Greek Life Part Two: Citizen vs. Subject
(Source: Unsplash/Timon Studler.)
One of my first urban design observations after moving to Waco, Texas, came to me while sitting by the window in a local food hall. I had my computer with me so I was getting work done while sipping tea. But I was also people-watching out the window. More specifically, I was “people-dashing-across-a-dangerous-stroad” watching.
Union Market sits along Franklin Avenue, a four-lane, one-way stroad that cuts through downtown. I call it a stroad because it’s lined by businesses, but is so wide that drivers treat it more like a road than a street. It becomes one-way right on the edge of downtown and speedy drivers, happy to be released from their two-lane confines, come gunning into the neighborhood just when it becomes more pedestrianized.
Stop lights every few blocks break up the pace, including one right by Union market, and pedestrians technically could use this as a crossing point. But many of the lights are spaced just far apart enough (with lots of empty parking lots between them) that mid-block crossing is an ever-present temptation.
Such was the situation at Union Market. It’s located at the corner of Franklin and 8th, but both doors to enter the food hall are situated away from that corner, further down both streets, just far enough from the crosswalks to make it more attractive to walk away from the crosswalk and essentially jaywalk instead once you’re right in front of the doors. That afternoon, this is exactly the choice I watched person after person make: parking in the lot across the street, closest to the door then dashing across rather than walking down to the light, crossing, then walking back up to the door.
I’ve asked a few city staffers why there’s no crosswalk here. Turns out, providing common-sense, pedestrian-friendly crosswalks close to the doors wasn’t included in the terms and conditions of the market’s development, so one didn’t get built.
On one hand, design failures are frustrating reminders that someone we trust—the city, the developer, the public works department—is not doing their job right. On the other hand, they seem like perfect opportunities for tactical improvements by ordinary citizens… How hard can it be to paint a crosswalk? (Hint: not that hard.)
In a recent episode on The Bottom-Up Revolution, I talked about this briefly with Jon Jon Wesolowski, an old friend and founding member of Chattanooga Urbanists Society. Wesolowski and his fellow “racoons in trench coats” (listen to our podcast to get this joke) have embraced the tactical approach to improving things around their city: installing benches at bus stops, clearing roadways of debris, and, perhaps most famously, repairing a broken railing on a pedestrian walkway across a busy highway.
This kind of tactical approach is improving cities all around the world. It’s effective at drawing attention to the slow and unresponsive nature of “official change” that we’d experience if we waited for city departments to fix everything. It’s also effective at testing solutions to see what works before putting millions of dollars behind them. It also effectively draws attention to the extent to which we’ve become conditioned to waiting for the expert to fix our city problems.
Which brings me to the Greeks. We’ve now made it to part five in the Yale lecture series with Professor Donald Kagan in which he credits the Greeks for creating the concept of citizen:
There never was a citizen in the world before the polis. There are only subjects. People who are subject either to God, or the king or to a chieftain…somebody who in a sense owns them all. But nobody owns a citizen. And this is something brand new in the world.
He goes on to explain how Pericles resolves the tension between private interest and the public good by uniting them. Here Kagan paraphrases the Athenian politician:
The individual's highest needs and goals could only be met through the polis. His wellbeing was tied up with the wellbeing of the polis. You cannot truly achieve what you want and need what you want in life without being an active and loyal citizen to this great community. It is the center of his life.
A citizen, compared to a subject, has more rights, more agency, more say in things. A citizen is seen as a rightful participant in directly shaping the fabric of the city. It’s what you might have seen had you been able to walk the streets of old American cities: ordinary people who live in the city building it themselves.
I suspect this vision of citizenship as an active participant and co-builder is part of what fuels the tactical urge and Strong Towns conversations, both of which are taking root in Chattanooga and other cities. It’s the positive side of tacticalism: reclaiming the citizen’s freedom to fix things, not just the negative side of challenging local government.
We could see having a class of professional city builders and fixers as a sign of prosperity, similar to the fact that we don’t have to each individually provide our own food. Or we could see it as a sign of fragility. If Kagan is right, the Greeks understood that part of thriving as a human being in the world and part of building resilient communities involved establishing the concept of the citizen and with it a paradigm of shared responsibility and participation by ordinary people in the life of the polis. Looking at today’s over-regulated public sphere and the unnecessary barriers faced by “do-it-yourself” citizens, it seems clear to me that this is a concept urgently in need of recovery.
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.