By Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber. Dubrovsky is an artist, writer, and founder of the David Graeber Institute and the Museum of Care. Graeber was an anthropologist, activist, and bestselling author This excerpt is adapted from their book Cities Made Differentlyand is distributed in partnership with Human Bridges. Cross posted from Wiki Observatory.
Introduction
In thousands of ways, we are taught to accept the world we live in as the only possible one, but thousands of other ways of organizing homes, cities, schools, societies, economies, and cosmologies have existed and could exist.
We started a project called Made Differently: designed to play with the possibility and to overcome the suspicion—instilled in us every day—that life is limited, miserable, and boring.
Our first focus is Cities Made Differently, exploring different ways of living together. Read and imagine four different kinds of cities taken from our book which are listed below, and continue your exploration, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.
City of Greed
What if you had to live in a city whose citizens must pay not only for housing and health care but also for the air they breathe?
The dystopian novel The Air Merchant takes place in a secret underground factory city. Mr. Bailey, the factory owner, condenses air from the atmosphere and sells it to his fellow citizens for a profit. Eventually, the Earth’s atmosphere thins, creating a catastrophic shortage of breathable air. With the price of air increasing, fewer and fewer humans can afford to keep breathing.
When people can’t pay for the air they breathe, the police throw them out of the city. Everyone lives in constant fear of suffocating, thinking only of how to earn enough money to spare their loved ones and themselves that terrible fate. The food company Nestlé is often criticized for its irresponsible use of water in India, Pakistan, and other developing countries. Captured in the documentary film We Feed the World (2005), former Nestlé chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said:
“It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter… NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right… That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff, it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware it has its price…”
City as a Family
Imagine a city without any strangers, where everything is shared, and everyone looks after each other. There are no shops, no money, and no danger at all.
We think of the family as a group that practices “basic communism”: from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. Any family is thought to be protected by bonds of kinship from the cruel laws of the outside world. Unlike businesses, rarely will a family throw out a sick child or an elderly parent because they are no longer “revenue-generating assets.”
According to Roman law, which still underlies the value system of Western societies, a family was all those people living within the household of a paterfamilias or father whose authority over them was recognized as absolute. Under the protection of her father, a woman might be spared abuse from her husband, but their children, slaves, and other dependents were his to do with as he wanted.
According to early Roman law, a father was fully within his rights to whip, torture, or sell them. A father could even execute his children, provided that he found them to have committed capital crimes. With his slaves, he didn’t even need that excuse.
The patriarchal family is also the model for authoritarianism. In ancient Rome, the patriarch had the right to treat his household members as property rather than as equal human beings.
The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that humankind originally lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers composed of close friends and relatives until big cities and agriculture emerged, and with them wars, greed, and exploitation.
However, archaeology shows us numerous examples of how people in different times and across different parts of the Earth lived in large metropolitan areas while managing their collective affairs on a fairly egalitarian basis. At the same time, there have always been small communities where status inequality prevailed and a privileged minority at the top benefited by exploiting the rest.
We know from our personal experience that in almost every family there are elements of both authoritarianism and baseline communism. This contradiction never fully goes away but different cultures handle it differently.
A City оf Runners
The people who live in this city believe that real life is all about constant competition.
The people in a city of runners find it fascinating or even necessary to keep track of who among them is more important, who is richer, smarter, more beautiful, or more worthy. There are many ideas about how the city came to have habits like this.
One of the city’s revered philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, believed that the natural state of human beings is to seek violent domination over their neighbors, and that society without the authority of the sovereign would quickly turn into a battle of all against all. Constant competition between people is thus seen as an enjoyable game as compared to real war, which is always lurking around the corner.
Naturally, in cities like this, there must be some who are poor, ugly, and unhappy. Just as in some children’s games, there are winners and losers.
People living in the city of runners foster an admiration for winning in their kids, and an ambition to surpass their peers in all areas. Children in the city of runners have no interest in learning together, sharing, or mutual aid. Helping someone pass an exam is considered “cheating” and is strictly punished. All their lives, adults are engaged in constant competition over beauty, skill, and wealth.
Runners believe that people who live differently from them and who refuse to play their games simply choose to be losers. During the 1968 student unrest in Western countries, some disaffected young people abandoned the big cities for the “sleepy” provinces where they created autonomous settlements, many of which still exist today.
Underground City
Living in an underground city could be safe and convenient. Without weather, there’s no risk of storms. And no trees mean no forest fires.
Underground cities have been around practically forever. The city of Derinkuyu in the Turkish province of Cappadocia, for example, was built between 2000 and 1000 BCE. The landscape of volcanic tuff—a unique soft stone—could be hollowed out without requiring complex tools, making room to house 20,000 people. The underground city boasted a stable, corrals, churches, schools, canteens, bakeries, barns, wine cellars, and workshops. The intricate system of tunnels connecting it all together meant that intruders would not know their way around and quickly get lost.
Tunnels are found underneath many cities. Rome is famous for its catacombs, and at one time subterranean burial chambers were commonplace. These days, tunnels tend to be for underground trains called subways. In Beijing, the residents became so fearful of nuclear war that they built an entire bunker city, with 30 kilometers of tunnels connecting underground houses, schools, hospitals, shops, libraries, theaters, and factories. There’s even an underground roller skating rink!
Mexico City has not gone as far as to build an entire city underground, but architect Esteban Suarez is planning an underground apartment building. And what a building it will be! Piercing the center of the Mexican capital with its tip will be a 65-story pyramid—no wonder they call it the earthscraper. The glass-enclosed area above the surface will be for recreation and outdoor concerts.
Underground, the building will be heated and powered with geothermal energy, making the pyramid energy self-sufficient. It’s not easy building downward into the earth, but building underground won’t disrupt the historical landscape of the city. And it evades the city’s building codes restricting the height of structures to eight floors.
Mirny, a town in the Russian far north, has its eye on an abandoned diamond mine as the site for an underground city. There are no more diamonds to be found, but its abandonment threatens neighboring villages with cave-ins and landslides. Moscow architect Nikolai Lyutomsky has proposed a solution: building a strong concrete skeleton inside the quarry to strengthen its walls while covering its top with a transparent dome, resulting in an underground eco-city fit for 10,000 people.
Located in the Yakutia Republic, the town has a harsh arctic climate with temperatures reaching as low as -60 degrees Celsius in the winter. But underground, the temperature never falls below zero. The quarry would thus be good for both people and plants. Its architects have allocated most of the city’s inner space to vertical farms. Farms for food production, technical laboratories, factories, and research centers are located underground and, aboveground, there will be play centers and schools. Moving between the underground and the surface is quick and easy.
Going underground to avoid possible misfortunes—might seem like a good idea, but there’s a catch: if you don’t like the rules of your community it’s tough to get out. How important is it to be able to easily leave one community, whose rules no longer suit you, and join a different one?
Living underground is a viable option and I have even suggested it myself in regions which will experience ferocious heat going forward. However – and you knew that there was going to be a however – humans need sunlight in order to survive because of the need for vitamin D synthesis from the sunlight. I’m not even sure it is a good thing to cut ourselves off from our circadian rhythm. So unless we are going to rapidly evolve into Morlocks, this will be something that will have to be taken account of-
https://www.drlauragouge.com/2022/02/17/the-body-needs-sunlight-to-thrive/
I’ve always imagined we’d end up, by necessity, in hastily improvised floating pirate cities similar to Armada in China Mieville’s ‘The Scar’, but with the bulk of the population needing to be below the waterline where it’s cooler.
Not sure that we can take it into account – we can’t synthesise sunlight well enough to fool the body for long. The health ramifications are potentially enormous.
“city of Derinkuyu in the Turkish province of Cappadocia, for example, was built between 2000 and 1000 BCE”
The start was actually 700-800 BC, and the use ended in 1923 according to Wikipedia, hence “churches” not probable between 2000 and 1000 BC.
My career in city planning and architecture spanned 50 years, and I learned that people don’t design cities – cities design themselves through sheer inertia. Fifty years is the smallest increment of change in that arena. So, it’s fun to engage in “drawing and dreaming,” but don’t ever expect results in your own lifetime.
The one exception to that is nuclear war – read Annie Jacobsen’s book, “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” and you’ll find out that all the cities in this world would easily be wiped clean of at least 3 billion humans in the first hour of a plausible nuclear exchange.
We could then start over. But nobody would be alive to do it.
Or, even consider the idea of building another city ever, since it was “city-folk” who thought up nuclear devices that ruined life for those not in cities, where people might survive, although not healthily.
My typical Midwest city founded in the 1860 by land developers and tradesmen has as the ground zero in land development the Zoning Commission filled with political appointments. Developers and real estate make very large contributions to local government campaigns so their wishes are paramount. This lead to the only city planning constant being a development scheme that mostly resembled an expanding donut. The city continued to expand outward requiring infrastructure to keep extending while the inner section was left to decline. Course now the trend is gentrification of the core area for tourism and a boho industrial experience for PMC couples. Meanwhile the homeless keep expanding as there is little affordable housing for the low-wage workers. They are kept moving around the city.
I know of one city plan that was implemented in the US and Canada. Garden City see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement
When uranium was found in northern Ontario, the little town of Elliot Lake was inspired by the garden city planners. No four way intersections, the roads are loops and crescents. There only T intersections. The problem with the plan is that it was intended for a flat area with little snow. Elliot Lake is very hilly and gets lots of snow… There are blind intersections because of the hills and the smaller crescents have to have snow hauled away because there is no where to put it over the course of the winter. My Dad was the Superintendent of Public Works – he hated those planners.
A visionary, Buckminster Fuller, who still does not get the exposure that he deserves.
I was looking for a link to the city that he nearly built in the midwest (?), but permission was withdrawn before it became reality.
I sat through two of Bucky’s patented five-hour lectures around 1970, and have written a couple of articles about him. I never heard of an “almost-city” project, and he probably never sat still long enough to plan one. His “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” however, should be mandatory reading.
Here’s a link about Triton City, a.sea sled of 5,000 inhabitants that was considered for Baltimore Harbor.
I’m still looking for the land based project I thought I remembered.
Is it this?
Yes, I believe it is. Thank you. As you can see, Bucky again gets short shrift by TPTB as this article has come and gone through the ages, with the note that “This article is only a stub.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, a man with answers and solutions, has been continuously memory-holed for more than half a century.
Thanks to both for digging these up. Never heard of either, but Bucky’s output was prolific. What he did propose was construction of a one-millionth-scale model of Earth at the University of Minnesota; he never built it, but ten thousand 4th and 5th graders led by a UMn grad did it in 1993.
The 8 page Buckminster Fuller article, Humanity’s Critical Path: From Weaponry to Livingry, copyright 1983, is currently found on the Internet Archive. It is essential reading for anyone interested in alternative futures.
I too was lucky enough to attend one of his lectures in the ’70s, but I learned more about his ideas from reading the short article above than from listening to his 4 1/2 hr lecture. In the lecture I attended his focus was on the detail of his individual projects, not on the overall direction of his work.