What is the urban in the contemporary world ?

Central concepts of contemporary life such as politics, civilization, and citizenship derive from the city’s form and social organization. The city expresses the socio-spatial division of labor, and Henri Lefèbvre proposes to view its transformation within a continuum from the political city to the urban, whereby it completes its domination over the countryside. The city’s transformation into the urban takes place when industry brings production (and the proletariat) into that space of power. The city, locus of surplus, power, and the fiesta, a privileged scenario for social reproduction, was subordinated to the industrial logic and underwent a dual process: its centrality imploded, and its outskirts exploded on surrounding areas through the urban fabric, bearing with it the seeds of the polis and civitas. The urban praxis, formerly restricted to the city, re-politicized social space as a whole. In Brazil, the urban has its origins in the military governments’ centralizing and integrating policies, following Vargas’s expansionism and Kubitschek’s developmental interiorization (or occupation of the hinterlands). Today, urban-industrial processes impose themselves over virtually all social space, in contemporary extended urbanization. Cities; Urbanization; Urban Health Introduction The relationship between the city and the countryside is situated historically and theoretically at the center of human societies. The city’s domain over the countryside, as the result of the division between intellectual and manual labor and through the market’s command over productive activities, has marked human societies since ancient times, and particularly in the modern capitalist industrial societies to which we belong. However, the adjectives urban and rural, referring to the city and the countryside, only recently gained autonomy in the sense of referring to a range of cultural, socioeconomic, and spatial relations between forms and processes deriving from them respectively, however without allowing the dichotomous clarity that characterized them until the last century. On the contrary, the borders between urban and rural space are increasingly diffuse and difficult to identify. This may occur because these adjectives currently lack their original substantive reference, to the extent that city and countryside are both no longer pure concepts that are easy to identify or demarcate. What are the cities of Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bela Vista de Minas, or any other large, medium-sized, or even small cities in contemporary Brazil or in the world? Where do they begin, and where do they end? On the other hand, what is the countryside today? Does it consist WHAT IS URBAN IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD? 943 Cad. Saúde Pública, Rio de Janeiro, 21(3):942-948, mai-jun, 2005 of remote villages or the outskirts of cities, the so-called “rural area”? Is it large ranches, agribusinesses, or settlements of the Landless movement, in the Northeast, the cerrado (savannah), or the Amazon? At any rate, the definition of the limits and nature of both the city and rural versus urban areas is increasingly diffuse and difficult. Cities in Brazil are defined legally by the city limits of municipal centers and districts (or townships), and thus what are considered urbanized territories and populations include the city limits of towns serving as the seats of municipal districts or townships. However, urbanized areas encompass broad areas neighboring on cities whose integrated urban space extends over adjacent and distant territories, in an expansion process that began in the 19th century and was accelerated irreversibly in the 20th century. In addition, the cities, or the political and socio-cultural space formed on the basis of them, became the center of organization for society and the economy. On the international scale, a handful of cities organize and command major interest blocs and reorder the global economic space 1,2. On the local, regional, and national scales the cities define forms of organization and location of economic activities and the population, provide the references for social identities, and define modes of community constitution. Indeed, central concepts in contemporary life derive from the city’s spatial form and social organization. The Greek notion of polis comes from the concept of politics; the Latin civis and civitas give us citizen, citizenship, city, and civilization, implying the existence of cities. Peoples which did not produce cities, such as the semi-nomads of Americas, were considered uncivilized, as opposed to the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca “civilizations”, even though ethno-historical, anthropological, and archeological approaches now question such classifications and the very concept of city 3. Latin also gives us the term urban, with a double connotation: urbanum (plow) came from the sense of settlement, the physical form of the space demarcated by the furrow of the plow pulled by the sacred oxen, marking the territory for Roman production and life; thence came the terms urbe and urbs, the latter referring to Rome, the Imperial city and center of the world, which disappeared until the resurgence of large cities in the modern era. The term urban was retrieved in the 16th century 4 to refer to the Imperial city, especially the city that was headquarters to the British Empire under construction 5, where the word city 6,7 relates to the financial center London as opposed to the countryside in the Victorian Age. City and countryside, opposite and complementary socio-spatial elements, thus constitute the centrality and periphery of power in socio-spatial organization. Cities guarantee diversity and scale for competition and cooperation in human life. The countryside, which is also diverse, guarantees the homogeneities and production for competition and cooperation, managed by the cities and limited within its growing dependency. The city, according to the prevailing view of political economics, results from the deepening socio-spatial division of labor and the opening to other communities and regular processes of exchange. It also implies sedentary life, socio-spatial hierarchy, and a power structure sustained by the extraction of a regular surplus from collective production, in addition to regular flows of goods and persons between communities. The city thus presupposes the emergence of a dominant class that extracts and controls this collective surplus through ideological processes accompanied by the use of force. According to Paul Singer 8, the city is the mode of socio-spatial organization that allows the ruling class to maximize the regular extraction of surplus production from the countryside and transform it into a food base for its own sustenance and that of the army that guarantees its regular extraction. This therefore establishes what Henri Lefèbvre 9,10 referred to as the “political city”, that is, the city that maintains it domain over the countryside (with the resulting extraction of surplus production) based on political control. In this context, the countryside is the space for production and the city is the space for control of the surplus, the locus of political and ideological power which extracts from the countryside the conditions for reproduction of the ruling class and its direct military and civil servants. According to the heterodox hypothesis presented by Jane Jacobs 11 and rejected for decades, the city has always been more productive than the countryside, which in fact guaranteed its domain, while it often produced the rural space a posteriori. This precedence of the city over the countryside has been reclaimed in the legendary city of Jericho, among others 12. However, Lefèbvre proposes that one consider a continuum of the political city with the