SPACE AND CULTURE: THE CASE FOR LAND RIGHTS
by Hune Margulies, Ph.D.
The Continuum Ethnicity-Culture-Space and Urban Planning
The basic argument is that culture develops within the framework of the continuum culture-community-territory, where the term community can be replaced by historic ethnicities. In order to preserve and reproduce culture, the connection between the three elements of the continuum must be maintained. In order to create a new culture (or cultures in general), different ways of connecting new continuum paradigms must be devised. In the case of the city realm, urban enclaves posses the seed potential to constitute the territories within which the resident community develops, preserves and reproduces culture (new or old). Furthermore, in order to exist and persist, a cultural community requires access to a residentially based settlement on a territory over which they exercise a modicum of control.
The relationship between culture and space is established by positing the premise that there is a continuum between space, community and culture[1]. Local culture is a function of a local community in a local space. From an urbanist's perspective, the key element is the localization of culture, culture as it crystallizes and develops at the level of the neighborhood and the region. Culture and space are inherently connected. Culture, being a social category, requires a community to be its bearer, and the community requires a space in which to interact. It is from the interaction between members of a community within the bounds of a territory they share, that the process of local culture creation and reproduction gets under way. Local cultures emerge in the context of a deep and multifarious connection between a community and the local territory they inhabit. Likewise, community emerges in the context of a space imbued with its unique culture. In order to create a local culture, a local space must be demarcated. In addition, only local cultures are small enough to emerge in the context of relatively more intimate communities. Intimacy, which requires face-to-face, walking-distance type communities, is one of the foundations of the intentional society[2].
In order to create a group culture, any common culture, not just "ethnic" ones, space is a prerequisite. Culture is used here in its anthropological, life-style, definition. Culture, as a social construct, emerges in the context of a given period of a community's life, a process of evolution and interaction within and with its own space. A people cut off from its territorial and administrative continuity, whether through colonial domination, exile, or a combination thereof, will experience loss and irreparable damage in terms of its ancestral culture[3].
Only a community can create a culture and only a culture provides the shared identity underlying community. In traditional terms, local cultures were known as ethnic cultures. In modern terms, we can talk about regional diversity and the richness it brings to the larger society. We also talk about new ethnicities. New ethnicities are the creation of the pluralistic, large city. These new forms of ethnicity are formed on the basis of cultural affinities in local spaces. There is no ancestral blood-lineage to these new ethnicities, there is instead an identifiable cultural (and class) affinity and its territorial component[4].
In conclusion, we can argue that culture, in the pluralistic and democratic city, is no longer associated only with ethnicity. New ethnicities create new cultures without the recourse to of their traditional nation-state spaces and structures. Cultures no longer need a state to provide a boundary and a containment structure. New ethnicity cultures derives their legitimacy not from a national flag or from the state's imprimatur, but instead, new cultures are developing quite freely and independently from any national cannon. This phenomenon is happening right here, in the neighborhoods of large cities, and on the basis of multi-ethnic, multi religious populations. What's still missing is the full fledged intentional planning program that would allow these cultures to reach fruition as urban utopian spaces.
One important distinction: historically, the continuum existed between territory, culture and ethnicity. The terms ethnicity and community adopted an almost interchangeable significance. The ethnic make up represented also the initial visible bearer of the culture of the group. Every cultural creation expressed the parameters of expression and esthetic sensibility of a given ethnic time and place[5]. The modern pluralistic cities however, as discussed above, are beginning to succeed in the break up of the biological component of ethnicity, rendering culture a freer agent of communal creation. But the evolution of ethnicity from ancestral blood-referent to non-blood referent, is a phenomenon that results in an even stronger opportunity for local cultural creation. As urbanists, we pose and emphasize the concept of the local. Urban planners deal with the local, with the circumscribed realm of a city within the global nation, and it is within the local, the micro, the neighborhood, that the planning profession operates best.
The question then arises: being that space in the cities has already been configured to reflect and abate social distinctions, how is urban space to be transformed or re-configured in order to serve as the infrastructure for communal reconstruction. The answer to that may lie in some of the proposals argued by advocates of communalism, and more specifically, by an approximation to the model of spatial culture exhibited by the Hasidic community. As planners concerned with the issues of space and community, can we device spatial and administrative means to rescue the communal aspect of territoriality in the modern large cities? Can we design spaces that are apart, though not apartheid spaces? The danger is unintentionally, but nonetheless materially, to revert back into old forms of spatial discrimination.
The Hasidic Litmus Test
One way to approach the real implications of an analysis of spatial issues, in the context as used in this study, is in the form of the establishment of policy precedents. One case where precedents are most useful is when confronted with the issue of when should spatial tolerance be practiced and when it should not be. The Hasidics help this discussion by offering us a litmus test: Only those groups meeting the Hasidic test: that of being both a persistent people and an intentional societies will be allowed, as a matter of policy, a measure carefully crafted spatial tolerance. Groups pursuing exclusionary-racial agendas will enjoy no such tolerance. The Hasidic case helps to sharpen that essential distinction between segregation and intentionality. In our largely segregated cities, where space is often used to advance class or race agendas, using the Hasidics as a litmus test helps us define the precise contours of where, how and when spatial policies become either communitarian or segregational. The Hasidic case study help us define the distinction between space as a cultural enclave and space as a ghetto or an apartheid.
The Hasidic litmus test consists of five main components to the legitimacy of urban-group spatial claims:
1. The Hasidics are not an ethnic group in the conventional biologically-primordial sense of the term. Hasidics are first and foremost a religious group which has originated within a given, larger ethnicity, that of the Jews. The Hasidic’s ethnic origin, which is similar in this sense to the ethnic origin of most religious minorities, does not circumscribe them within the confines of an ethnic identity. The Jews themselves are hardly a monolithic ethnicity, though they may be viewed as such from the outside. Many religious groups have originated from within single ethnic histories, only to evolve, as history permits, into a more culturally-centered polity. Histories of suffering under racial and ethnic discrimination only helped root the ethnic origins of smaller religious groupings at the expense of their more cultural characteristics. Therefore, in terms of litmus test, should a similar spatial claim as that of the Hasidics be raised by a given group, the first litmus test is to ascertain whether the membership in that group is defined on the basis of culture or rather on that of a conventionally defined biological ethnicity. When both, culture and ethnicity coincide, the test is what gives meaning and definition to the other: is the culture defined by ethnic membership, or the ethnicity is defined by open cultural affiliation? The Hasidic case reflects mostly the latter option. This also applies to the case of what is often referred to as the new ethnicities[6].
2. The Hasidic enclave is a cultural enclave, not an ethnic, racial or class enclave. Their spatial policies are not ethically or materially comparable to those of race or segregated class type of enclaves. Hasidic enclaves impose no physical barriers, gates, guards or permit tags on cars. Should a given group raise a spatial claim, the second litmus test is whether the intention behind the enclave is the advancement of cultural life style contents or the exclusion of ethnic others.
3. The Hasidic enclave was established on the basis of an intentional social agenda. Should a group raise a spatial claim the third litmus test is whether or not the intention behind the enclave is the advancement of a shared social, political or economic programme. The Hasidic agenda, coined in religious-messianic terms, can also be understood within the secular context of communitarianism.
4. The Hasidic enclave is not exclusionary but open, in the sense that all those who so chose are able to convert and join the community. Moreover, whether joining or not, moving into their neighborhoods or villages is not restricted to members only. Should a group raise a spatial claim, the fourth litmus test is whether residence rights are restricted or instead are open to all citizens wishing to partake of their social or religious vision.
5. The Hasidic exclusion of outsiders is not based on race or class, but only on life style considerations. (broadly defined to include culture and religion). This type of exclusion is not necessarily inconsistent with the democratic and pluralistic nature of the city. In fact, in a private property system, any group, in principle, can collectively purchase land and settle there only those whom they deem to be eligible for membership. The key issue is how and on what basis membership is selected. Should a group raise a spatial claim the fifth litmus test is whether culture is used with a racial, class or other discriminatory connotation, or, contrary to that, if all who so desire are able to potentially become eligible members and gain full access to the group's spaces and institutions.
With these distinctions in mind, we are now in a better position to examine public policy towards enclaves and other forms of spatial separation so prevalent in the city. The Hasidic litmus test therefore is whether a group raising a spatial claim meets all or a combination of these five characteristics. In other words, When do spatial policies of cultural resistance become a problem for the democratic, pluralistic city? The answer is when the Hasidic litmus test fails.
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[1] The continuum issue is separate, and to some extent, independent from the other two. Also the double issue of autonomy-confederation is, by some accounts, a separate matter. However, basic intentional theory holds autonomy, and the confederation of autonomies, to be the corollary of the programme of dismantling the external state. The Anarchist goal of dismantling the state cannot be achieved, according to this view, unless the political nation reconstructs its space into autonomous communities federated with each other into larger units.
[2] See John Dewey in Liberalism and Social Action. According to Dewey, the restoration of community in American social life must start with what he calls the privileging of the intimate personal intercourse between members of smaller communities. The face to face, the small communal interchange is the model of community to be pursued by concerted social action.
[3] Witness again the cases of Tibet, which is a combination of exile and administrative colonialism, the cases of the Basques and Catalans, which are mostly of an administrative nature, and the case of the Jews which included uprootedness on an almost total scale.
[4] See Latitudes and Attitudes for a study of how market research is able to identify cultures, attitudes and desires, predict trends and target tastes with pinpoint accuracy simply by studying the residents within a given zip codes or census tracts.
[5] The alternative to local culture was the belief in global civilization, an all encompassing universal standard of culture against which all others are measured. Once this belief in the universality or superiority of one given culture adopts an activist agenda, what emerges is colonialism and imperialism.
[6] For a discussion of the concept of new ethnicities, see Les Back, New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives, UCL Press, 1996. Also, John W. Bennett's The New Ethnicity, Perspectives from Ethnology, West Publishing Co. 1975. Classic studies of ethnicity, though not using the term "new ethnicity" have nonetheless strongly advanced the concept of ethnicities as "constructs". A construct is a new creation. In our study, the attempt is made to draw from the concept of new ethnicities political implications for urbanism, in particular within the context of libertarian municipalism. New ethnicities are cultural communities that can best persist and reproduce in the context of a communitarian structure of urban space.
© Hune Margulies, 2000
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Sacred Spaces: City Planning and Spirituality in Ancient Indigenous Societies:
The relationship between Indigenous village planning models and the sacred nature of the natural realm will help elucidate important issues concerning the spatial, social and political organization of ancient Indigenous communities. We will show how Indigenous cosmological beliefs translated into the concept of sacred space and how, from that, it flows a particular city planning culture. While some research has been conducted on Mayan architecture and on their political organization, this study will bring together separate research strands into a unified interpretation of Indigenous society through the perspective of community planning. The study will be conducted through the examination of sites in the field and through extensive bibliographic research. The research is expected to last one year. This research aims to contribute to a better understanding of Indigenous spirituality through a careful and detailed examination of their approaches to, and models for, the spatial design and political administration of their cities. On the reverse side, this study also aims to better interpret Indigenous society through an analysis of the interrelationship between concepts of sacred space and the way these concepts have been put to use in their specific practices of city planning.
The reason to undertake this study from this particular spatial-spiritual perspective, is that it is our belief that within the context of a city’s planning policies, many different strands of a society’s culture come together into play. Studying the spatial culture and social organization of a society gives us a privileged and unique vantage point from where to evaluate the society’s multifarious attitudes towards issues in human relationships, in concentration of power and distribution of democracy, class divisions and housing rights, membership in a given citizenship and its implications for the creation of a national-cultural identity, as well as to issues of mutual aid, physical hygiene and ecological planning. In the case of the Indigenous communities of Latin America, being those societies imbued with a deep and manifestly spiritually based cosmology, one of the most fruitful ways to understand the depth, subtlety and intricacy of their beliefs is to examine the practical behavior they exhibit and the concrete attitudes taken towards their natural and ecological surroundings. More specifically, we will focus on the ideological principles guiding the application, extent, manner and processes of implementation of policies in the areas of Indigenous city planning.
We will also show that a better comprehension of the Indigenous spatial culture will help shed a new light on some of the factors that have contributed to the demise of their early political society. In temple-centered cities, cataclysmic changes for the society as a whole, have often followed the compromising of the status of their temples. In this context, we will describe and explain the Indigenous hierarchical continuum of sacredness. The Indigenous hierarchical continuum of sacredness was manifested in the establishment of a central sanctorum space of and for the temple, and in the flow emanation out from this point of ever decreasing measures of spatial sacredness to the rest of the periphery of city space. This hierarchical-emanation model will help elucidate aspects of the initial strength and the subsequent weakness of ancient Indigenous societies. We believe that more research in this area of Indigenous city planning is needed and its results will help clarify many significant aspects of ancient Indigenous spirituality.
There is one additional aspect of interest related to the application of ancient Indigenous planning principles to issues in contemporary urbanism. These new applications can help reassess and revalue the spiritual significance of Indigenous philosophy and spirituality. Specifically, from the Indigenous spatial culture, as it will be examined in this study, we will be able to derive principles of considerable impact for the elucidation of issues in cultural conflict resolution, especially in regions of the world where societies must plan their cities around and in reference to spaces imbued with spatial sacredness.
This study intercrosses interdisciplinary areas of study bringing together academic fields into one unified research project. We believe this interdisciplinary study is important and worth pursuing for its scholarly contribution to the understanding of the unique relationship between the spatial culture and the spirituality of ancient Indigenous societies, and also for the contribution that this understanding will have on the cultural discourse of urbanism in general.
© Hune Margulies, 2001
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