• Print version
• Send to a friend

Nature, the Prehistory of the City

Text Manuel Cruz

Photo: Albert Fortuny

There are cities that, when you think of them, the image that comes to mind includes the people who live there, and others that, for reasons which are not immediately obvious, you imagine empty. Then, when you get the chance to discover them, when the opportunity of visiting arises, people turn out to be an intrinsic element: you cannot think of those places without remembering the people who live there. There must be something symptomatic in this process. A town planner would probably attribute it to the influence of a model of city like those in the southern USA (Phoenix, Dallas or Atlanta), which almost by definition are urban areas without people, cities full of tunnels and passageways, designed to be used without ever entering into the public sphere. Cities designed with mobility rather than community in mind, in which people even disappear from our field of vision - or, at most, are relegated to the status of fleeting images, mere blurred silhouettes glimpsed through some half-open window.

       There must be something of that. Yet it seems probable that this initial predisposition to not include people in the representation of the city has to do with something else. Perhaps it happens because this idea comes very close to the fantasy of contemporary man: the city as the new nature. The old nature is now nothing more than our prehistory, something it's worth preserving for reasons that lie somewhere between melancholy and the desire for survival, but which is always somewhere else in our imaginary representation of the world. It is no longer the exterior that surrounds humanised spaces (an exterior that still seems to be present in expressions like "going out into the countryside"), but rather the reverse. And, thus, we talk about nature reserves or we propose laws that regulate access to nature (an expression that inverts the classical image: now it is nature that is surrounded - perhaps we should rather say besieged - by the city).

       The city, today, as a philosopher would put it, is that which is given: that which we must take as read, the reality we have no alternative but to take as our starting point. With this idea, we are going one step further than the simple affirmation that everything that happens, happens in the city: it seems now that the concept of society has been absorbed by that of city, as appears to be shown by the fact that in our everyday speech the term society, as it was used, for example, in the discourses of the 1960s, is tending to disappear - and when it is used, it seems to carry with it naïve anachronistic connotations. Now the city is everything. Thus, Marx's old intuition would seem to be confirmed: in the same way that all history is contained within the antithesis city-countryside, so also the fate of the modern city seems to sum up the future of all humanity.

         However, by describing this situation as the "fantasy of contemporary man", I was trying to slip in a caveat with respect to all this. It is true, on one hand, that it is a mistake to think of the city in terms of nature for, unlike the latter, the city is a product, a result of our activity. Such a declaration is a mere statement of what is patently obvious, yet this often seems to be forgotten in the very common notion of the city as a network of services and possibilities within the reach of its citizens, that simply exist with the same mix of necessity and availability as trees or birds in nature. On the other hand, the absorption of the idea of society by the city can also lead to mistakes of its own, like, for example, supposing that any problems bound up with the concept that has been absorbed have automatically been overcome in the process. Yet it is not so much that we cease to think about the old problems associated with society, turning instead to the problems of the great cities, as that the latter must be conceived of within this new theoretical framework. Which means we have to deal, at one and the same time, with the traditional forms of understanding social conflicts, and with the idea of the city. Which, when all is said and done, is precisely what this magazine sets out to do.

Summer (July - September) 2009