Macrohistory and City Futures

How do cities, impacted by the current context of tumultuous upheaval, manage the change process? The traditional tools of strategic and urban planning seem blunt in the face of the combined challenges of population growth or movement from rural to urban areas, the cost of infrastructure, pollution, and meeting basic needs for water, food, housing and energy. Are there deeper patterns or synergies that may be used to make wiser decisions about creating better urban futures? This piece explores these synergies within the city, examining the macrohistorical models of thirteen thinkers and applying them to the city as a cultural unit. The twelve perspectives they developed were chosen for their diversity and for the contribution they make to the field of cultural change. They are Augustinus Aurelius, Nikolai Kardashev and Freeman Dyson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Riane Eisler, Pitirim Sorokin, Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar, Ibn Khaldun, Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, and James Lovelock. The first task is to identify links between the key themes of macrohistorian X and macrohistorian Y. What are the commonalities amongst the different macrohistorical perspectives about the city? Within the twelve models, three grand patterns can be discerned linear, cyclic, and spiral macro-histories. Linear models of historical processes depict critical changes as irreversible and evolution as progressive. There is a distinct starting point, and an undeviating path forward. Cyclical models assert that history follows a rise and fall, or expansion and contraction, pattern; there is repetition of particular patterns of events. Spiral models suggest that history folds back on itself: there is progress in some areas and cycles in others. (Inayatullah 2002: 172) In this spiral conception, historical processes are both linear and cyclical, just as light exhibits both particle and wave properties through different frameworks or experiments.