Dissertation

Between Town and Country: City Planning as Practical Political Philosophy

… practical men of affairs are turning their attention to working out the means whereby the city may be made an efficient instrument for providing all its people with the best possible conditions of living.

Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennet, Plan of Chicago, 1909.

Not only do city planners make strong assumptions about what the good life is, they also project this onto the polity to ensure that such goals are realised through the city planning process. City planning is practical philosophy: it has always been so. To Hippodamus Aristotle grants the distinction of being both the first political philosopher and the first city planner, but both criticism and praise are levelled on a singular continuum. The ancients and the moderns saw little distinction between city planning and political philosophy. From Plato we have not only the Kallipolis (lit. the beautiful city) of the Republic and Magnesia of the Laws, but also Atlantis from the Timaeus and Critias. Aristotle’s ideal city of Books VII–VIII of the Politics spends most of its time detailing why and how the city should be physically ordered. Even modern city planners make the same distinctions that we find in ancient philosophy, as seen above: of the good life with the most practical means of achieving them, therefore presupposing not only political organisation and action and power, but also a political anthropology and a definitive view of human nature and man’s place in the polis.

My dissertation seeks to return to that older understanding of city planning as political philosophy in practice. Each form, each ideal type of the city, assumes a certain view of human conduct, of the manifestation of man as polis animal. The paradox of the city is that it relies upon a premodern ideal of city life: of face-to-face interactions that form and mould an ideal of politics and of the good life. But not only do these ideals manifest themselves in grand, monumental architecture—cathedrals, railway stations, town halls, civic plazas—they are woven into the very urban fabric of the city. From the Periclean Parthenon to the “smart cities” of the Middle East, I look at how cities embody and reflect political philosophy’s practical application throughout history and chart a trajectory for cities past, present, and future. 

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Chapters:

1. Between Town and Country, Ancient and Modern: Jefferson and Early Modern America
2. The Town in the Country: the Ancient Greek Polis
3. Not-so-Doux-Commerce: The Industrial City
4. Between Sanitation and Beautification: The Rationalist City
5. Technology, Smart Cities, and the Flight from Reality