Marx & City

Regarding to my interests about city and urban studies, I review some theories about city. In this post , I reviewed Marx's approach about city:

Marx and the city/countryside opposition

It can be claimed that Marx is the first prominent philosopher to think and write seriously about city life. Like his other theories, his ideas about city are heavily influenced by the industrialization process. To Marx, the most important consequence of industrialization, which resulted in an increase in the population of the cities and the emergence of the working class, was the division of labor phenomenon. Based on this new phenomenon other divisions were also created, among them, the city/countryside division. The City became the place for intellectual labor, accumulation of capital, pleasure, new experiences, new facilities, and countryside became the place for physical labor, loneliness and isolation, lack of thought and creativity, lack of pleasure and experience, and the like.
When opposing the bourgeoisie division of labor, Marx criticized the opposition of city and countryside as well. Marx’s perspective regarding city issues was a completely dialectical view. He knew that dismissing the advantages of the city and blindly praising nature and the simplicity of people in the countryside is not based on reality.
Marx has written on human isolation, self-alienation and similar issues which are the difficulties of city life, but he believes that “the solution to these problems can be found in the city” (Aryan 46). It should be noted that although Marx celebrated the modern dominance of the city over the countryside as a historically progressive development, he was more concerned with the phenomenon of the separation between town and countryside as an expression of Man’s alienated “pre-history” under the social division of labor. For Marx, moreover, the resolution of the problem was not the urbanization of the countryside in the present, but the abolition of the distinction between town and country in the socialist and communist future.
Marx believes that “the most important achievement of city life is the possibility of establishing close relationships, going through new experiences, and new ways of interaction. Marx himself hated the countryside and loved the city. Marx spent all his life in big cities” (47).

Aryan, Amir A. “City in the Hands of Theorists”. Kheradnameh, 35(1388): 46-48.