Such cities are far from museums, however; rather they are places where people can live well, whether or not they’re rich; where those from all walks of life are neighbours; where there is time and space to talk, think and socialise as well as to work, where neighbourhoods have distinct identities and communities are strong. Such cities are heterogeneous both in their fabric and their society; they are tolerant places where public life thrives and democracy flourishes.
Jane Jacobs gave a perfect description of a wise city when she wrote about daily life in Greenwich Village, New York, during the 1960s.1 She described what she called ‘the ballet of Hudson Street’: the everyday comings and goings of residents, visitors, traders and shopkeepers that kept her mixed-use neighbourhood buzzing. The street was busy during the mornings and evenings as people did their shopping on their way to and from work, cafés were crowded at midday as workers ate their lunch, and bars and restaurants thronged from early evening into the night. The myriad of personal exchanges that took place in this “ballet” of intertwined lives created a strong sense of local identity, Jacobs noted; a sense of communal ownership that encouraged people to look after the street, and by extension, one another.
She recalled one incident in which a little girl was seen tussling with a man on the pavement; before she could decide whether to descend from her third-floor apartment to assist, she noticed that the couple who ran the butcher’s shop in her building had already emerged with determined looks on their faces, and the man who ran the delicatessen opposite was also watching closely. The struggle turned out to be a false alarm (the man was the girl’s father); the point was that, rather like a pathogen falling into a healthy microbial community, the disturbance was immediately noticed and help was on hand if needed. Hudson Street shopkeepers acted like neighbourhood policemen; they knew everyone, and made it their business to know what was going on.
The wise market
Although Jacobs didn’t pay special attention to the role of food in forging such social bonds, it was clearly pivotal. The delis, butchers, cafes and restaurants where locals and strangers mixed and regulars got to know each other formed the matrix through which the community was built. The same has been true of every great city in history, from Ur through Athens and Rome to Paris, London, Mumbai, Rio and Tokyo. Food markets were the archetypical public spaces of such cities, where people from all corners came to trade food, goods, news and opinions. The greatest of all was arguably the Athenian agora: a melting pot of food, politics and commerce where democracy itself was born. An irregular sandy compound dotted with plane trees and fringed by stoas (colonnaded public lounges), the agora served as a food market, law court, place of entertainment, ceremonial space and open-air assembly, where citizens gathered to vote. Athenians of all stripes came here to shop and socialise; Socrates himself was often to be found holding forth by the fish stalls. As the ultimate space of the hoi polloi, the agora was a vital counterbalance to the exclusively male dinner parties (symposia) held behind closed doors by the Athenian elite, which were the subject of much suspicion and envy. Such tensions between public and private power have always featured in urban life, and wise cities have always found ways to balance them—and to do it visibly.
The fact that Socrates chose to deliver his subversive musings in the agora says everything about him—and about it. Like all major markets, the agora was a great social leveller… anyone could go there and do or say anything; and anyone spouting nonsense would soon be put in their place. Surrounded by rotting fish-heads, any pomposity would soon be brought back down to earth. Although the world’s first experiment in urban democracy was far from perfect (the exclusion of women and slaves being one of its more glaring defects), the act of holding the citizens’ assembly in the open market was a stroke of genius. By placing politics directly among the common people, the city inoculated itself against the scheming and corruption likely to breed when elites met behind closed doors. It was, one might say, a wise move.
Food is central to the creation of wise cities because it is the prime creator and animator of urban public space. What Jacobs’ Hudson Street and the Athenian agora had in common was the quality of a place frequented by everybody; where the mundane rhythms and patterns and everyday life built up over time to create a sense of community, identity and belonging. Food is critical to such a process because it expresses more powerfully than anything else what we all have in common; whoever we are and whatever we think, we all need to eat. We may eat differently, but by the time our chicken bhuna, spaghetti alle vongole or beans on toast has morphed into bone, blood and muscle, we are all essentially made of the same stuff.
Table manners
This commonality in diversity, so characteristic of food, is also the defining quality of good public space, itself the indispensable medium of a wise city. Public space hosts encounters with the “other”, which in turn breeds the tolerance and respect we need in order to be good citizens. By articulating what we have in common, public space enables the shared engagement without which society itself could not exist. Crucially, it is learning to act in such negotiated space—whether celebrating some public ritual such as a national holiday, or simply haggling over a carrot—that we become social beings; just as, when we are children (if we are lucky) we learn to share food and converse around the kitchen table.
In a sense, the wise city’s public realm is the kitchen table scaled up. It is a place where everyone is welcome, where everybody has a voice, where commonality is celebrated and differences negotiated, where daily life is acted out and trust and empathy built over the course of many years. Above all, it is the space of everyman and woman; the crucible in which society is forged. A wise city, in short, is one that embraces the complexities of hospitality, bringing strangers together, nurturing them and making them feel at home.2 In this sense, it is the opposite of the smart city, with its emphasis on everything being as quick, lean and efficient as possible, leaning as it does towards technological, rather than human, values.
In this sense, the wise city is a necessary counterpart to the smart city, whose principles are more aligned with the ruthless calculations of capitalism. Jane Jacobs’ life’s work, indeed, was spent in fighting such figures as Robert Moses, a pioneer of smart city thinking who wanted to sweep away her Greenwich Village neighbourhood in order to build a new expressway. Jacobs won her fight; yet, half a century on, the battle still rages. In cities across the industrialised world, mixed neighbourhoods such as hers have been steadily eroded by the combined forces of development, privatisation and gentrification, while the family-run businesses that once knitted communities together have been decimated by global chains such as Starbucks and Pret. In traditionally wise cities such as Amsterdam, Venice and Barcelona, long-term residents have been ousted by the scourge of Airbnb, while the public realm has had the life sucked out of it by the internet.
It’s not hard to see how such developments threaten the very fabric of society. Every social function once performed in the market square or high street—buying food, trading, socialising, swapping news and gossip—can now be done online. As the 2021 storming of the US Capitol proved, however, the internet is no substitute for public space. On the contrary, it is a place where malicious or misguided lies, rumours and conspiracy theories are harboured and propagated, to the point where democracy itself comes under threat.3 In the US, UK and increasingly elsewhere, tens of millions now believe the 2020 US Election was stolen, that Covid was a hoax or that Democrats are devil-worshipping paedophiles. Previously rational societies are fragmenting before our eyes into a series of mutually antagonistic cabals motivated by hatred and distrust. A society further from wisdom is hard to imagine.
The question of how we respond to such threats is of far more than merely academic interest; it is existential. Social disintegration doesn’t come from nowhere; in this case, it stems from the failed promises of late capitalism and the privations and resentments felt by the majority arising from the steady accumulation of power by a shadowy elite (we are back in the agora with the hoi polloi and their rightful distrust of shady symposiasts). It is in the context of today’s vast inequalities of wealth, power and opportunity that any discussion of a wise city must therefore sit.
Cradles of democracy
Returning to our original question, then, we might say that wise cities are cradles of democracy, and that their preservation represents nothing less than our last bastion against the disintegration of urban civilisation itself. Critical to such cities’ survival is the provision of physical spaces and contexts in which people can gather in order to share thoughts and ideas and build empathy and trust. The protection of such public spaces is therefore paramount, and essential to the functioning of those, in turn, is food, our oldest and greatest connector.
Food’s role in the socio-political lives of wise cities is crucial, yet its importance doesn’t end there. It has two other pivotal roles to play in the realms of prudence and common sense. Firstly, food is of course critical to our health; no wise city would feed its citizens a diet that made them overweight or ill. Secondly, food is critical to the relationship without which no city can survive: that with the countryside. Historically, the food markets, where people came to eat and mingle, were also places where the countryside came to the city: where farmers shared news, cows mooed and fruit and vegetables were seasonal. Markets, in short, made the countryside and its ways palpable to city-dwellers.
Today, the people and animals that feed us are no longer visible; they, and the landscapes from which they come, are both physically and mentally distant. Most of our food arrives in the dead of night, travelling invisibly and anonymously down specialised “chill chains” to fill supermarket shelves while we sleep. Our cities are fed as if by magic; yet what is increasingly evident is that the industrial food system that evolved to create this illusion is vastly damaging to us and our planet, with unaffordable externalities ranging from deforestation, soil degradation, water depletion, pollution and slavery to mass extinction and climate change.4 Since no wise city would eat in such a way as to threaten its own future or that of its citizens, what is clear is that we need a radical rethink of the way we feed our cities.
In order to create and preserve wise cities in the future, those of us living in the industrialised world are going to need a social, political, ethical and ecological overhaul of almost everything we do. We’ve based our idea of a good life on the premise that nature is infinite and comes for free; an assumption that might have made sense to Adam Smith in 1750 when he was laying the foundations of free market capitalism, but clearly no longer does. The ultimate product of this mindset is “cheap” food: a substance upon which our modern lives are built, but which a second’s thought ought to tell us couldn’t possibly exist.
Sitopia
The challenge of moving from our present consumerist lifestyles towards more equitable, resilient modes of existence that reward us in other ways (while simultaneously transitioning from technologically-driven “smart” solutions towards more human-based wise ones) represents nothing less than a reimagining of a good life fit for the twenty-first century. The task is undoubtedly daunting; yet thankfully we have a wise guide to lead us and a powerful medium through which to act: food. Unlike power, money or influence, food is a material thing—and since we all have to eat every day, it has lost none of its power to connect us. Since food shapes every aspect of our lives, from our bodies and minds, our habits and homes, cities, landscapes, politics, economics and climate, it has almost unlimited potential to shape our lives for the better. All we have to do is learn to value it again and put it at the heart of our thinking. With the right political vision, a food-based renewal could form the basis of a reconfigured society, building the sorts of resilient, wise communities we’ll need if we are to thrive in years to come.
I have a word for this: sitopia, or food-place (from sitos, food + topos, place). In essence, sitopia is a practical, food-based alternative to utopia, a place that is perfect and therefore can’t exist.5 In our centuries-long search for a good industrial-capitalist life, we’ve lost our sense of what really matters to us and of what really makes us happy. Yet, as we discovered under lockdown, it isn’t shiny new toys that bring us lasting joy, but the primal things: good health, being with those we love, closeness to nature, a sense of meaning and purpose, being valued, having time. Although food isn’t the only agent shaping such qualities in our lives, it is connected to them all.
This connectedness is what gives food its ultimate power. By valuing food again and putting it back at the heart of our lives, we can make it a force for good. By producing and sharing it wisely, making time for it in our daily routines and space for it in our homes, cities and countryside, we can rebalance our relationship with nature and one another. Sitopia is not utopia; yet by shaping our world through good food, we can come close to the utopian dream of building a more resilient, tolerant and equitable future. Food is our most valuable shared resource and the very stuff of life; to put it at the heart of our existence is the very essence of wisdom.
