The City: Agora and Underground, Camouflage and Masks

Extract

Professor Markus seems to be concerned with the city as symbol and as organization. What does the city now mean, and how does it and might it function ? These two questions are very closely related; even a purely technical system will, if it functions, have various significant impacts on the aesthetic and ethical levels. And if a symbolic system really involves efficacious symbols these will at some point cut into the world of allocations and preferences. If his questions 3 and 4 were to be answered as he would seem to wish, we would be at the same time well on the way to answering 1 and 2. The really efficient city where rights and duties were clearly mapped would be therapeutic and liberating. I think again he doesn’t see this therapeutic role of the city as something static—rather as being more like a group psycho-therapy where recovery and discovery are both part of the programme.

I think though that we must start distinguishing; there is man’s activity carried out under the sign of the city, and that carried out as man the tool-maker, if you like man the world changer. The city expressed in the agora, a community of citizens functioning as a juridical and political unit, is essentially a Mediterranean institution; of course, there were cities elsewhere, among the Arabs, in India or China, and for that matter in pre-colonial black Africa. But these lacked the characteristic patterns of the city-state, centring round the concept of a body of citizens with specific rights and duties constituting the polis. Despite the claim of Massignon, the Arab cities had no real system of guilds; the Hindu cities had activity which may be called political within the various quarters, but there were no overall civic democracies, or oligarchies, nor did the Chinese city have any greater degree of civic personality.