The City

I. One Word, Two Meanings

When Germans say “City”, a borrowed English word, they mean the shopping street in the town centre. When the English say “the City”, they mean the square mile in London where the banks and insurers sit. One is the place where money is spent, the other the place where money is made with money. Neither has much to do with what the word originally meant: civitas was the community of citizens, and politics takes its name from the Greek polis.

II. Mumford’s City

In 1961 Lewis Mumford published The City in History, a history of the city from its beginnings to the metropolis. Three of his ideas are the yardstick for this essay.

The city begins as a magnet before it becomes a container. First it is a sanctuary, a grave, a meeting place to which people come. Only then does it hold people, stores and knowledge. Cologne carries this origin in its name: in the settlement that Emperor Claudius raised to a city in the year 50 stood an altar, the Ara Ubiorum, at which the tribes of the region gathered. It became Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium.

With power comes the citadel that towers over the city. In it Mumford sees the seed of the megamachine, an organisation of people that works like a machine.

And the city has a task: to convert power into form and energy into culture. When it no longer achieves this, it grows into a megalopolis and ends, says Mumford, as a necropolis, a dead city.

Mumford does not romanticise the city. From the very beginning, he writes, exploitation was built into it: every improvement in farming and building made the population grow, and with it the kings, priests and overseers who watched over it. The citadel needed workers, and often they were slaves. His hope was therefore not the large, centralised metropolis but the manageable city within a living region, built for the purpose for which people live in cities at all: to come together.

Mumford wrote from the perspective of New York and Europe. What has happened since, he did not foresee on this scale.

III. What Has Happened since 1961

When Mumford’s book appeared, about a third of humanity lived in cities. Since around 2007 it has been more than half. The growth did not take place in Europe or North America but in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Lagos, Dhaka, Kinshasa, Karachi and Delhi grew within a few decades from cities of millions to giant cities.

This growth has two faces, and they could hardly be more different.

IV. The Glittering City

One face shines. In 1991 the sociologist Saskia Sassen coined the term “global city”: New York, London and Tokyo as command centres of a world economy that pulls its strings across the whole planet. The City of London is its purest example. Around 8,600 people live there, and around 600,000 work there. In elections to its administration not only residents vote but also voters nominated by businesses, and they make up about two thirds of the electorate. A city in which companies have more votes than citizens is Mumford’s citadel in modern form.

New centres joined the old ones. Since 1980 Shenzhen has grown from a border area of villages into a city of around 17 million people. Since 2010 the world’s tallest building has stood in Dubai. In Saudi Arabia, “The Line” was to be a city built as a 170-kilometre glass wall through the desert; in 2026 the project was drastically scaled back. These are cities designed as images before anyone lives in them: containers that simulate a magnet.

V. The Planet of Slums

The other face was described in 2006 by the American historian Mike Davis in Planet of Slums. According to the United Nations, more than a billion people now live in slums and informal settlements, roughly one in four of the world’s city dwellers.

Davis’s thesis is uncomfortable. In nineteenth-century Europe people came to the cities because the factories were there. In the global South they come although there are no factories for them. Davis calls this urbanisation without industrialisation. People flee the countryside because agriculture no longer feeds them, and end up in a city that does not need them. Davis lays much of the blame on the structural adjustment programmes that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank imposed on indebted countries in the 1980s: cuts in housing, health and public services, precisely when the influx was strongest.

The slums arise where no one else wants to build: on slopes that slide, in floodplains that flood, next to rubbish dumps and railway tracks. Their inhabitants live from the informal economy, selling on the street, collecting waste, sewing at home. They are not part of the city, but they keep it running.

VI. Glitter and Corrugated Iron, Wall to Wall

What is frightening is not only that both cities exist. It is also that they often lie side by side. In São Paulo a well-known photograph shows the high-rise district of Morumbi with a swimming pool on every balcony, and right next to it, separated only by a wall, the favela of Paraisópolis. In Mumbai, Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest informal settlements, borders a business district of glass façades. In Lagos the luxury city of Eko Atlantic is being built on land reclaimed from the sea, while in the lagoon the district of Makoko stands on stilts in the water.

And the chain reaches all the way to Europe. The clothes that were sold in German town centres and are now ordered online are to a large extent sewn in Bangladesh and shipped through the port of Chittagong. On the beaches north of the city the world’s decommissioned ships are broken up, often by hand. The glittering city and the slum city are not two worlds. They are the two ends of the same machine.

VII. Who Still Needs Them?

Glaeser’s hope rests on a ladder. South Korea, Taiwan and China climbed it: first textiles and simple assembly with cheap labour, then electronics, then their own technology. Bangladesh stands on the lowest rung with its garment factories. The economist Dani Rodrik has described how this ladder is breaking away: in today’s developing countries, industrial employment peaks much earlier and at much lower incomes than it once did in Europe or East Asia.

At the end of this development stand the dark factories, factories in which the lights can stay off because hardly anyone works in them any more. Sewing was long considered hard to automate, because fabric is soft and cannot be gripped like sheet metal. Once it too belongs to the machines, it pays to produce where the customers are. Then the port of Chittagong is no longer needed, and neither are the people in the slums.

Who will still need them then? As workers, no one. Davis spoke of a surplus humanity, and Mumford would have said: the megamachine first needed people as components and now no longer needs even that.

Here lies the fundamental problem of rationalisation. Each individual company acts rationally when it replaces labour with machines. In sum, however, it dismisses workers and customers at the same time, because everyone wants to produce ever more cheaply and everyone wants to consume ever more cheaply. Henry Ford is said to have doubled his workers’ wages in 1914 so that they could afford the cars they built. The dark factory is the opposite: a factory whose goods no one can buy who would have had to work in it. The people nobody needs do not disappear. The question of who still needs them falls back on the glittering cities.

VIII. And the German City?

Compared with this, the dying of German town centres seems small, but it belongs in the same picture. The post-war town centre was a container for goods. As long as people had to shop there, it was also a magnet.

Since people have been shopping online, the magnet has lost its pull. Galeria, the department-store chain that grew out of Kaufhof and Karstadt, has filed for insolvency three times since 2020. The goods still come from Chittagong; they just no longer pass through the town centre.

IX. Where the City Comes Back, and Where It Does Not

In the twelve years I lived in Medellín, I saw every form of the barrios populares, the working-class districts, and carried out projects in some of them. The history of the city can be read there like the rings of a tree. Around the original centre the city was first extended according to plan, for example with the districts around the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. Then the slopes were flooded by the so-called invasiones: people from the countryside, many fleeing violence, occupied land and built where no one planned. Some of these barrios have developed over the years and today have a rudimentary infrastructure. But even they cannot shake off their unplanned state.

At the beginning of the 1990s Medellín was considered the most dangerous city in the world. Since 2004 cable cars, the Metrocable, have linked the barrios on the slopes with the metro in the valley. Library parks were built at their stations, and in 2011 escalators were installed in Comuna 13 to spare people the steep climb. In 2013 Medellín was named the most innovative city in the world.

The cable cars and the libraries have achieved a great deal, but very many problems remain. What they showed is the direction: instead of enlarging the citadel, the magnet was brought to where people live. What they also showed is the limit: a city that has grown without a plan can be connected, but it cannot be planned after the fact.

X. The City upon a Hill

There is a fourth meaning of the city, and it has been understood as a promise. In 1630 the Puritan John Winthrop preached a sermon on Christian charity to the settlers setting out with him for New England. It contains the sentence: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” The image comes from the Sermon on the Mount: “A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”

Winthrop’s city was not a place of glamour but of obligation. He spoke of there being rich and poor, but said they must be bound together like a single body: suffering together, labouring together, rejoicing together. The world was to look at this city because it would show that people can live together in this way.

Three and a half centuries later Ronald Reagan turned it into the “shining city upon a hill”. In his farewell address in 1989 he described it as a city teeming with commerce and creativity, and said that if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get there. Winthrop’s community of the obligated had become a promise to the capable.

Little of either remains today. The cities the world looks at are the glittering ones, and they shine because they wall themselves off. The wall between Morumbi and Paraisópolis has no doors. The city upon a hill has become a gated community, and what the eyes of all people mostly see of it is the fence.

XI. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The strongest objection comes from the economist Edward Glaeser. In Triumph of the City he argued in 2011 that cities do not make people poor but attract poor people, because they have better chances there than in the countryside. For many, the slum is a waystation on the way up, like the tenements of New York or Berlin once were. This must be taken seriously, and for some cities, in East Asia for example, it holds true.

The second objection concerns Mumford himself. His ideal city is the medieval European city, manageable and organically grown. Whoever measures the cities of the global South by this standard overlooks that they develop their own forms of community and order, often without and against the state.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that the world’s slums become ordinary city districts within a generation, as Glaeser expects, and not, as Davis fears, permanent camps of a humanity that nobody needs.

XII. The Question

Mumford feared that the city would end as a necropolis, a dead city. Something else has come: a city that shines and decays at once, glass above and corrugated iron below. The citadel is higher than ever, and around it grows a city that is not even a container, because nobody built it.

Winthrop wanted a city the world would look at because rich and poor lived there as one body. Today the world looks at cities in which walls divide them.

A city that no longer needs people as workers would have to need them as citizens. Otherwise it does not need them at all.

The question is not how large cities will yet become, but whether they will once again achieve what they were invented for: to turn power into form and people into citizens.