When the city becomes a revolution

La place de l'Indépendance, à Kiev.

Posted Sep 30, 2022 10:46 AM

The numbers repeat themselves over and over again. In particular since the UN communicates on the transition, indicated for 2008, to a human population that has become predominantly urban. City dwellers accounted for 10% of the total in 1900. They would represent two-thirds in 2050. Two works take up these contextual data and look into more urban de facto themes: the psyche, migrations, revolutions.

The founding fathers of sociology, in the forefront of which Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel, saw the city as the cradle of modernity. From the beginning of the XXe century, researchers, mainly Americans, whose work has been brought together in the expression “Chicago school”, note the specificity of urban behavior and the singularities of the urban personality.

Urban stress

Two contemporary British sociologists, rereading their great elders, take up the theoretical torch. Bringing together their discipline and advances in neuroscience, they are interested in the mental health of urban dwellers, that of migrants in particular. If the big city brings concentration of wealth, services and opportunities, it strongly affects the psyche. When nearly 2 billion people live in megacities with populations of more than a million, when congestion and pollution add to stress and inequality, “biopolitical” and “biosocial” problems, as Nikolas calls them Rose and Des Fitzgerald, take on an unprecedented scale.

In order to solve them and allow the urban brain to fully realize itself, the human urban habitat must be ecologically compatible with the existence of flowers and trees, but also that of rats and viruses. The main question is that of quality housing (in terms of health and self-fulfilment) for uprooted rural people heading for the metropolises of the Great South (previously we said “developing countries”). These migrants are the most affected by stress, turmoil and adversity, with all their psychological consequences. Admittedly, Rose and Fitzgerald tell us, classic difficulties of the right to the city and spatial justice arise. Planning, architecture and urban management must however focus on an ecological perspective of well-being. Their so-called “neuroecosocial” approach to urban experience does not provide turnkey solutions. They recommend starting not from the dreams of public planners, but from the trajectories of the most vulnerable. They consider it a priority to fight against urban loneliness.

From these pages we will remember, in a mnemonic way, that the reality and the future of cities were studied, at the beginning of the XXe century, in Chicago. Current events and urban futures are now taking shape in Shanghai. Let us add to the benchmarks proposed by the authors, the case of Lagos, which, by 2100, would be the largest city in the world, with nearly 90 million inhabitants.

The spaces of the revolution

Political scientist at Princeton, Mark R. Beissinger, for his part, dissects another urban subject: the revolution. In a thick book, written before the war in Ukraine, highlighting the case of kyiv (in 1905 and in 2014), he develops the results of very detailed investigations. Using a database and models he has compiled, he points out that revolutions have become both more urban and less lethal. Civic revolutions are defined as collective mobilizations (with a threshold of more than 1,000 civilians involved) aimed at replacing a regime in place. Beissinger lists 122 events of this type, on a global scale, between 1985 and 2014 (think in particular of the Arab Spring). Just under half resulted in the overthrow of power. Two-thirds first took place in the city, while this was the case for only 45% of the revolutionary episodes counted between 1900 and 1984.

The revolution became mainly urban with the XXIe century. Less rural, less immediately violent, less repressed by force, the revolutionary phenomenon moved towards the cities. Mobilization passed from the peasants and proletarians to the middle classes. The former fought for living conditions, the latter are involved in fighting corruption. Concretely, for revolutionaries, it is no longer necessary to rely on a vanguard party, it requires depreciated power, will and Internet connection. Beissinger insists: these are not necessarily democratic revolutions, but rebellions against predatory and discredited public authorities. And Beissinger argues that the urban future could turn out to be more turbulent and more riotous. On good terms.

The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City

by Nikolas Rose, Des Fitzgeralds. Princeton University Press, 2022, 280 pages, $27.95.

The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion

by Mark R. Beissinger. Princeton University Press, 2022, 592 pages, $35.

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