Cities

In this chapter I ask what is distinctive about living in cities. My concern is for qualitative rather than quantitative issues, and I dispense quickly with issues of data such as a city’s size or the density of its population. But density leads me to the idea of proximity as the condition of a large mass of people from different backgrounds inhabiting a single site, which I develop through Edward Soja’s account from archaeological evidence of Çatal Hüyük, one of the first cities, in Sumeria. Soja argues that at Çatal Hüyük the city was a primary form of settlement established before villages in its environs. Before looking at this I note the differentiation of urban from rural patterns of sociation in the work of early sociologists Emile Durkheim and Fernand Tönnies, and in Georg Simmel’s view of metropolitan life; and contrast the work of Ernest W. Burgess and Louis Wirth in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s with that of feminist writers such as Elizabeth Wilson (1991). Finally I ask if there is any substance in the idea that city air is liberating, looking to the writing of Henri Lefebvre. In case studies I cite Iain Sinclair’s story of London’s orbital motorway (2003); Jennifer Robinson’s case for ordinary cities (2006); and an image of Hassan Fathy’s experimental settlement at New Bariz, Egypt (constructed 1967, photographed 2005).