Ape Rifle

Cape Town, South Africa, March 2007

Montreal’s urban form, like many other North American cities, is been affected by two major forces of change. The first is suburbanization, a defining element of the 20th century so analyzed and debated that it needs no further discussion in these pages. The second is the gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods, a process which has transformed many a derelict warehouse on this continent over the past twenty years or so. The latter, in particular, has hit a fever pitch in these parts, with long-standing vacant lots suddenly devoured by high-rise concrete skeletons and neglected post-industrial neighbourhoods being lined up for China-style radical transformation.  Add to this yet another large-scale project to overhaul one of the downtown area’s more lifeless sections, and you’d think the city was serious about dealing with its urban blunders of the 20th century (forgetting for a second that it was exactly these sorts of large-scale grands projets that got us in trouble in the first place).

The other day, however, a long walk in search of some picture frames led me through a stretch of Montreal’s urban fabric that has yet to experience either story of dynamic change. It was a landscape I have seen in many North American cities (particularly older ones in the northeast US and eastern Canada), a spatial no man’s land lost between the density of the central city and the mall-serviced sub-divisions of the suburban periphery. These are the areas not conveniently located enough to be a target for gentrification, yet way too engrained in the concrete urban fabric to be considered by those seeking suburban delights. They have seen scant construction or upgrading since the middle of last century, but are hardly abandoned- these are the forgotten landscapes, the negative infrastructural spaces in between areas that people want to be.

Often, these landscapes are a strange mix of industrial detritus from a bygone era, service garages and U-Haul lots. Space here is filled with low-rise sheds and cracked-pavement parking lots, and mostly devoid of people and life. Urban negative space is like the storage area for North American industrial society, its aging backbone that no one wants to see: train tracks and expressways, old warehouses, bargain furniture stores, ugly motels and graffiti-covered remnants of loading docks. Buildings here are cheaply built, purely functional, with an aesthetic that has decayed along with the passage of time since the 1970s. This negative space is unnerving in that it reveals the growing age of the ‘new world’, reminding us North Americans just how much of our urban space has been devoted to the needs of gritty logistics and throwaway commerce- the physical embodiments of which have not necessarily aged well since their heyday.

Wandering in such a space on a cold Sunday in November, it is difficult not to feel a certain quiet malaise, a sense of a society that is obliviously easing itself into an age of decline. Amidst the twisted metal fences overgrown with weeds, the idle boxcars and the fading billboards, contemplation of our great industrial experiment is all but essential. And out of it comes a fear that through our long-standing thirst for production and consumption, we have produced vast swathes of disposable built environment barely worth remembering.

Last June, a particularly interesting piece of news came and went without much fanfare: those who concern themselves with such things estimated that, sometime during the next year, humanity would become a majority urban species for the first time in its history. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that this milestone slipped by largely unnoticed, little more than a flash in the carnival of endless distractions that comprise our modern airwaves. The media rule of thumb seems to be that the less trivial a matter is, the less attention it receives- hence the amount of coverage devoted to inconsequential personal details in the American presidential perma-campaign, or the latest exploits of spoiled brats misspending their fifteen minutes of fame.

So in this time when long attention spans are de facto discouraged, it is tempting to dismiss this urban majority estimate as just another tidbit in a sea of information, filed under “Did you know?” alongside sports trivia and tech gadget statistics. I would argue, however, that this news deserves a different fate, one in which it is given more thought and consideration. It is one thing to casually acknowledge that more people might now live in cities than rural areas, but another to truly contemplate what this means and how this might affect the course of our species in the long-term.

Granted, an initial difficulty with this contemplation lies in the arbitrary definitions of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. In such a complex and fluid world, is this division even relevant? As anyone who has spent time navigating the endless and ill-defined fringes of a mega-city could tell you, it is perhaps no longer even physically identifiable in many areas. On a conceptual level, then, the terms are left open enough for those who use them to do as they please: in China, for example, some ‘cities’ are in fact geographically vast regions comprising large rural areas where residents are ‘urban’ by legal fiat only.

And related to this is the tricky subject of rural-to-urban migration: when are rural migrants to the city considered urban? How are they counted? What if they spend some years in the city but ultimately go back to rural homes? Can they be considered urban and rural? It is quite possible, likely even, that the fluidity of social networks and migrant patterns render problematic any academic attempts to fit people into neatly defined spatial boxes.

Despite these somewhat semantic difficulties, it remains that large-scale urbanization as a force of change is one of the most important stories of our time. To expand on this, it is important to note at this point that a rural/urban divide should not be understood in any narrow physical sense (which leads to the problems mentioned above), but rather as a fundamental difference in lifestyle. A move from a rural, agrarian existence to an urbanized, industrial life is, above all, an escape from direct toil of the land. In the most rudimentary of rural environments, people survive through their own direct agricultural efforts; in any urban setting, people survive by accumulating virtual wealth that gives them claim to food and resources. The latter condition places urbanity at the very heart of industrial modernity as it is so often understood today: this reliance on complex production systems is considered advanced, while direct reliance on working the land is considered backwards.

Standard of living measures that are tossed around by governments and development agencies alike are, after all, doing little more than measuring the extent to which a society or region has urbanized itself (ie removed itself from direct toil of the land and built up complex industrial systems which can be understood through statistics). So as people the world over strive for a better life, it should come as no surprise that this process manifests itself as urbanization; after all, the very concept of the good life as many understand it today is inescapably urban, which is perhaps why the visualization of wealth is so often tied to city skylines. Perhaps also why informal urban settlements the world over swell ever more with new arrivals.

But enough of the academic meandering and back to the main point of inquiry: what can we expect from a humanity that is now in the majority off the land and seeking survival in an urban context? I believe we will see the growth of two related paradoxes- the first involving the environment and the second involving political stability and personal freedoms.

Regarding the environment, an increasingly urban humanity will be more mentally detached than ever from its reliance on the natural world- unfortunately, this at a time when our impact on the planet will be greater than ever. As people move from direct reliance on agriculture to indirect survival based on the accumulation of money, this drives the growth of complex industrial systems, be they transportation, commercial or utilities. Agriculture, somehow, just becomes another industry, no more or less than others.

So as these systems grow so complex that people can survive by trading financial derivatives or selling digital music, the reality that our whole existence is still based on the fruits of agriculture gets lost in a haze of economics and post-industrial drivel. Unfortunately, our physical impact on the land is as real as ever- it’s just that the urban human is less conditioned to understand its implications. Rather, we obsess with the survival of our industrial systems (the art of economics) as if they were self-contained entities disconnected from environmental limitations. And I fear that despite all the talk of environmentalism these days, the continued urbanization of humanity will only accentuate this trend with unforeseen consequences.

This development has significant implications, as all good environmental trends do, deeper inside the social and political fabric- and this brings us to the second paradox. While much is said about the freedom and vitality of cities and the opportunity they offer compared to agrarian life, what is less mentioned is that urbanization is also a process of disempowerment. A city dweller, unlike someone who can directly grow the means to their survival, relies completely on systems and services to provide for them. And for many, this is fine if not ideal- but only because they are well positioned to benefit and/or control these systems. In the dreamscape of development economists everywhere, this is the end state of paradise- everyone a productive, happy industrial consumer with the whole machine humming along nicely.

Of course, reality has a nasty tendency of getting in the way. The urban modernist dream falls apart with the realization that a transfer from an agrarian to an urban lifestyle does not always result in a nice condo with family trips to the mall. In many cases, it can mean a squalid existence in harsh slums, an urban density devoid of the services that are supposed to accompany it. This is detachment from the land as a means of survival, but without the access to the services or virtual wealth (ie money) that are supposed to replace it.

It isn’t much of a stretch from here to imagine, then, how increased urbanization might result in increased unrest and political stability. As agrarian beings, we associated our survival with nature- the quality of the soil, the constancy of rainfall, the scourge of floods or droughts. We were completely in God’s hands, so to speak- it is quite difficult to argue with a cloud, for example. As urban beings, however, we associate our survival with man-made systems (which, to be said, operate quite poorly if at all in many parts of the world). In this context, it is much easier to blame failures on governments, municipalities, corporations, etc. With mass urbanization, states are quick to grasp at the benefits- industrial development, large labour pools – without, perhaps, truly comprehending that they’ll take the brunt of the blame when large numbers of people feel the system doesn’t provide.

And, finally, this is why increased urbanization has the potential to lead to stricter state control at the very same time as it causes unrest and political instability. Just as those who are utterly disempowered and yet find themselves in dense urban environments will need to be contained, the industrial infrastructure that services the fortunate will need to be protected. When the ability to survive of the fortunate urban citizenry depends on the integrity of industrial systems (be they physical such as transportation or virtual such as finance), their protection against acts of terrorism and/or civil unrest becomes paramount.

In places where the large majority of urbanites are net benefactors of these industrial systems, this will be accepted without much thought or question- for example, think of the boom in CCTV surveillance in Western cities with London leading the way. As more people join the complex structure of the urban world, the more people need to be catalogued, counted and monitored. In places where huge majorities of urbanites are excluded from these systems, while at the same time increasingly depending on them, reaction is likely take on more violent undertones. One sure way to ferment protest is to strip people of their self-reliance and provide little or nothing in return- whether in the historically deprived urban townships of South Africa or the rural land gobbling industrial frenzy in China.

So detachment from the environment will deepen as the need to address our impact on it grows, and the potential for unrest is matched by the prospect of greater state control. I am not attempting here to romanticize the rural lifestyle; but rather, to temper the frothy narrative of economic miracles and growing skylines with the realization that there are some serious implications to urbanization. As more people than ever search for the good life in an urban landscape, it is important to contemplate what could happen if they find little more than exclusion and a denser version of the misery they left behind. As the human condition becomes increasingly defined by an urban lifestyle, as a majority of us come to rely on man-made systems for survival, it becomes ever more important that these systems be inclusive. Unfortunately, considering our current track record, this hasn’t exactly been a strong point in our evolution as a species.