The Vicious Cycle of Ecological Destruction and Urban Decay

How human environments everywhere have decayed together

Florence, Italy (photo by Kevin Martin Jose on Unsplash)

The mass movement of people from the countryside to the city was crucial to the initial success of the capitalist system.

It’s a claim which needs no introduction and little elaboration. Only with a large permanent population of landless workers to sell their labor to the factories was early industrial capitalism ever going to get off its feet. Though this constituted one of the largest and most sudden social shifts in all of human history, it rarely ever gets a mention, and its effects go largely unrecognized. But this shift has yielded a precipitous decline in the livability of the city and the country both, and this decline has rendered too many people today miserable.

Take European towns and cities built before, say, 1800. Urban life was overall far grimier (if not technically dirtier) than rural life, and to the social elite, the needs of the rural serfs who made up such a vast majority of the overall population far outweighed the needs of the few urban proletariat. And yet, it’s no secret that most people massively prefer the urban design or the walkable, uniform and, perhaps, effortful medieval city to the smoggy, chaotic and corporatized city of today. That’s precisely because the grime of the medieval city and the appeal of the relatively pristine wilderness people could live next to instead made it a necessity for medieval city builders to plan accordingly and build beautifully to attract a living population.

Whenever urban livability dipped an unacceptable level below rural levels, change had to be enacted. When Manchester became known worldwide as a hideous and hostile industrial wasteland of a city and Charles Dickens popularized the image of the desperate proletarian trapped in the inhuman industrialized city, the British government stepped in and reformed sewage systems and pollution laws. And now?

Now, budget, profit, industry and automobiles guide urban planning. As the existence of terms like “urban decay”, “brownfields”, “greyfields”, “dead malls”, “food deserts” and “urban prairies” indicate, the results haven’t been so great for the city. Beauty, art and architecture are all subjective, sure, but that doesn’t…