The Architectural Association

City Cultures Research Cluster 2008/2010

What is the Purpose of a City?

Peter Carl

We spend most of our civic effort managing the economic issues – either organising the infrastructure or
making the infrastructure fruitful for capitalism. As important is public safety, which aspires to the elimination
of all injury much the way health aspires to the elimination of all disease. Aristotle, who was the first to ask
about the purpose of a city (in fact the polis), of course declared that, "a polis is not merely the sharing of a
common locality for the purpose of preventing mutual injury and exchanging goods" (Politics 1280b30). He
continues by calling these elements "necessary pre-conditions," but "these do not make a polis" (indeed he
regards trade and usury "justly stigmatised because they are not according to nature but involve men taking
things from one another" [Politics 1258a 39 ff]).

With regard to the "common locality", probably the most interesting aspect to architects, Aristotle (Pol.
1330a34 ff) acknowledges the four winds. Unlike Vitruvius (I.iii-vii), he does not superimpose the practical
upon the symbolic in the expectation that the architecture would carry the meaning. Instead he develops
fairly general criteria (e.g. "a citadel-hill for an oligarchy and monarchy, a level site for a democracy, several
strong sites for an aristocracy"), concerns practical and military (for which an irregular street plan is useful),
the disposition of religious and political institutions and notably separating a "free agora" for legal and
political purposes from an agora for mercantile purposes. This separation reflects Aristotle's distinction in the
Nichomachean Ethics (1140a1 ff) with regard to praxis (roughly, moral action) – between phronesis (actions
for their own sake, like morals or politics) and techne (actions for the sake of producing something, like a
house or a speech). Aristotle is operating mostly in the practical domain (unlike the speculative or symbolic
utopias of Plato or Augustine); but he does not confuse moral and productive action, as do the instrumental
topographies of, for example, Vitruvius or Ledoux or Le Corbusier.

Aristotle summarises the purpose of the polis as "the good life...both collectively for all members and
individually" (Pol. 1278b25). Following a hierarchy from the beginning of the Nichomachean Ethics
(1095b18) which proceeds from the life of pleasure to the political life and also to the life of contemplation
(the bios theoretikos, where 'theory' involves contemplation of that which is common to all, divine). He
clarifies the good life as follows, (Pol.1323b40): "the best life, whether separately for an individual or
collectively for the polis, is the life conjoined with virtue (arete) furnished with sufficient means for taking part
in virtuous actions". This hardly exhausts Artistotle on the subject (or his debt to Plato, despite the familiar
differences); but the reader arrives at a vision of a 'good' polis as one that is well-situated between mountain
and shoreline, well-nourished and supplied with fresh water, well-defended and suitably organised and
governed to provide for the virtuous life and, ultimately, for the bios theoretikos. In other words, the natural
conditions provide the context for the exercise of civic praxis, which provides the context for contemplation.
Since the logos theoretikos is an interpretation of physis (the fundamental conditions, eternal, divine), we
may say that Aristotle regards the polis as an institution oriented to the understanding of its place with
respect to the fundamental conditions of existence. When, in the Metaphysics, he declares that the universal
is available only through the particular (Met. 1001a28-30), we may see that the historical, concrete life of the
polis, with its conflicts and vicissitudes, is the vehicle by which the universal is possible to contemplate. The
universal is by definition that which is common to all, divine.

Before we, like Hannah Arendt, are accused of "polis envy", it is worth repeating that this vision of polis is not
a plan for ensuring the virtuous life (nor is it a scheme for reducing the polis to an academy). True, if what
we have called his 'vision' corresponded to actual daily practice in ancient Athens, let alone other poleis, the
Politics would not have been necessary to write; and Aristotle does not hesitate to issue opinions. It is
possible to imagine communities more suited to contemplation of highest things, such as monasteries (as did
Le Corbusier). However, these tend to exclude those who only partially understand, or misunderstand, or
simply disagree. Indeed, philosophy grew out of the innate tendency of democracies to degenerate into a
plurality. Aristotle does not subject the concrete diversity of the city to planning, or virtue to techne. It is only
through the fractious diversity that one can approach what is common, or universal.

The stratification of being that we have derived from Aristotle's conception of the polis is at once eminently
acceptable and quite foreign to contemporary thinking. Since the European Enlightenment it has been
customary to prefer what is general (what quantitatively pertains to many people) over the universal (what
qualitatively pertains to all). For example, we are all subject to gravity, but this is not a universal. A theme
such as the Highest Good is a universal because it is a fundamental insight regarding being-human, or a
possible being-human, that is necessarily always-open to interpretation. It is part of our freedom, a
possibility granted within the claims of necessity, and therefore within our finitude (in the ontological sense of
"eccentric to reality"). It is not something that can be legislated or enforced (though reflection on the Highest
Good might guide legislation or legal judgement), or managed through science or technology. It is
theoretically possible to imagine a hermeneutics of the Highest (or Lowest) Evil, although such a project
would be self-defeating, since it involves the paradox of doing evil well. For Plato, the Highest Good
comprised the whole of reality, seen therefore as ethical (as distinct from moral, which pertains to particular
judgements in history). The drama of the human condition is the potential reconciliation of the individual with
the fundamental (ethical) conditions of reality, which are common-to-all, universal.

On this basis, one can see that Aristotle's polis is a framework in which this can happen, whose operation, in
the domain of the particular, is oriented to virtue. Aristotle outlines an ontology with the polis deeply
implicated.

Nonetheless, Plato, Aristotle and Augustine (City of God) in their different ways all attempted to understand
how deeply it could penetrate an understanding of what is common-to-all into the milieu of praxis,
characterised by negotiation, conflict, difference. Is this at all relevant for our secular culture where the first
principle of politics is adherence to individual rights, and where 'economics' is a matter of Adam Smith's self-
interested individual? This is the city for which 'common' is expressed as statistical generalisations (and
manifest in such topographies as those devoted to 'housing') and for which equitable distribution typically
relies upon sociological analysis for "equitable" and upon economic techniques for "distribution". In other
words, our present procedures invoke a conflict between general and universal in the understanding of
'common'. Agamben, in Homo Sacer, speaks of an inversion – instead of living within our resources for the
sake of cultural understanding, we use a sophisticated politics for the management of resources, in pursuit of
the ever-deferred objective of overcoming of human finitude. If the concept of 'growth' which lay at the heart
of late capitalism must perforce succumb to the exigencies of sustainability – and therefore to some version
of common purpose – in the practical domain, does this also necessarily invoke the ancient understanding of
universal? If it does, can such an understanding be attained without gods or symbols?