Urbanism and the Common Good

“One who is incapable of participating or who is in need of nothing through being self-sufficient is no part of a city, and so is either a beast or a god.” - The Politics, Aristotle

Urbanism is a dirty word. It is often considered to be a pet project of the left and its loudest proponents come from that corner. Conservatives, for their part, tend to rebel against urban city planning. The distaste for urbanism on the right comes from two very different camps. On the one hand, there is the suburban “boomer” conservative who hates all things city because it frustrates the autonomy of suburbia. For them the city is busy, filled with crime, and besides, there is never a place to park. They want the “freedom” to live a ten minute drive from the massive parking lot in front of Walmart. Further away from the city is the other conservative camp—the country-side-ites. They view the city as a cesspool of vice and corruption. Cities are so morally destitute that only the countryside provides the context in which the virtuous life is possible.

Both camps get it wrong. Urbanism promotes the common good, and goes to the very heart of what it means to be a coherent, unified, political community.

To understand why the city is essential for the common good we must back up and consider the nature of the political community. Man is a political animal. He is naturally social and needs relationships to perfect his nature. Because of this, he naturally comes together to form communities, first among which is the family. According to Aristotle, man comes together out of necessity; he lacks certain things necessary for the fulfilment of his nature when left to himself.¹ This necessity is both physical and metaphysical. Man has certain physical needs which require cooperation by other humans. For example, he needs a partner to bear offspring and specialization of labor to cultivate the land and produce different goods. But more than this, man needs to live with other humans because only then can he perfect his social nature. The perfection of our social nature consists in the realization of the social and civic virtues; those virtues which are possible only when man exists in relation to other humans (charity, neighborliness, hospitality, friendship, etc.). Thus, the political community flows naturally from man because it is only therein that man can become fully what his nature has made him to be—political. “The complete community, . . . is the city. It reaches a level of full self-sufficiency, so to speak; and while coming into being for the sake of living, it exists for the sake of living well.”²

That which constitutes the political community, then, is that community which provides the context for man’s actualization of the social and civic virtues. In other words, the political community must be just that, a community: a physical entity composed of fellow humans sharing a common life. This is why Aristotle conceived of the political community as identical with the polis—the city state.³ Scale mattered to him because the end of the political community was not just providing physical needs like safety which the family alone could not provide, but the anthropological need of having a social reality in which man can perfect his nature as a political animal. Man “alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of this sort; and community in these things is what makes a household and a city.”⁴

To be that in which man can practice the social virtues, however, requires a certain physical constitution. Because man is an embodied creature, the political community which flows from his nature is likewise embodied. Thus, the coming together which constitutes the political community must be a physical coming together. The city must have a physical unity. It must be a city that can be set apart and distinguished from another city, not just juridically but physically. It must bring those who live in it together. Urbanism, then, is merely an attempt at making the city more what its nature has made it to be—a city.

While urbanism does not, on its own, cause true community in which man can live out the social virtues, it is a precondition to such a community. Put another way, a people who are actively trying to live out true community will naturally form urban cities, whereas a people who believe themselves beyond community will tend to slowly drift apart into suburbia.

Urbanism helps structure our cities so that they can provide the contexts for exercising the social virtues in two ways. First, the sheer fact of creating physical proximity between people makes it more likely that we will have encounters with others who live near us. These encounters are opportunities to practice the virtues. As I argued here, proximity helps create the contexts in which man can exercise the social virtues and forces us to treat our social existence as something prior to our will, not created by it. The social virtues include those virtues which require relationships for their exercise, chief among which is charity. Simply living close to others increases the opportunities for practicing this virtue. For example, if you live in a townhome that shares a wall and a yard with your neighbor and you both attend the same church on Sunday, the number of interactions which call for charity increase. Proximity makes us vulnerable to relationships. In suburbia we choose our relations. In the city, because encounters with the other occur naturally, relationships exist independent of our will. The other breaks in upon us and makes autonomy more difficult and requires us to respond in charity to that other.

Prior to the car, proximity was all too natural. There was no question that the city consisted of physical proximity between people because it was necessary for each man to acquire the physical goods which the city provided. With the car, however, that need is gone. We can drive to work, church, and the grocery store and who cares how close they are? However, the metaphysical need for a community which provides that context in which man can fulfill his social nature still remains.

Second, urbanism also helps create the contexts for exercising the social virtues by integrating where people live, work, and worship. Urbanism promotes the corner grocer, coffee shop, or pub. It seeks to place churches and schools into neighborhoods, walking distance for as many people as possible. In this way, urbanism promotes an integrated community where people share the important aspects of their lives. For example, when a city is walkable, those who live near each other provide, through their work, those services which people need for their lives and thereby create identifiable social relations—the postman, the barber, the doctor. In an integrated community these services are not merely commodities that we consume, but the livelihoods of our neighbors which are in turn needed for our own livelihood. Neighbors come to rely on each other and their lives form an interrelation of dependence irrespective of any one individual’s will. The postman needs the grocer. The lawyer needs the doctor.

However, while proximity matters, scale does not (actually, it both does and doesn’t). The “city” need not be a metropolis like New York. “City,” in the Aristotelian sense, refers equally to large cities and small towns—any community of people which provides the context for the social and civic virtues. In another way scale does matter. First, the “city” cannot be so small as to no longer be self-sufficient, but neither can it be so large as to lose all cohesion. At a certain scale, the “city” becomes too large to provide us with the ability to exercise the social virtues because interpersonal relations become impossible. The largeness of a city like New York, however, is not necessarily an evil. Historically, large cities naturally formed discrete, coherent boroughs or neighborhoods within the city which could serve to provide this type of community. Just as towns exist within larger political communities like states and nations, and families exist within cities, so too, neighborhoods once existed within cities which formed a part of that larger whole.

Contrary to the city, suburbia is hostile to community. It is by its nature individualistic. It has no physical unity. Instead, it is a disaggregated spacing of homes in which humans have no relation to those who live immediately next to them and where those aspects of shared life—work, school, church, etc.—are chosen at will. It has neither place nor culture. Man comes naturally together into the city, not away from each other to their subdivision homes. The physical buffer between people created by car infrastructure, grants to the individual anonymity in their social interactions. One can go about without having to know or be known by one’s neighbors or those whose business we engage. Because of this anonymity, the individual also becomes autonomous since without social relations there are no corresponding social duties. Thus, suburbia conceives of man’s social relations as the accidental, and often unfortunate, consequence of his material needs. If we have destroyed our cities and towns it is because we no longer wish to be a political animal, but an individual animal that groups together as disconnectedly as possible for his common convenience. John Locke anyone?

While merely having a walkable city alone will not spontaneously create a healthy, integrated community, it is impossible to have one without it. Urban cities can suffer from other ailments of modernity which make an integrated community difficult. For example, a city can get a perfect “walkability” score and be equally as soulless and individualistic as suburbia if it is fully infested with corporatism. What differs, however, is that suburbia makes true community impossible. The physical distance of suburbia creates a buffer between individuals such that they can ignore relations with others that proximity would bear upon them. Take for example the postman. You might not get to know your postman if he walks to your door every day, but you cannot get to know him if he drives to your mailbox because the subdivision he serves is just too big to walk. Urbanism, while not itself sufficient, is necessary for the formation of communities in which we can live out the social virtues.

Man is a political animal who needs the complex, integrated community of the city to perfect his nature. Suburbia rejects this view of human nature in favor of a Lockean vision of man as fundamentally individual with no metaphysical need for community to fulfill his nature. It provides to the individual those material goods which the individual cannot acquire on his own without the pesky burden of knowing and caring for the person who supplies those goods. Urbanism is uncomfortable for many Americans because communal life is demanding. It requires us to surrender many of our “freedoms” we have grown accustomed to in suburbia. But if we have no need for the city we become like either the beasts or the gods. And perhaps, as we try to make ourselves more like the gods, we become more like the beasts.

1. Aristotle, The Politics, 1252b12-19.

2. Aristotle, The Politics, 1252b28-30.

3. Aristotle, The Politics, 1252b28-29.

4. Aristotle, The Politics, 1253a16-18 (emphasis added).