Living for the City

I am a city person. Un-asphalt-scented air makes me nervous. I still shudder from a childhood memory of a week spent visiting an aunt's rural home, especially in the evenings, smothering in the too-dark, bugnoisy, neighbor-absent countryside. I am aware that I view the "pastoral" as another alien life form, yet I recognize my narrow-minded city-biases. These prejudices are probably shared with many others in the United States, for the Census Bureau informs us that the majority of citizens, 79 percent, inhabit metropolitan areas. "Metropolitan" usually refers to both urban and suburban, yet the city remains the central component of the mix.

I am also sharply aware that, as a long-time resident of Detroit, my attitudes have been shaped by parameters of race, and the insidious connections made between race and poverty and lawlessness. After Detroit's black civil disturbance of 1967, white flight went into fast forward. A local newspaper ran an infamous headline: "Will the Last One Out of Detroit, Please Turn Off the Lights?" These biases bleed over into this century, with suburbanites refusing to let their children cross into Detroit's environs. This entwined Detroit and suburban history, with my own biases, have influenced the meanings of "the city."

Cities were part of the economic development of the modernist industrial complexes I call home. These cities are often viewed as dumping grounds for the unwashed, holding pens for labor, or residences for the wealthiest. My father's family migrated to Detroit from southern states throughout the 1940s and '50s, escaping farming and sharecropping, seeking American dreams of wealth and equality. As with my own family's fortune, the micro-agrarian economy has been displaced. Today, agribusinesses suck the life from family-owned farms, which have become endangered species. The small farmer sells out and moves, often into urban promises of employment. The problem is bigger than the United States: economic engines driving toward globalization have changed the meanings of wealth, relationships, and community around the world, forcing families off farms and creating larger cities.

Our faith lives and religious institutions were shaped, not many years ago, by the contrast between the ratchety, raucous city and the peaceful, spiritual countryside. If we ever needed an authoritative source for this information, we could refer to Augustine's City of God or any biblical passage praising flora and fauna.

Our religious imagery is full of unperfected ideas of lambs and doves and trees. We have been deluded into maintaining the myth of heaven as a pastoral scene. Toni Morrison, as keynote speaker at an American Academy of Religion conference a few years ago, asked a question I still ponder: what is paradise for us today?

Our religious and social understandings of the city are influenced by strongly negative interpretations throughout the West's intellectual history. The negative is rooted in the bifurcation of life--the sacred from the secular, the profane from the holy. This is an insight from which to begin rethinking the religious meaning of the city, of which we have only told partial tales. But to tell the story we need new language. Today, even as the shapes of cities are rapidly changing, our informed reflection about what is occurring remains sparse. Architects, environmentalists, industrialists, politicians are more likely than theologians to proffer urban dreams.

Political pundits cry for "remaking" cities. Commerce is the way to do that, they claim. Land development and tax-free zones raise property values. Economic shifts and new businesses destroy established but poor neighborhoods. Regentrification has a much different meaning for those of us who have been in the cities all along.

Land use is driven by dollars while environmental concerns multiply. Urban planners seek to recreate the cities. The problem with most urban planning is that it is usually driven by government agencies, run by and for the city. Their tax bases drive most cities; therefore, businesses of all kinds are natural partners of this type of urban planning. Lyn Lewis, colleague and noted sociologist, is African American and a Detroit resident. She states that neither the macro management approach or the New Urbanism offer real choices. Instead she calls for holistic planning that involves the citizens, cutting through urban planners' pretensions: "Have y'all forgotten about me?"

Her complaint is heard within city communities where we know that red lining still happens by zip code. We know that we pay higher prices for insurances. Mortgages and consumer credit, with higher interest rates, are less available to most city residents. We suspect higher prices for many items, even in the few chain stores in the city, where it is more difficult to pay by check. Occasionally, a church group will try to start a boycott; businesses have learned another form of defense. One pastor, who had led a protest of a nearby company's business practices, began to question how relationships had shifted when the congregation accepted a large donation of computers from the same company. How can a church community maintain a prophetic stance and keep the doors open at the same time?