Tuberculosis and green space in cities
City Green Areas (%) Annual Death Rates (%)
London 14 1.9
Berlin 10 2.2
Paris 4.5 5.1
The smaller the green areas in a city, the more tuberculosis.
ployed at the expense of rural populations; the growth and development of industrial centers drains the countryside of its population. Of necessity, this has had a profound effect on the overall structure of the village. For generations, the rural agricultural family has cultivated its plot of land: the new generation leaves for the city, where work in industry promises a better living standard and access to cultural activities (consider too that the farmworker is paid the most miserable wage and that the backwardness and the dispersed nature of rural settlements makes it difficult for the rural poor to organize; in contrast, by the very nature of its concen-tration, the city facilitates the organized struggle of the working class). Small farmers are dy-ing out or are bedy-ing ruined, and small land ownership is effectively disappeardy-ing. Migration to cities, driven by the engine of the production system, occurs in an entirely haphazard man-ner. The deciding factor is not ability, education, or one’s free choice of a vocation but the im-peratives and requirements of industrial and corporate labor. Proof of this contention is provided by C. C. Zimmermann and Lynn Schmidt in their article “Migration to Town and Cities,” published in the American Journal of Sociology.
Cities experienced rapid growth from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. Their im-portance in the national economy increased. The metropolis becomes the focus of economic and cultural life; seeking work in industry, people leave the country, where agriculture is in-capable of providing employment for all inhabitants, and flock into the cities. The mass influx into cities is further exacerbated by the fact that birthrates in the country are considerably higher than in the city (because of the absence of cultural constraints, as well as the lack of knowledge concerning contraceptive practices). The whole process is completed by the in-dustrialization of agriculture, which induces ever larger numbers of the rural population to mi-grate into cities and enter the urban labor market. Thus the overcrowding of cities increases even more.3The surplus of work applicants, made worse by the continuing mechanization of production and the mass exodus of rural populations, produces a state of continuous over-population in the cities, besides causing a decline in wages and salaries and an accelerated rise in unemployment: in short, it lowers the living standard of an ever increasing number of the population, concentrated in the cities.
The end result is the wholesale proletarianization and pauperization of ever wider segments of the population: the urban housing shortage and its ensuing health defects must, therefore, be considered an inevitable consequence of the debasement of the material standard of broad segments of the population. The modern metropolis, a center of culture, civilization, and wealth, is also a place where “everything turns even more ominously into its opposite, and the same forces that produce wealth turn into sources of misery” (Marx)—that is, a place that har-bors the most unbelievable conditions of social, hygienic, and general human deprivation, in-cluding the twin scourges of poverty and housing distress. “In contrast to the village or the small town, the cultural sophistication of the metropolis is greater only because the number of people who truly benefit from it has become smaller. The increase of the living standard of a small portion of the overall population has effectively resulted in the curtailment of the liv-ing standard of the majority” (R. Unwin). The prodigious prosperity of the city center is set against the monstrous decline of social and hygienic conditions in the proletarian districts,
3) See Capital, vol. 3, chap. 2: “It is in the nature of the capitalist system of production to continu-ously reduce the agricultural population with respect to its nonagricultural counterpart, for in in-dustry (in the narrow sense of the word) the growth of constant capital in relation to variable capital is linked to absolute growth, or, if you wish, to the relative reduction of variable capital; while in agriculture, the variable capital required for the exploitation of a certain piece of land decreases, and can increase only with the increase of the agricultural territory, which in turn presupposes an even greater growth of the nonagricultural population.”
demonstrated most graphically by the twin phenomenon of the accumulation of wealth on the one hand and of misery on the other. Both result in the all-around exploitation of the working class: it is not only in the factory that the workers’ energy is sapped to exhaustion and his health is destroyed (not just in dingy, smoke-filled workshops, but even in seemingly hygienic, well-lit modern factories, which undermine the worker’s health by the merciless tempo of speeded-up assembly lines that disregard fatigue and exhaustion, and where machines are not adjusted for appropriate work, conditions necessary for physical well-being and the re-duction of stress); but the same is done in the worker’s dwelling as well, in the rental barracks to which industry consigns its robots, which destroy the physical strength and the health of its inhabitants even more violently.
The changes that took place in the social structure of cities during the nineteenth century can be readily identified by reading their plans. The nineteenth-century street block violates the medieval uniformity of the facades, as the house is transformed into an independent element that expresses the individual taste of its builders or owners. The stone adornments of the fa-cade are trimmed according to the wishes of each individual owner: the bizarre potpourri of the facades announces to everyone that the tastes of the rich have been indulged to the fullest.
Influenced by early capitalist land speculation, site plans were introduced that included su-perfluous streets not because they were necessary for traffic, but simply because such a sac-rifice of land proved to be good for profit: both the parcels and the streets increased in value.
Nineteenth-century site plans — especially those of the era of the Gründerjahre [founding and pioneering years]—paid no attention to the effects of such layouts on the quality of the apart-ments, the overall plan of the city, the higher cost of water and sewage lines, and so on.
Ownership rights clearly took precedence over the requirements of health and hygiene. Cur-rent building codes are an embarrassing compromise between the interests of the so-called public (i.e., the interests of property owners as a class) and the interests of private ownership, trying to exploit for profit different categories of land rent, such as location and width of av-enues, height of buildings, floor area coverage, and access to light and air and to green areas and parks in the city — as well as exploiting the locational advantages of sites located near the greenbelts surrounding the city. The greatest decline in the art of city building set in at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century: it was during those decades that we witness the building of the most inhuman and brutal type of rental barracks, with their dreary rear alleys, and developments that are placed on the building site without the slightest concern for proper orientation toward the sun and open space.
The contemporary city is concentric and centripetal. It is a concentration camp. The center of historical cities were fixed since medieval and frequently even Roman times; access roads to markets became their main traffic thoroughfares. All attempts to solve the problems of con-gested centers external to the old center, attempts at decentralizing as well as transplanting the heart of the city to other, more open locations, have proven futile. In reality, the center is determined by the singular circumstance of its location, and the transformation of the me-dieval square into a business center of modern capitalism can be accomplished only by de-molishing and rebuilding old city centers. For these reasons, the transformation of the medieval city into the metropolis of modern capitalism had to start at the old center of the city:
it is from the center that the shifts of social patterns have radiated outward during this cen-tury (see Leo, Grosshaus und Citybuilding [Mega-house and City Building, ca. 1928]).
The center of the city did not adapt. The old city was too old. Useless. It was a city built for pedestrians, horse-drawn transport, and pushcarts. It found itself at odds with the era of rail-roads, subways, streetcars, automobiles, and aviation. From the Middle Ages until the dawn of the machine age, the world did not move with great speed. During the last one hundred
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