I recently revisited two seminal works in urban studies — Susan Roberts’ (1991) critique of urban life cycles and David Harvey’s analysis of the body politic (2003) — that made me reconsider how we talk about cities. We often hear spaces, especially urban ones, described as living organisms: neighbourhoods as thriving, lively spaces and spatial decline as an ailing disease. At first, these metaphors seem intuitive, even useful. But as Roberts and Harvey reveal, they do more than just describe urban life — they shape how we understand it, often in ways that justify exclusionary policies and obscure structural inequalities. The former makes for an extensive account of the medical and visual vocabulary of the body, like localities as “cells” (Roberts 1991, p. 432) and urban degradation as deteriorating health. The latter centres around the use of the loaded and essentially contested term “body politic” (Harvey 2003), evaluating the implications of treating an urban space as a human body that ages and should be purified from pathogens.

I am reminded of one of the modules in high school geography that introduced us to the idea of naturalist taxonomy in geography as a sign of the discipline’s claim to being a ‘natural’ science. It was to mean that physical phenomena are seen as just as fundamental as physiological ones. ‘Eye’ of the storm, ‘mouth’ of the river, ‘face’ of the Earth and whatnot. But Harvey and Roberts help one see how these metaphors distort both an academic’s and a policy practitioner’s view of social realities. This distortion is motivated by the interests of the power elite — the state, as in the case of Singaporean authoritarianism and/or capitalists as is the case with many American urban areas — who create a master narrative of the urban space as an organism; and at some point, this analogy becomes an ontological truth.

Then, the socially powerful and sympathisers of the status quo use claims of environmental determinism and survival of the fittest to justify such organic metaphors for their benefit. This is evident in how the rhetoric of the city as a body politic is weaponised by naturalist claims of “purifying the body” (Harvey, 2003, p. 27). Since the body is perceived as a product of “natural processes” that “produce” and “diminish” it (p. 33), the city’s health is framed as contingent on purification — whether through segregation, apartheid, or untouchability. These are then justified as inevitable rather than as deliberate social and political interventions. Similarly, Roberts critiques the idea that urban spaces undergo scientific life cycles of birth, crescendo, and ultimately death. This leads us to see the slow decline and “final decay” of cities as a naturally “inescapable process,” one that merely acts upon passive, powerless objects (Roberts, 1991, p. 434). The consequence? The social and political choices leading to urban degradation are conveniently obscured, reducing human agency to irrelevance.

This, of course, ties into a larger reality: such obscuring of human agency is a form of knowledge production, inextricably linked to power dynamics. The discursive elements of capitalism and authoritarian governance work to cultivate a widespread sense of social pessimism. The belief that today’s urban fabric, overtly capitalist and dehumanised, is the final and permanent version of our civilisation forces us into a position of resignation. Instead of challenging these oppressive structures, we merely find ways to survive within them. This affects people’s conception of human agency, reducing it to a pursuit of futility. If we accept urban decline and social fragmentation as ‘natural,’ then human endeavour itself seems incapable of countering the so-called inevitable course of evolution.

Yet, this is precisely why I see this conversation to be both urgent and necessary: because organic metaphors are deployed to de-weaponise human initiative and agency, the project of collective action becomes even more critical. For Harvey, collective action will not eliminate the body politic, but it will determine who governs it and, consequently, what its interests, tendencies, and policies (or as he calls it, “the nature of the task”) will be. Similarly, for Roberts, conscious human intervention does not only postpone or minimise the effects of natural evolution. In turn, it actively creates alternative realities that are more optimistic.

All of this will require a collective understanding of the monumental role played by ideology in shaping both the world and its spatial configurations. Ideology possesses a generative force; it does not just reflect reality; it constructs it. What we perceive as organic realities today—the decline of cities, economic flows, the ‘purity’ crisis of spaces—are not neutral or natural. They are the deliberate constructions of an ideology, one that prioritises capital accumulation and exclusion above all else.

This urgency extends beyond urban spaces. In institutions, organisations, and communities, activism and collective action remain indispensable in pushing back against the covert tactics of the power elite. They make us believe that the rules they have created and the structures they have instated are mere manifestations of nature’s will. Yet, we must disillusion ourselves with this falsehood. The responsibility of dismantling these narratives—and by extension, the structures that sustain them—rests upon us.

Of course, we cannot hijack all processes of nature, or for that matter, even the contemporary economy. But as Griffith Taylor would argue, we can establish a middle path with nature (Meyer and Dylan M.T. Guss, 2017), one where we engage with our environment not as passive subjects but as active agents shaping our realities. The only refuge left for us is in a call for collective consciousness, followed by collective action.

References:

Harvey, D. (2003). The City as a Body Politic. Bloomsbury Academic.

Meyer, W. B., & Guss, D. M. T. (2017). Neo-environmental Determinism. Springer.

Roberts, S. (1991). A Critical Evaluation of the City Life Cycle Idea. Urban Geography.12(5): 431–449.

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Madiha Tariq studies Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. Her academic interests include cultural studies, urban anthropology, critical theory, and questions of identity.