Speculative Cities

The name civitas was applied by the Romans to each of the independent states or tribes of Gaul; in later times it adhered to the chief town of each of these states, which usually became afterwards the seat of civil government and of episcopal authority. Though there were civitates in Britain also in Roman times, the word was not adopted by the Angles and Saxons, who applied the name burh to all towns alike. In later times civitas may be found as a Latin equivalent of burh, and, in Domesday, it is frequently applied to the larger and more important byriȝ, burȝes, or boroughs, which were the centres of districts, and had in some cases municipal autonomy, and thus corresponded in character to the cités of France. As an English word, cité is found early in the 13th c., applied, both to foreign, and particularly ancient cities, where it is probably due to translation from Latin or French, and also to important English boroughs, such as London and Lincoln.

The city is a related collection of primary groups and purposive associations: the first, like family and neighborhood, are common to all communities, while the second are especially characteristic of city life. These varied groups support themselves through economic organizations that are likewise of a more or less corporate, or at least publicly regulated, character; and they are all housed in permanent structures, within a relatively limited area. The essential physical means of a city’s existence are the fixed site, the durable shelter, the permanent facilities for assembly, interchange, and storage; the essential social means are the social division of labor, which serves not merely the economic life but the cultural processes. The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city as theater, that man’s more purposive activities are focused, and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations.

Rocannon’s knees gave way. He sat down on the polished red pavement, and tried to repress his sick fear enough to think what to do. What to do. He must go back into the dome… At the thought of going back in there among the tall angelic figures whose noble heads held brains degenerated or specialized to the level of insects, he felt a cold prickling at the back of his neck; but he had to do it. His friends were in there and he had to get them out. Were the larvae and their nurses in the dome sleepy enough to let him? He quit asking himself questions. But first he must check the outer wall all the way around, for if there was no gate, there was no use. He could not carry his friends over a fifteen-foot wall.

There were probably three castes, he thought as he went down the silent prefect street: nurses for the larvae in the dome, builders and hunters in the outer rooms, and in these houses perhaps the fertile ones, the egglayers and hatchers. The two that had given water would be nurses, keeping paralyzed prey alive till the larvae sucked it dry. They had given water to dead Raho. How could he have not seen that they were mindless? He had wanted to think them intelligent because they looked so angelically human. ‘Strike Species 4?’, he told his drowned “Handbook”, savagely.