Metropolitan Cortices: The Nature and History of Global Cities, the Human Mind, and the Inconvenient Myth of Utopianism
Imagine you could design your own city. What would it look like? How big would it be? How many people would it accommodate? On occasion I will imagine how I’d tackle such an enormous assignment. What first step would I take? How would I approach things? I’m very high in openness but also incredibly systematic, so, first things first, I’d probably draw up a long bullet-point list of necessary features. Cities need houses and apartments. But they also need businesses, schools, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, post offices, communal centers, parks, buses, trains, traffic lights, roads, bridges, sidewalks, sewers, and, well, you get the point. Human infrastructure is incredibly varied.
Cities of the Future
Ever since the 1950s Americans have imagined the “cities of the future” …incredibly sleek, urban landscapes with flying cars and enormous geodesic domes. We haven’t yet invented the flying car, but we have designed many futuristic cities.
On January 10, 2021, Mohammed bin Salman announced his proposed idea for “The Line.” Think of a glass version of the “Wall” from Game of Thrones. His goal for this linear smart city under construction in the Neom, Tabuk province of Saudi Arabia was to eliminate cars and streets and reduce carbon emissions1,2.The $500 billion project, which will stretch for 170 kilometers (110 miles) from the Red Sea to the city of Tabuk will accommodate nine million residents and run entirely on renewable energy3,4. The designers will split the “Line” into three layers for pedestrians, infrastructure, and transportation. They will also use artificial intelligence (including predictive and data models) to help improve citizens’ lives.
Developer Dutch Docklands and the architects at Waterstudio have conceptualized a sea-level, rise-proof development known as the Floating City in Maldives5. Based on the local culture of this small, seafaring nation, the city would use canals as its main infrastructure for logistics and gateways, and it would characterize itself as a boating community5. No cars are allowed (only bicycles and electric, noise-free scooters/buggies), and the city, which would use a smart grid to respond to dynamic demand, weather, and climate change, would “[apply] best ecological practices to protect, preserve, and enhance the pristine marine eco-system”5.
“No Such Place”
The list of possibilities for these futuristic cities is endless. What would all these future cities be like? They’d all be clean, simple, and eco- friendly. Artificial intelligence and other virtual technologies would drive a lot of their infrastructure, and citizens could navigate them easily. There’d be no automobiles and zero carbon emissions. All the food would be locally sourced and the homes readily affordable. The sun would always shine, and people would never be upset about anything.
English Renaissance-era philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas More famously satirized this concept of the “perfect city” in his 1516 book, Utopia. As you may have surmised, the “perfect city” never turns out perfect. All the conflicts and the challenges remain, and people struggle as they always have. Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky famously criticized utopianism when he wrote in Notes from the Underground that a person would “contrive destruction and chaos [and] contrive suffering of all sorts…only to gain his point…that he’s a man and not a piano key!”
Deep Urban History
The opposite of the perfect, futuristic, pre-planned city is the city that “evolves,” and most cities across the globe are like that. No person ever drew up their original blueprints, and, even if they did, those blueprints were crude and simple. The designers couldn’t have implemented smart features that would’ve eliminated disease, poverty, or crime. The streets were filled with human waste. Most living spaces were dirty and cramped, and everyone smelled awful! Murder and theft were prolific, and the life expectancy of the average person was very low!
Turn the clock back far enough. Prior to the existence of any ancient city, small villages would have been the largest level of human gathering. They would’ve served their purposes for religious rituals and nomadic, prehistoric weigh stations; purposes the Neolithic Revolution undoubtedly kicked off when we transitioned from foraging and hunting to farming. Whether or not planters replaced foragers or foragers began planting, though, is unclear.
Swiss economic historian Paul Bairoch argued in his book Cities and Economic Development that agricultural activity necessarily predated all the earliest cities7. When did we formally determine that any given settlement transformed from a village or small town into a city, though? In 1950, Australian archaeologist Gordon Childe attempted to define a historic city using 10 general metrics6.
A historic city had monumental public buildings, systems of practical science and recordings, systems of writing, symbolic art, the trade or import of raw materials, specialist craftsmen from outside the kin-groups, a size and density of its population above normal, a population that differentiated in terms of specialties and trades, citizens who paid taxes to a king or divine ruler, and a king who supported those not growing their own food6.
Ancient Ruins
One of the world’s oldest cities was Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia (present-day Turkey). Over 10,000 people lived in Çatalhöyük, which existed from approximately 7400-5200 B.C.E. Hunting, agriculture and animal domestication all played a role in this ancient city that overlooked the Konya plain. Çatalhöyük had no streets or identifiable buildings, but its citizens would traverse the city by rooftops8. All the closely packed, mudbrick buildings had ladders leading to their rooftops, the openings of which provided proper ventilation8. There were no communal burial sites, as the bodies were buried under the floorboards8.
The citizens of Eridu- founded in approximately 5400 B.C.E. near the Persian Gulf of the Euphrates River- built and rebuilt their city numerous times over the centuries (and finally abandoned it around 600 B.C.E.)8. Canals for irrigation, reed huts, and mudbrick buildings characterized the first iteration of the city8.
Uruk, which the legendary Gilgamesh ruled from around 2800 B.C.E., also used many crisscrossing canals to connect its large enclave of adobe brick homes with the surrounding farmlands and Euphratean maritime trade networks8. Ur (founded in approximately 3800 B.C.E.), a close contemporary of both Uruk and Eridu, dominated the skyline of the Mesopotamian plains with its towering ziggurat temples8.
Other notable ancient precedents included ‘Ain Ghazal (east of Jericho on the banks of the Warqa River), Meghraj in present-day Pakistan, Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley, Pataliputra, Seleucia, Alexandria, Antioch, Jericho, Nineveh, Damascus, Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Babylon, Jerusalem, and many, many others that rose and fell!
The City of the Mind
Cities…all cities…those which have thrived and decayed and seen their fair share of celebration and renewal, deprivation, warfare, bombardment, famine, immolation, and destruction, bear the stamp of something else very similar. The human brain. This observation isn’t wholly new or insightful. Psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and other scholars have compared the brain to various systems beforehand- computers, water clocks, telephone switchboards, and more. The urban comparison, though, is no less interesting. The temporal lobe, which processes sounds and other auditory signals, is like the city’s event center9. The pituitary gland controls physical growth and urges such as hunger…mirroring an urban center’s main city council that controls its growth and satisfies its needs9. The parietal lobe is like the city’s headquarters9. The Thalamus is like its postal system9.
The Hypothalamus, which regulates body temperature, nutrient storage, motivations, emotions, hunger, thirst, sexual behavior, pleasure, and aggression, is very much akin to our major news stations9. The Medulla provides the streetlights, the Broca’s area the billboards, the corpus callosum the bridge that spans the various rivers, and the reticular formation the tornado sirens9. The cerebellum is the brain’s road system, the amygdala its police force, and the cerebral cortex its boundaries9.
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, all the world’s cities “went under”. All their streets and restaurants and schools and clubs and everything cleared out! Despite that, some pulse, no matter how low it may have been, kept all these fledgling “neural networks” alive. We received our nutrients, and we maintained our general sense of awareness.
But it was much more as though we were in a deep sleep or general anesthesia than any active or alert state. Thankfully, no modern metropolis suffered the full, irrecoverable fate of an ancient settlement like Uruk or Eridu. As soon as the vaccine arrived, the world really did slowly “come to.” It was as though all the cities awoke from a coma.
Body and Soul
The analogies between all the world’s various urban centers and the squishy ones between our ears are nearly inexhaustible. But the most telling analogy, in my estimation at least, is the one that goes back thousands of years…the analogy that all the philosophers from Aristotle and Plato to Rene Descartes and Dan Dennett have written about or spoken of- monism vs. dualism.
Is there a soul…a separate entity…a spirit that can detach itself from its physical vessel? Should we ever need to, can we upload Chicago, London, or New York City into “the cloud”? Or do those cities die as we do once all their synaptic connections fade…once all their citizens hightail it out of there?
We speak of somewhere like Manhattan having its own personality…a brusque, fast-paced one at that. Everyone—pedestrian, driver, cyclist, and the like—is in a constant hurry, and everything is urgent.
Then we visit a place like Charleston, South Carolina or Athens, Greece, and we find less urgency, less stress…much chiller vibes! London, Paris, and Milan are all sophisticated. Los Angeles is free-wheeling and creative. Munich and Berlin are industrious. Miami and Rio De Janeiro are fun-loving, and Washington D.C. is very formal.
The Present-Oriented City
Every city fluctuates in terms of the events that transpire within it. We’d prefer a city where things operate in a normal, healthy, and balanced way. But, alas, it isn’t just parades and sports events that light up our metropolitan areas. Fiery, violent protests and riots do so as well. We also have car accidents. Explosions. Mass shooters. Bomb threats. Natural disasters. Global pandemics. A nascent city may not contemplate such unpleasant occurrences. An ancient city may do nothing but anticipate such occurrences.
The parallel between that and something like existential anxiety or depression is palpable. The antidote? Modern psychiatrists and psychologists agree with ancient contemplatives. We simply notice the pedestrians and drivers and other inhabitants that make their way across our cities. We observe their behavior and quickly decide whether they are worth paying attention to. And thus, the modern imperative for mindfulness is born. It is a constant imperative…one that we must attend to no matter what type of city we live in…whether the city naturally grew over time or we carefully pre-planned it. The difficult truth- as both Sir Thomas More and Fyodor Dostoevsky observed- no city…no matter how carefully we design it…can reach utopian status. Every city will experience its highs and lows!
SOURCES
- Summers, Nick (11 January 2021). “Saudi Arabia is planning a 100-mile line of car-free smart communities”. Engadget. Archived from the original on 12 January 2021. Retrieved 12 January 2021.
- “Top Global Oil Exporter Saudi Arabia Launches Car-free City”. Barrons. 10 January 2021. Archived from the original on 11 January 2021. Retrieved 12 January 2021.
- “What is The Line? All you need to know about Saudi Arabia’s plan for a futuristic zero-carbon city”. Free Press Journal. Archived from the original on 11 January 2021. Retrieved 12 January 2021.
- Rashad, Marwa (10 January 2021). “Saudi Crown Prince launches zero-carbon city in NEOM business zone”. Reuters. Archived from the original on 10 January 2021. Retrieved 11 January 2021.
- https://maldivesfloatingcity.com/
- Childe, V. Gordon (1950). “The Urban Revolution”. The Town Planning Review. 21 (1): 3–17.
- Bassett, California
- https://www.thecollector.com/first-cities-human-civilization-oldest-cities/
- https://prezi.com/aslsex02k1e6/the-brain-is-like-a-city/
