Welcome to the city

When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

– Hugh Newell Jacobsen

There are two opposing schools of thought popular amongst philosophers called teleology and metaphysical naturalism. While the former dictates that we have eyes just to we can fulfill the purpose of sight, the latter has us believe that we can see because we have eyes. If one were to disregard both and instead notice the importance paid to the relationship between cause of effect, one will consequently observe that cannot exist without the occurrence of the other. It is the same with the wishes of mind and the desire it manifests in out actions. Whether or not we choose to understand it, has been present for eons and will inevitably persist. This has been evident ever since mankind, as we understand it be in form and function today, began to group itself into small communities that soon proved to be the fundamental and formative units of civilization. In what can only be termed as a systemic progression that involved man utilizing the natural resources around him, similar communities, which evidenced the possibility (or, to be more optimistic, the presence) of a common purpose of humanity itself, began to get drawn toward each other because of a few reasons. One of these included the fact that since each community had its own set of requirements in terms of the quantity and quality of those natural resources, those with similar demands had similar patterns of migration and settlement. This pattern was also the basis of the formation of little villages, towns and, eventually, large cities.

In India, the four largest cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata are prime examples of such regionalistic concentrations. The population within these cities is very high, especially since the last three are coastal settlements. But once you step outside their limits, the density drops drastically. Although this drop in numbers could have been more gradual earlier on, the high slope indicates that people settling in such hotspots began to fare better economically and, thus, socially, which in turn led to a steady migration from rural to such urban settlements, which in turn led to an unnatural distribution of natural resources. For example, suppose a 1,000 nomads are looking for a suitable place to settle, when they chance upon a large lake. They decide to settle at one point, say Point A. At another point B, at the opposite side of the lake, there is a mountain range at the feet of which flourishes a herd of cows. The community chief decides to send a group of 200 people to B to hunt down the animals, skin them and put them up for trade. The 200 then proceed to settle down at B since it is a more convenient option. Now, there is a possibility of there emerging a propensity amongst those at B to trade their valuables from B itself instead of sending them down to A and then waiting for the return of the caravans. Such a decision seeming a logistically enhanced one, the settlement at B will now exhibit greater and perhaps accelerated growth rates. At this point, those from A will abandon their homes in favor of moving to B. As the settlement grows larger, the group will now, as a second step, seek to minimize the amount of inconvenience tolerated in the procurement of resources. Sitting at B, the people will now travel a particular distance from B, gather the resources and then return home. Since traveling longer distances entailed a greater number of inconveniences, the density of a particular resource will decrease exponentially along a radially outward direction beginning from the heart of the settlement.

Graph depicting density of resources

(The curve will climb up again, exponentially or not, once the distance from a particular settlement is large enough to ensure that no inhabitant will have ventured in those parts.)

Now, points A and B can be compared in real life to any one of the following pairs:

1. Rural and urban settlements: With the onset of industrialization, almost everything that man used – from the tools in manufacturing to the vehicles in procurement – leaped a giant leap from singular primitivism to a point where he could now put together different tools to make one ‘supertool’ that handled more than one job. With the forerunners being the automotive and shipping industries, other smaller manufacturers and, subsequently, their competitors were forced to switch to machine-labor. In the example above, the lake can be compared to the factories and warehouses that enhanced the availability of these machine parts.
2. Developing and developed nations: Similar to the first case, a developed nation has more resources – whether in terms of money or otherwise – to offer anyone who wants a shot at them. One good example would be how skilled software engineers from south India migrate to the Silicon Valley: the Indian has the skill, and the US has the resource.
3. At a simpler level, points A and B can be alternatively compared to summer and winter capitals of some states.

Now, at this point, cities employ the basis they have in the availability of resources and begin to flourish as economic hotbeds. By this, I mean that cities as a whole begin to realize the fluency its people will begin to have in terms of trading in resources other than the ones with which they established themselves. Up until this point in time, the inhabitants will have concentrated on developmental activities. Once it becomes evident that the resources circulating within the city have become self-sustainable, the limits of the settlement will begin to expand – in terms of size, population and, most importantly, as a new source of resources. Now, what will happen is something like ripples on water. This city will now behave like the lake, drawing skilled people towards it, simultaneously rejecting those who seem incapable of surviving in its environs (like the abandonment of A).

So, we have seen how a community is born, how it grows to become a city, and how a city itself begins to attract people from different parts of the nation. However, ultimately, what does a city represent in a non-utilitarian sense? How does it contribute to humanity as a whole instead of just to the nation that harbors it? If you go through the previous paragraph, you will find that the answer is simple. A city contributes to humanity as a whole not by giving away something that belongs to itself, but by manifesting the triumph that nestles silently in the nudges that it gives us when we think we have lost. In other words, a city is the first image that comes to mind when you might speak to me of humanity as a whole. When you might tell me that there are always some people who will find it in them to help me selflessly, I will think of a city first. In fact, when you live in a city, you will realize that it is just more than the shelter it first took form as. It transforms itself, blind to the eye and shielded from the piercing gaze of the mind, gradually consuming our sorrows for nutrition and purifying the air around us. We ignore it as it speaks of a mind of its own, and we shun it when it rains the day we leave for a different city, when the roads are bad, when we almost miss the flight we’ve to catch, when we finally board the flight and find that the journey has been delayed for an hour due to bad weather, when we land in a strange place later to find no friendliness lingering the air as it once did…