Avner de-Shalit and Sunder Katwala
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Does the Identity of a City Matter in a Global Age? 
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Cities shape the lives and outlooks of billions of people, yet they have been overshadowed in contemporary political thought by nation-states, identity groups, and concepts like justice and freedom. Avner de-Shalit’s new book (written with Daniel Bell), The Spirit of Cities, revives the classical idea that a city expresses its own distinctive ethos or values. In the ancient world, Athens was synonymous with democracy and Sparta represented military discipline;
Avner de-Shalit explores how this classical idea can be applied to today’s cities, and explains why philosophy and the social sciences need to rediscover the spirit of cities. Cities investigated include Jerusalem (religion), Montreal (language), Singapore (nation building), Hong Kong (materialism), Beijing (political power), Oxford (learning), Berlin (tolerance and intolerance), Paris (romance), and New York (ambition). Drawing upon the richly varied histories of each city, as well as novels, poems, biographies, tourist guides, architectural landmarks, and the authors’ own personal reflections and insights, they show how the ethos of each city is expressed in political, cultural, and economic life, and also how pride in a city’s ethos can oppose the homogenizing tendencies of globalization and curb the excesses of nationalism. De-Shalit is joined by Sunder Katwala, director of the new think tank British Future, which looks at identity, integration, migration and opportunity (www.britishfuture.org), and former general secretary of the Fabian Society.
Avner de-Shalit holds the Max Kampelman Chair for Democracy and Human Rights and is dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include Disadvantage and Power to the People: Teaching Political Philosophy in Skeptical Times and now The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age.
Sunder Katwala is the Director of British Future. He has previously worked as a journalist. He was General Secretary of the Fabian Society thinktank from 2003 to 2011, and was previously a leader writer and internet editor at the Observer, a research director of the Foreign Policy Centre and commissioning editor for politics and economics at the publisher Macmillan. His support for Everton and Southend United football clubs reflects an upbringing in Cheshire and Essex, though he was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire, to parents who came to Britain from India and Ireland, to work for the NHS.
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February 18th, 2012 at 11:19 am
[...] of Cities, speaking in the UK – on Monday 20th February and Tuesday 21st in London and on the Tuesday evening in Bristol. It’s a lovely book and I’m sure it will be worth getting to one of the talks if you [...]
February 22nd, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Avner de-Shalit opened this talk by telling us that in a world dominated by global markets, the state’s ability to positively influence the lives of its citizens has been eroded. However, the sense of particularity that we all crave can be provided by cities, and specifically by the “ethos of the city” – the dominant set of ideas and goals that the inhabitants hold. It is this ethos that can bolster local democracy, counter nationalistic tendencies and supply the necessary corrective to global homogenization.
De-Shalit and his co-author have studied a number of cities that they see as having a particularly individual identity, and the talk covered two of those cities – Jerusalem and Berlin – in more detail.
Most of the research for the book seems to have been based on walking around each city, making observations and chatting to people on the street. Sunder Katwala, although praising the book as warm and enjoyable, pointed out that this approach cannot truly be described as an academic one, and I began to feel that although de-Shalit’s observations were entertaining, they hardly added up to a theory.
Furthermore, as an audience member accurately pointed out, data collected strolling the streets may be suspect as it will inevitably under-represent those with a tendency to be housebound – the elderly, the disabled and perhaps women.
In the discussion that followed, de-Shalit conceded that not all cities have the kind of ethos he was describing, and that – despite exceptions like Berlin with its current “top-down” imposed mantle of penitence – most cities need a strong, specific, historical tradition to acquire one. Indeed, the imposition of an ethos can only be described as civic branding.
So I put it to de-Shalit that, as important as cities are generally in the global equation, if many (perhaps most?) cities could never have the kind of ethos he saw as meaningful, then perhaps he was overestimating the broader impact of such a phenomenon. Was not the talk merely an interesting – if fairly subjective – look at a handful of unique cities, and that there are in reality few wider ramifications?
De-Shalit naturally disagreed. But I came away feeling that the “ethos of the city” is a fairly rare, difficult to quantify local condition that will have little impact on the vast majority of the world’s population.
February 22nd, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Thank you for the event. Interesting as far as it went. But not enough was discussed about the bridges between cities and how cities exchange things with one another.
The cities you spoke of seemed to belong in a mythical rather than a real context. What about where any city ends and its real context, its raison d’etre, its environment begins; the environment upon which any city depends for its bread and butter and water, and its spiritual refreshment. This environment is being degraded by cities which have neither boundaries nor any means of peacefully communicating with different groups.
Noone seems to have noticed that in this country at least we are completely urbanised. There is no city wall dividing city from city or city from the environment that supports cities. Yet it’s this border that we urgently need to think about.
February 23rd, 2012 at 3:32 pm
[...] by the ever fabulous Festival of Ideas on Daniel A Bell and Avner de Shalit’s new book The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age. The central suggestion here is that a city has an ethos, which they define as ‘a set of [...]