Anti-urbanism

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Anti-urbanism is hostility toward the city as opposed to the country. It may may take the form a simple rejection of city life, or an urbicidal wish to destroy the city.^[1][2] Like other hostile attitudes, it may be an individual sentiment or a collective trope, sometimes evoked by the expression "urbophobia"^[3] or "urbanophobia"^[4] This trope can become politicized and thus influence spatial planning. Antiurbanism, while appearing within different cultures for different political purposes, is a global concept^[5]

With massive urbanization and concentration of nearly half the world's population in urban areas,^[6] the anti-urban vision remains relevant. The city is perceived as a site of frustration^[7] but antiurbanism manifests more as resentment towards the global city rather than towards urbanity in general.^[8]

In the 17th and 18th centuries,^[9] anti-urbanism appeared amidst the Industrial Revolution, the exodus of thousands of peasants, and their pauperization. In earlier times cities were seen as a source of wealth, employment, services, and culture; but they progressively came to be considered nefarious, the source of evils such as criminality, misery, and immorality.^[10] England, the first country to industrialize, saw the birth of the first anti-urban newspaper, based on sentiment arising from deplorable sanitary conditions.^[1] The city was described as black and disease-ridden, teeming with miserable exploited workers.^[10] The 1873–1896 Long Depression also accounts for the mounting critiques of the city. The rising fear of cities can thus be understood as rejection of a traumatizing reality.^[11]

From the second half of the twentieth century critiques of the city are social and environmental, dealing with anonymity, pollution, noise pollution.^[1] In fact, positive and negative visions of the city may coexist; agrarianism may critique the bad conditions while acknowledging the role of progress and innovation. With an anti-urban ideology, negative ideas about the city are contrasted with positive values of the country such as tradition, community, and stability,^[2] which appear in the European context in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries along with the Romantic movement advocating a return to nature.^[12] One finds acute manifestations of antiurbanism at moments of economic, political, and social crisis such as the French Revolution, the crisis of agriculture in Switzerland at the end of the 19th century, and during the rise of totalitarianism.^[1][2] Anti-urbanism is a significant component of the conservative American ideology.