The main difference between the Anglo-saxon view of city (community, collectivity, christianity, protestantism, etc.) and the Latin ones might just be about the Roman urban and agricultural techniques and way of life seduction...

Do you mean that the Anglo-Saxon view of the city was primarily ideological in nature, while the Latin view was more based on engineering/logistics/"urban planning"?

What exactly are you referring to by "way of life seduction"?  (I do agree "seduction" sounds more Latin than Anglo-Saxon!  ;-)  )

Do you see either view -- Anglo-Saxon or Latin -- as being more closely connected to a view of life that would permit or encourage the emergence of the lotissement-based dystopia you are very worried about?

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

I come from a long line of rural folk.  We have always lived outside the city and viewed it with some suspicion.  As a child growing up, I remember "going to town" with my grandparents.  It was a major event that only happened once or twice a month.  They would get up very early and drive the 15 km or so to the nearest town.  They would try very hard to do all their accumulated business and shopping needs in one day and get back home by nightfall.  

The feeling back then, not so long ago really, was very much of traveling to another country, an alien place where we did not belong.  And that was just the nearest town, not so big as towns go, perhaps five thousand people or so.  The City, Oklahoma City, was perhaps a three hour drive away.  They only went there once a year, if that, in the most extraordinary circumstances.  

Our attitudes about going to town, about The City, have modified somewhat in succeeding generations, but the underlying sense that urban centers are an alien place, somewhere we do not belong, still colors our thinking even today.  I live on a small acreage a few kilometers outside the town where I work.  I have lived in one town or another in my life, though never a real city.  I have never really felt at home there.  Perhaps my perspective is not so far from the Angle or Saxon who travelled to the nearest village only when the needs of commerce demanded it.

I have argued with friends that the Old Testament can be read in a very different, not so religious, context if we think of it from a similar perspective.  If you read past all the angry monotheist themes, it can be seen as the chronicle of a nomadic, tribal, pastoral people coming in from the desert and learning to live in "the city."  Much of the stern moralism that pervades the Bible in general and the Old Testament in particular can be read as the painful adjustment of a close-knit, tribal society to the unsettling exposure to multi-cultural influences of urban life.  Or so it seems to me.

Somewhere in cyberspace, the ghost of de Chardin is smiling.

Do some of the hundred-km-long ones still exist?  Could you offer some names/links?  (Coz I'm fascinated.)

Re: the city as village, well, I've always thought of the centre of the city as a village with excellent amenities.  But town/city in England was a religious designation.  A city has a cathedral.

And I dunno but I like the idea of the city connecting out to its food sources in the countryside, and also keeping food inside its borders, along pathways, in gardens...green cities...  So I suppose the geography and the surrounding agricultural possibilities...work to give each city a "flavour"...on large rivers you can transport a lot by boat, but if the river is small but the surrounding hills and valleys are fertile...and oh yes...I live by the sea, so ports...ships...

Worra great great diary, I'm rambling.  Thanks, I enjoyed reading it, the tone, the approach...I'm rambling...and also this afternoon I will take the bus out of the city centre to the edge of the city and once again view this place...

...an earthship, power independent, it needs quite a bit of land for food...I liked the environment, but my wife and daughter didn't...like you say, utopias are always populated by our friends and not our enemies...did you say that?  I realised this when I realised that by getting rid of the car (e.g. by petrol being too expensive)...the city would soon resound with the sound of a thousand thousand tiny motorbikes revving at lights, teenagers on hybrid bikes making a racket...in yer face...but that's okay...better than the car...

...ach oh aye!  Great diary!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

There are only four major urban civilization recorded.

    * The middle-east from where most of us of advanced countries have inherited the concept... Tigres and Euphrates (The reference to Gilgamesh often seen as the father of the City concept or at least as it's vehicle in litterature).
    * The Indus and the Gange one (not yet fully recorded) with Mohenjo-Daro and now several cities discovered i what is also called the Harrapa civilization.
    * The Yellow river in China, Huanghe that is the Chines civilization cradle
    * The high plateau of Andes... (Uh???) Hey, how come? Where is the hot desert and the river ?... Well in South America the problem (as in France today) was more about the crop... Corn ! That is highly demanding of water! And on a limestone plateau that's not a simple task!

Could you comment a bit on why the city states of ancient Mesoamerica (e.g., Tical, Palenque, Montealban, Teotihuacan, etc.) don't count? Is it because the core function of these cities seems to have been religious and ritual? They were built around temples and other sites of worship and ritual, and while they usually developed peripheries of human dwellings (apparently housing tenths of thousands of people in some cases), housing a human population never seems to have been the primary function of these cities. Of course, it may be equally appropriate to view these as instantiating a radically different concept of the city - since they did develop a lot of the same structural features as cities in other places.

Damn George Bush! Damn everyone that won't damn George Bush! Damn every one that won't put lights in his window and sit up all night damning George Bush!

Could you explain more about what lotissements are?  I read the entry in French Wikipedia, but it was not clear from that whether they are truly autonomous "villages": i.e. autonomous economically, in terms of energy supply, food, etc.  From your diary, it seems that people actually commute outside of the villages for work.  If so, they are clearly not autonomous in that sense.

Rather than Israeli kibbutzim or ecovillages, are lotissements more like low-cost versions of "gated communities"?  What do you think of the idea of intentional communities?

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

I see them as hell on earth, but apparently the people living there are happy with them. Going by train from my old suburbanized village to Amsterdam I always passed the Vinex "Weidevenne" near Purmerend. I remember a couple of middle-aged English women talking about the 'nice houses' so 'near to the water'. It's beyond me how anyone can like these things, but maybe I'm just too judgemental.

You can see plenty of the atrocities through a google image search.

Really great diary. I still dream of my self-sufficient house by the riverbank one day, when I retire in 40 years or so. But it's the city for me now. It's great to read about these things -- decentral energy production in the city, community, organisation, design... it's a way of thinking I don't grok yet at all.

At first I thought you meant "private residences"; now I think you mean "stand alone houses"...

I think both add something to a city--balanced by a perhaps majority of city-supported/maintained properties...I'm not sure of the numbers/dynamics so would be interested in accounts of how the mix works out.

Somehow (not sure how) a city needs to cater for all tastes, so a row of individual houses also makes a city statement, as does a tall block of flats (side point here about a friend of mine who said--I think it was--eight (or was it seven?) floors (found across Europe) is a natural maximum height for buildings, with shops on the ground floor and residences above.)  It isn't so much the type of accomodation (unless one type predominates)...coz students need and prefer a type, as do old couples, old singles, young singles, young couples...workers, the unemployed, those on sickness benefit, the well-off, the not well-off...it's the social space...the mixing of cultures within the space...that gives the city...its citiness...

My off the top of my head definition of a workable social environment:

--nature a bus ride away (or less!)
--a pub two minutes away
--a shop two minutes away
--low low car speed (usage!)
--high pedestrian movement
--music venue
--theatre
--cinema
--variety of buildings
--train access
--light industries
--trade out and in
--you could walk to the very centre in twenty minutes [okay, half an hour] (if you're young and fit...those less young and fit--cough cough--me!--have to live closer)

You could build that structure and keep small...and I'd still enjoy it, I think.  I lived in a place of < 40,000 that had all the above.  The cinema was a yearly club; the town pulled about 100,000 (my guess) from the surrounding villages...it also had large industry (Olivetti), and when that collapsed the town turned inward...became small, losing the facilities, the cinema club shut down...there are tiny suburbs growing up in the villages around...

Now I want to read your diary about Gilgamesh!  I bought a translation a few years ago, sort of enjoyed it, but...I didn't find in it what you have...not yet...

I'll re-read it in anticipation...

I am however surprised to see you limit the first urban civilisations to four. It seems that cities have emerged in many places around the same period of time.

The Hatti and, after them, the Hittites had built big cities in Çatal Hüyük, Nersa/Kültepe and Hattusha, as well as the Egyptians in Thebes. The Jiroft civilisation is also another example.

   

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

as it's obvious which came first, i think of cities as evolved from farming communities, in turn evolved from nomadic living.

suburbs could not have existed without cheap fuel and high numbers of cars, as they would be a huge challenge to serve without public transport, though it would be energetically cheaper than the 'cancer alleys' full of crawling, choking traffic that ring every modern city with a haze of life-threatening gas.

but suburbs were irresistible, after seeing cityscapes for a few generations out the grimy windows.

and healthier for the children, dear!

at first it was a snobby thing, and some still are, but during the 60's in england, 'suburban' was a terrible insult, whether applied to decor or people.

coz most suburbs were like croydon, not wimbledon.

so it was prices affordable to the young's first house, still within a brain-numbing rail haul into the maw, the caldera of creativity that is the centre, the mothernode, the octopus beak and brain.

too much city life is hard on the health, and the people who seemed to be best positioned to recieve the most benefit from the city, seem to be those who arrive fresh and hale from the commonwealth, or the dales, or cornwall...

or the 2% whose lifestyles permit the finest accoutrements. taxis everywhere, to whom the city is a smooth, well-oiled machine to satisfy any conceivable desire, no matter how bizzarre or exotic.

after the high accountability of living in a place where not only do you know everyone, but all your relations know everything about all their relations too, and nothing escapes often prurient notice, the city's allure is also anonymity, the relative invisibiilty of the crowd, in which mighty emotions were shared, in colosseum and cathedral, or in the crowded squares and markets.

markets created towns.

now look at dubai...it's a town creating a market!

cities accrued and concentrated wealth through adding value by education, and by secrecy, as in the guilds, the masons and the institutions of government, ecclesiastic, academic, monarchic, administrational and militaristic -easy to defend was a prime consideration, viz italy's hilltowns, like cortona.

the inability to make cities healthy places to live may change with peak oil, and possibly less car fumes, tho' if we return to coal for heat it would be a nightmare.
i remember the pea-soup yellow fogs of 50's london, and there are many more living there now.

tho i heard the thames is getting cleaner.

with telecommuting, travel costs that truly reflect the energy they burn, and the widespread rollout of highspeed broadband, i am betting on a resutgence of country life.

as petrochemical farming dies out, the countryside will be much less polluted, rivers will be fishable, reservoirs will be used to store rain and runoff, wildlife will return as more biomass land is planted.

travelling will become the mindblowing experience it was before homogenisation, and abandoned, once empty reaches of habitation will recolonise with those who have wearied of the bombardment of data the city insists upon, and who value the peace to collate and peruse what they have learned.

cities will plant many more trees and make parks, roof gardens, balconies for flowers, and ugly buildings will be covered by creeping vines.

instead of division between centre and periphery, i foresee a flattening out of the differences between city and country...

both/and, not either/or.

a balanced childhood would combine wide experiences of both, so people are comfortable with either, as both -and all the burbs in between - can be interesting as points along the continuum between society and solitude, both so necessary for survival and equilibrium.

thanks for letting me share what my crystal ball is showing!

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower