What is a city?

So, I'm not really capable of answering this question. But I've been thinking about it a lot, and as I'm now halfway through my project, I figured I'd write down some of my thoughts.

One option—actually two options—are given by Thucydides. On the beach in Syracuse, far from home, the Athenian Nicias encourages his soldiers: "Reflect that you are yourselves a city wherever you set down... Men make the city, and not walls or ships without men in them." That a city is fundamentally its people—that those people make up a city even in the absence of any kind of urban infrastructure—is rather distant, even radically so, from what our current discourse suggests. As Nicias implies, it is also conceivable to construct a theory of city based on physical structures—"walls and ships," but also buildings and houses, all anchored to the same landscape. We, it seems, incline toward this definition; especially since the industrial revolution, with fluid populations and massive construction projects, a spatial rhetoric has become the default. Yet recently, our urban idea has gone beyond even this. 

It seems now that not only is a city "first of all a physical reality"—as Pierre Lelièvre claims—but also one that is increasingly "no-place." Nowhere is this more true than in airports (hello from Vienna International, by the way), where anonymity and ubiquity are king. But much of 20th century architecture is comparable: the "international style" of the 1930s, for instance, was designed to remove all vestiges of place from its buildings. Buildings effaced in this way seem to proclaim nothing about themselves, to have no message. And this is to say nothing of the current explosion of financial centers and "urban sprawl"—whose architecture is often similarly evacuated of content. 

Of course, many cities retain much of their "old selves." Rome, for instance, has a distinctly "Roman character," provided as much (perhaps more) by its inhabitants than by its buildings. And this is just as well, for tourism has made sure that every city's icons no longer truly belong to it—they charge admission, they are flocked with busses and cameras. Stripped of whatever function they originally served for the populace, they become like works in a gallery; the rest of the city, the white wall-space between paintings. Of course, this is a gross generalization, with many exceptions and nuances that should be raised; still, it might be said that "white spaces" are the only unequivocally local topographies of cities as they now stand.

This issue becomes more troubled when we consider the fact that a good portion of Europe's cities were obliterated in the Second World War. Nearly every major city in Germany was ground into rubble by bombing raids; the same fate met much of Poland, Britain, Spain, northern France—most of Europe, in short. In the face of such urban destruction, it is tempting to seek refuge in Nicias' sentiments: that was not the city, we are the city. But to bomb a city is not only to attack its buildings, and countless civilian casualties meant that the "we" of cities emerged from the war no less damaged. Yet still greater traumas were visited on public bodies—by the Holocaust, by Stalin's mass killings in the East, by warfare, and even by post-war ethnic cleansing. These wounds left Europe's cities with gaping holes in their populations—Jews, fundamental components of so many cities' realities; Germans, deported from Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia where they had lived for hundreds of years; young men, dead on battlefields.

These gaps are difficult enough for a city—for its people—to process. But when the city was in fact responsible for its own crippling—when it, in fact, endorsed it, the regret coming only later—what was to be done? Of course, I'm talking primarily about Germany here. In Germany, the Holocaust was a gesture both of murder and suicide—the Reich excised parts of its own public body (though of course, the Nazi Party did not see it quite that way). And what's more, Hitler's espousal of the idea of Volk meant that any idea of "the German people" was very fraught after the war—so tainted was the legacy of Germanness by National Socialism.

For instance: Cologne—pictured above—was left desolate both in structure and populace. What, then, would the city be, deprived of both of the traditional loci of urbanity? The direction that Cologne took centers on a hard truth: buildings, unlike people, can be replaced. Cologne's existential anxiety was therefore worked out (it seems, quite poorly) through rebuilding. Buildings deemed essential to the character of the city—its Gothic structures—were restored. The rest of the city, beyond saving, was built from scratch—though not entirely. For though the entire medieval Altstadt is now a web of (truly depressing) steel and glass and advertising, its streets, by and large, follow the plan of the Medieval city. This is an attempt at connection with the "historical Cologne" against severe odds; to preserve in shape, in memory, what was destroyed in body and spirit. As it is now, it is not clear to me that Cologne has any meaningful identity beyond its cathedral, churches, and status as a major capitalist center.

On the other hand, there is the converse anxiety: that of having chosen to preserve historical buildings, whatever the cost. This is the case in Rome, where Pope Pius XII—a leading figure during the War—was accused of caring more for Rome's monuments (St. Peter's in particular) than for its people. Thus, when Italy was put under Germany's direct control, Jews were carted out of the city as its buildings stood intact. Rome, in fact, has never been seriously damaged by modern warfare; in fact, most all the damage to Roman buildings has been perpetrated by Romans. Rome, therefore, has no trouble locating itself in its stones; but this is done at the risk of forgetting why cities are built in the first place.