Fusion of Town and Country

[Kamil]

Just read a bit by Engels on the Division of Labor where he focused on the division between town and country, the translation I have uses the phrase "fusion of town and country", he talks about the "abolition of the division between town and country". What actual steps have been taken in so-called Communist countries towards the dissolution of the divide between "town and country" as it were? What does this idea mean to you? How do you envision this actually happening and functioning? It seems very abstract to me, what would it be like?

[Kamil]

25 views and no fucking reply??????

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

You raise some very important questions. I think this is something that has largely been ignored for sometime, to the detriment of the fight for a human community.

Capital has centered life in huge urban centers, drawing in even more than it can use (to the point where many who flock to the cities from the countryside to make a living end up living in vast shanty towns).

The divide between the city and country increases, at the expense of everyone.... The inhumanity of urban life (overcrowded, overpriced, overburdened, etc.) and the dullness of rural life.

How can this be overcome? It will require active, rational planning on the part of humanity. But that can only result from the creation of new conditions. The overthrow of capitalism; the abolition of wage slavery, money markets, class and labor divisions, etc.; the mechanization of agriculture, automation, the carrying out of production to meet human need, etc.; all of these things will eliminate the need to concentrate and confine so many people in such small spaces or keep individuals isolated in the hinterlands.

I think this issue really does deserve more attention. I don't have a lot of specific answers, and I don't have the time to elaborate on the few I do have. I'd be glad to see others weigh in.

[Fulanito de Tal]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Literacy_Campaign

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

There was the "Systematisation" campaign in Romania (of all places), where villages were to be combined into medium sized town settlements to provide services, new housing, water and so on, to make country and city equal; however, this plan was never much proceeded with, and little change was actually affected as relates to the country side; and it was soon abandoned in favour of show-piece redevelopments of major cities in the 1980's.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Modern cities have been developed based primarily on the needs of capital: from cities being located at ports to large suburbs being created so that industry can be concentrated and workers have to commute by train or traffic-jam to get to commercial and industrial centers. Food is produced in large factory-farms and shipped across the country or overseas not because it's necessarily the most efficient for producing good food or feeding people but because it's the most profitable way to do it.

A society with collective and democratic planning would produce to make their lives better, not for profits and so I think breaking down these barriers would happen quickly. Professionals and well-paid workers already go out of their way to try and do this in very limited ways by creating all their yuppie urban gardens and "buy local" morality as well as their desire here in California to create these kind of gentrified "small town" urban communities with corner shops and appartments above commericial buildings and lots of parks and whatnot. I kind of hate this because these people live in a kind of idealistic "be the change you want" bubble, but I understand that beneath all the smarmy liberal moralism is a sense that modern life is not organized in a human-friendly way.

One of my favorite pet-utopian schemes is industrial farming that can be done inside large buildings. Monoculture crops can still be grown in mass inside and the process would make the work less labor intensive, eliminate the need for pesticides, eliminate the need to grow based on seasons, and could provide fresh air and purify water in populated areas. It would also eliminate the need for large areas of land to be set aside for many crops. It's technologically possible to do this now but it would take about a decade for investors to start to see a return - so in capitalism, there is no need for this when the farming industry is already set up for exploiting large chunks of land and cheap farm-labor... it's simply more profitable to produce food in a more harmful way and then ship it to China or Europe or elsewhere.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Cuba may be eliminating the distinction of town and country, but they are doing it in a sort of regressive way. The government has been encouraging people in Havana to raise chickens and growing food in their houses so more agricultural land can be used for things other than feeding the population.

The reason we have not really seen any positive attempts at the erosion of this division is that we haven't really seen any society where production is run based on democratic planning and decision-making. Regardless of what someone's position on Cuba being progressive or socialist or whatnot, crop production has been run on an on again off again basis of providing crops to Russia for trade or now to Europe for trade, not based on what people collectively decide.

[Die Neue Zeit]

One of my favorite pet-utopian schemes is industrial farming that can be done inside large buildings. Monoculture crops can still be grown in mass inside and the process would make the work less labor intensive, eliminate the need for pesticides, eliminate the need to grow based on seasons, and could provide fresh air and purify water in populated areas. It would also eliminate the need for large areas of land to be set aside for many crops. It's technologically possible to do this now but it would take about a decade for investors to start to see a return - so in capitalism, there is no need for this when the farming industry is already set up for exploiting large chunks of land and cheap farm-labor... it's simply more profitable to produce food in a more harmful way and then ship it to China or Europe or elsewhere.

That's not utopian at all. It's being implemented and will be implemented as I speak. There's vertical farming in large warehouses, and then there's vertical farming covering entire skyscrapers.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I suppose I meant utopian in the good sense, not the pie-in-the-sky sense. But in the pop-sci articles I read about this, the engineers were suggesting that this could be done as the primary source of crop production.

I guess the pie in the sky aspect would be thinking that capitalism would implement this change without being forced to either through regulations or necessity. Maybe fuel prices would make shipping produce great distances too unprofitable, creating an opening for this in capitalism. I'd rather things not get to that point though.

[syndicat]

Kropotkin proposed agricultural green belts around towns so the population, or a good portion, could spend some of their work time doing agricultral work.

K.'s concept was adapted by Ebenezer Howard to his concept of a "garden city." Altho the lingo was adopted by capitalist developers, Howard had in mind a decentered city with self-managed neighborhoods that would control their own land collectively, and would include a mix of residential, distribution, education and arts in all the neighborhoods, which would be separated by greenbelts that would be working agricultural areas, along the lines suggested by Kropotkin.

the city would be "de-centered" in the sense that there would not be, as there was in the early 20th century capitalist city, a tendency to concentrate services and control at a single center, the "downtown". the "downtown" is a purely capitalist product...due to the way land values work in urban areas. the office and commercial uses, being very concentrated, tend to have higher market value than industrial or residental uses. Industrial, because it is very land-intensive, tends to have the lowest market value. zoning schemes were just a regularation by the state of the practices of capitalist developers.

but the auto-centric suburbanized city is "de-centered" but not in the way that Howard had in mind. developers of residential housing want the lowest cost solution so they go to greenfield developments with no services, and the state & utiltiies bear the infrastructure costs of far flung suburban homes. services are concentrated in a malls or shopping centers, typically sited for freeway or highway access.

so you have vast areas of single family homes with no services in walking distance...what feminist critics call "lonelyvilles". this is the opposite of the sort decentering proposed by Howard, with a mix of uses and services directly available to residents in each neighborhood within walking distance. this is important if we're to get away from the ecologically unsustainable auto-dependency. and the various neighborhoods of the "garden metropolis" would be separated by greenbelts but united by an electric rapid transit railway, so people would have ready access to things of interest in other neighborhoods. and some things could not be replicated in all neighborhoods...such as a regional university or a big hospital.

Howard was a utopian socialist and the thing about speculation of this kind is that we don't really know what the mass of the people would do if actually empowered to control their society.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

It should also be noted that a number of ideas around this question sprung up in the initial period after the October Revolution.

The idea of garden cities, originally inspired by the socialistic Novel "Looking Backward" gained some support. Linear cities too. And constructivism, which was also interested in city planning, arose.

Magnitogorsk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitogorsk) was originally supposed to be constructed as a linear city.

The furthest attempt to break down the divide between city and country came later. The constructivist architect Mikhail Okhitovich argued for something called "disurbia," in which series of connected single-unit dwellings would be spread over large areas. The constructivists were basically driven out of public life as the revolution degenerated. (Okhitovich was kicked out of the party, rejoined, and was kicked out again. "Disurbia" was rejected, the journal of the Organization of Contemporary Architects was criticized by the politburo and then closed after it backed disurbia, and Okhitovich was imprisoned and then killed after he criticized the rising nationalist tide and cult of personality around Stalin. "Socialist realism" and classicism took over.).

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_urban_planning_ideologies_of_the_1920s):

"The disurbanist school was led by the theorists M. Okhitovich and M. Ginsberg. In contrast to the urbanists, the disurbanists saw the achievement of the Marxist goal of the dissolution of the difference between town and country as the total abolition of the traditional concept of the town. They proposed that settlement be dispersed across the whole of the Soviet Union in the form of continuous ribbon developments. Individual dwellings would be distributed along roads in natural and rural surroundings, but within easy reach of communal dining and recreation amenities. Employment centres would be located at road junctions, with bus services transporting workers from their houses. Whilst individual living space would be private, the disurbanists proposed a communal lifestyle similar to that proposed by the urbanists.

"Proposals put forward by the disurbanists included Okhitovich’s 1930 plan for Magnitigorsk which consisted of eight 25km long ribbons converging on a metallurgical plant. Ginsberg imagined that Moscow’s population be emptied and resettled in long linear zones of communal houses through forests, serviced by bus stations and zones of recreation and service amenities at regular intervals."

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

I should also probably mention the "social condenser," which was promoted by the constructivists. The idea was to contribute to the break down in divisions and hierarchies with the use of architecture... so that, for example, two different kinds of work spaces (maybe a train office and a radio station) would overlap, causing people to interact instead of being walled away in specialized areas... or public spaces would be placed in a way to draw in people from all walks of life.