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Degruyter Opphil Opphil-2020-0130 586..598 ++ Open Philosophy 2020; 3: 586–598 Philosophy of the City Jules Simon* Welcoming Newcomers and Becoming Native to a Place: Arendt’s Polis and the City Beautiful of Detroit https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2020-0130 received May 25, 2020; accepted August 19, 2020 Abstract: My goal, in interpreting Arendt’s analyses of the polis – both modern and ancient – is to conceptualize the role that ‘healthy’ public spaces can play in modern cities. What distinguishes my interpretation of her work is how I integrate her seminal conception of a philosophy of natality in the constellation of elemental concepts: labor, work, and action, as a way to understand the rise and fall of Detroit and to set the possible horizon for its reincarnation as a ‘sustainable’ and flourishing city beautiful. For me, it is precisely this conceptualization, as a philosophy of natality, that enables us to better identify the metaphysical and political foundations of her ideas about the polis and its possible pragmatic application for recreating public spaces in other modern, cosmopolitan cities. I end up considering what it means to become “native to a place” in the sense that was adopted in the rebirth of the River Rouge Complex and just what that has to do with the emergence of the barrio of Mexicantown in Detroit as a quintessential sign of successful city living and a sign of hope for a brighter, more beautiful future. Keywords: philosophy of the city, Detroit, Arendt, polis, public space, immigrants, sustainability In what follows, I explore Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of the polis to comment on the modern city through exploring the rise of Detroit as a “world city,” its decline, and its potential for reinventing itself. Detroit is my case study. However, Arendt’s phenomenological–ethical approach is the critical tool that guides my critique. My larger concern, as a philosopher of the city, generally has to do with how cities could and should function as the primary locus not only for providing essential goods and social services for the nation-states in which they are situated but also for eudemonic opportunities for cultivation and employment not only for a populace but also and just as importantly for stateless non-nationalists. In an unpublished paper that I presented at a Philosophy of the City conference in Porto, Portugal, I make the case that we should be thinking about the essential interrelatedness of contemporary phenomena of immigration and ‘the sanctuary city’.¹ The central claim in that paper is the following: “[...] for a city to be sustainable it must be able to support the inclusion of exiles and strangers, vis a vis the existing international political order that is structured on a system of nation-states that can and have committed genocide or been otherwise hostile to humans and other living beings.” This is the phenomenon that would have been uppermost in Arendt’s mind in the 1950s when she was writing The Human Condition, which was published in 1958, because of her own status as stateless for 18 years.² She was only naturalized 1 Simon, “An Ethical Challenge of Exile and the City for a Philosophy of the City.” 2 Arendt, The Human Condition. * Corresponding author: Jules Simon, Department of Philosophy, University of Texas, El Paso, United States of America, e-mail: [email protected] Open Access. © 2020 Jules Simon, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Welcoming Newcomers: Arendt’s Polis and the City Beautiful of Detroit 587 as a US citizen in 1951 after arriving there as an exile in 1941 from Europe after fleeing Nazi persecution and genocide. How she philosophically dealt with her circumstance continues to be timely and perhaps even more relevant today because of how immigrants, exiles, and refugees, globally, seek not only welcome and hospitality but also the kinds of material support that cities best provide: available and affordable housing, ample employment opportunities, and reliable social services such as education, police and the judicial system, health facilities, and public spaces for cultural and artistic self-exploration and expression. In The Human Condition, Arendt proposed that the phenomenon of the polis deserves our attention because it is the arena of “public space” where humans afford themselves the opportunity to demonstrate their creative ability, their expressive cultivation, and their ethical character. According to my interpretation of her proposal, she uses the forms of public space that developed in ancient Greece and Rome in order to critically assess the modern forces of bureaucracy, conformism, and mob-forming totalitarian and populist politics that, post-World War II, were characteristic of genocidal, federal nation- states such as Germany, Italy, and Japan. In doing so, she provides us with a phenomenology of the politics of the city as opposed to focusing on the federal powers and centralized governments of the modern nation states and the ethical nature of their responses to the racial, genocidal, and socio-economic abuses of totalitarian governments such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Arendt takes the latter approach in two of her other seminal books: The Origins of Totalitarianism³ and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.⁴ With her two-fold focus in mind, I take up Arendt’s critical tools as a means to focus attention on how the citizens that constitute modern cities can and do engender the kind of city-state that is able to counteract the worst effects of what has become a crisis of the under-reaching economic and social policies of modern nation-states. Contemporary modern nation-states just do not do enough for the marginal members of their own nations and, especially, for those people of the world seeking refuge and relief from persecution in their own ‘home’ countries. I believe such critical assessments follow practically from Arendt’s underlying metaphysics. I set aside the obvious difficulties of how cities relate to other cities within distinct states and within an overarching federal government. This relates not only to the issue of sanctuary cities but also to the conflicts, especially in the United States, between federal and state governments and cities that have been sparked by the coronavirus pandemic in the first half of 2020. I see two very different city responses: (1) that of my home city, El Paso, TX, which was at odds with state- mandated ‘return to normal’ prescriptions by the state governor, Greg Abbott,⁵ and (2) that of the home city of my fellow philosopher of the city, Sanna Lehtinen – Helsinki, Finland – which exemplifies an ethically functional relationship.⁶ 1 Misreadings create misunderstandings I begin with the common tendency to misread Arendt’s ideas on the polis by interpreting her favorable comments about the agora of ancient Athens as an ideal, which we have to somehow romantically retrieve or reconstitute in order to experience the freedom of political expression and to test our character through public confrontations. Arendt does valorize the agora for the way in which it tests our political values and for how it enables lasting creations of art and culture, but, as I will show below, she ultimately rejects, on ethical grounds, the historical phenomenon of public space in Athens in order to reconceptualize modern public spaces – in the form of modern cosmopolitan cities – which not only would be more inclusive of 3 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 4 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 5 Aguilar, “With COVID-19 cases rising, El Paso officials ask governor to exclude them from next phase of reopening.” 6 Wahba, “A functional city’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.” 588 Jules Simon marginalized peoples but also could include the possibility for city dwellers to check the powers of state and nation-state governments. The issue has to do with the function of local self-governance versus national political sovereignty and the relationship of the two. Singapore, Malta, Monaco, and the Vatican City exemplify what constitute contemporary ‘sovereign’ city-states. But a looser definition could include cities that historically exercise greater degrees of governing independence and which, by virtue of their histories and concentrations of population and economic, industrial, and cultural powers, count as city-states in the sense of being ‘world’ cities. A list of those would include Hong Kong, New York City, Paris, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Delhi, Mumbai, Beijing, and even a ‘failed city’ like Detroit. Why Detroit? Because at one time in its history, around 1950, Detroit was THE wealthiest city in the world and was a mecca for migration, architectural innovation, urban expansion, transportation, and cultural integration and segregation. Moreover, the issue of sovereignty and local control is especially important given the increasing rise in the preemption of the control of city governance at the local level by state and federal powers, noted with concern in a report by the National League of Cities.⁷ And although I have never been a citizen of the city of Detroit and thus am an outsider looking in, from those limited perspectives, it is clear that even an outsider like me can understand how the recent loss of local governing control was a significant ethical problem for that city, as well as a contributing factor to the city’s serious metaphysical identity issues. Detroit emerged from state-mandated control after filing for bankruptcy in May 2018 and thereby assumed full governance for the first time in four decades.⁸ This takes me to the other two parts of my paper: Mexicantown, a thriving immigrant neighborhood in Detroit, and the Ford River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, Michigan. I contend that both of these places function interdependently as reconstructed Arendtian “public spaces” for how they provide essential existential developments for substantive flourishing of a new form of Detroit as the City Beautiful.
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