Of Concrete Skylines and the Unforgotten Soil

Colin Todhunter

Gleaming office buildings and concrete flyovers, the modern city is increasingly presented as a symbol of progress. Few regard it as the endpoint of a destructive paradigm: the command-centre of an extractive, neoliberal order that has reshaped land, labour and life itself.  

If policymakers believe that urbanisation is the natural evolution of a modern nation-state, they should stop to consider that it is based on the deliberate outcome of policies that undermine rural self-sufficiency, commodify soil and force agrarian communities into precarity.  

Once traditional farming systems have been destabilised by corporate input regimes, global supply chains, patented seeds and monocultural production, mass migration to cities becomes an inevitability engineered from above. The city thus absorbs the displaced because the countryside has been systematically stripped of opportunities. 

But more than this, the urban-industrial system rests on a profound moral and spiritual crisis. Care for land, the dignity of manual labour, intergenerational continuity, local democracy and ecological restraint are values that are fundamentally at odds with the city’s organising principles of speed, consumption, a redefinition of the individual and perpetual economic expansion.  

Urban society reduces human beings to instruments in a market system, producing an atmosphere of alienation, competition and mistrust. Pollution, infrastructural breakdown, inflated living costs and stark inequalities are the structural consequences of a model built on dispossession. Whether in places like The Netherlands where there is much talk of a huge tristate city or megacities like Delhi, modern urbanisation is a deeply anti-ecological project that severs people from soil, memory and community.  

Moreover, urban planning often masks deeper forms of enclosure, surveillance and corporate capture, reinforcing a vision of the future in which technological management replaces human-scale living. 

Despite this bleak assessment, certain moral and cultural residues persist ‘beneath the flyover, beside the temple’ in the form of informal economies, community solidarities and local food traditions that continue to embody an agrarian ethic even within concrete landscapes.  

These acts of self-sufficiency and mutual care are expressions of the ‘art of the impossible’: a refusal to submit entirely to the logic of commodification and a testament to the resilience of an older, place-based moral order.  

Such practices, though often marginal and unheralded, represent intellectual and ethical resistance to the corporatised urban future. They suggest that the agrarian imagination is not confined space but capable of adaptation and capable of surviving in a system that seeks to extinguish it. 

Farmer, poet and writer Wendell Berry’s reflections on stewardship, intergenerational responsibility and the intimate relationships between humans and soil resonate deeply with the practices of community solidarity and local food traditions that persist even within urban landscapes.  

Similarly, Gerard Winstanley, writing in the 17th century, envisioned a society in which land and labour were shared as a common good, not commodities to be exploited. His insistence on communal responsibility and ecological justice underscores the radical, enduring potential of agrarian ethics against the logic of extraction and profit. 

In this light, the critique of urban-centric development becomes more than an economic critique. It represents a challenge to the very definition of progress. The rejection of the celebratory narrative of neoliberal modernity is a philosophical insistence that a society cannot be judged by its technological prowess while its ecological foundations crumble and its people are alienated from the sources of life.  

The modern city, therefore, becomes a battleground where two visions of civilisation confront one another: the dominant model of corporate-led, centrally managed growth and the fragile but persistent ethic of stewardship, locality and shared responsibility.  

Genuine development cannot be measured by urban skylines or GDP figures but by the survival of relationships between people, land and community that give meaning to life.  

The ultimate aim must be a decentralised and complementary relationship between rural and urban worlds, grounded in ecological sanity rather than profit, and animated by an imagination willing to defy the narrow ‘certainties’ of the present.