Historical and Theological Underpinnings of Cities

The change in history from a hunter-gather to an agricultural/urban society is described in a number of ancient stories about ‘origins’ including Judeo-Christian stories in the Bible that have become a part of how we understand ourselves. These ancient stories are being re-examined by urban writers, sociologists and theologians such as David Harvey, Jaques Ellul and Tim Gorringe to try and understand how we are to address another turning point in history where we are forced back on our fundamental values and views.[i]

Cities began from a choice in history to leave the hunter-gatherer ‘garden’. Adam (meaning original man) and Eve are described in the very ancient story of Genesis as being in the Garden of Eden where all of their needs are met and they remain in a state of innocence – totally dependent on nature. They chose however to eat the fruit from ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. This is a deliberate choice and from that point on people must follow through using their knowledge to create their own futures rather than being in innocence where they had no need for this knowledge. They are as a consequence locked out of Eden and need to till the soil and build cities.

The tension between our growing cities and the need to reduce our natural resource consumption is not new. Our urban civilization has always been a mixture of both trends—towards greater urban independence and greater vulnerability. The ancients could see this and certainly the prophets in the Bible suggest this. Cities became the dwelling place of humanity but their potential to collapse could never be forgotten. The prophets saw their role as reminding people of this possibility, even about the problem of resources running out. For example Isaiah attacked a city that felt they could do what they liked about their future resources:

‘Though in their pride and arrogance they say,

The bricks are fallen but we will build in hewn stone,

The sycamores are hacked down,

But we will use cedars instead.’ Isaiah 9:10.

But the city was not seen as fundamentally wrong, so people were told not to ‘leave Babylon’ until it was about to collapse. Cities were thus seen to be in a kind of tension between their tendency to create positive opportunities and their tendency to descend into violence, enslavement and exploitation. Urban dwellers are caught between what David Harvey calls the ‘spaces of hope’ and the possibilities of destruction. Cities will always need to adapt, to respond to new challenges or risk the possibility of collapsing.

The last book in the Bible, Revelation, pitches two scenarios of the future, which stand in tension. One is called Zion, the City of God, the ‘eternal city’, the city of hope, which is built by human science and craftsmanship (it is pictured as a city of jewels – which are of course human-made achievements) as well it is a city in harmony with nature (a tree of life and a river of life flow through the city). The other city is called Babylon, the City of Man (not the historical city of Babylon but any city that does what it did and collapsed), the city of fear; this city is full of frivolous consumption, repression of people and degradation of nature. This city is under judgment and it will collapse. The future is a clash between the two scenarios.

The ‘eternal city’, whatever that means in a temporal world, would seem to be something that humans contribute to through their work, creating diamonds of hope that build the city. Resilience may not be eternal but it is about designing to last and it is certainly built of the hope stories like those told in later chapters.