#106, September 13, 2006

The Happening Place

I remember in graduate school that whenever we discussed E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class someone would always refer to his contention that class was not a thing that could be observed at a particular point in time. One couldn’t, Thompson argued, look at the social landscape and observe classes. They could only be observed in relation to each other and over time. Class, indeed, was “a happening.” Whenever I heard this I always wanted to respond, and may have done once or twice, that if this was the case, then the city must surely be a happening place. Such quips were generally frowned upon.

That is a somewhat bizarre beginning for what follows, though I think it may actually be relevant. The city is not a thing, and like class it cannot be observed synchronically. Like many things it can only be defined in relational terms. One city is not another city; the city is not the country; and so forth (except, of course, when one decides that in fact one city is another, and the country is in actuality the city, only misidentified). Well, what follows is one person’s sketchy attempt to go beyond the positivistic notions of the city generally found in urban studies and history.

How do we define the city? What are its boundaries? How should it be characterized and who has the right to characterize it, and who will be privileged in the process? How have these characterizations changed over time?

There have been several historiographical approaches to studying cities. One of these, the so-called Chicago School approach, was a product of some of the conflicts and developments occurring during the first half of the twentieth century when the school was coming to the fore. It is important for our purposes as it gives some insight into the way in which cities were defined at the time, and how many of the anxieties of the academy affected such definitions. The Chicago School, with its Foundation-born twin, Area Studies, was framed around certain teleological and modernization assumptions about the trajectories of societies and the role of cities within them. Members of the school assumed that there was a process of assimilation of immigrant and migrant populations who were being melded by the urban experience. Such experience, though, was necessarily bleak.

While the focus on ghettoized communities, which followed from this assumption, was significantly enlarged through a theory of urbanization in The City in History, the somewhat bleak perspective of cities as sites of poverty was accentuated in Lewis Mumford’s work. The cities on which I have focused my recent research might be seen during the period I cover (1850-1940ish) as being “slums, semi-slums and super-slums.” Whether each one of the cities incorporated all three of these areas, or whether one might be seen as slum (London), another semi-slum (NYC), and the last as super-slum (Bombay), was not explored.

Asa Briggs rescued the city from the nagativism of American social policy and cultural imagery (Hollywood), and from the blight brought on by the suburbanization (which Mumford had recognized did more to destroy the city than the Luftwaffe – or the USAF and the RAF), turning slums into rubble no less. The manner of Briggs’ rescue project is important, for Briggs endeavored to highlight the specificity of each city, keenly aware of changes over time, and the different intensities of connection to global markets (p. 33). For Briggs, then, “Victorian cities were not the ‘insensate’ ant-heaps which find a place in Mumford’s pages (Trevelyan: Deadening cage for the human spirit).” Briggs recognized that vitality and squalor went hand in glove, at least during the Victorian era. As such, he believed the city was the locale of intense creativity alongside the grim streets portrayed in Dickens. And here one is tempted to concur with Briggs, for containing poverty (in all its manifestations) and using its progeny as cheap labor required (and still requires) wondrous creativity in the forms of new technologies of power (both physical and mental). Moreover, what Briggs called for was the comparative study of cities (and other things on page 53), something that, provided it took into consideration linkages (see Rodgers’ Atlantic Crossings) might be extremely beneficial.

But are we left agreeing with Briggs and wanting a more penetrating and less dismal history of our cities? Or are there limitations also in Briggs’s study that should be attended to? Certainly, by accepting Briggs’s vision of the Victorian city we are left curious as to what happened to it. Are we left, then, with a periodization whereby the viable Victorian city is replaced by the post-Victorian slum. Thus the Chicago/Mumford vision merely arises from the peculiarities of the American urban condition, which presages a general condition – the Americans taking the fast track to the post-industrial city. Perhaps, using Briggs, who excluded American and non-white British Empire cities from his work, we are ironically left reaffirming the Chicago School vision. The Victorian City is perhaps a class-inflected (all white) phenomenon, while the insensate city is the product of deep-seated racial and ethnic divisions. There are hints in Victorian Cities that might lead us to believe otherwise (mention of Bombay and of connected histories of Stead, for example), but we may be excused for ending with this impression.

The slums generated by “shock” cities, even those like Chicago and Bombay, are “creative” ones generating local and world capital; the ghettoes of post-industrial American and those emerging around the world – to be described perhaps as “global ghettoes” – are not functional to capitalism, so much as to societies’ systems of race relations.

The way out of this predicament, to allow the non-Victorian city to be “rescued” (if we must do so), or at least to allow its inhabitants some degree of recognition for their “creative” lives, is to interrogate our definition of the city. If we establish firm boundaries for our cities, which are then juxtaposed to other cities defined with equally firm boundaries, then we begin to see our cities taking on particular manifestations at particular times – we are able, in short, to categorize them (when we have no intellectual right to do so). But, when we do so we can compare across time as well as space, and, not surprisingly, we end up with the kind of nostalgic, almost romantic picture Briggs has painted. Indeed, it cannot be altogether surprising that the dualities of the city (described by Briggs, and to which we shall return for our own purposes), mirrored the kinds of Manichean dualities found in romantic literature and art. It is this very nostalgia that feeds into an American trajectory away from the city – a veritable “white flight” of academics and inhabitants from the city upon a hill to the Crabgrass Frontier.

So, our need, therefore, is to begin expanding our understanding of the boundaries of the city – moving perhaps from the materialist conception back to an idealist one. As such, the city is not defined by certain streets or walls around its perimeter (alone). It comes into existence in the minds of its (non) residents; it incorporates and may be defined by the connections made with other cities [Here we see the merging of comparison and connection]. The flexibility we need for interpreting our cities is gained from this shift from materialism to idealism – not to the objective idealism that would situate each city within its nation-state, or tie it to a particular race or regional type. Rather, we see cities as they form across nations and ethnicities – provoking, perhaps, attempts to restrict them therein.

To be continued…in an ill-defined city park, on a bench dedicated to the workers of the world, or some such.