Ivan Smekalin

Analyst, Positive Changes Factory, MA in Sociology student (EHESS, Paris)

As a community of city dwellers, the ancient polis differs from what is understood to be a city nowadays: the city merged with the village and was undivided from it and the state (Svanidze, 1999). Plato, in his Republic, depicts the ultimate social order that is effective precisely within the boundaries of the polis.

As part of the ideal polis, Plato described the coexistence of different social categories for the public good. The city is structured as nested circles with the center in the form of a temple complex and palace (Polyakov & Kryukova, 2015). The polis consists of the city proper and the adjoining land, where a citizen has two dwellings – in the city and on the outskirts. Citizens’ houses in the city are continuously arranged around a circular block with public buildings (courts, market squares, gymnasiums, and military units) in the center. Rings of residential development are surrounded by greenbelts and bodies of water. This city layout was to support the concept of a just social order – a middle way in politics, where each citizen occupies a clear position in the state (philosopher, warrior or craftsman) and in the city. Plato’s polis was based on autonomy and was completely static – the project did not envisage trade with the outside world or any change in the structure of the city.

Historically, the city as an independent phenomenon is the result of the specialization of labor. In the 9th and 13th centuries cities were separated from villages as places where artisans and church hierarchs lived. Cities emerge as centers of trade and craft production (Tilly, 2009). It is worth noting that the city in the modern sense is a historically contingent phenomenon that is about a thousand years old. Moreover, during these years most of humanity lived in villages, and it was not until 2006 that city dwellers began to be more numerous[7].

It was in the Middle Ages that the city began to demonstrate social distinctions: it became the center of trade, administration, religious and social life (Svanidze, 1999). Residents moved from the village to the city also for the reason that there was a legal custom "The urban air makes you free" (Gurevich, 2005). It meant that a serf was liberated after several years of life in the city. Cities were created on someone’s land – the land of a feudal lord, monarch, or church. Simultaneously with the formation of the urban system came the communal movement. It was a struggle of the urban community (commune) against their liege lord. The ideal city of the Middle Ages is artistically and metaphysically typified by the City of God without a concrete image of the urban layout.

The industrialization would alter a medieval city very much. Industrial buildings and new social classes appeared in its center. The period of transition from the medieval to the modern city saw the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. In it he strongly criticized contemporary industrialization and the negative effects it had on the community: "Your sheep… be become so great devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves." Here More describes the practice of enclosing farmland as pasture for wool production, which accompanied the creation of the cloth industry in Britain – the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The enclosures damaged the economic well-being of the peasants, their culture and customs.

Thomas More’s Utopia used Plato’s ideas. In contrast to the emerging industrial society, the agrarian family community was taken as the basis of the ideal city – the city included individual households propagating their craft skills. More’s Utopia is known for then-sensational proposal of abolishing private property and achieving complete uniformity, ultimately ending up in having identical clothes and dwellings. The square city is centrally crossed by a river with cultural and public buildings along its banks.

The spatial arrangement in Utopia is in many ways similar to the concepts of the "ideal city" that were prevalent during the Renaissance. The general principles of these projects were: clear geometric forms, symmetry and centricity, defensive buildings on the edges and public spaces in the center (Romanova, 2015). It is noteworthy that the projects of the "ideal city" were literally utopian – that is, they were abstractly spaced and were common in design, i.e. with no regard to the geographical features of the territory.

The medieval city ends with the advent of a new social class, the bourgeoisie. They are no longer peasants who farm the land and belong to the landlord, nor craftsmen who are enslaved through the shop and corporate system.

In particular, it was the urban bourgeoisie who participated in the events of the Great French Revolution: the city dwellers opposed the feudal privileges of the aristocracy and advocated the freedom of private property (Hobsbawm, 1999). A French politician known as Abbot Sieyes, a contemporary of the events, formulated the postulates of the third estate (all citizens except the clergy and nobility) as follows: "What is the third estate? – Everything. What has it been so far politically? – Nothing. What does it want to be? – Something." (Sieyes, 2003). After the revolution, the city became "something": the revolutionaries wanted to reflect the new values in the architecture as much as possible, the city dwellers developed a new approach: the palaces of the nobility were turned into public and trade spaces. The French Revolution gave birth to the city of the future: ideal cities were no longer abstract, but became subject to rational design (Romanova, 2015).

More laid the foundations of utopia – a separate genre at the nexus of fiction and journalism. In the 19th century, Enlightenment ideas produced a new class of writers, i.e. utopian socialists, who focused separately on the city and how people’s coexistence could serve the purpose of moral development.

The Industrial Revolution revealed iron as a new construction material: it was used to build exhibition halls, train stations and pavilions, or, in other words, – public spaces (Benjamin, 1996). Covered shopping streets – passages – became a feature of Napoleonic-era Paris. It was in the passages that Charles Fourier saw the Phalanstère. The idea was to create a self-sufficient commune of about a thousand and a half people who would live in one phalanx house. Residential blocks are connected to the central multipurpose block by means of covered passage galleries, and the zoning is vertical: the underground level is allotted for utility rooms, and the upper levels – for living.

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