Local Core(s) of Influence
Preface
(possibly unnecessary fluff; feel free to skip)
How can we define the City? Surely, we can agree that it is a place, existing in a plane that we agreeably call Earth. It matters little whether this is above ground, underwater, over water, or in the "heavens," though so far we seem to prefer building upon solid ground.
Calling it a place is not nearly enough. Many places are not cities. Villages both in pre-civilized and post-industrial societies elude this title, as do towns, townships, ecosystems, or colonies. Colonies are an interesting detraction, particularly when referencing colonies in the animal kingdom*, such as those designed and inhabited by ants, termites, or bees. The confusion is in the definition for each term - a colony is “a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country, typically a distant one, and occupied by settlers from that country” whereas a city is defined horribly as “a large town,” or alternatively as an “incorporated municipal center” (municipal circularly means “of or relating to a city”). This must beg the question “what is a town?” A town is “an urban area that has a name, defined boundaries, and local government, and that is generally larger than a village and smaller than a city” or “a densely populated area, especially as contrasted with the country or suburbs.” From these definitions we should deduce that a city is a densely populated and defined space. Since ant colonies are ruled by a local leader, why are they not a city?
The point: regardless of the debate above about some technical definition (though not to dismiss it as useless), i like to think of the City as an organism. Not because it is an organism, but because of what this thought process can provide to our understanding of how and why cities operate, change, interact. So, what defines an organism? Etymologically, an organism (should be) an amount of matter singularly contained with at least one organ. This happens to be a bit too much, leaving out single-celled organisms that like separate organs. Regardless, even these tiny movers are individually contained and - importantly - alive.
As such, an organism is more than a conglomeration of parts, like so many inanimate objects. Indeed, an alternative definition of organism is "a whole with interdependent parts, likened to a living being." I believe that the City can fit this definition.
Jean Paul Sartre argues that our individual selves can be defined in three parts - our facticity (that which we have factually been), our transcendence (that which we can become, based largely on what we have been), and our present self (a fickle mash up of these two). I believe this exists for a City as well, as does Simone de Beauvoir's edit to her partner's work - we are also inescapably defined as a reflection, or what the external world thinks of and shares back to us. Without this, we can make up whatever we wish, until we are met with the frustrating difficulties of reality - competing desires, reliance on others, scarcity of resources, one's personal value/ level of influence, etc.
What these two thinkers are describing are parts of the soul, the underlying mechanics that help to separate the living from what we often define as inanimate (to be clear, [almost] all matter is moving, [almost] all the time). Does the City have a soul?
I believe that it does. I like to think of the City as more than a conglomeration of parts on a regionally defined spatial plane; i like to think of it as an organism, complete with a soul, an energy, a title, a future. The City interacts, it influences, it inspires, creates. Sure, it could be argued that it is the human components that accomplish this; could there be a built environment without builders? Could parts - or regions - exist referentially without being first defined?
Yet, to digress, is this building process limited to humans? No. Even the most anthropocentric wastelands - ecological graveyards with tombstones of concrete and plastic - are unable to fully rid themselves of the verminous non-human organisms interrupting the synthetic peace of the built environment in the Virtual Age. These are the dormant rebels, begrudgingly assimilating into our colonial hegemony. They interact with our artificial realm, seeking favor or opportunity, waiting for a moment of systemic failure to recapture and redefine the home they once built. They have a different definition of the City - indeed, many of them to this day build cities themselves.
Perhaps i've digressed too far - remember, we are comparing and likening the City to an organism - though i find none of this entirely trivial. To make matters worse, however, i don't only find the City to be organismic, i find organisms to operate as a conglomeration that is strikingly similar to the City. Consider this statement about pseudomonas aeruginosa (biofilms) in Harvard’s Museum of Natural History: “Biofilms are like cities of microbes. Like cities they develop and grow over time; they have architecture; they are built by the residents; and in these cities the residents are protected from numerous dangers they might encounter.” In this way, the human body is more like a planet than it is like a city, with a massive amount of autonomous systems built of many (microbial) citizens, all interacting with each other to address the needs of other celestial bodies - interactions that do exist, but not in a way that one or the other is every truly absorbed - regardless of some rather nefarious attempts over time.
One thing that can be consumed - or absorbed - is influence. Living organisms contain a variety of consumable varieties of influence. Influential exchanges provide different stimuli that grow, shrink, or maintain the amount of influence we desire to maintain based on feedback from the external realm - that which exists outside of the organism of self - informing us of our carrying capacity for influence as we journey through life. It is our "load,” the baggage we obtain, maintain, and consider to be our property.
Yet influence dies in the darkness of neglect, where interactions cease to exist. An influencer necessarily requires an attentive receiver, an audience member. Mumford supports this by saying that the "urban center is in fact a theater (70)" and... "the actor needs an audience to re-enforce his own ego and lend importance to his role." Guy Debord supports these notions further in his work on the Society of The Spectacle, where he argues that actors within the Spectacular Society are merely representing authenticity, projecting stories to audiences who exchange attention for influential dissemination. In this way, the City is itself a spectacle, a reconfiguration of realistic materials into a model of reality, a physical projection of human imagination, a tangible utopia of comfort-augmentation, a living machine of efficiency maximization. This relationship between the real and imagined multiverses that makeup a cityscape is further supported by Soja, suggesting the “irony of the conjunction of now and here is that it produces the word 'nowhere.' Another is that 'nowhere' is a rough translation of the Greek root for 'utopia.'"
About utopias, they seem to be the attempts to provide physical manifestations of an imagined improvement to our socio-spatial experience(s). If what we are actually experiencing is already artificial (a “Spectacle” rather than a first-order authentic engagement), what does this mean if we continue to further embed ourselves in a dreamlike imagination of improvement? Debord asserts that we interact through notions and references to the Spectacle, that we trade symbolic representations (simulacrum) of our experiences as a way to express our understanding of the world. In this way, all of our social interactions are spatial interactions, constantly referencing the spaces that have defined us, the space in between us, the space of us. After all, as Heidegger says, “to exist is to take space.”
The City influences its residences as much as the residences influence the City. The built environment “denotes and produces a society’s ethos.” Soja says that we always look at time - not space - as shaping humans. He is right to bring our attention to this - space defines so much of our self actualization, our personality, goals, methods of interaction, values, or categorization of what exists. Robert E. Park agues this by saying “the city is rooted in the habits and customs of the people who inhabit it. The consequence is that the city possesses a moral as well as physical organization, and these two mutually interact in characteristic ways to mold and modify a person.” Built environments are still environments, the living space of all sentient creatures that determine fundamental properties such as natural selection and resulting adaptation. We each adapt to the spectacle presented before us, much as our skin tone adapts over generations to the amount of sun we absorb in our physical location.
Just like that of an electrical field, our Local Core of Influence (for humans, their brains) has a central processing center. A powerstation, a server, a headquarters, interestingly quartered within our head. Our very specifically bound and hitherto described limit of dendritic synapses with external influential stimulus is the fleshy nylon we call skin. Yet, as we know, these are not impermeable surfaces. Our body's geographical borders have walls, sure, but they have entrance gates as well that decide who gets to enter and who doesn't. This can be tied back to Soja’s assertion that “space is not a container.” A stab wound is a battering ram, a bullet wound an asteroid, a mine is a needle. We dig into ourselves as a farmer would his field, tilling the top soil - the desiccated floor underneath a savannah's drought-ridden grassland. Volcanoes with white peaks and mountains with black peaks breach the surface, sometimes in clustered ranges that stretch across our chins, or along the back ridge of our shoulders. We extract trees swaying in the wind as a lumberjack would from the sky, with metal tongs that clamp around the trunk and lifts it upward, roots and all, until it flies away. We mow entire forests down with razors that slide and scrape across one another like tectonic transform plates, entrapping and crunching tree trunks as they slide horizontally across.
What is social atomization, and how would we consider it if we thought of the City as an organism? If living organisms rely on interaction, how do these change when sociality becomes more atomized? Does it affect the built environment? If so, how? Can social atomization and a number of other key trends have led to a demotion of Milwaukee’s advantageous housing stock? This can lead us back to the original point - the City is made up of so many single detached houses that it was simultaneously the “City of Houses” and the second-densest city in the USA. If Milwaukee’s soul consisted of brewing, manufacturing, affordable housing, and festivals, its bones were the physical structures that helped piece this all together. The arrival and continuation of a housing crisis is therefore a battle for both the structural and spiritual elements of Cream City.
