Urban Mind
Apartments in Pyongyang (above) compared to apartments in Seoul.
A recent report in the Korean Herald announced that 62.4% of the North Korean population now live in urban areas. In South Korea it’s 81.4%. I was surprised that North Korea is catching up so fast. But I suppose for a totalitarian state one advantage of having people live in urban conglomerations is that by being corralled together they are easier to keep an eye on, and in a pre-Internet culture, to indoctrinate with the same analogue information. Urbanization is, of course, part of a global trend. The world average is 56.2%, and is predicted to rise to 60.4% in 2030, and 70% by 2050. Most is occurring in less developed country.
I’m one of the 18.6% who don’t live in a conurbation in South Korea. But we’re not isolated halfway up a mountain. We’re conveniently close to a small town with a subway station, and a highway that takes us direct to Seoul in an hour. The uniqueness of where I live is that the existence of unurbanized land so near to Seoul is a consequence of the division of the Korean peninsula. Development has not been encouraged so close to the DMZ. This is why we can enjoy ‘country’ life while also being near enough to the urban conveniences. South, east, and west of Seoul it is a horror show of concrete and steel sprawl, of ever-widening characterless infrastructure. Alas, the same is happening around us now. A new highway has just opened nearby. A highspeed train station arrives soon. We are being engulfed. But as long as the two Koreas remain enemies, this relentless urbanization has to stop a few kilometres north of us. The Demilitarized Zone is also a De-urbanized Zone.
The pandemic has given the fundamental societal distinction between urban and non-urban locations heightened resonance, because the virus spreads much more freely in densely populated places. At the moment, we can almost forget about Covid-19 where we live. We don’t wear masks when we go out walking, and its only when we head into town that suddenly the virus is quite literally in our face. Masks are now mandatory. EVERYONE in urban areas wears them.
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In 1600 only two cities in the whole world had a population of over one million – London and Beijing. By 1900 the population of London was already six and a half million, and almost 14 % of the world’s humanity were urbanites, with 12 cities massing one million or more inhabitants. In 1950, 30% of the world's population was residing in urban centres and the number of cities with over 1 million people had grown to 83. By 2008 the world's population was evenly split between urban and rural areas for the first time, and there were more than 400 cities with over 1 million people, while 19 had over 10 million. The more developed nations were now about 74% urban, and 44% of the residents of less developed countries lived in urban areas.
Historically, as cities and towns increased in size and number attitudes towards them evolve. For the ancient Greeks and Romans the city was largely seen as a great pearl of civilization. Eulogies to the city abound in classical texts. Before the modern era the city was regarded as the prerequisite and fruit of progress; the Renaissance is inconceivable without the stability and focus provided by the city-states of Italy - Florence, Venice, Rome, Sienna. They provided the security and prosperity necessary for the blossoming of the arts and sciences, and for the establishment of the principles of good government, conditions that were largely absent elsewhere in Europe. Even so, urban life was also seen to create obvious problems. In the writings of Virgil, for example, a characteristically urbanised yearning for the simple country life can already be discerned. In the fourteenth century, the characters in Boccaccio’s famous work, the The Decameron, are obliged to flee the festering alleyways of Florence for the countryside because the plague spread so virulently in densely populated places – an aspect of city life we have become uncomfortably familiar with once again, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Gustave Doré’s bleak vision of Victorian London.
‘Nature’, cast as the antithesis to the ‘urban’ and humanly-made took on a distinct character as the cities grew. The Romantics decisively turned their backs on urban life. William Wordsworth, for example, chose to settle in what he called the ‘terrestrial Paradise’ of the English Lake District, a place as yet untouched by the poisoning breath of industrialisation. In America, Thoreau retired to Walden Pond (which only seems to have been a little less isolated from the rest of humanity than we are here in Korea) and had his epiphanies. The rejection of urban life was part-and-parcel of a broader reaction in which modern people sought to re-connect with what they felt was a lost sense of belonging. Often, their rejection of urban culture was shadowed by reactionary disgust for the ‘urban type’. The city was a den of decadent Jewish cosmopolitanism, for example, where the time-honoured ties to the past were swept-away to be replaced by meaningless rituals and transient pleasures. Fear of the mob is a recurring theme in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and authoritarian leaders sought to harness its anarchic energy, while urban planners, such as Baron Haussmann in Paris, aimed to re-plan the city to minimise its potential for social revolt.
As cities expand, engulfing more and more countryside and absorbing more and more people, complex attitudes developed. Charles Baudelaire’s vision of Paris in his poetry collection Les Fleurs de Mal was so controversial because he envisaged Paris as a thoroughly ambiguous place - certainly no Paradise, but nor the kind of Hell one should necessarily avoid and fear, either. Indeed, for Baudelaire’s flaneur – the man of the boulevards - Paris was endlessly fascinating precisely because within it’s clammy embrace the old values and ways of being no longer prevailed. New modes of life were emerging, forged on the anvil of this vibrant centre of modernity, and the spleen Baudelaire vents in his city was the well-spring of his creativity, even as it was premised on a far more intimate awareness of the potential meaninglessness and emptiness that comes when the old certainties and continuities are destroyed. Avant-garde artists in the first half of the twentieth century celebrated a bold ‘machine-aesthetic’, which was meant to be the epitome of modernity in art, and was synonymous with urban life. Only the city represented the Modern, the New, the Now. The English Vorticists jeered at their city-loving Italian Futurist compatriots in the avant-garde for being insufficiently urbanised and industrialised, and so less authentically ‘modern’. Marxists and Marxist-inspired artists, such as the Constructivists, followed the Bolshevik Party in viewing the city as the only home of the truly revolutionary class. In the countryside the peasantry still wallowed in the passivity characteristic of pre-industrial society. The fact that in the Soviet Union urbanisation was at a much lower level than in Britain of Germany was an awkward fact they preferred to ignore. For the Surrealists in Paris, the city was a fantasticdreamscape, an ever-changing setting for reverie and amour fou, essentially unreal and therefore open to endless imaginative transformations. The city, as the Situationist Guy Debord wrote in the 1950’s was the home of the derive - seemingly aimless but wonderfully fruitful wanderings. The truly avant-gardist was thus a Baudelairian flaneur, exploring the streets.
It would be too simplistic to say that the metropolitan city equals open-mindedness and tolerance while those living elsewhere inevitably nurture closed-mindedness. But clearly there is some truth in this assertion. Cosmopolitanism is inextricably bound to urbanization. My sister lives in north Devon, a beautiful part of England, but she often moans about the fact that she is surrounded by people who voted for Brexit. The demographics of that farrago are stark: city NO, country YES. So is the gerontography: old people NO, young people YES. There is, of course, a correlation, as the city is where young people choose to live. But it’s not so clear cut. In fact, the social divide today in the developed world is not so much between town and country as between city and urban, with countryside featuring only marginally. So we need to make a basic distinction between two kinds of urban geography: the metropolitan city on the one hand, and the suburban and small town on the other. A significant development since the 1950s is not just in the growth of megacities but the expansion of vast areas of suburbanity. These urban people are non-metropolitan but not necessarily living in the countryside. It was the inhabitants of such urban places who voted Brexit, not the people who live in the countryside.. These people mimic the city-mind but without any of the benefits that accrue from the cosmopolitanism that is central to such life. Hence their envy and resentment. But the most important divide today, the one that is generating so much social conflict, isn’t city versus countryside. It’s city versus small-scale urban. On a basic level the big city dweller and the small towner or suburbanite share the same mindset.
Suburbia!
The urban life – city or small town and suburbia - is premised not just on humanity’s separation from the rest of the ecological environment but also on its subjugation. This brings immediate advantages. A Master of Fine Art student of mine here in Korea recounted how she grew up in the countryside, and how her work was about the cleanness and glamour of the city life she now experienced thanks to the fact that her family had moved to greater Seoul. For her life outside the urban environment was smelly, unpredictable, and boring. The squeaky-clean new and convenient tower-block in which she lived, like the vast majority of Koreans, was by comparison a kind of paradise, a paradise in which everything is humanly made, and designed to further our dream of emancipation from nature.
I’m not just talking about the green stuff. Planting greenspaces in the city is therefore no solution. The urban mindset is not just an anti-ecological mindset, or a mindset that is ignorant of ecology. Urban existence seems increasingly designed to facilitate the subordination or even the docking of the biological body. In fact, thanks to the pandemic, we are much more aware of the problematic status of our ‘wetware’. The virus is nature at loose in the city, a stark reminder that nature is an enemy. The urban mindset is now being even more entrenched, and we withdraw ever further into the entirely human domain of digital media.
Urban life nurtures an abstract relationship to the world. It encourages the idea and experience of transcendence at the price of the denial of the here and now, separating us from the immediacies of our experience. The big confrontation today is between the vision of the human as disembodied mind the vision of the human as embodied mind. Traditionally, we Westerners think the ‘Orientals’ have a better sense of this corporeal embeddedness. But if North and South Korea is anything to go on, I don’t think this is the case today. Perhaps it never was, and it was just Western fantasy, something we were struggling to recognize in ourselves, and located elsewhere in order to see it more clearly.