2023-09-18 19:40:00
On occasion, you will have encountered some individuals who have referred to the cities of New York, Chicago or Santiago de los Caballeros in Guatemala as places worth visiting. They praised, perhaps, the skyscrapers of the former: the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the Seagram, the Sears Tower, the Monadnock, or the convents of the latter: the Capuchinas, Santa Clara, Santa Catalina, Concepción, and Santa Teresa. If you visited them you could delight in their shows, with the Rockettes or with the processions during Holy Week.
Now I want to invite you to reflect on the previous paragraph. Typically, as in the beginning of the paragraph, people refer to the city as a place: New York City is a place worth visiting, or I want to go to Chicago. However, in the second part of the paragraph when they refer to it they mean the physical structure of the city that consists of the buildings and streets. And as we see in the last part of the paragraph, they also refer to the people, the inhabitants: the Rockettes, the processions. When it is said that New York City was shaken by the disaster caused by the September 11 attacks, we are talking about the people and not the place or the buildings. This ambiguity in the use of the term may be acceptable, although I doubt it, in casual conversation, however, it is unacceptable for a serious analysis of the city and the city. That is why I consider it necessary to first define the terms that I will use in this exposition.
The city is a type of association. It is an association of producers who are also free traders who aim to live a prosperous life. The Greeks called it polis and its best system of government, according to Aristotle, one constitutional and of laws, politeia. Our word city comes from Latin civitas, which means the group of citizens freely associated to live in harmony. The Romans called his type of government Res Publica which means matter of public interest. And what was in the public interest was the freedom of each citizen. Tacitus tells us:
«The kings owned Rome in the beginning; Lucius Brutus has given freedom to the Romans.
What did he mean by this? Let’s see, what kind of concept is ‘freedom’? A concept is ‘relative’ when it is the case that its relation to something else is a necessary condition of its existence. It is ‘correlative’ when that relationship occurs in both directions. Freedom is a ‘correlative’ concept, that is, it is explained in relation to something else. For example, the term ‘son’ is correlative, since it is explained in relation to the term ‘father’, and the latter in relation to the term ‘son’. The same happens with the term ‘slave’ which is explained in relation to ‘master’, and the latter in relation to the former. In the same way, ‘freedom’ is only explained in correlation to ‘master’ and ‘society’ and the latter in relation to the former.
Let’s examine this relationship. Solon tells us that a slave is one who is subject unconditionally under the command of another man. His bondage is brought about by arrogant attack and maintained by the physical force of others. But the fundamental point for Solon here is that a peasant, for example, was at the mercy and vulnerable to attack and subjugation by physical force against himself and his family, by the one he wished to enslave them. The essence of slavery then is the use of force or the threat of force against someone by other men, without regard to laws or legal adjustments.
Solon remedied this situation of disorder and eliminated the slavery of the Athenians with the city, under a ‘good order’ (Eunomia) focused on justice (dike) and in written laws. Thus he freed the Athenians, who were to be protected against those who initiated force against them, by means of written and universal laws that could be enforced by everyone. The men who were now ‘free men’ (eleutherous), that is, not slaves and who were contrasted with the previous slaves (doulien), they constituted a state eleutherous (of free men) that existed in opposition to an enslaved one or tyranny. So for Solon, a free man is a human, Attic, without any master, whose personal autonomy within the polis She is protected from the attack of her companions and foreigners or barbarians.
It should be noted that not any group or community is a society. Only one where its members are free partners. Freedom, then, always refers to relationships between men. A man is free as long as he can live and act without being at the mercy of the arbitrary decisions of other people. The solitary, isolated, self-sufficient man will be autonomous, but he is not free. He is at the mercy of anyone who is stronger than him. The strongest guy has the power to kill him with impunity, or to enslave him.
Freedom is a condition of man within a contractual civil society. Social cooperation under a system of respect for individuals and their ownership of the means of production means that the individual is not obliged to obey and serve a feudal lord. As long as he gives and serves other people, he does so for his own pleasure with the purpose of receiving a reward in return or a service from those served. He exchanges goods and services, not forced labor and tribute. He is not independent, commercially speaking. Rather he is interdependent with the other members of society. This interdependence is mutual. As a member of a contractual society he is free because he serves others only by serving himself.
The concept of freedom is not applicable to nature or physical laws. Man cannot ‘free himself’ from the restrictions imposed by nature. The concept of freedom does not make sense in this context. It makes no sense to say that one is not free because he has to work to live.
So the essential principle that distinguishes freedom from slavery is: the principle of voluntary action versus that of physical coercion. Freedom in a political context is the power to act without being at the mercy of the coercive and arbitrary power of the state – and nothing more.
The function of the government in society is the protection of the freedoms of citizens, or in other words, their individual rights. The principle of individual rights, being an extension of morality in a social system, imposes a legal constraint on the use of government power: it must refrain from violating the rights of citizens. Individual rights serve as protection of the individual against the use of arbitrary force by the majority by subordinating power to law, to what is morally correct, just. Kant recognized that rights are a moral principle, an antecedent condition for the constitution of society or the State, which for him is a union of men under the rule of Law, a law that is derived from what is morally correct. This union, whose conception of the term many authorities credit to Kant, the Germans called Rule of lawor what in Spanish constitutes a State of Law, that is, a State where the government is not above what is correct, what is just, ethics, universal norms of right conduct, the law .
It is a concept similar to the Anglo-American Rule of Law, but with emphasis on moral correctness. In a Rule of law Citizens have their individual rights guaranteed by a Constitution and are legally respected. The government is instituted for the sole purpose of ensuring the rights of citizens, protecting them from criminals, and the Constitution is written to protect the citizen from the government. It is explicitly declared in this way that individual rights replace any social or public power.
The rights of man can only be violated through physical force. Only through violence can a man or a group of men deprive another or others of their life, their liberty and their property. Only through physical force can they rob him, enslave him, prevent him from acting to achieve his own ends, or force him to act against his own rational judgment. And anyone who uses force to violate the rights of others is a criminal. To resolve these cases the city has legal protection against criminals.
The law is the collective organization of the individual right of self-defense, the right to defend, even by force if necessary, one’s life, liberty and property. This right of self-defense precedes the law. The latter replaces individual forces with collective force to persecute and punish anyone who violates the right of a citizen. It thus serves to guarantee the integrity of people, their freedoms and their properties.
The use of collective force, which is the union of individual forces, cannot be invoked for any purpose other than self-defense. Therefore, the law that has force as a necessary instrument cannot have legitimate dominion beyond the legitimate dominion of force. The purpose of the law is the protection of the rights of the citizen, and the limit of the law is those same rights. The right is what is just; The privilege is the unfair.
Citizen, then, is the person who can enjoy all his rights: right to life, right to liberty and right to property, rights protected by the Body Political. Citizen means ‘free man’, he is the ‘eleutheros’ of the Greeks and the ‘for’ of the Romans. This meaning, of ‘free man’, can also be seen in the English word ‘freeman’ which means citizen. And it is the reason why the revolutionaries of the French Revolution designated themselves as citizens.
The city is the architecture of the city. The word is derived from the Latin word city which means the factory surrounded by walls of a town. The city is the set of buildings, streets, squares, parks, infrastructure facilities, monuments, aqueducts, walls, etc. Its fundamental structure is its layout or the addition of the successive layouts that constitute it. Due to being surrounded by walls and the main mobilization within them was pedestrian, the ancient cities were compact in layout in order to increase their population density and bring the services within them closer to the largest possible number of inhabitants.
The layout that forms the urban fabric is structured by a primary plot or network. This is made up of the main circulation routes, unique spaces and green areas. The secondary plots divide the primary ones. They are the transversal streets included between the arteries of the primary network and form a more flexible network and of less structural importance. An urban microstructure composed of alleys, open or covered passages and neighborhood patios divide the secondary plot. The urban structure with its three frames is superimposed on the natural and topographic elements of a site. The city is the compact physical structure with high housing density where a town with a political order resides. The city expresses through its buildings the political order of those who build it. Thus, the city of a monarchical regime, of a tyranny, or of the city, expresses its respective political orders in its buildings.
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