Beneath the Concrete, the Soil Still Whispers

Gleaming office buildings, concrete flyovers and ever-sprawling housing developments and industrial parks, the modern city is increasingly presented as a symbol of progress. But what if this very ‘progress’ conceals a destructive order? What if the modern city represents 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 the debt-trap of subsidised loans, structural adjustment policies, 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 or carved up for infrastructure or real estate schemes.

From The Netherlands’ proposed tristate metropolis to megacities like Delhi, modern urbanisation severs people from soil, memory and community in an inherently anti-ecological drive.

But more than this, the modern urban-industrial system rests on a profound moral and spiritual crisis. Care for land, the value of manual work, intergenerational continuity, local democracy and ecological restraint are values that are fundamentally at odds with the city’s organising principles of speed, consumption, the doctrine of land-as-asset, the recasting of the self as consumer and perpetual economic expansion.

Capitalist modernity reduces human beings to instruments in a market system, fostering dependency, alienation and mistrust. Take Bangladesh, for instance, where rural farmers displaced by land grabs for shrimp aquaculture migrated to Dhaka garment factories, enduring 14-hour shifts, factory collapses like Rana Plaza (killing 1,134 in 2013) and wages below subsistence levels amid global fast-fashion demands.

Moreover, urban planning often masks deeper forms of dispossession; think ‘urban renewal’ drives that evict thousands of informal market traders from prime street locations to make way for malls and luxury developments. Such planning involves increasing surveillance, corporate capture and a technocratic vision of the future, all of which undermine or replace intimate place-based living.

This might seem a bleak assessment. However, 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. We need only look at India’s decentralised agriproduce retail markets and, elsewhere, agro-ecological urbanism in the form of community gardens, rooftop farms and participatory food cooperatives.

Implementing these models will not magically overcome the problems discussed, but they show that agrarian ethics can and do infiltrate urban life: stewardship, locality and ecological restraint can be woven into the fabric of urban planning.

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 represent 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.

Writing about practices, ethics and morality grounded in agrarian philosophy cannot be dismissed as naïve or a daydreamer’s utopia; such writing is vital because it preserves conscience and imagination, bears witness to overlooked truths and sustains visions of what ought to be, guiding reflection and action even when the world falls far short.

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. As made clear in my new open access book, The Agrarian Imagination: Development and the Art of the Impossible (available here), genuine human 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.

Colin Todhunter specialises in food, agriculture and development and is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. His open access books on the global food system can be accessed via Figshare (no sign in or sign up required).

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