Five Reflections on the Mittelpolitan
Going back to the beginning, inspired by Alan Jacobs
A little over ten years ago, over the month of May in 2013, Alan Jacobs—an English professor and scholar of many diverse things whom I’ve read, followed from platform to platform, and occasionally corresponded with for years, though we’ve never met in the flesh—starting sharing on one of his blogs (which at the time was being carried by The American Conservative) a series of “City Meditations.”
I can’t remember what exactly I was thinking about or aspiring to write about in the spring of 2013, but something about those meditations captivated me. They aren’t available on TAC’s website any longer, but fortunately, thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can still find all of them online (I’m going to comment on each one below). It was his eighth meditation, where he talked out his then-upcoming move from Wheaton, Illinois (which is nominally a distinct small town, but is actually an indistinguishable part of the Chicagoland suburban agglomeration) to Waco, Texas (a much smaller urban area, but very much its own distinct, stand-alone city) which particularly fired me up. When he wrote that most people, when they speak of cities, have in their minds “the world’s very largest cities, the ones where wealth and power are most dramatically concentrated,” something clicked for me: what, then, was the “city-ness” of Wichita, the distinct city of not-quite 400,000 people in south-central Kansas I lived in? (That was basically its population then, by the way, and is still basically its population today; Wichita’s population growth through the 2010s and probably throughout the 2020s is likely to hang around .5% per year).
As I elaborated in a post I put up on May 17, 2013, the day after Alan had put up his:
The literature on cities as the vanguards or birthplaces of basic liberal and cosmopolitan insights and practices--pluralism, tolerance, individual rights, civil society, economic specialization, political freedom, trade--is vast. But so is the literature on the qualities and virtues of rural and small town life--participatory democracy, communitarian solidarity, self-governance, authenticity, agrarianism, long-term sustainability. It really isn't at all difficult to express cities and country life, with their various marginal cases, by way of a couple of broad types: city life is liberal and individualistic and fast-paced and consumption-based and filled with opportunity and risk; country life is conservative and socially restrictive and leisurely-paced and land-based and filled with attachment and "satisficing." Neither type is fully accurate, of course, but they have their theoretical uses. Do mid-sized cities have a similar use? If only to help us think about environmental and economic and civic and moral problems, so as to give us as human beings--social creatures that we are--a handle on the difficult problem of tipping points: when is a city too small, or too large, to be able to legitimately associate itself with this or that particular end? I don't know. I don't know if it might be that, throughout history, the mid-sized city (which, in my mind, is some combination of: 1) geographic isolation (which itself is a technology-dependent judgment), and 2) a population from 100,000 to 500,000 people--but what do I really know about it?) has actually filled some important, unstated, conceptual hole in our social imagination. Then again, maybe there isn't anything at all unique or worth particular respect when it comes to the mid-sized city--maybe, in terms of their public amenities and urban problems and environmental costs and economic opportunities, they're just communities stuck midway between either growing/bloating to some sufficient/too-big size, or shrinking/reducing to a more-reasonable/less-productive scale. And, of course, constitutional matters--local empowerment, federal arrangements, and all the rest, come into play here as well. Perhaps a mid-sized city, unlike huge metropolises, can be managed in a way so as to cultivate the sort of practices associated with small town environments, or perhaps they can be developed so as to attract, unlike rural areas, the sort of investments and opportunities that normally require a significant critical mass of people. Or perhaps both such possibilities are pointless goals, utterly inappropriate to the average city which is neither large nor small enough.
I don’t know if I should feel embarrassed or impressed that what I wrote down just over ten years ago is still as clear an expression of my curiosity with and concerns for what I came to call “mittelpolitanism” as anything I could write originally today. Maybe both? I’ve learned a lot since then, and refined my thinking quite a bit. But what I sketched out back then is still my animating intellectual drive, at least insofar this topic goes.
In any case, if you’re reading this, that means you’re someone that, hopefully, has at least some engagement with this topic, broadly speaking, and some interest in what I have to say about it. That interest could be grounded specifically in how Wichita’s mid-sized-ness contributes to (or complicates) thinking about questions of governance, environmental and fiscal sustainability, political legitimacy, and or just the city’s news of the day; or it could be grounded more broadly in how larger urban trends across the country, and the world, and how those trends play into the ways we articulate basic cultural and social question, can affect or be affected by the particular phenomenon and struggles and successes of cities that are not small or shrinking, but also are not primary nodes of the flows of people and capital and reputational branding power upon which so much of the contemporary global urban economy, and our reflections within such, depends. Either way, those are some pretty high and abstract stakes, to be sure. But to the extent that my thinking about mittelpolitan places was kicked off by Alan’s ideas, then I make no apologies for reaching so high, because Alan himself is about as lofty a thinker as any I know.
Alan published ten meditations; not all of those, looking back on them 10 years on, can be fit into what I’ve learned and what I’m still trying to find a good way to say about mittelpolitan places, but a fair number of them can. So, as a start to what hopefully will not be another decade of thinking but coming to no publishable conclusions about mittelpolitanism, let’s dive into the Pensieve and see what I’ve discovered, or at least have questions about, with Alan’s meditations as my guide.
His first and second meditations drew upon the comic book Transmetropolitan, the revival and transformation of Times Square in NYC during the 1990s, and an essay on the musician Tom Waits. The conceptual linkages between all these are the related ideas of urban corruption and urban courage—that cities are inevitably sites of both diversity and discovery, as well as dissolution and danger. Being able to navigate such things allows one to access source of inspiration and creativity, but only if one lives a life of sufficient open-mindedness and courage (or perhaps just enough individualistic bullheadedness) to not be frightened away by it all. Some questions which this meditations raises for me that I’d still like to answer are: are “corruption” and “courage” relative? Is there some baseline size or demography necessary for an urban space to be taken seriously (by whom? and meaning what, exactly?) as a source of creative energy or as a threat to one’s body and soul? Artists and journalists and creatives are presumably not flocking in large numbers to Wichita, KS—and yet, are we not the “big city” to young creatives in the small Kansas towns of Winfield or Pretty Prairie? And aren’t there similarly Wichitans who move out to those places, because the pace and the complicated costs of living in urban Wichita become too much for them? Or would we be right in considering all such responses simply foolish—because the promise and threat of “the City” can’t reside in a mid-sized place? Some of these questions gave rise to one of my earliest “Mid-Sized Meditations” (the label I long used for the ruminations of the earlier version of what I’m attempting to do here), but it’s a set of interrelated questions I need to return to.
His third meditation applies some of the above considerations to the matter of Christian spiritual formation (Alan is a deeply commited evangelical Anglican), especially in regards to the fact that the Christian story of salvation, as drawn from the Bible, has an urban, rather than rural or pastoral, society as its heart: the “new Jerusalem.” Drawing on the sermons of Tim Keller, Alan takes the “numbers argument” seriously: if humans are made in God’s image, shouldn’t Christians want to such around images, and the opportunities to serve and and be blessed by them, as much as possible—which means going to where the greatest number of diversity of such images of God are to be found? When I thought about some questions tangential to these years ago, I found myself thinking about Harvey Cox, one of the earliest Christian boosters of urbanism, and how, as smart as some of his claims were, there was a self-justifying technological and progressive (and deeply Protestant) boosterism to his treatment of our disenchanted urban modernity; Christian formation, I thought then, needed to be supplemented by an agrarian, rural stability, even if it needn’t reject the creative destruction of the city entirely. I could, and should, think about this some more.
His fourth and fifth meditations pick up on his first two in light of his third: if cities constitute and form—and, therefore, also warp—us in various ways, then that invariably brings up certain reactions that we, as individuals capable of making decisions and taking action, much confront: do we embrace the city or do we flee it, and whichever one we choose, are we so doing because we are looking to return to or preserve some isolated, Arcadian past or present, or because we are looking to create or change or reform our existing environments, urban or otherwise, into something Utopian? Spider Jerusalem, the hero of Transmetropolitan, fled the city for his health, returned to it (and found himself both rejuvenated by though ultimately exhausted by that return), and then fled again; Alan counter-poses this to Machiavelli, who wrote with frustration regarding his exile from Florence, and yet also waxed poetic about the luxuries of the mind which his retreat afforded him. So is the country retreat, the exurban homestead, an Arcadia—or perhaps (because Machiavelli and Spider both had at least certain resources they were able to bring with them from the city) a built Utopia in its remove from urban reality? Or in leaving the urban tumult, were they abandoning their ability to build something better there? Or, yet again, is the attempt to “build something better” is the midst of the dangerous and diverse delights and opportunities of urbanism itself an misguided Utopianism, a misunderstanding of what the urban means? All these questions can be cast into yet different lights when considered in relation to a mid-sized, slow-growth city. Might it actually be the case that tens of millions of Americans already live in urban environments which balance the kinds of liberty and stability which these different Utopian or Arcadian visions imply? Or maybe the surburban experiment of the past 70 years has just been one long, evironmentally and fiscally ruinous pursuit of such? I’ve sometimes connected my own thoughts concepts of space (both Utopian and Arcadian) to questions of liberty, environmental and political sustainability, and civic identity, but actual formation? The fundamental social envisionings of those who make a home in the city vs. the country, to say nothing of the people who live in cities in-between? I’ll have to think more about that.
His sixth, seventh, and eighth meditations move in the direction of those thoughts and questions which were—and remain—most fundamentally engaging to me. He begins once again with ideas of formation and perception, and using William Hogarth, C.S. Lewis, Juvenal, J.R.R. Tolkien, and William Shakespeare, explores how the city—and its opposite, the wilderness or the empty (an thus both untouched and holy and alien and foreboding) forest—is a commanding, absolute, transformative context. People go to city and are forever changed; people go to the mountains and nothing is ever the same again. Which perhaps suggests that the places which are neither, the suburbs or exurbs (depending on how one defines the term), the places with one foot in urbanism but also one foot outside of it, the places that might be considered the odd bastard of misconceived efforts to create Utopian or to retreat to Arcadian places without really owning up to either impulse entirely, are left behind in the formation game, at least not when it comes to our mythologizing of our spatial contexts. While Alan doesn’t mention it, that self-interested mythologizing is probably at work when we are obliged to put specifics to our spatial experiences: we make our social worlds, our cities or our forests, most dense and populated and diverse, or more desolate and dangerous, than they actually are or were Medieval cities were actually cacaophonious, and modern cities actually pretty safe, when all of history is considered. So we have to come back to perceptions: when the whole world has essentially urbanized, but some urbanites know they aren’t experiencing urbanism in the way they imagine it supposed to be—or, more likely, are just unaware of the urban drama around them, because their perceptions blind them to it—what is to be done? In his final meditation, Alan—who was, remember, at the time about to move from the much-mythologized urban agglomeration of Chicagoland to very mittelpolitan Waco, TX—sums up: “Those who live somewhere other than the Countryside or the vast City must content ourselves with stories about our lives that are not fundamentally place-based, that do not derive their contours from the particular configuration of homes and workplaces in which they dwell.” The question of perception, and the stories we tell ourselves, has been a recurring theme in all my own interrogations of life in Wichita, KS. What does, or what can, a mid-size city see in itself in relation to the wider world? In relations to its own common resources? In relation to the conservatism associated with non-dynamic places, or the liberalization that is an unavoidable concomitant to urbanism anyway, or the conceptual divisions such electoral and cultural realities pose? Good and still unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) questions, all. (And this isn’t just for me, but for Alan as well; as he just recently wrote, now in connection to thinking about Augustine’s The City of God, “cities are in a sense rhetorical acts, saturated with symbolic and even archetypal meaning.” So these questions haven’t gone away for him either!)
His ninth and tenth meditations take questions of formation and perception in two new directions. First he thinks about “home” as a place which, in our minds, oscillates: the city is too busy, but the countryside is too quiet; both places can be locations which we want to “get back home to.” Perhaps that perceptual oscillation is a natural, or at least logical, way of dealing with a very human response to our social conditions; perhaps attempting to combine dyads spatially will never satisfy, and we’ll always feel out of place in any place that lacks its own mythic integrity, as both “the City” and “the Country” do? And yet his second, and really final substantive meditiation, pushes against that suggestion, as it turns to the flip side of the lawless and/or undisturbed, beautific and/or terrifying, forest: that is, the actually productive countryside, the rural world of bounty upon which cities (as William Jenning Bryan said long ago—“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country”) fundamentally depend upon. So perhaps what is most needed is a perception of how the more sustainable, more agrarian, more integrated-with-its-surrounding-country city might articulate itself, make itself part of the spatial conversation? I’ve probably come closer to making some kind of actual sense in response to this question than any other, but still, more work needs to be done. And it does, I think, truly need to be. Another one of Alan’s parting thoughts when he closed his meditations—and a particularly insightful one—is that those who are “not fundamentally place-based” (whether or not one fully agrees with that formulation “may be a preservative against an idolatry of place that can produce both arrogance (in relation to those who live elsewhere) and weakness (in relation to the imperative of self-formation).” So Wichita, and Waco, and other places like them, whatever else they may not have, might be understood to posesses, in their mid-sized connections to the actual productive mechanics and necessities of our lives on this earth, the conceptual tools to be urban without being idolatrous? An interesting idea, that.
Okay, this has been long and fun, but also way too theoretical for starting off this new (or at least rebooted) exercise of mine. Next time, I need to do what I promised myself in my new (rebooted) introduction to this online space, and maybe just write something short updating my thoughts about the race for Wichita’s mayor. If anyone is out there, maybe I’ll see you then.