5 - The city and the country: towards a new environmentalism

Summary

So if the urban process is open-ended and if urbanisation is global and boundless, any transformative politics presumably need to be likewise. (Merrifield 2013: 916)

THE CITY AND THE COUNTRY

The previous chapter brought together key elements in our analysis of climate change through a consideration of work and urbanisation under neoliberalism. ‘Development’ more generally, and therefore sustainable development more particularly, intrinsically involves urbanisation. But urbanisation does not have any natural or inevitable form, as attested to by the diversity of visions for the good urban life projected in ancient and modern times. As asserted by Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) in the wake of the 1968 events, the capitalist urban condition is not synonymous with the city. As noted in our discussion of Arendt, using the ancient Greek polis as a model for urban existence under advanced capitalism is illegitimate. The polis was a geographically limited site with a typical population of no more than 100,000. Of this population perhaps one in five would constitute politically enfranchised individuals in a democratic polity (see Gates 2011). Political life would therefore consist of regular encounters with a large but strictly encompassed class involved in the bios politikos (political life).

Thus, while the polis arguably constituted a genuine political Gemeinschaft (community), the modern city corresponds to a Gesellschaft (society). In the latter case face-to-face political community is untenable, thereby necessitating various communication media to establish the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006 [1983]) of the modern nation state. The industrial metropolis and, a fortiori, the neoliberal megalopolis, is not a readily delimited site. Rather, virtual boundlessness is its distinctive feature. This very sense of limitlessness no doubt accounts in part for the stratifications and striations of modern urban society. Where there are no outer bounds, inner boundaries spring up more frequently and emphatically. Nineteenth-century accounts of a city such as London abound in metaphors indicating a basic inability to encompass the modern city (see Ackroyd 2000: 562–85).