To an extent Gandhi, whose time in England coincided with the Garden City movement, located India’s freedom movement outside the urban city. It raises concerns for what lies ‘outside’ as set up with a disadvantage – country, nature, wilderness. But even as the urban imaginary fueled the profession of planning, it also anchored itself in the humanities, becoming a fertile ground of critique, particularly among dialectical thinkers who argued the problematic nature of an edge constituted by a difference asserted by the city. Its bid to plan cities grew in competition with the metropolitan movement which advocated large centered cities in a field of smaller ones. It began with the influential Garden City movement that advocated and implemented cities of an arguable size, density, economy and amenities surrounded by greenbelts of ‘country’ across the world, including India. The 20 th century was given to the urban city. This way the idea of the urban has literally replaced the walled city with the urban city, an entity that expectedly is often clearer in the mind’s eye, maps and descriptions than it is on the ground. But whatever it is asserted to be, it is intended to clarify an edge of difference, enabling designers, historians, and an array of social scientists and activists to distinguish the city from a non-city or a lesser-than-city such as suburbia, exurbia, urban sprawl, country, rural, wilderness, and nature. The city, writes Robert Park of the ‘Chicago School’ of urban sociology, is “a state of mind, a body of customs and tradition, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition.” His colleague, author of the influential “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” defines the city as “a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals.” Today, the competing definitions of the city will fill a book. Others see them (additionally perhaps) in a trajectory of growth from a historic origin (often walled). To the majority of them these limits are in an applied statistic, such as density, land use, literacy level, economy, or infrastructure. With the idea of the urban replacing walls, the limits of the city are a matter of assertion and agreement and their presence on the ground, a professional enterprise in the hands of planners and administrators. As the house has its household gods, so has the city its protecting deity, its local saint.” “What his house is to the peasant,” he writes, “the city is to civilized man. This lesser, rebellious field, which secedes from the limitless one, and keeps to itself, is a space sui generis, of the most novel kind, in which man frees himself from the community of the plant and the animal, leaves them outside, and creates an enclosure apart which is purely human, a civil space.” It is the urban at work when Lewis Mumford describes the city as a work of art where “ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and self-conscious society.” It is again the urban that permits planner and historian Peter Hall to deploy an even stronger metaphor of containment to describe the city: “a unique crucible of creativity.” And it is what facilitates historian Oswald Spengler to see the city as the equivalent of a house. t is purely and simply the negation of the fields. It is the urban and not necessarily walls that allows José Ortega y Gasset to define the city as “an enclosed, finite space over against amorphous, limitless space. It gives the city a limit, an inside and an outside. In this capacity the urban is an idea by which people articulate and distinguish a city in the manner that walls once did, viz., as a clear and distinct entity that occupies and exhausts a portion of the earth surface. The word urban is generally taken to mean “of, pertaining to, or comprising a city.” But it has increasingly come to refer to that which distinguishes the city in the absence of the walls that once presented it as something set apart from its surroundings, something that claimed to be different and defensible.
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