CIVICISM
In the Western tradition, political thinking first emerged as a comparison of different cities and the values they expressed. Ancient Athens represented democracy and faith in the judgment of ordinary people (with the exception of slaves and women) whereas Sparta represented a more oligarchic model, with well-disciplined citizen-soldiers (and relatively powerful women) striving for the glory of the state. Different political thinkers took sides and derived inspiration from these competing models to develop their own theories of political rule. Plato may have been favorably inclined toward Sparta whereas Aristotle, arguably, had a more balanced view of democratic rule and saw some virtues in the Athenian way. A third city—Jerusalem—called into question the concern for this-worldly political success: the ultimate purpose of life is to worship God. Three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—were to lay claim to Jerusalem as symbolizing religious values.1
Around the same time that Greek city-states were at their peak, the country that came to be known as China was divided into different warring states that competed for political supremacy. The capitals of the seven leading powers were walled cities that dwarfed earlier Chinese cities: each had a population of one hundred thousand or more. The cities were bureaucratically organized for the purpose of registering, taxing, and conscripting the people of the state, but not all cities developed a military or political ethos: for example, the twin cities that made up the Zhou dynasty’s capital at Louyang flourished as a commercial metropolis. Political thinkers and strategists roamed from city to city with different ideas for making the country strong and secure, and the main schools of Chinese social and political thinking emerged out of the ferment of ideas in Warring States cities.2 The theorists did all share the ideal of a unified world without territorial boundaries (in contrast to early Greek thinkers, who argued for the virtues of small states), but they had radically different ideas about how to achieve it and what the end state would look like. Thinkers such as Confucius and Mencius tried to persuade rulers to rule in accordance with morality whereas the hard-nosed realists known as Legalists advocated rule by means of harsh punishments. The Legalists had more immediate success with the king of Qin, who unified the country under his rule, assuming the title of First Emperor, but the subsequent Han dynasty gradually adopted Confucian principles. It would be only a slight exaggeration to describe the succeeding two thousand years of Chinese political history as a constant struggle between Legalism and Confucianism.
Does it make sense to think of cities as representing different political values in the modern world? In comparison with ancient Greek city-states and ancient Chinese walled cities, today’s cities are huge, diverse, and pluralistic,3 and it may seem peculiar to say that one city represents this or that. But just think of Jerusalem and Beijing: Can cities get any more different than those? Both cities are designed with a core surrounded by concentric circles, but one core expresses spiritual values and the other represents political power (not to mention that Beijing has a population twenty-nine times bigger than Jerusalem’s). Clearly, some cities do express and prioritize different social and political values: what we can call an “ethos” or “spirit” of a city. Ethos is defined as the characteristic spirit, the prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community (Oxford English Dictionary). We apply this definition to cities throughout the book. More specifically, we define a city’s ethos as a set of values and outlooks that are generally acknowledged by people living in the city.4
Cities reflect as well as shape their inhabitants’ values and outlooks in various ways. The design and architecture of their buildings reflect different social and cultural values. Public monuments often mark politically significant episodes and different ways of honoring the dead. The extent of metropolitan sprawl and traffic reflects different assumptions about city versus rural life in the areas of population control and state planning versus the free market. The presence or absence of women in public streets reveals something about and influences conceptions of gender relations. As David Harvey has argued, the deterioration of many neighborhoods is closely related to issues of social justice and makes an impact on how people think about social justice.5 The composition of communities and neighborhoods can either undermine or promote democracy and public participation. Ghettos reflect badly on the state of race relations. Theaters, stadiums, cafés, and restaurants are related to questions of lifestyle, hedonism, elite versus popular culture, and so on. Cities built for walking and bicycling versus those built for cars encourage and promote different values about sustainability.6 Street signs are often written in more than one language, revealing different takes on multiculturalism and minority rights. The presence or absence of hospitals says something about concern for the body. The way ordinary citizens interact with one another and with outsiders reflects different values. Even (especially?) the conversation topics of taxi drivers says something about the dominant ethos of a city. Despite what we hear about “globalization” and “homogenization,” there are often huge differences between different cities in these respects.
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain.
Photograph © Gerard Lazaro. Courtesy of Shutterstock.
Now, it could be argued that there is a limit to how much planning, buildings, and architecture can shape a city’s ethos and the way its inhabitants reflect on life, but there are clear-cut cases of influence, such as the “Jerusalem syndrome,” in which tourists are so touched by the religious symbolism of the city’s streets and buildings that they believe they have metamorphosed into Jesus himself. Stalinist and fascist architecture often has the effect of dwarfing the individual, making it easier for the state to make people believe that they should submit to the state and its “great leader.” More positively, perhaps, awe-inspiring Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres can reinforce faith in a higher being (Napoleon famously said that the cathedral “makes atheists feel uneasy”). It is difficult not to be moved by the Taj Mahal, perhaps the world’s most beautiful testament to the power of love. Frank Gehry’s spectacular museum in Bilbao almost single-handedly changed the Spanish city from a declining industrial center into a mecca for tourism. The use of particular buildings to shape values is not always effective—the buildings of Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament Island on the outskirts of Columbo combine Sinhalese, Buddhist, and Western features and are meant to convey the image of an ideal multicultural and tolerant Sri Lanka7—but over time and in the wider context of a city’s ethos, people can be shaped by their urban environment. As Charles Landry, the founder of Comedia (a think tank promoting creative thinking in urban life) argues, the city’s physical infrastructure makes an impact on the human dynamics of a place.8
City-based ethoses also affect the way people evaluate cities. Consider the way we often make comparative judgments about the ways of life of different cities. People often say, “I love (Montreal, Beijing, Jerusalem, etc.),” and “I hate (Toronto, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, etc.),” almost as though cities were like people, with distinctive personalities. Typically speaking, an evaluation of a city’s desirability is not just an aesthetic judgment; it is also a judgment about the moral ways of life of people in that city. Such judgments are often more strongly held than judgments about countries, which tend to be more abstract and imagined entities than cities are. For example, it would be strange for an educated person to say, “I love (Canada, China, Denmark, etc.),” and “I hate (France, Korea, Ethiopia, etc.)”; we expect more nuanced judgments in such matters. But judgments made about cities do not seem so sweeping or morally problematic; it is often worth inquiring further into the reasons for such judgments, and on reflection we might well agree. Cities are also more open to outsiders’ affection and identification. A foreigner is more apt to say, “I love Amsterdam,” than “I love the Netherlands,” and this identification is less likely to be seen as odd by locals.
Yet hardly anybody theorizes about such city-based judgments. In political theory, the debates tend to be about whether the whole world or particular nations should be the sites of normative theorizing. But why shouldn’t people living in cities struggle to nourish and promote their particular ways of life in the political process? In political practice, cities are often sites of collective self-determination, but contemporary thinkers fail to theorize in ways designed to provide informed judgments about what’s good and what’s bad about urban pride.9 In fact, it’s hard to think of a word that even captures the idea of urban pride, the idea that residents of a city are proud of their way of life and struggle to promote its particular identity. Patriotism today refers to national pride, but what about feeling proud of being a member of the (Jerusalem, Beijing, Montreal, etc.) community? We nominate the word civicism to express the sentiment of urban pride.10
COSMOPOLITAN COMMUNITARIANISM
Why do we care about this topic? In Avner’s case, the idea stemmed from his work on environmental theory. He began to question the assumption that the environment was always about “wilderness”—surely cities are part of the environment as well—and so he was one of a group of environmental theorists who started to work on cities. And since he had applied the method of creating environmental theory by letting the environment talk to and inspire the theorist, he did a paper on New York, treating it as an environment that “talks” to the gentle stroller, revealing itself via monuments, buildings, city grids, and unexpected conversations with its inhabitants. The basic idea is to accumulate as much information as possible before firmly settling on research questions and theories. In the case of Daniel, he was talking to Avner about cities when it hit him: he had been moving from comparing civilizations (East Asia and the West) to countries (China and the United States); why not move further “down” to compare cities? To the extent that such comparisons are problematic because they tend to “essentialize” diverse units of analysis, maybe they become less problematic the further “down” one moves, given that the units of analysis become more and more concrete and “real.”11 Plus, Daniel had been living in several different cities for extended periods of time and he was struck by their differences in terms of what they express and represent as social and political ways of life. Why not follow Avner’s model and theorize on the basis of lived experiences and sentiments?
As political theorists, we try to describe and explain social and political phenomena but we also try to think about implications of normative questions such as “What are morally justifiable forms of political life?” So here’s our agenda: our book is meant to counter the worry that in an age of globalization, social units have no political and economic will to oppose globalization.12 Perhaps states are becoming more uniform, but cities may come to the rescue, so to speak. States often have to comply with international agreements and regulations and with the dictates of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Union, or simply the free market, which tends to diminish the role of particular cultures, values, and ways of life. In that sense, globalism has the effect of homogenizing cultures, transforming a variety of cultures into a single culture of consumerism, the result of which is a feeling of sameness and lessening of pluralism and diversity in cultural ideas and alternatives. Liberal theorists who defend the idea that states should be neutral between conceptions of the good life unintentionally add to the flattening of cultures by leaving no room for the state to nourish and support particular forms of life that are threatened by globalization.
But many people do want to experience particularity, to maintain and nurture their own cultures, values, and customs that they believe are constitutive of their identities, and without which their communal way of life would be substantially diminished. Hence, we want to suggest that cities have been increasingly the mechanism by which people oppose globalization and its tendency to flatten cultures into sameness. Many cities invest thought, time, and money in protecting their unique ethos and preserving it through policies of design and architecture and through the way people use the cities and interact with them. Arguably, not all cities do this, and some may simply surrender to the demands of globalization. But the idea that cities can and should promote their particular ways of life does not arouse much controversy: even defenders of liberal neutrality at the level of the state tend to allow for the public expression of particularity at the level of cities. And surely it is no coincidence that cities with an ethos often have an international reputation and tend to attract visitors and residents who are drawn in large part by that ethos.
In short, an ethos contributes to the diversity that makes human social life so valuable and interesting. Partly, it’s an aesthetic pleasure—different kinds of cities create a more beautiful human canvas. Partly, it’s a moral case for diversity—different kinds of cities add to our possibilities of forms of social and political life. And sometimes cities can accomplish morally desirable aims more difficult to achieve at the level of the state: while the Chinese government seems averse to national projects for energy conservation such as binding caps on emissions, several cities in China compete for a “green” ethos by means such as the provision of tax subsidies for green technology (the city of Baoding is largely powered by solar energy) and the use of big events, such as a World’s Fair in Shanghai, to promote electric vehicles. The same goes for India: New Delhi has converted all its buses and taxis to compressed natural gas. In the United States, San Francisco is revising its building code to require that new structures be wired for electric car chargers,13 a policy that would be inconceivable at the national level.14 Cities can also achieve other aims. The Chinese city of Chongqing is experimenting with alternative forms of property rights designed to promote relatively egalitarian forms of economic development.15 In addition, cities with a similar ethoses can sometimes communicate above (or below) the heads of national leaders in order to achieve shared goals, such as sharing ideas and expertise between cities committed to preserving traditional architecture.16 And creative thinkers put forward city-based ideas for dealing with problems (for example, Paul Romer’s proposal for “charter cities,” city-scale administrative zones governed by a coalition of countries that can help those cities break out of poverty traps).17 What can’t be done at the level of states to combat the “imperative” to remain competitive in an era of globalization can often be done at the level of cities.18
Of course, globalization also has a good side. It is often a synonym for the free movement of capital, humans, and goods, and an open-minded attitude to foreigners and the “other.” Who can object to the free flow of information, greater familiarity with distant peoples, a feeling of global solidarity, and the variety of economic opportunities that globalization can open up for historically marginalized peoples? Hence, we focus on cities whose ethoses do not oppose openness and global solidarity; if the ethos is built around xenophobia, racism, or hatred, we are not interested. Berlin in its intolerant phase embraced the world’s most monstrous regime, and we would not want to respect that ethos. But once cities (and other social and political entities) pass a threshold of minimal human rights—basic material necessities (food, water, shelter) are secure and nobody is being tortured, murdered, enslaved, or systematically discriminated against—then there is a good prima facie case for respect of the prevalent ethos.
The case for respecting a city’s ethos is best expressed by the proverb, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” For one thing, it can be psychologically destabilizing and expensive in terms of energy and money to change a city’s ethos. But we want to suggest that there is a case for respecting a city’s ethos even when we would normally object to the values that characterize that ethos.19 If the ethos does not justify egregious human rights abuses and we believe it reflects the particular values of a city’s inhabitants, that it shapes their collective identity, and that it helps to sustain diversity and plurality without being too exclusionary, then there is a strong case for respecting that ethos. For example, we might have less reason to criticize economic inequality in Hong Kong—a city that takes pride in its capitalist way of life—than in cities that place high value on economic equality.20 Or consider this: the Singaporean government’s claim that it is sometimes necessary to curtail a particular political right might sound dubious on first hearing, but we need to remain open to the possibility that constraints may be necessary to overcome poverty in states that lack a strong sense of national unity. Similarly, it may be justifiable to force shop owners in predominantly English-speaking parts of Montreal to put up French language signs, or for the city of Jerusalem to force shops (and the university!) to close on religious holidays.21
Still, we do not mean to imply that the dominant ethos should be respected no matter what the consequences. If it turns out that the dominant ethos is self-defeating—for example, that policies designed to promote nation building in Singapore have the opposite effect, or that religious fanaticism in Jerusalem tends to be collectively damaging to higher religious sensibilities—then criticism of the prevailing ethos may be justified. But such critical arguments can be made only on the basis of detailed local knowledge, that is, an informed account of how the disadvantages of particular interpretations of a collective ethos outweighs the advantages.
Let us address a possible misunderstanding. We do not mean to imply that everyone should be committed to a city with an ethos. Some people may prefer to live in homogenized communities where they can blend anonymously with the crowds (just as some people prefer “international” five-star hotels or Mc-Donald’s over charming hotels and restaurants with local characteristics).22 Others may be happy living in neighborhoods that express particular characteristics even if the city as a whole is an incoherent mess. And perhaps some people are attached to “characterless” cities just because they are born and bred there. That’s reasonable. But we are writing this book for those who do value cultural particularity and diversity, and who worry that globalism may work against that diversity. We do believe that many city residents share our point of view, but even if it’s a small minority or people we hope to keep the cause alive.
Nor do we mean to defend a value system that justifies commitment to only one kind of city or ethos. On the contrary, we believe that cosmopolitanism has many benefits and that it is possible to feel at home in several cities. Admittedly, our own personal experiences mesh with our normative outlooks: we feel rooted in more than one city. Daniel was raised in Montreal, did his graduate work in Oxford, worked in Singapore and Hong Kong, and now lives in Beijing. Avner was raised in Jerusalem and works there now, but he spent several years in Oxford and frequently returns for research and holidays and feels very much at home there. So each of us can identify with at least two cities’ ethoses, and perhaps some readers of this book will feel the same about two or more cities. Presumably there are limits to such attachments: one can’t feel a strong sense of belonging to an infinite number of communities.23 But the fact that one can belong to several circles of communities implies that our moral outlook is not some narrow kind of communitarianism: we therefore describe it as “cosmopolitan communitarianism,” meaning that we allow for the possibility that our loyalties and interests can be extended to other cities. Hence, we also write about cities beyond our original “home communities.”24
STROLLING AND STORYTELLING
This leads us to justify our choice of cities. We focus on cities that we can write about from personal experience; we draw on that experience to speak with a degree of confidence about the prevalent ways of social and political life of those cities, and we also show how our own lives and moral outlooks have been implicated—and changed, in some cases—by our experiences living in those cities. One can perhaps write compelling essays (or even books) about sports in Singapore or jazz in Jerusalem, but the large majority of residents in those cities can lead their lives entirely unaffected by such themes. In contrast, the dominant ethos tends to implicate, like it or not, the people living in those cities. Montrealers, almost without exception, must navigate the tricky linguistic politics of that city; Singaporeans are necessarily implicated in the city-state’s attempt to promote a common national identity; and it would be difficult to imagine a Jerusalemite not being made conscious of questions of religious identity.
Our choice of cities is also determined by more “objective” concerns. We chose cities that relate to key themes in contemporary political thinking; that is, we try to show what can be learned about cities that express and prioritize themes such as the pursuit of economic wealth (Hong Kong) and ambition (New York). In other words, we choose cities that prioritize certain values and themes that lend themselves to philosophical speculation of social and political import.25 Put negatively, we have left out cities that do not really seem to express dominant values, meaning that one has to think hard and argue about what that city is supposed to represent. For our purposes, the ethos of cities should be pretty obvious to anyone who knows anything about those cities.26
How do we get to know the ethos? As academics, we read a great deal about each city, including novels, poems, and tourist guides. We need to study each city’s culture, sociology, economy, and design, as well as try to tell coherent historical narratives of how cities became what they are now. In principle, we should do our best to use “hard” science to write about values and cities. One way might be to draw on public opinion polls or values survey data, though such surveys tend to compare countries and larger regions, not cities.27 Another marker of value prioritization would be to look at the distribution of resources in city budgets: one would expect a high share of the budget in Montreal to go to the protection of language, in Oxford to learning and culture, and so on. Perhaps the number of Google hits is one indication of prioritization; for example, “Jerusalem and religion” has nine million hits, compared to one million for “Jerusalem and romance” (though, to be frank, we do not expect such superficial indications to change our findings). Most important, perhaps, would be to draw on archival research and accounts of city planners who explain what values motivated what they did. We do rely on such methods to a certain extent, and we believe this kind of research is important and desirable.
In this book, however, we rely mainly on qualitative methods. We (re)visited the cities in our book and arranged interviews in advance with inhabitants of those cities (e.g., a college president in Oxford, a writer in Paris, a young political activist in Berlin). More controversially, perhaps, we also assume that much can be learned about cities and their values through strolling and spontaneous interviewing. In the past four years, we have been walking in the cities’ streets, talking with their people, and listening to their buildings, monuments, streets, and neighborhoods as if they were talking to us. Avner was reassured of the worth of this method shortly after he was made dean: when he asked colleagues what he could do to better understand the needs of the faculty, he was advised to simply walk the corridors and randomly bump into people rather than sit in his office and wait for people to come to him. In this more “subjective” and less designed method of philosophizing, the city and its inhabitants serve as a source not only of information but also of inspiration. Cities inspire not just ideas, but also stories and sentiments, which in turn inspire ideas. This “strolling” method has been particularly useful for researching cities that are not so constitutive of our identities, such as Paris and New York (in contrast, we can draw on a large stock of past personal experience to talk about Montreal and Jerusalem). Of course, there are also limits to strolling in sprawling and polluted cities such as Beijing.
Let us say a bit more about strolling. We are not the first social scientists or philosophers to employ strolling as a method of research. Most famously, Walter Benjamin (1898–1940) invoked the image of the flâneur—the person who walks long and aimlessly through the streets—as a way of examining the rise of capitalism, consumerism, and urbanism in nineteenth-century Paris. Benjamin studied the streets of Paris, especially the arcades—iron-and-glass-covered streets of shops—as a microcosm of modern society. While describing his strolling in the streets, he related, often in a manner of connotation or association, to works in history, culture, and sociology. Unlike many methods in sociology that highlight the detached researcher, Benjamin showed that the intimate knowledge, the “here and now” experience, is no less important for understanding social phenomena.28
In our case, we did not come equipped with firm hypotheses but instead let the cities inform us. As we were strolling, we deliberately tried to set aside our expectations and prejudices, remaining open to whatever happened to us and to the possibility that we might need to revise our preliminary views as to what the ethos of the city might be.29 For example, it struck Daniel that Montreal might have reached the end state of its language wars when he observed that Montrealers now display more flags of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team than flags of Quebec and Canada. Our approach is therefore very similar to data-driven research, in which our growing understanding develops in a way that is driven by the data that we collect, quite randomly, by meeting people, seeing buildings, talking to people on the street, and interpreting events that happen to us. This data-driven research is often challenged nowadays because most researchers would rather engage in hypothesis-driven research. But we found that a visit to a graveyard, a chat with a shopkeeper, or a visit to the main train station can supply data that lead to new research questions and hypotheses. How did we choose which bits of information to collect? We accepted data that allowed us to draw a coherent picture of an ethos, in which each story is consistent with other stories and each bit of data has a place. For example, stories implying that Jerusalem is a city of harmony do not cohere with the fact that there are so many ethnic and religious clashes in Jerusalem, and therefore we rejected such stories.
Now, our argument can be challenged by the claim that states rather than cities have an ethos. Had we described only New York, Oxford, Beijing, and Jerusalem, this could be a plausible counterargument. But we do have separate chapters about the very different ethoses of Beijing and Hong Kong, two cities in the same country. Moreover, in some of the chapters we write about the city comparing it to another city in the same country. We compare Oxford to Cambridge, Montreal to Toronto, and Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. This allows us to claim that the ethoses characterize particular cities rather than the countries.
Our argument can also be challenged by the claim that cities have more than one defining ethos, and that ethoses vary by social stratum and class, by location, and by religion within a given city. Well, we do our best to show that ethoses are shared by ethnic groups, social classes, and genders, and we do this by interviewing members of different groups as well as referring to literature and scholarly works about them.
One last methodological comment: as much as we were influenced by Benjamin’s method, it does not explain why we were moved to write and research in the way we did rather than in a more standard academic voice. Although we admire and respect standard academic work, we also think that much academic writing has become too specialized and far removed from everyday concerns. We prefer to write in an accessible style that engages people’s emotions while trying to speak the truth as we see it.
PROMOTING AN ETHOS
Given our preference for cities with a dominant ethos, it is worth saying something about the factors that increase the likelihood that a city will develop one. Policy makers and concerned citizens who agree with our outlook can therefore make informed decisions about how to create, revive, or nourish the “spirit” of a city. One caveat, however. We would like to emphasize that the public commitment to create or nourish an ethos should be invoked only once the city has overcome material scarcity. One of the features that distinguish cities from rural areas is that cities are generally wealthier. But some cities in poor countries are still very poor, meaning that many inhabitants struggle to get the necessities of daily life, such as enough food or water, or decent toilet facilities. In such conditions, it is difficult for a city to develop an ethos that unites people. Nor should it: it seems immoral to strive to develop an ethos in very poor cities if it comes at the expense of the most pressing task of securing the necessities of life. By this we do not claim that people of poor cities do not or did not care in the past about their ethos; we claim only that it would be inappropriate to demand that a city work on its ethos if the demand conflicts with the more pressing task of dealing with extreme poverty.30 Let us then turn to the factors that help to promote an ethos.
First, the city does not have a huge gap between rich and poor or between ethnic and racial groups. If different groups lead separate lives and strongly dislike one another, they will find it difficult to partake of a shared common (dominant) ethos. In some American cities the rich/poor and white/black divide is so pervasive that city residents share hardly anything in common. Jerusalem seems to be an exception because the sharply polarized groups are generally committed to the ideal of the city as a symbol of religious identity. Belfast serves as an example of a city that was divided and, now that it is united, is searching for its ethos. But here there is also a normative aspect. In some cities the gap between the poor and the rich and/or different ethnic groups has yet to be bridged (e.g., in Paris, where many poor immigrants reside in the city’s outlying areas). Our claim is that more affluent inhabitants should do all they can to embrace the newcomers. We also claim, more controversially, that immigrants who move to a city might want to consider the ethos there and whether it suits them. True, some immigrants move to a certain city because they are desperate and do not have any choice. But once they find themselves in that city, they can still strive to adapt to its ethos, as well as contribute to shaping that ethos in new ways.
Second, the city has a long-term rivalry with another city, often in the same country. Cities like Montreal, Beijing, or Jerusalem derive much of their identity by comparing themselves with Anglophone, “superficial,” or “hedonist” cities like Toronto, Shanghai, or Tel Aviv. From a moral point of view, such rivalries are less problematic than rivalries between nations because cities do not have their own armies (Singapore is an exception) and won’t go to war if competitive feelings get out of hand. Moreover, the rivalries are often the subject of humor and can inspire cultural creations of lasting value (e.g., the Montreal Canadiens would not have become the greatest team in hockey history without being able to repeatedly beat up the sad-sack Toronto Maple Leafs).31
Third, the city’s identity/ethos is threatened by outside forces, and hence residents have a strong motivation to struggle to keep their identity. The people of Hong Kong fight to maintain their capitalist way of life as opposed to “communist” China, the people of Montreal fight to preserve the French language in a “sea of English,” the people of Singapore fight to maintain their nation among larger and potentially hostile neighboring countries, and so on. So long as basic rights are not violated as part of the struggle, there is no reason to criticize such efforts.
Fourth, the city has substantial authority to enact laws (in the case of Singapore), ordinances, bylaws, and regulations that protect and nourish its particular identity or ethos. As a city-state, Singapore is the extreme example (but the government of Singapore is still not free to legislate as it sees fit: it is constrained by its small size and lack of natural resources and must often conform to the “dictates” of globalization). Chinese cities have the power to determine who becomes a full member of the city by means of the hukou (household registration system), which influences the character of the city and can have life-or-death implications for people (as in Tianjin during the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward). At the other extreme, American cities often lack authority to deal with common problems because cities have power only if state governments authorize them to act, hence contributing to suburbanization and the breaking up of the city into distinct neighborhoods based on class or race.32 More typical, perhaps, are “intermediate” cases, in which the rulers of cities like Paris and Beijing must deal with several overlapping layers of legal authority yet still manage (on occasion) to implement regulations designed to promote the ethos of the city.
Fifth, the cities have or had great city planners with the moral, political, and legal authority to enact transformative plans that help to realize a common public ethos. Extreme cases include cities planned from scratch, such as Canberra, Chandigarh, or (more recently) Masdar, the experimental project in the United Arab Emirates planned by Foster and Partners that aims to construct a “green” city where even the smallest details are conceived for the purpose of ecological sustainability.33 Great city planners discussed in our book include Baron Haussmann in Paris, Robert Moses in New York, Goh Keng Swee in Singapore, and Jean Drapeau in Montreal. This is not to imply that plans are always successful: typically they must be rooted in some latent ethos that the residents care about. The plan to build Brasilia into a classless urban society that owes nothing to the past led to an even more ruthless segregation between rich and poor than in any of the older Brazilian cities.34 And Jean Drapeau’s plans to make Montreal into a global power failed because most Montrealers cared more about language rights.
Sixth, an external agency, such as an advertising campaign or a movie, brands a city as having particular characteristics. Like urban planning, such efforts typically succeed only if the branding corresponds to something that already exists in people’s minds and in the urban landscape.35 Paris has become known as the “city of romance” in large part because of images in Hollywood films and the work of photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, but such images stick only because the city itself is so beautiful and lends itself to romantic imagery (though many Parisians reject the imagery, as we will discuss).
None of these six factors, taken alone, is necessary or sufficient to create or nourish an ethos. However, each factor does increase the likelihood of success, and the more such factors are present, the greater the likelihood of success. For a city that seeks to develop or nourish an ethos, it might be useful to keep these factors in mind; put negatively, if they are not present or likely to became significant factors in the foreseeable future, then concerned citizens and city leaders should turn to other matters of moral and political importance, such as securing the basic necessities of life.
Let us, at long last, turn to the structure of our book. We discuss nine cities and we try to show how each city has developed and nourishes a common public ethos. Along the way, we take the opportunity to theorize on the basis of stories and sentiments generated by personal experience with those cities (we use italics for passages that describe our personal experience). We begin with the cities that have done most to shape our identities—Jerusalem (in the case of Avner) and Montreal (in the case of Daniel)—and then move on to the cities that have played important subsequent roles in shaping our identities: Singapore, Hong Kong, and Beijing (in the case of Daniel), and Oxford and Berlin (in the case of Avner). Those chapters are written by the author who has been most affected by the ethos of those cities. The final section discusses two cities—Paris and New York—that are not so crucial to our own personal identities but we think have important things to teach us about maintaining an ethos. Those two chapters are written by Daniel and draw on extensive notes (in the case of Paris) and an earlier essay (in the case of New York) by Avner.
The first chapter, on Jerusalem, discusses religious conviction. No doubt the ethos of this city is religion. Religion can be spiritual and gentle, as reflected in the lifestyle of many Jerusalemites. But the city has often been torn among national groups, ethnic groups, religions, and different schools within each religion. Moreover, Jerusalem is held to be the center of monotheism, but religion has often deteriorated into a kind of paganism, with stones and buildings being sanctified and human beings sacrificed and killed in the name of God. Avner ends on an optimistic note, suggesting a way of returning to faith.
The second chapter, on Montreal, discusses the value of language both in an economic sense and in the psychological sense of feeling at home in the world. Such issues often lead to social conflict in multilingual settings like Montreal. Daniel discusses the turbulent history of conflict over language in Montreal as well as the relatively peaceful and mutually beneficial resolution of linguistic conflict in that city—today, both Francophones and Anglophones take pride in the value of bilingualism—which might serve as a model for other multilingual cities that prioritize the value of language.
The third chapter discusses Singapore. As the only large city that is a separate state, Singapore has had to engage in nation building since it was expelled from the Malayan federation in 1965. The government has promoted three values meant to constitute national identity—the values of material well-being, multiracialism, and meritocracy—in ways that have actually served to undermine national bonding, instead leading to an extreme form of individualism. The chapter ends with an account of Daniel’s recent visit to Singapore during which he unexpectedly discovered that there has been substantial progress in nation building over the past fifteen years or so.
The fourth chapter turns to Hong Kong, a “special administrative region” within China. Since its early days as a colonial outpost, Hong Kong has survived, and sometimes prospered, by means of its free-market ideology. In some ways, the ideology of free-market individualism did not match reality: the success of Hong Kong is partly explained by the fact that the government implemented a kind of welfare state with “Confucian characteristics” as well as by the presence of a widely shared Confucian ethic that prioritizes care for family members and other communities over individual self-satisfaction. The capitalist ideology is still a source of pride that marks off Hong Kong from cities in mainland China, but Hong Kong–style capitalism is not founded on self-interest or the pursuit of hedonism.
The fifth chapter focuses on Beijing. In contrast to Shanghai and Hong Kong, Beijing has long prided itself as being a political city. But the political history of the city has not always gone according to plan: most tragic, the communist experiment with revolution, centered in Beijing, fundamentally misapplied one of the key lessons of Karl Marx’s theory of history. In the second half of the chapter, Daniel discusses the present-day government’s effort to depoliticize the Chinese population by means of very political symbols in Beijing, ending with some speculation about how Confucian political traditions will shape the future of Beijing and, more broadly, China.
The sixth chapter discusses the case of Oxford and the ethos of learning. Oxford is well known for its university, one of the oldest in the world and a center of excellence. Avner argues that the idea of Oxford is learning rather than research, and scholarship rather than publishing. In addition, he takes a critical look at the distribution (or lack thereof) of access to learning in this city.
The seventh chapter focuses on Berlin and the idea of (in)tolerance. Berlin has been engaged in the project of learning from history, and we wonder how practical this project can be and what people really learn from history. The city nowadays seems to be a mecca for those who care about tolerance, but its inhabitants remain skeptical, fearing that at any minute the situation could change dramatically to one of intolerance. Avner asks if a new political culture is enough, or whether there is a need for some institutional mechanisms to prevent Berlin from deteriorating into a new era of racism and violence.
The eighth chapter turns to Paris and romance. The idea of Paris as a romantic city owes much to foreign perceptions that are rejected by Parisians themselves. However, a more sophisticated ethos of romance—what we call a “non-pasteurized” romance that contrasts with bourgeois modes of life—is a more accurate description of the Parisian ethos as understood by “locals.” The chapter concludes with some reflections on the tension between the pursuit of romance and the pursuit of morality.
The final chapter discusses New York—the “capital of the world”—and its ethos of ambition. New York became the capital of finance and culture as a result of its history of attracting different kinds of ambitious immigrants, who innovate and create by constant questioning of established ways of life. The dark side of ambition, however, is an extreme form of individualism that is almost unique among great cities. Paradoxically, however, there is a strong sense of “civicism” in New York that allows the city to survive the repeated challenges to decent community life.
THICK AND THIN
This book is both too thick and too thin. It’s too thick in the literal sense. As authors, we hope that the readers will read the whole thing, and we tried to write in an accessible and enjoyable style that might make the task less arduous. But we realize that some choices may need to be made. In fact, the book need not be read in any particular order. We hope that readers will read about their own cities and perhaps discover new insights, but we hope even more that readers will learn new things about different cities. The process of learning about different cities can also improve self-understanding: we understand ourselves better by understanding who we are not.
The book is too thin in the sense of that our discussion of cities is not as comprehensive as it might be. Our discussion is largely determined—and limited by—our personal experience. In the eyes of hard-core social scientists, our method may seem too impressionistic. We can and should support our claims about the ethoses of cities with more objective tests and studies. Moreover, some academics may object that the book does not make full use of the findings of disciplines such as sociology, geography, architecture, psychology, and urban studies. Even though we try to be interdisciplinary, we may still be limited by our expertise in political theory. Perhaps the theories of Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Pierre Bourdieu—and the theories of influential contemporary scholars of the city, such as Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells, Witold Rybczynski, Edward Glaeser, Mario Polese, David Harvey, Richard Florida, Charles Landry, and Jeb Brugmann—can help us to think further about the ethoses of cities, or perhaps cast doubt on the whole idea.
In our defense, we think that our method yields plausible results. We mean to open dialogues about the cities we discuss rather than to close them off. We welcome the opportunity to test our claims, and it could be that social science will disprove some of them. Even as a series of personal engagements with the cities we discuss, our book is most definitely not meant to be the final answer. Perhaps other writers can tell different and more compelling stories about even more dominant ethoses in the cities we discuss: Hong Kong and cultural hybridity? Jerusalem and learning? Paris and food? Italo Calvino has written an enjoyable book that seemingly recounts stories of different cities as told by Marco Polo to the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan, but it turns out that Marco Polo is just providing interpretations of different ethoses of the same city (Venice).36 The work is fiction (almost dreamlike), but we do not mean to deny the possibility that alternative stories about “our” cities could be told that would seem at least as compelling as those we tell.
What we’re more sure about is that insightful stories can be told about the common public ethoses of cities not covered in this book. We hope to hear accounts of the ethoses of cities in Africa (Johannesburg and racial reconciliation?), Latin America (Managua and revolution?), India (Bombay and film?),37 Japan (Kyoto and tradition?), as well as different cities in the United States (sports in Green Bay, dissent in Berkeley, environmentalism in Portland?) and elsewhere. This book is just a start, and we hope other authors will be encouraged to tell stories mixing the personal and the political about the ethoses of their own cities.
City-zens of the world, unite!38