It is with a sense of foolish trepidation that I embark upon this blog. Plato is among a short list of global superstars, like Pele (football), Elvis (singing), and Tom and Jerry (cartoon protagonists), who are so well known they don’t even need a surname to be instantly recognized. It feels rather presumptuous for a non-philosopher to take on the task of summarizing the relevance of Plato for thinking about cities and urbanization in the twenty-first century.
Plato lived between 428-7 and 348/347 BCE, in the Athens of Ancient Greece. It is not recorded how Plato felt about living in an era labelled by his contemporaries as ‘ancient’, but I suspect that such a profound thinker, must have chafed against the constraints of being so far removed from the modern world. Plato belonged to the most prestigious pupil-teacher lineage in history. Plato’s own teacher-mentor was Socrates (c470-399 BCE) and his pupil was Aristotle (384-322BCE), who in turn taught noted pillage-plunderer connoisseur Alexander the Great (356-323BCE).
After a cursory glance – having never studied philosophy, cursory is a very good word to describe my Platonic engagement – it seems that Plato should have much to say of profound wisdom to an organization such as the Charter Cities Institute (CCI).
CCI often writes about how well-governed cities can contribute to human flourishing through their positive impact on employment, productivity, and innovation. Plato was well ahead of us and pondered deeply about ethics, justice, and equality centuries ago.
CCI is clear about their ideal city, we like them sparkling new, with freshly minted rules of governance, and independent of any lumbering central government. Plato was again well ahead of us here, writing in his most famous work The Republic, of the ideal state, which just happened to be an independent city.
CCI are devotees of scholar Alain Bertaud and we often pay homage to his work and declare a city to be in essence, a labor market, which should match workers and firms together in a manner characterized by affordability and mobility. Plato, as was his wont, got there two and half millennia ago, in The Republic he describes the city as structured around the organization of labor, which for him comprised three social classes, rulers, soldier-guardians, and producers (farmers and craftsmen). With fitting modesty Plato suggested that philosophers were best-suited to be rulers and much less so to suffering the dangers of battle or pulling heavy plows under an ancient Greek sun.
CCI often quotes Doug Gollin and colleagues who are concerned that African cities have become places of oil-revenue fueled consumption rather than production (manufacturing). We have another Platonic tick here, Plato, as noted above, knew the virtues of farmers and craftsmen centuries back.
CCI has a tendency to a grey utilitarianism, we talk much of building upwards, density, connectivity, and sewers. Where is our poetry? People don’t just live in cities because of bus timetables. Plato knew this, and wrote much about beauty and truth, his wisdom was derived from long conversations with friends while drinking copious amounts of Greek wine. Plato knew better than CCI how to live a good urban life.
Thus far it seems evident that all city-scholars, city-builders, and city-managers should seek enlightenment from Plato. To delve further into our collective enlightenment, I picked a book which had two particular virtues, i) it contained Plato’s most famous and very detailed discussion of a single city – Atlantis, and ii) it was very short.
Into my eager hands fell a 1971 copy of Timaeus (c360BCE) and Critias (unclear date, but likely published late in Plato’s life). I started, appropriately enough, with the first dialogue, Timaeus.
What can I say about Timaeus? The writer of this blog and the Timaeus dialogue go together with all the grace and elegant compatibility of a shortsighted buffalo on roller skates going down a hill.
Timaeus is a dialogue between Socrates (philosopher), Timaeus (noted historian), and Critias (politician). I couldn’t help wonder, how could the conversation cope without an economist to take care of the data and general bonhomie of the gathering? The discourse of Timaeus ranged from an account of the origin of the world, the divine purpose behind the universe, and a discussion of the phenomenon of nature.
On the composition of the human soul Timaeus clarifies,
From the indivisible, eternally unchanging Existence and the divisible, changing Existence of the physical world he mixed a third kind of Existence intermediate between them; again with the Same and Different he made, in the same way, compounds intermediate between their indivisible element and their physical and divisible element: and taking these three compounds he mixed them into a single unity, forcing the Different, which was by nature allergic to mixture into union with the Same, and mixing both with Existence.
Well, I was glad to clear that one up!
And until Timaeus, I had no idea how important, in a philosophical sense, triangles are. Of this pointy matter Timaeus explained,
In the first place it is clear to everyone that fire, earth, water and air are bodies, and all bodies are solids. All solids are again bounded by surfaces, and all rectilinear surfaces are composed of triangles.
I felt a little sheepish, it was clear to everyone (else)?
I know some generous sipping on Friday night can have a detrimental impact on one’s sense of balance, but from Timaeus, I learned how limited my understanding of intoxication really was. Timaeus teaches,
White phlegm mixed with black bile can confuse the divine circles in the head.
No doubt a New Year’s party hosted by Plato would have been a fun occasion. Perhaps after all there was no need for an economist to act as a social lubricant?
Whilst suitably enlightened on many other matters, Timaeus offered me some tantalizing hints about Atlantis. The character Critias explains that he heard the story of Atlantis via Solon (the wisest of the seven wise men) who vouched for its truth, and was a relation and close friend of Drophides (the great grandfather of Critias) who then told the story to the grandfather of Critias. Economists spend a lot of time dealing with data and torturing them with impenetrable econometrics. As one accustomed to staring at data, Timaeus leaves me in no doubt, the story of Atlantis must be true. The story of Atlantis happened 9,000 years before Critias chatted with Timaeus and Socrates, and apart from the gap in the story-lineage of about 8,950 years, the evidence really does hold up.
Atlantis is Plato’s model of an ideal society close to that described in The Republic. This is a big deal because Plato is a big deal. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947CE), a mathematician and philosopher of relentless, perspiring, and numbing virtue declared that. “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” So, this really was the book to learn what the greatest western philosopher said about the composition of an ideal city, and (hurrah) if Whitehead was right, I need never read Western philosophy ever again.
I turned the page and beheld the second dialogue – Critias.
In Critias, Plato makes the useful observation, one still repeated often by development economists that a surplus in agriculture is necessary to feed any labor that works in urban industry or other sectors. Plato notes, “The soil was more fertile than that of any country and so could maintain a large army exempt from the calls of agricultural labour.” But Critias goes too far and argues that all wealth, whether urban or otherwise, is ultimately derived from agriculture. Atlantis was created by the god Poseidon who was lavish in his creative efforts, he “equipped the central island with godlike lavishness; he made two springs flow, one of hot and one of cold water, and caused the earth to grow abundant produce of every kind.” This view was one last espoused by the French Physiocrats, a group of French economists grouped around Francois Quesnay (1694-1774CE), Quesnay was a doctor and early economist at the court of King Louis XV. For the physiocrats manufacturing was a ’sterile’ activity in that it could only transform agricultural inputs but could not create wealth. For two long centuries, since we have known this presumption to be false, manufacturing does create wealth and has more capacity to do so than agriculture. This lavish potential explains why global economic growth has been commonly associated with industrialization. It is the central role of cities in bringing together workers and firms that helps create a supply of inputs, a pool of workers, and a consumer demand that facilitates the growth of manufacturing.
In Critias, Plato is clear that international trade is solely a means to generate a surplus of exports over imports. Atlantis “Received many imports” but this need was limited by the abundance of the island as “for most of their needs, the island itself provided.”. Atlantis was carefully designed with infrastructure – a canal, 350 feet wide and 150 feet deep¹ from the sea to the inner island accessible to large ships and bridges and channels throughout the land for smaller vessels – to enable Atlantis to export. That network of rivers for example, enabled Atlantis to float timber down to the ports for export. The Atlantean economy was geared up to exporting resource and agricultural wealth overseas and to minimize the need to import. Such a view was widely held by economists known as The Mercantilists, from the sixteenth century. Adam Smioth criticized the Mercantilists in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, and their views fell increasingly out of favor during the nineteenth century, in light of the realization that consumption is the end goal of production, not just exports. To escape poverty, people need more clothes, shoes, housing, medical care, and frivolous consumer goods to make life more fun. A city that expends its labor to allow only the citizens of distant lands to benefit is not itself experiencing economic development.
In Critias, Plato is clear that Atlantis is ideal because it is better than any other city or country at everything. Atlantis is large – larger than Libya and Asia combined and located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantis is also more lavish and abundant in everything important for the economy – namely every aspect of agriculture (and as noted, in infrastructure). Critias notes that mineral resources, timber, domesticated and wild animals, cultivated crops such as cereals and pulses, and tree fruits for oil and food, “were produced by that sacred island, then still beneath the sun, in wonderful quality and profusion.” On Atlantis, two springs provided hot and cold water respectively and a network of pipes distributed that water around the island for people, horses, and agriculture. Rivers, lakes, and meadows provided pasture for animals and the fertile irrigated land allowed two harvests a year. David Ricardo developed the classical theory of comparative advantage in his jaunty 1817 book On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (sadly, two-hundred years later still awaiting a Netflix mini-series). In his book Ricardo explained a fallacy, yes, any economy (Atlantis being our example) may have an absolute advantage in everything – it can produce all agricultural produce more cheaply and productively than other countries – but what matters is Comparative Advantage! Atlantis would be better off specializing in what it has a relative or comparative advantage in and exporting those goods or services, and importing those goods or services in which other countries have a comparative advantage. A pattern of trade according to mutual comparative advantage, Ricardo demonstrated, would increase incomes, both in Atlantis and elsewhere.
In Critias, Plato writes of the merits of a division of labor. The city founder, the God Poseidon originally divided up Atlantis into ten kingdoms, each ruled by an absolute hereditary monarch. A military class lived separate from the rest of society and were provided with necessary consumption for their maintenance and training, but otherwise had no private property. The soil was cultivated by a skilled and hereditary class of farmers. A division of labor but no labor market! In Atlantis men remained in fixed occupations and inherited the occupation of their fathers (women seem strangely absent in Atlantis). Each occupation was kept physically separate from the others and workers were forbidden from undertaking any other duties. The desirability and benefits of inherited occupations have been espoused by some political systems – notably the feudal economic system of Europe from the 10th to 13th centuries CE and the caste system in India, which dates back perhaps 3,000 years. That is not the labor market that CCI thinks about. CCI thinks of cities along the premises of Alain Bertaud, as a means to allow workers to better acquire education and training and be allocated through a market mechanism to those occupations in which they earn the most, where they are the most productive, or that fulfil other desirable qualities (close to home, convivial working conditions and so on). Firms likewise seek the cheapest and most productive labor. Where the market reconciles these two motives, will be a position of mutual benefit for both firms and workers. A good urban labor market is one characterized by mobility and accessibility and resulting dynamic flexibility, not one centered on the hereditary principle.
CCI likes good laws, as their website proudly proclaims “By improving governance and institutions, charter cities can create a more competitive business environment that attracts investment, creates more jobs, and improves the lives of millions. They are one of the best public policy tools to ensure rapid urbanization jumpstarts long-term economic growth, rather than poverty, in emerging economies.” Not so Atlantis according to Plato, where this ‘ideal’ city was ruled by ten hereditary monarchs, and “Each of the ten kings had absolute power, in his own region and city, over persons and in general over laws, and could punish or execute at will.” This would have made much sense to many scholars and religious leaders in 16th and 17th century Europe – when they taught and preached the notion of the divine right of kings. This nostrum held that monarchs had been appointed by God and so the populace was compelled to obedience. The last few centuries have seen a near total and global reaction against this idea, much of it stemming from the book Two Treatises of Government published by anti-absolutist philosopher John Locke (1632-1704CE) in 1689.
Well, there we go, Atlantis, the ideal city-society, written by the greatest western philosopher is actually a mishmash of discredited economics and philosophy – the Physiocrats, the Mercantilists, the pre-Ricardian proponents of absolute advantage, and the divine rights of kings. Should we praise Plato for anticipating so many strands of political science several thousand years before they became mainstream thinking? Should be condemn Plato for not-anticipating each would then be discredited. Over to you dear reader (assuming there are any).
We can’t finish there. We need to conclude with the dramatic finale of Atlantis.
It is not ultimately in living that we should learn from Atlantis, what should inspire us as a lesson is the end of Atlantis. In Timaeus Plato writes, “At a later time there were earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single dreadful day and night all your fighting men were swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis was similarly swallowed up by the sea and vanished.”
The literal swallowing up of cities by the sea takes us directly into the recent work by my friend and colleague Eva Klaus who has recently (2024) published research on urban resilience and notes,
In a survey of global cities, one feature stands out: coastal or riverine location. The primary reason for this is well-understood. Cities have historically proliferated in these areas due to trade route accessibility, which helps foster economic growth and development. However, this geographical advantage comes with inherent risks. Costal and riparian cities face heightened vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels, storm surges, and flooding.
This is where Atlantis should most profoundly influence those who think and write about, and work in city-related policy. Atlantis is not relevant because of its system of governance, or number of canals, or principal exports, but in its dramatic destruction, and how that should serve as a warning. The coastal port of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania is on course to become the third largest city in the world by 2100CE, with a population forecast to exceed 70 million people. One can only hope global remedial action against climate change is taken in time, so that philosophers in 9,000 years’ time are not discussing the legendary city of Dar Es Salaam that “was swallowed up by the sea and vanished.”
¹ The famous US Erie Canal by comparison was only 120 feet wide and 12 feet deep.
