The word civilization comes from the Latin civis, meaning “city.” This curious epiphenomenon of civilization gives us as good a definition for civilization as we could ask for; etymologically and anthropologically, “civilization” means a culture of cities. Civilizations certainly count as complex societies, but we can imagine other kinds of complex societies which, whether or not they prove tenable in reality, would still fail to meet the criteria of civilization, chiefly because they would also lack cities, and all that goes with them. So what do we mean by a “city,” and what makes it so uniquely unsustainable?
Cities typically feature “city life”: the unique social network of bureaucrats, merchants, and a dense human population that arises in such urban centers, but defining a city in such terms seems tautological. No standard definition for “city” (versus other permanent settlements like a “village”) exists. From the American Heritage Dictionary, we get “A center of population, commerce, and culture; a town of significant size and importance.” Archaeologists define a city in terms of population density, with 5,000 or more people living in an at least semi-permanent settlement.
Such definitions try to capture an intuitive understanding that ultimately comes down to an ecological relationship: they point to the city as a unique form of human population density, with a unique relationship to its landbase. In his two-volume book Endgame, Derrick Jensen offers perhaps the best definition of the city to date, in explicitly ecological terms:
I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as a culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts— that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning city-state), with cities being defined—so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (meadow long in the Tolowa tongue), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville. Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth. Beautiful or not, Tenochtitlán required, as do all cities, the (often forced) importation of food and other resources. The story of any civilization is the story of the rise of city-states, which means it is the story of the funneling of resources toward these centers (in order to sustain them and cause them to grow), which means it is the story of an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside.
In the documentary, What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, William Catton (author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change) concurs, noting that we can almost define a city as a population that grossly exceeds its local carrying capacity.
To define a city as an ecological phenomenon, we now have several points which our previous definitions reached towards but ultimately failed to bring together satisfactorily, including:
- Permanent settlement
- A population density that grossly exceeds its local carrying capacity (5,000, for instance, acting as a fairly arbitrary number that would generally meet this criteria; by recognizing this as an ecological relationship, rather than a matter of absolute numbers, we can see that 5,000 acts simply as a rule of thumb for a more important ecological relationship)
- As a result of #2, cities require the importation of resources. In former times, a “hinterland” supplied this.
Because of this, cities give rise to civilization: concentration of power and wealth, class society, standing armies and the rest of Vere Gordon Childe’s primary criteria for civilization all follow from meeting the needs of cities, made possible (and in many ways, required by) agriculture. If we accept this definition of a city, then the unsustainability of the city seems tautological—it follows from the very definition of a city.
This has upset some observers, including Ran Prieur, who wrote:
The other night I watched What A Way To Go again, and noticed a sloppy, circular argument about cities: 1) Define a city as requiring the importation of resources. 2) Anything that requires the importation of resources will exhaust its resource base and collapse. 3) Therefore, we must give up living in cities.
A more careful and empowering argument would go like this: 1) Anything that systematically takes more than it gives will exhaust its resource base and collapse. 2) Cities as we know them take more than they give. 3) Therefore, if we want to live in cities, we must reinvent them.
Primitivists like to think that anything that wasn’t done 20,000 years ago cannot be done, or is not worth doing. At the other extreme, the myth of “progress” says that something impossible—eternal increase—is inevitable. I’m trying to find a middle ground. I envision a dynamic future, full of change and experimentation, but stabilized by having no ratcheting increase—no “growth”.
Applying this to urban design, we come up with pretty much what Leopold Kohr envisioned decades ago: a world of small independent city-states, with urban centers supported by surrounding farmland. Integrate some newer and older ideas, and “farming” becomes permaculture and forest gardens and wild lands managed to optimize foraging and hunting. The people in the dense central area have to import food, but they can export their composted waste, as well as providing things that give “civilization” a good name, like complex tools and urban culture.
We already know everything we need to know to do this now, with one exception, the ancient problem that nobody has yet solved: If just one culture falls from stability to “growth,” and starts depleting its landbase, increasing its population, and conquering, what’s to stop that pattern from consuming the whole world like a fire? Tragically, the more we restore the land, grow forests, build topsoil, the bigger that threat becomes.
Let’s take a closer look at this idea. Could our definition straight-jacket “cities” too narrowly? Might we simply need to expand our imagination of what a city could look like?
A crucial distinction divides agriculture from permaculture, namely, the kind of change they effect on their environments. Agriculture cultivates by means of catastrophe, while permaculture (or horticulture) cultivates by means of succession. We can see the clearest difference in their ecological impacts: the first farmers turned the vast cedar forests of Iraq into the desert wasteland we know today, while Indian permaculturalists created the Amazon rainforest and the Great Plains. We can see examples of Indian civilizations, such as the Mexica (Aztec) already mentioned in the quote from Derrick Jensen. But notably, those civilizations did not take part in the great ecological terraforming projects that their tribal, permacultural neighbors undertook. They, like civilizations in the Old World, also created deserts. Why do we find this consistent behavior?
Ran’s critique does make some good and valid points: we know how to cultivate and regenerate soil simultaneously, and such techniques can feed permanent settlements, namely villages. Villages differ from cities in several important ways. For example, they remain within local ecological limits, and even, typically, within the human cognitive limits set by Dunbar’s Number. That said, the reasons for permaculture’s success also limit its ability to scale. The reliance on edge in permaculture means that we can’t simply multiply yields per acre times the number of acres. Permaculture relies on the interaction of ecological zones, and those zones require a certain amount of area simply to remain viable. If a particular permaculture garden relies on a forest edge, then it can’t multiply its acreage into the forest without damaging the forest and destroying the edge it requires. Agriculture, based on catastrophe, works much more simply: if you need more food, you can always just rip up another acre of soil, because agriculture doesn’t rely on ecological relationships, but instead relies on breaking down ecological relationships.
Permaculture also proves difficult to mass-produce or ship very far. That means that human population density must more or less match the nutritional density of permacultural output. Even the most optimistic permacultural advocates, including David Mollison, while they expect permaculture could feed even more people than the current population, also readily admit that doing so would require a much more evenly distributed human population: i.e., the end of cities. Anthropological precedent clearly shows us that while permaculture works well for village life, it does not scale up to the level of cities. To export food to cities requires the raw, absolute production that only agriculture can provide.
Exporting waste to match food intake cannot make a city sustainable, due to the law of conservation of energy. Such an arrangement finds precedent in Chinese “night soil,” and while it can slow the damage of an unsustainable system, it cannot make the system sustainable. Food imported into the city becomes human energy, and the city’s population uses some of that energy for breathing and blood flow and keeping themselves alive. They excrete only a fraction of it as waste. So with each iteration of the cycle, less energy comes back to the “farm” than originally left, so the system still exports the ecological health of the land to keep the city alive.
These factors seem to underline, rather than detract, from our definition of a city. It suggests that the city has fundamental problems, and simply cannot become sustainable without ceasing to exist as a city. Villages certainly show potential for the future, but villages differ from cities in many ways. It also seems worth noting that what Ran calls “things that give ‘civilization’ a good name, like complex tools and urban culture,” do not occur uniquely in civilization, so we have no need to give up such things. While primitive technology does emphasize elegance over complexity, this often results in more effective tools. But city life itself likely makes up the thing most people will miss most of all: the chance to meet many new people, and to engage in the bustle and frenetic energy of the urban setting. For that, primitive societies had festivals and fairs which would bring together all of a region’s tribes and bands in a single place for a short time. They would trade, meet up, sometimes exchange members, get married, and effectively create a temporary, ad hoc city life for a few days, before dispersing again, before they began to have a lasting detrimental impact. That kind of “flash mob” approach to city life strikes a balance between our occasional needs for mass interaction, and the ecological (and psychological) strains that such interactions take. Even if we ignore the ecological implications, most of us eventually become stressed and fatigued from the constant bustle of city life, and eventually seek retreat into a more-than-human world to rejuvenate from that. The festival provides everything we love best about cities, without destroying the land that gives us life, or even outlasting its usefulness when it energizes us, to become the hectic urban trap that ultimately drains us.