The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age

THE SPIRIT OF CITIES

THE SPIRIT OF CITIES

Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age

Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

OXFORD

Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press

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Third printing, and first paperback printing, with a new preface by the authors, 2014

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15969-0

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Bell, Daniel (Daniel A.), 1964–

The spirit of cities : why the identity of a city matters in a global age / Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15144-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Cities and towns—Social aspects. 2. Identity politics. 3. Urban policy. I. De-Shalit, Avner. II. Title.

HT151.B415    2011

307.76—dc23     2011019200

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Garamond and Archer

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

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TO CITY-ZENS

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book came to us in early September 2001, when we were walking the streets of San Francisco (the official reason for the trip was a meeting of the American Political Science Association). We were struck by the charm of the city and speculated that it would be a good idea to walk the streets of different cities and write a book about our experiences. A few days later, however, terrorists struck in New York, and the plan was shelved. It seemed impossible to imagine that it would be possible to stroll in our favorite cities without fear of the world collapsing before our eyes.

Fortunately, we were too pessimistic, and the project was revived a few years later. At this stage we had read a lot on strolling as a method of research, and we encountered much enthusiasm and encouragement. Hence, we would like to thank the generous support of the Max Kampelman Chair for Democracy and Human Rights at the Hebrew University, the Lady Davis Fellowship (which allowed Daniel to spend two months in Jerusalem), as well as the Department of Philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Institute of Arts and Humanities at Jiaotong University in Shanghai. We are also grateful to the East Asian Institute in Singapore for supporting Daniel’s stay in Singapore longer than was strictly necessary. We wish also to express our thanks to three very energetic and helpful research assistants, Orly Peled, Alon Gold, and Nimrod Kovner, and to Emilie Frenkiel, Marie-Eve Reny, and Kevin Tan, who helped us to secure photos for the book.

Much of our research focused on talking to family members, friends, and strangers in the streets of our nine cities, and some of these interviews were intensive and very long. We want to thank our interviewees: they were patient, helpful, and very cooperative. They are named in the book itself, so we won’t thank them by name here.

Early drafts of chapters were presented and discussed in seminars and workshops. We are grateful for the feedback of our colleagues at Concordia University, Duke University, Fudan University, Hebrew University, Heilongjiang University, Huafan University, University of Hong Kong, University of Macau, City College of Hunan, McGill University, Princeton University, Rhodes University, Oxford University, and Tsinghua University. We confess that some of these ideas were presented before they were mature and we thank our colleagues for patiently putting us on the right track.

We are very grateful for family members, friends, and colleagues who discussed and commented on individual chapters: Judy Abrams, Tevia Abrams, Eitan Alimi, Daniel Attas, Shlomo Avineri, Bai Tongdong, Céline Bell, Julien Bell, Valérie Bell, Eyal Ben-Ari, Fran Bennett, Annie Billington, Sébastien Billioud, Kateri Carmola, Joseph Chan, Maurice Charland, Chee Soon Juan, Anne Cheng, Chua Beng Huat, Ci Jiwei, G. A. Cohen, Sébastien Correc, Nevia Dolcini, Jack Donnelly, Michael Dowdle, James Fallows, Fan Ruiping, Emilie Frenkiel, Nicole Hochner, Noam Hofshtater, Ian Holliday, P. J. Ivanhoe, Jiang Haibo, Lily Kaplan, Gillian Koh, Lee Chun-Yi, Donna Levy, Li Ying, Liu Kang, Kimberley Manning, Kai Marchal, David Miller, Glenn Mott, Lilach Nir, Anthony Ou, Paik Wooyeal, Randy Peerenboom, Daphna Perry, Kam Razavi, Marie-Eve Reny, Mike Sayig, Tatiana Sayig, Phillippe Schmitter, Joseph Schull, Daniel Schwartz, Shlomi Segall, Song Bing, Kristin Stapleton, Kevin Tan, Joel Thoraval, Wang Hao, Lynn White, Jonathan Wolff, Gadi Wolfsfled, Benjamin Wong, David Yang, Peter Zabielskis, Bo Zhiyue, and Zhu Er. We are particularly grateful for friends who commented on the large bulk of the manuscript—Parag Khanna, Leanne Ogasawara, and Jiang Qian—as well as for two referees for Princeton University Press, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Weinstock, who wrote thoughtful and constructive reports that helped us to improve the manuscript.

Princeton University Press has been excellent. Our editors—Ian Malcolm and Rob Tempio, as well as the press’s director, Peter Dougherty—have been supportive and enthusiastic, and have encouraged us throughout the various stages of publication. We are also grateful for the careful copyediting of Madeleine Adams and to Leslie Grundfest for the efficient production of the manuscript.

Last but not least, we are most grateful to our family members. If it’s true that our identities were constituted in our cities, they helped us along the way and made the whole thing worthwhile.

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

THE CITY AND IDENTITY

Who am I? Which social relations constitute my identity, and how do they shape my social responsibilities? In the twentieth-century, the nation became the main source of political identity and site of collective self-determination. A patriot takes pride in her own country because it expresses a particular way of life in its history, politics, and institutions. But states find it increasingly difficult to provide this sense of uniqueness because they have to comply with the demands of the market and international agreements. They have less autonomy when it comes to shaping their policies according to their own values and ideas of the good (unless they cut themselves off from the rest of the world, like North Korea or Bhutan).

In the twenty-first century, much has been written about the rise of global identities and cosmopolitanism. Due to migration, free flow of labor and capital, the internet and the new social media, and the exchange of customs, more and more people experience of sense of cosmopolitanism. The extreme manifestation of this trend is the Davos Man, somebody who has transcended all national allegiances and views himself as a citizen of the world (or views the world, to be more negative, as a place where he can enrich himself). But how common is the Davos Man? Even in Davos, it turns out, few identify themselves solely (or even mainly) as a citizen of the world. Our book was presented at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in 2012, and it generated heated debates between proponents of competing city loyalties: Johannesburg versus Cape Town, Washington versus New York, and so on. Cities, it seems, can also shape the identity of modern (wo)man. The desire to experience a sense of uniqueness and particularity seems deeply rooted in human nature. With the decline of national attachments, the best place to look for a supplement (or a replacement) might be down to the city rather than up to the world.

Can cities provide the alternative? Can they provide a sense of uniqueness, of a particular political identity? Well, today more than half the world’s population lives in cities, compared to less than 3 percent in 1800. Not surprisingly, the city has become an important area of research. Most of the theorizing about cities tends to focus on what makes urban life special compared to small town and rural life: cities allow for economic development and low per capita carbon emissions, they are sites of creativity and innovation, and so on. The smart or ideal city, will try to maximize these advantages according to one matrix of success. Theories arguing for the general advantages of urban life are important. But there is hardly theorizing about what makes cities special and different from each other and why city-based identities matter from a normative point of view, and we felt we needed to take an initial stab at this work. It seems obvious that city-zens take special pride not just in the fact that they live in an urban environment with characteristics that make urban life desirable compared to rural life, but also that they take special pride in the fact that they live in an urban environment that is special relative to other cities. We call this pride civicism. This civicism is rooted in the feeling that a city is particular; it’s hard to feel proud of a city that only expresses the homogeneity of globalization, just as it’s hard to feel proud of a neighborhood McDonald’s. A sense of community—something that seems as deeply rooted in human nature as, say, the quest for personal freedom—typically needs to be attached to a community that expresses particular characteristics, or what we call an ethos or spirit. So we studied many cities; and we argue the nine cities discussed in this book do express an ethos.

Of course, we recognize that our argument faces an uphill battle. Social critics in the past wrote about the atomized loneliness and alienation of big-city life compared to small towns and rural life. As Mark Twain put it in 1867, A man walks his tedious miles through the same interminable street every day, elbowing his way through a buzzing multitude of men, yet never seeing a familiar face. Perhaps urban life is desirable in many ways, but a sense of community rooted in particularity doesn’t seem to be one of them. To the extent there is any common life in modern cities, it seems to be a highly individualistic quest for the latest high-tech gadget. When urbanization is combined with the seemingly inexorable force of capitalism, it has the effect of transforming a variety of cultures into a single culture of consumerism.

But a different form of community has evolved in modern cities. More and more people experience a growing sense of cosmopolitanism, but they also want to feel unique. Cities, we think, allow for a combination of both cosmopolitanism and a sense of community rooted in particularity. Indeed, we see that city-zens often take pride in their cities and the values they represent, and seek to nourish their distinctive civic cultures and ways of life. Jerusalemites struggle to promote their religious identities, Montrealers struggle to promote their linguistic identities, and so on. It is no coincidence that the slogan I love New York is perhaps the most famous marketing slogan of the modern era. Cities around the world are copying this slogan. I love Beijing—in English—is commonly seen on T-shirts in the Chinese capital. It’s easy to be cynical, to say the whole thing is driven by money, but the slogan does tap into a real emotion. People really do love their cities. The New York ethos is famously individualistic (what we call ambition), but its underlying sense of community and urban pride emerges with full force in times of crisis, such as 9/11. And part of that civicism comes from the sense that New York is different from the rest of the country (including other American cities). New Yorkers often say they feel more attached to their city than to their nation. Other American cities, for their part, seek to distinguish themselves from New Yorkers. When he was elected as Chicago’s mayor in 2011, Rahm Emanuel addressed Chicago’s residents saying we are different from New Yorkers. While New York takes pride in being a magnet for migrants, Chicago takes pride in the fact it has the least emigration among large United States cities: people who are born or migrate to Chicago tend to stay for life. So we see that cities that seem to express a particular identity, or ethos, typically generate the most intense forms of urban pride.

China might seem to pose a special challenge to the claim that cities can affirm a sense of community grounded in local particularity. The country has undergone the most rapid and disruptive urbanization process in human history: from 1982 to 2011, the urban population as a percentage of the total population increased from 20.6% to 51.3%. The trend is only expected to accelerate in the future: by 2025, China is expected to have 15 megacities, each with an average population of 25 million. Big Chinese cities seem to smother difference; the drab, uniform look of Chinese cities appears to have erased the diversity that makes human social life so valuable and interesting. Chinese cities were subject to 30 years of Soviet-style modernization, followed by 30 years of American-style modernization. From an architectural point of view, it may be the worst of both worlds.

But the similar look of Chinese cities masks a quest for particularity and community that, once again, seems deeply rooted in human nature. In China, the quest for community grounded in particularity has special urgency because of the decline of traditional rural attachments and the widely-felt need to instill a new sense of social responsibility in an age of rapid urbanization. If people identify with their cities—and they are more likely to do so if they feel their city expresses a particular identity—they are more likely to have a sense of social responsibility, to care about and be civil towards fellow city-zens. Since our book was published (and translated into Chinese: our book seems to have struck a special chord in China),¹ several Chinese cities have carried out research to affirm their own spirit (jingshen) that underlies the apparent architectural sameness; again, the idea is that promoting a sense of community grounded in particularity is key to promoting a sense of responsibility. Beijing itself canvassed public views to affirm its own spirit, and such findings influence urban planning and the protection of cultural heritage. The key slogans are pasted along the Beijing’s major thoroughfares: patriotism, inclusiveness, creativity, and virtue. Shanghai is the obvious point of contrast, reminding us that civicism is often defined vis-à-vis another city that expresses contrasting values. Daniel teaches in both Beijing and Shanghai, and he is inevitably asked which city he prefers. Before he even begins to answer the question, the Beijing-based interlocutor will say how much she or he loves Beijing and dislikes Shanghai; and vice versa in Shanghai. Clearly the two cities express a different set of social and political values, as reflected in the street layouts, the different forms of economic activity, the degree of openness to outsiders, and even the conversations of taxi drivers. China’s other cities are also less uniform than they seem at first glance. Smaller cities specialize in particular products, while larger ones flaunt their educational capacity and cultural appeal. Whatever the origin of such projects, city-zens—including foreign residents of those cities—often take pride in their city’s achievements

In short, our book is primarily motivated by an optimistic belief that cities can combine the openness of the global with the sense of community grounded in particularity. And we think cities have other advantages of states as sites of identity. Most important, the quest for particularity at the level of the city is not likely to spill into serious hatred and warfare. In fact, civicism can curb the excesses of nationalism. Except for city-states like Singapore, cities do not have armies, so civic pride is not likely to take dangerous forms. Hence, it is better that the need for community grounded in particularity be attached to cities.

Now, residents of capital cities are often quite nationalistic. It’s also true that people tend to rally around the flag in times of crisis, such as a major foreign-sponsored terrorist attack. But interviews we conducted in the nine cities we studied—and our research in other cities since then—show that most city-zens have their own sense of identity that need not stretch in full form to the nation. This is not to deny that there is a legitimate role for nationalism: for example, a strong sense of the Chinese nation as a common project helps to motivate efforts to redistribute wealth and resources from China’s east coast to the impoverished west. But nationalism unconstrained by an even stronger sense of civicism is more likely to take dangerous forms, just as nationalist demagogues find it easier to get support from unmarried young males without strong family ties. In short, our argument is not that civicism can and should replace nationalism as a source of political identity (though it may do so in the future); rather, we want to suggest that civicism, with its combination of local pride and openness to the world and the universal, provides the psychological underpinnings for people to be more moderate nationalists.

Another reason to affirm the ethos of cities is that cities with an ethos can also accomplish desirable political goals that are harder to accomplish at the level of the state. We will wait a long time for politicians in the United States or China to implement serious plans to deal with climate change. But cities like Curitiba (Brazil), San Francisco (United States), and Hangzhou (China) take pride in their environmental ethos and go far beyond what the state can do in terms of environmental protection. New York City, the self-styled, capital of the world, can draw on its ethos of ambition to effectively carry out its own foreign policy: Mayor Bloomberg has invited hundreds of mayors from around the world to focus on how urban leaders can share policy initiatives and technologies to reduce emissions. And cities can now measure their relative rates of success: at the World Urban Forum held in Rio de Janeiro in 2010, it was announced that the world’s cities now had a common method for calculating the amount of greenhouse gases produced within their legal boundaries. This is not to deny for the need for state-based cooperation and for international environmental projects with budgets that cities cannot afford, but cooperation between sister cities with similar ethoses can underpin and support such efforts.

There are also good economic reasons to promote the ethos of a city. Cities that develop a clear identity can help to revive moribund economies. One beautiful museum transformed Bilbao from a declining industrial city into a Mecca of the art world (as an aside, note the urban metaphors we use to express our political ideals). In China, cultural tourists are attracted to Qufu because they want to learn about the home base of Confucianism, which helps to develop the local economy. A workable model at the level of the city can be extended to other parts of the country. One of the not-so-well known aspects of the Chinese state is that it allows for substantial fiscal and legislative city-based autonomy (compared to cities in the United States and India, where more authority lies with state governments), and competition between cities is an important reason for China’s economic dynamism. Shenzhen, the first special economic zone, has grown from a small fishing village in 1979 into a booming metropolis of 10 million today. Many other cities, from Guangzhou to Shanghai, soon followed the path of market reforms. Dalian and Tianjin competed to attract the annual Winter Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum (it was eventually decided to alternate between both cities), and both cities upgraded their infrastructure to the benefit of residents. Megacities such as Chengdu and Chongqing compete for commitment to social justice and reducing the income gap between urban residents and residents of the surrounding countryside. Chengdu’s approach has been driven by a long-term effort involving consultation and participation from the bottom-up, whereas Chongqing has been relying more on state power and the dislocation of millions to achieve similar results. If Chengdu’s gentle model proves to be more effective at reducing the income gap, it can set an economic model for rest of the country, just as Shenzhen set a model for market reforms.

As political theorists, we hope that a city’s ethos can also inspire social and political thinking of global importance. As noted in the introduction, the competing models of Athens and Sparta provided the intellectual fodder for both Plato and Aristotle’s political theories, and the most creative period in Chinese social and political thinking emerged out of the ferment of ideas in different Warring States cities. John Locke’s Letter on Toleration was directly inspired by his stay in Amsterdam, the most open minded and tolerant city of seventeenth-century Europe. And surely it is no coincidence that Charles Taylor’s theories of multiculturalism and language rights emerged from Montreal, where residents inevitably must navigate the tricky linguistic politics of the city.

Of course, the idea that a city should affirm an ethos rests on the assumption that a city has an ethos. Hence, we discuss the particular ethoses of nine cities in this book. We did lots of reading and tried to present historically informed interpretations, but we recognize that our approach is limited in the sense that we draw mainly on qualitative methods of research. Personal experience matters: if someone has lived in a city for an extended period, he or she is likely to have a good sense of its dominant ethos, or habits of the heart. We scheduled interviews with people of different classes, ethnic groups, and genders in different cities: we tried to find out if they argue about similar things (e.g., religion in Jerusalem, language in Montreal, national-level politics in Beijing) and what they say about those things. And we made use of the strolling method: random strolls and chats with strangers can shape and refine hypotheses about the ethos of a city, especially cities we know less from personal experience. Our strolls, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s project The Arcades of Paris, systematically carried out in different parts of the city over extended periods, are meant to aggregate stories told by locals and paint a more comprehensive picture of the city’s ethos.

Let us briefly respond to some oft-heard criticisms of our approach. Some critics object that our method is too impressionistic and subjective, and there is a need for more quantitative methods. In fact, we recognize that quantitative methods can be helpful. We do make use of public opinion pools and values surveys data, but the problem is that most surveys compare countries, not cities. Hence, we make more use of survey data in the chapter on Singapore, the only city-state in the book. We also use data on the special administrative zone of Hong Kong, which has often been treated by researchers as though it is separate than the rest of China. In the future, we certainly hope that social scientists can do more city-based research and the results may challenge our hypotheses.

Other criticisms tend to come from opposite directions. On the one hand, we have been accused of essentializing the ethos of a city; in fact, cities are much more complex, diverse, changing, and pluralistic than one value or set of values. We do recognize that our hypotheses may be more revealing of a city’s core, e.g., the ethos of ambition may be more central to the way of life of Manhattanites than New Yorkers who live in outer boroughs. We also agree that ethoses can change over time, and our historically-informed approach is meant to show how such changes took place. But—and perhaps we should have been more explicit in the hardcover version of our book—an ethos is not so much commitment to a set of values as commitment to an argument. To the extent we have a responsibility to do as the Romans do, it means arguing within the set of terms that generally inform arguments in Rome. Hence, in Jerusalem, people argue about religion, in Montreal, about language, and so on. What we do as political theorists concerned with normative issues is to join those arguments; in each chapter, we aim to provide a morally defensible interpretation of what that ethos should be. We discuss stories and impressions in the context of an argument about what the ethos is and what a morally defensible interpretation of that ethos should be. For example, the point of the Jerusalem chapter is not to make the banal case that people argue about religion; rather, Avner argues for an interpretation of religion that is gentle and spiritual and that respects people rather than things. Although this account of religion is reflected in the lifestyles of many Jerusalemites, Avner recognizes that it’s an uphill struggle to combat more dogmatic and institutionalized forms of religion. The chapter on Montreal is more optimistic, because Daniel argues that the morally defensible way of thinking about the value of language has slowly become the mainstream way of thinking and living. This argument has proven to be controversial—the Montreal chapter generated an uproar when a leading journalist for a francophone newspaper drew on our argument to calm those who sought to revive language wars—but the argument is as much normative as it is descriptive. In short, we try to argue for a particular interpretation of an ethos in each chapter, one that can be defended from a moral point of view and help to inspire change in those cities.

On the other hand, we have been accused of being moral relativists in disguise. Beyond a very thin set of basic human rights, we seem to argue that the ethos of a city should be respected whatever its content. If Montrealers favor curtailing the linguistic rights of Anglophones, it’s too bad for them. If Jerusalemites favor curtailing the rights of atheists, well, non-believers should pack up their bags and move elsewhere rather than complain about it. If a city, such as Amsterdam, wants to promote a creative class by favoring the construction of small, one-bedroom flats favored by young unmarried professionals, well, people who want to stay there will just have to limit their procreativity. Local officials in Qufu plan to make the city and its surrounding area into a Confucius cultural special zone, and Confucian scholars have objected to plans to build a Christian church in Qufu that is higher than the Confucian temple. Again, Christians who want to build such a church would need to do so elsewhere just as, presumably, Confucians could not build a temple higher than St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. In other words, our approach seems to justify the highly controversial and discriminatory policies by city administrators who claim to be acting in the name of an ethos. Most states would not dare to promote such policies as they would be immediately challenged in courts, so why should cities be allowed to do so? Our reply is that states indeed are expected to be more even-handed. But cities can and should be allowed to express a thicker way of life than states, so long as they respect basic human rights. Moreover, our research indicates that this is what city-zens expect their cities to do. And sometimes, the outcome may be more open and tolerant than policies decided at the national level. For example, in 2012 Germany’s Supreme Court ruled that circumcision in an early age was illegal because it amounts to grievous bodily harm. Needless to say Jews and Muslims found this ruling very difficult to cope with. The city of Berlin decided that its own dedication to tolerance and coming to terms with the past takes precedence this court decision, and that the city would allow circumcision. Cities, in short, are central to human well-being in the modern era, in the sense that they provide a sense of community grounded in particularity that states cannot provide, and hence should have more leeway to promote policies that express the city’s identity.

The introduction to the hardcover edition of the The Spirit of Cities ended with the claim that the book is just a start. Normally, such claims should be dismissed as false modesty. However, we did mean it. But we also think that our topic is important, one of the most important and least studied topics of our age. By infusing us with their spirit and identity, our cities may, in fact, help to empower humanity to face the most difficult challenges of the 21st century.

NOTE

1. The Chinese translation (simplified form) was awarded the prize of one of the ten most influential non-fiction books in 2012 by Xinhua.net (one of the largest internet news sites in China) and China Commercial Publishing House. The prize was decided based on internet votes by readers and expert evaluations.

THE SPIRIT OF CITIES

INTRODUCTION

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