Collier Books, 1962.
- The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs, Random House, 1969.
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| Chase Tower left and Comerica right in Austin |
Max Weber investigated the
fundamental sociology of the city, given that cities have different origins.
Some began as armed camps, others as markets, production centers, consumption
centers, or extensions of the household of the strongest local warlord. However established, the essential
function of the successful city is to be a marketplace.
Today, we accept the
plurality of cultures in a modern city, but it was a radical idea that you
could disassociate from your family and form new bonds with co-workers and
customers in guilds and the fraternities, regardless of their own ethnic
origins. Cities always have
attracted distant people. Athens
prospered because of the metics, free Greeks from other cities, but forever
non-citizens within Athens.
In the Middle Ages, if you
could evade your manor lord for a year within the city walls, you were
free. On the other hand, everyone
was expected to contribute to the defense of the city. Men who work for a living have no time
for training, so the city depended on firearms for protection: easy to use and
devastating against an attacker.
Also in the ancient city
and paradigmatic to the medieval city, political power rested within an elected
council. Democracy and urbanism
are intimately related. Also in
the medieval city, women were enfranchised. The city erased previous classes,
patrician and plebian, granted that it created new statuses. While some of them
were heritable, most were not.
Reading Weber through
modern eyes, it is easy to find all of those elements and many others within
the society of the United States of America. We are literally a bourgeois (burgher) society, a nation of
cities. That is also the underlying thesis in Jane Jacobs’s The Economy of Cities.
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| Frost Tower |
Her major premise is that
groups of hunters came together at fixed sites which became permanent trading
settlements. Division of labor was an inevitable consequence. From that, agriculture and herding
became distinct occupations. This created the crossbred hybrids that we
associate with the agricultural revolution. Gardening requires land and soon farmers moved outside the
cities. Jacobs marshals her
evidence and concludes the first chapter with an easy challenge. Today, electricity is critical to the
city and the largest electrical production factories are found in rural areas.
In some distant future wrong-thinking archaeologists might conclude that
electricity was invented on farms and exported as surplus to cities. In fact we know that plows, tractors,
fertilizers, everything that a farms needs is produced in cities. Jacobs argues
that this has always been true.
Moving forward, she
explains how complex divisions of labor come from new work invented to
supplement existing products and services. She discusses the industries of
Birmingham, England, contrasting them with Manchester. To frame her presentation, she begins
with the brassiere. Invented by
Ida Rosenthal, it epitomized the commerce of the city. First, it was a
secondary product: as a dressmaker, Rosenthal was searching for a specific
solution. Then, it became an independent product according to division of
labor; and it spawned subsidiary industries in metal fasteners needed for
production. Most subtly, the Maidenform Bra did not meet the needs of Ida
Rosenthal’s clients: they would have preferred to keep their dressmaker, rather
than have her abandon them for a new enterprise.
Multiplied by hundreds,
thousands, and eventually millions, that is the story of the city.
Cities enjoy explosive
growth when many different kinds of enterprises come together in one place.
Some succeed; many fail. The
creation of new work is the engine that pumps life into the city. Let its
economy become dependent on a single industry and contraction, recession, and
depression cannot be avoided. Any
city that enjoys and encourages an uncontrolled riot of many disparate economic
activities will survive and thrive.
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