The Urban Function
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Archeologists have been able to deduce from pottery shards and other debris that the earliest cities existed in Mesopotamia, the Land Between the Rivers, now known as Iraq.
These cities were little more than granaries for the region used to store crops for future distribution. But even in this pristine form the city evinced its fundamental character: it had a function or purpose to perform for the greater society and was symbiotically wedded to agriculture. Since then cities have magnified in size and multiplied their functions to such an extent that the agricultural link has become obscured.
Recent events in the world remind us that neglecting this link is dangerous, especially to the highly industrialized nations.
The various functions of a modern city can trace their development to the early management of an agricultural surplus. Cities that became government administrative centers were no more than surplus control centers for very large regions. This was Cuzco in the Inca Empire, Leningrad for Czarist Russia, and Washington for us, lest you forget where all that federal funding gets raised and allocated.
As men vainly attempted to recreate their pasts they built ceremonial centers commemorating their antecedents, spiritual and mortal. So the oracles of ancient Greece and the cathedral cities of medieval Europe some of which have survived into the modern era, function intact, like Canterbury in England.
With the improvement of communications between regions, agricultural surpluses and the crafts they supported tended to be traded, giving rise to commercial cities like Novgorod of medieval Russia, the cities of the Hanseatic League or Boston and New York in the early years of our country.
Over time cities came to incorporate more than one function and also grew in size as the excess population from the countryside, spared by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, streamed in. To employ these throngs new forms of non-agricultural production were devised setting off the Industrial Revolution and giving the cities a new function which came to overlay all the others: industrial manufacture.
Modern Paris is a premier example of blending all the traditional functions with the industrial. It is truly the heart of France. With the further development of communications and transportation in the more developed countries, especially since WW II, cities, as highly concentrated functional centers, were free to disaggregate.
Cities could be diffused into the countryside and the necessary functional ties kept by telephone and fluid highway systems.
In Washington, federal agencies moved their offices into the Virginia countryside led by you know who in Langley. Factories crept out of the Rotten Apple into New Jersey and Connecticut to be later followed by the corporate headquarters. The pattern has been repeated in England, Sweden, and Germany.
Controlling the urban diffusion has become the profession of urban and regional planners who work with government officials to give all this growth some human direction.
Professional planners are very conscious of one function of the cities which until now has always been assumed: the social function. Cities are not only a collection of buildings or people densely packed together; before all this they are the loci of infinitely varied and complex social interactions. Cities are people.
It is the people and their needs, then, who must be served first, for a city to function as a human habitat. This translates into adequate housing, social services, good transportation, and a real choice of leisure time activities. Of course, city planners can go too far as in Moscow, where everything is planned down to the use of your "free" time.
Not all cities are fortunate enough to have the expertise or the resources to guide urban growth in an optimal diffusion pattern into the surrounding countryside. Some cities remain highly concentrated, sometimes deliberately.
Weak governments like to lavish their capital city with glistening monuments such as sports complexes or skyscrapers towering high above the city slums. This serves to remind the populace of the government's power if not its wisdom. Also by keeping many urban functions tightly centralized the government can keep a close eye on things. Such was Sukarno's Jakarta.
Whether it is planned or not, urban centers must diffuse further and further as more and more people immigrate from the overpopulated agricultural sector.
In some countries this process has a legal, political limit — national boundaries. Countries like Holland and Belgium have become city-states, the agricultural sector wholly subsumed by urban-industrial growth. England, Japan, and Germany are not far behind. The cities can diffuse no further within national boundaries.
The essential symbiotic relationship still applies between the city and the agricultural hinterland except now we are speaking in global terms.
England must get its wheat and beef from Australia and New Zealand. Japan must get is soybeans from the United States.
City-states which have exhausted their own agricultural sources must now go elsewhere. This can't help but create an uncomfortable dependence, one that has always been there, but which now is beyond one's sovereign control.
It is fortunate for the vulnerable highly-industrialized city-states that the United States has the agricultural muscle to keep them from kowtowing to hostile producers of food as they have had to do with respect to oil. But to earn their food supply they still have to perform functions for the agricultural sector of the United States. It's the old symbiotic relationship at work again.
As cities continue to diffuse and meld together into the one Global City, one can appreciate the tremendous importance United States agriculture will have on its growth and stability.
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