THIS URBAN LIFE

From my window, nineteen floors up, I watch a dusky brown sea hawk soar majestically on thermals composed of bus exhaust fumes, air conditioner heat, boiling pots of congee, roasting ducks, sun-baked pavements, and the human caloric seepage from a canyon composed of skyscrapers.  This great symbol of nature circles above the open space created by a small city park and playground below, his keen eyes scanning for rats and mice that ply the little alleys in the early morning to feast on the detritus of the restaurants and dried seafood shops that abound here, and the tons of trash that daily spill down these tower blocks of flats.  Despite his supreme confidence, he seems out of place in so urban a hunting ground.  But, like everyone else here, he seems to have made his accommodation with the frantic and vertiginous urbanity of this place, this gritty old, teeming old quarter of Hong Kong called Sheung Wan.

I feel a kinship with this hawk that I would not likely have if we were together in some mountain valley.  We humans, after all, are also relative newcomers to life in cities.  The great part of our hundreds of thousands of years of evolution was spent in the wilds of nature, in caves and on savannahs, not in cities.  Some scholars argue that we humans, and hawks I suppose, are not biologically fit for the urban environment, and claim that many of our diseases and disorders are a product of urban pressures and stresses.  But I disagree.

The adaptability of our human species always awes me.  The question of whether or not we belong in cities remains much debated, not only in scholarly journals, but also by people in cities every day.  I am somewhat less amazed by the paradox that anti-urban sentiments remain unabated.  Many urbanites yearn for a “return” to the non-urban rusticity of the countryside, and some actually migrate there, although they are vastly outnumbered by those who must settle for that compromise between the city and the country that we call, with double entendre, “sub-urbia.”  For most, the circumstances of our place of birth, the exigencies of employment, and accessibility to urban opportunities, take precedence over naked preference.  And the circumstance that most people find themselves in today, whether they regard it to be, for better or worse, is the City.

Indeed, as more and more people find themselves, by choice or circumstance, in the City the further humankind will be from the memory of when life was, for most, non-urban.  In the Middle Ages the German phrase, stadt luft macht frei (city air makes one free),* meant that cities were places where people could begin to escape not only the travails, limitations and insecurities of rural life, but the rigidities if class systems and social status based upon blood lines rather than merit.  This is, of course, a transformation that remains “in progress,” but it would be difficult to make the case that, for example, the condition and status of women, anywhere, is better in a society that is predominantly non-urban.  The question, therefore, that people must ask themselves is not whether they “like” the City, but “compared to what?”

In the middle of the 1990s the World Health Organization announced that for the first time in the history of the world more than half of the world’s population could be defined as “urban.”  The announcement went largely comment in the media, probably because most people likely already were under the impression that most people were urbanites, or city dwellers.

It is therefore easy these days to take the City for granted; to take its opportunities, its variety, its liberating institutions, as “givens.”  But the City is a relative newcomer to human life and its affairs.  Indeed, for all but a fraction of human history we have lived in camps or caves and did mostly two things:  hunt and gather food and migrate to find it.  Later, when we began to plant crops and domesticate animals, it became possible for a few of us to live in small semi-permanent settlements.  But most of the world’s people for the great part of history did not even conceive of, much less live in, cities.  Even today, when half the world is urbanized, China, a nation with at least three cities in the teens of millions in population, is almost eighty percent “rural.”

Yet the allure of the City continues to exert its powerful magnetism.  Today, in that same, mostly rural, China, millions are migrating from the countryside to cities, in search of economic opportunity.  Cities offer the opportunities to be something other than a farmer, to receive a higher education, to become a participant in a vast commercial, industrial, institutional and civic enterprise.  But in the vast and complex institutional structure of the City they will also find a vortex of forces that buffet and threaten their traditional institutional structures of family, religion and work.