Episode 97 - Cities
Transcript
Ellie: 0:13
Hello, and welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:15
The podcast where your two favorite city dwellers talk about ideas and our everyday life.
Ellie: 0:22
I'm doctor Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:23
And I'm doctor David Pena Guzman.
Ellie: 0:26
David, I was hanging out with some friends recently, just chilling, watching some YouTube videos, And got completely mesmerized by a video showing the plan for a new city called The Line in Saudi
David: 0:40
Arabia. Oh my gosh. Yes. The line. How could we not talk about this at the very beginning?
Ellie: 0:45
Yeah. So The Line is a city currently under construction that is shaped, like a line. and it's 110 miles long. It's anticipated to house 9,000,000 people. So Saudi Arabia is experiencing this population explosion, and they need a new city in order to accommodate all of, the people who are moving there. And what's interesting about it is that it's designed to have no cars or carbon emissions. It would be run entirely on renewable energy. And one purpose of building it in a line is that it has less of an impact on the surrounding area. It's gonna have, these glass mirrored sides to this long wall, and it's more or less the size of the Empire State Building. So it's like this big line, size of the Empire State Building. It would have extraordinarily high population density. I mentioned that 9,000,000 people are meant to live there, and this would mean that its population density is almost 6 times that of Manila, which is currently the world's most densely populated city.
David: 1:45
wow.
Ellie: 1:46
Yeah. So it's gonna be like, pretty packed, although you don't see a lot of people in this, propaganda video that I just, totally ate up.
David: 1:53
It's all just like glass horizontally organized with a background of the desert.
Ellie: 1:58
Yeah. Yeah. it looks stunning.
David: 2:01
But not a soul to be seen.
Ellie: 2:04
Yeah. no, they have a few people shopping in the video, the line doesn't even have streets as well. Instead, it's gonna have three layers, a ground layer for pedestrians. That's, presumably where the shopping was happening. An underground layer for infrastructure and a further layer. I'm sorry. I forgot if this is below or above, but for transportation. And in the video that I was watching, it has like a Blade Runner element, but it's very sanitized. Like it's really beautiful, minimalist construction, in these 3 layers, there is a park on the ground floor. There's a lot of like greenery. The idea is that any needs that you have would be accommodated within a 5 minute walk. So there are these little neighborhoods within it. There's going to be these like AI robots flying around, bringing you other stuff you need, and you can take this train that doesn't release any carbon emissions from one end of it to another within 20 minutes, and so you can move really fast between different neighborhoods.
David: 3:06
Yeah. Because there's gonna be a railway system. That's what would allow people to move up and down the line and to shuttle up and down.
Ellie: 3:14
Instead of cars.
David: 3:15
I although I read an article that mathematicians are having this debate in connection to the line about whether in order to be energy efficient, they should have done the circle rather than the line. Because right now, yeah, If you need to go from one end to the other one, you have to go literally in a straight line. But if it had been a circle, you could just, save time by going the other way. But, I think this very clearly seems like futurist, modernist piece of, design that looks very much like a skyscraper toppled onto its side. So it's like the horizontalization of what previously was the height of modernism, which was the skyscraper, this building of glass that reached into the sky.
Ellie: 3:59
Yeah. Although it is gonna be as tall as the Empire State. So I think it would be more fair to say it's just, as if the Empire State Building was 3D printed, however many times in order to
David: 4:09
make this... copy and paste.
Ellie: 4:10
mile long, mirrored glass structure.
David: 4:13
And where it's not as if the skyscraper would be the thing that stands out in the city, it would be the building block of the city. It would be like 1 of the many pixels that make up the city. And of course, it sounds amazing. It sounds like the future has arrived. But there's also a very clearly dystopian element to the line because we know-
Ellie: 4:33
Yeah. Yeah. Hit me with it because I was just, taken in by this propaganda video. And I knew I was taken in by it, but I'm just, watching the video with my friends, like woah!
David: 4:41
No, no. It's very arresting. And, Aesthetically, I do have to say it speaks to my sensibilities. it very much captures my attention.
Ellie: 4:49
You like a little sanitized blade runner aesthetic?
David: 4:52
Yes. I really do. And I just rewatched Blade Runner 20 49 for the third time, so very much right up my alley.
Ellie: 4:59
haven't seen it yet. Am I still allowed to be in a cities episode?
David: 5:02
Maybe not. You're officially canceled from this episode, Ellie, because you're not a Blade Runner-er like me. But also like Blade Runner, there would be pretty serious power dynamics that would infuse the line because by now we know that the plan is for artificial intelligence to monitor the city and to use predictive and data models to find new ways to quote, unquote constantly improve the life of its citizens. So you already see that kind of benevolent big brother language creeping in with residents being paid for willingly submitting data to The Line with a capital L. Speak to the line. Sell your data to the line. The line has spoken.
Ellie: 5:50
So they're incentivized to have a big brother moment.
David: 5:54
Yeah. they definitely are, but I think this also speaks to a dream that has for a long time captured our imagination, which is the dream of the perfect city. The city of the future that arrives in the present and that In many ways, materializes this objective of absolute unity and coherence at the individual and the social levels.
Ellie: 6:17
I wonder what Plato would think about the line.
David: 6:19
It's like the polis par excellence, for a 20 first century audience. And this brings to mind another city that was the dream of people in the past, which is the city of Brasilia, which is the capital of Brazil. And this is something that the author Marshall Berman talks about in his book. What's the title? The title is a reference to Marx. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, which is a wonderful little book about the experience of modernization. And in it, he gives a reading of the layout of various cities, such as New York and Saint Petersburg, but he begins by talking about Brasilia. And just to give you a little bit of context for this, Brasilia was created in the late 1950s , Literally ex nihilo by the president of Brazil. A man by the name of Juscelino Kubitschek who really wanted to create the futuristic city in the here and now. And so they picked a spot in Brazil where there was nothing before, nothing meaningful, only because it was the geographical center of the country. And then they pick 2 architects, Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, a very famous modernist architect, to create this ideal city that should represent the acme of modernity and in particular of Brazilian modernism. And the thing about Brasilia is that they designed it to literally look like a plane.
Ellie: 7:56
Oh my god.
David: 7:57
if you take a photo, an air photo of Brasilia, it looks like the outline of a plane because in the 1950s and 60s, of course, planes were the fastest objects on Earth, and they represented the advent of what is to come. And so they thought that by making the city take the shape of this object that represents the future, it itself would, actualize the future in the form of perfect metropolitan life.
Ellie: 8:25
That's That's such a bizarre idea. I'm looking I'm taking a look at it now, and it is, it's very heavy. It's very wing heavy. It's actually kind of line-like. Because there's like a curved It has a curvilinear structure primarily that I think is meant to look like the airplane wings, and it's, yeah, it's like a line.
David: 8:42
So it's not like a perfect plane, but, in terms of the design, it's very legible as a plane. Anyways, Marshall Berman talks about how even though it was meant to represent the ideal city, by now people agree that it was an absolute disaster. And actually a nightmare when it came to inhabiting it from within because the people who designed it were so focused on representing the future spatially that they left no room, for example, for public space. There were no spaces for democratic engagement. And so many of the things that you usually find actually in Latin American cities like plazas and parks and things like that, their absence made living conditions in the city absolutely dismal. And so I see the line as a new iteration of this desire for the perfect polis.
Ellie: 9:36
I wonder where people are gonna gather in the line for celebrations or protests or something like that, or whether there might potentially, along with this AI data collection be some nefarious forces stopping things like that from happening. Who knows?
David: 9:53
I don't know. Oh, Ellie, in the future, there's not gonna be any protest because there is no source of social discomfort or conflict, obviously.
Ellie: 10:00
Because we have no carbon emissions in the line and presumably no social inequality among the 9,000,000 residents positioned in different places on this giant up and down city.
David: 10:13
Breaking news! The line fixed global warming. Today, we are talking about cities.
Ellie: 10:22
What is the nature of urban life today?
David: 10:25
How have histories of colonization shaped cities in different parts of the world?
Ellie: 10:30
And how did a Renaissance feminist philosopher envision a utopian city of women?
David: 10:42
There is no doubt that the history of the west is a history of cities. The epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian epic that was recorded over 4000 years ago, introduces Gilgamesh as the founder of the city of Uruk and boasts of the city's grand walls and prosperity.
Ellie: 11:00
And then you have the Iliad in the eighth century BCE, which is about the siege of the city of Troy. Virgil's Aeneid as well concludes with the founding of the city of Rome. So the city does have a central role in the ancient literature that's considered foundational to Western civilization.
David: 11:17
And, thus, given the importance of epics For civilization, I think we can say that the city itself is foundational to Western civilization by extension.
Ellie: 11:28
But certainly the cities of Uruk, Troy, and Rome were very different cities from the ones that we live in today. For one, they were mere villages compared with the cities you and I live in. David, I say as I crouch in my closet recording this episode because I live in the middle of Los Angeles where the car traffic whooshes around me at all times.
David: 11:48
Yeah. And, certainly, the noise pollution of modern cities is way worse than in the good old days of Troy, something that we talked about in our episode on hearing from a while back.
Ellie: 11:58
Noise pollution, not Troy.
David: 11:59
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. but we are very lucky nowadays, I would say, to have far fewer offensive smells than in those cities, thanks to modern plumbing and waste management. So you win some, you lose some.
Ellie: 12:12
This is true. And for all of the reasons we might complain about contemporary cities, they do have a lot of perks, and I, for one, am definitely happy to live in one. This is actually shameful to admit, but I've learned the hard way that I am a city slicker. Big cities foster my happiness in a way that smaller settings just do not. I really prefer live in a city.
David: 12:36
I know and honestly my partner knows this about me now that I can't even handle going to small towns on vacation. I just feel really claustrophobic in small towns. And he dislikes this because now it's, a rule of thumb for us that whenever we vacation, it has to be in a big city in which I could see myself living, which means it has to be bigger than, at the very least, San Francisco size. San Francisco is like the lower end for me, so I'm already pushing it.
Ellie: 13:04
Okay. let's talk about the contemporary philosopher Quill Kukla's book City Living because they identify in their book 4 features that distinguish city living from living in other places that I think are pretty interesting to consider. And the first and foremost that I really want to get into is the idea that one of the facets of living in a city is that you were in close proximity to strangers, and these strangers are often very different from you. So there's a kind of diverse engagement with strangers that one finds in the city frequently. I personally find this to be a major source of joy in cities. I'm curious what you think about it.
David: 13:47
As somebody who grew up for most of my childhood and the first part of my teenage years in a very small town and who then went to high school in the US in a similarly small town. I have to say that I did experience the shift into city living when I moved to Reno, Nevada for my undergraduate, precisely as my first meaningful encounter with difference, that's where I, for the very first time, met people that I had never met before who encouraged me to think about and to behave in ways that I know I would not have been encouraged to think in or behave in had I stayed in a small town or rural environment. So I very much felt that in the flesh when I began my freshman year of college in this new city.
Ellie: 14:35
And this feature of being surrounded by diverse strangers is not only something that Kukla finds noteworthy about cities, but it's something that the philosopher, Iris Marion Young actually points to as an explicitly positive feature of cities. For Young, city life is actually defined as the being together of strangers. City dwellers, of course, find ourselves surrounded by those that we have affinities with, but we also venture beyond these groups. And we participate in arenas where strangers are not only passing by one another, but also meeting one another. And so for her city life, As she puts it, instantiates difference without exclusion, and this presents a sort of normative ideal of city life. It actually allows us to honor difference.
David: 15:24
Yeah. And we might fit this argument into to a larger framework that Kukla draws in their book where they argue that there are two currents of thought about the urban experience in the twentieth century. One current of thinking, which is embodied by people like Young but also by Jane Jacobs who wrote that very famous book, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, is composed of people who think that this encounter with difference is invigorating, it is galvanizing, and it prompts us to think of ourselves in new ways and build communities based on difference rather than sameness. And so the difference here is something that is community building and the foundation of politics really for these thinkers. Then on the other hand, you have thinkers such as Georg Simmel who thought that, in fact, this encounter with Such radical difference in city spaces is so overwhelming that it becomes a source of alienation. Georg Simmel, for instance, wrote an essay called the Metropolis and Mental Life where he argues that you meet so many different people in a city that at some point, everybody becomes like an x because everybody is equally unconnected to 1 another and unknown by other city dwellers. And so here, this encounter with difference is actually depoliticizing, alienating, and it undoes the very conditions for the possibility of meaningful community. So there are those two strands
Ellie: 17:00
And part of the argument from this Simmel strand is that this proximity with passing strangers encourages a transactional approach to social life because these passing strangers, you're mostly interacting with precisely in a transactional fashion. Let me ask you for directions. Let me buy a bag of chips from your bodega, etcetera. And so there is a lack of place identity and profound human connection for Simmel because of the preponderance of transactional encounters, whether they're explicitly market based ones or not. I think one of the things that Kukla's discussion of this really brought out for me Though, is that this Simmel strand that you're talking about is happening at a different time than this other strand that you see in Jane Jacobs and Iris Marion Young, where people are excited about city life because Simmel is writing in the early twentieth century before the proliferation of suburbs. So when Simmel is talking about the ills of city life, he's implicitly contrasting them with towns, villages, and rural life. Whereas Jane Jacobs and Iris Marion Young are writing well post World War II. And it's really post World War II, especially in the 1950s, that you get the explosion of suburbs, at least in the US. And so for them, the relevant distinction is city versus suburb. And the suburb by contrast is this really barren landscape of strip malls and, homogenous streets where everybody looks alike and so on and so forth. And so then the city becomes this vibrant space relative to the suburb. Whereas for Simmel, the city is not vibrant. You actually get the vibrant life in, small town or rural life.
David: 18:47
it's not that it's not vibrant because he does talk about how it can become especially perceptually overloading. Is that a term, overloading? Or perceptually overwhelming, Rather, that's the term. and he talks a lot about how our literal senses are bombarded when we are in a city to the point that we shut down emotionally, and that is what triggers that transactional, mode of interacting with other city dwellers that you mentioned, Ellie. So it's not that it lacks vibrancy, but that it its kind of vibrancy is too sensorial and gets in the way of maybe a more meaningful kind of vibrancy, which would be the vibrancy of human connection, really.
Ellie: 19:30
Mhmm. And I think that also pertains to something that I find interesting in Kukla's analysis, which is, another feature of city life. And this is what they describe as a fast switching between skills and expectations. When you live in a city, you have to have a flexible and wide set of what they call meta skills, which is an ability to actually switch between different sets of skills. It's like I'm interacting with the barista at the local coffee shop who I've met a few times in such and such a way. I'm getting out of the way of somebody passing on the street. And this other way, I am petting the dog of, a friend of mine who's passing in this additional way. So there's this flexible set of meta skills that we have to develop because we're constantly having to shift between different stances and expectations.
David: 20:16
Yeah. I really like this portion of the book. I have to say the discussion about how fast our minds work in these versus, to some extent, the less demanding cognitive environment of a rural space. But first, before talking about that, I wanna point out that this fast cognitive movement that we have to perform in order to survive in a fast paced environment like a city is Interestingly contrasted with the slow rate at which we literally move through cities. According to Kukla, in order to go from 1 neighborhood to another, you go through all these stations, you go through all these people, but ultimately, it might take you, 30 minutes to travel a couple of miles. Whereas in a more rural environment, you just get in your car, get on the freeway, and go. So you traverse space much faster. It's just that the space doesn't have as many distractions and as many cognitive demands that it places on you. but when it comes to those meta skills that we have to develop in order to engage in all the micro negotiations, as says that we have to move through the city. They talk about a particular danger. And that is that in order for us to move intelligently through that space, we sometimes have to rely on mental priors and that includes mental priors that can be problematic And that can lead us into the dangerous space of implicit bias. Where we start making certain judgments about who belongs, who doesn't belong, who is safe, who's unsafe based on perceptual models and predictions that ultimately turn out to be quite problematic.
Ellie: 21:59
For sure. And I think this speaks to this idea of how we perceive risk versus safety in cities. As city dwellers, we are often called upon to assess whether or not a situation is safe. And Kukla points out, drawing on the work of other theorists who've talked about this, that oftentimes our perception of risks doesn't actually map on to the reality of risk or not. And so there's a few different dimensions of this. One is the notion of territories because city life is not a homogenous space of like urban, there's a single vibe in a city. Different neighborhoods, different places are what Kukla calls territories. And these territories have different norms that hold within them. I think you really see this in some cities more than others. Like I recently got back from a few months in Copenhagen. Copenhagen does have what I would call territories, but it's a quite homogeneous city. I don't think the territories aren't quite as distinct culturally as in other places, but New York and, we both lived in Atlanta, David, these are places that I think have pretty clear territories. once you go above 120 fifth street, you're in Harlem or, in Atlanta, these are literally demarcated by the differences in street names when you go from what were historically black neighborhoods to historically white.
David: 23:23
White. Yes.
Ellie: 23:24
there's a researcher named Sarah Elwood who did a study of residents of Puerto Rican neighborhoods in American cities and found that These residents of Puerto Rican neighborhoods tend to experience them as bustling and filled with traditions in life, but outsiders perceive these very same neighborhoods as empty, dilapidated, and threatening. And I think this speaks to the point about territory that Kukla is trying to make is that There's a certain territory that is this Puerto Rican neighborhood, and it's going to have somewhat clear boundaries, but not extremely clear boundaries, But the territory demarcates like who belongs versus who doesn't and those who belong in this Puerto Rican neighborhood don't experience it as particularly risky or unsafe, but outsiders do. And so this notion of territory and risk, both echoes the way that different city dwellers inhabit different spaces within their city, but it also has performative effects, Kukla says, because the more that like outsiders enter into this Puerto Rican neighborhood, let's say, perhaps by gentrification, the more they're gonna shape their environment if they're living there such that the territory itself is going to change, and ultimately, they might end up becoming the ones who belong more in this neighborhood than the long term residents.
David: 24:41
No. You're right. and for starters, I think this speaks to a distinction that Kukla discusses in their book, Leaning on the work of the scholar, Elijah Anderson, which is the distinction between street etiquette and street wisdom. So street etiquette is primarily about all those rules that most city dwellers know by virtue of being city dwellers, right? Like You need to get a ticket to get into the metro. If you see somebody, having a fight or swinging a knife, walk around them, or try to avoid the situation. Whereas street wisdom refers to, as Kukla says, a more flexible and textured shared local knowledge that might be territory specific. And so this is where that difference in perception kicks in. The Puerto Rican Inhabitants of the Puerto Rican neighborhood, they have the right kind of street wisdom to see vibrancy, to see community, To see social life in a place where maybe somebody who doesn't have the right kind of social or cultural history or the right kind of relationship to place would see only empty streets and abandoned buildings. And the problem with that external perception that, let's say, lack of street wisdom on the part of third parties is that, as you point out, Ellie, it can have performative effects. If somebody who doesn't know the neighborhood comes in and they say, oh, this neighborhood is rundown and crappy, that is already a judgment on the space that will change how they interact with the space. But in particular, if the person who is having that perception happens to be somebody in a position of power, like a police officer, It can trigger much more serious and devastating consequences for the neighborhood. And this connects to that well known broken windows theory of neighborhood policing where, the idea is that if there is minor crime in a neighborhood, it's gonna lead to major crimes, so we need to over police that neighborhood. But in order for you to make the judgment that this neighborhood has broken windows, I e that there's a lot of petty crime and it's run down, that judgment presupposes possibly, and in most cases, I would say, a lack of street wisdom that is tied to that particular locality.
Ellie: 27:02
One of the things that Kukla mentions is that there are really different perceptions of risk For residents versus non residents because everything is unpredictable for non residents. And so they don't even really know what they're looking at. It's Is this, unusual or is this normal? And so that can mean that there's this like exciting openness to experiences on the part of non residents because everything is unpredictable to them. And that also means that they don't necessarily have those mental priors. They might have the same prejudices that residents do. However, it can also expose them to danger and uncertainty like the time, David, that you got your wallet stolen, in the subway in Mexico City because you didn't know, what a threat getting pickpocketed was in, subway in Mexico City, and so you weren't really as cognizant as you would have been had you had the street etiquette and street wisdom of a resident.
David: 27:57
Yeah. No. That's right. I definitely did not know, that my own people would do that to me even though I very much look like them, and, next time I'm gonna pickpocket them. But no. I think this also speaks to the role that tourism has in the constitution of the urban experience. Because when you talk about non residents, you're talking about tourists. Right? People who come to a city to visit it, and you're right that those people maybe don't have the same association between particular places in the city and then particular prejudices. They might have the prejudices, but they don't know where to apply them in the city.
Ellie: 28:32
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's very true.
David: 28:34
But they there's also an interesting duality in connection to the tourists because even though this kind of excitement about the new and being exposed to places that they don't already know opens them up to difference because they are tourists and because they don't know where to go, they typically tend to rely on passive models of visitation where they're literally being told where to go, what to look at, what it means, and how to experience it. Kukla talks about The example of the people who get on those buses, those, Citytrip bus, and they say, here we see a double kind of passivity. The tourist who is not a resident is passive because they have a primarily ocular experience. It's just about seeing without interacting, But it's also passive in another sense, and that is that the tour guide is the one that is making all the decisions, which leads to A shrinking of the agency of the tourist.
Ellie: 29:39
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David: 30:00
The philosopher Don Deere wrote an article a few years ago entitled On Spatial techniques of ordering, where he talks about how when we think about modern techniques of controlling people through the organization of Space, we often think about Foucault's analyses of disciplinary power in connection, for example, to the prison or to the hospital or to the clinic, so on and so forth. But according to Deere, the weaponization of space and spatial design long predates the eighteenth and nineteenth century contexts that Foucault is writing about in most of his work. It is a central component of the logic of Spanish colonialism in the Americas in as early as the sixteenth century. Now according to Deere, when the Spanish colonized the Americas and, quote, unquote, discovered this new world, what they ended up finding was a vast expanse in which they thought they could realize their own dreams of geometrical order and mathematical rigor, especially dreams that they could not realize on the continent because of how most European cities have emerged in time.
Ellie: 31:17
Presumably, because cities in Europe emerged organically over long periods of time to meet different needs at different times and different levels of populations. And, then there's You build a city, then the plague happens, and you repurpose these buildings, and you've got different styles. It's just, more of a hodgepodge. Is that fair to say? Whereas they're building these cities from scratch, unless they were building them on the sites of indigenous peoples' towns and villages.
David: 31:43
No. The terms hodgepodge and organic are the two right terms here because most major European cities emerged organically through the expansion of preexisting medieval towns, which is why if you look at many downtowns in major cities and even just the layout of the city, there is nothing geometrical about them. Just think about Paris. It's a hotchpotch of streets going in all kinds of directions because it's just a medieval order that kind of outgrows itself. By contrast, when you Look to the Americas in the wake of the arrival of the Spanish colonizers. What you have is the emergence of large cities that are meant, kind of like The Line and like Brasilia that we talked about a few minutes ago to represent ideal rational spaces that in the context of colonization would embody the power and the perfection of the crown in this new continent. And this is why Don Deere says that the new world became a heterotopic laboratory for the space of the grid. Because in these new spaces, Europeans could build cities that were rational and geometrical in a way that Europe could not handle.
Ellie: 32:55
Okay. So I do wanna clarify though, when you're talking about these gridded cities being created as if ex nihilo. Were they being created in new spaces where people had not been inhabitants prior, or were they building these cities in Latin America on existing sites where indigenous peoples had already lived? Because that latter point is, something you all over, histories of colonization, including here in California, including Los Angeles.
David: 33:25
in this case, there is not gonna be a one size fits all answer. Obviously, there's gonna be some cities that were built where there already were things and other ones that were created and legislated into being by, royal fiat from the colonizers. But in thinking about this, we might look to the work of the Uruguayan theorist, Angel Rama, whom Dear mentions And Rama wrote a book called The Lettered City. In Spanish, it is La Ciudad Letrada, which I've taught before in one of my courses. And it's a wonderful little book about how Latin urbanism was forged in the context of Spanish colonization And how that meant that cities in the Americas just look very different and are positioned very differently relative to space than European cities. So for instance, think about South America. If you look at most major cities in South America, most of them are coastal cities. That includes Brazil. That includes Argentina. That includes most other countries. And that's Because when the Spanish and the Portuguese colonizers arrived and started colonizing, they made decisions about where to build large urban centers, Not based on where local people already had a living community or a meaningful connection to space, But based on where the needs of the rising empire would be better served. And so
Ellie: 34:56
Yeah.
David: 34:56
the cities were built to serve two primary functions. On the one hand, they were meant to be fortresses to defend against other imperial powers that might try to, creep into the land and hold them off while the dominating power was moving inward and extracting resources. The second thing is that all these cities on the coast were meant to create a network of ports that would enable commerce. And so the entire layout of South America when we think about cities, it's all coastal cities that were meant to perform these 2 pro-imperial functions. And this contrast very clearly with the fact that there aren't really any major European capitals that are coastal cities because that's not how they emerge. That was not their logic
Ellie: 35:47
What about Lisbon?
David: 35:49
yeah. So you have Lisbon. You also have Copenhagen, you might also have one or two other ones, but none of the major ones are coastal cities, and that is a marked difference between these 2 spaces.
Ellie: 36:01
Paris, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, you name it.
David: 36:04
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You name it, chances are that it grew from a preexisting center of activity and that it was not externally exposed by an imperial power that wanted to create a network of forts and ports.
Ellie: 36:18
Yeah. And I think this analysis of the colonial cities in Latin America emerging as gridded utopias of what Europe wanted to be while simultaneously actually really being places of fortification and like trade also brings to mind for me some other aspects of colonial cities. 1 of which is just the vast inequality that you have in these cities. I think cities in general often tend to be places where inequality thrives And this to some extent, I think has always been the case, maybe not universally, but pretty generally. You've got, the wealthiest and the poorest living in many cities. But there's also, I think in colonial cities in particular, often more of a strict division that is visual in a lot of ways and enforced in a lot of ways that it might not be in non colonial cities such as Paris or Madrid. And I have in mind here for one, Johannesburg, which Kukla points out in their book, literally has a series of pedestrian overpasses for middle class office workers that go over the more impoverished places underneath. And of course, Johannesburg is in South Africa where there's a long history of apartheid. And also Frantz Fanon talks about the Manichean city in his book, The Wretched of the Earth, and says that the colonial city is a Manichean city in the sense that it's a city cut in two, right? So Manichean reverse to this like light dark binary, right wrong binary, an extremely dualistic element. On the one hand, you have the settlers town, this hygienic, clean, nice area, this territory we might call it. And on the other hand, you have the native town, which is cramped, dark, chaotic, hungry and poor. And I am not remembering what movie I saw that totally is indicative of this, but there is this great Latin American film, from like mid century, maybe fifties that I watched a number of years ago. And I cannot tell you anything more about it other than it was like a kind of communist propaganda film that was really interesting to watch. And it precisely got at this Manicheanism of the two aspects of the city. If anybody knows what film I'm talking about, it's in black and white. It starts with this, beautiful shot of a boat going along a river with, grass on the sides, I'm, like, so embarrassed that I can't remember, but I have a famously bad memory, so that's why. But there's also a more recent example, which is the Korean film Parasite, where there's a wealthy people who live above and they have their perfectly manicured lawns and gates, etcetera. And then there's the poor family who lives literally beneath, like close to the gutters in proximity to trash and all of that.
David: 39:08
Yeah. And, we can think about the violence of urbanism in terms of these divisions, like the Manichean city or the Parasite City of Above and Below.
Ellie: 39:16
We, can I, quickly make one point of clarification, which is just that I'm, I was using Parasite as an example of the colonial city? That's It's technically not that. I moved from talking about the colonial city, which is Manichean, to using another example of a Manichean city, even though, Yeah. It's okay. Anyway, okay. Continue, David. Sorry.
David: 39:33
No. No. No. So what I was gonna say is that, yeah, we can think about it in terms of these divisions. Up and down, black and white, rich and poor. One thing that's really interesting to me In connection specifically to colonization, to bring it back to that topic, is that the violence of colonialism sometimes manifests itself through of these binaries, but sometimes it does not in the same way. So for example, Don Deere, the philosopher I just mentioned, talks about how In the Americas, what the Spanish did in creating these, hyper ordered, literally regimented cities with a geometrical grid structure where you have literally right angles. All the streets have names and numbers. It's not that they wanted to divide, let's say, the Spaniards and the Amerindians on 1 side and another. It's rather that for them, the grid itself became a tool for Colonizing the souls and the minds of the Amerindian communities because they thought that the grid itself would bring order into an otherwise disordered barbarian soul. And it's It's really interesting because he looks at a number of royal decrees, literally laws that came down from Spain in the early 15 hundreds about how to literally organize the city. And most of the things that are dictated in these decrees is that there is a kind of spiritual benefit to being in an urban space for Amerindians Because Amerindians suffer from a constitutive weakness by virtue of their inferior racial nature, And that is that they are fundamentally forgetful. the Amerindian soul just, wanders away. And when they go back into their villages and their wilderness, They forget the lessons of Christianity. They forget the lessons of the Spanish colonizers. And what the urban grid does is because of its layout, it reminds them of what order is. And so urban space itself becomes a way of curing the Amerindian subject of this fundamental forgetfulness from which they suffer, but it's not through a division of up and down black and white, it's the urban space itself is the source of colonial violence.
Ellie: 42:20
David, we're gonna take quite a pivot now and go back to The Middle Ages. Because in 1405, the poet and philosopher, Christine de Pizan, wrote a book that has since come to be known as 1 of the earliest feminist writings. This is a book called The City, which is why we're talking about it in the cities episode, The City of Ladies. And de Pizan is a Super interesting and colorful figure. She grew up in Italy and France as the daughter of a court physician and astrologer, which you might remember listeners from our astrology episode used to be, like, a pretty legit position in the court. So it's not like he was this random kook, To be a court physician and astrologer was not a surprising combination. Then de Pizan's husband died of the plague And she had to find a job to support herself and her children, so she became a court writer for various royals and aristocrats in medieval Europe, Which sounds like a pretty cool job to have, in the early fifteenth century for a woman. It's not like women had that much access to learn to jobs as writers. As Part of this job, she wrote various books of advice for princes and princesses.
David: 43:34
Yeah. She was quite the versatile thinker and writer because she would write some books about proper etiquette for ladies of good social and moral standing, but then give military advice in the next book for people in positions of power. So she was just like, donning these two masks of, A moral lady who will also expand your empire. And I have to say for our readers that the editor of that volume calls her the First professional woman writer of Europe. That's how significant she was in the history of ideas.
Ellie: 44:10
And she did write as part of this job as professional woman writer, A bunch of rebuttals to mainstream misogynist claims that were being trafficked around medieval Europe. And so she was defending women against a lot of misogyny in a number of these works. One of which is a book that I am super excited to talk with you about, namely, the city of ladies.
David: 44:29
The city of ladies. Yes. No. so you had us read sections of this for the episode today. And, initially, I have to say I was confused as to why we were reading this for an episode on cities because I thought maybe the term city was being used primarily metaphorically to think about just the status of women as a group. But as I made my way through the text, I came to the realization That she is using the city as a metaphor, but she's also relying on a trope that we can trace all the way back Plato of imagining a utopian city as a way of launching a social critique of the status quo. So it's like the feminist version of the Republic. And, yeah. And, honestly, I couldn't help but think about the city also In the Barbie movie, which as I, watched not too long ago, which is run entirely by women and has, a Mount Rushmore of women It has a supreme court of all women, and I think that de Pizan would have been probably very down with
Ellie: 45:33
She definitely would. Yeah. Yeah. I know the Barbie movie is definitely a city of ladies. Although there are some men in the city in the Barbie movie. They're just like sidelined, whereas there are absolutely no men in de Pizan's City of Ladies. So I'm just gonna briefly set Scene for our listeners as we get into our discussion of this. So in this book, Christine herself is the protagonist And she gets visited by 3 allegorical ladies, Reason and her two buddies, Rectitude and Justice. These 3 allegorical ladies appear to Christine and they're like, hey, it's your job to construct a city of ladies to defend the ladies against people's misogynistic views of women. And there are a few features of this that I think speak to how cities were literally constructed and envisioned in the middle ages. They say they'll give her fresh water and plenty of material that is stronger than marble, And the city will be beautiful and eternal. It's gonna be built on fertile and flat land. So that's a key piece of city life. It has to have Agricultural possibilities surrounding it. And so you need fertile land, and they say rivers as well. So it's this fertile flat land
David: 46:52
With reverse. Yeah. no.
Ellie: 46:56
did I say the agricultural rate? I
David: 46:58
No. I No. I think that's right. And let me just add a quick little note that this is what Rama argues was the one other condition for building cities in, the Americas. Was a fortress and it was a place of commerce, but they would choose typically a place with water and rivers so that it would be self sustainable.
Ellie: 47:14
Totally. But actually, I'm glad you mentioned the fortress, David, because that is also a really noteworthy feature of the City of Ladies. The city of ladies is constructed on a firm foundation with an exterior city wall. And Here's where the fun feminist point comes in. So Christine is building the city of ladies. this is an allegory, so it's unclear to what extent this is literal or not. She's making women be the foundation stones and the walls. And so obviously, that's not meant to be literal.
David: 47:46
You know how the cover of, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is, the Leviathan made up of little Humans, like the shape The Leviathan city of later the city of ladies is literally a city built of individual women as the building blocks.
Ellie: 48:03
That sounds like something out of Game of Thrones. So the foundation, the allegorical foundations of this city are women who have succeeded in the military. They have a military prowess. And so the main point of this book is essentially to rebut misogynistic arguments by providing a litany of women who have been important throughout history. And obviously that is super interesting in and of its own right. I would recommend checking it out, But that is not the main purpose of our discussion of this today. As David said, we're more interested in like the city components. you've got the foundation of these military ladies, And then there's a defensive city wall. And so this city is primarily meant to be defensive. It has a fortress like structure. this is the middle ages in Europe that we're talking about and the walls are made out of learned ladies and ladies who were inventors. And they're like, Hey, lest you think that there are no women inventors, a bunch of women inventors and what's more, Jesus used some of the inventions created by women, including bread. Bread was invented by Ceres, right? The Greek god of agriculture, and Jesus loved bread. So.
David: 49:15
Q.E.D.
Ellie: 49:17
He said it was his body. Yeah.
David: 49:20
Women made Jesus. So okay. Let me take a couple of steps back here to say that, in terms of the structure of the book, because I think this is important for highlighting the role that this city allegory plays in the text. So in terms of the structure, the book is divided into 3 parts, and each part adds a layer to the city. and so for example, in part 1, she says, here, I'm going to get the ditch ready for, throwing the first stones. And then secondarily, I'm going to lay the first stone. So you make a ditch, you lay the foundation. Yeah. And so in part 1, the question then becomes, what is the ditch and the foundation that she's actually talking about? And for de Pizan, the foundation on which all of this rests, I think, are 2 things. One is that she has a very long discussion of the fact that all these men who write books where they accuse women of being, you name it, inconstant, fickle, vain, shallow, unintelligent and dumb.
Ellie: 50:31
Barbies essentially. But not in the Greta Gerwig movie. Barbies in the that we usually of them. Old
David: 50:37
school Barbies. The problem with these arguments is that they are actually against nature. and so according to de Pizan, there is a natural equality between the sexes That most male writers of her time have not been able to understand, she says, mostly because they're just bitter that they're old and weak now, And they wanna blame women for the fact that their lives suck nowadays. and so she has this theory of intellectual equality between men and women, which is what she calls digging the ditch and laying the first stone, which will be the foundation of the city. And so for each step of building a city, there's an actual correlate that matches onto that, which is a kind of belief or attitude that we should take in connection to sex and gender, which is what I'm drawing attention to here. But it all depends on that natural equality.
Ellie: 51:33
And You might think then that the city would be built for both men and women, but no, it is indeed only built for the ladies because we talk about how the foundations and the walls are created by ladies for ladies, of ladies. That's actually the big thing. But then there are also houses in it and the houses are constructed out of virtuous ladies for Christine. Then you're wondering, okay, who's actually living here? And what really peeved me about this is that the first inhabitant of the city is described as a loyal wife. She's one of the most famous loyal wives in the street. It's no, but there's also well educated women and women saints in the city, and these women will live forever. Christine says there don't need to be any men in the city because nobody has to give birth. It's just going to be these eternal living ladies with who's their queen David? tell our listeners.
David: 52:24
Widow, who is the
Ellie: 52:25
Oh, did you read the excerpt? You skimmed it,
David: 52:28
I did. I don't remember. I did not skim
Ellie: 52:31
Okay. Take it take a wild guess as to what, women to
David: 52:35
oh, it's Virgin Mary. Virgin Mary. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. I thought you were tricking me. no, It's Virgin Mary.
Ellie: 52:42
queen. And she will reside, Christine says, both over the Christian and the pagan inhabitants of the city, because there are indeed lots of Greek and Roman ladies in here. But David, I have a question for you, which is, you mentioned an analogy to the Barbie movie, but one thing in the city in the Barbie movie is all kinds of fun activities and jobs and like things that they're actually doing. These Barbies are creating legislation. They're like getting things done. And there are no in the City of Ladies, Industrial centers, activity centers, military operations, agricultural operations, as far as I can tell. It's the only structures that they have built are foundations, walls, and houses. And then they're like, we're done. And so what are these ladies doing? The city of ladies doesn't really seem like a fun place to live, which I think speaks to the fact that the nature of a city is to have things to do.
David: 53:40
Yeah. No. this is the 1400s version of Brasilia. Good in theory, but terrible in practice. Or the Line, the Line for ladies. and no. But so I think this speaks to, On the one hand, an ambiguity within the text, which is the presence or absence of men, because you mentioned that it's only for Ladies for it's only for women. But she does say that the women are married, and they are married to men. And so there are men in the city. And
Ellie: 54:14
No. She doesn't say that the men are inhabitants, though. She's just.
David: 54:17
But, if you're married and then she says they have to be loyal to their man, because she's Christian. we have to keep it in context. But I think this is one of my criticisms, if any, of the kind of political orientation that is at work here because de Pisan says men and women are equal intellectually. But because of that, Ladies, we don't have to worry about occupying public positions, similar to the men's. We don't really need to be lawyers. Deep down, we know that we could do it if we wanted to, but we can sit this 1 out because it's not virtuous for us to be boldly making arguments in the public where, the lawyers and the politicians. And so I suspect that there is, I would say, a purely internalist view of equality here that doesn't translate into, civic or political equality, which is why You don't actually see any male dominated profession or field from the time reflected in the city, which would be most of them. we don't know what's going on in the city because I think it's like a city within a city. The city of ladies is just recognizing that women are not inferior to men while maintaining the status quo largely as it is.
Ellie: 55:36
But I do think there is even if you're focusing just on traditionally, quote, female professions. There is room for that in the city, potentially. She loves spinning, for instance. She thinks that spinning is really worthwhile. Like what she says that is women's work, making clothes is women's work, but that's okay. But there aren't any Textile centers in the city of ladies. And so this also signals to me that the city of ladies for de Pizan Is a city of houses where women are just doing their own industries within their private homes, which I think is weirdly almost a Victorian model of women as presiding over the home as having their sphere of domesticity. And you certainly do see that also in the ancient world, like in a lot of ancient philosophers too, but there were also a lot of women in the middle ages who are working outside of the house, and I think you don't really see that here in the city of ladies. Like, where is their gathering space? Where are those, what are called in contemporary urban planning, third spaces that are neither spaces of commerce nor private spaces? We don't even have spaces of commerce. But, my city of ladies you gotta have a shopping mall in the city of ladies, guys. What are you talking about? The ladies love to shop.
David: 56:57
Yeah. Just like in Brasilia, there are no public parks and democratic spaces. There are no meeting points in the city of ladies. And in fact, when she talks about, building the houses of the city, Her two go to, figures for talking about the kind of woman that inhabits the city, as you mentioned, is the devoted wife who is loyal to her husband, and then the devoted daughter who is always committed to carrying out her familial duties, Which is why she has so many examples of moral virtue that hinge on serving the family. And all of this has to do with the fact that when you get to the end of the book part 3, after she has dug the ditch and she has laid the foundations and she has built the houses, she says, now I'm gonna talk about the high tops of the towers in the city, the cherry on the top. And for her, that is Christian virtue. So it's ultimately a Christian city where Christian women are not meeting other women in public, because that's not a virtuous activity. And in fact, that's where we get all the examples of all the women saints who prove their virtue, for example, as in the case of Lucretia, by killing herself after she was raped to defend her own honor. Or, there are all these kind of self sacrificial models of femininity.
Ellie: 58:22
Yeah. And I also wanna return to the fortress point for a moment because I think this speaks to some of the limitations of this type of view of the city, which is that the City has a primarily defensive purpose. Because one thing that strikes me in reading the City of Ladies is how in Constructing this allegorical city according to the accepted norms of Christine de Pizan's day, She's constructing a city that is paradigmatically masculinist, we might say. It has a defensive structure even though we don't have a sense that there's actually gonna be battles. it does say that the city will be assaulted, but, Don't worry. The city will be all good. So we don't have any inhabitants that are responsible for actually keeping it safe. But in having a defensive structure, I think it has this militaristic and we might say masculinist dimension. And so I'm curious what you think about that, David, because I was struck by a potential dissonance between this, embracing and beautiful taking pleasure in all of the achievements of women in the context of, formal structure that actually serves to reinscribe
David: 59:38
Militaristic and defensive and bellicose.
Ellie: 59:41
Yeah. Fortress city of the middleages.
David: 59:44
Yeah. I think it's important to contextualize that bellicosity to the aims and objectives of De Pizan herself. Because, yes, she builds the city and there is a defense that is mounted, but we have to ask, it's a defense against whom? It's not a defense against other cities. In the traditional sense of the term, it's a defense against men. Men are the threat to the city of ladies. and that's what she was doing also in many of her other writings coming to the defense of women from all these accusations that men would print. And I emphasize the word print because this actually brings me to what I think would be a defense of de Pizan from the very argument that I just made against her, which is that there you know, we just made against her, which is that there is no public life. There is no solidarity. There is no meeting point. And I think the solidarity and the point of action, political action here is in fact in The writing in writing books, writing essays, writing novels like de Pizan herself did. And that means that the city of ladies should be interpreted in the vein of the Republic of Letters tradition. It's a city that comes into being through writing, which is why the only model actually of this kind of political activity that we see in her book, She mentions a woman by the name of Hortensia, who knows who she is. We just hear that her name is Hortensia, who wrote in the defense of women when 1 time there was going to be a tax on expensive jewels, and Hortensia Spoke publicly against it. And so there's which I was like, okay. So a little bit weird with the class Politics there where don't come for the expensive jewels. But, again, the point is that there is still a kind of political orientation here That is rooted in rhetoric and writing done by women for women. And I think that does make this, all joking aside, quite a powerful text from a historical perspective.
Ellie: 1:01:54
But if you don't have access to creating the city that you want through letters, you can always do as one of the ladies in Christine de Pizan's city of ladies did, which is breastfeed your mother in prison, and that will be your form of sacrifice.
David: 1:02:07
Yes.
Ellie: 1:02:09
Presented without context, folks. Read the city ladies, if you wanna know what I am talking about. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for access to bonus content, live q and a's, and more. And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info, Go to overthink podcast dot com, and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink underscore pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, Our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.