American scientists have calculated that 23 May marked a historic turning point in our planet's demographic situation – for the first time in human history, the number of urban dwellers has exceeded the number of rural residents, reports the publication “Physorg.com”. The study, conducted by scientists at North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia, used United Nations estimates which projected that by 2010 the proportion of urban dwellers would reach 51.3%. Based on this figure, as well as data on the dynamics of urban and rural population numbers since 2005, they concluded that this is the very day that the symbolic 50% threshold was crossed, namely, the number of urban dwellers reached 3,303,992,253, while rural residents reached 3,303,866,404.
LETA, 24 May 2007

And so, the Rubicon has been crossed; there are more people in the urban world than in the rural. What began in Babylon has reached its climax. The road ahead can only lead downwards.

Of course, one can point to the inaccuracy of such calculations, the approximate nature of the approaches used by sociologists, and finally to the fact that this majority is currently small and it would only take wiping a small town off the face of the earth for urban dwellers to become a minority again. But these are just excuses. The trend is obvious; in any case, as far as it is visible at first glance. To evaluate it, one must look at the historical, social and cultural aspects. Let us start with the historical. A historian would say that the proportion of “cities” or “rural areas” depends on the type of society. In an agrarian society, there are few cities and they are small; in an industrial society, people leave the countryside. It should be added here that an agrarian society is not always replaced by an industrial one, and it has been the other way around: just remember how the barbarians who destroyed and inhabited the Western Roman Empire “de-urbanised” it. Sheep and goats grazed in the streets of empty Roman cities, and vegetable gardens grew in the huge squares. It is known that the city later took ruthless revenge. Every Soviet textbook titled “History of Modern Times in Western Countries (Part 1)” could tell you about England's “urbanisation”, which literally washed people away from the countryside, into flows that the industrial revolution sucked into cities a hundred or so years later. It is hard to trust Soviet historiography, but in this case, there is some truth to it. Similar processes took place in almost all Western countries, and today the same has happened and continues to happen in Eastern and Southern lands. Megacities suck like blood-gorged ticks. Sometimes they burst and splatter the surroundings with the patches of repulsive slums.

Now let us move to the social aspect. Many cities, especially in Latin America, South Asia and Africa, are surrounded by jungles of shacks, bougainvillea and favelas for tens of kilometres. Often, the inhabitants of this circle of hell outnumber the actual city dwellers. Where exactly do these poor people live? What should we call them? What should they be considered? On one hand, they seem to reside in the city, yet they have none of the advantages of city life – no running water, no electricity, no gas, no transport, no social services, absolutely nothing. Yet they cannot be called rural folk – they do not sow, they do not graze, they own neither land nor livestock, and their lifestyle is very different from that of peasants. They are remembered only when they start to riot, and when politicians need their votes (or their lives). I suggest that demographers introduce a third social category: hell-dwellers.

And finally, the cultural aspect. As long as literature has existed, it has included the theme of “city and country”. The most common way the West discusses this topic is through talk of “civilisation and barbarism”. In the last century, a summary of such discourse was created by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, who in general had dedicated his long life to producing various cultural syntheses.

The story of civilisation and barbarism in Borges' case appears as a story of the horseman and the city. The first version of the essay “Story of the Horseman” is dated to 1930, and it contains almost everything found in later versions by Borges: the horseman, the wanderer arrives in the city. His confusion, fear, incomprehension. The gaucho who arrived in Buenos Aires for the first time does not leave his room at the inn for three days. A unit of gauchos avoids Montevideo by a wide berth because herdsmen fear the city. Another band of gauchos raids the small Argentine town of Paraná, but the horsemen cannot think of anything better to do than show off on their horses in the central square and gallop away – mocked by the emboldened townsfolk behind them. The thirty-year-old Borges, as usual, does not limit himself to stories about South American cowboys; the essay features Mongols who do not know what to do with the captured Beijing, centaurs defeated by the Lapiths, and so on. The essay concludes rather banally: “The ploughman gives life to the word 'culture', the city – to the word 'civilisation', but the horseman gallops away like a fleeting storm.” Fifteen years after the essay “Story of the Horseman” was published, “The Aleph” appeared, one of Borges' most famous books. Here, in the essay “Story of the Warrior and the Captive”, the theme is interpreted slightly differently. Borges writes about the Lombard warrior Droctulft, who betrayed his people and died defending Ravenna, which was surrounded by his own tribesmen. The Lombards, of course, were not “horsemen”, they were “barbarians”; and so the theme of the horseman and the city finally becomes the theme of “barbarian and civilisation”. The “city” is the main invention and symbol of civilisation. Borges treats Ravenna, the city – or rather, the City – as a revelation that blinds the barbarian Droctulft. Droctulft “sees a whole made up of many things but without disorder; he sees a city – an organism made of statues, temples, gardens, houses, amphitheatres, vases, capitals, and open, regular squares.” The city aesthetically conquers the barbarian; the same city which, to our modern eyes, would seem half a village: miserable, dirty, unimaginably smelly to our delicate noses, and completely unsuitable for living. But that is not the main point. “The city”, according to Borges, turns out to be aesthetically stronger than “barbarism”.

Let us conclude our reflections with the realisation that today's “greens” are pushing specifically for the aesthetic appeal of barbarism. Well, what can you say – their wonderfully fragrant “green world” is exactly the world from which Droctulft fled to smelly Ravenna.
Article first published in the July 2007 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks