1 The belief that cities or towns are an unacceptable setting for human life. 2 The belief that existing, large or dense cities are unacceptable.
Anti-urbanism and anti-urbanist are usually pejorative terms. Most of those accused of that attitude would deny it, saying that they object to certain kinds of cities, not cities in general. ebenezer howard, for example, is often called anti-urban because he was convinced that the big cities of his time had no future, though he sought civic qualities in smaller towns and his garden cities. Even frank lloyd wright, who advocated extreme decentralisation, called his favoured form of development BROADACRE CITY. A follower of JANE JACOBS might accuse LEWIS MUMFORD of being an anti-urbanist, while a follower of Mumford might accuse Frank Lloyd Wright of the same.
The classical Roman poet Horace wrote: ‘The chorus of writers, one and entire, detests the town and yearns for the sacred grove.’ The well-known line from Abraham Cowley’s 1666 poem ‘The Garden’ expresses an anti-urban sentiment: ‘God the first garden made, and the first city Cain’. (Cain was the first murderer.) The poet Shelley wrote in 1819 that ‘Hell is a city much like London – a populous and smoky city’. The novelist DH Lawrence agreed. ‘London seems to me like some hoary massive underworld, a hoary ponderous inferno,’ he wrote in a letter. ‘The traffic pours through the rigid grey streets like the rivers of hell’ (quoted by Knevitt, 1986). HENRY GEORGE (1886) wrote: ‘This life of great cities is not the natural life of man. He must, under such conditions, deteriorate, physically, mentally, morally. Yet the evil does not end there. This is only one side of it. This unnatural life of the great cities means an equally unnatural life in the country. Just as the wen or tumour, drawing the wholesome juices of the body into its poisonous vortex, impoverishes all other parts of the frame, so does the crowding of human beings into great cities impoverish life in the country.’ Andrew Saint has noted that the founders of the NATIONAL TRUST, OCTAVIA HILLM, Robert Hunter and Hardwick Rawnsley, ‘all held that tenacious English belief in the superior morality of the countryside to the city’. The prime minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman observed in 1907 when receiving the freedom of the City of Glasgow (hardly tactfully, considering the occasion) that ‘the concentration of human beings in towns… is contrary to nature, and… this abnormal existence is bound to issue in suffering, deterioration and gradual destruction to the mass of population’ (quoted in Cherry, 1982). The historian Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) wrote in The Decline of the West, published in 1918 (but written before the war): ‘In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of true-type people, born of and grown of the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially the highest form of countryman, the country gentleman’.
RALPH NEVILLE (1909), a prominent lawyer recruited by Ebenezer Howard as the first chairman of the Garden City Association, wrote that in a metropolis ‘the multitude of impressions received by the brain and the rapidity of their impressions tend to induce shallowness of thought and instability of purpose. An increase of emotionalism and a loss of steadfastness are marked characteristics of town dwellers.’ The survival of the race, Neville declared, would depend on freeing the working classes from the cities. FJ OSBORN (1938) wrote: ‘Great cities mean a choice between two appalling evils; a concrete landscape and four flights of stairs for mother and baby, or an hour of agonising strap hanging in a tube for father.’ Such comments led to Osborn and other garden city and new town pioneers being accused (as contemporary urban decentralists often are today) of being anti-urban. Osborn (1939) retorted that his critics were not real urbanists at all. ‘Just as many people have doubted whether a nation which watches professional footballers is a nation of sportsmen and athletes,’ he wrote, ‘so I doubt whether the swarm of art addicts and lecture eaters who make up high-brow London constitute a true urban culture… Such habits have little to do with creative culture, resound in nothing resembling a community, produce no tradition and no collective memories.’ The architect CHARLES REILLY (1938) was typical of the critics in referring to ‘a garden city with all that implies in pettiness and snobbishness and the village outlook’. Jane Jacobs (1961) wrote of Ebenezer Howard: ‘He not only hated the wrongs and mistakes of the city, he hated the city and thought it an outright evil and an affront to nature that so many people should get themselves into an agglomeration. His prescription for saving the people was to do the city in.’ Jacobs dismissed garden cities as ‘really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own’.
In Ayn Rand’s 1943 bestselling novel THE FOUNTAINHEAD, Dominique Francon (whose character was much like herself in a bad mood, Rand said) is repulsed by, if not New York, then all contact with its people. ‘She had always hated the streets of a city. She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear… fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met… she had kept herself clean and free in a single passion – to touch nothing.’ She can not even bear the thought of her lover, the modernist architect Howard Roark, touching the hand of the vendor when he buys a packet of cigarettes. Her attitude brings to mind the words of the sociologist RICHARD SENNETT (1990): ‘What is characteristic of our city-building is to wall off the differences between people,’ he writes, ‘assuming that these differences are more likely to be mutually threatening than mutually stimulating. What we make in the urban realm are therefore bland, neutralising spaces, spaces which remove the threat of social contact: street walls faced in sheets of plate glass, highways that cut off poor neighbourhoods from the rest of the city, dormitory housing developments.’ For a very different view of passing strangers to that of Dominique Francon/Ayn Rand, see EDWIN MORGAN.
To the poet ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887–1962), a city represented an intolerable concentration of people. In ‘November Surf’ he imagines ‘The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks more numerous,/ The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed/ Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains/ The dignity of room, the value of rareness.’ Jeffers wrote in his 1939 poem ‘Shine, Perishing Republic’: ‘when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains’. LOUIS SULLIVAN (1949) felt ‘swallowed up’ when he moved to the city of Boston. ‘The effect was immediately disastrous,’ Sullivan wrote. ‘As one might move a flourishing plant from the open to a dark cellar, and imprison it there, so the miasma of the big city poisoned a small boy acutely sensitive to his surroundings. He mildewed; and the leaves and buds of ambition fell from him. In those about him, already city-poisoned, even in his own kin, he found no solace, and ceased openly to lament. Against the big city his heart swelled in impatient, impotent rebellion. Its many crooked streets, its filthy streets, lined with stupid houses crowded together shoulder-to-shoulder like selfish hogs upon these trough-like lanes, irritated him, suffocated him; the crowds of people, and wagons, hurrying here and there so aimlessly – as it appeared to him – confused and overwhelmed him, arousing amazement, nausea and dismay.’
Morton and Lucia White (1962) claimed: ‘The fact that our most distinguished intellectuals have been on the whole sharply critical of urban life helps explain America’s lethargy in confronting the massive problems of the contemporary city in a rational way.’ Jonathan Raban (1974) reported that ‘in America the city is widely regarded as the sack of excrement which the country has to carry on its back to atone for its sins. Radio, television, magazines, colleges mount ritual talk-ins in which the word “urban”, pronounced in the hushed and contrite tone of a mea culpa, is monotonously followed by the two predicates, “problems” and “renewal”. On these joyless occasions, it is made clear that the problems have no real solutions, and that the notion of rehabilitation is a piece of empty piety, a necessary fiction in which no one really believes.’ Stephen Barber (2002) cites the 1995 Japanese film Tokyo Fist, directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, as a vision of how a city can degrade its population. ‘The film’s cityscapes show vast, empty corporate towers, illuminated at night, while their human components are contained into the minuscule, flickering images of surveillance cameras or blindly perform their insane corporeal floods of movement across the opaque, screeching terrain,’ Barber writes. The film reflects ‘the city’s sensory engulfing of its inhabitants, whose forms dissolve, disappear and resurge.’ BILL HILLIER (1996) has argued that ‘for much of the twentieth century, nineteenth-century anti-urbanism provided the paradigm for urban design and planning’. Councillor Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council, declared at the URBAN SUMMIT in 2002 that ‘we need to change the fundamental culture of this country, which is an anti-urban culture.’
You would expect the devil to rejoice in cities’ least pleasant attributes. So it makes sense that the devilish narrator in Glen Duncan’s 2002 novel I, Lucifer calls MANHATTAN in summer ‘my kind of place, my kind of time’. Lucifer exults in the scene. ‘Cab grilles snarl in the boomerang light. The subway’s foetid lung exhales. Winos strip to the earliest sartorial strata – salmon pink t-shirts and sepia string vests, emblems of the pasts [that] drinks and I have stolen. Garbage trucks chow down on the city’s ordure – what a sight: the slow-chewing maw with its stained teeth and heady halitosis. Beautiful. The sun-hot sidewalks give up their ghosts of piss and dogshit. Treacle-coloured roaches conduct their dirty business while pot-bellied rats cloak-and-dagger through the shadows. The pigeons look like they’ve been dipped in gasoline and blow-dried.’ Lucifer congratulates himself on a job well done. Jonathan Meades (2005) writes: ‘The history of English urbanism – though not Scottish or European urbanism – is the history of a longing for suburbanism. Mistrust of urbanism and of cities themselves is deeply embedded in the English psyche. If a culture is essentially a compound of custom, practice, tics, habits, traditions and collectively received ideas then we have an anti-urbanistic culture to fight against for the very survival of this country as a place worth living in.’
See also CITYCIDE and URBICIDE, and compare GREENERY, NEVER TRUST AIR YOU CAN’T SEE and POST-URBANISM.