Urban Excursions

Modern life seems to be a progression toward ever larger urban experiences. My roots lie in the prairie landscape, in the fields and farms and rural schools that are inexorably dwindling. But such roots—which are anything but “humble”—can no longer be maintained in today’s world. Adulthood, for me, has been a migration into the urban landscape.

But every city is twofold. On the one hand you have the buildings, the walls, the architectural foundation—the empty shell in which urban life unfolds. On the other you have that very urban life, comprised of people joined by social bonds. The 7th-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville termed these the urbs and the civitas, respectively. For him, the essence of the “city” was the inhabitants, not the building stones. In this way, too, the city isn’t rooted geographically, but exists where its citizens dwell.

Or is this duality so concrete? Literature and life has long proven the urbs and the civitas to be undoubtedly interconnected. Perhaps urban life really takes place in some compromising middle ground, where citizen and edifice interact. The civiturbs?