Ecology of the City

The City as Ecosystem

The city throughout history has been considered anything but a human habitation. Cities as sinks of unrighteousness and dens of iniquity find their prototypes in the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The cities have been traditionally cast as undesirable places to live in contrast to rural living and most of the homespun morality of any country, in almost any time, describes country and rural life as beautiful, virtuous, and therefore desirable, in contrast to the immoral predatory nature of the city. Long after migration to cities established them as the principal place of living for most of the people on Earth, the cities are described as virtually unfit for human existence.

In the Cities of the Night

Arnold Toynbee describes the inhabitants of the great cities of the world as prey, not for the beasts of the forests and jungle, but to the tiger that roams its streets — the street criminal.

The contrasts are strong because the city has also been described as the place to go to win one s future. The cities are the center of learning, the homes of many if not most of the great universities and libraries, concert halls and cathedrals.

Heaven and Hell

Both of these aspects of the life of the city are true. Cities are great trade and business centers. They are therefore, the land of opportunity. They are centers of art learning, religion, theater, and music. Cities do offer virtually unlimited opportunities in man's technological world. But at the same time they are the places of abject poverty and crime, neglect and human suffering. Persons at the very highest and the very lowest strata of human society live in cities, although in the absolute sense of poverty, the most abjectly impoverished live in the rural areas of the world, the noble savage not withstanding.

Primary Ecosystem of Man

As long as cities are viewed as something other than the primary ecosystem of man, the paradox of great wealth, learning, and advancement in the healing arts will be cultivated side by side with decay, deterioration, disease, discomfort and decline. There can be no easy answer to the problem of wealth distribution in modern society and there is no easy answer to the delivery of important and needed services in the cities education, health and welfare but it seems relatively certain that the problems will not be solved until the city is recognized as an ecosystem of men and until ecosystem properties and characteristics are used to analyze, at least in part, some of the dynamics of the city.

Communities of Buildings not Men

The technological developments of cities, to a very great extent, obscures and confuses its ecosystem properties. It is easy to see the buildings, streets and factories and omit the people and more particularly their interrelationships. There is a great tendency to examine the state of repair of buildings and not look to the state of repair of the human social fabric. More importantly, there is a great inclination to look at those elements of the society that prey upon other elements of the society as somehow outside the system, the white collar criminal to the contrary. It would seem to be better if the poor were invisible, and the rapist and the mugger are somehow easier thought of as not quite human. The fact is that most crime in cities seems to be organized as business enterprises are organized and popularization of such crime may culturally elicit our admiration as outstanding examples of dominant (therefore admirable) characteristics of man.

Man the Prey

The violence in movies and television, while ranging from highly stylized to stark explicitness, may in fact relate to our subordinate hierarch position in the animal kingdom. In a list of animals which as adults seem to fear no other animal, man is not very high. Adult man seems inherently, biologically and evolutionarily of the mentality of the prey not the predator. Whales, elephants and moose seem not to fear other animals. Grizzly bears, while quite shy in nature, seem to have no natural enemies except man with a weapon. The TV illusion of the dominant man, supremely confident and unafraid may in fact be partly satisfying an evolutionary hunger for man to be without fear—when in fact his very survival as the most important creature on the face of the Earth is due precisely to the fact that man is fearful and consequently prudent. Man with fear has need of technology, man without fear would probably not have developed language or technology. In short, man without fear most likely would not have developed into modern man.

Fear and Family

Man has learned to deal with his fear in the socialization processes that make him into man. The truly remarkable fact about man is that without the socialization processes beginning just with the family and finally with society at large, an individual simply cannot survive in the ecosystem of man. The socialization of most higher animals has analogies to the socialization of man indicating that the processes are deeply embedded in the evolutionary process that produced the biological animal that is man. These processes particularly those associated with the family are truly ancient in comparison with the technology and cultural evolution of man. Even the ability to speak must be considered a trait far younger than the family — and as can be seen from other non-human social groups, speech is not necessary for life in a family. Life as we know it and our standards of living in any of the modern societies of man is unthinkable without language and the technology it produced; and in considering the city as a humane habitation we must not only consider the healthy survival of biological man we must also consider the survival of cultural and technological man. It is all these together that form the modern city. These features that must be considered first are those that relate to the biological survival of man and relate essentially to man's security, well-being, and comfort.

. . . Ted Sudia . . .
Undated ms circa 1972

© Copyright 1989
Institute for domestic Tranquility