Among attempts to create the concept of the "city," this will surely not be the last. The object of this attempt is to employ Aristotle’s method for working with extreme dualities, which allows us to construct a framework, "final" concept (though this too will surely not be the last).
The first dualistic pair is the "authentic-artificial."
The city is artificial to the degree to which it is engrossed in the idea of its specific forms of existence: design and planning. The artifice of the city finds expression in the fact that its resources are artificial (finances, technologies, etc.). At the same time, the city is authentic. It becomes an authentic phenomenon during its history, begins to exist according to its own laws and throughout the course of history becomes a unique phenomenon.
In this sense, it is interesting to note the attempts made by American cities to outstrip their own histories in the shortest time possible, which is the purpose of city holidays and traditions, the mission of the city. This sometimes violent authentication, in all its seeming naivete, is justified. Similar phenomena occurred in Moscow of the times of Ivan the Terrible, when the doctrine arose, "Moscow is the Third Rome, and the Last." Of course, artificial authentication is absurd, unsupported by history.
The authenticity of the city, extending beyond the limits of artificial substance, lends it an irreplaceable charm and taste: Prague without alehouses is not Prague (the bar U Fleku opened in 1242, which is highly evident in the taste of local beers), St. Petersburg impossible without white nights and floods, Venice not Venice without gondolas, Naples not Naples without song, and New York unrecognizable without the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
The second pair is "technical-natural."
The city is technical in the sense of Aristotle’s techne: it is organized, controlled, procedural, according to its flows of goods, services, communications, information. The city, independent of its size, is cosmic. It is not a purely situational phenomenon. The situationality of the city is in its city politics, in its relations with neighbors far and near, with the surrounding territory (the city usually fulfills the role of organizational center of a territory). The city is a technologically-organized and functionally operative expanse for the vital activity of humans.
Concurrently, the city is a natural occurrence, primarily an expression of the nature of humans. The city is an ancient form of human cohabitation (cave cities) and the social nature of humans: it is in the cave cities that the troglodytic (three-tier) and the bushmen (four-tier) social structures were formed.
According to antiquity, cities arose after the feats of Prometheus and the subsequent gift of justice given by Zeus to humans. Zeus and his consultant, Hermes, set the Promethean division of labor against the universality of the principle of justice: it is possessed by all humans. The city, according to the myth, was the first offspring of justice. Here in the city, any and all may find protection for the sense of justice. Such is the nature of the city and humans.
And, of course, the city is natural in the material sense – flowers, trees, birds, animals; the city is sufficiently wild and untamed, elemental, chaotic and incomprehensible.
At the intersection of the concepts of "authentic-artificial" and "technical-natural," we observe the following quadrants:
The quadrant designated "artificial-technical" is occupied by civilization, which becomes ever more technology-oriented and saturated with infrastructure. Civilization possesses one highly remarkable quality: the more developed it is, the more easily it translates. The computerized civilization of cities possesses ultimate possibilities for translation, a fact which thereby erases differences in the qualities of the civilizations arising in various cities.
The quadrant designated "artificial-natural" is occupied by city culture. City culture is formed as a result of the iconization of specific norms.
This principle can be illustrated by Moscow of the late 19th Century.
In those days, in the springtime, usually during Easter Week, the majority of workers (meaning tens, even hundreds of thousands of people in a city of 1.5 million) set out for the villages of the greater Moscow region, went home, as it were, since these workers were not city dwellers, but rather peasants working in Moscow only during the agricultural off-season and living in the city without their families in barracks and flophouses. They would return to Moscow only after the Assumption, at the end of the agricultural season. They did not take advantage of the city’s benefits and were, according to their own description and the opinion of other city dwellers, outsiders. More often than not, they referred to themselves as "factory workers," or "millworkers," not "city dwellers," and certainly not "Muscovites."
At the opposite end of the social structure of the city were the aristocracy, which considered itself to be something other than "Muscovite" and were rooted in their patrimonies and estates, to which they would retire for the summer. After the workers and aristocracy, together with their servants, abandoned the city for the summer, the students, professors, teachers, actors, artists, and even the army to a great degree, would follow. The city would become almost empty, without personality, due to the fact that the most prominent and contrasting personalities would leave it. In the summer months, Moscow would turn into a grey, Philistine, provincial village, brimming only with trade. Gradually, this shabby, grey, dusty, Philistine, provincial, faceless, summertime Moscow became the indelible image, the stubborn stereotype, and no revolution, whether structural or social, would be able to displace it.
The quadrant designated "technical-natural" is occupied by the Centaur, those objects that have spun out of our control. This is the "second nature," living partly according to technical standards and laws with which we are familiar and partly according to laws unfamiliar to us. In this quadrant, we all experience the feeling of the sorcerer’s pupil who, having made the broom dance, now cannot stop its wild gyrations. Technical water is biologically inert and even toxic to humans, technical love leads not to the promulgation of our species but rather to extinction, the technical climate of cities gives rise to tuberculosis, cancer and other adversities. Living in cities (especially in the US and Canada), both beast and bird have evolved from noble denizens of the wild into pathetic parasites on the hide of civilization, into thieves and beggars.
Finally, the quadrant designated "authentic-natural," is the asymmetrically narrow and quickly disappearing expanse known as "pristine nature," unsullied by human activity, unrecognized and unadapted to our needs. This pristine nature, which Aristotle christened physis, cannot be encompassed by ideas or deeds. This is not to say that physis is concealed in unknown depths, heights or distances: a simple drinking glass holds within itself the same physis that is found among the sand of a beach on an uninhabited island. Every instant, we pass by physis without touching or noticing it. In this sense, the quadrant of pristine nature constricts only in our understanding of it, a fact which does more damage to our self-image than to physis, which exists with complete indifference to us, even in the most urban of territories.
Such are the representations of the city in the expanse of actuality, in the expanse of our actions and activities, where appear all modalities of existence, as well as ideas, interests, motives, intentions. Actuality possesses this causality and color of actual and potential actions and activities.
City actuality is always polyphonic and multi-layered: a municipality and a city of beggars have nothing in common in terms of systematic markers, not in structure, morphology, procedure, not in communications or materials. Thus, for the poor of the Moscow metro, all of humanity falls, morphologically speaking, into servants, non-servants and persecutors (militia, racketeers, etc.). All of our actions, those of the servants, are merely a part of the operational technological chain of the routine of poverty, like letters written by outraged apartment dwellers, the routine of the Municipal Service for Justification of Inaction or Impotence. And it cannot be claimed that this city of beggars or the city of municipal workers is primitive and one-sided – it is just as saturated, both technically and dramatically, as a city of poets.
Since each city dweller performs several simultaneous, social roles in the city (voter, passenger, occupant, taxpayer, recipient of services, consumer, object), each has his or her own unique understanding of that which he or she calls a city, down to the very boundaries of that city. At the same time, the city dweller provides more than a unique description of his or her "own city," employing specific, unique language for this description, unique toponymy, unique city streets and a unique history of the city, including his or her own version of the city’s future.
Reality is just as conditional as actuality. But this is not the arena for action. Reality is non-procedural. More likely, this is, to use a term coined by Heidegger, Gegnet, objective reality in its entire, neutral-infinitive form, and also es gibt, "given," in which es is more than uncertain, uncertain to the same degree to which gibt is definable: Moses received tablets with ten commandments (more than the defined gibt), but they were received from a cloud, a bright light, unobservable and incomprehensible. Objective reality in its uncertainty allows us to fill this void of uncertainty with our own rationale, for which, according to Heidegger, rationale was given in the first place.
Like actuality, reality is plural: there are no pretenders claiming to possess a single, universal reality.
The reality of a Buddhist is emptiness, which is why his or her reality is an absolute silence accompanied by a chorus for reality: "Gunas whirl within gunas." Which is why the city, for Buddhists and their reality, is the same empty space as jungles, deserts, outer space or the inner world of human beings.
In the reality of the Christian, the city and its spiritual and universal lining have an unconditionally ethical nature, from the city hated by Christ, known as Babylon, Rome, Jerusalem, incorrigibly greedy and sinful, to the Heavenly Jerusalem, the City of Our Father, the incarnation of the true life.
The Christian reality of the city transmogrifies into customs within the civilized quadrant (the customs of Heroditus), into morals within the cultural quadrant (Heroditus even defined "morals and customs" as a matter of geography), into salva terra (the city still serves as a refuge and shelter for the hunted and persecuted) within the quadrant of "second nature," and, within the quadrant known as "pristine nature," into the temple of miracles and a place for the performance of miracles, in short, the most natural, simple – and obvious from the Christian viewpoint –manifestation of God.