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Cities can be disproportionate, sinful, corrupt places, as well as civilizing, creative, free… The Romans and the great empires loved them, while the Mongol leader Genghis KhanLike many tyrants, he hated them; he abhorred all the human beings who had settled within its stone walls and had forgotten the satisfaction of living in the open air. Cities weaken the spirit of the warrior. Cities kill the animal and give life to the human.
The British Ben Wilson publishes in Spain, through Debate, an essay on the transforming capacity of cities and their long idyll with humanity. “Cities change, adapt, evolve. The pandemic illustrates this perfectly. Cities are made up of many layers of the past,” this historian of cambridge university.
The war in the city
‘metropolis’ It is a journey through seven thousand years of history, from the turmoil of Babylon to the sophistication of nineteenth-century Paris, ending in the mountain range of skyscrapers that today floods the most civilized world. In a matter of eighteen years, the number of buildings over 150 meters and 40 floors has gone from 600 to 3,251. It is estimated that two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, attracted by the endless opportunities.
But, beyond their economic and social advantages, cities are ruthless environments, capable of perverting the soul, ruining the pocket and filling the lungs with pollution. They are the worst place to be when a war breaks out and a point that the tyrants of all time always want to erase. Although his generals advised him not to attack Warsaw in 1939, Hitler insisted on razing it to the ground. the polish capital, whom he especially hated. According to one witness, the dictator reveled in “how the skies would darken, how millions of tons of bombs would rain down on her, how the people would drown in blood. His eyes almost popped out of their sockets, he became a different person ».
Warsaw suffered from the terror of aerial bombardment and systematic destruction, but it rose from its ashes. “People who live in urban centers are usually amazingly resilient people,” Wilson warns over the phone, just as another major Eastern European capital is under siege by an invading army.
The Briton believes that, even if Kiev is taken or razed, he will always find a way to rebuild what, more than concrete masses or squares, is an irreducible “idea”: “History tells us that cities are rarely destroyed by a war. They always find a way to respond, and as we see in Kiev, people have great love for their city and are unable to leave it. Kiev will be rebuilt as soon as its inhabitants have a chance».
Hitler was obsessed with invading Warsaw. Putin seems obsessed with Kiev. Why this attraction of dictators for them?
“Dictators are drawn to the cities of their enemies, often with disastrous consequences. Capturing, occupying or destroying a major city, particularly a capital city, has immense symbolic value. It means total victory, control over the governing bodies and cultural treasures of a defeated nation. It is an act of triumphalism and deliberate humiliation that goes far beyond the strategic. Capture the city and your enemy’s morale will collapse. Often this is delusional. The urban battlefield is exceptionally difficult to completely control, even if it is in ruins. As Hitler discovered in Leningrad and Stalingrad, the desire to capture cities can ultimately lead to total defeat.
– Fighting in an urban environment is a challenge not solved by the armies?
—Yes, and I think they will never solve it. The cases of Stalingrad, Leningrad or Hamburg in the Second World War illustrate all the blood and pain that a city is capable of absorbing. Although they were practically destroyed, they continued to function despite everything. From ancient times to Kiev, a city can be a death trap for the invader.
—Hernán Cortés was responsible for the destruction of Tenochtitlan, but also for the construction of something greater. Are cities not destroyed, only transformed?
—What is most fascinating regarding cities is that there are a lot of layers of history that can be decoded by walking through their streets. You can see an exercise of imperial power in Mexico City and a desire to replicate what the Spanish knew. Mexico City was created around a lake and there was first a very productive agriculture, which the Spanish had no interest in using. The Europeans had no desire to learn from these cities or from the Asian ones, much more dispersed and surely better in some respects. In this sense, over time cities have become more homogeneous, with fewer regional differences, pure replicas of the European model. There is something like an aspiration to globalize and for all cities to be more and more similar.
—Are European cities losing spontaneity?
—They are increasingly controlled and monitored. It’s as if cities are shopping malls, a curated experience subjected to tourism… The malls are being sucked out of their energy. They are dying of success due to gentrification processes, due to excessive regulation that causes creativity to be lost and they become a kind of museum. It happens in Spain, in the rest of Europe and even in the Arab States. It seems that the center has become a donut emptied of soul and life.
—After the pandemic, people are no longer satisfied with surviving, but want to live in cities. What is expected of them?
— If we talk regarding urban life, I think we are asking for many things that go once morest the conventional model at a time when cities are under a lot of pressure to recover their economies. During the pandemic, cities have caused problems for people’s mental health, so now we demand that they adapt to our new needs, for example that people work more from home and want more quality of life, not just a better economic status. Cities are expected to have better social life on the streets and to be affordable from an accommodation point of view. We will see how this adaptation works.
—Does the rural world have to lose in its fight once morest the urban?
—In my book I have tried to identify the origin of the tension between rural life and urban life. In Judeo-Christian culture, cities were seen as dangerous places, hotbeds of sin and disorder. The tension between the rural and the urban has to do with these prejudices and with the fact that many languages are spoken in cities, different ways of doing things, different ethics, different values are mixed… Cities are places of wealth and power that tensions arouse.
—In your book, you warn that cities are the problem and, at the same time, the possible solution to climate change.
I recognize that there is a paradox there. New York City consumes more resources than all of Sub-Saharan Africa and causes obvious damage to its environment. Large cities fragment biodiversity, nature and are more vulnerable in the event of disasters. However, the city can also be a solution if we let nature grow in abandoned places, if we create more green areas… If we think regarding the economy of scale, resources can be made more efficient and a circular economy can be developed. . In addition, a city has a greater capacity to adapt than nation states, it can better manage its resources and be a laboratory for change and innovation.
