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FOOD POLITICS - September 2018 Max Muller

Food Solidarity in the Basque Country

Written by Max Muller

In this piece, we will show how the Basque Country’s former struggle for political independence is nowadays tied to the notion of food sovereignty. We will trace the historical origins of the Basque’s passion for autonomy and relate it to its contemporary reincarnation in the form of a reappreciation of the traditional peasant lifestyle and its accompanying vision of social-economic transformation towards a more just society.

Although strictly speaking it is not a state, the Basque Country sure seems like one. Straddling along the border between Spain and France, this region is home to a culture distinct from either. Akin to the case for Catalan, their language, Euskera, has acted as a catalyst for Basque nationalism, and thus, after a long struggle, they have gained many rights for self-governance. In Spain, the Basques currently dwell mainly in the Autonomous Regions of the (somewhat confusingly called) Basque Country and Navarre.

Today’s Basque Country (Euskal Herria) is home to the rich city of San Sebastián. Or, as the Basques themselves call it: Donostia. In terms of food, this coastal town has a lot to offer.  It has the second-highest amount of Michelin Stars awarded to restaurants per square meter of all the cities in the world. In addition, it features many private establishments that are an idiosyncratic feature of Basque culture called txokos. In these gastronomic societies, people from all social strata of Basque society come together to wine, dine, and cook on a regular basis.

Basque Country has a highly industrialized economy and some provinces like Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa are very urban. However, for many inhabitants, the rural areas are the more familiar territory. This is due to the fact that there is a horticultural and agricultural tradition in the region that is practiced by people who have small farms or gardens on the edges of small towns.

A history lesson

In order to discuss the notions of food sovereignty and re-peasantisation, however, we must leave these gastro-sociological rarities aside for a moment and delve a bit deeper into Basque history. As we remarked before, the people from Euskal Herria in times past are marked by struggle. Sometimes, as in the case of the separatist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, which means “Basque Homeland and Liberty”), the struggle was violent. At other moments these clashes did not involve any bullets, only symbolic action.

During the 19th century, there were a number of wars between the Basques, their allies, and their opponents. The Basques and Catalans sided with the so-called Carlists, who were supporters of Carlos V, a reactionary who claimed the throne. He was angry about the onset of Liberalism in Spain and the waning influence of Catholicism and nationalism on the Iberian Peninsula. These differences in political opinion split the whole country into two factions: the Carlists and the Liberals.

The Carlists always lost.

After their third war in 1876, the government abolished the Fueros, laws unique to the Basques that ensured them a certain degree of autonomy. Coupled with excessive industrialization and fast-paced immigration of Spanish-speaking people, the Basques quickly lost much of their cherished culture and their traditional way of life. This put them on the defensive and provided fuel for an ongoing sense of nationalism.

In 1895, Sabino de Arana established the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (Basque Nationalist Party). He was determined to re-establish Euskera as the sole language in the region and to reassert its declining culture. To that end, he created a flag, an ideology, and a myth to reinvigorate the Basque lands, which he named Euskadi.

The Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 can be interpreted as the Fourth Carlist War, as this conflict erupted between the Republicans (which incorporated the former Liberal faction) and the Nationalists (which included the Carlists). The Nationalists won and one of their generals Francisco Franco became the autocratic ruler of Spain.

Although this time victory was on the Carlists’ side, Francisco Franco did not grant the Basques many favors. The Euskadi government was ousted and General Franco instated a Catholic dictatorship throughout Spain. He was particularly harsh on the Basques: he outlawed their language and tried to get rid of all forms of Basque nationalism. Furthermore, he was responsible for thousands of Basque deaths and imprisonments. Most notably, he supported the German-led bombing of the Basque town of Guernica. Picasso famously depicted this brutal slaughter of civilians in a painting that bears the town’s name.

Photo by stephane333/ CC BY

Guernica held a lot of symbolic significance. It was the place where the Basques once held the ceremony of the royal oath in which the kings of Castille had to swear to follow the Fueros. In doing so, they granted the Basques their autonomy. The bombing of this historical town fueled much anger and Arana’s fervent nationalism. It also later justified, in the eyes of many Basque people, ETA’s violence towards the Spanish state.  

ETA was established in 1959 and originated in the action-oriented efforts of a group of students from the Jesuit Deusto University in Bilbao. In Sabino de Arana’s spirit, it sought for the reinvigoration of Basque nationalism. The organization was committed to a re-establishment of the Basque language and the cultural ideals of its people. Often, it did so violently. During, but mostly after, the end of Franco’s regime — he died in 1975 — they killed more than 800 people through terrorist attacks.

Eventually, the ETA got what it sought: a reasonable degree of autonomy for the Basque provinces within the Spanish Kingdom and the recognition and affirmation of Euskera as an official language in the Autonomous Communities. Nowadays, ETA’s armed struggle is over. It agreed to a cease-fire in 2011 and disarmament in 2017.  

Back to Food

What the history lesson has hopefully shown is that the idea of a struggle for identity and political self-determination is of immense importance to the Basque people. While not violent anymore, the fighting continues symbolically and culturally through the efforts of the ikastolas (Basque language schools) and a commitment to self-governance. The Basque people are unusually engaged with political activities and are committed to taking part in public meetings of local municipalities to let their voices be heard.

Recently, however, the struggle has manifested itself in quite a different way. The Basque agrarian sector has suffered severe economic blows during the 2008 recession. In addition, the concurrent processes of industrialization, mechanization, and a subsequent rural exodus have intensified the malaise. Between 1999 and 2009, the number of farms in the Autonomous Basque Community fell by more than 33%.

In order to counteract this trend, there has been an explosion of processes and activities centered on the notion of food sovereignty. This concept is linked to political sovereignty that emerged as part of a struggle of baserritarras (small peasant farmers) to protect their traditional way of life. Furthermore, it takes a stand against the propagation of agrarian modernization and the imposition of neoliberal policies of the Basque Government, who favored large-scale food industry projects over the baserritarras, which operated on a much smaller scale. As such, it is also connected with the desire for a more equal society.

It is not a coincidence these efforts are focused on the baserritarras. The language survived Franco’s dictatorship largely thanks to the small farmers in the countryside, who usually hardly spoke any Spanish at all.

Food as a way of life  

It is in this socio-cultural environment that the food sovereignty movement has emerged, gaining momentum after the financial crisis. As mentioned above, it is especially geared towards baserritarras. The organization EHNE-Bizkaia aims to preserve and support their traditional lifestyle. It is a member of the worldwide overarching peasant organization called La Vía Campesina and has 800 paying members. They determine its politics, elect its board, and receive technical services. In 2007, EHNE-Bizkaia launched a community-supported agriculture scheme called Red Nekasarea.

Red Nekasarea strategically connects 80 baserritarras to 700 households. The households are divided into consumer groups of no more than 30 households. Each peasant is linked to one consumer group. The peasants provide these groups with food baskets that usually include vegetables, meat, milk, eggs, and pasta.

Photo by Elaine Casap

Before the initiation of this project, the peasants were in a predicament. The baserritarras would sell their products as faceless producers in the globalized market. In addition, they were forced to lower their prices substantially, understandably leading to much discontent. Through Red Nekasarea, they are always able to sell their vegetables for a fair price. In addition, they know their customers personally and are told how tasty and good their products are. Whereas being a baserritarra used to be seen as something derogatory, the project brings back a sense of pride among the peasants. This feeling is reinforced because people feel that they are participating in a project for social change.

Not only does EHNE-Bizkaia engage in helping existing farmers, it also actively seeks to recruit new ones. Currently, only 10% of farmers are under 40 years of age. As such, youth are a critical part of the food sovereignty movement in the Basque Country.

In order to rejuvenate the agricultural sector, EHNE-Bizkaia offers training courses in agroecology. These courses especially attract young people, as agroecology is advantageous for its low dependency on investment, technology, and external inputs. Furthermore, they aim to foster the urban youngsters’ resurgent enthusiasm regarding the way of life as a farmer by organizing gatherings and sharing information.

You may wonder why there’s such a renewed interest for agricultural living among these young people. In most cases, they aren’t born into the peasant lifestyle. They are usually brought up in affluent families, are socially well-integrated, and have a university degree. Although the economic crisis did lead to job loss, labor instability, and a lack of opportunities — conditions that may have motivated some to migrate to the countryside — the crisis does not seem to be the deciding factor.

To many, food production and agriculture are linked with a larger goal of social transformation. Their ideal is autonomy. It is linked to self-realization and the satisfaction that comes from control over one’s own life. Their choice represents a craving for self-sufficiency and a move away from large industries. They feel that by producing food themselves, control is taken away from multinationals. The re-peasantization process is intimately tied to a desire for social change in the overall socio-economic system.

As such, the Basque peoples’ fight for autonomy has changed to yet another front. It has moved successively from actual warfare to linguistics, and now to peasant food struggles. This last endeavor is tied to important questions: how do we reconcile local values and customs with an ever-spreading economic system that favors efficiency and uniformity? How can control be regained by people in a world dominated by an increasingly small set of conglomerates aiming solely at making more profits?

Thus, the Basque food movement is emblematic of the current socio-economic tensions between the local and the global, autonomy and dependency, and finally between heterogeneity and homogeneity. Whereas the Basques used to rebel against some Castilian King or Roman Emperor, by now they protest against economic rule. Although its efforts may have marginal effects, it offers guidance and prospects to those seeking to grow a different world.

MADNESS - July & August 2018 Max Muller

Transient Madness

Written by Max Muller

According to the philosopher – and former sufferer of psychosis – Wouter Kusters, wisdom lies behind madness. There are multiple ways by means of which useful knowledge can be gained from mental illnesses. For instance, one may be able to formulate deep insights about oneself from the talks about one’s own personal road to insanity.

In addition, mental illnesses can teach us important lessons about our own society. According to this doctrine, madness is not so much a signal of individual mental health problems. Instead, it signifies problems on a societal level. Like canaries in a coal mine, those with psychotic disorders alert us of a society in which interpersonal relationships are suffocating. According to this view, psychosis is more of a vision than a confused malfunction of the brain. It is a healthy reaction to a sickening environment (such a conception of mental illness was also advanced in Jurek’s article for this month’s issue).

From this point of view, it follows that we can unravel certain negative and debilitating aspects of our society if we can adequately describe what ails those who have gone mad. In a sense, those with mental problems can pinpoint the weaknesses and evils of the society in which they live.

Let us consider, for instance, the case of a mental illness that has, by and large, disappeared by now. An illness that has prevailed within a certain time frame and geographical area is called a transient mental illness. Such a type of madness is not some mental malfunction that comes and goes in this or that patient. It is a type of madness that exists only at certain times and places.

In Mad Travellers, the philosopher of science Ian Hacking chronicles the story of the transient mental illness called fugue. It began one morning in July 1887, when a young man arrived crying in a ward in the ancient Bordeaux hospital of Saint-André. His name was Albert Dadas. He was 26 years old, and the first fugueur. Albert became notorious for his extraordinary expeditions to Algeria, Moscow, Constantinople and other places.

While those expeditions are interesting in their own right, there was something else remarkable about them; they were made, in a certain sense, unconsciously. Albert traveled obsessively, as if under a spell. While he traveled, he often did not carry identity papers. Indeed, he did not know who he was or why he traveled, and he only knew where he was going next. When he arrived at a certain location, he had little recollection of where he had been. It was only under hypnosis that Albert could recall lost weekends or even years.

As word about his travels spread, Albert initiated a small epidemic of compulsive, mad voyagers. At first, hysterical fugue was diagnosed only in Bordeaux. Soon, however, it spread to Paris. Later, people all around France were found who supposedly suffered from this mental disease. It subsequently spread to Germany, too.

It is interesting to note, however, that people have been making strange and unexpected trips – often in states of obscured consciousness – for a long time. Only in 1887, when the young medical student Philippe Tissié described it in his thesis, did it arise as a specific, diagnosable type of insanity. Why did the identification of this type of mental illness happen to take place specifically during the end of the 19th century in France? Why did it spread so rapidly? And, perhaps equally important: why did the phenomenon fade away after a while? The last conference on fugue took place in Nantes, 1909. Between 1887 and 1909 fugue was a significant, if transient, mental illness. And then it was no more.

Philippe Tissié hypnotizes his patient Albert Dadas under the watchful eye of Étienne Eugène Azam, another doctor from Bordeaux

To be able to grapple with these questions, we must delve into Hacking’s notion of the so-called ecological niche. It is a metaphor for a framework that allows us to understand why certain types of mental illness and some arrangements of symptoms proliferate at some times and places, while they are absent in others. The ecological niche is a concatenation of a large number of diverse types of elements – including social factors, biological origins of the patient, and medical viewpoints – in which some particular types of illness can thrive. We call these components vectors.

Please note that just because a mental disease is transient, it does not mean it is not “real.” It is never merely a social construct. These people genuinely suffered. There are two possibilities for the transient aspect of the disease. First, it could merely mean that the symptoms of the disease are later subsumed within other mental illnesses, rendering the diagnosis of the old disease impossible. On a related note, our ideas about what constitutes a mental illness change over time. Homosexuality used to be typified as a mental disease, but not anymore.

Second, it could mean that the vectors supporting the niche within which it thrives at some point erode or even disappear. This makes the disease possibly less prevalent, or its symptoms less severe. Societal influences can amplify or diminish the severity of mental diseases that have biological origins, or even account for their existence.  

In the case of fugue, its ecological niche consists of four principal vectors: cultural polarity, release, observability, and medical taxonomy. Let us examine the first two of these vectors. By cultural polarity, Hacking means that fugue fitted between two important social phenomena in fin de siècle France: romantic tourism and criminal vagrancy. The second half of the 19th century was, among other things, the era of popular tourism. It was not limited anymore to the highly affluent aristocrats. With the advent of a widespread railway network across Europe, travel agencies, and efficient, steam-powered trains, tourism became available to the masses.

However, Albert and most other fuguers were not part of the middle class. They were members of the working poor. As such, they were not able to take part in touristic activities like their wealthier contemporaries. Fugue literally provided a way out. It allowed relatively poor men (for they were almost always male) to escape and see the world.

While tourism was the virtuous side of travel, its polar cultural opposite was vagrancy. Vagrancy was seen through the lens of France’s degeneracy program. This was the set of beliefs that identified the decline of France compared to Britain and Germany, and it was exacerbated by France’s loss of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and massive unemployment during the Belle Époque. It was connected with low birth rates, suicide, prostitution, homosexuality, and insanity.

Dr. Jekyll and his dual, the degenerate Mr. Hyde, capture the European obsession with decline and degeneracy towards the close of the 19th century (picture from 1895)

To the French people in the 1880s, the vagrant signified racial degeneracy, no reproduction, or reproduction of those very features that the French race ought to get rid of. Thus, tramps came to be seen as a critical social problem. In 1885, a fierce set of anti-vagrancy laws was passed. Vagrants were degenerates and should be medicalized.

In this regard, it is easy to see that many fugueurs came to be seen as vagrants. They were often seized by the police, who claimed they had found yet another antisocial vagabond. However, psychotherapists insisted fugueurs were afflicted by a very real mental affliction and should be treated as such. Thus fugue became part of a power struggle between medical men on the one hand and police on the other. The doctors relieved those with fugue from their individual responsibilities, for their behavior resulted from mental illness.

Therefore, fugue thrived between two cultural opposites. On the one hand, fugue became a pathological variant of tourism for those who could not afford more customary ways of travel. It provided men with a kind of release from their duties and boring lives back home. On the other, fugue hovered just above crime. Those afflicted escaped harsh penalties for vagrancy, for a type of insanity they could not control that caused their behavior. Those in the medical establishment protected the status of fugue as a form of madness, thereby ensuring its legitimacy.

One of the reasons fugue did not continue to be a significant mental disease was the gradual disappearance of the vagrancy scare and its corresponding overarching degeneracy program. Furthermore, tourism itself became more and more entrenched in French society. Its novelty had worn off. Thus, two important vectors of the ecological niche for fugue disappeared. Finally, the definition and the symptoms of hysterical fugue were subsumed within a new framework of mental illnesses. By 1990s criteria, some of those old fugueurs probably suffered from head injuries, some from temporal lobe epilepsy, and some from a new disease called dissociative fugue.

We will not go into the details of the process by means of which fugue gradually died out. For our discussion of the topic, it suffices to note that a certain ecological niche allowed fugue to thrive in a certain time and place. When the niche disappeared, so did the transitory mental illness as a species within it. We might wonder what kind of ecological niche(s) we can observe nowadays, allowing contemporary types of insanity to flourish in our society.

The cultural polarity vector of the ecological niche for fugue represents the basic premise of psychoanalysis:; mental illness concerns the collision of desire and its prohibition. The working poor in 19th century France longed for fantastic journeys, but they were inhibited by the duties they had to fulfill for their families, and by limited financial means. They found their release in quasi-criminal, mad travel.

This conflict between desire and its prohibition concerns the demands of society that go against the desires of the individual. What kinds of societal demands are nowadays imposed on us? In On the new discontents of civilization, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe observes that we currently live in a so-called neoliberal meritocracy.

Neoliberalism refers to the idea that every market regulates itself, and should, therefore, be steered as little as possible, in order for everyone to get equal opportunities. While this may sound like an admirable arrangement, the model often results in very negative consequences for people in places where it is implemented. In a meritocracy, everyone is responsible for his or her own success, and for his or her own failure. It propels the myth of the self-made man.

The Dutch government adopts this line of reasoning. They even radically extend it to domains vastly beyond the reach of the economic sphere. People are held accountable not only for their own welfare (resulting in enormous economic disparities), but also for the wellbeing of nature, the environment and the dangerous effects of climate change. Interestingly enough, the government often turns a blind eye to polluting companies. People and companies are not held to the same standards.

In the 1990s, the Dutch government’s policies were redolent of neoliberal ideology. Within that context, the governmental organization Postbus 51 formulated the slogan, “Een beter milieu begint bij jezelf” (A better environment starts with yourself). On the surface, it is a rather innocent statement, encouraging people to be more environmentally aware. However, it is an insidious psychological trick, emphasizing our individual responsibilities with regards to climate change.

In the wake of carbon-induced rising temperatures, we are obliged to behave as formidable, responsible model citizens. We must live frugally, emitting as little greenhouse gasses as possible. We must turn off the lights, drive as little as possible, and re-use our plastic bags. We are obliged to insulate our houses, go vegan, and replace our gas stoves with their electrical counterparts.

Yet at the same time, we must behave as frantic consumers, supporting the companies that act as pillars of the neoliberal economy. It is paramount we buy biological eggs, fair-trade chocolate, and recyclable clothes without animal fur. We are encouraged to buy plane tickets, but should also pay a carbon tax for the resulting emissions. Living green should be our number one priority, never mind the prohibitive costs and the difficulties it imposes on our lives.

Both of these contradictory lines of thinking emphasize the same message, if disastrous climatic consequences unfold, you are to blame. We, as individual citizens, are held accountable for the rising sea levels and massive ecological devastation. The government’s slogan capitalizes on our feelings of guilt and shame. As individualized people, we all carry it on our own. Individuality has led to less solidarity. This makes it even harder to bear.

It is perhaps not surprising that in such a social climate, new transient mental illnesses arise. In the Tegenlicht episode “Worsteling van de Groenmens“(Struggle of the Groenmens), people are shown to be struggling with their perceived individual responsibilities to save the world from climate catastrophes. One poignant example is Babette Porcelijn. At one point during the documentary, she confesses that she even had suicidal thoughts. After all, it would be best for the climate if one were not alive anymore. If you kill yourself, you cannot cause the environment and the climate any more harm.

This extreme compulsion to alleviate the harmful consequences of individual emissions on the climate and the environment was coined “ecorexia”. I believe this neologism hits the nail on the head. It is an allusion to the clothing industry that sets unrealistic beauty standards for women around the world. This industry thereby causes widespread insecurity among women, and in severe cases it results in anorexia. Both anorexia and ecorexia are examples of symptoms of greater societal problems.

Akin to the clothing industry, the Dutch government and the neoliberal meritocracy it embraces provide the base for the ecological niche in which ecorexia can proliferate. Oddly enough, psychologists and medical experts have not systematically studied it yet despite multiple cases already being reported (here, here, and here). I think it is only a matter of time before the diagnosis of this mental ailment will become endemic to Western culture.

As we have seen from our discussion of fugue, however, mental illnesses can be transient. Ecorexia, too, could be a case of such a disease. Just as it arrived within a certain ecological niche, it could be one day be eliminated, too. The niche counts the neoliberal meritocracy, government propaganda, and a highly politicized and heated debate about climate change among its vectors.

Babette Porcelijn is our modern-day Albert Dadas. From her we have learned that our current approach to climate change mitigation is harmful to regular people, possibly even lethal. We ought to change our society in such a way that we can remove the vectors supporting the niche for ecorexia. First and foremost, we should replace the neoliberal meritocracy with a more humane societal system. A system in which cooperation, solidarity, and interdependency are stressed. This will allow for the sharing of the burden of responsibility.

Furthermore, the focus of responsibility for climate change should be transferred from citizens to large corporations. People’s behavior is not the main cause of climate change. Between 1751 and 2010, 63% of all global industrial gas emissions came from just 90 companies. In the Netherlands, households pay almost two-thirds of environmental taxes, while they emit only one-fifth of the total amount of carbon dioxide. It is not the people, but the large companies that are largely to blame. The government should hold them responsible and tax them accordingly.

Hopefully, this will alleviate Babette’s symptoms, and minimize the possibility of other people struggling with them in the future.

Max Muller THE CITY - April 2018

Understanding Cities through Metaphors

Written by Max Muller

Although I have never been to an Alicia Keys concert, I imagine it must go something like this: first you excitedly wait in line, eagerly waiting for the moment you’re allowed to enter the sold-out stadium. After you and your friends have found your seats, you share some food and thoughts on her latest album. Then, the lights fade. The buzzing noise of chatting people immediately follows suit. A few seconds later, a roar from the crowd breaks the silence: she has arrived. You sing and dance your heart out to her classics, including “If I Ain’t Got You” and “No one”. You get a sore throat and you’re exhausted from the intense experience. And yet… something is missing. Until you realize she has saved her best song for the finale: “Empire State of Mind (Part II)”:

“Baby, I’m from…

New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of

There’s nothing you can’t do”

You finally find closure, as she has put the cherry on the cake.

Well, at least that’s how I imagine the experience. To me, that’s her best song. Her beautiful voice and talented piano playing notwithstanding, there is another element of the song that appeals to me. It’s the lyrics: they’re clever. The comparison of New York with a “concrete jungle” strikes me as particularly insightful.

Transformations of Meaning

In 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote their now seminal book Metaphors We Live By. Until their work, the role of metaphors in philosophy and linguistics had only been deemed of peripheral interest. Lakoff and Johnson made huge swathes of people realize that metaphors are not just stylistic devices to spice up a mediocre novel. They showed, on the contrary, that they’re essential ingredients for people to concoct an overarching view of reality. In other words: people largely understand the world through metaphors.

Consider, for instance, the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR. This conception of arguments or discussions is deeply entrenched in our understanding of the concept. Our language betrays it. For us it is completely natural to say things like:

  • Your claims are indefensible.
  • His criticisms were right on target.
  • I demolished his argument.
  • I’ve never won an argument with him.

Chances are you haven’t even realized that we use ideas from wars to metaphorically speak about arguments. Moreover, Lakoff and Johnson point out that we do not just talk about arguments in terms of war. We actually win and lose arguments. The idea of war thus gives us an indispensable tool that allows us to understand the concept of having an argument.

Throughout their book (which I heartily recommend) they give countless other examples of metaphors we use to grapple with complex phenomena, including IDEAS ARE RESOURCES (“he ran out of ideas”, “don’t waste your thoughts on useless projects”), LOVE IS MADNESS (“I’m crazy about her”, “she drives me out of my mind”), and SEEING IS TOUCHING (“I can’t take my eyes off him”, “he wants everything within reach of his eyes”).

Perhaps that is why Alicia Keys’ lyrics stuck with me. Though I sympathize with her fondness for New York in particular, I think it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to view all cities as forests, or, within an even wider perspective, ecosystems.

Let’s confine ourselves a bit and stick with the metaphor CITIES ARE JUNGLES. Obviously, the buildings are trees in this regard. It is perhaps for this reason that the English expression “to climb up the stairs” exists. In addition, hints of organic perceptions of cities can be found in sentences like “these are the world’s fastest-growing cities” and “Beijing is expanding rapidly”.

The process of incoming and outgoing commuters bears some similarity to the rhythmic movements of lungs filling and releasing air. Just like photosynthesizing trees that convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, the buildings of the city can breathe people in and out. Antonio Gaudi’s “La Sagrada Familia”, a church that seems to have grown organically from the ground upwards, epitomizes this conception of buildings.

Illustration by David Fleck, 1972

Baucis, the tree city from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” , as illustrated by David Fleck. The motif of the city as a forest also appears in Calvino’s book “The Baron in the Trees.”

Modern man has thus linguistically incorporated cities as a natural place to live, just like early humans discovered that they could find a safe haven away from the savanna and into the forest. The trees provided shelter against the rain and their height proved very useful for evading predators. The higher and bigger the tree, the more protection it could provide.

Joseph Campbell in his book The Power of Myth, points out that one can tell what’s informing society by what the tallest building is. In medieval towns, it was the cathedral. In an 18th century town, it was the political palace. Whereas in modern cities, the tallest buildings are the office buildings. We attach great significance to our centers of economic life. This is consistent with the cultural value “Bigger is Better”, which in turn is coherent with Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor GOOD IS UP (“we hit a peak last year, but it’s been downhill ever since”, “he does high-quality work”).

Another metaphor that pervades our languages and myths is that of Mother Nature. Thus we undoubtedly attribute nature with feminine characteristics. It is a bringer of life. The ancient Greeks, who coined the term “metropolis”, highlighted the nurturing character of cities as forests in particular. The word is a combination of the words mḗtēr (mother) and pólis (city). From their perspective, the city lied at the very heart of the origins of life. Since then, cities have only become more and more important. Nowadays, more than half of the world’s population consists of urban dwellers.

If cities are so important to us, it is perhaps not so surprising that the CITIES ARE JUNGLES metaphor is not the only one that has entered our collective subconscious. Concepts that are at once important to us and difficult to understand require multiple ways of viewing them.

This is because when we focus on one aspect of the concept, we necessarily leave out or ignore many others. Take love, for instance. Not only do we take the above-mentioned metaphor LOVE IS MADNESS into consideration when we speak and think about it. We also have the metaphors LOVE IS A PATIENT (“they have a healthy marriage”) and LOVE IS MAGIC (“she cast her spell over me”) in our mental repertoire. These other metaphors enable us to look at and think about love from different angles.

Berlin is, like, a pretty cool guy

So where does that leave us with regards to our beloved cities? Again, Lakoff and Johnson provide us with a hint, as they explain that personification is a widely employed metaphorical device. We could say, for instance, “his theory explained to me how tidal movements work”. In this case, the theory of tidal movements is personified. We conceptualize the theory as a person, or perhaps more specifically as a teacher.

Cities, too, are seen as people. Each of them has its own, distinct personality. Evidence of this is found in the adjectives to describe them. We use words such as “charming”, “rebellious”, “enterprising”, and “endearing” to speak about them. In turn, they reveal how we think of these places.  

Who wouldn’t agree with me that Amsterdam is a rebellious, free-spirited, slightly scruffy but also strong, experienced, and battle-hardened guy with a mustache? He’s a man of extremes: both a party-person and a sophisticated art-lover, at once a rich business man and a poor, single father with a kid.

On the other hand we have Chartres, the medieval French town with the beautiful cathedral. She is more of a charming woman with long, brown hair and an elegant ocher dress. Whereas Amsterdam is tall and heroic, Chartres is petite and endearing. If Amsterdam is bustling and vibrant, Chartres is calm and composed.

Of course, cities are often too big to be described as having monolithic personalities. Amsterdam, for instance, is composed of a mosaic of different neighborhoods, each with its own personality traits. Amsterdam Zuid is old, rich, cultured, and of high stature. But Noord is more like the Wild West: adventurous, enterprising and experimental.

Some neighborhoods harbor multiple personalities. As a result of the quick gentrification process, the Pijp is hip, upcoming, and expensive. Its trendy restaurants and cafés act as magnets to young urban professionals hailing from all over the country. But it used to be the true Amsterdammers who lived there.

A glimpse of Amsterdam’s topographically
distributed personality types, by Nomad List

A while ago, I saw the words “Alle yuppen de Pijp uit!” (“All yuppies – young, urban professionals – should leave the Pijp!”) sprayed on a wall on the Albert Cuyp market. Viewed from a metaphorical perspective, the words signified a clash of personalities to me. It was also an expression of frustration about what kind of personality or image the neighborhood ought to have.

I hope this description of metaphors gives you some insight in the way we perceive our cities, and that it can aid you as a conceptual tool for greater understanding of all sorts of things. Considering cities in particular, we might wonder where the branches of the trees are in cities, if they are jungles. And if they are people, how do they relate to one another? How do their personalities change? Are there any other metaphors that characterize cities? I leave these questions for you to answer.