Cities and Civilizations: Exploring the Problems of Cultural Interaction from Both Angles

Kian Tajbakhsh

Peace Policy, volume 7, 2002

A few years ago President Khatami published a book in Persian entitled From the City of the World to the World of the City: Reflections on Western Political Philosophy (Tehran, 1996). Mr. Khatami’s book is written from the point of view of a Muslim theologian and politician. His use of the term “city” reflects a long tradition in philosophical and theological thought that has used the term as a metaphor for a space within which humans live and dwell together – “co-habitate.” St. Augustine’s well known work, City of God, the tenth century Iranian philosopher Farabi’s The Book of the Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous City, as well as 19th century utopian socialists such as St. Simone and Fourier, all used the metaphor in one way or another to evoke the idea of a real or ideal place. The power of the metaphor of the city to evoke very abstract and sweeping images of human existence is reflected in the etymological roots of the parallel words for civilization in English (and other Romance languages derived from Latin) and in Persian and Arabic. “Civilization” shares a root with the words for the “city,” “civic,” “citizen,” “civil,” and so on. In Persian and Arabic the word for civilization is tammadon, the roots of which can be traced to Madineh (Medina), the first city of Islamic history. Also relevant here is the root of the word “politics,” derived from the Greek word for city, “polis” (as in for example, Persepolis – city of the Persians) and which interestingly also gives us the English word, “police.” Thus there is a clear link between the words for civilization and cities. The fact that Mr. Khatami is also a well known proponent of the “Dialogue of Civilizations” thus fits this conceptual model.

But the title of Khatami’s book intrigued me for another reason, because I had just finished writing a book called The Promise of the City: Space, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). In this book, I discuss how the changing spatial patterns of contemporary (mostly Western) cities have shaped some of the most important questions raised by social scientists and urban social theorists over the last three or four decades. I, too, was inspired by the use of the metaphor of the city as a way to understand some key aspects of contemporary societies, as well as their potential for human growth and enlightenment. The city is a useful way to explore these rather daunting questions, because it tends to be concrete and recognizable. The notion of the city is easier to grasp than civilization, which is pretty fuzzy and unwieldy, if nonetheless evocative. Professor Ali Mazrouie, an African scholar and writer, made a similar point in his address to the UN conference on the Dialogue of Civilizations – if you want to see how civilizations interact, look at how people of different religions, ethnicities, languages, and customs live together in cities and use their neighborhoods, parks, streets, and public spaces.

Looking at the concreteness of the spaces of the cities in which we live helps us ask some important questions about the problems of peaceful co-existence through negotiation and compromise, a topic central to this special issue on globalization and moral capital formation. How do these different urban groups and cultures get along? How do they negotiate the different spaces where they must work, live, shop, or worship? What kind of boundaries or borders do they create to mark off different neighborhoods? Are these borders rigid and anxiously defended, or porous and open to outsiders? How much mixing occurs of these different groups in different spheres of life (e.g., mixed marriages)? How do groups who live in very different private worlds of family, home, neighborhood, or place of worship, come together as citizens sharing a public space and common fate to make collective decisions on problems facing all of them? Indeed, can we take it for granted that, despite the greater separation between private worlds (e.g., in the U.S. between rich and poor neighborhoods and between different ethnic communities), all people do in fact see themselves as sharing a common bond of citizenship?

These are some of the questions urbanists ask (and try to answer). But these are also the kinds of questions that are raised by the new discourse on the Dialogue Among Civilizations, as well as by political philosophers (e.g., John Rawls in his recent work, The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, 1999). My thesis is that the connection between the problems of cities and civilizations goes beyond etymology and well into content.

Admittedly, there are some significant asymmetries. Where civilizations are represented by nation-states, the latter possess state and military apparatuses that groups or neighborhoods in cities typically don’t have. On the other hand, cities do have institutions that organize and represent local group interests in diverse circumstances, ranging from (armed) conflict and violence (e.g., Belfast, Jerusalem, Beirut, Sarajevo, Bombay) to peaceful negotiation over urban services (e.g., New York City). Despite these qualifications, I am proposing that thinking about the parallels between cities and civilizations addresses challenges common to both and leads to some common insights. This means that we can perhaps learn from the experience of complex, multicultural cities something about how “peoples,” even civilizations, pursue dialogue, fail at dialogue (when interaction turns to violence), or just get by.

If we ask ourselves how social relations in a diverse, economically stratified, multicultural city should be organized, two ideal types or basic models implicitly underlie most conventional conceptions. The first is based on the idea of a single homogeneous community. In this view, the “true” city should represent the underlying unity of the people: we are all in the same boat, we are all children of God, we are all French, and so on. On the international level, this view is presented in terms of the common humanity possessed by members of all cultures. In this model, what unites us is more important than what differentiates us from each other – or, to extend the point, the common good is more pressing than the individual. In this model, the city is seen as a more or less homogeneous population with harmonious relations. The second model reverses this and makes the parts more important than the whole, the individual more sacred than the common good. The picture of the city here is one of a kaleidoscope or a mosaic in which the boundaries of each part touch but do not interpenetrate. We can see this in large North American cities, where ethnic neighborhoods are divided off from each other. The elements making up the totality can be neighborhoods, ethnic groups, or individuals. The important point is that these two models are closely related. Both are based on the idea of rigid boundaries – the first defining a single homogeneous universal community, the second defining a multitude of homogeneous individual communities.

These models have significant weaknesses, however, both as ideals of what should be and as descriptions of current social trends. The universalistic model is ultimately undermined by the fact of the diversity of the world’s peoples and their beliefs. The individualistic model underestimates the potential for a high degree of social interaction and cultural interpenetration between peoples sharing a given locality or space. These weaknesses suggest that we try to imagine an alternative.

The alternative I want to suggest is built on a different way of thinking about boundaries. It is conventional to view borders or boundaries as areas in between two entities and thus as “gray zones” where nothing happens. Botanists and biologists, however, have another way of seeing the boundary – they see it as a fertile place where new things happen, and new strains and species emerge. This fecundity of the margin results from the fact that it is a space where two previously (relatively) stabilized entities meet, and also because it is something like a free zone, somewhat removed from the order and law of the two primary spaces. We can follow the natural scientists here and refer to the emergence of new hybrid forms and species. Similarly, in the study of social forms such as persons and cultures, we can also think positively about the hybridity resulting from marginal spaces. Through these spaces, communities and identities come to see their apparent solidity, naturalness, and homogeneity as historically contingent, and merely dependent on the boundaries separating them from other groups and identities. They see the possibility of transcendence into something new and different from what they were. In this view, the boundaries separating identities are fuzzy and porous. Individuals, communities, and civilizations change, grow, and mix with other individuals, communities, and cultures because there is such a zone of interpenetration.

Certain urban neighborhoods in large complex cities seem to possess such fuzzy boundaries. Everyone knows that there is a neighborhood, but no one really knows exactly where the boundaries lie. Thus complex cities offer opportunities to transcend the boundaries and inherited meanings of who we are. They do this because the diverse communities that make up the city’s fabric press up against each other, and each is confronted with other truths and other worldviews. As a result, the “truth” of each community appears relative and contingent; its edges – where the children from different neighborhoods play together, or public spaces such as parks and shopping areas, or even where there are cross-religious or cross-cultural marriages – show each community the possibility of inventing new traditions and new meanings for everyday life. I have argued in my book that modern cities create for individuals the possibility of a hybrid sense of self, where identities are contingent and open to change and renegotiation. Embracing this latent possibility seems to me to be an unavoidable necessity in the context of the goals of a multicultural, complex democracy. The latter requires that, despite their differences, all individuals and groups respect the parallel public space of shared destiny, where decisions are made together. Democratic procedures in a complex multicultural context require complex selves where each individual needs to see things not only from other people’s points of view but from the many different desires and needs, sometimes contradictory, that exist within each person. This is what I have called the promise of the city.

Unfortunately, an increasingly visible current trend in forms of urbanism recoils from this possibility and “voluntarily” withdraws into residential enclaves and homogeneous spaces, whereby the boundaries between inside and outside are made more rigid and more brittle. Examples of these “gated” or otherwise policed neighborhood residential spaces are increasingly to be found throughout North America and even Latin American countries such as Brazil. Here the possibilities of hybridity are rejected and purity and homogeneity are stressed. As a result, the democratic dimension of city space – that is, mobility in a public space which is not tightly regulated or segmented relative to class or ethnic criteria – is violated.

The most understandable reason for this rejection is that the openness I have advocated can easily – as is the case in colonial experiences – lead to the erosion and loss of cherished traditions, beliefs, and ways of life. The stress on change, novelty, and hybridity – critics contend – underestimates ordinary people’s need for a space of continuity, stability, and order. These tensions clearly also underlie the debate over the pros and cons of the interaction of civilizations and cultures.

These are reasonable objections and highlight an enduring tension in peoples’ reactions to complex cities, societies, and civilizations. This tension between stability and change, between the defense of the known versus the embrace of the different and unknown, is also reflected in the spaces of the modern city. A truly “urban” city is one which is complex enough to offer its inhabitants two fundamental kinds of experience. One is a stable space of continuity, where we can rely on our beliefs and self-identifications. The other is where we put ourselves – our beliefs and worldviews – at risk. Through confrontation with different truths, we question our beliefs, values, and identities and are thus led to expand our moral imaginations of what is possible and important. Imagine all the public spaces of the past that brought people out from their neighborhoods to hear new ideas, see new ways of interacting, find new books, meet new people. Interesting cities possess this division. Finding the right balance between the exhilarating and disorienting on the one hand and the stable and reassuring on the other is a constant challenge for modern urbanites. Cities are a concrete, empirical example of a social institution grappling with the issues of cultural complexity and interaction. The record of success has not been particularly stellar, but some evidence of “civilizational” interaction in the concrete spaces of the city suggests the usefulness and possibilities of the idea of dialogue among civilizations.
Thinking about the interaction of civilizations, cultures, or groups carries these same tensions and possibilities. We should not allow the idea of civilizational dialogue to imply the stability and sanctity of the two entities engaged in dialogue. Dialogue (even clash) implies interaction, and that means a border, and thus the possibility of change and of hybridities. It is this type of dialogue I believe is being called for by President Khatami and other advocates of a civilizational dialogue (Tehranian). Keeping the conversation going, across civilizations and across neighborhood boundaries, within conditions of equal voice and representation for all participants, is no doubt a laudable and perhaps indispensable task for the future.