What is Antiurbanism? A Theoretical Perspective

Abstract

Antiurbanism has a long lineage. Hatred of—or even ambivalence toward—the city or urban life seems a constant companion to the history of cities themselves. If we trace the long history of antiurbanism, we find a complex, varied phenomenon; one that changes as historical and political shifts make certain aspects of city either attractive or despised. In the end, antiurbanism is more than a mere hatred of city life. It is embedded in an overlapping series of economic, cultural, political, and sociological realities. It is a force that continues to have relevance in contemporary life, too, whether in terms of predicting or explaining political ideology or even mapping the variation of cultural habits and norms. Urban analysts tend to neglect the ways that nonurban areas and residents can manifest antiurban attitudes and behavior and they fail to grasp the importance of antiurban attitudes on political and cultural life. But in so doing, they also neglect some of the larger issues about the connection between space and consciousness, between ideas and location, and about the ways that other forms of social life—such as political values, religiosity, and so on—can be changed by nonurban environments. The commonplace view tends to be that nonurban areas are, in some way, those residues of the past; that they in some way are spaces where people have been untouched by cosmopolitan and modern ways of life.