Last year I decided to become more familiar with what was going on in fiction—I tried to keep up on the reviews of books in the NY Times and read a good number of books that were still cooling from the printing presses. I also targeted a few genres that I ignored--science fiction (actually, I read more slipstream stuff for its creativity and unusual pathos.)

This year I will concentrate on literature written in architecture and city planning. I think a lot about how urban spaces are organized and presented and how cities fit into the larger world. My dissertation deals a great deal with how networks of cities fit into the process of nationalization. My argument is that Rhenish cities developed a new collaborative politics, regionalism, that allowed them to promote themselves politically, culturally, and economically into national affairs. According to the fellowship essay I am writing:

Rhenish regionalism was different from the particularism (or provincialism) that preceded it. Rather than insisting that the independence of culture and politics should be preserved and protected, the emerging regionalism stressed the contribution that local culture and politics could make to the nation. The nation that Rhinelanders imagined was composed of regions in cooperation with one another--each unique and self-supporting, all intertwined, none dominating the others. Rhenish regionalism set forth the notion of a "nation of regions."

What set Rhinelanders apart was the extreme urban development (the Rhine-Ruhr conurbation is the birthplace of urban sprawl) and their worldly outlook (very commercially-minded people). I figure that city-related studies would be a big help.

The first book on my list has given me a lot to think about. No, not reconsideration of my topic, but theoretical pay dirt! John Friedmann has been kicking around for decades; The Prospect of Cities (Minnesota, 2002) is a short summation of his thinking in urban studies. A short summary of his Weltanschauung would be that cities must maintain a variety of resources (economic, political, cultural, social) to keep both connected to and competitive in the global network of cities. That development of resources depends on increasing autonomy for cities, increased organization of regions by cities (creation of city-regions), and cooperation between cities in networks.

Friedmann claims the existence of a hierarchy of cities. First, the developed and peripheral worlds a determined by their access to the accoutrements of urban civilization (cultural life, communications)--whether its cities are part of a system that is directed outwardly toward the world or inwardly toward the problems faced by the nation. Thereafter cities are divided by function: global/financial, national/political, and regional. The success of cities is a reflection of how connected they are to the global urban network; peripheries are outside that network (perhaps only invaded for the purposes of exploitation.)

That being said, cities must engage in wealth creation in order to compete and collaborate in the global urban network. The resources that need to develop range a variety of human and economic needs: everything from education to health care to parks to natural resources to environmental health to infrastructure. Cities must cultivate the well-being and development of residents, democratization and legitimacy, and connections to the larger world. For successful cities, the will to develop and innovation must be internal (even if the capital might come from outside.)

Perhaps up to this point this will all seem to be common sense. What interested me was Friedmann's assertion that development requires the creation of a city-region unit. According to Friedman, "The city is dead." No longer are there sharp differences between settlement density. No longer is there a distinctive city that is vastly different from the rest of the world. Instead, one must look at the degree to which urban qualities have penetrated an area. In this sense the urban extends beyond the political boundaries of the city itself. The city-region is an autonomous entity that integrates surrounding areas into the work of the city. The city becomes the focal point for the management of the resources of the hinterland, including their protection for economic and financial reasons. The problem that naturally arises is that the notion of a city-region, which is somewhat bottom-up, comes into conflict with the administrative units that the state has arbitrarily developed. The territories that states create aim at uniformity in order simplify rule. City-regions are unique organisms that are uniquely situated in history and in space. Each represents something unique in the global urban network, something which administrative units attempt to suppress. Survival requires that cities become actors in a larger field. They must become more like city-states of the past. They must work within a given hinterland; they must conduct some fashion of diplomacy on their own.

Friedmann's theories neatly reflect ideas that I have been trying to work out in my research. In the early nineteenth century the Rhenish cities struggled to maintain their independence against the growth of national power. Despite being defeated, they reinvented themselves to achieve global goals without separating themselves from the nation-state. If Friedmann is right, that cities must move toward greater autonomy from the nation while organizing more tightly locally, are we not seeing some reestablishing of the pre-1815 balance between cities and states? From an administrative standpoint, the nation-state would just be an anomaly in history: dead two centuries after its birth.