Build the Urbs, but Don’t Forget the Polis
(Source: Unsplash/Judith Ekedi Jangwa.)
I am not a huge fan of superhero movies, but a few weeks ago, I recently agreed to watch Thor Ragnarok, my husband’s favorite. Quick overview: a superhero (Thor) gets stranded away from his galactic home, Asgard, and needs to make it back before it’s destroyed by a villain. As Thor and his colleagues are fighting to save Asgard, he must wrestle with the possibility that they could get everyone in the city aboard a spaceship, but the city itself might be lost. He finds comfort in his late father’s reminder that, “Asgard is not a place, it’s the people.”
At this point in the film, I leaned over to my husband and said, “That’s Greek”—referring not to a frat or sorority, nor to the language, but to a series of lectures on Greek society we have been listening to by Yale professor Donald Kagan. Greek political society, Kagan explains, revolved around the polis: the external life of the community made up of shared political, economic, and cultural activities and which bound citizens to each other. Greek people, according to Kagan, simply could not envision being human without the polis. For them, without the polis, without political society, there was no man. The idea of losing their city was tragic, but conceivable; losing the polis (the people and relationships) was not.
But the polis was not just a series of activities and relationships, it was also a place. The rhythms of the polis happened in specific built environments: the home, the agora (public square), and the marketplace. The life and activities of the polis couldn’t happen without the urbs, without a particular kind of built environment. The urbs and the polis depend on and reinforce each other. The kinds of connectedness and sense of public duty needed for a strong polis are more likely to emerge in well-defined communities that facilitate robust public life—but such a place can only work if there’s a strong civic culture to sustain it. Without that strong civic fabric based in trust and reciprocity, living in proximity to one’s neighbors might prove dangerous.
This idea of a community marked not only by a specific place and built environment, but also by a strong, intergenerational civic tie connecting citizens to each other is probably difficult for most of us to envision in our modern era, given the spread-out, atomized world we live in. But that doesn’t make the polis any less necessary. In fact, I think many of our cities’ challenges can be boiled down to a lack of attention to the polis, in addition to our unsustainable and hostile patterns of urban design.
Yes, we have serious problems in the built environment: too-wide streets, too much regulation, not enough housing…these are issues of the built environment. It’s important to address these, but it’s also important to cultivate a healthy polis, too. We have to think as well about the culture, norms, and activities that tie us together…and about what happens if we lose them.
I don’t watch the news often, but in the past year I’ve heard of a shocking number of flash robberies happening across the country, some of them armed. In the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, locals took it on themselves to defend a local Nike store that had been robbed at least 10 times. According to a report from the National Retail Federation, the increase in retail theft over the last three years has cost retailers nationwide more than $110 billion and, in some cases, forced them to close locations entirely.
The economic cost is serious and the loss of these shops disproportionately affect lower-income communities who rely on big box retailers for everyday goods. But the cost is more than economic. What might look like a disappointing attack on a faceless corporation is really an attack against the social fabric of these neighborhoods and cities, the social fabric that makes political life possible. The same can be said about the alarmingly high levels of red-light running and organized street racing that has been afflicting neighborhoods nationwide for several years now.
Cities have always struggled with crime, so these kinds of issues are to be expected to some degree, but rather than being shrugged off as a “normal” problem, these kinds of incidents should remind us that the polis needs cultivating just as much as the urbs needs building. Without the polis, our cities will become a mere collection of buildings and people who are disconnected and indifferent at best, competitive and conflicting at worst.
What might this look like on the ground level? There’s no magical policy or ordinance that would solve this issue, but there’s plenty to do. City leaders should equip their police departments to take small crimes seriously. They should support residents who want to host events (e.g., get rid of the fees and bureaucracy around block parties). We can reform zoning to allow more third spaces within neighborhoods, places where people can connect and build social ties. On a personal level, we can support churches and nonprofits who provide mentoring to youth.
I’m not one to look to superhero movies for nuggets of wisdom, but I think we could all benefit these days from the reminder that the fullest expression of our communities is to be found not just in the things we’ve built or in the amenities they offer, as wonderful as they might be; the fullest expression is to be found in the people, in the polis.
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.