What is the difference between civitas and polis

The idea of the city denotes a form of life, a state of mind, and a way of being in the world; and the actual lived experience of the city is no less imaginative than it is social and material. As Fustel de Coulanges points out in his classic book The Ancient City , in both Greek and Latin the idea of the city is given two distinct meanings marked by different words.

In classical Greek, the terms are asty and polis ; in Latin the parallel terms are urbs and civitas. Indeed, the concept of the city in the West does offer two imaginative possibilities that are heuristically and conceptually distinct but are in reality often intertwined. These are a market society of competitors and exchangers urbs or the urban and a moral and political community of equality under law and active pursuit of shared purpose.

An urbs is an area of mass assembly: originally a site of religious gathering and ritual, and later a center for commercial transactions and exchange. As it lost its association with the religious or ritual center of the society, the urbs became the center of commerce and economic exchange; the urbs is where everything and everybody has its price, is for sale, is a commodity.

An urbs is a market, and the forms of life there consist primarily in the pursuit of material self-interest and the gratification of desire. In the early modern period the urbs also became a new and virtually unprecedented space of individuation, privacy, and anonymity; the city as urbs is the dwelling place of strangers; cooperative strangers, to be sure, but strangers nonetheless.

The city generically is also the theater for the invention and reinvention of the self. In the civitas the persona is shaped by a mutuality of common good and civic virtue. Private individuals reinvent themselves—at least periodically and for important occasions—as public citizens. If the urbs is a market of entrepreneurial and strategic endeavor, civitas connotes a political and legal community created for the purpose of pursuing the common good.

This civic notion of the good is not necessarily essentialist, as in natural law theories, nor equivalent to the notion of aggregate net benefit, as in utilitarianism and modern economic theory. The civic is a structure of citizenship ordered by reciprocity, equity, and just and proportionate laws. It is not content merely to protect the security and person of its citizens important as those negative rights are but also seeks to extend positive rights of equal voice, mutual assistance, and a setting conducive to the realization of a broad range of capabilities and a reasonably open future.

Cooperation, as I am using it here, is a self-governance that has instrumental meaning and value to its participants, which is always calculated and provisional because it is rooted in an aspiration of individual interest and control. What we might call a just ecological city will revitalize the sense of civic place and return us to founding roots of the city, which are communal in ways that embrace diversity, mobility, and self-discovery, and just in ways that empower parity of participation and voice.

In his book All Over the Map , urban designer Michael Sorkin argues that we need to invent a new kind of city:. There is intense need for research and speculation into what the forms and agencies of these cities might be. That needed research is philosophical as well as architectural and sociological. Theories of community and justice do not always embrace these aspects of the city as civitas. Community can press the values of stability and conformity rather than dynamism and experiments in living.

Justice can emphasize a rational distributional pattern and paternalistic planning from the top down rather than the praxis of democratic discourse and participation.

But through community that is alive and justice that is a practice, the contemporary city provides a ground for a dynamic, differentiated, and democratic political and moral sensibility. Can this be precisely the sensibility we need in order to motivate a new kind of human relationship to the natural world?

It is essential not to let this opportunity for ethical and political reconstruction in the city as civitas slip by. Because the strategic pursuit of competitive interests in the urban marketplace has corroded community, and the rational persons who are supposed to design and run institutions governed by principles of impartiality, merit, and fairness are nowhere to be found among the leadership elites of nations and international affairs today.

New senses of community and interdependence can emerge from a recognition of our dire ecological and planetary situation, and new forms of just democracy can emerge in the context of cities even very large ones more readily than in the context of the nation state. Finally, the city as civitas may prove to be a place equal to the task of transforming justice and democracy still further into an ecological democracy that respects the integrity and resilience of nature and that respects and preserves, as matters of solidarity, justice, and right, the capabilities of future generations of human beings.

Heaven knows, there are powerful reasons of enlightened self-interest that by their own logic should lead to the steps required to limit the damage we are doing to the climate system and the other fundamental planetary systems of life biodiversity, nitrogen load, fresh water, and so on. And yet look at what is happening and what seems likely to happen. Consider, for instance, a recent report from an interdisciplinary team of leading scientists providing evidence that further delay in drastically reducing atmospheric carbon through both reducing emissions and enhancing natural sinks will have long-term lag effects that are much more severe than previously recognized.

Hence, self-interest rightly understood is not cutting it. Apparently, the reasons of enlightened self-interest are weaker than the logic of competitive advantage in market economics and market politics, and our institutions of governance are so constructed that they are overwhelmed by more short-term, short-sighted forces.

As dangerous as flirting with Ecotopia may be, embracing the ideal of the city as a civic commons and enacting shared rules and restraints based on an understanding of the good of human and natural flourishing may be the only way out. Despite a plethora of initiatives, policies, and p Applied Linguistics for Teachers of Cultural Irrespective of the language taught, whether first Police Psychology and Its Growing Impact on Police psychology has become an integral part of p Handbook of Research on the Facilitation of Outreach and engagement initiatives are crucial in Modern Societal Impacts of the Model Minorit The model minority stereotype is a form of racism Technology Integration and Foundations for E In areas of the empire newly under Roman rule as frequently in Gaul, Britain, Spain, and Africa in the early empire such a civitas formed from a local ethnic or social unit, had a citizenry, council and magistrates, and a set of procedural rules adaptable to local custom.

In many cases there was also encouragement to form a city to provide a physical setting for the new institutions. The next step might be the grant of full municipal status see municipium. You do not currently have access to this article Login Please login to access the full content. Subscribe Access to the full content requires a subscription. Oxford University Press. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save. Close Save.