Monthly Archive for October, 2010

From Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham’s Quarterly

The Census Bureau counts 232,581,397 Americans, 82.6 percent of the population, living in the nation’s cities, but if our moralists and intelligence services are to be believed, they do so at no small risk to the safety of their persons and the security of their souls. This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly addresses the obvious contradiction. If the city is a sewer of vice and a slough of despond, why do so many people choose to live there? On what toxic landfill does the city stand as the embodiment of its ennobling cognate, civilization? The questions bear asking because the future is urban, and the answers are what the new millennium is likely to make of its art and religion as well as of its government and working arrangement with nature.

I borrow the supposition from Oswald Spengler’s reading of world history as city history. He located in the city “the determinative form” of a culture or the spirit of an age (“Egypt is Thebes, the orbis terrarum is Rome, Islam is Baghdad, France is Paris”), and in 1917 he foresaw, “long after the year 2000,” the appearance of “cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants,” lumpen and inorganic agglomerations with “notions of traffic and communications that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness.” Match the contemporary scale of municipal infrastructure in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with the demographic estimates—nearly half the world’s population, at least 3.3 billion people, already live in cities—and we have before us what Spengler regarded, not cheerfully, as an “artificial, mathematical, utterly land-alien product of pure intellectual satisfaction.” The description accords with satellite photographs of Shanghai or Lagos, the drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright, the designs of Blade Runner and Grand Theft Auto.

To Read More…